元学习是一种处理不平衡和嘈杂标签学习的有效方法，但它取决于验证集，其中包含随机选择，手动标记和平衡的分布式样品。该验证集的随机选择和手动标记和平衡不仅是元学习的最佳选择，而且随着类的数量，它的缩放范围也很差。因此，最近的元学习论文提出了临时启发式方法来自动构建和标记此验证集，但是这些启发式方法仍然是元学习的最佳选择。在本文中，我们分析了元学习算法，并提出了新的标准来表征验证集的实用性，基于：1）验证集的信息性； 2）集合的班级分配余额； 3）集合标签的正确性。此外，我们提出了一种新的不平衡的嘈杂标签元学习（INOLML）算法，该算法会自动构建通过上面的标准最大化其实用程序来构建验证。我们的方法比以前的元学习方法显示出显着改进，并在几个基准上设定了新的最新技术。

The introduction of high-quality image generation models, particularly the StyleGAN family, provides a powerful tool to synthesize and manipulate images. However, existing models are built upon high-quality (HQ) data as desired outputs, making them unfit for in-the-wild low-quality (LQ) images, which are common inputs for manipulation. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing a novel GAN structure that allows for generating images with controllable quality. The network can synthesize various image degradation and restore the sharp image via a quality control code. Our proposed QC-StyleGAN can directly edit LQ images without altering their quality by applying GAN inversion and manipulation techniques. It also provides for free an image restoration solution that can handle various degradations, including noise, blur, compression artifacts, and their mixtures. Finally, we demonstrate numerous other applications such as image degradation synthesis, transfer, and interpolation.

COVID-19大流行已经暴露了全球医疗服务的脆弱性，增加了开发新颖的工具来提供快速且具有成本效益的筛查和诊断的需求。临床报告表明，Covid-19感染可能导致心脏损伤，心电图（ECG）可以作为Covid-19的诊断生物标志物。这项研究旨在利用ECG信号自动检测COVID-19。我们提出了一种从ECG纸记录中提取ECG信号的新方法，然后将其送入一维卷积神经网络（1D-CNN）中，以学习和诊断疾病。为了评估数字信号的质量，标记了基于纸张的ECG图像中的R峰。之后，将从每个图像计算的RR间隔与相应数字化信号的RR间隔进行比较。 COVID-19 ECG图像数据集上的实验表明，提出的数字化方法能够正确捕获原始信号，平均绝对误差为28.11 ms。我们提出的1D-CNN模型在数字化的心电图信号上进行了训练，允许准确识别患有COVID-19和其他受试者的个体，分类精度为98.42％，95.63％和98.50％，用于分类COVID-19 vs.正常，与正常人分类， COVID-19与异常心跳和Covid-19和其他类别分别与其他阶级。此外，提出的方法还为多分类任务实现了高级的性能。我们的发现表明，经过数字化的心电图信号训练的深度学习系统可以作为诊断Covid-19的潜在工具。

基于硬件的加速度是促进许多计算密集型数学操作的广泛尝试。本文提出了一个基于FPGA的体系结构来加速卷积操作 - 在许多卷积神经网络模型中出现的复杂且昂贵的计算步骤。我们将设计定为标准卷积操作，打算以边缘-AI解决方案启动产品。该项目的目的是产生一个可以一次处理卷积层的FPGA IP核心。系统开发人员可以使用Verilog HDL作为体系结构的主要设计语言来部署IP核心。实验结果表明，我们在简单的边缘计算FPGA板上合成的单个计算核心可以提供0.224 GOPS。当董事会充分利用时，可以实现4.48 GOP。

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Graph neural networks have shown to learn effective node representations, enabling node-, link-, and graph-level inference. Conventional graph networks assume static relations between nodes, while relations between entities in a video often evolve over time, with nodes entering and exiting dynamically. In such temporally-dynamic graphs, a core problem is inferring the future state of spatio-temporal edges, which can constitute multiple types of relations. To address this problem, we propose MTD-GNN, a graph network for predicting temporally-dynamic edges for multiple types of relations. We propose a factorized spatio-temporal graph attention layer to learn dynamic node representations and present a multi-task edge prediction loss that models multiple relations simultaneously. The proposed architecture operates on top of scene graphs that we obtain from videos through object detection and spatio-temporal linking. Experimental evaluations on ActionGenome and CLEVRER show that modeling multiple relations in our temporally-dynamic graph network can be mutually beneficial, outperforming existing static and spatio-temporal graph neural networks, as well as state-of-the-art predicate classification methods.

Solving the analytical inverse kinematics (IK) of redundant manipulators in real time is a difficult problem in robotics since its solution for a given target pose is not unique. Moreover, choosing the optimal IK solution with respect to application-specific demands helps to improve the robustness and to increase the success rate when driving the manipulator from its current configuration towards a desired pose. This is necessary, especially in high-dynamic tasks like catching objects in mid-flights. To compute a suitable target configuration in the joint space for a given target pose in the trajectory planning context, various factors such as travel time or manipulability must be considered. However, these factors increase the complexity of the overall problem which impedes real-time implementation. In this paper, a real-time framework to compute the analytical inverse kinematics of a redundant robot is presented. To this end, the analytical IK of the redundant manipulator is parameterized by so-called redundancy parameters, which are combined with a target pose to yield a unique IK solution. Most existing works in the literature either try to approximate the direct mapping from the desired pose of the manipulator to the solution of the IK or cluster the entire workspace to find IK solutions. In contrast, the proposed framework directly learns these redundancy parameters by using a neural network (NN) that provides the optimal IK solution with respect to the manipulability and the closeness to the current robot configuration. Monte Carlo simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed approach which is accurate and real-time capable ($\approx$ \SI{32}{\micro\second}) on the KUKA LBR iiwa 14 R820.

Robots have been brought to work close to humans in many scenarios. For coexistence and collaboration, robots should be safe and pleasant for humans to interact with. To this end, the robots could be both physically soft with multimodal sensing/perception, so that the robots could have better awareness of the surrounding environment, as well as to respond properly to humans' action/intention. This paper introduces a novel soft robotic link, named ProTac, that possesses multiple sensing modes: tactile and proximity sensing, based on computer vision and a functional material. These modalities come from a layered structure of a soft transparent silicon skin, a polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) film, and reflective markers. Here, the PDLC film can switch actively between the opaque and the transparent state, from which the tactile sensing and proximity sensing can be obtained by using cameras solely built inside the ProTac link. In this paper, inference algorithms for tactile proximity perception are introduced. Evaluation results of two sensing modalities demonstrated that, with a simple activation strategy, ProTac link could effectively perceive useful information from both approaching and in-contact obstacles. The proposed sensing device is expected to bring in ultimate solutions for design of robots with softness, whole-body and multimodal sensing, and safety control strategies.

Recent studies on adversarial images have shown that they tend to leave the underlying low-dimensional data manifold, making them significantly more challenging for current models to make correct predictions. This so-called off-manifold conjecture has inspired a novel line of defenses against adversarial attacks on images. In this study, we find a similar phenomenon occurs in the contextualized embedding space induced by pretrained language models, in which adversarial texts tend to have their embeddings diverge from the manifold of natural ones. Based on this finding, we propose Textual Manifold-based Defense (TMD), a defense mechanism that projects text embeddings onto an approximated embedding manifold before classification. It reduces the complexity of potential adversarial examples, which ultimately enhances the robustness of the protected model. Through extensive experiments, our method consistently and significantly outperforms previous defenses under various attack settings without trading off clean accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first NLP defense that leverages the manifold structure against adversarial attacks. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/dangne/tmd}.

Generating consistent and high-quality images from given texts is essential for visual-language understanding. Although impressive results have been achieved in generating high-quality images, text-image consistency is still a major concern in existing GAN-based methods. Particularly, the most popular metric $R$-precision may not accurately reflect the text-image consistency, often resulting in very misleading semantics in the generated images. Albeit its significance, how to design a better text-image consistency metric surprisingly remains under-explored in the community. In this paper, we make a further step forward to develop a novel CLIP-based metric termed as Semantic Similarity Distance ($SSD$), which is both theoretically founded from a distributional viewpoint and empirically verified on benchmark datasets. Benefiting from the proposed metric, we further design the Parallel Deep Fusion Generative Adversarial Networks (PDF-GAN) that aims at improving text-image consistency by fusing semantic information at different granularities and capturing accurate semantics. Equipped with two novel plug-and-play components: Hard-Negative Sentence Constructor and Semantic Projection, the proposed PDF-GAN can mitigate inconsistent semantics and bridge the text-image semantic gap. A series of experiments show that, as opposed to current state-of-the-art methods, our PDF-GAN can lead to significantly better text-image consistency while maintaining decent image quality on the CUB and COCO datasets.