Target-specific stance detection on social media, which aims at classifying a textual data instance such as a post or a comment into a stance class of a target issue, has become an emerging opinion mining paradigm of importance. An example application would be to overcome vaccine hesitancy in combating the coronavirus pandemic. However, existing stance detection strategies rely merely on the individual instances which cannot always capture the expressed stance of a given target. In response, we address a new task called conversational stance detection which is to infer the stance towards a given target (e.g., COVID-19 vaccination) when given a data instance and its corresponding conversation thread. To tackle the task, we first propose a benchmarking conversational stance detection (CSD) dataset with annotations of stances and the structures of conversation threads among the instances based on six major social media platforms in Hong Kong. To infer the desired stances from both data instances and conversation threads, we propose a model called Branch-BERT that incorporates contextual information in conversation threads. Extensive experiments on our CSD dataset show that our proposed model outperforms all the baseline models that do not make use of contextual information. Specifically, it improves the F1 score by 10.3% compared with the state-of-the-art method in the SemEval-2016 Task 6 competition. This shows the potential of incorporating rich contextual information on detecting target-specific stances on social media platforms and implies a more practical way to construct future stance detection tasks.

最近的研究表明，神经组合优化（NCO）在许多组合优化问题（如路由）中具有优于传统算法的优点，但是对于涉及相互条件的动作空间的包装，诸如打包的更加复杂的优化任务的效率较低。在本文中，我们提出了一种经常性的条件查询学习（RCQL）方法来解决2D和3D包装问题。我们首先通过经常性编码器嵌入状态，然后采用先前操作的条件查询注意。条件查询机制填充了学习步骤之间的信息差距，将问题塑造为Markov决策过程。从复发中受益，单个RCQL模型能够处理不同尺寸的包装问题。实验结果表明，RCQL可以有效地学习用于离线和在线条带包装问题（SPP）的强烈启发式，优于空间利用率范围广泛的基线。 RCQL与最先进的方法相比，在离线2D 40盒案例中将平均箱间隙比率降低1.83％，3.84％。同时，我们的方法还实现了5.64％的空间利用率，对于1000件物品的空间利用率比现有技术更高。

在不失去先前学习的情况下学习新任务和技能（即灾难性遗忘）是人为和生物神经网络的计算挑战，但是人工系统努力与其生物学类似物达成平等。哺乳动物的大脑采用众多神经手术来支持睡眠期间的持续学习。这些是人工适应的成熟。在这里，我们研究了建模哺乳动物睡眠的三个不同组成部分如何影响人工神经网络中的持续学习：（1）在非比型眼运动（NREM）睡眠期间观察到的垂直记忆重播过程； （2）链接到REM睡眠的生成记忆重播过程； （3）已提出的突触降压过程，以调整信噪比和支持神经保养。在评估持续学习CIFAR-100图像分类基准上的性能时，我们发现将所有三个睡眠组件的包含在内。在以后的任务期间，训练和灾难性遗忘在训练过程中提高了最高准确性。尽管某些灾难性遗忘在网络培训过程中持续存在，但更高水平的突触缩减水平会导致更好地保留早期任务，并进一步促进随后培训期间早期任务准确性的恢复。一个关键的要点是，在考虑使用突触缩小范围的水平时，手头有一个权衡 - 更具侵略性的缩减更好地保护早期任务，但较少的缩减可以增强学习新任务的能力。中级水平可以在训练过程中与最高的总体精度达到平衡。总体而言，我们的结果都提供了有关如何适应睡眠组件以增强人工连续学习系统的洞察力，并突出了未来神经科学睡眠研究的领域，以进一步进一步进行此类系统。

There are multiple scales of abstraction from which we can describe the same image, depending on whether we are focusing on fine-grained details or a more global attribute of the image. In brain mapping, learning to automatically parse images to build representations of both small-scale features (e.g., the presence of cells or blood vessels) and global properties of an image (e.g., which brain region the image comes from) is a crucial and open challenge. However, most existing datasets and benchmarks for neuroanatomy consider only a single downstream task at a time. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new dataset, annotations, and multiple downstream tasks that provide diverse ways to readout information about brain structure and architecture from the same image. Our multi-task neuroimaging benchmark (MTNeuro) is built on volumetric, micrometer-resolution X-ray microtomography images spanning a large thalamocortical section of mouse brain, encompassing multiple cortical and subcortical regions. We generated a number of different prediction challenges and evaluated several supervised and self-supervised models for brain-region prediction and pixel-level semantic segmentation of microstructures. Our experiments not only highlight the rich heterogeneity of this dataset, but also provide insights into how self-supervised approaches can be used to learn representations that capture multiple attributes of a single image and perform well on a variety of downstream tasks. Datasets, code, and pre-trained baseline models are provided at: https://mtneuro.github.io/ .

Compliance in actuation has been exploited to generate highly dynamic maneuvers such as throwing that take advantage of the potential energy stored in joint springs. However, the energy storage and release could not be well-timed yet. On the contrary, for multi-link systems, the natural system dynamics might even work against the actual goal. With the introduction of variable stiffness actuators, this problem has been partially addressed. With a suitable optimal control strategy, the approximate decoupling of the motor from the link can be achieved to maximize the energy transfer into the distal link prior to launch. However, such continuous stiffness variation is complex and typically leads to oscillatory swing-up motions instead of clear launch sequences. To circumvent this issue, we investigate decoupling for speed maximization with a dedicated novel actuator concept denoted Bi-Stiffness Actuation. With this, it is possible to fully decouple the link from the joint mechanism by a switch-and-hold clutch and simultaneously keep the elastic energy stored. We show that with this novel paradigm, it is not only possible to reach the same optimal performance as with power-equivalent variable stiffness actuation, but even directly control the energy transfer timing. This is a major step forward compared to previous optimal control approaches, which rely on optimizing the full time-series control input.

In the Earth's magnetosphere, there are fewer than a dozen dedicated probes beyond low-Earth orbit making in-situ observations at any given time. As a result, we poorly understand its global structure and evolution, the mechanisms of its main activity processes, magnetic storms, and substorms. New Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, including machine learning, data mining, and data assimilation, as well as new AI-enabled missions will need to be developed to meet this Sparse Data challenge.

Dataset scaling, also known as normalization, is an essential preprocessing step in a machine learning pipeline. It is aimed at adjusting attributes scales in a way that they all vary within the same range. This transformation is known to improve the performance of classification models, but there are several scaling techniques to choose from, and this choice is not generally done carefully. In this paper, we execute a broad experiment comparing the impact of 5 scaling techniques on the performances of 20 classification algorithms among monolithic and ensemble models, applying them to 82 publicly available datasets with varying imbalance ratios. Results show that the choice of scaling technique matters for classification performance, and the performance difference between the best and the worst scaling technique is relevant and statistically significant in most cases. They also indicate that choosing an inadequate technique can be more detrimental to classification performance than not scaling the data at all. We also show how the performance variation of an ensemble model, considering different scaling techniques, tends to be dictated by that of its base model. Finally, we discuss the relationship between a model's sensitivity to the choice of scaling technique and its performance and provide insights into its applicability on different model deployment scenarios. Full results and source code for the experiments in this paper are available in a GitHub repository.\footnote{https://github.com/amorimlb/scaling\_matters}

The availability of frequent and cost-free satellite images is in growing demand in the research world. Such satellite constellations as Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 provide a massive amount of valuable data daily. However, the discrepancy in the sensors' characteristics of these satellites makes it senseless to use a segmentation model trained on either dataset and applied to another, which is why domain adaptation techniques have recently become an active research area in remote sensing. In this paper, an experiment of domain adaptation through style-transferring is conducted using the HRSemI2I model to narrow the sensor discrepancy between Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2. This paper's main contribution is analyzing the expediency of that approach by comparing the results of segmentation using domain-adapted images with those without adaptation. The HRSemI2I model, adjusted to work with 6-band imagery, shows significant intersection-over-union performance improvement for both mean and per class metrics. A second contribution is providing different schemes of generalization between two label schemes - NALCMS 2015 and CORINE. The first scheme is standardization through higher-level land cover classes, and the second is through harmonization validation in the field.

We seek methods to model, control, and analyze robot teams performing environmental monitoring tasks. During environmental monitoring, the goal is to have teams of robots collect various data throughout a fixed region for extended periods of time. Standard bottom-up task assignment methods do not scale as the number of robots and task locations increases and require computationally expensive replanning. Alternatively, top-down methods have been used to combat computational complexity, but most have been limited to the analysis of methods which focus on transition times between tasks. In this work, we study a class of nonlinear macroscopic models which we use to control a time-varying distribution of robots performing different tasks throughout an environment. Our proposed ensemble model and control maintains desired time-varying populations of robots by leveraging naturally occurring interactions between robots performing tasks. We validate our approach at multiple fidelity levels including experimental results, suggesting the effectiveness of our approach to perform environmental monitoring.

Cartesian impedance control is a type of motion control strategy for robots that improves safety in partially unknown environments by achieving a compliant behavior of the robot with respect to its external forces. This compliant robot behavior has the added benefit of allowing physical human guidance of the robot. In this paper, we propose a C++ implementation of compliance control valid for any torque-commanded robotic manipulator. The proposed controller implements Cartesian impedance control to track a desired end-effector pose. Additionally, joint impedance is projected in the nullspace of the Cartesian robot motion to track a desired robot joint configuration without perturbing the Cartesian motion of the robot. The proposed implementation also allows the robot to apply desired forces and torques to its environment. Several safety features such as filtering, rate limiting, and saturation are included in the proposed implementation. The core functionalities are in a re-usable base library and a Robot Operating System (ROS) ros_control integration is provided on top of that. The implementation was tested with the KUKA LBR iiwa robot and the Franka Emika Robot (Panda) both in simulation and with the physical robots.