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.

我们研究了在偏见的可观察性模型下，在对抗性匪徒问题中的在线学习问题，称为政策反馈。在这个顺序决策问题中，学习者无法直接观察其奖励，而是看到由另一个未知策略并行运行的奖励（行为策略）。学习者必须在这种情况下面临另一个挑战：由于他们的控制之外的观察结果有限，学习者可能无法同样估算每个政策的价值。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一系列算法，以保证任何比较者政策与行为政策之间的自然不匹配概念的范围，从而提高了对观察结果良好覆盖的比较者的绩效。我们还为对抗性线性上下文匪徒的设置提供了扩展，并通过一组实验验证理论保证。我们的关键算法想法是调整最近在非政策强化学习背景下流行的悲观奖励估计量的概念。

政策梯度（PG）算法是备受期待的强化学习对现实世界控制任务（例如机器人技术）的最佳候选人之一。但是，每当必须在物理系统上执行学习过程本身或涉及任何形式的人类计算机相互作用时，这些方法的反复试验性质就会提出安全问题。在本文中，我们解决了一种特定的安全公式，其中目标和危险都以标量奖励信号进行编码，并且学习代理被限制为从不恶化其性能，以衡量为预期的奖励总和。通过从随机优化的角度研究仅行为者的政策梯度，我们为广泛的参数政策建立了改进保证，从而将现有结果推广到高斯政策上。这与策略梯度估计器的差异的新型上限一起，使我们能够识别出具有很高概率的单调改进的元参数计划。两个关键的元参数是参数更新的步长和梯度估计的批处理大小。通过对这些元参数的联合自适应选择，我们获得了具有单调改进保证的政策梯度算法。

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.

Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) has recently accomplished successful achievements in various fields such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, which typically require a lot of labour to construct ground-truth. Especially in the depth estimation task, annotating training data is very costly and time-consuming, and thus recent SSL regime seems an attractive solution. In this paper, for the first time, we introduce a novel framework for semi-supervised learning of monocular depth estimation networks, using consistency regularization to mitigate the reliance on large ground-truth depth data. We propose a novel data augmentation approach, called K-way disjoint masking, which allows the network for learning how to reconstruct invisible regions so that the model not only becomes robust to perturbations but also generates globally consistent output depth maps. Experiments on the KITTI and NYU-Depth-v2 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of each component in our pipeline, robustness to the use of fewer and fewer annotated images, and superior results compared to other state-of-the-art, semi-supervised methods for monocular depth estimation. Our code is available at https://github.com/KU-CVLAB/MaskingDepth.

Deep Reinforcement Learning is emerging as a promising approach for the continuous control task of robotic arm movement. However, the challenges of learning robust and versatile control capabilities are still far from being resolved for real-world applications, mainly because of two common issues of this learning paradigm: the exploration strategy and the slow learning speed, sometimes known as "the curse of dimensionality". This work aims at exploring and assessing the advantages of the application of Quantum Computing to one of the state-of-art Reinforcement Learning techniques for continuous control - namely Soft Actor-Critic. Specifically, the performance of a Variational Quantum Soft Actor-Critic on the movement of a virtual robotic arm has been investigated by means of digital simulations of quantum circuits. A quantum advantage over the classical algorithm has been found in terms of a significant decrease in the amount of required parameters for satisfactory model training, paving the way for further promising developments.