We present in this paper a family of generalized simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (G-SPSA) estimators that estimate the gradient of the objective using noisy function measurements, but where the number of function measurements and the form of the gradient estimator is guided by the desired estimator bias. In particular, estimators with more function measurements are seen to result in lower bias. We provide an analysis of convergence of the generalized SPSA algorithm, and point to possible future directions.

在本文中，我们提出了一种随机梯度算法，用于最大程度地减少对嘈杂成本样本的期望，而对于任何给定参数，则只观察到后者。我们的算法采用带有随机扰动的梯度估计方案，该方案是使用单位球体截断的cauchy分布形成的。我们分析了提出的梯度估计量的偏差和方差。发现我们的算法在目标函数是非凸且参数维度较高的情况下特别有用。从渐近收敛分析中，我们确定我们的算法几乎可以肯定地收敛到目标函数的固定点并获得渐近收敛速率。我们还表明，我们的算法避免了不稳定的平衡，这意味着与局部最小值的融合。此外，我们对我们的算法进行非反应收敛分析。特别是，我们在这里建立了一个非质子绑定，用于寻找非convex目标函数的$ \ epsilon $ stationary点。最后，我们通过模拟以数字方式证明我们的算法的性能在一些非凸面设置上优于GSF，SPSA和RDSA，并进一步验证其在凸（NOISY）目标上的性能。

基于实用的缺点风险（UBSR）是一种风险指标，越来越受到金融应用中的流行，由于它享有的某些理想的属性。我们考虑在递归设置中估算UBSR的问题，其中来自潜在损耗分布的样本是一次性的。我们将UBSR估计问题作为根发现问题，并提出了基于随机近似的估计方案。我们在样本数量的估计误差中获得了非渐近界。我们还考虑在随机变量的参数化类中的UBSR优化问题。我们提出了一种用于UBSR优化的随机梯度下降算法，并导出其收敛性的非渐近界。

我们通过失真风险度量（DRM）解决了风险敏感的增强学习（RL）环境中控制问题的问题。我们提出了策略梯度算法，该算法最大程度地提高了累积奖励的DRM，以在政策和损失的RL设置中进行情节的马尔可夫决策过程。我们采用两种不同的方法来设计政策梯度算法。在第一种方法中，我们得出了构成DRM目标的策略梯度定理的变体，并与基于可能的梯度估计方案结合使用该定理。在第二种方法中，我们从累积奖励的经验分布中估算了DRM，并使用此估计方案以及基于功能的平滑梯度估计方案。对于使用这两种方法的策略梯度算法，我们得出了非反应界限，这些界限将收敛建立到DRM目标的近似固定点。

While the brain connectivity network can inform the understanding and diagnosis of developmental dyslexia, its cause-effect relationships have not yet enough been examined. Employing electroencephalography signals and band-limited white noise stimulus at 4.8 Hz (prosodic-syllabic frequency), we measure the phase Granger causalities among channels to identify differences between dyslexic learners and controls, thereby proposing a method to calculate directional connectivity. As causal relationships run in both directions, we explore three scenarios, namely channels' activity as sources, as sinks, and in total. Our proposed method can be used for both classification and exploratory analysis. In all scenarios, we find confirmation of the established right-lateralized Theta sampling network anomaly, in line with the temporal sampling framework's assumption of oscillatory differences in the Theta and Gamma bands. Further, we show that this anomaly primarily occurs in the causal relationships of channels acting as sinks, where it is significantly more pronounced than when only total activity is observed. In the sink scenario, our classifier obtains 0.84 and 0.88 accuracy and 0.87 and 0.93 AUC for the Theta and Gamma bands, respectively.

There are multiple scales of abstraction from which we can describe the same image, depending on whether we are focusing on fine-grained details or a more global attribute of the image. In brain mapping, learning to automatically parse images to build representations of both small-scale features (e.g., the presence of cells or blood vessels) and global properties of an image (e.g., which brain region the image comes from) is a crucial and open challenge. However, most existing datasets and benchmarks for neuroanatomy consider only a single downstream task at a time. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new dataset, annotations, and multiple downstream tasks that provide diverse ways to readout information about brain structure and architecture from the same image. Our multi-task neuroimaging benchmark (MTNeuro) is built on volumetric, micrometer-resolution X-ray microtomography images spanning a large thalamocortical section of mouse brain, encompassing multiple cortical and subcortical regions. We generated a number of different prediction challenges and evaluated several supervised and self-supervised models for brain-region prediction and pixel-level semantic segmentation of microstructures. Our experiments not only highlight the rich heterogeneity of this dataset, but also provide insights into how self-supervised approaches can be used to learn representations that capture multiple attributes of a single image and perform well on a variety of downstream tasks. Datasets, code, and pre-trained baseline models are provided at: https://mtneuro.github.io/ .

The intersection of ground reaction forces in a small, point-like area above the center of mass has been observed in computer simulation models and human walking experiments. This intersection point is often called a virtual pivot point (VPP). With the VPP observed so ubiquitously, it is commonly assumed to provide postural stability for bipedal walking. In this study, we challenge this assumption by questioning if walking without a VPP is possible. Deriving gaits with a neuromuscular reflex model through multi-stage optimization, we found stable walking patterns that show no signs of the VPP-typical intersection of ground reaction forces. We, therefore, conclude that a VPP is not necessary for upright, stable walking. The non-VPP gaits found are stable and successfully rejected step-down perturbations, which indicates that a VPP is not primarily responsible for locomotion robustness or postural stability. However, a collision-based analysis indicates that non-VPP gaits increased the potential for collisions between the vectors of the center of mass velocity and ground reaction forces during walking, suggesting an increased mechanical cost of transport. Although our computer simulation results have yet to be confirmed through experimental studies, they already strongly challenge the existing explanation of the VPP's function and provide an alternative explanation.

The proliferation of automatic faithfulness metrics for summarization has produced a need for benchmarks to evaluate them. While existing benchmarks measure the correlation with human judgements of faithfulness on model-generated summaries, they are insufficient for diagnosing whether metrics are: 1) consistent, i.e., decrease as errors are introduced into a summary, 2) effective on human-written texts, and 3) sensitive to different error types (as summaries can contain multiple errors). To address these needs, we present a benchmark of unfaithful minimal pairs (BUMP), a dataset of 889 human-written, minimally different summary pairs, where a single error (from an ontology of 7 types) is introduced to a summary from the CNN/DailyMail dataset to produce an unfaithful summary. We find BUMP complements existing benchmarks in a number of ways: 1) the summaries in BUMP are harder to discriminate and less probable under SOTA summarization models, 2) BUMP enables measuring the consistency of metrics, and reveals that the most discriminative metrics tend not to be the most consistent, 3) BUMP enables the measurement of metrics' performance on individual error types and highlights areas of weakness for future work.

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.

The lack of standardization is a prominent issue in magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. This often causes undesired contrast variations due to differences in hardware and acquisition parameters. In recent years, MR harmonization using image synthesis with disentanglement has been proposed to compensate for the undesired contrast variations. Despite the success of existing methods, we argue that three major improvements can be made. First, most existing methods are built upon the assumption that multi-contrast MR images of the same subject share the same anatomy. This assumption is questionable since different MR contrasts are specialized to highlight different anatomical features. Second, these methods often require a fixed set of MR contrasts for training (e.g., both Tw-weighted and T2-weighted images must be available), which limits their applicability. Third, existing methods generally are sensitive to imaging artifacts. In this paper, we present a novel approach, Harmonization with Attention-based Contrast, Anatomy, and Artifact Awareness (HACA3), to address these three issues. We first propose an anatomy fusion module that enables HACA3 to respect the anatomical differences between MR contrasts. HACA3 is also robust to imaging artifacts and can be trained and applied to any set of MR contrasts. Experiments show that HACA3 achieves state-of-the-art performance under multiple image quality metrics. We also demonstrate the applicability of HACA3 on downstream tasks with diverse MR datasets acquired from 21 sites with different field strengths, scanner platforms, and acquisition protocols.