前列腺癌是全世界男性癌症第二大的癌症和第六主要原因。专家在诊断前列腺癌期间面临的主要问题是含有肿瘤组织的感兴趣区域（ROI）的定位。目前，在大多数情况下，该ROI的分割是由专家医生手动进行的，但是该程序受到某些患者的检测率低（约27-44％）或过度诊断的困扰。因此，几项研究工作解决了从磁共振图像中自动分割和提取ROI特征的挑战，因为此过程可以极大地促进许多诊断和治疗应用。然而，缺乏明确的前列腺边界，前列腺组织固有的异质性以及多种前列腺形状的多样性使这一过程非常难以自动化。在这项工作中，通过获得的MRI图像数据集对六个深度学习模型进行了培训和分析。来自Dijon中心的医院和Catalunya大学。我们使用分类跨环膜损失函数进行了多种深度学习模型（即U-NET，注意U-NET，密度密度，R2U-NET和R2U-NET）的比较。使用通常用于图像分割的三个指标进行分析：骰子分数，JACCARD索引和均方误差。为我们提供最佳结果分割的模型是R2U-NET，骰子，Jaccard和平均平方误差分别达到0.869、0.782和0.00013。

风险评估在任何工作场所相关，然而，在处理易燃或危险物质时，在处理易燃或危险物质时，在这种情况下，这种情况都有程度的不可预测性可能是不够的。这的一个例子是喷射火灾的冲击，火焰的热量可以达到附近的设备，并显着增加Domino效应与灾难性结果的概率。因此，从风险管理的角度来看，这种火灾事故的表征是重要的。一种这样的表征将是火焰中不同辐射区的分割，因此本文提出了有关几种传统计算机视觉和深度学习分割方法来解决此具体问题的探索性研究。还探讨了使用丙烷喷射火灾的数据集丙烷喷射火灾训练和评估不同地区的分布以及寻求缓解数据不平衡的不同丢失功能的分布。此外，不同的指标与专家执行的手动排名相关联，以便对专家的标准密切相关的评估。 Hausdorff距离和调整后的随机索引是具有最高相关性的度量，并且从UNET架构获得了具有加权交叉熵损耗的最佳结果。这些结果可用于未来的研究，以从分割面具中提取更多几何信息，或者甚至可以在其他类型的火灾事故中实施。

Robotic teleoperation is a key technology for a wide variety of applications. It allows sending robots instead of humans in remote, possibly dangerous locations while still using the human brain with its enormous knowledge and creativity, especially for solving unexpected problems. A main challenge in teleoperation consists of providing enough feedback to the human operator for situation awareness and thus create full immersion, as well as offering the operator suitable control interfaces to achieve efficient and robust task fulfillment. We present a bimanual telemanipulation system consisting of an anthropomorphic avatar robot and an operator station providing force and haptic feedback to the human operator. The avatar arms are controlled in Cartesian space with a direct mapping of the operator movements. The measured forces and torques on the avatar side are haptically displayed to the operator. We developed a predictive avatar model for limit avoidance which runs on the operator side, ensuring low latency. The system was successfully evaluated during the ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition semifinals. In addition, we performed in lab experiments and carried out a small user study with mostly untrained operators.

The purpose of this work was to tackle practical issues which arise when using a tendon-driven robotic manipulator with a long, passive, flexible proximal section in medical applications. A separable robot which overcomes difficulties in actuation and sterilization is introduced, in which the body containing the electronics is reusable and the remainder is disposable. A control input which resolves the redundancy in the kinematics and a physical interpretation of this redundancy are provided. The effect of a static change in the proximal section angle on bending angle error was explored under four testing conditions for a sinusoidal input. Bending angle error increased for increasing proximal section angle for all testing conditions with an average error reduction of 41.48% for retension, 4.28% for hysteresis, and 52.35% for re-tension + hysteresis compensation relative to the baseline case. Two major sources of error in tracking the bending angle were identified: time delay from hysteresis and DC offset from the proximal section angle. Examination of these error sources revealed that the simple hysteresis compensation was most effective for removing time delay and re-tension compensation for removing DC offset, which was the primary source of increasing error. The re-tension compensation was also tested for dynamic changes in the proximal section and reduced error in the final configuration of the tip by 89.14% relative to the baseline case.

Learning enabled autonomous systems provide increased capabilities compared to traditional systems. However, the complexity of and probabilistic nature in the underlying methods enabling such capabilities present challenges for current systems engineering processes for assurance, and test, evaluation, verification, and validation (TEVV). This paper provides a preliminary attempt to map recently developed technical approaches in the assurance and TEVV of learning enabled autonomous systems (LEAS) literature to a traditional systems engineering v-model. This mapping categorizes such techniques into three main approaches: development, acquisition, and sustainment. We review the latest techniques to develop safe, reliable, and resilient learning enabled autonomous systems, without recommending radical and impractical changes to existing systems engineering processes. By performing this mapping, we seek to assist acquisition professionals by (i) informing comprehensive test and evaluation planning, and (ii) objectively communicating risk to leaders.

In inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), a learning agent infers a reward function encoding the underlying task using demonstrations from experts. However, many existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent has access to full information about the environment. We remove this assumption by developing an algorithm for IRL in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). We address two limitations of existing IRL techniques. First, they require an excessive amount of data due to the information asymmetry between the expert and the learner. Second, most of these IRL techniques require solving the computationally intractable forward problem -- computing an optimal policy given a reward function -- in POMDPs. The developed algorithm reduces the information asymmetry while increasing the data efficiency by incorporating task specifications expressed in temporal logic into IRL. Such specifications may be interpreted as side information available to the learner a priori in addition to the demonstrations. Further, the algorithm avoids a common source of algorithmic complexity by building on causal entropy as the measure of the likelihood of the demonstrations as opposed to entropy. Nevertheless, the resulting problem is nonconvex due to the so-called forward problem. We solve the intrinsic nonconvexity of the forward problem in a scalable manner through a sequential linear programming scheme that guarantees to converge to a locally optimal policy. In a series of examples, including experiments in a high-fidelity Unity simulator, we demonstrate that even with a limited amount of data and POMDPs with tens of thousands of states, our algorithm learns reward functions and policies that satisfy the task while inducing similar behavior to the expert by leveraging the provided side information.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored, with applications in gaming, character animation, virtual reality, and telepresence systems. State-of-the-art methods deform the face topology of the target actor to sync the input audio without considering the identity-specific speaking style and facial idiosyncrasies of the target actor, thus, resulting in unrealistic and inaccurate lip movements. To address this, we present Imitator, a speech-driven facial expression synthesis method, which learns identity-specific details from a short input video and produces novel facial expressions matching the identity-specific speaking style and facial idiosyncrasies of the target actor. Specifically, we train a style-agnostic transformer on a large facial expression dataset which we use as a prior for audio-driven facial expressions. Based on this prior, we optimize for identity-specific speaking style based on a short reference video. To train the prior, we introduce a novel loss function based on detected bilabial consonants to ensure plausible lip closures and consequently improve the realism of the generated expressions. Through detailed experiments and a user study, we show that our approach produces temporally coherent facial expressions from input audio while preserving the speaking style of the target actors.

We study the problem of graph clustering under a broad class of objectives in which the quality of a cluster is defined based on the ratio between the number of edges in the cluster, and the total weight of vertices in the cluster. We show that our definition is closely related to popular clustering measures, namely normalized associations, which is a dual of the normalized cut objective, and normalized modularity. We give a linear time constant-approximate algorithm for our objective, which implies the first constant-factor approximation algorithms for normalized modularity and normalized associations.

This work presents a set of neural network (NN) models specifically designed for accurate and efficient fluid dynamics forecasting. In this work, we show how neural networks training can be improved by reducing data complexity through a modal decomposition technique called higher order dynamic mode decomposition (HODMD), which identifies the main structures inside flow dynamics and reconstructs the original flow using only these main structures. This reconstruction has the same number of samples and spatial dimension as the original flow, but with a less complex dynamics and preserving its main features. We also show the low computational cost required by the proposed NN models, both in their training and inference phases. The core idea of this work is to test the limits of applicability of deep learning models to data forecasting in complex fluid dynamics problems. Generalization capabilities of the models are demonstrated by using the same neural network architectures to forecast the future dynamics of four different multi-phase flows. Data sets used to train and test these deep learning models come from Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of these flows.

Neuromorphic systems require user-friendly software to support the design and optimization of experiments. In this work, we address this need by presenting our development of a machine learning-based modeling framework for the BrainScaleS-2 neuromorphic system. This work represents an improvement over previous efforts, which either focused on the matrix-multiplication mode of BrainScaleS-2 or lacked full automation. Our framework, called hxtorch.snn, enables the hardware-in-the-loop training of spiking neural networks within PyTorch, including support for auto differentiation in a fully-automated hardware experiment workflow. In addition, hxtorch.snn facilitates seamless transitions between emulating on hardware and simulating in software. We demonstrate the capabilities of hxtorch.snn on a classification task using the Yin-Yang dataset employing a gradient-based approach with surrogate gradients and densely sampled membrane observations from the BrainScaleS-2 hardware system.