描述了一种用于分析摄像机陷阱延时记录的新的开源图像处理管道。该管道包括机器学习模型，以帮助人类的视频细分和动物重新识别。我们在为期一年的项目中使用了该管道的实用性的一些绩效结果和观察结果，研究了Gopher Tortoise的空间生态和社会行为。

语言模型既展示了定量的改进，又展示了新的定性功能，随着规模的增加。尽管它们具有潜在的变革性影响，但这些新能力的特征却很差。为了为未来的研究提供信息，为破坏性的新模型能力做准备，并改善社会有害的效果，至关重要的是，我们必须了解目前和近乎未来的能力和语言模型的局限性。为了应对这一挑战，我们介绍了超越模仿游戏基准（Big Bench）。 Big Bench目前由204个任务组成，由132家机构的442位作者贡献。任务主题是多样的，从语言学，儿童发展，数学，常识性推理，生物学，物理学，社会偏见，软件开发等等。 Big-Bench专注于被认为超出当前语言模型的功能的任务。我们评估了OpenAI的GPT型号，Google内部密集变压器体系结构和大型基础上的开关稀疏变压器的行为，跨越了数百万到数十亿个参数。此外，一个人类专家评估者团队执行了所有任务，以提供强大的基准。研究结果包括：模型性能和校准都随规模改善，但绝对的术语（以及与评估者的性能相比）；在模型类中的性能非常相似，尽管带有稀疏性。逐渐和预测的任务通常涉及大量知识或记忆成分，而在临界规模上表现出“突破性”行为的任务通常涉及多个步骤或组成部分或脆性指标；社交偏见通常会随着含糊不清的环境而随着规模而增加，但这可以通过提示来改善。

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

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.

Reinforcement-learning agents seek to maximize a reward signal through environmental interactions. As humans, our contribution to the learning process is through designing the reward function. Like programmers, we have a behavior in mind and have to translate it into a formal specification, namely rewards. In this work, we consider the reward-design problem in tasks formulated as reaching desirable states and avoiding undesirable states. To start, we propose a strict partial ordering of the policy space. We prefer policies that reach the good states faster and with higher probability while avoiding the bad states longer. Next, we propose an environment-independent tiered reward structure and show it is guaranteed to induce policies that are Pareto-optimal according to our preference relation. Finally, we empirically evaluate tiered reward functions on several environments and show they induce desired behavior and lead to fast learning.

Estimating the probability of failure for complex real-world systems using high-fidelity computational models is often prohibitively expensive, especially when the probability is small. Exploiting low-fidelity models can make this process more feasible, but merging information from multiple low-fidelity and high-fidelity models poses several challenges. This paper presents a robust multi-fidelity surrogate modeling strategy in which the multi-fidelity surrogate is assembled using an active learning strategy using an on-the-fly model adequacy assessment set within a subset simulation framework for efficient reliability analysis. The multi-fidelity surrogate is assembled by first applying a Gaussian process correction to each low-fidelity model and assigning a model probability based on the model's local predictive accuracy and cost. Three strategies are proposed to fuse these individual surrogates into an overall surrogate model based on model averaging and deterministic/stochastic model selection. The strategies also dictate which model evaluations are necessary. No assumptions are made about the relationships between low-fidelity models, while the high-fidelity model is assumed to be the most accurate and most computationally expensive model. Through two analytical and two numerical case studies, including a case study evaluating the failure probability of Tristructural isotropic-coated (TRISO) nuclear fuels, the algorithm is shown to be highly accurate while drastically reducing the number of high-fidelity model calls (and hence computational cost).

Manually analyzing spermatozoa is a tremendous task for biologists due to the many fast-moving spermatozoa, causing inconsistencies in the quality of the assessments. Therefore, computer-assisted sperm analysis (CASA) has become a popular solution. Despite this, more data is needed to train supervised machine learning approaches in order to improve accuracy and reliability. In this regard, we provide a dataset called VISEM-Tracking with 20 video recordings of 30s of spermatozoa with manually annotated bounding-box coordinates and a set of sperm characteristics analyzed by experts in the domain. VISEM-Tracking is an extension of the previously published VISEM dataset. In addition to the annotated data, we provide unlabeled video clips for easy-to-use access and analysis of the data. As part of this paper, we present baseline sperm detection performances using the YOLOv5 deep learning model trained on the VISEM-Tracking dataset. As a result, the dataset can be used to train complex deep-learning models to analyze spermatozoa. The dataset is publicly available at https://zenodo.org/record/7293726.

End-to-end multilingual ASR has become more appealing because of several reasons such as simplifying the training and deployment process and positive performance transfer from high-resource to low-resource languages. However, scaling up the number of languages, total hours, and number of unique tokens is not a trivial task. This paper explores large-scale multilingual ASR models on 70 languages. We inspect two architectures: (1) Shared embedding and output and (2) Multiple embedding and output model. In the shared model experiments, we show the importance of tokenization strategy across different languages. Later, we use our optimal tokenization strategy to train multiple embedding and output model to further improve our result. Our multilingual ASR achieves 13.9%-15.6% average WER relative improvement compared to monolingual models. We show that our multilingual ASR generalizes well on an unseen dataset and domain, achieving 9.5% and 7.5% WER on Multilingual Librispeech (MLS) with zero-shot and finetuning, respectively.

Despite the huge advancement in knowledge discovery and data mining techniques, the X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis process has mostly remained untouched and still involves manual investigation, comparison, and verification. Due to the large volume of XRD samples from high-throughput XRD experiments, it has become impossible for domain scientists to process them manually. Recently, they have started leveraging standard clustering techniques, to reduce the XRD pattern representations requiring manual efforts for labeling and verification. Nevertheless, these standard clustering techniques do not handle problem-specific aspects such as peak shifting, adjacent peaks, background noise, and mixed phases; hence, resulting in incorrect composition-phase diagrams that complicate further steps. Here, we leverage data mining techniques along with domain expertise to handle these issues. In this paper, we introduce an incremental phase mapping approach based on binary peak representations using a new threshold based fuzzy dissimilarity measure. The proposed approach first applies an incremental phase computation algorithm on discrete binary peak representation of XRD samples, followed by hierarchical clustering or manual merging of similar pure phases to obtain the final composition-phase diagram. We evaluate our method on the composition space of two ternary alloy systems- Co-Ni-Ta and Co-Ti-Ta. Our results are verified by domain scientists and closely resembles the manually computed ground-truth composition-phase diagrams. The proposed approach takes us closer towards achieving the goal of complete end-to-end automated XRD analysis.

Recent advances in reinforcement-learning research have demonstrated impressive results in building algorithms that can out-perform humans in complex tasks. Nevertheless, creating reinforcement-learning systems that can build abstractions of their experience to accelerate learning in new contexts still remains an active area of research. Previous work showed that reward-predictive state abstractions fulfill this goal, but have only be applied to tabular settings. Here, we provide a clustering algorithm that enables the application of such state abstractions to deep learning settings, providing compressed representations of an agent's inputs that preserve the ability to predict sequences of reward. A convergence theorem and simulations show that the resulting reward-predictive deep network maximally compresses the agent's inputs, significantly speeding up learning in high dimensional visual control tasks. Furthermore, we present different generalization experiments and analyze under which conditions a pre-trained reward-predictive representation network can be re-used without re-training to accelerate learning -- a form of systematic out-of-distribution transfer.