自动驾驶的车辆和自动地面机器人需要一种可靠，准确的方法来分析周围环境的遍历以进行安全导航。本文提出并评估了一种基于机器学习的遍历性分析方法，该方法将基于SVM分类器的混合方法中的几何特征与基于外观的特征相结合。特别是，我们表明，整合一组新的几何和视觉特征并专注于重要的实施细节，可以显着提高性能和可靠性。已提出的方法已与最先进的深度学习方法进行了比较。在不同的复杂性方面，它的准确性为89.2％，表明其有效性和鲁棒性。该方法在CPU上完全运行，并在其他方法方面达到可比的结果，运行速度更快，并且需要更少的硬件资源。

本文介绍了基于仅使用合成数据训练的深卷积神经网络的人体部位分割的新框架。该方法实现了尖端的结果，而无需培训具有人体部位的真实注释数据的模型。我们的贡献包括数据生成管道，该管道利用游戏引擎来创建用于训练网络的合成数据，以及一种结合边缘响应映射和自适应直方图均衡的新型预处理模块，以指导网络来学习网络人体部位的形状确保对照明条件的变化的稳健性。为了选择最佳候选架构，我们对真正的人体四肢的手动注释图像进行详尽的测试。我们进一步将我们的方法与若干高端商业分割工具进行了对体零分割任务的几个。结果表明，我们的方法通过显着的余量优于其他模型。最后，我们展示了一个消融研究来验证我们的预处理模块。通过本文，我们释放了所提出的方法以及所获取的数据集的实现。

Pre-trained language models (PLM) have advanced the state-of-the-art across NLP applications, but lack domain-specific knowledge that does not naturally occur in pre-training data. Previous studies augmented PLMs with symbolic knowledge for different downstream NLP tasks. However, knowledge bases (KBs) utilized in these studies are usually large-scale and static, in contrast to small, domain-specific, and modifiable knowledge bases that are prominent in real-world task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. In this paper, we showcase the advantages of injecting domain-specific knowledge prior to fine-tuning on TOD tasks. To this end, we utilize light-weight adapters that can be easily integrated with PLMs and serve as a repository for facts learned from different KBs. To measure the efficacy of proposed knowledge injection methods, we introduce Knowledge Probing using Response Selection (KPRS) -- a probe designed specifically for TOD models. Experiments on KPRS and the response generation task show improvements of knowledge injection with adapters over strong baselines.

The current trend of applying transfer learning from CNNs trained on large datasets can be an overkill when the target application is a custom and delimited problem with enough data to train a network from scratch. On the other hand, the training of custom and lighter CNNs requires expertise, in the from-scratch case, and or high-end resources, as in the case of hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW NAS), limiting access to the technology by non-habitual NN developers. For this reason, we present Colab NAS, an affordable HW NAS technique for producing lightweight task-specific CNNs. Its novel derivative-free search strategy, inspired by Occam's razor, allows it to obtain state-of-the-art results on the Visual Wake Word dataset in just 4.5 GPU hours using free online GPU services such as Google Colaboratory and Kaggle Kernel.

In this paper we propose a general approach to define a many-valued preferential interpretation of gradual argumentation semantics. The approach allows for conditional reasoning over arguments and boolean combination of arguments, with respect to a class of gradual semantics, through the verification of graded (strict or defeasible) implications over a preferential interpretation. As a proof of concept, in the finitely-valued case, an Answer set Programming approach is proposed for conditional reasoning in a many-valued argumentation semantics of weighted argumentation graphs. The paper also develops and discusses a probabilistic semantics for gradual argumentation, which builds on the many-valued conditional semantics.

Weather forecasting centers currently rely on statistical postprocessing methods to minimize forecast error. This improves skill but can lead to predictions that violate physical principles or disregard dependencies between variables, which can be problematic for downstream applications and for the trustworthiness of postprocessing models, especially when they are based on new machine learning approaches. Building on recent advances in physics-informed machine learning, we propose to achieve physical consistency in deep learning-based postprocessing models by integrating meteorological expertise in the form of analytic equations. Applied to the post-processing of surface weather in Switzerland, we find that constraining a neural network to enforce thermodynamic state equations yields physically-consistent predictions of temperature and humidity without compromising performance. Our approach is especially advantageous when data is scarce, and our findings suggest that incorporating domain expertise into postprocessing models allows to optimize weather forecast information while satisfying application-specific requirements.

We study the learning dynamics of self-predictive learning for reinforcement learning, a family of algorithms that learn representations by minimizing the prediction error of their own future latent representations. Despite its recent empirical success, such algorithms have an apparent defect: trivial representations (such as constants) minimize the prediction error, yet it is obviously undesirable to converge to such solutions. Our central insight is that careful designs of the optimization dynamics are critical to learning meaningful representations. We identify that a faster paced optimization of the predictor and semi-gradient updates on the representation, are crucial to preventing the representation collapse. Then in an idealized setup, we show self-predictive learning dynamics carries out spectral decomposition on the state transition matrix, effectively capturing information of the transition dynamics. Building on the theoretical insights, we propose bidirectional self-predictive learning, a novel self-predictive algorithm that learns two representations simultaneously. We examine the robustness of our theoretical insights with a number of small-scale experiments and showcase the promise of the novel representation learning algorithm with large-scale experiments.

Pretrained transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in many tasks and benchmarks recently. Many state-of-the-art Language Models (LMs), however, do not scale well above the threshold of 512 input tokens. In specialized domains though (such as legal, scientific or biomedical), models often need to process very long text (sometimes well above 10000 tokens). Even though many efficient transformers have been proposed (such as Longformer, BigBird or FNet), so far, only very few such efficient models are available for specialized domains. Additionally, since the pretraining process is extremely costly in general - but even more so as the sequence length increases - it is often only in reach of large research labs. One way of making pretraining cheaper is the Replaced Token Detection (RTD) task, by providing more signal during training, since the loss can be computed over all tokens. In this work, we train Longformer models with the efficient RTD task on legal data to showcase that pretraining efficient LMs is possible using much less compute. We evaluate the trained models on challenging summarization tasks requiring the model to summarize long texts to show to what extent the models can achieve good performance on downstream tasks. We find that both the small and base models outperform their baselines on the in-domain BillSum and out-of-domain PubMed tasks in their respective parameter range. We publish our code and models for research purposes.

Synthetic data generation has recently gained widespread attention as a more reliable alternative to traditional data anonymization. The involved methods are originally developed for image synthesis. Hence, their application to the typically tabular and relational datasets from healthcare, finance and other industries is non-trivial. While substantial research has been devoted to the generation of realistic tabular datasets, the study of synthetic relational databases is still in its infancy. In this paper, we combine the variational autoencoder framework with graph neural networks to generate realistic synthetic relational databases. We then apply the obtained method to two publicly available databases in computational experiments. The results indicate that real databases' structures are accurately preserved in the resulting synthetic datasets, even for large datasets with advanced data types.

In this paper, we propose the first-ever real benchmark thought for evaluating Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and, in general, Neural Rendering (NR) frameworks. We design and implement an effective pipeline for scanning real objects in quantity and effortlessly. Our scan station is built with less than 500$ hardware budget and can collect roughly 4000 images of a scanned object in just 5 minutes. Such a platform is used to build ScanNeRF, a dataset characterized by several train/val/test splits aimed at benchmarking the performance of modern NeRF methods under different conditions. Accordingly, we evaluate three cutting-edge NeRF variants on it to highlight their strengths and weaknesses. The dataset is available on our project page, together with an online benchmark to foster the development of better and better NeRFs.