开放的太空草地越来越耕种或建造，导致针对路边边缘的保护工作逐渐增加。在该国500,000公里的道路上，大约有一半的英国草原物种可以找到，约有91种威胁要么受到威胁。因此，仔细管理这些“野生动植物走廊”对于防止物种灭绝和维持草地栖息地的生物多样性至关重要。野生动植物信托基金经常获得志愿者的支持，以调查路边的边缘，并确定新的“当地野生动植物场所”是具有高保护潜力的地区。使用来自3,900公里的路边潮流的志愿者调查数据以及公开可用的街景图像，我们介绍Deepverge；一种基于深度学习的方法，可以通过检测阳性指标物种的存在来自动调查路边的段。 Deepverge使用来自林肯郡农村县的图像和地面真相调查数据的平均准确性为88％。地方当局可以使用这种方法来确定新的当地野生动植物站点，并根据法律和政府的政策义务一致，援助管理和环境计划，从而节省了数千小时的体力劳动。

现有的LIDAR基金​​标记系统具有使用限制。特别是，利达塔格（Lidartag）需要特定的标记放置和基于图像的激光雷达基准标记，要求从一个角度对点云进行采样。结果，随着点云从多个角度采样，基准标记的检测仍然是一个未解决的问题。在这封信中，我们开发了一种新颖的算法来检测多视点云中的基准标记。提出的算法包括两个阶段。首先，感兴趣的区域（ROI）检测发现可能包含基准标记的点簇。具体而言，由于从空间的角度来看，从强度的角度提取ROI的方法是引入的，即从空间角度来看，标记是纸张或薄板的床单，与它们所连接的平面是不可区分的。其次，标记检测验证候选ROI是否包含基金标记，并输出有效ROI中标记的ID号和顶点位置。特别是，将ROI传输到预定义的中间平面，目的是采用球形投影以生成强度图像，然后通过强度图像完成标记检测。提供定性和定量实验结果以验证所提出的算法。代码和结果可在以下网址获得：https：//github.com/york-sdcnlab/marker?detection-general

Research on automated essay scoring has become increasing important because it serves as a method for evaluating students' written-responses at scale. Scalable methods for scoring written responses are needed as students migrate to online learning environments resulting in the need to evaluate large numbers of written-response assessments. The purpose of this study is to describe and evaluate three active learning methods than can be used to minimize the number of essays that must be scored by human raters while still providing the data needed to train a modern automated essay scoring system. The three active learning methods are the uncertainty-based, the topological-based, and the hybrid method. These three methods were used to select essays included as part of the Automated Student Assessment Prize competition that were then classified using a scoring model that was training with the bidirectional encoder representations from transformer language model. All three active learning methods produced strong results, with the topological-based method producing the most efficient classification. Growth rate accuracy was also evaluated. The active learning methods produced different levels of efficiency under different sample size allocations but, overall, all three methods were highly efficient and produced classifications that were similar to one another.

This paper presents a novel framework for planning in unknown and occluded urban spaces. We specifically focus on turns and intersections where occlusions significantly impact navigability. Our approach uses an inpainting model to fill in a sparse, occluded, semantic lidar point cloud and plans dynamically feasible paths for a vehicle to traverse through the open and inpainted spaces. We demonstrate our approach using a car's lidar data with real-time occlusions, and show that by inpainting occluded areas, we can plan longer paths, with more turn options compared to without inpainting; in addition, our approach more closely follows paths derived from a planner with no occlusions (called the ground truth) compared to other state of the art approaches.

Feature acquisition algorithms address the problem of acquiring informative features while balancing the costs of acquisition to improve the learning performances of ML models. Previous approaches have focused on calculating the expected utility values of features to determine the acquisition sequences. Other approaches formulated the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and applied reinforcement learning based algorithms. In comparison to previous approaches, we focus on 1) formulating the feature acquisition problem as a MDP and applying Monte Carlo Tree Search, 2) calculating the intermediary rewards for each acquisition step based on model improvements and acquisition costs and 3) simultaneously optimizing model improvement and acquisition costs with multi-objective Monte Carlo Tree Search. With Proximal Policy Optimization and Deep Q-Network algorithms as benchmark, we show the effectiveness of our proposed approach with experimental study.

The celebrated proverb that "speech is silver, silence is golden" has a long multinational history and multiple specific meanings. In written texts punctuation can in fact be considered one of its manifestations. Indeed, the virtue of effectively speaking and writing involves - often decisively - the capacity to apply the properly placed breaks. In the present study, based on a large corpus of world-famous and representative literary texts in seven major Western languages, it is shown that the distribution of intervals between consecutive punctuation marks in almost all texts can universally be characterised by only two parameters of the discrete Weibull distribution which can be given an intuitive interpretation in terms of the so-called hazard function. The values of these two parameters tend to be language-specific, however, and even appear to navigate translations. The properties of the computed hazard functions indicate that among the studied languages, English turns out to be the least constrained by the necessity to place a consecutive punctuation mark to partition a sequence of words. This may suggest that when compared to other studied languages, English is more flexible, in the sense of allowing longer uninterrupted sequences of words. Spanish reveals similar tendency to only a bit lesser extent.

This report summarizes the 3rd International Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP 2022), held as a part of the 5th Workshop on Formal Methods for ML-Enabled Autonomous Systems (FoMLAS), which was collocated with the 34th International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV). VNN-COMP is held annually to facilitate the fair and objective comparison of state-of-the-art neural network verification tools, encourage the standardization of tool interfaces, and bring together the neural network verification community. To this end, standardized formats for networks (ONNX) and specification (VNN-LIB) were defined, tools were evaluated on equal-cost hardware (using an automatic evaluation pipeline based on AWS instances), and tool parameters were chosen by the participants before the final test sets were made public. In the 2022 iteration, 11 teams participated on a diverse set of 12 scored benchmarks. This report summarizes the rules, benchmarks, participating tools, results, and lessons learned from this iteration of this competition.

Automatic machine translation (MT) metrics are widely used to distinguish the translation qualities of machine translation systems across relatively large test sets (system-level evaluation). However, it is unclear if automatic metrics are reliable at distinguishing good translations from bad translations at the sentence level (segment-level evaluation). In this paper, we investigate how useful MT metrics are at detecting the success of a machine translation component when placed in a larger platform with a downstream task. We evaluate the segment-level performance of the most widely used MT metrics (chrF, COMET, BERTScore, etc.) on three downstream cross-lingual tasks (dialogue state tracking, question answering, and semantic parsing). For each task, we only have access to a monolingual task-specific model. We calculate the correlation between the metric's ability to predict a good/bad translation with the success/failure on the final task for the Translate-Test setup. Our experiments demonstrate that all metrics exhibit negligible correlation with the extrinsic evaluation of the downstream outcomes. We also find that the scores provided by neural metrics are not interpretable mostly because of undefined ranges. Our analysis suggests that future MT metrics be designed to produce error labels rather than scores to facilitate extrinsic evaluation.

Reliable and automated 3D plant shoot segmentation is a core prerequisite for the extraction of plant phenotypic traits at the organ level. Combining deep learning and point clouds can provide effective ways to address the challenge. However, fully supervised deep learning methods require datasets to be point-wise annotated, which is extremely expensive and time-consuming. In our work, we proposed a novel weakly supervised framework, Eff-3DPSeg, for 3D plant shoot segmentation. First, high-resolution point clouds of soybean were reconstructed using a low-cost photogrammetry system, and the Meshlab-based Plant Annotator was developed for plant point cloud annotation. Second, a weakly-supervised deep learning method was proposed for plant organ segmentation. The method contained: (1) Pretraining a self-supervised network using Viewpoint Bottleneck loss to learn meaningful intrinsic structure representation from the raw point clouds; (2) Fine-tuning the pre-trained model with about only 0.5% points being annotated to implement plant organ segmentation. After, three phenotypic traits (stem diameter, leaf width, and leaf length) were extracted. To test the generality of the proposed method, the public dataset Pheno4D was included in this study. Experimental results showed that the weakly-supervised network obtained similar segmentation performance compared with the fully-supervised setting. Our method achieved 95.1%, 96.6%, 95.8% and 92.2% in the Precision, Recall, F1-score, and mIoU for stem leaf segmentation and 53%, 62.8% and 70.3% in the AP, AP@25, and AP@50 for leaf instance segmentation. This study provides an effective way for characterizing 3D plant architecture, which will become useful for plant breeders to enhance selection processes.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in zero-shot reasoning tasks, including abductive reasoning. This is reflected in their ability to perform well on current benchmarks in this area. However, to truly test the limits of LLMs in abductive reasoning, a more challenging benchmark is needed. In this paper, we present such a benchmark, consisting of 191 long-form mystery stories, each approximately 1200 words in length and presented in the form of detective puzzles. Each puzzle includes a multiple-choice question for evaluation sourced from the "5 Minute Mystery" platform. Our results show that state-of-the-art GPT models perform significantly worse than human solvers on this benchmark, with an accuracy of 28\% compared to 47\% for humans. This indicates that there is still a significant gap in the abductive reasoning abilities of LLMs and highlights the need for further research in this area. Our work provides a challenging benchmark for future studies on reasoning in language models and contributes to a better understanding of the limits of LLMs' abilities.