近年来，ML社区已经看到对普遍稳健的学习和隐式层次的兴趣飙升，但这两个领域之间的联系很少被探索。在这项工作中，我们将来自这些领域的创新结合起来解决N-K安全受限的最佳功率流量（SCOPF）的问题。 N-K SCOPF是用于电网操作的核心问题，并旨在以稳健的方式调度发电，以潜在的K同步设备中断。灵感来自对逆势稳健的培训中的方法，我们将n-k scopf框架作为最低限度优化问题 - 将发电设置视为可调节参数和设备中断作为（对抗性）攻击 - 并通过基于梯度的技术来解决这个问题。此Minimax问题的丢失函数涉及解析表示网格物理和操作决策的隐式方程，我们通过隐式功能定理来区分。我们展示了我们在解决N-3 SCOPF方面的框架的功效，传统上被认为是对解决问题规模的昂贵昂贵的昂贵，因为问题规模在组合上取决于潜在的中断的数量。

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 ability to convert reciprocating, i.e., alternating, actuation into rotary motion using linkages is hindered fundamentally by their poor torque transmission capability around kinematic singularity configurations. Here, we harness the elastic potential energy of a linear spring attached to the coupler link of four-bar mechanisms to manipulate force transmission around the kinematic singularities. We developed a theoretical model to explore the parameter space for proper force transmission in slider-crank and rocker-crank four-bar kinematics. Finally, we verified the proposed model and methodology by building and testing a macro-scale prototype of a slider-crank mechanism. We expect this approach to enable the development of small-scale rotary engines and robotic devices with closed kinematic chains dealing with serial kinematic singularities, such as linkages and parallel manipulators.

This paper considers a combination of actuation tendons and measurement strings to achieve accurate shape sensing and direct kinematics of continuum robots. Assuming general string routing, a methodical Lie group formulation for the shape sensing of these robots is presented. The shape kinematics is expressed using arc-length-dependent curvature distributions parameterized by modal functions, and the Magnus expansion for Lie group integration is used to express the shape as a product of exponentials. The tendon and string length kinematic constraints are solved for the modal coefficients and the configuration space and body Jacobian are derived. The noise amplification index for the shape reconstruction problem is defined and used for optimizing the string/tendon routing paths, and a planar simulation study shows the minimal number of strings/tendons needed for accurate shape reconstruction. A torsionally stiff continuum segment is used for experimental evaluation, demonstrating mean (maximal) end-effector absolute position error of less than 2% (5%) of total length. Finally, a simulation study of a torsionally compliant segment demonstrates the approach for general deflections and string routings. We believe that the methods of this paper can benefit the design process, sensing and control of continuum and soft robots.

Image classification with small datasets has been an active research area in the recent past. However, as research in this scope is still in its infancy, two key ingredients are missing for ensuring reliable and truthful progress: a systematic and extensive overview of the state of the art, and a common benchmark to allow for objective comparisons between published methods. This article addresses both issues. First, we systematically organize and connect past studies to consolidate a community that is currently fragmented and scattered. Second, we propose a common benchmark that allows for an objective comparison of approaches. It consists of five datasets spanning various domains (e.g., natural images, medical imagery, satellite data) and data types (RGB, grayscale, multispectral). We use this benchmark to re-evaluate the standard cross-entropy baseline and ten existing methods published between 2017 and 2021 at renowned venues. Surprisingly, we find that thorough hyper-parameter tuning on held-out validation data results in a highly competitive baseline and highlights a stunted growth of performance over the years. Indeed, only a single specialized method dating back to 2019 clearly wins our benchmark and outperforms the baseline classifier.

The availability of frequent and cost-free satellite images is in growing demand in the research world. Such satellite constellations as Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 provide a massive amount of valuable data daily. However, the discrepancy in the sensors' characteristics of these satellites makes it senseless to use a segmentation model trained on either dataset and applied to another, which is why domain adaptation techniques have recently become an active research area in remote sensing. In this paper, an experiment of domain adaptation through style-transferring is conducted using the HRSemI2I model to narrow the sensor discrepancy between Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2. This paper's main contribution is analyzing the expediency of that approach by comparing the results of segmentation using domain-adapted images with those without adaptation. The HRSemI2I model, adjusted to work with 6-band imagery, shows significant intersection-over-union performance improvement for both mean and per class metrics. A second contribution is providing different schemes of generalization between two label schemes - NALCMS 2015 and CORINE. The first scheme is standardization through higher-level land cover classes, and the second is through harmonization validation in the field.

In this paper, we address the problem of multimodal emotion recognition from multiple physiological signals. We demonstrate that a Transformer-based approach is suitable for this task. In addition, we present how such models may be pretrained in a multimodal scenario to improve emotion recognition performances. We evaluate the benefits of using multimodal inputs and pre-training with our approach on a state-ofthe-art dataset.

Algorithms that involve both forecasting and optimization are at the core of solutions to many difficult real-world problems, such as in supply chains (inventory optimization), traffic, and in the transition towards carbon-free energy generation in battery/load/production scheduling in sustainable energy systems. Typically, in these scenarios we want to solve an optimization problem that depends on unknown future values, which therefore need to be forecast. As both forecasting and optimization are difficult problems in their own right, relatively few research has been done in this area. This paper presents the findings of the ``IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge on Predict+Optimize for Renewable Energy Scheduling," held in 2021. We present a comparison and evaluation of the seven highest-ranked solutions in the competition, to provide researchers with a benchmark problem and to establish the state of the art for this benchmark, with the aim to foster and facilitate research in this area. The competition used data from the Monash Microgrid, as well as weather data and energy market data. It then focused on two main challenges: forecasting renewable energy production and demand, and obtaining an optimal schedule for the activities (lectures) and on-site batteries that lead to the lowest cost of energy. The most accurate forecasts were obtained by gradient-boosted tree and random forest models, and optimization was mostly performed using mixed integer linear and quadratic programming. The winning method predicted different scenarios and optimized over all scenarios jointly using a sample average approximation method.

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.