公共数据集在推进车牌识别（LPR）的最新技术方面发挥了关键作用。尽管数据集偏见在计算机视觉社区中被认为是一个严重的问题，但在LPR文献中很大程度上忽略了它。 LPR模型通常在每个数据集上进行训练和评估。在这种情况下，他们经常在接受培训的数据集中证明了强大的证明，但在看不见的数据集中表现出有限的性能。因此，这项工作研究了LPR上下文中的数据集偏差问题。我们在八个数据集上进行了实验，在巴西收集了四个，在中国大陆进行了实验，并观察到每个数据集都有一个独特的，可识别的“签名”，因为轻量级分类模型预测了车牌（LP）图像的源数据集，其图像的源95％的精度。在我们的讨论中，我们提请人们注意以下事实：大多数LPR模型可能正在利用此类签名，以以失去概括能力为代价，以改善每个数据集中的结果。这些结果强调了评估跨数据库设置中LPR模型的重要性，因为它们提供了比数据库内部的更好的概括（因此实际性能）。

在DNA序列中定位启动子区域对于生物信息学领域至关重要。这是文学中广泛研究的问题，但尚未完全解决。一些研究人员使用卷积网络提出了显着的结果，允许自动提取来自DNA链的特征。然而，尚未实现可能概括为若干生物的普遍架构，从而要求研究人员寻求新的架构和对每个新的生物体的近似数目。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种基于胶囊网络的多功能架构，可以精确地识别来自七种不同生物，真核和原核的原始DNA数据中的启动子序列。我们的模型是Capsprom，可以帮助在生物之间的学习转移并扩大其适用性。此外，CAPSPROM显示出具有竞争力的结果，克服了七个测试数据集中的五分之一的基线方法（F1分数）。模型和源代码在https://github.com/lauromoraes/capsnet-promoter提供。

已经广泛地研究了使用虹膜和围眼区域作为生物特征，主要是由于虹膜特征的奇异性以及当图像分辨率不足以提取虹膜信息时的奇异区域的使用。除了提供有关个人身份的信息外，还可以探索从这些特征提取的功能，以获得其他信息，例如个人的性别，药物使用的影响，隐形眼镜的使用，欺骗等。这项工作提出了对为眼部识别创建的数据库的调查，详细说明其协议以及如何获取其图像。我们还描述并讨论了最受欢迎的眼镜识别比赛（比赛），突出了所提交的算法，只使用Iris特征和融合虹膜和周边地区信息实现了最佳结果。最后，我们描述了一些相关工程，将深度学习技术应用于眼镜识别，并指出了新的挑战和未来方向。考虑到有大量的眼部数据库，并且每个人通常都设计用于特定问题，我们认为这项调查可以广泛概述眼部生物识别学中的挑战。

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).

We describe a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) that simulates the flow induced by the astronomical tide in a synthetic port channel, with dimensions based on the Santos - S\~ao Vicente - Bertioga Estuarine System. PINN models aim to combine the knowledge of physical systems and data-driven machine learning models. This is done by training a neural network to minimize the residuals of the governing equations in sample points. In this work, our flow is governed by the Navier-Stokes equations with some approximations. There are two main novelties in this paper. First, we design our model to assume that the flow is periodic in time, which is not feasible in conventional simulation methods. Second, we evaluate the benefit of resampling the function evaluation points during training, which has a near zero computational cost and has been verified to improve the final model, especially for small batch sizes. Finally, we discuss some limitations of the approximations used in the Navier-Stokes equations regarding the modeling of turbulence and how it interacts with PINNs.

Can we leverage the audiovisual information already present in video to improve self-supervised representation learning? To answer this question, we study various pretraining architectures and objectives within the masked autoencoding framework, motivated by the success of similar methods in natural language and image understanding. We show that we can achieve significant improvements on audiovisual downstream classification tasks, surpassing the state-of-the-art on VGGSound and AudioSet. Furthermore, we can leverage our audiovisual pretraining scheme for multiple unimodal downstream tasks using a single audiovisual pretrained model. We additionally demonstrate the transferability of our representations, achieving state-of-the-art audiovisual results on Epic Kitchens without pretraining specifically for this dataset.

Integrated information theory (IIT) is a theoretical framework that provides a quantitative measure to estimate when a physical system is conscious, its degree of consciousness, and the complexity of the qualia space that the system is experiencing. Formally, IIT rests on the assumption that if a surrogate physical system can fully embed the phenomenological properties of consciousness, then the system properties must be constrained by the properties of the qualia being experienced. Following this assumption, IIT represents the physical system as a network of interconnected elements that can be thought of as a probabilistic causal graph, $\mathcal{G}$, where each node has an input-output function and all the graph is encoded in a transition probability matrix. Consequently, IIT's quantitative measure of consciousness, $\Phi$, is computed with respect to the transition probability matrix and the present state of the graph. In this paper, we provide a random search algorithm that is able to optimize $\Phi$ in order to investigate, as the number of nodes increases, the structure of the graphs that have higher $\Phi$. We also provide arguments that show the difficulties of applying more complex black-box search algorithms, such as Bayesian optimization or metaheuristics, in this particular problem. Additionally, we suggest specific research lines for these techniques to enhance the search algorithm that guarantees maximal $\Phi$.

In this paper, we consider the problem where a drone has to collect semantic information to classify multiple moving targets. In particular, we address the challenge of computing control inputs that move the drone to informative viewpoints, position and orientation, when the information is extracted using a "black-box" classifier, e.g., a deep learning neural network. These algorithms typically lack of analytical relationships between the viewpoints and their associated outputs, preventing their use in information-gathering schemes. To fill this gap, we propose a novel attention-based architecture, trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL), that outputs the next viewpoint for the drone favoring the acquisition of evidence from as many unclassified targets as possible while reasoning about their movement, orientation, and occlusions. Then, we use a low-level MPC controller to move the drone to the desired viewpoint taking into account its actual dynamics. We show that our approach not only outperforms a variety of baselines but also generalizes to scenarios unseen during training. Additionally, we show that the network scales to large numbers of targets and generalizes well to different movement dynamics of the targets.

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is characterized by disorganised electrical activity in the atria and is known to be sustained by the presence of regions of fibrosis (scars) or functional cellular remodeling, both of which may lead to areas of slow conduction. Estimating the effective conductivity of the myocardium and identifying regions of abnormal propagation is therefore crucial for the effective treatment of AF. We hypothesise that the spatial distribution of tissue conductivity can be directly inferred from an array of concurrently acquired contact electrograms (EGMs). We generate a dataset of simulated cardiac AP propagation using randomised scar distributions and a phenomenological cardiac model and calculate contact electrograms at various positions on the field. A deep neural network, based on a modified U-net architecture, is trained to estimate the location of the scar and quantify conductivity of the tissue with a Jaccard index of $91$%. We adapt a wavelet-based surrogate testing analysis to confirm that the inferred conductivity distribution is an accurate representation of the ground truth input to the model. We find that the root mean square error (RMSE) between the ground truth and our predictions is significantly smaller ($p_{val}=0.007$) than the RMSE between the ground truth and surrogate samples.

Echo State Networks (ESN) are a type of Recurrent Neural Networks that yields promising results in representing time series and nonlinear dynamic systems. Although they are equipped with a very efficient training procedure, Reservoir Computing strategies, such as the ESN, require the use of high order networks, i.e. large number of layers, resulting in number of states that is magnitudes higher than the number of model inputs and outputs. This not only makes the computation of a time step more costly, but also may pose robustness issues when applying ESNs to problems such as Model Predictive Control (MPC) and other optimal control problems. One such way to circumvent this is through Model Order Reduction strategies such as the Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) and its variants (POD-DEIM), whereby we find an equivalent lower order representation to an already trained high dimension ESN. The objective of this work is to investigate and analyze the performance of POD methods in Echo State Networks, evaluating their effectiveness. To this end, we evaluate the Memory Capacity (MC) of the POD-reduced network in comparison to the original (full order) ENS. We also perform experiments on two different numerical case studies: a NARMA10 difference equation and an oil platform containing two wells and one riser. The results show that there is little loss of performance comparing the original ESN to a POD-reduced counterpart, and also that the performance of a POD-reduced ESN tend to be superior to a normal ESN of the same size. Also we attain speedups of around $80\%$ in comparison to the original ESN.