由于几个因素之间的微妙权衡：参与者的隐私，生态有效性，数据保真度和后勤开销，记录野外未脚本人类互动的动态是具有挑战性的。为了解决这些问题，在社区精神上为社区的“数据集”之后，我们提出了会议生活实验室（Conflab）：一个新的概念，用于多模式多模式数据收集，野生野外社交对话。对于此处描述的Conflab的首次实例化，我们在一次大型国际会议上组织了现实生活中的专业网络活动。该数据集涉及48个会议参与者，捕捉了地位，熟人和网络动机的各种组合。我们的捕获设置改善了先前野外数据集的数据保真度，同时保留隐私敏感性：从非侵入性的架空视图中获得8个视频（1920x1080，60 fps），并具有定制的可穿戴传感器，并带有车载记录（完整9） - 轴IMU），具有隐私性的低频音频（1250 Hz）和基于蓝牙的接近度。此外，我们开发了用于采集时分布式硬件同步的自定义解决方案，并以高采样速率对身体关键点和动作进行了及时的连续注释。我们的基准测试展示了与野外隐私保护社交数据分析有关的一些开放研究任务：从高架摄像头视图，基于骨架的No-Audio扬声器检测和F-Formation检测中的关键点检测。

在社交谈话中的人类行为预测中的默认范式涉及选择利息的特定未来语义事件（例如，演讲者转变变化，群体离开），然后识别他们与低级非语言提示的关系。如此自上而下的方法中的常见障碍是对监督学习的事件标记数据的可用性有限，源于此类事件的不频率。为了解决这一挑战，我们建议将预测投入到一个小说自下而上的自我监督问题中，以利用更大的低级行为线索。我们正规化社会提示预测（SCF）的任务，并表征所涉及的具体建模挑战。为了解决这些社会科学文献的关键观察，并提出社会过程（SP）模型 - 社会意识到序列序列模型，该序列模型将每个对话组视为元学习任务，以解释特定于组的动态。我们的SP模型学习每位参与者未来提示的活动不可知论者，同时捕捉全球不确定性，通过联合推理本集团所有成员的未来。对于SCF的这种新任务，在实际行为数据上提高了非元学习模型的实证性能验证了我们的元学习方法。此外，通过具有类似假设的Meta学习模型的消融和比较验证了我们对此任务的具体建模选择。

Modern deep neural networks have achieved superhuman performance in tasks from image classification to game play. Surprisingly, these various complex systems with massive amounts of parameters exhibit the same remarkable structural properties in their last-layer features and classifiers across canonical datasets. This phenomenon is known as "Neural Collapse," and it was discovered empirically by Papyan et al. \cite{Papyan20}. Recent papers have theoretically shown the global solutions to the training network problem under a simplified "unconstrained feature model" exhibiting this phenomenon. We take a step further and prove the Neural Collapse occurrence for deep linear network for the popular mean squared error (MSE) and cross entropy (CE) loss. Furthermore, we extend our research to imbalanced data for MSE loss and present the first geometric analysis for Neural Collapse under this setting.

This study proposes an approach for establishing an optimal multihop ad-hoc network using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to provide emergency communication in disaster areas. The approach includes two stages, one uses particle swarm optimization (PSO) to find optimal positions to deploy UAVs, and the other uses a behavior-based controller to navigate the UAVs to their assigned positions without colliding with obstacles in an unknown environment. Several constraints related to the UAVs' sensing and communication ranges have been imposed to ensure the applicability of the proposed approach in real-world scenarios. A number of simulation experiments with data loaded from real environments have been conducted. The results show that our proposed approach is not only successful in establishing multihop ad-hoc routes but also meets the requirements for real-time deployment of UAVs.

We introduce an approach for the answer-aware question generation problem. Instead of only relying on the capability of strong pre-trained language models, we observe that the information of answers and questions can be found in some relevant sentences in the context. Based on that, we design a model which includes two modules: a selector and a generator. The selector forces the model to more focus on relevant sentences regarding an answer to provide implicit local information. The generator generates questions by implicitly combining local information from the selector and global information from the whole context encoded by the encoder. The model is trained jointly to take advantage of latent interactions between the two modules. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that our model is better than strong pre-trained models for the question generation task. The code is also available (shorturl.at/lV567).

2048 is a single-player stochastic puzzle game. This intriguing and addictive game has been popular worldwide and has attracted researchers to develop game-playing programs. Due to its simplicity and complexity, 2048 has become an interesting and challenging platform for evaluating the effectiveness of machine learning methods. This dissertation conducts comprehensive research on reinforcement learning and computer game algorithms for 2048. First, this dissertation proposes optimistic temporal difference learning, which significantly improves the quality of learning by employing optimistic initialization to encourage exploration for 2048. Furthermore, based on this approach, a state-of-the-art program for 2048 is developed, which achieves the highest performance among all learning-based programs, namely an average score of 625377 points and a rate of 72% for reaching 32768-tiles. Second, this dissertation investigates several techniques related to 2048, including the n-tuple network ensemble learning, Monte Carlo tree search, and deep reinforcement learning. These techniques are promising for further improving the performance of the current state-of-the-art program. Finally, this dissertation discusses pedagogical applications related to 2048 by proposing course designs and summarizing the teaching experience. The proposed course designs use 2048-like games as materials for beginners to learn reinforcement learning and computer game algorithms. The courses have been successfully applied to graduate-level students and received well by student feedback.

Automatically estimating 3D skeleton, shape, camera viewpoints, and part articulation from sparse in-the-wild image ensembles is a severely under-constrained and challenging problem. Most prior methods rely on large-scale image datasets, dense temporal correspondence, or human annotations like camera pose, 2D keypoints, and shape templates. We propose Hi-LASSIE, which performs 3D articulated reconstruction from only 20-30 online images in the wild without any user-defined shape or skeleton templates. We follow the recent work of LASSIE that tackles a similar problem setting and make two significant advances. First, instead of relying on a manually annotated 3D skeleton, we automatically estimate a class-specific skeleton from the selected reference image. Second, we improve the shape reconstructions with novel instance-specific optimization strategies that allow reconstructions to faithful fit on each instance while preserving the class-specific priors learned across all images. Experiments on in-the-wild image ensembles show that Hi-LASSIE obtains higher quality state-of-the-art 3D reconstructions despite requiring minimum user input.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

This paper aims to improve the Warping Planer Object Detection Network (WPOD-Net) using feature engineering to increase accuracy. What problems are solved using the Warping Object Detection Network using feature engineering? More specifically, we think that it makes sense to add knowledge about edges in the image to enhance the information for determining the license plate contour of the original WPOD-Net model. The Sobel filter has been selected experimentally and acts as a Convolutional Neural Network layer, the edge information is combined with the old information of the original network to create the final embedding vector. The proposed model was compared with the original model on a set of data that we collected for evaluation. The results are evaluated through the Quadrilateral Intersection over Union value and demonstrate that the model has a significant improvement in performance.

Although understanding and characterizing causal effects have become essential in observational studies, it is challenging when the confounders are high-dimensional. In this article, we develop a general framework $\textit{CausalEGM}$ for estimating causal effects by encoding generative modeling, which can be applied in both binary and continuous treatment settings. Under the potential outcome framework with unconfoundedness, we establish a bidirectional transformation between the high-dimensional confounders space and a low-dimensional latent space where the density is known (e.g., multivariate normal distribution). Through this, CausalEGM simultaneously decouples the dependencies of confounders on both treatment and outcome and maps the confounders to the low-dimensional latent space. By conditioning on the low-dimensional latent features, CausalEGM can estimate the causal effect for each individual or the average causal effect within a population. Our theoretical analysis shows that the excess risk for CausalEGM can be bounded through empirical process theory. Under an assumption on encoder-decoder networks, the consistency of the estimate can be guaranteed. In a series of experiments, CausalEGM demonstrates superior performance over existing methods for both binary and continuous treatments. Specifically, we find CausalEGM to be substantially more powerful than competing methods in the presence of large sample sizes and high dimensional confounders. The software of CausalEGM is freely available at https://github.com/SUwonglab/CausalEGM.