无监督的强化学习（URL）的目标是在任务域中找到奖励无知的先验政策，以便改善了监督下游任务的样本效率。尽管在下游任务中进行填补时，以这种先前的政策初始化的代理商可以获得更高的奖励，但在实践中如何实现最佳预定的先前政策，这仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。在这项工作中，我们介绍PORTER（策略轨迹集合正规化） - 一种可以适用于任何URL算法的预处理的一般方法，并且在基于数据和知识的URL算法上特别有用。它利用了在预处理过程中发现的一系列政策合奏，并将URL算法的政策移至更接近其最佳先验的政策。我们的方法基于理论框架，我们分析了其对白盒基准测试的实际影响，使我们能够完全控制PORTER。在我们的主要实验中，我们评估了无监督的强化学习基准（URLB）的Polter，该实验由3个域中的12个任务组成。我们通过将各种基于数据和知识的URL算法的性能平均提高19％，在最佳情况下最多可达40％，从而证明了方法的普遍性。在与调谐的基线和调整的polter的公平比较下，我们在URLB上建立了最新的新作品。

深卷积神经网络需要大量标记的数据样本。对于许多现实世界应用，这是一个主要限制，通常通过增强方法对待。在这项工作中，我们解决了在小数据集上学习深神经网络的问题。我们提出的称为Chimeramix的体系结构通过生成实例组成来学习数据的增强。生成模型成对编码图像，结合了由面具引导的功能，并创建了新样本。为了进行评估，所有方法均已从头开始训练，没有任何其他数据。基准数据集上的几个实验，例如CIFAIR-10，STL-10和CIFAIR-100与当前用于小型数据集分类的最新方法相比，Chimeramix的出色性能表现出了出色的性能。

Support Vector Machines have been successfully used for one-class classification (OCSVM, SVDD) when trained on clean data, but they work much worse on dirty data: outliers present in the training data tend to become support vectors, and are hence considered "normal". In this article, we improve the effectiveness to detect outliers in dirty training data with a leave-out strategy: by temporarily omitting one candidate at a time, this point can be judged using the remaining data only. We show that this is more effective at scoring the outlierness of points than using the slack term of existing SVM-based approaches. Identified outliers can then be removed from the data, such that outliers hidden by other outliers can be identified, to reduce the problem of masking. Naively, this approach would require training N individual SVMs (and training $O(N^2)$ SVMs when iteratively removing the worst outliers one at a time), which is prohibitively expensive. We will discuss that only support vectors need to be considered in each step and that by reusing SVM parameters and weights, this incremental retraining can be accelerated substantially. By removing candidates in batches, we can further improve the processing time, although it obviously remains more costly than training a single SVM.

A major challenge when using k-means clustering often is how to choose the parameter k, the number of clusters. In this letter, we want to point out that it is very easy to draw poor conclusions from a common heuristic, the "elbow method". Better alternatives have been known in literature for a long time, and we want to draw attention to some of these easy to use options, that often perform better. This letter is a call to stop using the elbow method altogether, because it severely lacks theoretic support, and we want to encourage educators to discuss the problems of the method -- if introducing it in class at all -- and teach alternatives instead, while researchers and reviewers should reject conclusions drawn from the elbow method.

Adequately assigning credit to actions for future outcomes based on their contributions is a long-standing open challenge in Reinforcement Learning. The assumptions of the most commonly used credit assignment method are disadvantageous in tasks where the effects of decisions are not immediately evident. Furthermore, this method can only evaluate actions that have been selected by the agent, making it highly inefficient. Still, no alternative methods have been widely adopted in the field. Hindsight Credit Assignment is a promising, but still unexplored candidate, which aims to solve the problems of both long-term and counterfactual credit assignment. In this thesis, we empirically investigate Hindsight Credit Assignment to identify its main benefits, and key points to improve. Then, we apply it to factored state representations, and in particular to state representations based on the causal structure of the environment. In this setting, we propose a variant of Hindsight Credit Assignment that effectively exploits a given causal structure. We show that our modification greatly decreases the workload of Hindsight Credit Assignment, making it more efficient and enabling it to outperform the baseline credit assignment method on various tasks. This opens the way to other methods based on given or learned causal structures.

Active learning as a paradigm in deep learning is especially important in applications involving intricate perception tasks such as object detection where labels are difficult and expensive to acquire. Development of active learning methods in such fields is highly computationally expensive and time consuming which obstructs the progression of research and leads to a lack of comparability between methods. In this work, we propose and investigate a sandbox setup for rapid development and transparent evaluation of active learning in deep object detection. Our experiments with commonly used configurations of datasets and detection architectures found in the literature show that results obtained in our sandbox environment are representative of results on standard configurations. The total compute time to obtain results and assess the learning behavior can thereby be reduced by factors of up to 14 when comparing with Pascal VOC and up to 32 when comparing with BDD100k. This allows for testing and evaluating data acquisition and labeling strategies in under half a day and contributes to the transparency and development speed in the field of active learning for object detection.

Segmentation of lidar data is a task that provides rich, point-wise information about the environment of robots or autonomous vehicles. Currently best performing neural networks for lidar segmentation are fine-tuned to specific datasets. Switching the lidar sensor without retraining on a big set of annotated data from the new sensor creates a domain shift, which causes the network performance to drop drastically. In this work we propose a new method for lidar domain adaption, in which we use annotated panoptic lidar datasets and recreate the recorded scenes in the structure of a different lidar sensor. We narrow the domain gap to the target data by recreating panoptic data from one domain in another and mixing the generated data with parts of (pseudo) labeled target domain data. Our method improves the nuScenes to SemanticKITTI unsupervised domain adaptation performance by 15.2 mean Intersection over Union points (mIoU) and by 48.3 mIoU in our semi-supervised approach. We demonstrate a similar improvement for the SemanticKITTI to nuScenes domain adaptation by 21.8 mIoU and 51.5 mIoU, respectively. We compare our method with two state of the art approaches for semantic lidar segmentation domain adaptation with a significant improvement for unsupervised and semi-supervised domain adaptation. Furthermore we successfully apply our proposed method to two entirely unlabeled datasets of two state of the art lidar sensors Velodyne Alpha Prime and InnovizTwo, and train well performing semantic segmentation networks for both.

Explainable AI (XAI) is slowly becoming a key component for many AI applications. Rule-based and modified backpropagation XAI approaches however often face challenges when being applied to modern model architectures including innovative layer building blocks, which is caused by two reasons. Firstly, the high flexibility of rule-based XAI methods leads to numerous potential parameterizations. Secondly, many XAI methods break the implementation-invariance axiom because they struggle with certain model components, e.g., BatchNorm layers. The latter can be addressed with model canonization, which is the process of re-structuring the model to disregard problematic components without changing the underlying function. While model canonization is straightforward for simple architectures (e.g., VGG, ResNet), it can be challenging for more complex and highly interconnected models (e.g., DenseNet). Moreover, there is only little quantifiable evidence that model canonization is beneficial for XAI. In this work, we propose canonizations for currently relevant model blocks applicable to popular deep neural network architectures,including VGG, ResNet, EfficientNet, DenseNets, as well as Relation Networks. We further suggest a XAI evaluation framework with which we quantify and compare the effect sof model canonization for various XAI methods in image classification tasks on the Pascal-VOC and ILSVRC2017 datasets, as well as for Visual Question Answering using CLEVR-XAI. Moreover, addressing the former issue outlined above, we demonstrate how our evaluation framework can be applied to perform hyperparameter search for XAI methods to optimize the quality of explanations.

The extensive surviving corpus of the ancient scholar Plutarch of Chaeronea (ca. 45-120 CE) also contains several texts which, according to current scholarly opinion, did not originate with him and are therefore attributed to an anonymous author Pseudo-Plutarch. These include, in particular, the work Placita Philosophorum (Quotations and Opinions of the Ancient Philosophers), which is extremely important for the history of ancient philosophy. Little is known about the identity of that anonymous author and its relation to other authors from the same period. This paper presents a BERT language model for Ancient Greek. The model discovers previously unknown statistical properties relevant to these literary, philosophical, and historical problems and can shed new light on this authorship question. In particular, the Placita Philosophorum, together with one of the other Pseudo-Plutarch texts, shows similarities with the texts written by authors from an Alexandrian context (2nd/3rd century CE).

Autonomous vehicles currently suffer from a time-inefficient driving style caused by uncertainty about human behavior in traffic interactions. Accurate and reliable prediction models enabling more efficient trajectory planning could make autonomous vehicles more assertive in such interactions. However, the evaluation of such models is commonly oversimplistic, ignoring the asymmetric importance of prediction errors and the heterogeneity of the datasets used for testing. We examine the potential of recasting interactions between vehicles as gap acceptance scenarios and evaluating models in this structured environment. To that end, we develop a framework facilitating the evaluation of any model, by any metric, and in any scenario. We then apply this framework to state-of-the-art prediction models, which all show themselves to be unreliable in the most safety-critical situations.