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.

在本文中，我们研究了波斯语的G2P转换的端到端和多模块框架的应用。结果表明，我们提出的多模型G2P系统在准确性和速度方面优于我们的端到端系统。该系统由发音词典作为我们的查找表组成，以及使用GRU和Transformer架构创建的波斯语中的同符，OOV和EZAFE的单独模型。该系统是序列级别而不是单词级别，它使其能够有效地捕获单词（跨字信息）之间的不成文关系，而无需进行任何预处理，而无需进行任何预歧歧义和EZAFE识别。经过评估后，我们的系统达到了94.48％的单词级准确性，表现优于先前的波斯语G2P系统。

计算机视觉在智能运输系统（ITS）和交通监视中发挥了重要作用。除了快速增长的自动化车辆和拥挤的城市外，通过实施深层神经网络的实施，可以使用视频监视基础架构进行自动和高级交通管理系统（ATM）。在这项研究中，我们为实时交通监控提供了一个实用的平台，包括3D车辆/行人检测，速度检测，轨迹估算，拥塞检测以及监视车辆和行人的相互作用，都使用单个CCTV交通摄像头。我们适应了定制的Yolov5深神经网络模型，用于车辆/行人检测和增强的排序跟踪算法。还开发了基于混合卫星的基于混合卫星的逆透视图（SG-IPM）方法，用于摄像机自动校准，从而导致准确的3D对象检测和可视化。我们还根据短期和长期的时间视频数据流开发了层次结构的交通建模解决方案，以了解脆弱道路使用者的交通流量，瓶颈和危险景点。关于现实世界情景和与最先进的比较的几项实验是使用各种交通监控数据集进行的，包括从高速公路，交叉路口和城市地区收集的MIO-TCD，UA-DETRAC和GRAM-RTM，在不同的照明和城市地区天气状况。

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.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.