在自动驾驶领域内朝着更高水平的自动化迈进的进步伴随着对车辆操作安全的需求的增加。由计算资源的限制引起的，算法的计算复杂性之间的权衡及其在确保自动化车辆安全运行的潜力之间经常遇到。情境感知的环境感知提出了一个令人鼓舞的例子，其中计算资源分布在感知区域内的区域，这些区域与自动车辆的任务相关。尽管经常利用先前的地图知识来确定相关区域，但在这项工作中，我们提供了仅依赖在线信息的安全区域的轻量级标识。我们表明，我们的方法可以在关键方案中实现安全的车辆操作，同时在环境感知中保留了不均匀分配资源的好处。

自动化代理的环境感知领域的进步导致生成的传感器数据持续增加。处理这些数据的可用计算资源必将变得不足以实时应用程序。通过基于代理商的情况识别最相关的数据（通常称为情况意识）来减少要处理的数据量，并增加了研究的兴趣，并且预计互补方法的重要性将在不久的将来进一步增加。在这项工作中，我们将最近引入的情境感知环境感知概念的适用性范围扩展到Unicaragil项目的分散自动化体系结构。考虑到车辆的特定驾驶能力，并以后处理方式使用有关目标硬件的实际数据，我们提供了每日降低功耗的估计，该功耗累积到36.2％。在实现这些有希望的结果的同时，我们还表明，如果应最佳利用情况意识的好处，则需要考虑软件模块设计中的数据处理中的可扩展性以及功能系统的设计。

在自动驾驶领域内，环境感知的明显趋势趋于更多的传感器，更高的冗余和计算能力的总体增加。这主要是由范例驱动，以尽可能地掌握整个环境。然而，由于功能复杂性的持续上升，必须考虑妥协以确保感知系统的实时能力。在这项工作中，我们介绍了一种情况感知环境感知的概念，以控制资源分配在数据内处理相关区域，以及仅用于用于环境感知的功能模块的子集，如果足够的驱动任务。具体地，我们建议评估自动化车辆的上下文，以得出定义相关区域的多层注意图（MLAM）。使用此MLAM，动态配置有源功能模块的最佳状态，并强制执行仅相关数据的模块内处理。我们概述了我们概念在手头的直接实施中使用真实数据应用的可行性。在保留整体功能的同时，我们实现了59％的累计处理时间的降低。

An optimal delivery of arguments is key to persuasion in any debate, both for humans and for AI systems. This requires the use of clear and fluent claims relevant to the given debate. Prior work has studied the automatic assessment of argument quality extensively. Yet, no approach actually improves the quality so far. Our work is the first step towards filling this gap. We propose the task of claim optimization: to rewrite argumentative claims to optimize their delivery. As an initial approach, we first generate a candidate set of optimized claims using a sequence-to-sequence model, such as BART, while taking into account contextual information. Our key idea is then to rerank generated candidates with respect to different quality metrics to find the best optimization. In automatic and human evaluation, we outperform different reranking baselines on an English corpus, improving 60% of all claims (worsening 16% only). Follow-up analyses reveal that, beyond copy editing, our approach often specifies claims with details, whereas it adds less evidence than humans do. Moreover, its capabilities generalize well to other domains, such as instructional texts.

The identification of material parameters occurring in constitutive models has a wide range of applications in practice. One of these applications is the monitoring and assessment of the actual condition of infrastructure buildings, as the material parameters directly reflect the resistance of the structures to external impacts. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have recently emerged as a suitable method for solving inverse problems. The advantages of this method are a straightforward inclusion of observation data. Unlike grid-based methods, such as the finite element method updating (FEMU) approach, no computational grid and no interpolation of the data is required. In the current work, we aim to further develop PINNs towards the calibration of the linear-elastic constitutive model from full-field displacement and global force data in a realistic regime. We show that normalization and conditioning of the optimization problem play a crucial role in this process. Therefore, among others, we identify the material parameters for initial estimates and balance the individual terms in the loss function. In order to reduce the dependence of the identified material parameters on local errors in the displacement approximation, we base the identification not on the stress boundary conditions but instead on the global balance of internal and external work. In addition, we found that we get a better posed inverse problem if we reformulate it in terms of bulk and shear modulus instead of Young's modulus and Poisson's ratio. We demonstrate that the enhanced PINNs are capable of identifying material parameters from both experimental one-dimensional data and synthetic full-field displacement data in a realistic regime. Since displacement data measured by, e.g., a digital image correlation (DIC) system is noisy, we additionally investigate the robustness of the method to different levels of noise.

Nucleolar organizer regions (NORs) are parts of the DNA that are involved in RNA transcription. Due to the silver affinity of associated proteins, argyrophilic NORs (AgNORs) can be visualized using silver-based staining. The average number of AgNORs per nucleus has been shown to be a prognostic factor for predicting the outcome of many tumors. Since manual detection of AgNORs is laborious, automation is of high interest. We present a deep learning-based pipeline for automatically determining the AgNOR-score from histopathological sections. An additional annotation experiment was conducted with six pathologists to provide an independent performance evaluation of our approach. Across all raters and images, we found a mean squared error of 0.054 between the AgNOR- scores of the experts and those of the model, indicating that our approach offers performance comparable to humans.

Modal verbs (e.g., "can", "should", or "must") occur highly frequently in scientific articles. Decoding their function is not straightforward: they are often used for hedging, but they may also denote abilities and restrictions. Understanding their meaning is important for various NLP tasks such as writing assistance or accurate information extraction from scientific text. To foster research on the usage of modals in this genre, we introduce the MIST (Modals In Scientific Text) dataset, which contains 3737 modal instances in five scientific domains annotated for their semantic, pragmatic, or rhetorical function. We systematically evaluate a set of competitive neural architectures on MIST. Transfer experiments reveal that leveraging non-scientific data is of limited benefit for modeling the distinctions in MIST. Our corpus analysis provides evidence that scientific communities differ in their usage of modal verbs, yet, classifiers trained on scientific data generalize to some extent to unseen scientific domains.

Understanding customer feedback is becoming a necessity for companies to identify problems and improve their products and services. Text classification and sentiment analysis can play a major role in analyzing this data by using a variety of machine and deep learning approaches. In this work, different transformer-based models are utilized to explore how efficient these models are when working with a German customer feedback dataset. In addition, these pre-trained models are further analyzed to determine if adapting them to a specific domain using unlabeled data can yield better results than off-the-shelf pre-trained models. To evaluate the models, two downstream tasks from the GermEval 2017 are considered. The experimental results show that transformer-based models can reach significant improvements compared to a fastText baseline and outperform the published scores and previous models. For the subtask Relevance Classification, the best models achieve a micro-averaged $F1$-Score of 96.1 % on the first test set and 95.9 % on the second one, and a score of 85.1 % and 85.3 % for the subtask Polarity Classification.

For augmentation of the square-shaped image data of a convolutional neural network (CNN), we introduce a new method, in which the original images are mapped onto a disk with a conformal mapping, rotated around the center of this disk and mapped under such a M\"obius transformation that preserves the disk, and then mapped back onto their original square shape. This process does not result the loss of information caused by removing areas from near the edges of the original images unlike the typical transformations used in the data augmentation for a CNN. We offer here the formulas of all the mappings needed together with detailed instructions how to write a code for transforming the images. The new method is also tested with simulated data and, according the results, using this method to augment the training data of 10 images into 40 images decreases the amount of the error in the predictions by a CNN for a test set of 160 images in a statistically significant way (p-value=0.0360).

Current state-of-the-art approaches to text classification typically leverage BERT-style Transformer models with a softmax classifier, jointly fine-tuned to predict class labels of a target task. In this paper, we instead propose an alternative training objective in which we learn task-specific embeddings of text: our proposed objective learns embeddings such that all texts that share the same target class label should be close together in the embedding space, while all others should be far apart. This allows us to replace the softmax classifier with a more interpretable k-nearest-neighbor classification approach. In a series of experiments, we show that this yields a number of interesting benefits: (1) The resulting order induced by distances in the embedding space can be used to directly explain classification decisions. (2) This facilitates qualitative inspection of the training data, helping us to better understand the problem space and identify labelling quality issues. (3) The learned distances to some degree generalize to unseen classes, allowing us to incrementally add new classes without retraining the model. We present extensive experiments which show that the benefits of ante-hoc explainability and incremental learning come at no cost in overall classification accuracy, thus pointing to practical applicability of our proposed approach.