Cashews are grown by over 3 million smallholders in more than 40 countries worldwide as a principal source of income. As the third largest cashew producer in Africa, Benin has nearly 200,000 smallholder cashew growers contributing 15% of the country's national export earnings. However, a lack of information on where and how cashew trees grow across the country hinders decision-making that could support increased cashew production and poverty alleviation. By leveraging 2.4-m Planet Basemaps and 0.5-m aerial imagery, newly developed deep learning algorithms, and large-scale ground truth datasets, we successfully produced the first national map of cashew in Benin and characterized the expansion of cashew plantations between 2015 and 2021. In particular, we developed a SpatioTemporal Classification with Attention (STCA) model to map the distribution of cashew plantations, which can fully capture texture information from discriminative time steps during a growing season. We further developed a Clustering Augmented Self-supervised Temporal Classification (CASTC) model to distinguish high-density versus low-density cashew plantations by automatic feature extraction and optimized clustering. Results show that the STCA model has an overall accuracy of 80% and the CASTC model achieved an overall accuracy of 77.9%. We found that the cashew area in Benin has doubled from 2015 to 2021 with 60% of new plantation development coming from cropland or fallow land, while encroachment of cashew plantations into protected areas has increased by 70%. Only half of cashew plantations were high-density in 2021, suggesting high potential for intensification. Our study illustrates the power of combining high-resolution remote sensing imagery and state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms to better understand tree crops in the heterogeneous smallholder landscape.

While much attention has been paid to identifying explicit hate speech, implicit hateful expressions that are disguised in coded or indirect language are pervasive and remain a major challenge for existing hate speech detection systems. This paper presents the first attempt to apply Entity Linking (EL) techniques to both explicit and implicit hate speech detection, where we show that such real world knowledge about entity mentions in a text does help models better detect hate speech, and the benefit of adding it into the model is more pronounced when explicit entity triggers (e.g., rally, KKK) are present. We also discuss cases where real world knowledge does not add value to hate speech detection, which provides more insights into understanding and modeling the subtleties of hate speech.

Time series motif discovery has been a fundamental task to identify meaningful repeated patterns in time series. Recently, time series chains were introduced as an expansion of time series motifs to identify the continuous evolving patterns in time series data. Informally, a time series chain (TSC) is a temporally ordered set of time series subsequences, in which every subsequence is similar to the one that precedes it, but the last and the first can be arbitrarily dissimilar. TSCs are shown to be able to reveal latent continuous evolving trends in the time series, and identify precursors of unusual events in complex systems. Despite its promising interpretability, unfortunately, we have observed that existing TSC definitions lack the ability to accurately cover the evolving part of a time series: the discovered chains can be easily cut by noise and can include non-evolving patterns, making them impractical in real-world applications. Inspired by a recent work that tracks how the nearest neighbor of a time series subsequence changes over time, we introduce a new TSC definition which is much more robust to noise in the data, in the sense that they can better locate the evolving patterns while excluding the non-evolving ones. We further propose two new quality metrics to rank the discovered chains. With extensive empirical evaluations, we demonstrate that the proposed TSC definition is significantly more robust to noise than the state of the art, and the top ranked chains discovered can reveal meaningful regularities in a variety of real world datasets.

通用数据模型解决了标准化电子健康记录（EHR）数据的许多挑战，但无法将其集成深度表型所需的资源。开放的生物学和生物医学本体论（OBO）铸造本体论提供了可用于生物学知识的语义计算表示，并能够整合多种生物医学数据。但是，将EHR数据映射到OBO Foundry本体论需要大量的手动策展和域专业知识。我们介绍了一个框架，用于将观察性医学成果合作伙伴关系（OMOP）标准词汇介绍给OBO铸造本体。使用此框架，我们制作了92,367条条件，8,615种药物成分和10,673个测量结果的映射。域专家验证了映射准确性，并且在24家医院进行检查时，映射覆盖了99％的条件和药物成分和68％的测量结果。最后，我们证明OMOP2OBO映射可以帮助系统地识别可能受益于基因检测的未诊断罕见病患者。

We address the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation when the source domain differs from the target domain because of a shift in the distribution of a latent subgroup. When this subgroup confounds all observed data, neither covariate shift nor label shift assumptions apply. We show that the optimal target predictor can be non-parametrically identified with the help of concept and proxy variables available only in the source domain, and unlabeled data from the target. The identification results are constructive, immediately suggesting an algorithm for estimating the optimal predictor in the target. For continuous observations, when this algorithm becomes impractical, we propose a latent variable model specific to the data generation process at hand. We show how the approach degrades as the size of the shift changes, and verify that it outperforms both covariate and label shift adjustment.

Runtime monitoring provides a more realistic and applicable alternative to verification in the setting of real neural networks used in industry. It is particularly useful for detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs, for which the network was not trained and can yield erroneous results. We extend a runtime-monitoring approach previously proposed for classification networks to perception systems capable of identification and localization of multiple objects. Furthermore, we analyze its adequacy experimentally on different kinds of OOD settings, documenting the overall efficacy of our approach.

Most benchmarks for studying surgical interventions focus on a specific challenge instead of leveraging the intrinsic complementarity among different tasks. In this work, we present a new experimental framework towards holistic surgical scene understanding. First, we introduce the Phase, Step, Instrument, and Atomic Visual Action recognition (PSI-AVA) Dataset. PSI-AVA includes annotations for both long-term (Phase and Step recognition) and short-term reasoning (Instrument detection and novel Atomic Action recognition) in robot-assisted radical prostatectomy videos. Second, we present Transformers for Action, Phase, Instrument, and steps Recognition (TAPIR) as a strong baseline for surgical scene understanding. TAPIR leverages our dataset's multi-level annotations as it benefits from the learned representation on the instrument detection task to improve its classification capacity. Our experimental results in both PSI-AVA and other publicly available databases demonstrate the adequacy of our framework to spur future research on holistic surgical scene understanding.

Despite the impact of psychiatric disorders on clinical health, early-stage diagnosis remains a challenge. Machine learning studies have shown that classifiers tend to be overly narrow in the diagnosis prediction task. The overlap between conditions leads to high heterogeneity among participants that is not adequately captured by classification models. To address this issue, normative approaches have surged as an alternative method. By using a generative model to learn the distribution of healthy brain data patterns, we can identify the presence of pathologies as deviations or outliers from the distribution learned by the model. In particular, deep generative models showed great results as normative models to identify neurological lesions in the brain. However, unlike most neurological lesions, psychiatric disorders present subtle changes widespread in several brain regions, making these alterations challenging to identify. In this work, we evaluate the performance of transformer-based normative models to detect subtle brain changes expressed in adolescents and young adults. We trained our model on 3D MRI scans of neurotypical individuals (N=1,765). Then, we obtained the likelihood of neurotypical controls and psychiatric patients with early-stage schizophrenia from an independent dataset (N=93) from the Human Connectome Project. Using the predicted likelihood of the scans as a proxy for a normative score, we obtained an AUROC of 0.82 when assessing the difference between controls and individuals with early-stage schizophrenia. Our approach surpassed recent normative methods based on brain age and Gaussian Process, showing the promising use of deep generative models to help in individualised analyses.

The capture and animation of human hair are two of the major challenges in the creation of realistic avatars for the virtual reality. Both problems are highly challenging, because hair has complex geometry and appearance, as well as exhibits challenging motion. In this paper, we present a two-stage approach that models hair independently from the head to address these challenges in a data-driven manner. The first stage, state compression, learns a low-dimensional latent space of 3D hair states containing motion and appearance, via a novel autoencoder-as-a-tracker strategy. To better disentangle the hair and head in appearance learning, we employ multi-view hair segmentation masks in combination with a differentiable volumetric renderer. The second stage learns a novel hair dynamics model that performs temporal hair transfer based on the discovered latent codes. To enforce higher stability while driving our dynamics model, we employ the 3D point-cloud autoencoder from the compression stage for de-noising of the hair state. Our model outperforms the state of the art in novel view synthesis and is capable of creating novel hair animations without having to rely on hair observations as a driving signal.

Because of their close relationship with humans, non-human apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons, including siamangs) are of great scientific interest. The goal of understanding their complex behavior would be greatly advanced by the ability to perform video-based pose tracking. Tracking, however, requires high-quality annotated datasets of ape photographs. Here we present OpenApePose, a new public dataset of 71,868 photographs, annotated with 16 body landmarks, of six ape species in naturalistic contexts. We show that a standard deep net (HRNet-W48) trained on ape photos can reliably track out-of-sample ape photos better than networks trained on monkeys (specifically, the OpenMonkeyPose dataset) and on humans (COCO) can. This trained network can track apes almost as well as the other networks can track their respective taxa, and models trained without one of the six ape species can track the held out species better than the monkey and human models can. Ultimately, the results of our analyses highlight the importance of large specialized databases for animal tracking systems and confirm the utility of our new ape database.