Generalization is an important attribute of machine learning models, particularly for those that are to be deployed in a medical context, where unreliable predictions can have real world consequences. While the failure of models to generalize across datasets is typically attributed to a mismatch in the data distributions, performance gaps are often a consequence of biases in the 'ground-truth' label annotations. This is particularly important in the context of medical image segmentation of pathological structures (e.g. lesions), where the annotation process is much more subjective, and affected by a number underlying factors, including the annotation protocol, rater education/experience, and clinical aims, among others. In this paper, we show that modeling annotation biases, rather than ignoring them, poses a promising way of accounting for differences in annotation style across datasets. To this end, we propose a generalized conditioning framework to (1) learn and account for different annotation styles across multiple datasets using a single model, (2) identify similar annotation styles across different datasets in order to permit their effective aggregation, and (3) fine-tune a fully trained model to a new annotation style with just a few samples. Next, we present an image-conditioning approach to model annotation styles that correlate with specific image features, potentially enabling detection biases to be more easily identified.

发现预测未来疾病结果的患者特定成像标记可以帮助我们更好地了解疾病进化的个体水平异质性。实际上，可以在医学实践中采用的可以提供数据驱动的个性化标记的深度学习模型。在这项工作中，我们证明了数据驱动的生物标志物发现可以通过反事实综合过程来实现。我们展示了如何使用深层的条件生成模型来扰动基线图像中的局部成像特征，这些图像与特定于受试者的未来疾病进化有关，并导致反事实图像有望具有不同的未来结果。因此，候选生物标志物是由于检查了此过程中受到干扰的一组功能而产生的。通过对大型多扫描仪多中心多发性硬化症（MS）临床试验磁共振成像（MRI）数据集（RRMS）患者数据集（RRMS）患者数据集进行的几项实验，我们证明我们的模型会产生反面的反面事件，并具有成像变化反映了建立的临床标记的特征，可预测人群水平的未来MRI病变活性。其他定性结果表明，我们的模型有可能发现未来活动的新颖和主题的预测标记。

慢性疾病（例如多发性硬化症（MS））的精密医学涉及选择一种治疗方法，该治疗能够最好地平衡疗效和副作用/偏好。尽早做出这种选择很重要，因为寻找有效疗法的延迟可能会导致不可逆的残疾应计。为此，我们介绍了第一个针对MS患者的基线磁共振成像（MRI）（MRI）（MRI）（MRI）（MRI）的第一个深层神经网络模型。我们的模型（a）预测未来的新和扩大的T2加权（NE-T2）病变对多种治疗的随访MRI进行计数，并且（b）估计有条件的平均治疗效果（CATE），如预测的未来抑制NE所定义-t2病变，相对于安慰剂的不同治疗选择。我们的模型在四个多中心随机临床试验中从MS患者中获得的1817个多序列MRI的专有联合数据集进行了验证。我们的框架在未来NE-T2病变的二进制回归中达到了五种不同治疗的二进制回归，确定了异质治疗效果，并提供了个性化治疗建议，以说明治疗相关风险（例如，副作用，患者偏好，管理困难） 。

网络威胁情报（CTI）共享是减少攻击者和捍卫者之间信息不对称的重要活动。但是，由于数据共享和机密性之间的紧张关系，这项活动带来了挑战，这导致信息保留通常会导致自由骑士问题。因此，共享的信息仅代表冰山一角。当前的文献假设访问包含所有信息的集中数据库，但是由于上述张力，这并不总是可行的。这会导致不平衡或不完整的数据集，需要使用技术扩展它们。我们展示了这些技术如何导致结果和误导性能期望。我们提出了一个新颖的框架，用于从分布式数据中提取有关事件，漏洞和妥协指标的分布式数据，并与恶意软件信息共享平台（MISP）一起证明其在几种实际情况下的使用。提出和讨论了CTI共享的政策影响。拟议的系统依赖于隐私增强技术和联合处理的有效组合。这使组织能够控制其CTI，并最大程度地减少暴露或泄漏的风险，同时为共享的好处，更准确和代表性的结果以及更有效的预测性和预防性防御能力。

The recent increase in public and academic interest in preserving biodiversity has led to the growth of the field of conservation technology. This field involves designing and constructing tools that utilize technology to aid in the conservation of wildlife. In this article, we will use case studies to demonstrate the importance of designing conservation tools with human-wildlife interaction in mind and provide a framework for creating successful tools. These case studies include a range of complexities, from simple cat collars to machine learning and game theory methodologies. Our goal is to introduce and inform current and future researchers in the field of conservation technology and provide references for educating the next generation of conservation technologists. Conservation technology not only has the potential to benefit biodiversity but also has broader impacts on fields such as sustainability and environmental protection. By using innovative technologies to address conservation challenges, we can find more effective and efficient solutions to protect and preserve our planet's resources.

A Digital Twin (DT) is a simulation of a physical system that provides information to make decisions that add economic, social or commercial value. The behaviour of a physical system changes over time, a DT must therefore be continually updated with data from the physical systems to reflect its changing behaviour. For resource-constrained systems, updating a DT is non-trivial because of challenges such as on-board learning and the off-board data transfer. This paper presents a framework for updating data-driven DTs of resource-constrained systems geared towards system health monitoring. The proposed solution consists of: (1) an on-board system running a light-weight DT allowing the prioritisation and parsimonious transfer of data generated by the physical system; and (2) off-board robust updating of the DT and detection of anomalous behaviours. Two case studies are considered using a production gas turbine engine system to demonstrate the digital representation accuracy for real-world, time-varying physical systems.

We consider infinite horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with fast-slow structure, meaning that certain parts of the state space move "fast" (and in a sense, are more influential) while other parts transition more "slowly." Such structure is common in real-world problems where sequential decisions need to be made at high frequencies, yet information that varies at a slower timescale also influences the optimal policy. Examples include: (1) service allocation for a multi-class queue with (slowly varying) stochastic costs, (2) a restless multi-armed bandit with an environmental state, and (3) energy demand response, where both day-ahead and real-time prices play a role in the firm's revenue. Models that fully capture these problems often result in MDPs with large state spaces and large effective time horizons (due to frequent decisions), rendering them computationally intractable. We propose an approximate dynamic programming algorithmic framework based on the idea of "freezing" the slow states, solving a set of simpler finite-horizon MDPs (the lower-level MDPs), and applying value iteration (VI) to an auxiliary MDP that transitions on a slower timescale (the upper-level MDP). We also extend the technique to a function approximation setting, where a feature-based linear architecture is used. On the theoretical side, we analyze the regret incurred by each variant of our frozen-state approach. Finally, we give empirical evidence that the frozen-state approach generates effective policies using just a fraction of the computational cost, while illustrating that simply omitting slow states from the decision modeling is often not a viable heuristic.

While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aimed to fast track the development of autonomous exploration systems by evaluating their performance in real-world underground search-and-rescue scenarios. Subterranean environments present a plethora of challenges for robotic systems, such as limited communications, complex topology, visually-degraded sensing, and harsh terrain. The presented solution enables long-term autonomy with minimal human supervision by combining a powerful and independent single-agent autonomy stack, with higher level mission management operating over a flexible mesh network. The autonomy suite deployed on quadruped and wheeled robots was fully independent, freeing the human supervision to loosely supervise the mission and make high-impact strategic decisions. We also discuss lessons learned from fielding our system at the SubT Final Event, relating to vehicle versatility, system adaptability, and re-configurable communications.

Machine learning is the dominant approach to artificial intelligence, through which computers learn from data and experience. In the framework of supervised learning, for a computer to learn from data accurately and efficiently, some auxiliary information about the data distribution and target function should be provided to it through the learning model. This notion of auxiliary information relates to the concept of regularization in statistical learning theory. A common feature among real-world datasets is that data domains are multiscale and target functions are well-behaved and smooth. In this paper, we propose a learning model that exploits this multiscale data structure and discuss its statistical and computational benefits. The hierarchical learning model is inspired by the logical and progressive easy-to-hard learning mechanism of human beings and has interpretable levels. The model apportions computational resources according to the complexity of data instances and target functions. This property can have multiple benefits, including higher inference speed and computational savings in training a model for many users or when training is interrupted. We provide a statistical analysis of the learning mechanism using multiscale entropies and show that it can yield significantly stronger guarantees than uniform convergence bounds.

Implicit Neural Representations (INR) have recently shown to be powerful tool for high-quality video compression. However, existing works are limiting as they do not explicitly exploit the temporal redundancy in videos, leading to a long encoding time. Additionally, these methods have fixed architectures which do not scale to longer videos or higher resolutions. To address these issues, we propose NIRVANA, which treats videos as groups of frames and fits separate networks to each group performing patch-wise prediction. This design shares computation within each group, in the spatial and temporal dimensions, resulting in reduced encoding time of the video. The video representation is modeled autoregressively, with networks fit on a current group initialized using weights from the previous group's model. To further enhance efficiency, we perform quantization of the network parameters during training, requiring no post-hoc pruning or quantization. When compared with previous works on the benchmark UVG dataset, NIRVANA improves encoding quality from 37.36 to 37.70 (in terms of PSNR) and the encoding speed by 12X, while maintaining the same compression rate. In contrast to prior video INR works which struggle with larger resolution and longer videos, we show that our algorithm is highly flexible and scales naturally due to its patch-wise and autoregressive designs. Moreover, our method achieves variable bitrate compression by adapting to videos with varying inter-frame motion. NIRVANA achieves 6X decoding speed and scales well with more GPUs, making it practical for various deployment scenarios.