受约束的部分可观察到的马尔可夫决策过程（CPOMDP）已用于模拟各种现实现象。但是，众所周知，它们很难解决最优性，并且只有几种近似方法来获得高质量的解决方案。在这项研究中，我们将基于网格的近似值与线性编程（LP）模型结合使用来生成CPOMDP的近似策略。我们考虑了五个CPOMDP问题实例，并对其有限和无限的地平线配方进行了详细的数值研究。我们首先通过使用精确溶液方法进行比较分析来建立近似无约束的POMDP策略的质量。然后，我们显示了基于LP的CPOMDP解决方案方法的性能，用于不同的问题实例的不同预算水平（即成本限制）。最后，我们通过应用确定性政策约束来展示基于LP的方法的灵活性，并研究这些约束对收集的奖励和CPU运行时间的影响。我们的分析表明，LP模型可以有效地为有限和无限的地平线问题生成近似策略，同时提供了将各种其他约束结合到基础模型中的灵活性。

乳腺癌是一种常见且致命的疾病，但是早期诊断时通常可以治愈。尽管大多数国家都有大规模筛查计划，但就乳腺癌筛查的单一全球公认政策尚无共识。疾病的复杂性；筛查方法的可用性有限，例如乳房X线摄影，磁共振成像（MRI）和超声筛选；公共卫生政策都将筛查政策制定。资源可用性问题需要设计符合预算的政策，该问题可以作为约束的部分可观察到的马尔可夫决策过程（CPOMDP）建模。在这项研究中，我们提出了一个多目标CPOMDP模型，用于乳腺癌筛查两个目标：最大程度地减少因乳腺癌而死亡的终生风险，并最大程度地调整了质量调整后的寿命。此外，我们考虑了扩展的动作空间，该空间允许筛查乳房X线摄影超出筛查方法。每个动作都对质量调整后的终身年份和终身风险以及独特的成本都有独特的影响。我们的结果揭示了针对不同预算水平的平均和高风险患者的最佳解决方案的帕累托前沿，决策者可以将其用于实践制定政策。

We present a dynamic path planning algorithm to navigate an amphibious rotor craft through a concave time-invariant obstacle field while attempting to minimize energy usage. We create a nonlinear quaternion state model that represents the rotor craft dynamics above and below the water. The 6 degree of freedom dynamics used within a layered architecture to generate motion paths for the vehicle to follow and the required control inputs. The rotor craft has a 3 dimensional map of its surroundings that is updated via limited range onboard sensor readings within the current medium (air or water). Path planning is done via PRM and D* Lite.

Nine language-vision AI models trained on web scrapes with the Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) objective are evaluated for evidence of a bias studied by psychologists: the sexual objectification of girls and women, which occurs when a person's human characteristics are disregarded and the person is treated as a body or a collection of body parts. A first experiment uses standardized images of women from the Sexual OBjectification and EMotion Database, and finds that, commensurate with prior research in psychology, human characteristics are disassociated from images of objectified women: the model's recognition of emotional state is mediated by whether the subject is fully or partially clothed. Embedding association tests (EATs) return significant effect sizes for both anger (d >.8) and sadness (d >.5). A second experiment measures the effect in a representative application: an automatic image captioner (Antarctic Captions) includes words denoting emotion less than 50% as often for images of partially clothed women than for images of fully clothed women. A third experiment finds that images of female professionals (scientists, doctors, executives) are likely to be associated with sexual descriptions relative to images of male professionals. A fourth experiment shows that a prompt of "a [age] year old girl" generates sexualized images (as determined by an NSFW classifier) up to 73% of the time for VQGAN-CLIP (age 17), and up to 40% of the time for Stable Diffusion (ages 14 and 18); the corresponding rate for boys never surpasses 9%. The evidence indicates that language-vision AI models trained on automatically collected web scrapes learn biases of sexual objectification, which propagate to downstream applications.

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 apply the vision transformer, a deep machine learning model build around the attention mechanism, on mel-spectrogram representations of raw audio recordings. When adding mel-based data augmentation techniques and sample-weighting, we achieve comparable performance on both (PRS and CCS challenge) tasks of ComParE21, outperforming most single model baselines. We further introduce overlapping vertical patching and evaluate the influence of parameter configurations. Index Terms: audio classification, attention, mel-spectrogram, unbalanced data-sets, computational paralinguistics

Common to all different kinds of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is the intention to model relations between data points through time. When there is no immediate relationship between subsequent data points (like when the data points are generated at random, e.g.), we show that RNNs are still able to remember a few data points back into the sequence by memorizing them by heart using standard backpropagation. However, we also show that for classical RNNs, LSTM and GRU networks the distance of data points between recurrent calls that can be reproduced this way is highly limited (compared to even a loose connection between data points) and subject to various constraints imposed by the type and size of the RNN in question. This implies the existence of a hard limit (way below the information-theoretic one) for the distance between related data points within which RNNs are still able to recognize said relation.

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.

Earthquakes, fire, and floods often cause structural collapses of buildings. The inspection of damaged buildings poses a high risk for emergency forces or is even impossible, though. We present three recent selected missions of the Robotics Task Force of the German Rescue Robotics Center, where both ground and aerial robots were used to explore destroyed buildings. We describe and reflect the missions as well as the lessons learned that have resulted from them. In order to make robots from research laboratories fit for real operations, realistic test environments were set up for outdoor and indoor use and tested in regular exercises by researchers and emergency forces. Based on this experience, the robots and their control software were significantly improved. Furthermore, top teams of researchers and first responders were formed, each with realistic assessments of the operational and practical suitability of robotic systems.

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.