The Elo algorithm, due to its simplicity, is widely used for rating in sports competitions as well as in other applications where the rating/ranking is a useful tool for predicting future results. However, despite its widespread use, a detailed understanding of the convergence properties of the Elo algorithm is still lacking. Aiming to fill this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive (stochastic) analysis of the Elo algorithm, considering round-robin (one-on-one) competitions. Specifically, analytical expressions are derived characterizing the behavior/evolution of the skills and of important performance metrics. Then, taking into account the relationship between the behavior of the algorithm and the step-size value, which is a hyperparameter that can be controlled, some design guidelines as well as discussions about the performance of the algorithm are provided. To illustrate the applicability of the theoretical findings, experimental results are shown, corroborating the very good match between analytical predictions and those obtained from the algorithm using real-world data (from the Italian SuperLega, Volleyball League).

Algorithms that involve both forecasting and optimization are at the core of solutions to many difficult real-world problems, such as in supply chains (inventory optimization), traffic, and in the transition towards carbon-free energy generation in battery/load/production scheduling in sustainable energy systems. Typically, in these scenarios we want to solve an optimization problem that depends on unknown future values, which therefore need to be forecast. As both forecasting and optimization are difficult problems in their own right, relatively few research has been done in this area. This paper presents the findings of the ``IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge on Predict+Optimize for Renewable Energy Scheduling," held in 2021. We present a comparison and evaluation of the seven highest-ranked solutions in the competition, to provide researchers with a benchmark problem and to establish the state of the art for this benchmark, with the aim to foster and facilitate research in this area. The competition used data from the Monash Microgrid, as well as weather data and energy market data. It then focused on two main challenges: forecasting renewable energy production and demand, and obtaining an optimal schedule for the activities (lectures) and on-site batteries that lead to the lowest cost of energy. The most accurate forecasts were obtained by gradient-boosted tree and random forest models, and optimization was mostly performed using mixed integer linear and quadratic programming. The winning method predicted different scenarios and optimized over all scenarios jointly using a sample average approximation method.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

Standard imitation learning can fail when the expert demonstrators have different sensory inputs than the imitating agent. This is because partial observability gives rise to hidden confounders in the causal graph. We break down the space of confounded imitation learning problems and identify three settings with different data requirements in which the correct imitation policy can be identified. We then introduce an algorithm for deconfounded imitation learning, which trains an inference model jointly with a latent-conditional policy. At test time, the agent alternates between updating its belief over the latent and acting under the belief. We show in theory and practice that this algorithm converges to the correct interventional policy, solves the confounding issue, and can under certain assumptions achieve an asymptotically optimal imitation performance.

DeepMind的游戏理论与多代理团队研究多学科学习的几个方面，从计算近似值到游戏理论中的基本概念，再到在富裕的空间环境中模拟社会困境，并在困难的团队协调任务中培训3-D类人动物。我们小组的一个签名目的是使用DeepMind在DeepMind中提供的资源和专业知识，以深入强化学习来探索复杂环境中的多代理系统，并使用这些基准来提高我们的理解。在这里，我们总结了我们团队的最新工作，并提出了一种分类法，我们认为这重点介绍了多代理研究中许多重要的开放挑战。

在本文中，我们介绍Bayesldm，这是一个用于贝叶斯纵向数据建模的系统，该系统由高级建模语言组成，具有针对复杂的多变量时间序列数据建模的特定功能，并与编译器相结合，可以生成优化的概率程序代码，以在指定模型中执行指定的推理。 Bayesldm支持贝叶斯网络模型的建模，其特定关注动态贝叶斯网络（DBN）的高效，声明性规范。 Bayesldm编译器将模型规范与可用数据和输出代码相结合，用于执行贝叶斯推断，以同时处理丢失的数据，同时处理未知模型参数。这些功能有可能通过抽象产生计算有效的概率推断代码的过程来显着加速域中的迭代建模工作流，这些迭代建模工作流程涉及复杂纵向数据的分析。我们描述了Bayesldm系统组件，评估表示和推理优化的效率，并提供了该系统在分析异质和部分观察到的移动健康数据的应用示例。

机器人模拟一直是机器人领域研发的组成部分。模拟消除了通过启用机器人的应用测试来快速，负担得起的，而无需遭受机械或电子误差而进行机器人应用测试，从而消除了对传感器，电动机和实际机器人物理结构的可能性。通过虚拟现实（VR）模拟，通过提供更好的环境可视化提示，为与模拟机器人互动提供了更具吸引力的替代方法，从而提供了更严肃的体验。这种沉浸至关重要，尤其是在讨论社交机器人时，人类机器人相互作用（HRI）领域的子区域。在日常生活中，机器人的广泛使用取决于HRI。将来，机器人将能够与人们有效互动，以在人类文明中执行各种任务。在个人工作空间开始扩散时，为机器人开发简单且易于理解的接口至关重要。因此，在这项研究中，我们实施了一个使用现成的工具和包装的VR机器人框架，以增强社交HRI的研究和应用开发。由于整个VR接口是一个开源项目，因此可以在身临其境的环境中进行测试，而无需物理机器人。

在本文中，我们考虑了使用嘈杂的中间量子量子（NISQ）设备的几种用于量子计算机视觉的算法，并将它们基于对其经典对应物的真正问题进行基准测试。具体而言，我们考虑了两种方法：基于通用门的量子计算机上的量子支持向量机（QSVM），以及Qubost在量子退火器上。量子视觉系统是针对图像不平衡数据集进行基准测试的，其目的是检测制成的汽车件中的缺陷。我们看到，量子算法以几种方式优于其经典对应物，QBoost允许使用当今的量子退火器分析更大的问题。还讨论了数据预处理，包括降低维度和对比度增强，以及Qboost中的超参数调整。据我们所知，这是量子计算机视觉系统的首次实施，用于制造生产线中的工业相关性问题。

本文涉及分割中的伪标记。我们的贡献是四倍。首先，我们提出了伪标签的新表述，作为一种预期最大化（EM）算法，用于清晰的统计解释。其次，我们纯粹基于原始伪标记，即Segpl，提出了一种半监督的医学图像分割方法。我们证明，SEGPL是针对针对2D多级MRI MRI脑肿瘤分段任务和3D二进制CT肺部肺血管分段任务的半监督分割的最新一致性正则方法的竞争方法。与先前方法相比，SEGPL的简单性允许更少的计算成本。第三，我们证明了SEGPL的有效性可能源于其稳健性抵抗分布噪声和对抗性攻击。最后，在EM框架下，我们通过变异推理引入了SEGPL的概率概括，该推论学习了训练期间伪标记的动态阈值。我们表明，具有变异推理的SEGPL可以通过金标准方法深度集合在同步时执行不确定性估计。