可激发的光电设备代表了在神经形态（脑启发）光子系统中实施人工尖峰神经元的关键构件之一。这项工作介绍并实验研究了用谐振隧穿二极管（RTD）构建的光电 - 光学（O/E/O）人工神经元，该神经元（RTD）耦合到光电探测器作为接收器和垂直腔表面发射激光器作为发射机。我们证明了一个明确定义的兴奋性阈值，在此上面，该神经元在该神经元中产生100 ns的光学尖峰反应，具有特征性的神经样耐受性。我们利用其粉丝功能来执行设备中的重合检测（逻辑和）以及独家逻辑或（XOR）任务。这些结果提供了基于RTD的Spiking光电神经元的确定性触发和任务的首次实验验证，并具有输入和输出光学（I/O）终端。此外，我们还从理论上研究了拟议系统的纳米光子实施的前景，并结合了纳米级RTD元素和纳米剂的整体设计。因此，在未来的神经形态光子硬件中，证明了基于RTD的综合兴奋节点对低足迹，高速光电尖峰神经元的潜力。

在这项工作中，我们介绍了一种光电尖峰，能够以超速率（$ \ \左右100磅/光学尖峰）和低能耗（$ <$ PJ /秒码）运行。所提出的系统结合了具有负差分电导的可激发谐振隧道二极管（RTD）元件，耦合到纳米级光源（形成主节点）或光电探测器（形成接收器节点）。我们在数值上学习互连的主接收器RTD节点系统的尖峰动态响应和信息传播功能。使用脉冲阈值和集成的关键功能，我们利用单个节点来对顺序脉冲模式进行分类，并对图像特征（边缘）识别执行卷积功能。我们还展示了光学互连的尖峰神经网络模型，用于处理超过10 Gbps的时空数据，具有高推理精度。最后，我们展示了利用峰值定时依赖性可塑性的片外监督的学习方法，使能RTD的光子尖峰神经网络。这些结果证明了RTD尖峰节点用于低占地面积，低能量，高速光电实现神经形态硬件的潜在和可行性。

In this paper, we address the problem of multimodal emotion recognition from multiple physiological signals. We demonstrate that a Transformer-based approach is suitable for this task. In addition, we present how such models may be pretrained in a multimodal scenario to improve emotion recognition performances. We evaluate the benefits of using multimodal inputs and pre-training with our approach on a state-ofthe-art dataset.

Contrastive representation learning has proven to be an effective self-supervised learning method for images and videos. Most successful approaches are based on Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) and use different views of an instance as positives that should be contrasted with other instances, called negatives, that are considered as noise. However, several instances in a dataset are drawn from the same distribution and share underlying semantic information. A good data representation should contain relations between the instances, or semantic similarity and dissimilarity, that contrastive learning harms by considering all negatives as noise. To circumvent this issue, we propose a novel formulation of contrastive learning using semantic similarity between instances called Similarity Contrastive Estimation (SCE). Our training objective is a soft contrastive one that brings the positives closer and estimates a continuous distribution to push or pull negative instances based on their learned similarities. We validate empirically our approach on both image and video representation learning. We show that SCE performs competitively with the state of the art on the ImageNet linear evaluation protocol for fewer pretraining epochs and that it generalizes to several downstream image tasks. We also show that SCE reaches state-of-the-art results for pretraining video representation and that the learned representation can generalize to video downstream tasks.

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.

Information spread on networks can be efficiently modeled by considering three features: documents' content, time of publication relative to other publications, and position of the spreader in the network. Most previous works model up to two of those jointly, or rely on heavily parametric approaches. Building on recent Dirichlet-Point processes literature, we introduce the Houston (Hidden Online User-Topic Network) model, that jointly considers all those features in a non-parametric unsupervised framework. It infers dynamic topic-dependent underlying diffusion networks in a continuous-time setting along with said topics. It is unsupervised; it considers an unlabeled stream of triplets shaped as \textit{(time of publication, information's content, spreading entity)} as input data. Online inference is conducted using a sequential Monte-Carlo algorithm that scales linearly with the size of the dataset. Our approach yields consequent improvements over existing baselines on both cluster recovery and subnetworks inference tasks.

The publication time of a document carries a relevant information about its semantic content. The Dirichlet-Hawkes process has been proposed to jointly model textual information and publication dynamics. This approach has been used with success in several recent works, and extended to tackle specific challenging problems --typically for short texts or entangled publication dynamics. However, the prior in its current form does not allow for complex publication dynamics. In particular, inferred topics are independent from each other --a publication about finance is assumed to have no influence on publications about politics, for instance. In this work, we develop the Multivariate Powered Dirichlet-Hawkes Process (MPDHP), that alleviates this assumption. Publications about various topics can now influence each other. We detail and overcome the technical challenges that arise from considering interacting topics. We conduct a systematic evaluation of MPDHP on a range of synthetic datasets to define its application domain and limitations. Finally, we develop a use case of the MPDHP on Reddit data. At the end of this article, the interested reader will know how and when to use MPDHP, and when not to.

Time series is the most prevalent form of input data for educational prediction tasks. The vast majority of research using time series data focuses on hand-crafted features, designed by experts for predictive performance and interpretability. However, extracting these features is labor-intensive for humans and computers. In this paper, we propose an approach that utilizes irregular multivariate time series modeling with graph neural networks to achieve comparable or better accuracy with raw time series clickstreams in comparison to hand-crafted features. Furthermore, we extend concept activation vectors for interpretability in raw time series models. We analyze these advances in the education domain, addressing the task of early student performance prediction for downstream targeted interventions and instructional support. Our experimental analysis on 23 MOOCs with millions of combined interactions over six behavioral dimensions show that models designed with our approach can (i) beat state-of-the-art educational time series baselines with no feature extraction and (ii) provide interpretable insights for personalized interventions. Source code: https://github.com/epfl-ml4ed/ripple/.

This paper reviews existing work in software engineering that applies statistical causal inference methods. These methods aim at estimating causal effects from observational data. The review covers 32 papers published between 2010 and 2022. Our results show that the application of statistical causal inference methods is relatively recent and that the corresponding research community remains relatively fragmented.

Large language models (LLMs) show excellent performance but are compute- and memory-intensive. Quantization can reduce memory and accelerate inference. However, for LLMs beyond 100 billion parameters, existing methods cannot maintain accuracy or do not run efficiently on hardware. We propose SmoothQuant, a training-free, accuracy-preserving, and general-purpose post-training quantization (PTQ) solution to enable 8-bit weight, 8-bit activation (W8A8) quantization for LLMs that can be implemented efficiently. We observe that systematic outliers appear at fixed activation channels. Based on the fact that weights are easy to quantize while activations are not, SmoothQuant smooths the activation outliers by offline migrating the quantization difficulty from activations to weights with a mathematically equivalent transformation. SmoothQuant enables an INT8 quantization of both weights and activations for all the GEMMs in LLMs, including OPT-175B, BLOOM-176B, and GLM-130B. SmoothQuant has better hardware efficiency than existing techniques using mixed-precision activation quantization or weight-only quantization. We demonstrate up to 1.56x speedup and 2x memory reduction for LLMs with negligible loss in accuracy. Thanks to the hardware-friendly design, we integrate SmoothQuant into FasterTransformer, a state-of-the-art LLM serving framework, and achieve faster inference speed with half the number of GPUs compared to FP16. Our work offers a turn-key solution that reduces hardware costs and democratizes LLMs. Code is available at: https://github.com/mit-han-lab/smoothquant.