In intensively managed forests in Europe, where forests are divided into stands of small size and may show heterogeneity within stands, a high spatial resolution (10 - 20 meters) is arguably needed to capture the differences in canopy height. In this work, we developed a deep learning model based on multi-stream remote sensing measurements to create a high-resolution canopy height map over the "Landes de Gascogne" forest in France, a large maritime pine plantation of 13,000 km$^2$ with flat terrain and intensive management. This area is characterized by even-aged and mono-specific stands, of a typical length of a few hundred meters, harvested every 35 to 50 years. Our deep learning U-Net model uses multi-band images from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 with composite time averages as input to predict tree height derived from GEDI waveforms. The evaluation is performed with external validation data from forest inventory plots and a stereo 3D reconstruction model based on Skysat imagery available at specific locations. We trained seven different U-net models based on a combination of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 bands to evaluate the importance of each instrument in the dominant height retrieval. The model outputs allow us to generate a 10 m resolution canopy height map of the whole "Landes de Gascogne" forest area for 2020 with a mean absolute error of 2.02 m on the Test dataset. The best predictions were obtained using all available satellite layers from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 but using only one satellite source also provided good predictions. For all validation datasets in coniferous forests, our model showed better metrics than previous canopy height models available in the same region.

我们介绍了ThreedWorld（TDW），是交互式多模态物理模拟的平台。 TDW能够模拟高保真感官数据和富裕的3D环境中的移动代理和对象之间的物理交互。独特的属性包括：实时近光 - 真实图像渲染;对象和环境库，以及他们定制的例程;有效构建新环境课程的生成程序;高保真音频渲染;各种材料类型的现实物理相互作用，包括布料，液体和可变形物体;可定制的代理体现AI代理商;并支持与VR设备的人类交互。 TDW的API使多个代理能够在模拟中进行交互，并返回一系列表示世界状态的传感器和物理数据。我们在计算机视觉，机器学习和认知科学中的新兴的研究方向上提供了通过TDW的初始实验，包括多模态物理场景理解，物理动态预测，多代理交互，像孩子一样学习的模型，并注意研究人类和神经网络。

The performance of the Deep Learning (DL) models depends on the quality of labels. In some areas, the involvement of human annotators may lead to noise in the data. When these corrupted labels are blindly regarded as the ground truth (GT), DL models suffer from performance deficiency. This paper presents a method that aims to learn a confident model in the presence of noisy labels. This is done in conjunction with estimating the uncertainty of multiple annotators. We robustly estimate the predictions given only the noisy labels by adding entropy or information-based regularizer to the classifier network. We conduct our experiments on a noisy version of MNIST, CIFAR-10, and FMNIST datasets. Our empirical results demonstrate the robustness of our method as it outperforms or performs comparably to other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. In addition, we evaluated the proposed method on the curated dataset, where the noise type and level of various annotators depend on the input image style. We show that our approach performs well and is adept at learning annotators' confusion. Moreover, we demonstrate how our model is more confident in predicting GT than other baselines. Finally, we assess our approach for segmentation problem and showcase its effectiveness with experiments.

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.

We develop theory and methods that use the graph Laplacian to analyze the geometry of the underlying manifold of point clouds. Our theory provides theoretical guarantees and explicit bounds on the functional form of the graph Laplacian, in the case when it acts on functions defined close to singularities of the underlying manifold. We also propose methods that can be used to estimate these geometric properties of the point cloud, which are based on the theoretical guarantees.

Nearly all jurisdictions in the United States require a professional license exam, commonly referred to as "the Bar Exam," as a precondition for law practice. To even sit for the exam, most jurisdictions require that an applicant completes at least seven years of post-secondary education, including three years at an accredited law school. In addition, most test-takers also undergo weeks to months of further, exam-specific preparation. Despite this significant investment of time and capital, approximately one in five test-takers still score under the rate required to pass the exam on their first try. In the face of a complex task that requires such depth of knowledge, what, then, should we expect of the state of the art in "AI?" In this research, we document our experimental evaluation of the performance of OpenAI's `text-davinci-003` model, often-referred to as GPT-3.5, on the multistate multiple choice (MBE) section of the exam. While we find no benefit in fine-tuning over GPT-3.5's zero-shot performance at the scale of our training data, we do find that hyperparameter optimization and prompt engineering positively impacted GPT-3.5's zero-shot performance. For best prompt and parameters, GPT-3.5 achieves a headline correct rate of 50.3% on a complete NCBE MBE practice exam, significantly in excess of the 25% baseline guessing rate, and performs at a passing rate for both Evidence and Torts. GPT-3.5's ranking of responses is also highly-correlated with correctness; its top two and top three choices are correct 71% and 88% of the time, respectively, indicating very strong non-entailment performance. While our ability to interpret these results is limited by nascent scientific understanding of LLMs and the proprietary nature of GPT, we believe that these results strongly suggest that an LLM will pass the MBE component of the Bar Exam in the near future.

The future of population-based breast cancer screening is likely personalized strategies based on clinically relevant risk models. Mammography-based risk models should remain robust to domain shifts caused by different populations and mammographic devices. Modern risk models do not ensure adaptation across vendor-domains and are often conflated to unintentionally rely on both precursors of cancer and systemic/global mammographic information associated with short- and long-term risk, respectively, which might limit performance. We developed a robust, cross-vendor model for long-term risk assessment. An augmentation-based domain adaption technique, based on flavorization of mammographic views, ensured generalization to an unseen vendor-domain. We trained on samples without diagnosed/potential malignant findings to learn systemic/global breast tissue features, called mammographic texture, indicative of future breast cancer. However, training so may cause erratic convergence. By excluding noise-inducing samples and designing a case-control dataset, a robust ensemble texture model was trained. This model was validated in two independent datasets. In 66,607 Danish women with flavorized Siemens views, the AUC was 0.71 and 0.65 for prediction of interval cancers within two years (ICs) and from two years after screening (LTCs), respectively. In a combination with established risk factors, the model's AUC increased to 0.68 for LTCs. In 25,706 Dutch women with Hologic-processed views, the AUCs were not different from the AUCs in Danish women with flavorized views. The results suggested that the model robustly estimated long-term risk while adapting to an unseen processed vendor-domain. The model identified 8.1% of Danish women accounting for 20.9% of ICs and 14.2% of LTCs.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but the quality bar for medical and clinical applications is high. Today, attempts to assess models' clinical knowledge typically rely on automated evaluations on limited benchmarks. There is no standard to evaluate model predictions and reasoning across a breadth of tasks. To address this, we present MultiMedQA, a benchmark combining six existing open question answering datasets spanning professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries; and HealthSearchQA, a new free-response dataset of medical questions searched online. We propose a framework for human evaluation of model answers along multiple axes including factuality, precision, possible harm, and bias. In addition, we evaluate PaLM (a 540-billion parameter LLM) and its instruction-tuned variant, Flan-PaLM, on MultiMedQA. Using a combination of prompting strategies, Flan-PaLM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on every MultiMedQA multiple-choice dataset (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, MMLU clinical topics), including 67.6% accuracy on MedQA (US Medical License Exam questions), surpassing prior state-of-the-art by over 17%. However, human evaluation reveals key gaps in Flan-PaLM responses. To resolve this we introduce instruction prompt tuning, a parameter-efficient approach for aligning LLMs to new domains using a few exemplars. The resulting model, Med-PaLM, performs encouragingly, but remains inferior to clinicians. We show that comprehension, recall of knowledge, and medical reasoning improve with model scale and instruction prompt tuning, suggesting the potential utility of LLMs in medicine. Our human evaluations reveal important limitations of today's models, reinforcing the importance of both evaluation frameworks and method development in creating safe, helpful LLM models for clinical applications.

In this work, a method for obtaining pixel-wise error bounds in Bayesian regularization of inverse imaging problems is introduced. The proposed method employs estimates of the posterior variance together with techniques from conformal prediction in order to obtain coverage guarantees for the error bounds, without making any assumption on the underlying data distribution. It is generally applicable to Bayesian regularization approaches, independent, e.g., of the concrete choice of the prior. Furthermore, the coverage guarantees can also be obtained in case only approximate sampling from the posterior is possible. With this in particular, the proposed framework is able to incorporate any learned prior in a black-box manner. Guaranteed coverage without assumptions on the underlying distributions is only achievable since the magnitude of the error bounds is, in general, unknown in advance. Nevertheless, experiments with multiple regularization approaches presented in the paper confirm that in practice, the obtained error bounds are rather tight. For realizing the numerical experiments, also a novel primal-dual Langevin algorithm for sampling from non-smooth distributions is introduced in this work.

The goal of this paper is to detect objects by exploiting their interrelationships. Rather than relying on predefined and labeled graph structures, we infer a graph prior from object co-occurrence statistics. The key idea of our paper is to model object relations as a function of initial class predictions and co-occurrence priors to generate a graph representation of an image for improved classification and bounding box regression. We additionally learn the object-relation joint distribution via energy based modeling. Sampling from this distribution generates a refined graph representation of the image which in turn produces improved detection performance. Experiments on the Visual Genome and MS-COCO datasets demonstrate our method is detector agnostic, end-to-end trainable, and especially beneficial for rare object classes. What is more, we establish a consistent improvement over object detectors like DETR and Faster-RCNN, as well as state-of-the-art methods modeling object interrelationships.