卷积神经网络（CNNS）现在可以实现挑战对象识别任务的人为级别性能。 CNNS也是在视觉识别任务中预测神经和行为响应方面的主要定量模型。然而，有一个广泛接受的CNN模型批评：与新生动物不同，这些动物迅速和高效地学习，CNN被认为是“饥饿的数据”，需要大量的训练数据来开发用于对象识别的准确模型。这种批评挑战了使用CNNS作为可视化发展模型的承诺。在这里，我们通过对新生儿小鸡和CNNS进行平行控制饲养的实验，直接检查CNNS比新生动物更饥饿的数据。我们在严格控制的视觉环境中提出了新生儿小鸡，然后通过在视频游戏引擎中构建虚拟动物室来模拟该环境中提供的培训数据。我们记录了通过虚拟室移动的代理获取的视觉图像，并使用这些图像来训练CNN。当CNN收到与小鸡相似的视觉训练数据时，CNN成功解决了与小鸡相同的具有挑战性的视图 - 不变的对象识别任务。因此，CNNS并不多于动物的数据：CNN和CHICK两者都从单个对象的训练数据成功开发了强大的对象模型。

集体行为在动物王国范围内普遍存在。然而，迄今为止，集体行为的发展和机械基础尚未正式建立。什么学会机制推动新生动物中集体行为的发展？在这里，我们使用了深度增强学习和好奇心驱动的学习 - 深深植根于心理和神经科学研究的两种学习机制 - 建立开发集体行为的新生人工代理。像新生动物一样，我们的代理商学习来自自然主义环境中的原始感官投入的集体行为。我们的代理商还学习没有外部奖励的集体行为，只使用内在的动机（好奇心）来推动学习。具体而言，当我们在具有组织中的自然视觉环境中提高人工剂时，该代理自发地发展为自我运动，对象识别，以及对组织的偏好，迅速学习集体行为所需的所有核心技能。这项工作桥接了高维感官输入和集体动作之间的划分，导致了集体动物行为的像素与动作模型。更一般地说，我们表明，两个通用学习机制 - 深度加强学习和好奇心驱动的学习 - 足以学习来自无监督的自然体验的集体行为。

The 3D-aware image synthesis focuses on conserving spatial consistency besides generating high-resolution images with fine details. Recently, Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has been introduced for synthesizing novel views with low computational cost and superior performance. While several works investigate a generative NeRF and show remarkable achievement, they cannot handle conditional and continuous feature manipulation in the generation procedure. In this work, we introduce a novel model, called Class-Continuous Conditional Generative NeRF ($\text{C}^{3}$G-NeRF), which can synthesize conditionally manipulated photorealistic 3D-consistent images by projecting conditional features to the generator and the discriminator. The proposed $\text{C}^{3}$G-NeRF is evaluated with three image datasets, AFHQ, CelebA, and Cars. As a result, our model shows strong 3D-consistency with fine details and smooth interpolation in conditional feature manipulation. For instance, $\text{C}^{3}$G-NeRF exhibits a Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) of 7.64 in 3D-aware face image synthesis with a $\text{128}^{2}$ resolution. Additionally, we provide FIDs of generated 3D-aware images of each class of the datasets as it is possible to synthesize class-conditional images with $\text{C}^{3}$G-NeRF.

Cellular automata (CA) captivate researchers due to teh emergent, complex individualized behavior that simple global rules of interaction enact. Recent advances in the field have combined CA with convolutional neural networks to achieve self-regenerating images. This new branch of CA is called neural cellular automata [1]. The goal of this project is to use the idea of idea of neural cellular automata to grow prediction machines. We place many different convolutional neural networks in a grid. Each conv net cell outputs a prediction of what the next state will be, and minimizes predictive error. Cells received their neighbors' colors and fitnesses as input. Each cell's fitness score described how accurate its predictions were. Cells could also move to explore their environment and some stochasticity was applied to movement.

There is a dramatic shortage of skilled labor for modern vineyards. The Vinum project is developing a mobile robotic solution to autonomously navigate through vineyards for winter grapevine pruning. This necessitates an autonomous navigation stack for the robot pruning a vineyard. The Vinum project is using the quadruped robot HyQReal. This paper introduces an architecture for a quadruped robot to autonomously move through a vineyard by identifying and approaching grapevines for pruning. The higher level control is a state machine switching between searching for destination positions, autonomously navigating towards those locations, and stopping for the robot to complete a task. The destination points are determined by identifying grapevine trunks using instance segmentation from a Mask Region-Based Convolutional Neural Network (Mask-RCNN). These detections are sent through a filter to avoid redundancy and remove noisy detections. The combination of these features is the basis for the proposed architecture.

Feature selection helps reduce data acquisition costs in ML, but the standard approach is to train models with static feature subsets. Here, we consider the dynamic feature selection (DFS) problem where a model sequentially queries features based on the presently available information. DFS is often addressed with reinforcement learning (RL), but we explore a simpler approach of greedily selecting features based on their conditional mutual information. This method is theoretically appealing but requires oracle access to the data distribution, so we develop a learning approach based on amortized optimization. The proposed method is shown to recover the greedy policy when trained to optimality and outperforms numerous existing feature selection methods in our experiments, thus validating it as a simple but powerful approach for this problem.

In this paper, we learn a diffusion model to generate 3D data on a scene-scale. Specifically, our model crafts a 3D scene consisting of multiple objects, while recent diffusion research has focused on a single object. To realize our goal, we represent a scene with discrete class labels, i.e., categorical distribution, to assign multiple objects into semantic categories. Thus, we extend discrete diffusion models to learn scene-scale categorical distributions. In addition, we validate that a latent diffusion model can reduce computation costs for training and deploying. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to apply discrete and latent diffusion for 3D categorical data on a scene-scale. We further propose to perform semantic scene completion (SSC) by learning a conditional distribution using our diffusion model, where the condition is a partial observation in a sparse point cloud. In experiments, we empirically show that our diffusion models not only generate reasonable scenes, but also perform the scene completion task better than a discriminative model. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/zoomin-lee/scene-scale-diffusion

We introduce a new tool for stochastic convex optimization (SCO): a Reweighted Stochastic Query (ReSQue) estimator for the gradient of a function convolved with a (Gaussian) probability density. Combining ReSQue with recent advances in ball oracle acceleration [CJJJLST20, ACJJS21], we develop algorithms achieving state-of-the-art complexities for SCO in parallel and private settings. For a SCO objective constrained to the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we obtain the following results (up to polylogarithmic factors). We give a parallel algorithm obtaining optimization error $\epsilon_{\text{opt}}$ with $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3}$ gradient oracle query depth and $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3} + \epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2}$ gradient queries in total, assuming access to a bounded-variance stochastic gradient estimator. For $\epsilon_{\text{opt}} \in [d^{-1}, d^{-1/4}]$, our algorithm matches the state-of-the-art oracle depth of [BJLLS19] while maintaining the optimal total work of stochastic gradient descent. We give an $(\epsilon_{\text{dp}}, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm which, given $n$ samples of Lipschitz loss functions, obtains near-optimal optimization error and makes $\min(n, n^2\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^2 d^{-1}) + \min(n^{4/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{1/3}, (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1})$ queries to the gradients of these functions. In the regime $d \le n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{2}$, where privacy comes at no cost in terms of the optimal loss up to constants, our algorithm uses $n + (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1}$ queries and improves recent advancements of [KLL21, AFKT21]. In the moderately low-dimensional setting $d \le \sqrt n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{3/2}$, our query complexity is near-linear.

We propose a new causal inference framework to learn causal effects from multiple, decentralized data sources in a federated setting. We introduce an adaptive transfer algorithm that learns the similarities among the data sources by utilizing Random Fourier Features to disentangle the loss function into multiple components, each of which is associated with a data source. The data sources may have different distributions; the causal effects are independently and systematically incorporated. The proposed method estimates the similarities among the sources through transfer coefficients, and hence requiring no prior information about the similarity measures. The heterogeneous causal effects can be estimated with no sharing of the raw training data among the sources, thus minimizing the risk of privacy leak. We also provide minimax lower bounds to assess the quality of the parameters learned from the disparate sources. The proposed method is empirically shown to outperform the baselines on decentralized data sources with dissimilar distributions.

Given a large graph with few node labels, how can we (a) identify the mixed network-effect of the graph and (b) predict the unknown labels accurately and efficiently? This work proposes Network Effect Analysis (NEA) and UltraProp, which are based on two insights: (a) the network-effect (NE) insight: a graph can exhibit not only one of homophily and heterophily, but also both or none in a label-wise manner, and (b) the neighbor-differentiation (ND) insight: neighbors have different degrees of influence on the target node based on the strength of connections. NEA provides a statistical test to check whether a graph exhibits network-effect or not, and surprisingly discovers the absence of NE in many real-world graphs known to have heterophily. UltraProp solves the node classification problem with notable advantages: (a) Accurate, thanks to the network-effect (NE) and neighbor-differentiation (ND) insights; (b) Explainable, precisely estimating the compatibility matrix; (c) Scalable, being linear with the input size and handling graphs with millions of nodes; and (d) Principled, with closed-form formula and theoretical guarantee. Applied on eight real-world graph datasets, UltraProp outperforms top competitors in terms of accuracy and run time, requiring only stock CPU servers. On a large real-world graph with 1.6M nodes and 22.3M edges, UltraProp achieves more than 9 times speedup (12 minutes vs. 2 hours) compared to most competitors.