Data-driven models such as neural networks are being applied more and more to safety-critical applications, such as the modeling and control of cyber-physical systems. Despite the flexibility of the approach, there are still concerns about the safety of these models in this context, as well as the need for large amounts of potentially expensive data. In particular, when long-term predictions are needed or frequent measurements are not available, the open-loop stability of the model becomes important. However, it is difficult to make such guarantees for complex black-box models such as neural networks, and prior work has shown that model stability is indeed an issue. In this work, we consider an aluminum extraction process where measurements of the internal state of the reactor are time-consuming and expensive. We model the process using neural networks and investigate the role of including skip connections in the network architecture as well as using l1 regularization to induce sparse connection weights. We demonstrate that these measures can greatly improve both the accuracy and the stability of the models for datasets of varying sizes.

人工神经网络今天具有广泛的应用程序，因为它们的高度灵活性和从数据中建模非线性功能的能力。但是，由于其黑盒性质，从小型数据集概括的能力差以及在培训期间的不一致的融合，神经网络的可信度受到限制。铝电解是一个复杂的非线性过程，具有许多相互关联的子处理。人工神经网络可能非常适合对铝电解过程进行建模，但是此过程的安全性最关键的性质需要值得信赖的模型。在这项工作中，稀疏的神经网络经过训练，以建模铝电解模拟器的系统动力学。与相应的密集神经网络相比，稀疏模型结构的模型复杂性显着降低。我们认为这使模型更容易解释。此外，实证研究表明，稀疏模型比密集的神经网络从小型训练集中概括得更好。此外，训练具有不同参数初始化的稀疏神经网络的合奏表明，模型会收敛到具有相似学习的输入特征的相似模型结构。

In both terrestrial and marine ecology, physical tagging is a frequently used method to study population dynamics and behavior. However, such tagging techniques are increasingly being replaced by individual re-identification using image analysis. This paper introduces a contrastive learning-based model for identifying individuals. The model uses the first parts of the Inception v3 network, supported by a projection head, and we use contrastive learning to find similar or dissimilar image pairs from a collection of uniform photographs. We apply this technique for corkwing wrasse, Symphodus melops, an ecologically and commercially important fish species. Photos are taken during repeated catches of the same individuals from a wild population, where the intervals between individual sightings might range from a few days to several years. Our model achieves a one-shot accuracy of 0.35, a 5-shot accuracy of 0.56, and a 100-shot accuracy of 0.88, on our dataset.

We test the performance of GAN models for lip-synchronization. For this, we reimplement LipGAN in Pytorch, train it on the dataset GRID and compare it to our own variation, L1WGAN-GP, adapted to the LipGAN architecture and also trained on GRID.

High content imaging assays can capture rich phenotypic response data for large sets of compound treatments, aiding in the characterization and discovery of novel drugs. However, extracting representative features from high content images that can capture subtle nuances in phenotypes remains challenging. The lack of high-quality labels makes it difficult to achieve satisfactory results with supervised deep learning. Self-Supervised learning methods, which learn from automatically generated labels has shown great success on natural images, offer an attractive alternative also to microscopy images. However, we find that self-supervised learning techniques underperform on high content imaging assays. One challenge is the undesirable domain shifts present in the data known as batch effects, which may be caused by biological noise or uncontrolled experimental conditions. To this end, we introduce Cross-Domain Consistency Learning (CDCL), a novel approach that is able to learn in the presence of batch effects. CDCL enforces the learning of biological similarities while disregarding undesirable batch-specific signals, which leads to more useful and versatile representations. These features are organised according to their morphological changes and are more useful for downstream tasks - such as distinguishing treatments and mode of action.

Objective: Imbalances of the electrolyte concentration levels in the body can lead to catastrophic consequences, but accurate and accessible measurements could improve patient outcomes. While blood tests provide accurate measurements, they are invasive and the laboratory analysis can be slow or inaccessible. In contrast, an electrocardiogram (ECG) is a widely adopted tool which is quick and simple to acquire. However, the problem of estimating continuous electrolyte concentrations directly from ECGs is not well-studied. We therefore investigate if regression methods can be used for accurate ECG-based prediction of electrolyte concentrations. Methods: We explore the use of deep neural networks (DNNs) for this task. We analyze the regression performance across four electrolytes, utilizing a novel dataset containing over 290000 ECGs. For improved understanding, we also study the full spectrum from continuous predictions to binary classification of extreme concentration levels. To enhance clinical usefulness, we finally extend to a probabilistic regression approach and evaluate different uncertainty estimates. Results: We find that the performance varies significantly between different electrolytes, which is clinically justified in the interplay of electrolytes and their manifestation in the ECG. We also compare the regression accuracy with that of traditional machine learning models, demonstrating superior performance of DNNs. Conclusion: Discretization can lead to good classification performance, but does not help solve the original problem of predicting continuous concentration levels. While probabilistic regression demonstrates potential practical usefulness, the uncertainty estimates are not particularly well-calibrated. Significance: Our study is a first step towards accurate and reliable ECG-based prediction of electrolyte concentration levels.

As spatial audio is enjoying a surge in popularity, data-driven machine learning techniques that have been proven successful in other domains are increasingly used to process head-related transfer function measurements. However, these techniques require much data, whereas the existing datasets are ranging from tens to the low hundreds of datapoints. It therefore becomes attractive to combine multiple of these datasets, although they are measured under different conditions. In this paper, we first establish the common ground between a number of datasets, then we investigate potential pitfalls of mixing datasets. We perform a simple experiment to test the relevance of the remaining differences between datasets when applying machine learning techniques. Finally, we pinpoint the most relevant differences.

Manually analyzing spermatozoa is a tremendous task for biologists due to the many fast-moving spermatozoa, causing inconsistencies in the quality of the assessments. Therefore, computer-assisted sperm analysis (CASA) has become a popular solution. Despite this, more data is needed to train supervised machine learning approaches in order to improve accuracy and reliability. In this regard, we provide a dataset called VISEM-Tracking with 20 video recordings of 30s of spermatozoa with manually annotated bounding-box coordinates and a set of sperm characteristics analyzed by experts in the domain. VISEM-Tracking is an extension of the previously published VISEM dataset. In addition to the annotated data, we provide unlabeled video clips for easy-to-use access and analysis of the data. As part of this paper, we present baseline sperm detection performances using the YOLOv5 deep learning model trained on the VISEM-Tracking dataset. As a result, the dataset can be used to train complex deep-learning models to analyze spermatozoa. The dataset is publicly available at https://zenodo.org/record/7293726.

Head and neck cancers are the fifth most common cancer worldwide, and recently, analysis of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Computed Tomography (CT) images has been proposed to identify patients with a prognosis. Even though the results look promising, more research is needed to further validate and improve the results. This paper presents the work done by team MLC for the 2022 version of the HECKTOR grand challenge held at MICCAI 2022. For Task 1, the automatic segmentation task, our approach was, in contrast to earlier solutions using 3D segmentation, to keep it as simple as possible using a 2D model, analyzing every slice as a standalone image. In addition, we were interested in understanding how different modalities influence the results. We proposed two approaches; one using only the CT scans to make predictions and another using a combination of the CT and PET scans. For Task 2, the prediction of recurrence-free survival, we first proposed two approaches, one where we only use patient data and one where we combined the patient data with segmentations from the image model. For the prediction of the first two approaches, we used Random Forest. In our third approach, we combined patient data and image data using XGBoost. Low kidney function might worsen cancer prognosis. In this approach, we therefore estimated the kidney function of the patients and included it as a feature. Overall, we conclude that our simple methods were not able to compete with the highest-ranking submissions, but we still obtained reasonably good scores. We also got interesting insights into how the combination of different modalities can influence the segmentation and predictions.

This paper presents an evaluation of the quality of automatically generated reading comprehension questions from Swedish text, using the Quinductor method. This method is a light-weight, data-driven but non-neural method for automatic question generation (QG). The evaluation shows that Quinductor is a viable QG method that can provide a strong baseline for neural-network-based QG methods.