神经形态计算是一项新兴技术，可为需要有效的在线推理和/或控制的应用程序提供以事件为导向的数据处理。最近的工作引入了神经形态通信的概念，在该概念中，神经形态计算与Impulse Radio（IR）传输集成在一起，以实现无线物联网网络中的低能量和低延迟远程推断。在本文中，我们介绍了神经形态综合传感和通信（N-ISAC），这是一种新的解决方案，可实现有效的在线数据解码和雷达传感。 N-ISAC利用了一个常见的IR波形，以传达数字信息并检测存在或不存在雷达靶标的双重目的。在接收方部署了尖峰神经网络（SNN），以解码数字数据并使用接收的信号检测雷达目标。通过平衡数据通信和雷达传感的性能指标，突出了两个应用程序之间的协同作用和权衡，可以优化SNN操作。

生物智能的主要特征之一是能源效率，持续适应能力以及通过不确定性量化的风险管理。到目前为止，神经形态工程主要是由实施节能机器从生物学大脑的基于时间的计算范式中获得灵感的目标的驱动。在本文中，我们采取了朝着设计神经形态系统设计的步骤，这些系统能够适应改变学习任务，同时产生良好的不确定性量化估计。为此，我们得出了在贝叶斯持续学习框架内尖峰神经网络（SNN）的在线学习规则。在其中，每个突触重量都由参数表示，这些参数量化了先验知识和观察到的数据引起的当前认知不确定性。提出的在线规则在观察到数据时以流方式更新分布参数。我们实例化了实用值和二元突触权重的建议方法。使用英特尔熔岩平台的实验结果表明，贝叶斯在适应能力和不确定性定量方面的经常学习优点。

神经形态计算是一种新兴的计算范式，它从批处理的处理转向在线，事件驱动的流数据处理。当神经形态芯片与基于尖峰的传感器结合在一起时，只有在峰值时间内记录相关事件并证明对变化条件的低延迟响应时，才能通过消耗能量来固有地适应数据分布的“语义”。环境。本文为神经形态无线网络系统系统提出了端到端设计，该系统集成了基于尖峰的传感，处理和通信。在拟议的神经系统系统中，每个传感设备都配备了神经形态传感器，尖峰神经网络（SNN）和带有多个天线的脉冲无线电发射器。传输发生在配备了多Antenna脉冲无线电接收器和SNN的接收器上的共享褪色通道上进行。为了使接收器适应褪色的通道条件，我们引入了一项超网络，以使用飞行员控制解码SNN的权重。飞行员，编码SNN，解码SNN和超网络经过多个通道实现的共同训练。该系统被证明可以显着改善基于传统的基于框架的数字解决方案以及替代性非自适应训练方法，从时间到准确性和能源消耗指标方面。

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.

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.