We consider the problem of finding an accurate representation of neuron shapes, extracting sub-cellular features, and classifying neurons based on neuron shapes. In neuroscience research, the skeleton representation is often used as a compact and abstract representation of neuron shapes. However, existing methods are limited to getting and analyzing "curve" skeletons which can only be applied for tubular shapes. This paper presents a 3D neuron morphology analysis method for more general and complex neuron shapes. First, we introduce the concept of skeleton mesh to represent general neuron shapes and propose a novel method for computing mesh representations from 3D surface point clouds. A skeleton graph is then obtained from skeleton mesh and is used to extract sub-cellular features. Finally, an unsupervised learning method is used to embed the skeleton graph for neuron classification. Extensive experiment results are provided and demonstrate the robustness of our method to analyze neuron morphology.

As Artificial and Robotic Systems are increasingly deployed and relied upon for real-world applications, it is important that they exhibit the ability to continually learn and adapt in dynamically-changing environments, becoming Lifelong Learning Machines. Continual/lifelong learning (LL) involves minimizing catastrophic forgetting of old tasks while maximizing a model's capability to learn new tasks. This paper addresses the challenging lifelong reinforcement learning (L2RL) setting. Pushing the state-of-the-art forward in L2RL and making L2RL useful for practical applications requires more than developing individual L2RL algorithms; it requires making progress at the systems-level, especially research into the non-trivial problem of how to integrate multiple L2RL algorithms into a common framework. In this paper, we introduce the Lifelong Reinforcement Learning Components Framework (L2RLCF), which standardizes L2RL systems and assimilates different continual learning components (each addressing different aspects of the lifelong learning problem) into a unified system. As an instantiation of L2RLCF, we develop a standard API allowing easy integration of novel lifelong learning components. We describe a case study that demonstrates how multiple independently-developed LL components can be integrated into a single realized system. We also introduce an evaluation environment in order to measure the effect of combining various system components. Our evaluation environment employs different LL scenarios (sequences of tasks) consisting of Starcraft-2 minigames and allows for the fair, comprehensive, and quantitative comparison of different combinations of components within a challenging common evaluation environment.

Acquiring a better understanding of drought impacts becomes increasingly vital under a warming climate. Traditional drought indices describe mainly biophysical variables and not impacts on social, economic, and environmental systems. We utilized natural language processing and bidirectional encoder representation from Transformers (BERT) based transfer learning to fine-tune the model on the data from the news-based Drought Impact Report (DIR) and then apply it to recognize seven types of drought impacts based on the filtered Twitter data from the United States. Our model achieved a satisfying macro-F1 score of 0.89 on the DIR test set. The model was then applied to California tweets and validated with keyword-based labels. The macro-F1 score was 0.58. However, due to the limitation of keywords, we also spot-checked tweets with controversial labels. 83.5% of BERT labels were correct compared to the keyword labels. Overall, the fine-tuned BERT-based recognizer provided proper predictions and valuable information on drought impacts. The interpretation and analysis of the model were consistent with experiential domain expertise.

Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS) refers to clinician-performed and interpreted ultrasonography at the patient's bedside. Interpreting these images requires a high level of expertise, which may not be available during emergencies. In this paper, we support POCUS by developing classifiers that can aid medical professionals by diagnosing whether or not a patient has pneumothorax. We decomposed the task into multiple steps, using YOLOv4 to extract relevant regions of the video and a 3D sparse coding model to represent video features. Given the difficulty in acquiring positive training videos, we trained a small-data classifier with a maximum of 15 positive and 32 negative examples. To counteract this limitation, we leveraged subject matter expert (SME) knowledge to limit the hypothesis space, thus reducing the cost of data collection. We present results using two lung ultrasound datasets and demonstrate that our model is capable of achieving performance on par with SMEs in pneumothorax identification. We then developed an iOS application that runs our full system in less than 4 seconds on an iPad Pro, and less than 8 seconds on an iPhone 13 Pro, labeling key regions in the lung sonogram to provide interpretable diagnoses.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

In recent years, deep learning has infiltrated every field it has touched, reducing the need for specialist knowledge and automating the process of knowledge discovery from data. This review argues that astronomy is no different, and that we are currently in the midst of a deep learning revolution that is transforming the way we do astronomy. We trace the history of astronomical connectionism from the early days of multilayer perceptrons, through the second wave of convolutional and recurrent neural networks, to the current third wave of self-supervised and unsupervised deep learning. We then predict that we will soon enter a fourth wave of astronomical connectionism, in which finetuned versions of an all-encompassing 'foundation' model will replace expertly crafted deep learning models. We argue that such a model can only be brought about through a symbiotic relationship between astronomy and connectionism, whereby astronomy provides high quality multimodal data to train the foundation model, and in turn the foundation model is used to advance astronomical research.

The attention mechanism is considered the backbone of the widely-used Transformer architecture. It contextualizes the input by computing input-specific attention matrices. We find that this mechanism, while powerful and elegant, is not as important as typically thought for pretrained language models. We introduce PAPA, a new probing method that replaces the input-dependent attention matrices with constant ones -- the average attention weights over multiple inputs. We use PAPA to analyze several established pretrained Transformers on six downstream tasks. We find that without any input-dependent attention, all models achieve competitive performance -- an average relative drop of only 8% from the probing baseline. Further, little or no performance drop is observed when replacing half of the input-dependent attention matrices with constant (input-independent) ones. Interestingly, we show that better-performing models lose more from applying our method than weaker models, suggesting that the utilization of the input-dependent attention mechanism might be a factor in their success. Our results motivate research on simpler alternatives to input-dependent attention, as well as on methods for better utilization of this mechanism in the Transformer architecture.

我们介绍了一种考虑复杂的环境条件，在极地地区介绍了一种在极地地区长距离海上路线计划的方法。该方法允许构建优化的路线，描述了该过程的三个主要阶段：使用不均匀网格对环境条件进行离散建模，网格最佳路径的构建以及路径平滑。为了说明不同的车辆性能，我们构建了一系列数据驱动的功能，这些功能可以应用于环境网格，以确定给定容器和网格单元的速度限制和燃料要求，以图形和地理空间表示这些数量。在描述我们的结果时，我们展示了一个示例用途，用于Polar Research船RRS David Attenborough爵士（SDA）的路线规划，核算冰的性能特征，并验证韦德尔海地区的时空路线构建，南极洲。我们通过证明路线的变化取决于季节性海冰可变性，所使用的路线规划目标函数的差异以及其他环境条件（如电流）的存在来证明这种路线构建方法的多功能性。为了证明我们的方法的普遍性，我们在北极海洋和波罗的海中介绍了例子。本手稿中概述的技术是通用的，因此可以应用于具有不同特征的血管。我们的方法不仅可以拥有一个船只计划程序，而且我们概述了该工作流程如何适用于更广泛的社区，例如商业和乘客运输。

我们提出了Blenderbot 3，这是一个175B参数对话模型，能够通过访问Internet和长期内存进行开放域对话，并接受了大量用户定义的任务的培训。我们同时发布了模型权重和代码，还将模型部署在公共网页上，以与有机用户进行交互。该技术报告描述了该模型的构建方式（建筑，模型和培训计划）以及其部署的细节，包括安全机制。人类评估表明，它优于现有的开放域对话代理，包括其前身（Roller等，2021； Komeili等，2022）。最后，我们使用部署收集的数据详细介绍了持续学习的计划，该数据也将公开发布。因此，该研究计划的目标是使社区能够研究通过互动学习的不断改进的负责任的代理商。

自适应实例归一化（ADAIN）已成为样式注入的标准方法：通过通过缩放和迁移操作重新归一化功能，它发现在样式传输，图像生成和图像到图像转换中广泛使用。在这项工作中，我们提出了Adain的概括，该概括依赖于我们配音的美白和着色转化（WCT），我们将其申请在大型gan中申请样式注射。我们通过对Starganv2体系结构的实验来展示这种概括（尽管在概念上很简单，但在生成的图像的质量上都显着改善。