如今，基于CNN的架构在学习和提取功能方面的图像分类成功使它们如此受欢迎，但是当我们使用最先进的模型对嘈杂和低质量的图像进行分类时，图像分类的任务变得更加具有挑战性。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一种新颖的图像分类体系结构，该体系结构以模糊和嘈杂的低分辨率图像学习细节。为了构建我们的新块，我们使用了RES连接和Inception模块想法的想法。使用MNIST数据集，我们进行了广泛的实验，表明引入的体系结构比其他最先进的卷积神经网络更准确，更快。由于我们的模型的特殊特征，它可以通过更少的参数获得更好的结果。

Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has attracted considerable attention as a gradient-based Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method. Since the introduction of DARTS, there has been little work done on adapting the action space based on state-of-art architecture design principles for CNNs. In this work, we aim to address this gap by incrementally augmenting the DARTS search space with micro-design changes inspired by ConvNeXt and studying the trade-off between accuracy, evaluation layer count, and computational cost. To this end, we introduce the Pseudo-Inverted Bottleneck conv block intending to reduce the computational footprint of the inverted bottleneck block proposed in ConvNeXt. Our proposed architecture is much less sensitive to evaluation layer count and outperforms a DARTS network with similar size significantly, at layer counts as small as 2. Furthermore, with less layers, not only does it achieve higher accuracy with lower GMACs and parameter count, GradCAM comparisons show that our network is able to better detect distinctive features of target objects compared to DARTS.

Solving portfolio management problems using deep reinforcement learning has been getting much attention in finance for a few years. We have proposed a new method using experts signals and historical price data to feed into our reinforcement learning framework. Although experts signals have been used in previous works in the field of finance, as far as we know, it is the first time this method, in tandem with deep RL, is used to solve the financial portfolio management problem. Our proposed framework consists of a convolutional network for aggregating signals, another convolutional network for historical price data, and a vanilla network. We used the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm as the agent to process the reward and take action in the environment. The results suggested that, on average, our framework could gain 90 percent of the profit earned by the best expert.

To date, no "information-theoretic" frameworks for reasoning about generalization error have been shown to establish minimax rates for gradient descent in the setting of stochastic convex optimization. In this work, we consider the prospect of establishing such rates via several existing information-theoretic frameworks: input-output mutual information bounds, conditional mutual information bounds and variants, PAC-Bayes bounds, and recent conditional variants thereof. We prove that none of these bounds are able to establish minimax rates. We then consider a common tactic employed in studying gradient methods, whereby the final iterate is corrupted by Gaussian noise, producing a noisy "surrogate" algorithm. We prove that minimax rates cannot be established via the analysis of such surrogates. Our results suggest that new ideas are required to analyze gradient descent using information-theoretic techniques.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men worldwide and the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. One of the prognostic features in prostate cancer is the Gleason grading of histopathology images. The Gleason grade is assigned based on tumor architecture on Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained whole slide images (WSI) by the pathologists. This process is time-consuming and has known interobserver variability. In the past few years, deep learning algorithms have been used to analyze histopathology images, delivering promising results for grading prostate cancer. However, most of the algorithms rely on the fully annotated datasets which are expensive to generate. In this work, we proposed a novel weakly-supervised algorithm to classify prostate cancer grades. The proposed algorithm consists of three steps: (1) extracting discriminative areas in a histopathology image by employing the Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) algorithm based on Transformers, (2) representing the image by constructing a graph using the discriminative patches, and (3) classifying the image into its Gleason grades by developing a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCN) based on the gated attention mechanism. We evaluated our algorithm using publicly available datasets, including TCGAPRAD, PANDA, and Gleason 2019 challenge datasets. We also cross validated the algorithm on an independent dataset. Results show that the proposed model achieved state-of-the-art performance in the Gleason grading task in terms of accuracy, F1 score, and cohen-kappa. The code is available at https://github.com/NabaviLab/Prostate-Cancer.

Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication has been proposed as a potential solution to improve the robustness and safety of autonomous vehicles by improving coordination and removing the barrier of non-line-of-sight sensing. Cooperative Vehicle Safety (CVS) applications are tightly dependent on the reliability of the underneath data system, which can suffer from loss of information due to the inherent issues of their different components, such as sensors failures or the poor performance of V2X technologies under dense communication channel load. Particularly, information loss affects the target classification module and, subsequently, the safety application performance. To enable reliable and robust CVS systems that mitigate the effect of information loss, we proposed a Context-Aware Target Classification (CA-TC) module coupled with a hybrid learning-based predictive modeling technique for CVS systems. The CA-TC consists of two modules: A Context-Aware Map (CAM), and a Hybrid Gaussian Process (HGP) prediction system. Consequently, the vehicle safety applications use the information from the CA-TC, making them more robust and reliable. The CAM leverages vehicles path history, road geometry, tracking, and prediction; and the HGP is utilized to provide accurate vehicles' trajectory predictions to compensate for data loss (due to communication congestion) or sensor measurements' inaccuracies. Based on offline real-world data, we learn a finite bank of driver models that represent the joint dynamics of the vehicle and the drivers' behavior. We combine offline training and online model updates with on-the-fly forecasting to account for new possible driver behaviors. Finally, our framework is validated using simulation and realistic driving scenarios to confirm its potential in enhancing the robustness and reliability of CVS systems.

Algorithms that involve both forecasting and optimization are at the core of solutions to many difficult real-world problems, such as in supply chains (inventory optimization), traffic, and in the transition towards carbon-free energy generation in battery/load/production scheduling in sustainable energy systems. Typically, in these scenarios we want to solve an optimization problem that depends on unknown future values, which therefore need to be forecast. As both forecasting and optimization are difficult problems in their own right, relatively few research has been done in this area. This paper presents the findings of the ``IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge on Predict+Optimize for Renewable Energy Scheduling," held in 2021. We present a comparison and evaluation of the seven highest-ranked solutions in the competition, to provide researchers with a benchmark problem and to establish the state of the art for this benchmark, with the aim to foster and facilitate research in this area. The competition used data from the Monash Microgrid, as well as weather data and energy market data. It then focused on two main challenges: forecasting renewable energy production and demand, and obtaining an optimal schedule for the activities (lectures) and on-site batteries that lead to the lowest cost of energy. The most accurate forecasts were obtained by gradient-boosted tree and random forest models, and optimization was mostly performed using mixed integer linear and quadratic programming. The winning method predicted different scenarios and optimized over all scenarios jointly using a sample average approximation method.

In the process of materials discovery, chemists currently need to perform many laborious, time-consuming, and often dangerous lab experiments. To accelerate this process, we propose a framework for robots to assist chemists by performing lab experiments autonomously. The solution allows a general-purpose robot to perform diverse chemistry experiments and efficiently make use of available lab tools. Our system can load high-level descriptions of chemistry experiments, perceive a dynamic workspace, and autonomously plan the required actions and motions to perform the given chemistry experiments with common tools found in the existing lab environment. Our architecture uses a modified PDDLStream solver for integrated task and constrained motion planning, which generates plans and motions that are guaranteed to be safe by preventing collisions and spillage. We present a modular framework that can scale to many different experiments, actions, and lab tools. In this work, we demonstrate the utility of our framework on three pouring skills and two foundational chemical experiments for materials synthesis: solubility and recrystallization. More experiments and updated evaluations can be found at https://ac-rad.github.io/arc-icra2023.

Aiming at highly accurate object detection for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), this paper presents a Deep Neural Network based 3D object detection model that leverages a three-stage feature extractor by developing a novel LIDAR-Camera fusion scheme. The proposed feature extractor extracts high-level features from two input sensory modalities and recovers the important features discarded during the convolutional process. The novel fusion scheme effectively fuses features across sensory modalities and convolutional layers to find the best representative global features. The fused features are shared by a two-stage network: the region proposal network (RPN) and the detection head (DH). The RPN generates high-recall proposals, and the DH produces final detection results. The experimental results show the proposed model outperforms more recent research on the KITTI 2D and 3D detection benchmark, particularly for distant and highly occluded instances.

Text-based personality computing (TPC) has gained many research interests in NLP. In this paper, we describe 15 challenges that we consider deserving the attention of the research community. These challenges are organized by the following topics: personality taxonomies, measurement quality, datasets, performance evaluation, modelling choices, as well as ethics and fairness. When addressing each challenge, not only do we combine perspectives from both NLP and social sciences, but also offer concrete suggestions towards more valid and reliable TPC research.