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 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.

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.

Heuristic search algorithms, e.g. A*, are the commonly used tools for pathfinding on grids, i.e. graphs of regular structure that are widely employed to represent environments in robotics, video games etc. Instance-independent heuristics for grid graphs, e.g. Manhattan distance, do not take the obstacles into account and, thus, the search led by such heuristics performs poorly in the obstacle-rich environments. To this end, we suggest learning the instance-dependent heuristic proxies that are supposed to notably increase the efficiency of the search. The first heuristic proxy we suggest to learn is the correction factor, i.e. the ratio between the instance independent cost-to-go estimate and the perfect one (computed offline at the training phase). Unlike learning the absolute values of the cost-to-go heuristic function, which was known before, when learning the correction factor the knowledge of the instance-independent heuristic is utilized. The second heuristic proxy is the path probability, which indicates how likely the grid cell is lying on the shortest path. This heuristic can be utilized in the Focal Search framework as the secondary heuristic, allowing us to preserve the guarantees on the bounded sub-optimality of the solution. We learn both suggested heuristics in a supervised fashion with the state-of-the-art neural networks containing attention blocks (transformers). We conduct a thorough empirical evaluation on a comprehensive dataset of planning tasks, showing that the suggested techniques i) reduce the computational effort of the A* up to a factor of $4$x while producing the solutions, which costs exceed the costs of the optimal solutions by less than $0.3$% on average; ii) outperform the competitors, which include the conventional techniques from the heuristic search, i.e. weighted A*, as well as the state-of-the-art learnable planners.

To mitigate climate change, the share of renewable needs to be increased. Renewable energies introduce new challenges to power grids due to decentralization, reduced inertia and volatility in production. The operation of sustainable power grids with a high penetration of renewable energies requires new methods to analyze the dynamic stability. We provide new datasets of dynamic stability of synthetic power grids and find that graph neural networks (GNNs) are surprisingly effective at predicting the highly non-linear target from topological information only. To illustrate the potential to scale to real-sized power grids, we demonstrate the successful prediction on a Texan power grid model.

Correct scoring of a driver's risk is of great significance to auto insurance companies. While the current tools used in this field have been proven in practice to be quite efficient and beneficial, we argue that there is still a lot of room for development and improvement in the auto insurance risk estimation process. To this end, we develop a framework based on a combination of a neural network together with a dimensionality reduction technique t-SNE (t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding). This enables us to visually represent the complex structure of the risk as a two-dimensional surface, while still preserving the properties of the local region in the features space. The obtained results, which are based on real insurance data, reveal a clear contrast between the high and low risk policy holders, and indeed improve upon the actual risk estimation performed by the insurer. Due to the visual accessibility of the portfolio in this approach, we argue that this framework could be advantageous to the auto insurer, both as a main risk prediction tool and as an additional validation stage in other approaches.

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is one of the key components of a control system that aims to ensure autonomous navigation of a mobile robot in unknown environments. In a variety of practical cases a robot might need to travel long distances in order to accomplish its mission. This requires long-term work of SLAM methods and building large maps. Consequently the computational burden (including high memory consumption for map storage) becomes a bottleneck. Indeed, state-of-the-art SLAM algorithms include specific techniques and optimizations to tackle this challenge, still their performance in long-term scenarios needs proper assessment. To this end, we perform an empirical evaluation of two widespread state-of-the-art RGB-D SLAM methods, suitable for long-term navigation, i.e. RTAB-Map and Voxgraph. We evaluate them in a large simulated indoor environment, consisting of corridors and halls, while varying the odometer noise for a more realistic setup. We provide both qualitative and quantitative analysis of both methods uncovering their strengths and weaknesses. We find that both methods build a high-quality map with low odometry noise but tend to fail with high odometry noise. Voxgraph has lower relative trajectory estimation error and memory consumption than RTAB-Map, while its absolute error is higher.