数十年来，源自人类活动的海洋碎片一直在海洋，湖泊和河流等水下环境中积累。由于无法理解散布的确切机制，因此难以评估废物的程度，类型和数量，从而对海洋环境和人类健康产生了未知的后果。因此，用于检测和映射海洋碎片的方法对于洞悉污染动力学至关重要，而污染动态又可以用来有效地计划和执行物理去除。使用配备了水下高光谱成像仪（UHI）和立体声相机的自动驾驶水下车辆（AUV），在挪威卑尔根贝尔根的庇护海湾商店Lungegaardsvann中自主检测，映射和量化了海洋碎片。

Generalisation to unseen contexts remains a challenge for embodied navigation agents. In the context of semantic audio-visual navigation (SAVi) tasks, the notion of generalisation should include both generalising to unseen indoor visual scenes as well as generalising to unheard sounding objects. However, previous SAVi task definitions do not include evaluation conditions on truly novel sounding objects, resorting instead to evaluating agents on unheard sound clips of known objects; meanwhile, previous SAVi methods do not include explicit mechanisms for incorporating domain knowledge about object and region semantics. These weaknesses limit the development and assessment of models' abilities to generalise their learned experience. In this work, we introduce the use of knowledge-driven scene priors in the semantic audio-visual embodied navigation task: we combine semantic information from our novel knowledge graph that encodes object-region relations, spatial knowledge from dual Graph Encoder Networks, and background knowledge from a series of pre-training tasks -- all within a reinforcement learning framework for audio-visual navigation. We also define a new audio-visual navigation sub-task, where agents are evaluated on novel sounding objects, as opposed to unheard clips of known objects. We show improvements over strong baselines in generalisation to unseen regions and novel sounding objects, within the Habitat-Matterport3D simulation environment, under the SoundSpaces task.

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.

We revisit a simple Learning-from-Scratch baseline for visuo-motor control that uses data augmentation and a shallow ConvNet. We find that this baseline has competitive performance with recent methods that leverage frozen visual representations trained on large-scale vision datasets.

Poor sample efficiency continues to be the primary challenge for deployment of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for real-world applications, and in particular for visuo-motor control. Model-based RL has the potential to be highly sample efficient by concurrently learning a world model and using synthetic rollouts for planning and policy improvement. However, in practice, sample-efficient learning with model-based RL is bottlenecked by the exploration challenge. In this work, we find that leveraging just a handful of demonstrations can dramatically improve the sample-efficiency of model-based RL. Simply appending demonstrations to the interaction dataset, however, does not suffice. We identify key ingredients for leveraging demonstrations in model learning -- policy pretraining, targeted exploration, and oversampling of demonstration data -- which forms the three phases of our model-based RL framework. We empirically study three complex visuo-motor control domains and find that our method is 150%-250% more successful in completing sparse reward tasks compared to prior approaches in the low data regime (100K interaction steps, 5 demonstrations). Code and videos are available at: https://nicklashansen.github.io/modemrl

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are deep learning models designed to process attributed graphs. GNNs can compute cluster assignments accounting both for the vertex features and for the graph topology. Existing GNNs for clustering are trained by optimizing an unsupervised minimum cut objective, which is approximated by a Spectral Clustering (SC) relaxation. SC offers a closed-form solution that, however, is not particularly useful for a GNN trained with gradient descent. Additionally, the SC relaxation is loose and yields overly smooth cluster assignments, which do not separate well the samples. We propose a GNN model that optimizes a tighter relaxation of the minimum cut based on graph total variation (GTV). Our model has two core components: i) a message-passing layer that minimizes the $\ell_1$ distance in the features of adjacent vertices, which is key to achieving sharp cluster transitions; ii) a loss function that minimizes the GTV in the cluster assignments while ensuring balanced partitions. By optimizing the proposed loss, our model can be self-trained to perform clustering. In addition, our clustering procedure can be used to implement graph pooling in deep GNN architectures for graph classification. Experiments show that our model outperforms other GNN-based approaches for clustering and graph pooling.

We discuss a platform that has both software and hardware components, and whose purpose is to support research into characterizing and mitigating the sim-to-real gap in robotics and vehicle autonomy engineering. The software is operating-system independent and has three main components: a simulation engine called Chrono, which supports high-fidelity vehicle and sensor simulation; an autonomy stack for algorithm design and testing; and a development environment that supports visualization and hardware-in-the-loop experimentation. The accompanying hardware platform is a 1/6th scale vehicle augmented with reconfigurable mountings for computing, sensing, and tracking. Since this vehicle platform has a digital twin within the simulation environment, one can test the same autonomy perception, state estimation, or controls algorithms, as well as the processors they run on, in both simulation and reality. A demonstration is provided to show the utilization of this platform for autonomy research. Future work will concentrate on augmenting ART/ATK with support for a full-sized Chevy Bolt EUV, which will be made available to this group in the immediate future.

我们在本文中介绍了我们认为是视频游戏机翻译的首次尝试之一。我们的研究表明，只有有限的内域数据训练的模型超出了可公开可用的系统，随后的人类评估揭示了最终翻译中的有趣发现。本文的第一部分介绍了视频游戏翻译的一些挑战，一些现有文献以及本实验中使用的系统和数据集。最后一节讨论了我们对所得翻译的分析以及这种自动化系统的潜在好处。一个这样的发现突出了该模型学习从英语到法语的视频游戏翻译的典型规则和模式的能力。因此，我们的结论表明，鉴于令人鼓舞的结果，工作的高度重复性以及翻译人员在该领域中通常不良的工作条件，视频游戏机译的具体情况可能非常有用。但是，与文化部门中MT的其他用例一样，我们认为这在很大程度上取决于该工具的适当实施，该工具应与人类翻译人员进行交互方式来刺激创造力，而不是为了生产力而不是原始的后编辑。

神经网络修剪可以有效地用于压缩自动语音识别（ASR）模型。但是，在多语言ASR中，执行语言不足的修剪可能会导致某些语言的严重性能降解，因为语言 - 敏捷的修剪口罩可能不符合所有语言，并丢弃了重要的语言特定参数。在这项工作中，我们提出了ASR路径，这是一种稀疏的多语言ASR模型，该模型激活了特定语言的子网络（“路径”），从而明确地学习了每种语言的参数。通过重叠的子网络，共享参数还可以通过联合多语言培训来实现较低资源语言的知识传输。我们提出了一种新型算法来学习ASR途径，并通过流式RNN-T模型评估了4种语言的建议方法。我们提出的ASR途径的表现都优于密集模型（平均-5.0％）和语言不足的修剪模型（平均-21.4％），并且与单语稀疏模型相比，低资源语言的性能更好。

随着跨领域的机器人在共享环境中开始与人类合作，使他们能够推理人类意图的算法对于实现安全的相互作用很重要。在我们的工作中，我们通过预测动态环境中的轨迹的问题来研究人类的意图。我们探索导航准则相对严格定义但在其物理环境中没有明确标记的域。我们假设在这些领域内，代理人倾向于表现出短期运动模式，这些模式揭示了与代理人的一般方向，中间目标和运动规则相关的上下文信息，例如社会行为。从这种直觉中，我们提出了社交模式，这是一种复发，多模式轨迹预测的算法，该预测利用运动模式来编码上述上下文。我们的方法通过学习预测短期运动模式来指导长期的轨迹预测。然后，它从模式中提取次目标信息，并将其汇总为社会环境。我们评估了跨三个领域的方法：人类人群，体育中的人类和码头领空中的载人飞机，以实现最先进的表现。