This paper presents the Crowd Score, a novel method to assess the funniness of jokes using large language models (LLMs) as AI judges. Our method relies on inducing different personalities into the LLM and aggregating the votes of the AI judges into a single score to rate jokes. We validate the votes using an auditing technique that checks if the explanation for a particular vote is reasonable using the LLM. We tested our methodology on 52 jokes in a crowd of four AI voters with different humour types: affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive and self-defeating. Our results show that few-shot prompting leads to better results than zero-shot for the voting question. Personality induction showed that aggressive and self-defeating voters are significantly more inclined to find more jokes funny of a set of aggressive/self-defeating jokes than the affiliative and self-enhancing voters. The Crowd Score follows the same trend as human judges by assigning higher scores to jokes that are also considered funnier by human judges. We believe that our methodology could be applied to other creative domains such as story, poetry, slogans, etc. It could both help the adoption of a flexible and accurate standard approach to compare different work in the CC community under a common metric and by minimizing human participation in assessing creative artefacts, it could accelerate the prototyping of creative artefacts and reduce the cost of hiring human participants to rate creative artefacts.

While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aimed to fast track the development of autonomous exploration systems by evaluating their performance in real-world underground search-and-rescue scenarios. Subterranean environments present a plethora of challenges for robotic systems, such as limited communications, complex topology, visually-degraded sensing, and harsh terrain. The presented solution enables long-term autonomy with minimal human supervision by combining a powerful and independent single-agent autonomy stack, with higher level mission management operating over a flexible mesh network. The autonomy suite deployed on quadruped and wheeled robots was fully independent, freeing the human supervision to loosely supervise the mission and make high-impact strategic decisions. We also discuss lessons learned from fielding our system at the SubT Final Event, relating to vehicle versatility, system adaptability, and re-configurable communications.

Video segmentation consists of a frame-by-frame selection process of meaningful areas related to foreground moving objects. Some applications include traffic monitoring, human tracking, action recognition, efficient video surveillance, and anomaly detection. In these applications, it is not rare to face challenges such as abrupt changes in weather conditions, illumination issues, shadows, subtle dynamic background motions, and also camouflage effects. In this work, we address such shortcomings by proposing a novel deep learning video segmentation approach that incorporates residual information into the foreground detection learning process. The main goal is to provide a method capable of generating an accurate foreground detection given a grayscale video. Experiments conducted on the Change Detection 2014 and on the private dataset PetrobrasROUTES from Petrobras support the effectiveness of the proposed approach concerning some state-of-the-art video segmentation techniques, with overall F-measures of $\mathbf{0.9535}$ and $\mathbf{0.9636}$ in the Change Detection 2014 and PetrobrasROUTES datasets, respectively. Such a result places the proposed technique amongst the top 3 state-of-the-art video segmentation methods, besides comprising approximately seven times less parameters than its top one counterpart.

Scene change detection is an image processing problem related to partitioning pixels of a digital image into foreground and background regions. Mostly, visual knowledge-based computer intelligent systems, like traffic monitoring, video surveillance, and anomaly detection, need to use change detection techniques. Amongst the most prominent detection methods, there are the learning-based ones, which besides sharing similar training and testing protocols, differ from each other in terms of their architecture design strategies. Such architecture design directly impacts on the quality of the detection results, and also in the device resources capacity, like memory. In this work, we propose a novel Multiscale Cascade Residual Convolutional Neural Network that integrates multiscale processing strategy through a Residual Processing Module, with a Segmentation Convolutional Neural Network. Experiments conducted on two different datasets support the effectiveness of the proposed approach, achieving average overall $\boldsymbol{F\text{-}measure}$ results of $\boldsymbol{0.9622}$ and $\boldsymbol{0.9664}$ over Change Detection 2014 and PetrobrasROUTES datasets respectively, besides comprising approximately eight times fewer parameters. Such obtained results place the proposed technique amongst the top four state-of-the-art scene change detection methods.

Research on remote sensing image classification significantly impacts essential human routine tasks such as urban planning and agriculture. Nowadays, the rapid advance in technology and the availability of many high-quality remote sensing images create a demand for reliable automation methods. The current paper proposes two novel deep learning-based architectures for image classification purposes, i.e., the Discriminant Deep Image Prior Network and the Discriminant Deep Image Prior Network+, which combine Deep Image Prior and Triplet Networks learning strategies. Experiments conducted over three well-known public remote sensing image datasets achieved state-of-the-art results, evidencing the effectiveness of using deep image priors for remote sensing image classification.

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) describes a process for inferring quantifiable metrics of structural condition, which can serve as input to support decisions on the operation and maintenance of infrastructure assets. Given the long lifespan of critical structures, this problem can be cast as a sequential decision making problem over prescribed horizons. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) offer a formal framework to solve the underlying optimal planning task. However, two issues can undermine the POMDP solutions. Firstly, the need for a model that can adequately describe the evolution of the structural condition under deterioration or corrective actions and, secondly, the non-trivial task of recovery of the observation process parameters from available monitoring data. Despite these potential challenges, the adopted POMDP models do not typically account for uncertainty on model parameters, leading to solutions which can be unrealistically confident. In this work, we address both key issues. We present a framework to estimate POMDP transition and observation model parameters directly from available data, via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) conditioned on actions. The MCMC inference estimates distributions of the involved model parameters. We then form and solve the POMDP problem by exploiting the inferred distributions, to derive solutions that are robust to model uncertainty. We successfully apply our approach on maintenance planning for railway track assets on the basis of a "fractal value" indicator, which is computed from actual railway monitoring data.

Plastic shopping bags that get carried away from the side of roads and tangled on cotton plants can end up at cotton gins if not removed before the harvest. Such bags may not only cause problem in the ginning process but might also get embodied in cotton fibers reducing its quality and marketable value. Therefore, it is required to detect, locate, and remove the bags before cotton is harvested. Manually detecting and locating these bags in cotton fields is labor intensive, time-consuming and a costly process. To solve these challenges, we present application of four variants of YOLOv5 (YOLOv5s, YOLOv5m, YOLOv5l and YOLOv5x) for detecting plastic shopping bags using Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)-acquired RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) images. We also show fixed effect model tests of color of plastic bags as well as YOLOv5-variant on average precision (AP), mean average precision (mAP@50) and accuracy. In addition, we also demonstrate the effect of height of plastic bags on the detection accuracy. It was found that color of bags had significant effect (p < 0.001) on accuracy across all the four variants while it did not show any significant effect on the AP with YOLOv5m (p = 0.10) and YOLOv5x (p = 0.35) at 95% confidence level. Similarly, YOLOv5-variant did not show any significant effect on the AP (p = 0.11) and accuracy (p = 0.73) of white bags, but it had significant effects on the AP (p = 0.03) and accuracy (p = 0.02) of brown bags including on the mAP@50 (p = 0.01) and inference speed (p < 0.0001). Additionally, height of plastic bags had significant effect (p < 0.0001) on overall detection accuracy. The findings reported in this paper can be useful in speeding up removal of plastic bags from cotton fields before harvest and thereby reducing the amount of contaminants that end up at cotton gins.

本文提出了一种用于在线增量同时本地化和映射（SLAM）的强大优化方法。由于在存在感知混叠的情况下数据关联的NP硬度，可拖动（大约）数据关联方法将产生错误的测量。我们需要猛烈的后端，在达到在线效率限制的同时，在存在异常值的情况下，可以在存在异常值的情况下将其收敛到准确的解决方案。现有的强大SLAM方法要么对离群值敏感，对初始化越来越敏感，要么无法提供在线效率。我们提出了强大的增量平滑和映射（RISAM）算法，这是一种基于渐变的非跨识别性的稳健后端优化器，用于增量大满贯。我们在基准测试数据集上证明了我们的算法实现在线效率，优于现有的在线方法，并匹配或改善现有的离线方法的性能。

元学习是机器学习的一个分支，旨在将相关任务分布的数据合成以有效地解决新的数据。在过程控制中，许多系统具有相似且充分理解的动力学，这表明可以通过元学习创建可推广的控制器是可行的。在这项工作中，我们制定了一种元加强学习（META-RL）控制策略，该策略利用已知的离线信息进行培训，例如模型结构。对模型参数的分布而不是单个模型，对元RL代理进行了训练，从而使代理能够自动适应过程动力学的变化，同时保持性能。一个关键的设计元素是能够在培训期间离线利用基于模型的信息，同时保持与新环境交互的无模型策略结构。我们以前的工作已经证明了如何将这种方法应用于调整比例综合控制器以控制一阶过程的与工业相关的问题。在这项工作中，我们简要地重新引入了我们的方法，并证明了如何将其扩展到比例综合衍生的控制器和二阶系统。

Boll Weevil（Anthonomus Grandis L.）是一种严重的害虫，主要以棉花为食。由于亚热带气候条件，在德克萨斯州的下里奥格兰德山谷等地方，棉花植物可以全年生长，因此，收获期间上一个季节的剩下的种子可以在玉米中的旋转中继续生长（Zea Mays L.）和高粱（高粱双色L.）。这些野性或志愿棉花（VC）植物到达Pinhead平方阶段（5-6叶阶段）可以充当Boll Weevil Pest的宿主。得克萨斯州的鲍尔象鼻虫根除计划（TBWEP）雇用人们在道路或田野侧面生长的风险投资和消除旋转作物的田间生长，但在田野中生长的植物仍未被发现。在本文中，我们证明了基于您的计算机视觉（CV）算法的应用，仅在三个不同的生长阶段（V3，V6）（V3，V6）中检测出在玉米场中生长的VC植物，以检测在玉米场中生长的VC植物的应用。使用无人飞机系统（UAS）遥感图像。使用Yolov5（S，M，L和X）的所有四个变体，并根据分类精度，平均平均精度（MAP）和F1得分进行比较。发现Yolov5s可以在玉米的V6阶段检测到最大分类精度为98％，地图为96.3％，而Yolov5s和Yolov5m的地图为96.3％，而Yolov5m的分类精度为85％，Yolov5m和Yolov5m的分类准确性最小，而Yolov5L的分类精度最少。在VT阶段，在尺寸416 x 416像素的图像上为86.5％。开发的CV算法有可能有效地检测和定位在玉米场中间生长的VC植物，并加快TBWEP的管理方面。