我们提出了层饱和 - 一种简单的在线可计算的方法，用于分析神经网络中的信息处理。首先，我们表明层的输出可以限制在没有性能损失的方差矩阵的eIgenspace。我们提出了一种计算上的轻量级方法，用于在训练期间近似方差矩阵。从其无损EIGenspace的维度我们推导了层饱和度 - eIGenspace尺寸和层宽度之间的比率。我们表明饱和度似乎表明哪个层有助于网络性能。我们通过改变网络深度，滤波器大小和输入分辨率，展示如何改变神经网络中的层饱和度。此外，我们表明，通过在网络上更均匀地分配推动过程，所选择的输入分辨率提高了网络性能。

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.

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/ .

The ability to convert reciprocating, i.e., alternating, actuation into rotary motion using linkages is hindered fundamentally by their poor torque transmission capability around kinematic singularity configurations. Here, we harness the elastic potential energy of a linear spring attached to the coupler link of four-bar mechanisms to manipulate force transmission around the kinematic singularities. We developed a theoretical model to explore the parameter space for proper force transmission in slider-crank and rocker-crank four-bar kinematics. Finally, we verified the proposed model and methodology by building and testing a macro-scale prototype of a slider-crank mechanism. We expect this approach to enable the development of small-scale rotary engines and robotic devices with closed kinematic chains dealing with serial kinematic singularities, such as linkages and parallel manipulators.

This paper considers a combination of actuation tendons and measurement strings to achieve accurate shape sensing and direct kinematics of continuum robots. Assuming general string routing, a methodical Lie group formulation for the shape sensing of these robots is presented. The shape kinematics is expressed using arc-length-dependent curvature distributions parameterized by modal functions, and the Magnus expansion for Lie group integration is used to express the shape as a product of exponentials. The tendon and string length kinematic constraints are solved for the modal coefficients and the configuration space and body Jacobian are derived. The noise amplification index for the shape reconstruction problem is defined and used for optimizing the string/tendon routing paths, and a planar simulation study shows the minimal number of strings/tendons needed for accurate shape reconstruction. A torsionally stiff continuum segment is used for experimental evaluation, demonstrating mean (maximal) end-effector absolute position error of less than 2% (5%) of total length. Finally, a simulation study of a torsionally compliant segment demonstrates the approach for general deflections and string routings. We believe that the methods of this paper can benefit the design process, sensing and control of continuum and soft robots.

Image classification with small datasets has been an active research area in the recent past. However, as research in this scope is still in its infancy, two key ingredients are missing for ensuring reliable and truthful progress: a systematic and extensive overview of the state of the art, and a common benchmark to allow for objective comparisons between published methods. This article addresses both issues. First, we systematically organize and connect past studies to consolidate a community that is currently fragmented and scattered. Second, we propose a common benchmark that allows for an objective comparison of approaches. It consists of five datasets spanning various domains (e.g., natural images, medical imagery, satellite data) and data types (RGB, grayscale, multispectral). We use this benchmark to re-evaluate the standard cross-entropy baseline and ten existing methods published between 2017 and 2021 at renowned venues. Surprisingly, we find that thorough hyper-parameter tuning on held-out validation data results in a highly competitive baseline and highlights a stunted growth of performance over the years. Indeed, only a single specialized method dating back to 2019 clearly wins our benchmark and outperforms the baseline classifier.

The availability of frequent and cost-free satellite images is in growing demand in the research world. Such satellite constellations as Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 provide a massive amount of valuable data daily. However, the discrepancy in the sensors' characteristics of these satellites makes it senseless to use a segmentation model trained on either dataset and applied to another, which is why domain adaptation techniques have recently become an active research area in remote sensing. In this paper, an experiment of domain adaptation through style-transferring is conducted using the HRSemI2I model to narrow the sensor discrepancy between Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2. This paper's main contribution is analyzing the expediency of that approach by comparing the results of segmentation using domain-adapted images with those without adaptation. The HRSemI2I model, adjusted to work with 6-band imagery, shows significant intersection-over-union performance improvement for both mean and per class metrics. A second contribution is providing different schemes of generalization between two label schemes - NALCMS 2015 and CORINE. The first scheme is standardization through higher-level land cover classes, and the second is through harmonization validation in the field.

Diffusion models have shown a great ability at bridging the performance gap between predictive and generative approaches for speech enhancement. We have shown that they may even outperform their predictive counterparts for non-additive corruption types or when they are evaluated on mismatched conditions. However, diffusion models suffer from a high computational burden, mainly as they require to run a neural network for each reverse diffusion step, whereas predictive approaches only require one pass. As diffusion models are generative approaches they may also produce vocalizing and breathing artifacts in adverse conditions. In comparison, in such difficult scenarios, predictive models typically do not produce such artifacts but tend to distort the target speech instead, thereby degrading the speech quality. In this work, we present a stochastic regeneration approach where an estimate given by a predictive model is provided as a guide for further diffusion. We show that the proposed approach uses the predictive model to remove the vocalizing and breathing artifacts while producing very high quality samples thanks to the diffusion model, even in adverse conditions. We further show that this approach enables to use lighter sampling schemes with fewer diffusion steps without sacrificing quality, thus lifting the computational burden by an order of magnitude. Source code and audio examples are available online (https://uhh.de/inf-sp-storm).

In this paper, we address the problem of multimodal emotion recognition from multiple physiological signals. We demonstrate that a Transformer-based approach is suitable for this task. In addition, we present how such models may be pretrained in a multimodal scenario to improve emotion recognition performances. We evaluate the benefits of using multimodal inputs and pre-training with our approach on a state-ofthe-art dataset.

We present in this paper a family of generalized simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (G-SPSA) estimators that estimate the gradient of the objective using noisy function measurements, but where the number of function measurements and the form of the gradient estimator is guided by the desired estimator bias. In particular, estimators with more function measurements are seen to result in lower bias. We provide an analysis of convergence of the generalized SPSA algorithm, and point to possible future directions.