Late-life depression (LLD) is a highly prevalent mood disorder occurring in older adults and is frequently accompanied by cognitive impairment (CI). Studies have shown that LLD may increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, the heterogeneity of presentation of geriatric depression suggests that multiple biological mechanisms may underlie it. Current biological research on LLD progression incorporates machine learning that combines neuroimaging data with clinical observations. There are few studies on incident cognitive diagnostic outcomes in LLD based on structural MRI (sMRI). In this paper, we describe the development of a hybrid representation learning (HRL) framework for predicting cognitive diagnosis over 5 years based on T1-weighted sMRI data. Specifically, we first extract prediction-oriented MRI features via a deep neural network, and then integrate them with handcrafted MRI features via a Transformer encoder for cognitive diagnosis prediction. Two tasks are investigated in this work, including (1) identifying cognitively normal subjects with LLD and never-depressed older healthy subjects, and (2) identifying LLD subjects who developed CI (or even AD) and those who stayed cognitively normal over five years. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first attempts to study the complex heterogeneous progression of LLD based on task-oriented and handcrafted MRI features. We validate the proposed HRL on 294 subjects with T1-weighted MRIs from two clinically harmonized studies. Experimental results suggest that the HRL outperforms several classical machine learning and state-of-the-art deep learning methods in LLD identification and prediction tasks.

Existing training criteria in automatic speech recognition(ASR) permit the model to freely explore more than one time alignments between the feature and label sequences. In this paper, we use entropy to measure a model's uncertainty, i.e. how it chooses to distribute the probability mass over the set of allowed alignments. Furthermore, we evaluate the effect of entropy regularization in encouraging the model to distribute the probability mass only on a smaller subset of allowed alignments. Experiments show that entropy regularization enables a much simpler decoding method without sacrificing word error rate, and provides better time alignment quality.

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.

Despite many recent advancements in language modeling, state-of-the-art language models lack grounding in the real world and struggle with tasks involving complex reasoning. Meanwhile, advances in the symbolic reasoning capabilities of AI have led to systems that outperform humans in games like chess and Go (Silver et al., 2018). Chess commentary provides an interesting domain for bridging these two fields of research, as it requires reasoning over a complex board state and providing analyses in natural language. In this work we demonstrate how to combine symbolic reasoning engines with controllable language models to generate chess commentaries. We conduct experiments to demonstrate that our approach generates commentaries that are preferred by human judges over previous baselines.

To date, little attention has been given to multi-view 3D human mesh estimation, despite real-life applicability (e.g., motion capture, sport analysis) and robustness to single-view ambiguities. Existing solutions typically suffer from poor generalization performance to new settings, largely due to the limited diversity of image-mesh pairs in multi-view training data. To address this shortcoming, people have explored the use of synthetic images. But besides the usual impact of visual gap between rendered and target data, synthetic-data-driven multi-view estimators also suffer from overfitting to the camera viewpoint distribution sampled during training which usually differs from real-world distributions. Tackling both challenges, we propose a novel simulation-based training pipeline for multi-view human mesh recovery, which (a) relies on intermediate 2D representations which are more robust to synthetic-to-real domain gap; (b) leverages learnable calibration and triangulation to adapt to more diversified camera setups; and (c) progressively aggregates multi-view information in a canonical 3D space to remove ambiguities in 2D representations. Through extensive benchmarking, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed solution especially for unseen in-the-wild scenarios.

This paper is a technical overview of DeepMind and Google's recent work on reinforcement learning for controlling commercial cooling systems. Building on expertise that began with cooling Google's data centers more efficiently, we recently conducted live experiments on two real-world facilities in partnership with Trane Technologies, a building management system provider. These live experiments had a variety of challenges in areas such as evaluation, learning from offline data, and constraint satisfaction. Our paper describes these challenges in the hope that awareness of them will benefit future applied RL work. We also describe the way we adapted our RL system to deal with these challenges, resulting in energy savings of approximately 9% and 13% respectively at the two live experiment sites.

AI methods are used in societally important settings, ranging from credit to employment to housing, and it is crucial to provide fairness in regard to algorithmic decision making. Moreover, many settings are dynamic, with populations responding to sequential decision policies. We introduce the study of reinforcement learning (RL) with stepwise fairness constraints, requiring group fairness at each time step. Our focus is on tabular episodic RL, and we provide learning algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees in regard to policy optimality and fairness violation. Our framework provides useful tools to study the impact of fairness constraints in sequential settings and brings up new challenges in RL.

We present a retrospective on the state of Embodied AI research. Our analysis focuses on 13 challenges presented at the Embodied AI Workshop at CVPR. These challenges are grouped into three themes: (1) visual navigation, (2) rearrangement, and (3) embodied vision-and-language. We discuss the dominant datasets within each theme, evaluation metrics for the challenges, and the performance of state-of-the-art models. We highlight commonalities between top approaches to the challenges and identify potential future directions for Embodied AI research.

了解动态场景中的3D运动对于许多视觉应用至关重要。最近的进步主要集中在估计人类等某些特定元素的活动上。在本文中，我们利用神经运动场来估计多视图设置中所有点的运动。由于颜色相似的点和与时变颜色的点的歧义，从动态场景中对动态场景进行建模运动是具有挑战性的。我们建议将估计运动的正规化为可预测。如果已知来自以前的帧的运动，那么在不久的将来的运动应该是可以预测的。因此，我们通过首先调节潜在嵌入的估计运动来引入可预测性正则化，然后通过采用预测网络来在嵌入式上执行可预测性。所提出的框架pref（可预测性正则化字段）比基于最先进的神经运动场的动态场景表示方法在PAR或更好的结果上取得了更好的成绩，同时不需要对场景的先验知识。

在许多重要的科学和工程应用中发现了卷数据。渲染此数据以高质量和交互速率为苛刻的应用程序（例如虚拟现实）的可视化化，即使使用专业级硬件也无法实现。我们介绍了Fovolnet - 一种可显着提高数量数据可视化的性能的方法。我们开发了一种具有成本效益的渲染管道，该管道稀疏地对焦点进行了量度，并使用深层神经网络重建了全帧。 FOVEATED渲染是一种优先考虑用户焦点渲染计算的技术。这种方法利用人类视觉系统的属性，从而在用户视野的外围呈现数据时节省了计算资源。我们的重建网络结合了直接和内核预测方法，以产生快速，稳定和感知令人信服的输出。凭借纤细的设计和量化的使用，我们的方法在端到端框架时间和视觉质量中都优于最先进的神经重建技术。我们对系统的渲染性能，推理速度和感知属性进行了广泛的评估，并提供了与竞争神经图像重建技术的比较。我们的测试结果表明，Fovolnet始终在保持感知质量的同时，在传统渲染上节省了大量时间。