以富有成效和有效的方式处理和分析表格数据对于在医疗保健等领域的成功应用程序中的成功应用至关重要。但是，缺乏代表和标准化表格信息的统一框架对研究人员和专业人员都构成了重大挑战。在这项工作中，我们介绍了TabText，一种利用语言的非结构化数据格式的方法论，可以有效，准确地从不同的表结构和时间段编码表格数据。我们使用两个医疗保健数据集和四个预测任务，这些任务通过TabText提取的特征优于传统处理方法提取的那些提取的任务，而这些任务的功能却高于2-5％。此外，我们分析了框架对缺失价值观，元信息和语言描述性句子表示的不同选择的敏感性，并为赢得改善绩效的策略提供了见解。

人工智能（AI）系统在接下来的几十年中有很大的希望可以改善医疗保健。具体而言，利用多个数据源和输入模式的AI系统有望成为一种可行的方法，可以在广泛的应用程序中提供更准确的结果和可部署的管道。在这项工作中，我们提出并评估一个统一的医学中的整体AI（HAIM）框架，以促进利用多模式输入的AI系统的生成和测试。我们的方法使用可通用的数据预处理和机器学习建模阶段，可以很容易地适应医疗保健环境中的研究和部署。我们通过训练和表征基于MIMIC-IV-MM的14,324个独立模型来评估我们的HAIM框架，该模型是一种多模式临床数据库（n = 34,537个样本），其中包含7,279个独特的住院和6,485名患者，涵盖了4个数据模态的所有可能输入组合（即，所有可能的输入组合）表格，时间序列，文本和图像），11个独特的数据源和12个预测任务。我们表明，该框架可以始终如一地生产出在各种医疗保健示范中超过相似的单源方法的模型（乘以6-33％），包括10种不同的胸部病理学诊断，以及休息时间和48小时的死亡率预测。我们还使用Shapley值量化了每种模式和数据源的贡献，这证明了数据类型重要性的异质性以及在不同医疗保健相关的任务中多模式输入的必要性。我们的整体医学AI（HAIM）框架的可推广性能和灵活性可以为未来的临床和运营医疗环境中的多模式预测系统提供有希望的途径。

本文描述了一个新颖的机器学习（ML）框架，用于热带气旋强度和轨道预测，结合了多种ML技术并利用了多种数据源。我们的多模式框架（称为Hurricast）有效地结合了时空数据和统计数据，通过提取具有深度学习的编码器编码器体系结构的特征，并通过梯度增强的树进行预测。我们在2016 - 2019年在北大西洋和东太平洋盆地进行了24小时的提前时间和强度预测，评估我们的模型，并表明它们在秒内计算时达到了当前操作预测模型的可比平均绝对误差和技能。此外，将飓风纳入运营预测的共识模型可以改善国家飓风中心的官方预测，从而通过现有方法突出显示互补物业。总而言之，我们的工作表明，利用机器学习技术结合不同的数据源可以带来热带气旋预测的新机会。

Increasing research interests focus on sequential recommender systems, aiming to model dynamic sequence representation precisely. However, the most commonly used loss function in state-of-the-art sequential recommendation models has essential limitations. To name a few, Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) loss suffers the vanishing gradient problem from numerous negative sampling and predictionbiases; Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) loss subjects to negative sampling numbers, thereby it is likely to ignore valuable negative examples and reduce the training efficiency; Cross-Entropy (CE) loss only focuses on the last timestamp of the training sequence, which causes low utilization of sequence information and results in inferior user sequence representation. To avoid these limitations, in this paper, we propose to calculate Cumulative Cross-Entropy (CCE) loss over the sequence. CCE is simple and direct, which enjoys the virtues of painless deployment, no negative sampling, and effective and efficient training. We conduct extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CCE. The results show that employing CCE loss on three state-of-the-art models GRU4Rec, SASRec, and S3-Rec can reach 125.63%, 69.90%, and 33.24% average improvement of full ranking NDCG@5, respectively. Using CCE, the performance curve of the models on the test data increases rapidly with the wall clock time, and is superior to that of other loss functions in almost the whole process of model training.

The utilization of large-scale distributed renewable energy promotes the development of the multi-microgrid (MMG), which raises the need of developing an effective energy management method to minimize economic costs and keep self energy-sufficiency. The multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) has been widely used for the energy management problem because of its real-time scheduling ability. However, its training requires massive energy operation data of microgrids (MGs), while gathering these data from different MGs would threaten their privacy and data security. Therefore, this paper tackles this practical yet challenging issue by proposing a federated multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (F-MADRL) algorithm via the physics-informed reward. In this algorithm, the federated learning (FL) mechanism is introduced to train the F-MADRL algorithm thus ensures the privacy and the security of data. In addition, a decentralized MMG model is built, and the energy of each participated MG is managed by an agent, which aims to minimize economic costs and keep self energy-sufficiency according to the physics-informed reward. At first, MGs individually execute the self-training based on local energy operation data to train their local agent models. Then, these local models are periodically uploaded to a server and their parameters are aggregated to build a global agent, which will be broadcasted to MGs and replace their local agents. In this way, the experience of each MG agent can be shared and the energy operation data is not explicitly transmitted, thus protecting the privacy and ensuring data security. Finally, experiments are conducted on Oak Ridge national laboratory distributed energy control communication lab microgrid (ORNL-MG) test system, and the comparisons are carried out to verify the effectiveness of introducing the FL mechanism and the outperformance of our proposed F-MADRL.

This paper presents a safety-critical locomotion control framework for quadrupedal robots. Our goal is to enable quadrupedal robots to safely navigate in cluttered environments. To tackle this, we introduce exponential Discrete Control Barrier Functions (exponential DCBFs) with duality-based obstacle avoidance constraints into a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) with Whole-Body Control (WBC) framework for quadrupedal locomotion control. This enables us to use polytopes to describe the shapes of the robot and obstacles for collision avoidance while doing locomotion control of quadrupedal robots. Compared to most prior work, especially using CBFs, that utilize spherical and conservative approximation for obstacle avoidance, this work demonstrates a quadrupedal robot autonomously and safely navigating through very tight spaces in the real world. (Our open-source code is available at github.com/HybridRobotics/quadruped_nmpc_dcbf_duality, and the video is available at youtu.be/p1gSQjwXm1Q.)

Affect understanding capability is essential for social robots to autonomously interact with a group of users in an intuitive and reciprocal way. However, the challenge of multi-person affect understanding comes from not only the accurate perception of each user's affective state (e.g., engagement) but also the recognition of the affect interplay between the members (e.g., joint engagement) that presents as complex, but subtle, nonverbal exchanges between them. Here we present a novel hybrid framework for identifying a parent-child dyad's joint engagement by combining a deep learning framework with various video augmentation techniques. Using a dataset of parent-child dyads reading storybooks together with a social robot at home, we first train RGB frame- and skeleton-based joint engagement recognition models with four video augmentation techniques (General Aug, DeepFake, CutOut, and Mixed) applied datasets to improve joint engagement classification performance. Second, we demonstrate experimental results on the use of trained models in the robot-parent-child interaction context. Third, we introduce a behavior-based metric for evaluating the learned representation of the models to investigate the model interpretability when recognizing joint engagement. This work serves as the first step toward fully unlocking the potential of end-to-end video understanding models pre-trained on large public datasets and augmented with data augmentation and visualization techniques for affect recognition in the multi-person human-robot interaction in the wild.

Three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound imaging technique has been applied for scoliosis assessment, but current assessment method only uses coronal projection image and cannot illustrate the 3D deformity and vertebra rotation. The vertebra detection is essential to reveal 3D spine information, but the detection task is challenging due to complex data and limited annotations. We propose VertMatch, a two-step framework to detect vertebral structures in 3D ultrasound volume by utilizing unlabeled data in semi-supervised manner. The first step is to detect the possible positions of structures on transverse slice globally, and then the local patches are cropped based on detected positions. The second step is to distinguish whether the patches contain real vertebral structures and screen the predicted positions from the first step. VertMatch develops three novel components for semi-supervised learning: for position detection in the first step, (1) anatomical prior is used to screen pseudo labels generated from confidence threshold method; (2) multi-slice consistency is used to utilize more unlabeled data by inputting multiple adjacent slices; (3) for patch identification in the second step, the categories are rebalanced in each batch to solve imbalance problem. Experimental results demonstrate that VertMatch can detect vertebra accurately in ultrasound volume and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. VertMatch is also validated in clinical application on forty ultrasound scans, and it can be a promising approach for 3D assessment of scoliosis.

Random graph models with community structure have been studied extensively in the literature. For both the problems of detecting and recovering community structure, an interesting landscape of statistical and computational phase transitions has emerged. A natural unanswered question is: might it be possible to infer properties of the community structure (for instance, the number and sizes of communities) even in situations where actually finding those communities is believed to be computationally hard? We show the answer is no. In particular, we consider certain hypothesis testing problems between models with different community structures, and we show (in the low-degree polynomial framework) that testing between two options is as hard as finding the communities. In addition, our methods give the first computational lower bounds for testing between two different `planted' distributions, whereas previous results have considered testing between a planted distribution and an i.i.d. `null' distribution.

Free-text rationales (FTRs) follow how humans communicate by explaining reasoning processes via natural language. A number of recent works have studied how to improve language model (LM) generalization by using FTRs to teach LMs the correct reasoning processes behind correct task outputs. These prior works aim to learn from FTRs by appending them to the LM input or target output, but this may introduce an input distribution shift or conflict with the task objective, respectively. We propose KNIFE, which distills FTR knowledge from an FTR-augmented teacher LM (takes both task input and FTR) to a student LM (takes only task input), which is used for inference. Crucially, the teacher LM's forward computation has a bottleneck stage in which all of its FTR states are masked out, which pushes knowledge from the FTR states into the task input/output states. Then, FTR knowledge is distilled to the student LM by training its task input/output states to align with the teacher LM's. On two question answering datasets, we show that KNIFE significantly outperforms existing FTR learning methods, in both fully-supervised and low-resource settings.