In this paper, we present PARTIME, a software library written in Python and based on PyTorch, designed specifically to speed up neural networks whenever data is continuously streamed over time, for both learning and inference. Existing libraries are designed to exploit data-level parallelism, assuming that samples are batched, a condition that is not naturally met in applications that are based on streamed data. Differently, PARTIME starts processing each data sample at the time in which it becomes available from the stream. PARTIME wraps the code that implements a feed-forward multi-layer network and it distributes the layer-wise processing among multiple devices, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Thanks to its pipeline-based computational scheme, PARTIME allows the devices to perform computations in parallel. At inference time this results in scaling capabilities that are theoretically linear with respect to the number of devices. During the learning stage, PARTIME can leverage the non-i.i.d. nature of the streamed data with samples that are smoothly evolving over time for efficient gradient computations. Experiments are performed in order to empirically compare PARTIME with classic non-parallel neural computations in online learning, distributing operations on up to 8 NVIDIA GPUs, showing significant speedups that are almost linear in the number of devices, mitigating the impact of the data transfer overhead.

在各种方法中，旨在使神经网络的学习程序更有效，科学界会根据其估计的复杂性来开发策略，以从较大的网络中蒸发蒸馏知识，或利用对抗机器学习背后的原则。最近提出了一个不同的想法，命名为友好培训，这包括通过增加自动估计的扰动来改变输入数据，其目标是促进神经分类器的学习过程。只要训练收益，转变就会逐渐消失，直到它完全消失。在这项工作中，我们重新审视并扩展了这个想法，引入了通过神经发电机在对抗机器学习的背景下的完全不同和新的方法的启发。我们提出了一种辅助多层网络，该网络负责改变输入数据，使得在训练过程的当前阶段可以更容易地处理分类器。辅助网络与神经分类器共同培训，因此本质上增加了分类器的“深度”，并且预计将在数据改变过程中发现一般规律。辅助网络的效果逐渐减少到训练结束时，当它完全下降时，分类器部署用于应用程序。我们将这种方法称为神经友好培训。涉及多个数据集和不同神经架构的扩展实验程序表明，神经友好培训克服了最初提出的友好培训技术，提高了分类器的泛化，特别是在嘈杂的数据的情况下。

在过去的几年中，已经开发了图形绘图技术，目的是生成美学上令人愉悦的节点链接布局。最近，利用可区分损失功能的使用已为大量使用梯度下降和相关优化算法铺平了道路。在本文中，我们提出了一个用于开发图神经抽屉（GND）的新框架，即依靠神经计算来构建有效且复杂的图的机器。 GND是图形神经网络（GNN），其学习过程可以由任何提供的损失函数（例如图形图中通常使用的损失函数）驱动。此外，我们证明，该机制可以由通过前馈神经网络计算的损失函数来指导，并根据表达美容特性的监督提示，例如交叉边缘的最小化。在这种情况下，我们表明GNN可以通过位置功能很好地丰富与未标记的顶点处理。我们通过为边缘交叉构建损失函数来提供概念验证，并在提议的框架下工作的不同GNN模型之间提供定量和定性的比较。

深度学习技术的普及更新了能够处理可以使用图形的复杂结构的神经结构的兴趣，由图形神经网络（GNN）的启发。我们将注意力集中在最初提出的Scarselli等人的GNN模型上。 2009，通过迭代扩散过程编码图表的节点的状态，即在学习阶段，必须在每个时期计算，直到达到学习状态转换功能的固定点，传播信息邻近节点。基于拉格朗日框架的约束优化，我们提出了一种在GNNS中学习的新方法。学习转换功能和节点状态是联合过程的结果，其中通过约束满足机制隐含地表达了状态会聚过程，避免了迭代巨头程序和网络展开。我们的计算结构在由权重组成的伴随空间中搜索拉格朗日的马鞍点，节点状态变量和拉格朗日乘法器。通过加速扩散过程的多个约束层进一步增强了该过程。实验分析表明，该方法在几个基准上的流行模型有利地比较。

Computational units in artificial neural networks follow a simplified model of biological neurons. In the biological model, the output signal of a neuron runs down the axon, splits following the many branches at its end, and passes identically to all the downward neurons of the network. Each of the downward neurons will use their copy of this signal as one of many inputs dendrites, integrate them all and fire an output, if above some threshold. In the artificial neural network, this translates to the fact that the nonlinear filtering of the signal is performed in the upward neuron, meaning that in practice the same activation is shared between all the downward neurons that use that signal as their input. Dendrites thus play a passive role. We propose a slightly more complex model for the biological neuron, where dendrites play an active role: the activation in the output of the upward neuron becomes optional, and instead the signals going through each dendrite undergo independent nonlinear filterings, before the linear combination. We implement this new model into a ReLU computational unit and discuss its biological plausibility. We compare this new computational unit with the standard one and describe it from a geometrical point of view. We provide a Keras implementation of this unit into fully connected and convolutional layers and estimate their FLOPs and weights change. We then use these layers in ResNet architectures on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Imagenette, and Imagewoof, obtaining performance improvements over standard ResNets up to 1.73%. Finally, we prove a universal representation theorem for continuous functions on compact sets and show that this new unit has more representational power than its standard counterpart.

Real-world robotic grasping can be done robustly if a complete 3D Point Cloud Data (PCD) of an object is available. However, in practice, PCDs are often incomplete when objects are viewed from few and sparse viewpoints before the grasping action, leading to the generation of wrong or inaccurate grasp poses. We propose a novel grasping strategy, named 3DSGrasp, that predicts the missing geometry from the partial PCD to produce reliable grasp poses. Our proposed PCD completion network is a Transformer-based encoder-decoder network with an Offset-Attention layer. Our network is inherently invariant to the object pose and point's permutation, which generates PCDs that are geometrically consistent and completed properly. Experiments on a wide range of partial PCD show that 3DSGrasp outperforms the best state-of-the-art method on PCD completion tasks and largely improves the grasping success rate in real-world scenarios. The code and dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

Uncertainty quantification is crucial to inverse problems, as it could provide decision-makers with valuable information about the inversion results. For example, seismic inversion is a notoriously ill-posed inverse problem due to the band-limited and noisy nature of seismic data. It is therefore of paramount importance to quantify the uncertainties associated to the inversion process to ease the subsequent interpretation and decision making processes. Within this framework of reference, sampling from a target posterior provides a fundamental approach to quantifying the uncertainty in seismic inversion. However, selecting appropriate prior information in a probabilistic inversion is crucial, yet non-trivial, as it influences the ability of a sampling-based inference in providing geological realism in the posterior samples. To overcome such limitations, we present a regularized variational inference framework that performs posterior inference by implicitly regularizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence loss with a CNN-based denoiser by means of the Plug-and-Play methods. We call this new algorithm Plug-and-Play Stein Variational Gradient Descent (PnP-SVGD) and demonstrate its ability in producing high-resolution, trustworthy samples representative of the subsurface structures, which we argue could be used for post-inference tasks such as reservoir modelling and history matching. To validate the proposed method, numerical tests are performed on both synthetic and field post-stack seismic data.

Explainability is a vibrant research topic in the artificial intelligence community, with growing interest across methods and domains. Much has been written about the topic, yet explainability still lacks shared terminology and a framework capable of providing structural soundness to explanations. In our work, we address these issues by proposing a novel definition of explanation that is a synthesis of what can be found in the literature. We recognize that explanations are not atomic but the product of evidence stemming from the model and its input-output and the human interpretation of this evidence. Furthermore, we fit explanations into the properties of faithfulness (i.e., the explanation being a true description of the model's decision-making) and plausibility (i.e., how much the explanation looks convincing to the user). Using our proposed theoretical framework simplifies how these properties are ope rationalized and provide new insight into common explanation methods that we analyze as case studies.

Fruit is a key crop in worldwide agriculture feeding millions of people. The standard supply chain of fruit products involves quality checks to guarantee freshness, taste, and, most of all, safety. An important factor that determines fruit quality is its stage of ripening. This is usually manually classified by experts in the field, which makes it a labor-intensive and error-prone process. Thus, there is an arising need for automation in the process of fruit ripeness classification. Many automatic methods have been proposed that employ a variety of feature descriptors for the food item to be graded. Machine learning and deep learning techniques dominate the top-performing methods. Furthermore, deep learning can operate on raw data and thus relieve the users from having to compute complex engineered features, which are often crop-specific. In this survey, we review the latest methods proposed in the literature to automatize fruit ripeness classification, highlighting the most common feature descriptors they operate on.

Objective: Accurate visual classification of bladder tissue during Trans-Urethral Resection of Bladder Tumor (TURBT) procedures is essential to improve early cancer diagnosis and treatment. During TURBT interventions, White Light Imaging (WLI) and Narrow Band Imaging (NBI) techniques are used for lesion detection. Each imaging technique provides diverse visual information that allows clinicians to identify and classify cancerous lesions. Computer vision methods that use both imaging techniques could improve endoscopic diagnosis. We address the challenge of tissue classification when annotations are available only in one domain, in our case WLI, and the endoscopic images correspond to an unpaired dataset, i.e. there is no exact equivalent for every image in both NBI and WLI domains. Method: We propose a semi-surprised Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based method composed of three main components: a teacher network trained on the labeled WLI data; a cycle-consistency GAN to perform unpaired image-to-image translation, and a multi-input student network. To ensure the quality of the synthetic images generated by the proposed GAN we perform a detailed quantitative, and qualitative analysis with the help of specialists. Conclusion: The overall average classification accuracy, precision, and recall obtained with the proposed method for tissue classification are 0.90, 0.88, and 0.89 respectively, while the same metrics obtained in the unlabeled domain (NBI) are 0.92, 0.64, and 0.94 respectively. The quality of the generated images is reliable enough to deceive specialists. Significance: This study shows the potential of using semi-supervised GAN-based classification to improve bladder tissue classification when annotations are limited in multi-domain data.