With water quality management processes, identifying and interpreting relationships between features, such as location and weather variable tuples, and water quality variables, such as levels of bacteria, is key to gaining insights and identifying areas where interventions should be made. There is a need for a search process to identify the locations and types of phenomena that are influencing water quality and a need to explain why the quality is being affected and which factors are most relevant. This paper addresses both of these issues through the development of a process for collecting data for features that represent a variety of variables over a spatial region, which are used for training and inference, and analysing the performance of the features using the model and Shapley values. Shapley values originated in cooperative game theory and can be used to aid in the interpretation of machine learning results. Evaluations are performed using several machine learning algorithms and water quality data from the Dublin Grand Canal basin.

ICECUBE是一种用于检测1 GEV和1 PEV之间大气和天体中微子的光学传感器的立方公斤阵列，该阵列已部署1.45 km至2.45 km的南极的冰盖表面以下1.45 km至2.45 km。来自ICE探测器的事件的分类和重建在ICeCube数据分析中起着核心作用。重建和分类事件是一个挑战，这是由于探测器的几何形状，不均匀的散射和冰中光的吸收，并且低于100 GEV的光，每个事件产生的信号光子数量相对较少。为了应对这一挑战，可以将ICECUBE事件表示为点云图形，并将图形神经网络（GNN）作为分类和重建方法。 GNN能够将中微子事件与宇宙射线背景区分开，对不同的中微子事件类型进行分类，并重建沉积的能量，方向和相互作用顶点。基于仿真，我们提供了1-100 GEV能量范围的比较与当前ICECUBE分析中使用的当前最新最大似然技术，包括已知系统不确定性的影响。对于中微子事件分类，与当前的IceCube方法相比，GNN以固定的假阳性速率（FPR）提高了信号效率的18％。另外，GNN在固定信号效率下将FPR的降低超过8（低于半百分比）。对于能源，方向和相互作用顶点的重建，与当前最大似然技术相比，分辨率平均提高了13％-20％。当在GPU上运行时，GNN能够以几乎是2.7 kHz的中位数ICECUBE触发速率的速率处理ICECUBE事件，这打开了在在线搜索瞬态事件中使用低能量中微子的可能性。

心脏切断（CTG）是用于劳动期间胎儿监测的主要工具。对CTG的解释需要实时动态模式识别。它被认为是具有高度和观察者内部观察者分歧的艰巨任务。机器学习为客观和可靠的CTG评估提供了可行的路径。在这项研究中，使用自回归移动平均（ARMA）模型基于临床专业知识和系统控制理论来开发新的CTG特征，以表征胎儿心率与收缩的响应。在机器学习模型中评估特征，以评估它们在识别胎儿妥协时的功效。ARMA功能在顶级特征中排名，用于检测胎儿妥协。此外，包括基于信号质量的机器学习模型和修剪数据中的临床因素提高了分类器的性能。

The recent increase in public and academic interest in preserving biodiversity has led to the growth of the field of conservation technology. This field involves designing and constructing tools that utilize technology to aid in the conservation of wildlife. In this article, we will use case studies to demonstrate the importance of designing conservation tools with human-wildlife interaction in mind and provide a framework for creating successful tools. These case studies include a range of complexities, from simple cat collars to machine learning and game theory methodologies. Our goal is to introduce and inform current and future researchers in the field of conservation technology and provide references for educating the next generation of conservation technologists. Conservation technology not only has the potential to benefit biodiversity but also has broader impacts on fields such as sustainability and environmental protection. By using innovative technologies to address conservation challenges, we can find more effective and efficient solutions to protect and preserve our planet's resources.

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.

While the brain connectivity network can inform the understanding and diagnosis of developmental dyslexia, its cause-effect relationships have not yet enough been examined. Employing electroencephalography signals and band-limited white noise stimulus at 4.8 Hz (prosodic-syllabic frequency), we measure the phase Granger causalities among channels to identify differences between dyslexic learners and controls, thereby proposing a method to calculate directional connectivity. As causal relationships run in both directions, we explore three scenarios, namely channels' activity as sources, as sinks, and in total. Our proposed method can be used for both classification and exploratory analysis. In all scenarios, we find confirmation of the established right-lateralized Theta sampling network anomaly, in line with the temporal sampling framework's assumption of oscillatory differences in the Theta and Gamma bands. Further, we show that this anomaly primarily occurs in the causal relationships of channels acting as sinks, where it is significantly more pronounced than when only total activity is observed. In the sink scenario, our classifier obtains 0.84 and 0.88 accuracy and 0.87 and 0.93 AUC for the Theta and Gamma bands, respectively.

Variational autoencoders model high-dimensional data by positing low-dimensional latent variables that are mapped through a flexible distribution parametrized by a neural network. Unfortunately, variational autoencoders often suffer from posterior collapse: the posterior of the latent variables is equal to its prior, rendering the variational autoencoder useless as a means to produce meaningful representations. Existing approaches to posterior collapse often attribute it to the use of neural networks or optimization issues due to variational approximation. In this paper, we consider posterior collapse as a problem of latent variable non-identifiability. We prove that the posterior collapses if and only if the latent variables are non-identifiable in the generative model. This fact implies that posterior collapse is not a phenomenon specific to the use of flexible distributions or approximate inference. Rather, it can occur in classical probabilistic models even with exact inference, which we also demonstrate. Based on these results, we propose a class of latent-identifiable variational autoencoders, deep generative models which enforce identifiability without sacrificing flexibility. This model class resolves the problem of latent variable non-identifiability by leveraging bijective Brenier maps and parameterizing them with input convex neural networks, without special variational inference objectives or optimization tricks. Across synthetic and real datasets, latent-identifiable variational autoencoders outperform existing methods in mitigating posterior collapse and providing meaningful representations of the data.

There are multiple scales of abstraction from which we can describe the same image, depending on whether we are focusing on fine-grained details or a more global attribute of the image. In brain mapping, learning to automatically parse images to build representations of both small-scale features (e.g., the presence of cells or blood vessels) and global properties of an image (e.g., which brain region the image comes from) is a crucial and open challenge. However, most existing datasets and benchmarks for neuroanatomy consider only a single downstream task at a time. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new dataset, annotations, and multiple downstream tasks that provide diverse ways to readout information about brain structure and architecture from the same image. Our multi-task neuroimaging benchmark (MTNeuro) is built on volumetric, micrometer-resolution X-ray microtomography images spanning a large thalamocortical section of mouse brain, encompassing multiple cortical and subcortical regions. We generated a number of different prediction challenges and evaluated several supervised and self-supervised models for brain-region prediction and pixel-level semantic segmentation of microstructures. Our experiments not only highlight the rich heterogeneity of this dataset, but also provide insights into how self-supervised approaches can be used to learn representations that capture multiple attributes of a single image and perform well on a variety of downstream tasks. Datasets, code, and pre-trained baseline models are provided at: https://mtneuro.github.io/ .

We derive a set of causal deep neural networks whose architectures are a consequence of tensor (multilinear) factor analysis. Forward causal questions are addressed with a neural network architecture composed of causal capsules and a tensor transformer. The former estimate a set of latent variables that represent the causal factors, and the latter governs their interaction. Causal capsules and tensor transformers may be implemented using shallow autoencoders, but for a scalable architecture we employ block algebra and derive a deep neural network composed of a hierarchy of autoencoders. An interleaved kernel hierarchy preprocesses the data resulting in a hierarchy of kernel tensor factor models. Inverse causal questions are addressed with a neural network that implements multilinear projection and estimates the causes of effects. As an alternative to aggressive bottleneck dimension reduction or regularized regression that may camouflage an inherently underdetermined inverse problem, we prescribe modeling different aspects of the mechanism of data formation with piecewise tensor models whose multilinear projections are well-defined and produce multiple candidate solutions. Our forward and inverse neural network architectures are suitable for asynchronous parallel computation.

Landing an unmanned aerial vehicle unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on top of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) in harsh open waters is a challenging problem, owing to forces that can damage the UAV due to a severe roll and/or pitch angle of the USV during touchdown. To tackle this, we propose a novel model predictive control (MPC) approach enabling a UAV to land autonomously on a USV in these harsh conditions. The MPC employs a novel objective function and an online decomposition of the oscillatory motion of the vessel to predict, attempt, and accomplish the landing during near-zero tilt of the landing platform. The nonlinear prediction of the motion of the vessel is performed using visual data from an onboard camera. Therefore, the system does not require any communication with the USV or a control station. The proposed method was analyzed in numerous robotics simulations in harsh and extreme conditions and further validated in various real-world scenarios.