用于生存预测的深层神经网络在歧视方面超过了经典方法，这是患者根据事件的秩序。相反，诸如COX比例危害模型之类的经典方法显示出更好的校准，即对基础分布事件的正确时间预测。特别是在医学领域，预测单个患者的存活至关重要，歧视和校准都是重要的绩效指标。在这里，我们提出了离散的校准生存（DC），这是一个新型的深层神经网络，用于歧视和校准的生存预测，在三个医疗数据集的歧视中优于竞争生存模型，同时在所有离散时间模型中实现最佳校准。 DC的增强性能可以归因于两个新型功能，即可变的时间输出节点间距和新颖的损耗项，可优化未经审查和审查的患者数据的使用。我们认为，DCS是临床应用基于深度学习的生存预测和良好校准的重要一步。

针对组织病理学图像数据的临床决策支持主要侧重于强烈监督的注释，这提供了直观的解释性，但受专业表现的束缚。在这里，我们提出了一种可解释的癌症复发预测网络（Ecarenet），并表明没有强注释的端到端学习提供最先进的性能，而可以通过注意机制包括可解释性。在前列腺癌生存预测的用例上，使用14,479个图像和仅复发时间作为注释，我们在验证集中达到0.78的累积动态AUC，与专家病理学家（以及在单独测试中的AUC为0.77放）。我们的模型是良好的校准，输出生存曲线以及每位患者的风险分数和群体。利用多实例学习层的注意重量，我们表明恶性斑块对预测的影响较高，从而提供了对预测的直观解释。我们的代码可在www.github.com/imsb-uke/ecarenet上获得。

Artificial intelligence(AI) systems based on deep neural networks (DNNs) and machine learning (ML) algorithms are increasingly used to solve critical problems in bioinformatics, biomedical informatics, and precision medicine. However, complex DNN or ML models that are unavoidably opaque and perceived as black-box methods, may not be able to explain why and how they make certain decisions. Such black-box models are difficult to comprehend not only for targeted users and decision-makers but also for AI developers. Besides, in sensitive areas like healthcare, explainability and accountability are not only desirable properties of AI but also legal requirements -- especially when AI may have significant impacts on human lives. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is an emerging field that aims to mitigate the opaqueness of black-box models and make it possible to interpret how AI systems make their decisions with transparency. An interpretable ML model can explain how it makes predictions and which factors affect the model's outcomes. The majority of state-of-the-art interpretable ML methods have been developed in a domain-agnostic way and originate from computer vision, automated reasoning, or even statistics. Many of these methods cannot be directly applied to bioinformatics problems, without prior customization, extension, and domain adoption. In this paper, we discuss the importance of explainability with a focus on bioinformatics. We analyse and comprehensively overview of model-specific and model-agnostic interpretable ML methods and tools. Via several case studies covering bioimaging, cancer genomics, and biomedical text mining, we show how bioinformatics research could benefit from XAI methods and how they could help improve decision fairness.

Quantum computing (QC) promises significant advantages on certain hard computational tasks over classical computers. However, current quantum hardware, also known as noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers (NISQ), are still unable to carry out computations faithfully mainly because of the lack of quantum error correction (QEC) capability. A significant amount of theoretical studies have provided various types of QEC codes; one of the notable topological codes is the surface code, and its features, such as the requirement of only nearest-neighboring two-qubit control gates and a large error threshold, make it a leading candidate for scalable quantum computation. Recent developments of machine learning (ML)-based techniques especially the reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been applied to the decoding problem and have already made certain progress. Nevertheless, the device noise pattern may change over time, making trained decoder models ineffective. In this paper, we propose a continual reinforcement learning method to address these decoding challenges. Specifically, we implement double deep Q-learning with probabilistic policy reuse (DDQN-PPR) model to learn surface code decoding strategies for quantum environments with varying noise patterns. Through numerical simulations, we show that the proposed DDQN-PPR model can significantly reduce the computational complexity. Moreover, increasing the number of trained policies can further improve the agent's performance. Our results open a way to build more capable RL agents which can leverage previously gained knowledge to tackle QEC challenges.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) hold detailed longitudinal information about each patient's health status and general clinical history, a large portion of which is stored within the unstructured text. Temporal modelling of this medical history, which considers the sequence of events, can be used to forecast and simulate future events, estimate risk, suggest alternative diagnoses or forecast complications. While most prediction approaches use mainly structured data or a subset of single-domain forecasts and outcomes, we processed the entire free-text portion of EHRs for longitudinal modelling. We present Foresight, a novel GPT3-based pipeline that uses NER+L tools (i.e. MedCAT) to convert document text into structured, coded concepts, followed by providing probabilistic forecasts for future medical events such as disorders, medications, symptoms and interventions. Since large portions of EHR data are in text form, such an approach benefits from a granular and detailed view of a patient while introducing modest additional noise. On tests in two large UK hospitals (King's College Hospital, South London and Maudsley) and the US MIMIC-III dataset precision@10 of 0.80, 0.81 and 0.91 was achieved for forecasting the next biomedical concept. Foresight was also validated on 34 synthetic patient timelines by 5 clinicians and achieved relevancy of 97% for the top forecasted candidate disorder. Foresight can be easily trained and deployed locally as it only requires free-text data (as a minimum). As a generative model, it can simulate follow-on disorders, medications and interventions for as many steps as required. Foresight is a general-purpose model for biomedical concept modelling that can be used for real-world risk estimation, virtual trials and clinical research to study the progression of diseases, simulate interventions and counterfactuals, and for educational purposes.

Legal Prompt Engineering (LPE) or Legal Prompting is a process to guide and assist a large language model (LLM) with performing a natural legal language processing (NLLP) skill. Our goal is to use LPE with LLMs over long legal documents for the Legal Judgement Prediction (LJP) task. We investigate the performance of zero-shot LPE for given facts in case-texts from the European Court of Human Rights (in English) and the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland (in German, French and Italian). Our results show that zero-shot LPE is better compared to the baselines, but it still falls short compared to current state of the art supervised approaches. Nevertheless, the results are important, since there was 1) no explicit domain-specific data used - so we show that the transfer to the legal domain is possible for general-purpose LLMs, and 2) the LLMs where directly applied without any further training or fine-tuning - which in turn saves immensely in terms of additional computational costs.

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or bad) the decisions made by the learned agent are. Unfortunately, in a broad range of problems the design of a good reward function is not trivial, so in such cases sparse reward signals are instead adopted. The lack of a dense reward function poses new challenges, mostly related to exploration. Imitation Learning has addressed those problems by leveraging demonstrations from experts. In the absence of an expert (and its subsequent demonstrations), an option is to prioritize well-suited exploration experiences collected by the agent in order to bootstrap its learning process with good exploration behaviors. However, this solution highly depends on the ability of the agent to discover such trajectories in the early stages of its learning process. To tackle this issue, we propose to combine imitation learning with intrinsic motivation, two of the most widely adopted techniques to address problems with sparse reward. In this work intrinsic motivation is used to encourage the agent to explore the environment based on its curiosity, whereas imitation learning allows repeating the most promising experiences to accelerate the learning process. This combination is shown to yield an improved performance and better generalization in procedurally-generated environments, outperforming previously reported self-imitation learning methods and achieving equal or better sample efficiency with respect to intrinsic motivation in isolation.

Building trustworthy, effective, and responsible machine learning systems hinges on understanding how differences in training data and modeling decisions interact to impact predictive performance. In this work, we seek to better understand how we might characterize, detect, and design for data-model synergies. We focus on a particular type of data-model inefficiency, in which adding training data from some sources can actually lower performance evaluated on key sub-groups of the population, a phenomenon we refer to as negative data externalities on group performance. Such externalities can arise in standard learning settings and can manifest differently depending on conditions between training set size and model size. Data externalities directly imply a lower bound on feasible model improvements, yet improving models efficiently requires understanding the underlying data-model tensions. From a broader perspective, our results indicate that data-efficiency is a key component of both accurate and trustworthy machine learning.

Two-stage robust optimization problems constitute one of the hardest optimization problem classes. One of the solution approaches to this class of problems is K-adaptability. This approach simultaneously seeks the best partitioning of the uncertainty set of scenarios into K subsets, and optimizes decisions corresponding to each of these subsets. In general case, it is solved using the K-adaptability branch-and-bound algorithm, which requires exploration of exponentially-growing solution trees. To accelerate finding high-quality solutions in such trees, we propose a machine learning-based node selection strategy. In particular, we construct a feature engineering scheme based on general two-stage robust optimization insights that allows us to train our machine learning tool on a database of resolved B&B trees, and to apply it as-is to problems of different sizes and/or types. We experimentally show that using our learned node selection strategy outperforms a vanilla, random node selection strategy when tested on problems of the same type as the training problems, also in case the K-value or the problem size differs from the training ones.

使用相对比心脏磁共振成像（PC-CMR）进行的流量分析可以量化用于评估心血管功能的重要参数。该分析的重要部分是鉴定正确的CMR视图和质量控制（QC），以检测可能影响流量定量的伪像。我们提出了一个新型的基于深度学习的框架，用于对完整CMR扫描的流量进行完全自动化的分析，该框架首先使用两个顺序卷积神经网络进行这些视图选择和QC步骤，然后进行自动主动脉和肺动脉分段，以实现对量化的量化。钥匙流参数。对于观察分类和QC，获得了0.958和0.914的精度值。对于细分，骰子分数为$> $ 0.969，而平淡的altman情节表示手动和自动峰流量值之间的一致性很高。此外，我们在外部验证数据集上测试了管道，结果表明管道的鲁棒性。这项工作是使用由986例病例组成的多生临床数据进行的，表明在临床环境中使用该管道的潜力。