零售商的主要障碍之一是了解他们可以从合同需求响应（DR）客户期望的消费弹性。零售商提供的DR产品的目前的趋势不是消费者特定的，这对消费者在这些计划中的积极参与的额外障碍带来了额外的障碍。消费者需求行为的弹性因个人而异。该实用程序将从知识中获益，更准确地了解其价格的变化将如何修改其客户的消费模式。这项工作提出了博士签约消费者消费弹性的功能模型。该模型的目的是确定负载调整，消费者可以为不同的价格水平提供给零售商或公用事业。拟议的模型使用贝叶斯概率方法来识别实际的负载调整，单个合同的客户可以提供它可以体验的不同价格水平。发达的框架为零售商或公用事业提供了一个工具，以获得关于个人消费者如何应对不同价格水平的关键信息。这种方法能够量化消费者对DR信号作出反应的可能性，并识别各个合同的博士客户提供的实际负载调整提供他们可以体验的不同价格水平。该信息可用于最大限度地提高零售商或实用程序可以向系统运营商提供的服务的控制和可靠性。

The field of Automatic Music Generation has seen significant progress thanks to the advent of Deep Learning. However, most of these results have been produced by unconditional models, which lack the ability to interact with their users, not allowing them to guide the generative process in meaningful and practical ways. Moreover, synthesizing music that remains coherent across longer timescales while still capturing the local aspects that make it sound ``realistic'' or ``human-like'' is still challenging. This is due to the large computational requirements needed to work with long sequences of data, and also to limitations imposed by the training schemes that are often employed. In this paper, we propose a generative model of symbolic music conditioned by data retrieved from human sentiment. The model is a Transformer-GAN trained with labels that correspond to different configurations of the valence and arousal dimensions that quantitatively represent human affective states. We try to tackle both of the problems above by employing an efficient linear version of Attention and using a Discriminator both as a tool to improve the overall quality of the generated music and its ability to follow the conditioning signals.

Automatic Text Summarization (ATS) is becoming relevant with the growth of textual data; however, with the popularization of public large-scale datasets, some recent machine learning approaches have focused on dense models and architectures that, despite producing notable results, usually turn out in models difficult to interpret. Given the challenge behind interpretable learning-based text summarization and the importance it may have for evolving the current state of the ATS field, this work studies the application of two modern Generalized Additive Models with interactions, namely Explainable Boosting Machine and GAMI-Net, to the extractive summarization problem based on linguistic features and binary classification.

This work presents a thorough review concerning recent studies and text generation advancements using Generative Adversarial Networks. The usage of adversarial learning for text generation is promising as it provides alternatives to generate the so-called "natural" language. Nevertheless, adversarial text generation is not a simple task as its foremost architecture, the Generative Adversarial Networks, were designed to cope with continuous information (image) instead of discrete data (text). Thus, most works are based on three possible options, i.e., Gumbel-Softmax differentiation, Reinforcement Learning, and modified training objectives. All alternatives are reviewed in this survey as they present the most recent approaches for generating text using adversarial-based techniques. The selected works were taken from renowned databases, such as Science Direct, IEEEXplore, Springer, Association for Computing Machinery, and arXiv, whereas each selected work has been critically analyzed and assessed to present its objective, methodology, and experimental results.

Video segmentation consists of a frame-by-frame selection process of meaningful areas related to foreground moving objects. Some applications include traffic monitoring, human tracking, action recognition, efficient video surveillance, and anomaly detection. In these applications, it is not rare to face challenges such as abrupt changes in weather conditions, illumination issues, shadows, subtle dynamic background motions, and also camouflage effects. In this work, we address such shortcomings by proposing a novel deep learning video segmentation approach that incorporates residual information into the foreground detection learning process. The main goal is to provide a method capable of generating an accurate foreground detection given a grayscale video. Experiments conducted on the Change Detection 2014 and on the private dataset PetrobrasROUTES from Petrobras support the effectiveness of the proposed approach concerning some state-of-the-art video segmentation techniques, with overall F-measures of $\mathbf{0.9535}$ and $\mathbf{0.9636}$ in the Change Detection 2014 and PetrobrasROUTES datasets, respectively. Such a result places the proposed technique amongst the top 3 state-of-the-art video segmentation methods, besides comprising approximately seven times less parameters than its top one counterpart.

Scene change detection is an image processing problem related to partitioning pixels of a digital image into foreground and background regions. Mostly, visual knowledge-based computer intelligent systems, like traffic monitoring, video surveillance, and anomaly detection, need to use change detection techniques. Amongst the most prominent detection methods, there are the learning-based ones, which besides sharing similar training and testing protocols, differ from each other in terms of their architecture design strategies. Such architecture design directly impacts on the quality of the detection results, and also in the device resources capacity, like memory. In this work, we propose a novel Multiscale Cascade Residual Convolutional Neural Network that integrates multiscale processing strategy through a Residual Processing Module, with a Segmentation Convolutional Neural Network. Experiments conducted on two different datasets support the effectiveness of the proposed approach, achieving average overall $\boldsymbol{F\text{-}measure}$ results of $\boldsymbol{0.9622}$ and $\boldsymbol{0.9664}$ over Change Detection 2014 and PetrobrasROUTES datasets respectively, besides comprising approximately eight times fewer parameters. Such obtained results place the proposed technique amongst the top four state-of-the-art scene change detection methods.

Research on remote sensing image classification significantly impacts essential human routine tasks such as urban planning and agriculture. Nowadays, the rapid advance in technology and the availability of many high-quality remote sensing images create a demand for reliable automation methods. The current paper proposes two novel deep learning-based architectures for image classification purposes, i.e., the Discriminant Deep Image Prior Network and the Discriminant Deep Image Prior Network+, which combine Deep Image Prior and Triplet Networks learning strategies. Experiments conducted over three well-known public remote sensing image datasets achieved state-of-the-art results, evidencing the effectiveness of using deep image priors for remote sensing image classification.

The acquisition of high-quality human annotations through crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is more challenging than expected. The annotation quality might be affected by various aspects like annotation instructions, Human Intelligence Task (HIT) design, and wages paid to annotators, etc. To avoid potentially low-quality annotations which could mislead the evaluation of automatic summarization system outputs, we investigate the recruitment of high-quality MTurk workers via a three-step qualification pipeline. We show that we can successfully filter out bad workers before they carry out the evaluations and obtain high-quality annotations while optimizing the use of resources. This paper can serve as basis for the recruitment of qualified annotators in other challenging annotation tasks.

Machine Learning algorithms have been extensively researched throughout the last decade, leading to unprecedented advances in a broad range of applications, such as image classification and reconstruction, object recognition, and text categorization. Nonetheless, most Machine Learning algorithms are trained via derivative-based optimizers, such as the Stochastic Gradient Descent, leading to possible local optimum entrapments and inhibiting them from achieving proper performances. A bio-inspired alternative to traditional optimization techniques, denoted as meta-heuristic, has received significant attention due to its simplicity and ability to avoid local optimums imprisonment. In this work, we propose to use meta-heuristic techniques to fine-tune pre-trained weights, exploring additional regions of the search space, and improving their effectiveness. The experimental evaluation comprises two classification tasks (image and text) and is assessed under four literature datasets. Experimental results show nature-inspired algorithms' capacity in exploring the neighborhood of pre-trained weights, achieving superior results than their counterpart pre-trained architectures. Additionally, a thorough analysis of distinct architectures, such as Multi-Layer Perceptron and Recurrent Neural Networks, attempts to visualize and provide more precise insights into the most critical weights to be fine-tuned in the learning process.

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.