Masked Language Modeling (MLM) has proven to be an essential component of Vision-Language (VL) pretraining. To implement MLM, the researcher must make two design choices: the masking strategy, which determines which tokens to mask, and the masking rate, which determines how many tokens to mask. Previous work has focused primarily on the masking strategy while setting the masking rate at a default of 15\%. In this paper, we show that increasing this masking rate improves downstream performance while simultaneously reducing performance gap among different masking strategies, rendering the uniform masking strategy competitive to other more complex ones. Surprisingly, we also discover that increasing the masking rate leads to gains in Image-Text Matching (ITM) tasks, suggesting that the role of MLM goes beyond language modeling in VL pretraining.

虽然神经网络在平均病例的性能方面对分类任务的成功显着，但它们通常无法在某些数据组上表现良好。这样的组信息可能是昂贵的;因此，即使在培训数据不可用的组标签不可用，较稳健性和公平的最新作品也提出了改善最差组性能的方法。然而，这些方法通常在培训时间使用集团信息的表现不佳。在这项工作中，我们假设没有组标签的较大数据集一起访问少量组标签。我们提出了一个简单的两步框架，利用这个部分组信息来提高最差组性能：训练模型以预测训练数据的丢失组标签，然后在强大的优化目标中使用这些预测的组标签。从理论上讲，我们在最差的组性能方面为我们的方法提供泛化界限，展示了泛化误差如何相对于培训点总数和具有组标签的培训点的数量。凭经验，我们的方法优于不使用群组信息的基线表达，即使只有1-33％的积分都有组标签。我们提供消融研究，以支持我们框架的稳健性和可扩展性。

We examine the role of memorization in deep learning, drawing connections to capacity, generalization, and adversarial robustness. While deep networks are capable of memorizing noise data, our results suggest that they tend to prioritize learning simple patterns first. In our experiments, we expose qualitative differences in gradient-based optimization of deep neural networks (DNNs) on noise vs. real data. We also demonstrate that for appropriately tuned explicit regularization (e.g., dropout) we can degrade DNN training performance on noise datasets without compromising generalization on real data. Our analysis suggests that the notions of effective capacity which are dataset independent are unlikely to explain the generalization performance of deep networks when trained with gradient based methods because training data itself plays an important role in determining the degree of memorization.

While depth tends to improve network performances, it also makes gradient-based training more difficult since deeper networks tend to be more non-linear. The recently proposed knowledge distillation approach is aimed at obtaining small and fast-to-execute models, and it has shown that a student network could imitate the soft output of a larger teacher network or ensemble of networks. In this paper, we extend this idea to allow the training of a student that is deeper and thinner than the teacher, using not only the outputs but also the intermediate representations learned by the teacher as hints to improve the training process and final performance of the student. Because the student intermediate hidden layer will generally be smaller than the teacher's intermediate hidden layer, additional parameters are introduced to map the student hidden layer to the prediction of the teacher hidden layer. This allows one to train deeper students that can generalize better or run faster, a trade-off that is controlled by the chosen student capacity. For example, on CIFAR-10, a deep student network with almost 10.4 times less parameters outperforms a larger, state-of-the-art teacher network.

This article formulates a generic representation of a path-following controller operating under contained motion, which was developed in the context of surgical robotics. It reports two types of constrained motion: i) Bilateral Constrained Motion, also called Remote Center Motion (RCM), and ii) Unilaterally Constrained Motion (UCM). In the first case, the incision hole has almost the same diameter as the robotic tool. In contrast, in the second state, the diameter of the incision orifice is larger than the tool diameter. The second case offers more space where the surgical instrument moves freely without constraints before touching the incision wall. The proposed method combines two tasks that must operate hierarchically: i) respect the RCM or UCM constraints formulated by equality or inequality, respectively, and ii) perform a surgical assignment, e.g., scanning or ablation expressed as a 3D path-following task. The proposed methods and materials were tested first on our simulator that mimics realistic conditions of middle ear surgery, and then on an experimental platform. Different validation scenarios were carried out experimentally to assess quantitatively and qualitatively each developed approach. Although ultimate precision was not the goal of this work, our concept is validated with enough accuracy (inferior to 100 micrometres) for ear surgery.

Several self-supervised representation learning methods have been proposed for reinforcement learning (RL) with rich observations. For real-world applications of RL, recovering underlying latent states is crucial, particularly when sensory inputs contain irrelevant and exogenous information. In this work, we study how information bottlenecks can be used to construct latent states efficiently in the presence of task-irrelevant information. We propose architectures that utilize variational and discrete information bottlenecks, coined as RepDIB, to learn structured factorized representations. Exploiting the expressiveness bought by factorized representations, we introduce a simple, yet effective, bottleneck that can be integrated with any existing self-supervised objective for RL. We demonstrate this across several online and offline RL benchmarks, along with a real robot arm task, where we find that compressed representations with RepDIB can lead to strong performance improvements, as the learned bottlenecks help predict only the relevant state while ignoring irrelevant information.

To face the dependency on fossil fuels and limit carbon emissions, fuel cells are a very promising technology and appear to be a key candidate to tackle the increase of the energy demand and promote the energy transition. To meet future needs for both transport and stationary applications, the time to market of fuel cell stacks must be drastically reduced. Here, a new concept to shorten their development time by introducing a disruptive and highefficiency data augmentation approach based on artificial intelligence is presented. Our results allow reducing the testing time before introducing a product on the market from a thousand to a few hours. The innovative concept proposed here can support engineering and research tasks during the fuel cell development process to achieve decreased development costs alongside a reduced time to market.

A learned system uses machine learning (ML) internally to improve performance. We can expect such systems to be vulnerable to some adversarial-ML attacks. Often, the learned component is shared between mutually-distrusting users or processes, much like microarchitectural resources such as caches, potentially giving rise to highly-realistic attacker models. However, compared to attacks on other ML-based systems, attackers face a level of indirection as they cannot interact directly with the learned model. Additionally, the difference between the attack surface of learned and non-learned versions of the same system is often subtle. These factors obfuscate the de-facto risks that the incorporation of ML carries. We analyze the root causes of potentially-increased attack surface in learned systems and develop a framework for identifying vulnerabilities that stem from the use of ML. We apply our framework to a broad set of learned systems under active development. To empirically validate the many vulnerabilities surfaced by our framework, we choose 3 of them and implement and evaluate exploits against prominent learned-system instances. We show that the use of ML caused leakage of past queries in a database, enabled a poisoning attack that causes exponential memory blowup in an index structure and crashes it in seconds, and enabled index users to snoop on each others' key distributions by timing queries over their own keys. We find that adversarial ML is a universal threat against learned systems, point to open research gaps in our understanding of learned-systems security, and conclude by discussing mitigations, while noting that data leakage is inherent in systems whose learned component is shared between multiple parties.

In intensively managed forests in Europe, where forests are divided into stands of small size and may show heterogeneity within stands, a high spatial resolution (10 - 20 meters) is arguably needed to capture the differences in canopy height. In this work, we developed a deep learning model based on multi-stream remote sensing measurements to create a high-resolution canopy height map over the "Landes de Gascogne" forest in France, a large maritime pine plantation of 13,000 km$^2$ with flat terrain and intensive management. This area is characterized by even-aged and mono-specific stands, of a typical length of a few hundred meters, harvested every 35 to 50 years. Our deep learning U-Net model uses multi-band images from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 with composite time averages as input to predict tree height derived from GEDI waveforms. The evaluation is performed with external validation data from forest inventory plots and a stereo 3D reconstruction model based on Skysat imagery available at specific locations. We trained seven different U-net models based on a combination of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 bands to evaluate the importance of each instrument in the dominant height retrieval. The model outputs allow us to generate a 10 m resolution canopy height map of the whole "Landes de Gascogne" forest area for 2020 with a mean absolute error of 2.02 m on the Test dataset. The best predictions were obtained using all available satellite layers from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 but using only one satellite source also provided good predictions. For all validation datasets in coniferous forests, our model showed better metrics than previous canopy height models available in the same region.

Recently, extensive studies on photonic reinforcement learning to accelerate the process of calculation by exploiting the physical nature of light have been conducted. Previous studies utilized quantum interference of photons to achieve collective decision-making without choice conflicts when solving the competitive multi-armed bandit problem, a fundamental example of reinforcement learning. However, the bandit problem deals with a static environment where the agent's action does not influence the reward probabilities. This study aims to extend the conventional approach to a more general multi-agent reinforcement learning targeting the grid world problem. Unlike the conventional approach, the proposed scheme deals with a dynamic environment where the reward changes because of agents' actions. A successful photonic reinforcement learning scheme requires both a photonic system that contributes to the quality of learning and a suitable algorithm. This study proposes a novel learning algorithm, discontinuous bandit Q-learning, in view of a potential photonic implementation. Here, state-action pairs in the environment are regarded as slot machines in the context of the bandit problem and an updated amount of Q-value is regarded as the reward of the bandit problem. We perform numerical simulations to validate the effectiveness of the bandit algorithm. In addition, we propose a multi-agent architecture in which agents are indirectly connected through quantum interference of light and quantum principles ensure the conflict-free property of state-action pair selections among agents. We demonstrate that multi-agent reinforcement learning can be accelerated owing to conflict avoidance among multiple agents.