生物视觉系统的神经基础在实验上研究很具有挑战性，特别是因为相对于视觉输入，神经元活性变得越来越非线性。人工神经网络（ANN）可以为改善我们对这一复杂系统的理解提供各种目标，不仅充当硅中新假设产生的感觉皮层的预测数字双胞胎，而且还融合了生物启发的建筑主题，以逐步桥接桥梁生物和机器视觉之间的差距。该鼠标最近已成为研究视觉信息处理的流行模型系统，但是尚未确定识别鼠标视觉系统最新模型的标准化大规模基准。为了填补这一空白，我们提出了感官基准竞赛。我们从小鼠初级视觉皮层中收集了一个大规模数据集，其中包含七个小鼠的28,000多个神经元的反应，并通过数千个自然图像刺激，以及同时的行为测量，包括跑步速度，瞳孔扩张和眼动。基准挑战将基于固定测试集​​中神经元响应的预测性能对模型进行对模型，其中包括两个模型输入的轨道，仅限于刺激（感觉到）或刺激加行为（感觉符号+）。我们提供一个起始套件，以降低进入障碍的障碍，包括教程，预训练的基线模型以及带有一条线命令以进行数据加载和提交的API。我们希望将其视为定期挑战和数据发布的起点，也是衡量鼠标视觉系统及其他大规模神经系统识别模型中进度的标准工具。

深度神经网络在计算机视觉中的许多任务中设定了最先进的，但它们的概括对象扭曲的能力令人惊讶地是脆弱的。相比之下，哺乳动物视觉系统对广泛的扰动是强大的。最近的工作表明，这种泛化能力可以通过在整个视觉皮层中的视觉刺激的表示中编码的有用的电感偏差来解释。在这里，我们成功利用了多任务学习方法的这些归纳偏差：我们共同训练了深度网络以进行图像分类并预测猕猴初级视觉皮层（V1）中的神经活动。我们通过测试其对图像扭曲的鲁棒性来衡量我们网络的分发广泛性能力。我们发现，尽管在训练期间没有这些扭曲，但猴子V1数据的共同训练导致鲁棒性增加。此外，我们表明，我们的网络的鲁棒性非常接近Oracle网络的稳定性，其中架构的部分在嘈杂的图像上直接培训。我们的结果还表明，随着鲁布利的改善，网络的表示变得更加大脑。使用新颖的约束重建分析，我们调查了我们的大脑正规网络更加强大的原因。与我们仅对图像分类接受培训的基线网络相比，我们的共同训练网络对内容比噪声更敏感。使用深度预测的显着性图，用于想象成像图像，我们发现我们的猴子共同训练的网络对场景中的突出区域倾向更敏感，让人想起V1在对象边界的检测中的作用和自下而上的角色显着性。总体而言，我们的工作扩大了从大脑转移归纳偏见的有前途的研究途径，并为我们转移的影响提供了新的分析。

This paper presents a machine learning approach to multidimensional item response theory (MIRT), a class of latent factor models that can be used to model and predict student performance from observed assessment data. Inspired by collaborative filtering, we define a general class of models that includes many MIRT models. We discuss the use of penalized joint maximum likelihood (JML) to estimate individual models and cross-validation to select the best performing model. This model evaluation process can be optimized using batching techniques, such that even sparse large-scale data can be analyzed efficiently. We illustrate our approach with simulated and real data, including an example from a massive open online course (MOOC). The high-dimensional model fit to this large and sparse dataset does not lend itself well to traditional methods of factor interpretation. By analogy to recommender-system applications, we propose an alternative "validation" of the factor model, using auxiliary information about the popularity of items consulted during an open-book exam in the course.

Real-world robotic grasping can be done robustly if a complete 3D Point Cloud Data (PCD) of an object is available. However, in practice, PCDs are often incomplete when objects are viewed from few and sparse viewpoints before the grasping action, leading to the generation of wrong or inaccurate grasp poses. We propose a novel grasping strategy, named 3DSGrasp, that predicts the missing geometry from the partial PCD to produce reliable grasp poses. Our proposed PCD completion network is a Transformer-based encoder-decoder network with an Offset-Attention layer. Our network is inherently invariant to the object pose and point's permutation, which generates PCDs that are geometrically consistent and completed properly. Experiments on a wide range of partial PCD show that 3DSGrasp outperforms the best state-of-the-art method on PCD completion tasks and largely improves the grasping success rate in real-world scenarios. The code and dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) captures cross-sectional data and is used for the screening, monitoring, and treatment planning of retinal diseases. Technological developments to increase the speed of acquisition often results in systems with a narrower spectral bandwidth, and hence a lower axial resolution. Traditionally, image-processing-based techniques have been utilized to reconstruct subsampled OCT data and more recently, deep-learning-based methods have been explored. In this study, we simulate reduced axial scan (A-scan) resolution by Gaussian windowing in the spectral domain and investigate the use of a learning-based approach for image feature reconstruction. In anticipation of the reduced resolution that accompanies wide-field OCT systems, we build upon super-resolution techniques to explore methods to better aid clinicians in their decision-making to improve patient outcomes, by reconstructing lost features using a pixel-to-pixel approach with an altered super-resolution generative adversarial network (SRGAN) architecture.

This paper addresses the kinodynamic motion planning for non-holonomic robots in dynamic environments with both static and dynamic obstacles -- a challenging problem that lacks a universal solution yet. One of the promising approaches to solve it is decomposing the problem into the smaller sub problems and combining the local solutions into the global one. The crux of any planning method for non-holonomic robots is the generation of motion primitives that generates solutions to local planning sub-problems. In this work we introduce a novel learnable steering function (policy), which takes into account kinodynamic constraints of the robot and both static and dynamic obstacles. This policy is efficiently trained via the policy optimization. Empirically, we show that our steering function generalizes well to unseen problems. We then plug in the trained policy into the sampling-based and lattice-based planners, and evaluate the resultant POLAMP algorithm (Policy Optimization that Learns Adaptive Motion Primitives) in a range of challenging setups that involve a car-like robot operating in the obstacle-rich parking-lot environments. We show that POLAMP is able to plan collision-free kinodynamic trajectories with success rates higher than 92%, when 50 simultaneously moving obstacles populate the environment showing better performance than the state-of-the-art competitors.

Using Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems with extensive sensing arrangements on every civil structure can be costly and impractical. Various concepts have been introduced to alleviate such difficulties, such as Population-based SHM (PBSHM). Nevertheless, the studies presented in the literature do not adequately address the challenge of accessing the information on different structural states (conditions) of dissimilar civil structures. The study herein introduces a novel framework named Structural State Translation (SST), which aims to estimate the response data of different civil structures based on the information obtained from a dissimilar structure. SST can be defined as Translating a state of one civil structure to another state after discovering and learning the domain-invariant representation in the source domains of a dissimilar civil structure. SST employs a Domain-Generalized Cycle-Generative (DGCG) model to learn the domain-invariant representation in the acceleration datasets obtained from a numeric bridge structure that is in two different structural conditions. In other words, the model is tested on three dissimilar numeric bridge models to translate their structural conditions. The evaluation results of SST via Mean Magnitude-Squared Coherence (MMSC) and modal identifiers showed that the translated bridge states (synthetic states) are significantly similar to the real ones. As such, the minimum and maximum average MMSC values of real and translated bridge states are 91.2% and 97.1%, the minimum and the maximum difference in natural frequencies are 5.71% and 0%, and the minimum and maximum Modal Assurance Criterion (MAC) values are 0.998 and 0.870. This study is critical for data scarcity and PBSHM, as it demonstrates that it is possible to obtain data from structures while the structure is actually in a different condition or state.

Consensus clustering aggregates partitions in order to find a better fit by reconciling clustering results from different sources/executions. In practice, there exist noise and outliers in clustering task, which, however, may significantly degrade the performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel algorithm -- robust consensus clustering that can find common ground truth among experts' opinions, which tends to be minimally affected by the bias caused by the outliers. In particular, we formalize the robust consensus clustering problem as a constraint optimization problem, and then derive an effective algorithm upon alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with rigorous convergence guarantee. Our method outperforms the baselines on benchmarks. We apply the proposed method to the real-world advertising campaign segmentation and forecasting tasks using the proposed consensus clustering results based on the similarity computed via Kolmogorov-Smirnov Statistics. The accurate clustering result is helpful for building the advertiser profiles so as to perform the forecasting.

In computational advertising, a challenging problem is how to recommend the bid for advertisers to achieve the best return on investment (ROI) given budget constraint. This paper presents a bid recommendation scenario that discovers the concavity changes in click prediction curves. The recommended bid is derived based on the turning point from significant increase (i.e. concave downward) to slow increase (convex upward). Parametric learning based method is applied by solving the corresponding constraint optimization problem. Empirical studies on real-world advertising scenarios clearly demonstrate the performance gains for business metrics (including revenue increase, click increase and advertiser ROI increase).

In cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) advertising campaigns, advertisers always run the risk of spending the budget without getting enough conversions. Moreover, the bidding on advertising inventory has few connections with propensity one that can reach to target cost-per-acquisition (tCPA) goals. To address this problem, this paper presents a bid optimization scenario to achieve the desired tCPA goals for advertisers. In particular, we build the optimization engine to make a decision by solving the rigorously formalized constrained optimization problem, which leverages the bid landscape model learned from rich historical auction data using non-parametric learning. The proposed model can naturally recommend the bid that meets the advertisers' expectations by making inference over advertisers' historical auction behaviors, which essentially deals with the data challenges commonly faced by bid landscape modeling: incomplete logs in auctions, and uncertainty due to the variation and fluctuations in advertising bidding behaviors. The bid optimization model outperforms the baseline methods on real-world campaigns, and has been applied into a wide range of scenarios for performance improvement and revenue liftup.