在这项研究中，我们从新的全面角度处理了疫苗辩论的复杂性。为了关注意大利环境，我们研究了两个来源在2016 - 2021年期间产生的所有在线信息，这些信息符合误解的声誉，而没有声誉。尽管可靠的消息来源可以依靠更大的新闻编辑室，并涵盖更多的新闻，但对相应时间序列的转移熵分析表明，前者并不总是在疫苗主题上向后者占据主导地位。的确，流行前时期认为，即使是因果关系，错误的信息也使自己成为过程的领导者，并且比可靠来源的新闻更大程度地获得了用户参与。尽管在Covid-19爆发期间填补了这些信息差距，但可靠来源作为信息生态系统的驱动力的新发现的主要作用仅部分对减少用户对疫苗的错误信息的参与而产生了有益的效果。我们的结果确实表明，除了疫苗接种的有效性外，可靠的来源从未充分反对反vax的叙述，特别是在大大阶段的时期，因此有助于加剧科学否认和对阴谋论的信仰。然而，与此同时，他们确认了刻意提出令人信服的反叙事的错误信息传播的功效。确实，与其他两极分化的论点（例如安全问题，法律问题和疫苗业务）相比，疫苗接种的有效性是在大流行期间通过错误信息讨论的最不吸引人的话题。通过强调制度和主流交流的优势和劣势，我们的发现可能是改善和更好地针对疫苗错误信息的推动运动的宝贵资产。

Self-supervised learning is a popular and powerful method for utilizing large amounts of unlabeled data, for which a wide variety of training objectives have been proposed in the literature. In this study, we perform a Bayesian analysis of state-of-the-art self-supervised learning objectives and propose a unified formulation based on likelihood learning. Our analysis suggests a simple method for integrating self-supervised learning with generative models, allowing for the joint training of these two seemingly distinct approaches. We refer to this combined framework as GEDI, which stands for GEnerative and DIscriminative training. Additionally, we demonstrate an instantiation of the GEDI framework by integrating an energy-based model with a cluster-based self-supervised learning model. Through experiments on synthetic and real-world data, including SVHN, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100, we show that GEDI outperforms existing self-supervised learning strategies in terms of clustering performance by a wide margin. We also demonstrate that GEDI can be integrated into a neural-symbolic framework to address tasks in the small data regime, where it can use logical constraints to further improve clustering and classification performance.

We propose a novel approach for deep learning-based Multi-View Stereo (MVS). For each pixel in the reference image, our method leverages a deep architecture to search for the corresponding point in the source image directly along the corresponding epipolar line. We denote our method DELS-MVS: Deep Epipolar Line Search Multi-View Stereo. Previous works in deep MVS select a range of interest within the depth space, discretize it, and sample the epipolar line according to the resulting depth values: this can result in an uneven scanning of the epipolar line, hence of the image space. Instead, our method works directly on the epipolar line: this guarantees an even scanning of the image space and avoids both the need to select a depth range of interest, which is often not known a priori and can vary dramatically from scene to scene, and the need for a suitable discretization of the depth space. In fact, our search is iterative, which avoids the building of a cost volume, costly both to store and to process. Finally, our method performs a robust geometry-aware fusion of the estimated depth maps, leveraging a confidence predicted alongside each depth. We test DELS-MVS on the ETH3D, Tanks and Temples and DTU benchmarks and achieve competitive results with respect to state-of-the-art approaches.

Timely and effective feedback within surgical training plays a critical role in developing the skills required to perform safe and efficient surgery. Feedback from expert surgeons, while especially valuable in this regard, is challenging to acquire due to their typically busy schedules, and may be subject to biases. Formal assessment procedures like OSATS and GEARS attempt to provide objective measures of skill, but remain time-consuming. With advances in machine learning there is an opportunity for fast and objective automated feedback on technical skills. The SimSurgSkill 2021 challenge (hosted as a sub-challenge of EndoVis at MICCAI 2021) aimed to promote and foster work in this endeavor. Using virtual reality (VR) surgical tasks, competitors were tasked with localizing instruments and predicting surgical skill. Here we summarize the winning approaches and how they performed. Using this publicly available dataset and results as a springboard, future work may enable more efficient training of surgeons with advances in surgical data science. The dataset can be accessed from https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/isi-simsurgskill-2021.

A tractogram is a virtual representation of the brain white matter. It is composed of millions of virtual fibers, encoded as 3D polylines, which approximate the white matter axonal pathways. To date, tractograms are the most accurate white matter representation and thus are used for tasks like presurgical planning and investigations of neuroplasticity, brain disorders, or brain networks. However, it is a well-known issue that a large portion of tractogram fibers is not anatomically plausible and can be considered artifacts of the tracking procedure. With Verifyber, we tackle the problem of filtering out such non-plausible fibers using a novel fully-supervised learning approach. Differently from other approaches based on signal reconstruction and/or brain topology regularization, we guide our method with the existing anatomical knowledge of the white matter. Using tractograms annotated according to anatomical principles, we train our model, Verifyber, to classify fibers as either anatomically plausible or non-plausible. The proposed Verifyber model is an original Geometric Deep Learning method that can deal with variable size fibers, while being invariant to fiber orientation. Our model considers each fiber as a graph of points, and by learning features of the edges between consecutive points via the proposed sequence Edge Convolution, it can capture the underlying anatomical properties. The output filtering results highly accurate and robust across an extensive set of experiments, and fast; with a 12GB GPU, filtering a tractogram of 1M fibers requires less than a minute. Verifyber implementation and trained models are available at https://github.com/FBK-NILab/verifyber.

Semi-supervised learning methods can train high-accuracy machine learning models with a fraction of the labeled training samples required for traditional supervised learning. Such methods do not typically involve close review of the unlabeled training samples, making them tempting targets for data poisoning attacks. In this paper we investigate the vulnerabilities of semi-supervised learning methods to backdoor data poisoning attacks on the unlabeled samples. We show that simple poisoning attacks that influence the distribution of the poisoned samples' predicted labels are highly effective - achieving an average attack success rate as high as 96.9%. We introduce a generalized attack framework targeting semi-supervised learning methods to better understand and exploit their limitations and to motivate future defense strategies.

Extreme wildfires continue to be a significant cause of human death and biodiversity destruction within countries that encompass the Mediterranean Basin. Recent worrying trends in wildfire activity (i.e., occurrence and spread) suggest that wildfires are likely to be highly impacted by climate change. In order to facilitate appropriate risk mitigation, it is imperative to identify the main drivers of extreme wildfires and assess their spatio-temporal trends, with a view to understanding the impacts of global warming on fire activity. To this end, we analyse the monthly burnt area due to wildfires over a region encompassing most of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin from 2001 to 2020, and identify high fire activity during this period in eastern Europe, Algeria, Italy and Portugal. We build an extreme quantile regression model with a high-dimensional predictor set describing meteorological conditions, land cover usage, and orography, for the domain. To model the complex relationships between the predictor variables and wildfires, we make use of a hybrid statistical deep-learning framework that allows us to disentangle the effects of vapour-pressure deficit (VPD), air temperature, and drought on wildfire activity. Our results highlight that whilst VPD, air temperature, and drought significantly affect wildfire occurrence, only VPD affects extreme wildfire spread. Furthermore, to gain insights into the effect of climate change on wildfire activity in the near future, we perturb VPD and temperature according to their observed trends and find evidence that global warming may lead to spatially non-uniform changes in wildfire activity.

Recent video+language datasets cover domains where the interaction is highly structured, such as instructional videos, or where the interaction is scripted, such as TV shows. Both of these properties can lead to spurious cues to be exploited by models rather than learning to ground language. In this paper, we present GrOunded footbAlL commentaries (GOAL), a novel dataset of football (or `soccer') highlights videos with transcribed live commentaries in English. As the course of a game is unpredictable, so are commentaries, which makes them a unique resource to investigate dynamic language grounding. We also provide state-of-the-art baselines for the following tasks: frame reordering, moment retrieval, live commentary retrieval and play-by-play live commentary generation. Results show that SOTA models perform reasonably well in most tasks. We discuss the implications of these results and suggest new tasks for which GOAL can be used. Our codebase is available at: https://gitlab.com/grounded-sport-convai/goal-baselines.

Large language models (LLMs) have been reported to have strong performance on natural language processing tasks. However, performance metrics such as accuracy do not measure the quality of the model in terms of its ability to robustly represent complex linguistic structure. In this work, we propose a framework to evaluate the robustness of linguistic representations using probing tasks. We leverage recent advances in extracting emergent linguistic constructs from LLMs and apply syntax-preserving perturbations to test the stability of these constructs in order to better understand the representations learned by LLMs. Empirically, we study the performance of four LLMs across six different corpora on the proposed robustness measures. We provide evidence that context-free representation (e.g., GloVe) are in some cases competitive with context-dependent representations from modern LLMs (e.g., BERT), yet equally brittle to syntax-preserving manipulations. Emergent syntactic representations in neural networks are brittle, thus our work poses the attention on the risk of comparing such structures to those that are object of a long lasting debate in linguistics.

事实证明，图形神经网络（GNN）在图形结构数据的几个预测建模任务中已被证明。在这些任务中，链接预测是许多现实世界应用（例如推荐系统）的基本问题之一。但是，GNN不能免疫对抗攻击，即精心制作的恶意例子，旨在欺骗预测模型。在这项工作中，我们专注于对基于GNN的链接预测模型进行特定的白盒攻击，其中恶意节点的目的是出现在给定目标受害者的推荐节点列表中。为了实现这一目标，攻击者节点还可以指望它直接控制的其他现有同伴的合作，即在网络中注入许多``vicious''节点的能力。具体而言，所有这些恶意节点都可以添加新的边缘或删除现有的节点，从而扰乱原始图。因此，我们提出了野蛮人，一种新颖的框架和一种安装这种链接预测攻击的方法。野蛮人将对手的目标制定为一项优化任务，从而达到了攻击的有效性与所需的恶意资源的稀疏之间的平衡。在现实世界和合成数据集上进行的广泛实验表明，通过野蛮人实施的对抗性攻击确实达到了很高的攻击成功率，但使用少量恶性节点。最后，尽管这些攻击需要完全了解目标模型，但我们表明它们可以成功地转移到其他黑框方法以进行链接预测。