Network-based analyses of dynamical systems have become increasingly popular in climate science. Here we address network construction from a statistical perspective and highlight the often ignored fact that the calculated correlation values are only empirical estimates. To measure spurious behaviour as deviation from a ground truth network, we simulate time-dependent isotropic random fields on the sphere and apply common network construction techniques. We find several ways in which the uncertainty stemming from the estimation procedure has major impact on network characteristics. When the data has locally coherent correlation structure, spurious link bundle teleconnections and spurious high-degree clusters have to be expected. Anisotropic estimation variance can also induce severe biases into empirical networks. We validate our findings with ERA5 reanalysis data. Moreover we explain why commonly applied resampling procedures are inappropriate for significance evaluation and propose a statistically more meaningful ensemble construction framework. By communicating which difficulties arise in estimation from scarce data and by presenting which design decisions increase robustness, we hope to contribute to more reliable climate network construction in the future.

With the advent of Neural Style Transfer (NST), stylizing an image has become quite popular. A convenient way for extending stylization techniques to videos is by applying them on a per-frame basis. However, such per-frame application usually lacks temporal-consistency expressed by undesirable flickering artifacts. Most of the existing approaches for enforcing temporal-consistency suffers from one or more of the following drawbacks. They (1) are only suitable for a limited range of stylization techniques, (2) can only be applied in an offline fashion requiring the complete video as input, (3) cannot provide consistency for the task of stylization, or (4) do not provide interactive consistency-control. Note that existing consistent video-filtering approaches aim to completely remove flickering artifacts and thus do not respect any specific consistency-control aspect. For stylization tasks, however, consistency-control is an essential requirement where a certain amount of flickering can add to the artistic look and feel. Moreover, making this control interactive is paramount from a usability perspective. To achieve the above requirements, we propose an approach that can stylize video streams while providing interactive consistency-control. Apart from stylization, our approach also supports various other image processing filters. For achieving interactive performance, we develop a lite optical-flow network that operates at 80 Frames per second (FPS) on desktop systems with sufficient accuracy. We show that the final consistent video-output using our flow network is comparable to that being obtained using state-of-the-art optical-flow network. Further, we employ an adaptive combination of local and global consistent features and enable interactive selection between the two. By objective and subjective evaluation, we show that our method is superior to state-of-the-art approaches.

This short paper discusses continually updated causal abstractions as a potential direction of future research. The key idea is to revise the existing level of causal abstraction to a different level of detail that is both consistent with the history of observed data and more effective in solving a given task.

Many researchers have voiced their support towards Pearl's counterfactual theory of causation as a stepping stone for AI/ML research's ultimate goal of intelligent systems. As in any other growing subfield, patience seems to be a virtue since significant progress on integrating notions from both fields takes time, yet, major challenges such as the lack of ground truth benchmarks or a unified perspective on classical problems such as computer vision seem to hinder the momentum of the research movement. This present work exemplifies how the Pearl Causal Hierarchy (PCH) can be understood on image data by providing insights on several intricacies but also challenges that naturally arise when applying key concepts from Pearlian causality to the study of image data.

In recent years, nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) has been extensively used for solving automotive motion control and planning tasks. In order to formulate the NMPC problem, different coordinate systems can be used with different advantages. We propose and compare formulations for the NMPC related optimization problem, involving a Cartesian and a Frenet coordinate frame (CCF/ FCF) in a single nonlinear program (NLP). We specify costs and collision avoidance constraints in the more advantageous coordinate frame, derive appropriate formulations and compare different obstacle constraints. With this approach, we exploit the simpler formulation of opponent vehicle constraints in the CCF, as well as road aligned costs and constraints related to the FCF. Comparisons to other approaches in a simulation framework highlight the advantages of the proposed approaches.

In recent years the applications of machine learning models have increased rapidly, due to the large amount of available data and technological progress.While some domains like web analysis can benefit from this with only minor restrictions, other fields like in medicine with patient data are strongerregulated. In particular \emph{data privacy} plays an important role as recently highlighted by the trustworthy AI initiative of the EU or general privacy regulations in legislation. Another major challenge is, that the required training \emph{data is} often \emph{distributed} in terms of features or samples and unavailable for classicalbatch learning approaches. In 2016 Google came up with a framework, called \emph{Federated Learning} to solve both of these problems. We provide a brief overview on existing Methods and Applications in the field of vertical and horizontal \emph{Federated Learning}, as well as \emph{Fderated Transfer Learning}.

Topic modeling is widely used for analytically evaluating large collections of textual data. One of the most popular topic techniques is Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which is flexible and adaptive, but not optimal for e.g. short texts from various domains. We explore how the state-of-the-art BERTopic algorithm performs on short multi-domain text and find that it generalizes better than LDA in terms of topic coherence and diversity. We further analyze the performance of the HDBSCAN clustering algorithm utilized by BERTopic and find that it classifies a majority of the documents as outliers. This crucial, yet overseen problem excludes too many documents from further analysis. When we replace HDBSCAN with k-Means, we achieve similar performance, but without outliers.

The success of Deep Learning applications critically depends on the quality and scale of the underlying training data. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) can generate arbitrary large datasets, but diversity and fidelity are limited, which has recently been addressed by denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) whose superiority has been demonstrated on natural images. In this study, we propose Medfusion, a conditional latent DDPM for medical images. We compare our DDPM-based model against GAN-based models, which constitute the current state-of-the-art in the medical domain. Medfusion was trained and compared with (i) StyleGan-3 on n=101,442 images from the AIROGS challenge dataset to generate fundoscopies with and without glaucoma, (ii) ProGAN on n=191,027 from the CheXpert dataset to generate radiographs with and without cardiomegaly and (iii) wGAN on n=19,557 images from the CRCMS dataset to generate histopathological images with and without microsatellite stability. In the AIROGS, CRMCS, and CheXpert datasets, Medfusion achieved lower (=better) FID than the GANs (11.63 versus 20.43, 30.03 versus 49.26, and 17.28 versus 84.31). Also, fidelity (precision) and diversity (recall) were higher (=better) for Medfusion in all three datasets. Our study shows that DDPM are a superior alternative to GANs for image synthesis in the medical domain.

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are becoming increasingly more important in assisted and automated driving. Using such entities which are obtained using machine learning is inevitable: tasks such as recognizing traffic signs cannot be developed reasonably using traditional software development methods. DNN however do have the problem that they are mostly black boxes and therefore hard to understand and debug. One particular problem is that they are prone to hidden backdoors. This means that the DNN misclassifies its input, because it considers properties that should not be decisive for the output. Backdoors may either be introduced by malicious attackers or by inappropriate training. In any case, detecting and removing them is important in the automotive area, as they might lead to safety violations with potentially severe consequences. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to remove backdoors. Our method works for both intentional as well as unintentional backdoors. We also do not require prior knowledge about the shape or distribution of backdoors. Experimental evidence shows that our method performs well on several medium-sized examples.

Although massive pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP show impressive generalization capabilities for many tasks, still it often remains necessary to fine-tune them for improved performance on specific datasets. When doing so, it is desirable that updating the model is fast and that the model does not lose its capabilities on data outside of the dataset, as is often the case with classical fine-tuning approaches. In this work we suggest a lightweight adapter, that only updates the models predictions close to seen datapoints. We demonstrate the effectiveness and speed of this relatively simple approach in the context of few-shot learning, where our results both on classes seen and unseen during training are comparable with or improve on the state of the art.