两阶段探测器在物体检测和行人检测中是最新的。但是，当前的两个阶段探测器效率低下，因为它们在多个步骤中进行边界回归，即在区域提案网络和边界框头中进行回归。此外，基于锚的区域提案网络在计算上的训练价格很高。我们提出了F2DNET，这是一种新型的两阶段检测体系结构，通过使用我们的焦点检测网络和边界框以我们的快速抑制头替换区域建议网络，从而消除了当前两阶段检测器的冗余。我们在顶级行人检测数据集上进行基准F2DNET，将其与现有的最新检测器进行彻底比较，并进行交叉数据集评估，以测试我们模型对未见数据的普遍性。我们的F2DNET在城市人员，加州理工学院行人和欧元城市人数据集中分别获得8.7 \％，2.2 \％和6.1 \％MR-2，分别在单个数据集上进行培训并达到20.4 \％\％\％和26.2 \％MR-2。使用渐进式微调时，加州理工学院行人和城市人员数据集的重型闭塞设置。此外，与当前的最新时间相比，F2DNET的推理时间明显较小。代码和训练有素的模型将在https://github.com/abdulhannankhan/f2dnet上找到。

Modeling lies at the core of both the financial and the insurance industry for a wide variety of tasks. The rise and development of machine learning and deep learning models have created many opportunities to improve our modeling toolbox. Breakthroughs in these fields often come with the requirement of large amounts of data. Such large datasets are often not publicly available in finance and insurance, mainly due to privacy and ethics concerns. This lack of data is currently one of the main hurdles in developing better models. One possible option to alleviating this issue is generative modeling. Generative models are capable of simulating fake but realistic-looking data, also referred to as synthetic data, that can be shared more freely. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is such a model that increases our capacity to fit very high-dimensional distributions of data. While research on GANs is an active topic in fields like computer vision, they have found limited adoption within the human sciences, like economics and insurance. Reason for this is that in these fields, most questions are inherently about identification of causal effects, while to this day neural networks, which are at the center of the GAN framework, focus mostly on high-dimensional correlations. In this paper we study the causal preservation capabilities of GANs and whether the produced synthetic data can reliably be used to answer causal questions. This is done by performing causal analyses on the synthetic data, produced by a GAN, with increasingly more lenient assumptions. We consider the cross-sectional case, the time series case and the case with a complete structural model. It is shown that in the simple cross-sectional scenario where correlation equals causation the GAN preserves causality, but that challenges arise for more advanced analyses.

We present the interpretable meta neural ordinary differential equation (iMODE) method to rapidly learn generalizable (i.e., not parameter-specific) dynamics from trajectories of multiple dynamical systems that vary in their physical parameters. The iMODE method learns meta-knowledge, the functional variations of the force field of dynamical system instances without knowing the physical parameters, by adopting a bi-level optimization framework: an outer level capturing the common force field form among studied dynamical system instances and an inner level adapting to individual system instances. A priori physical knowledge can be conveniently embedded in the neural network architecture as inductive bias, such as conservative force field and Euclidean symmetry. With the learned meta-knowledge, iMODE can model an unseen system within seconds, and inversely reveal knowledge on the physical parameters of a system, or as a Neural Gauge to "measure" the physical parameters of an unseen system with observed trajectories. We test the validity of the iMODE method on bistable, double pendulum, Van der Pol, Slinky, and reaction-diffusion systems.

We propose Hierarchical ProtoPNet: an interpretable network that explains its reasoning process by considering the hierarchical relationship between classes. Different from previous methods that explain their reasoning process by dissecting the input image and finding the prototypical parts responsible for the classification, we propose to explain the reasoning process for video action classification by dissecting the input video frames on multiple levels of the class hierarchy. The explanations leverage the hierarchy to deal with uncertainty, akin to human reasoning: When we observe water and human activity, but no definitive action it can be recognized as the water sports parent class. Only after observing a person swimming can we definitively refine it to the swimming action. Experiments on ActivityNet and UCF-101 show performance improvements while providing multi-level explanations.

Artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of deep learning bears promise for drug discovery and chemical biology, $\textit{e.g.}$, to predict protein structure and molecular bioactivity, plan organic synthesis, and design molecules $\textit{de novo}$. While most of the deep learning efforts in drug discovery have focused on ligand-based approaches, structure-based drug discovery has the potential to tackle unsolved challenges, such as affinity prediction for unexplored protein targets, binding-mechanism elucidation, and the rationalization of related chemical kinetic properties. Advances in deep learning methodologies and the availability of accurate predictions for protein tertiary structure advocate for a $\textit{renaissance}$ in structure-based approaches for drug discovery guided by AI. This review summarizes the most prominent algorithmic concepts in structure-based deep learning for drug discovery, and forecasts opportunities, applications, and challenges ahead.

The ability to convert reciprocating, i.e., alternating, actuation into rotary motion using linkages is hindered fundamentally by their poor torque transmission capability around kinematic singularity configurations. Here, we harness the elastic potential energy of a linear spring attached to the coupler link of four-bar mechanisms to manipulate force transmission around the kinematic singularities. We developed a theoretical model to explore the parameter space for proper force transmission in slider-crank and rocker-crank four-bar kinematics. Finally, we verified the proposed model and methodology by building and testing a macro-scale prototype of a slider-crank mechanism. We expect this approach to enable the development of small-scale rotary engines and robotic devices with closed kinematic chains dealing with serial kinematic singularities, such as linkages and parallel manipulators.

Prevailing methods for assessing and comparing generative AIs incentivize responses that serve a hypothetical representative individual. Evaluating models in these terms presumes homogeneous preferences across the population and engenders selection of agglomerative AIs, which fail to represent the diverse range of interests across individuals. We propose an alternative evaluation method that instead prioritizes inclusive AIs, which provably retain the requisite knowledge not only for subsequent response customization to particular segments of the population but also for utility-maximizing decisions.

We study the problem of combining neural networks with symbolic reasoning. Recently introduced frameworks for Probabilistic Neurosymbolic Learning (PNL), such as DeepProbLog, perform exponential-time exact inference, limiting the scalability of PNL solutions. We introduce Approximate Neurosymbolic Inference (A-NeSI): a new framework for PNL that uses neural networks for scalable approximate inference. A-NeSI 1) performs approximate inference in polynomial time without changing the semantics of probabilistic logics; 2) is trained using data generated by the background knowledge; 3) can generate symbolic explanations of predictions; and 4) can guarantee the satisfaction of logical constraints at test time, which is vital in safety-critical applications. Our experiments show that A-NeSI is the first end-to-end method to scale the Multi-digit MNISTAdd benchmark to sums of 15 MNIST digits, up from 4 in competing systems. Finally, our experiments show that A-NeSI achieves explainability and safety without a penalty in performance.

Generic Object Tracking (GOT) is the problem of tracking target objects, specified by bounding boxes in the first frame of a video. While the task has received much attention in the last decades, researchers have almost exclusively focused on the single object setting. Multi-object GOT benefits from a wider applicability, rendering it more attractive in real-world applications. We attribute the lack of research interest into this problem to the absence of suitable benchmarks. In this work, we introduce a new large-scale GOT benchmark, LaGOT, containing multiple annotated target objects per sequence. Our benchmark allows researchers to tackle key remaining challenges in GOT, aiming to increase robustness and reduce computation through joint tracking of multiple objects simultaneously. Furthermore, we propose a Transformer-based GOT tracker TaMOS capable of joint processing of multiple objects through shared computation. TaMOs achieves a 4x faster run-time in case of 10 concurrent objects compared to tracking each object independently and outperforms existing single object trackers on our new benchmark. Finally, TaMOs achieves highly competitive results on single-object GOT datasets, setting a new state-of-the-art on TrackingNet with a success rate AUC of 84.4%. Our benchmark, code, and trained models will be made publicly available.

Hierarchical methods in reinforcement learning have the potential to reduce the amount of decisions that the agent needs to perform when learning new tasks. However, finding a reusable useful temporal abstractions that facilitate fast learning remains a challenging problem. Recently, several deep learning approaches were proposed to learn such temporal abstractions in the form of options in an end-to-end manner. In this work, we point out several shortcomings of these methods and discuss their potential negative consequences. Subsequently, we formulate the desiderata for reusable options and use these to frame the problem of learning options as a gradient-based meta-learning problem. This allows us to formulate an objective that explicitly incentivizes options which allow a higher-level decision maker to adjust in few steps to different tasks. Experimentally, we show that our method is able to learn transferable components which accelerate learning and performs better than existing prior methods developed for this setting. Additionally, we perform ablations to quantify the impact of using gradient-based meta-learning as well as other proposed changes.