安全仍然是自动驾驶的主要问题，为了在全球部署，他们需要提前充分预测行人的动作。尽管对粗粒（人体中心预测）和细粒度预测（人体关键点的预测）进行了大量研究，但我们专注于3D边界框，这是对人类的合理估计，而无需对自动驾驶汽车进行复杂的运动细节进行建模。这具有灵活性，可以在现实世界中更长的视野中进行预测。我们建议这个新问题，并为行人的3D边界框预测提供了一个简单而有效的模型。该方法遵循基于复发性神经网络的编码器编码器体系结构，我们的实验在合成（JTA）和现实世界（Nuscenes）数据集中显示出其有效性。博学的表示形式具有有用的信息来增强其他任务的绩效，例如行动预期。我们的代码可在线提供：https：//github.com/vita-epfl/bounding-box-prediction

强大的模拟器高度降低了在培训和评估自动车辆时对真实测试的需求。数据驱动的模拟器蓬勃发展，最近有条件生成对冲网络（CGANS）的进步，提供高保真图像。主要挑战是在施加约束之后的同时合成光量造型图像。在这项工作中，我们建议通过重新思考鉴别者架构来提高所生成的图像的质量。重点是在给定对语义输入生成图像的问题类上，例如场景分段图或人体姿势。我们建立成功的CGAN模型，提出了一种新的语义感知鉴别器，更好地指导发电机。我们的目标是学习一个共享的潜在表示，编码足够的信息，共同进行语义分割，内容重建以及粗糙的粒度的对抗性推理。实现的改进是通用的，并且可以应用于任何条件图像合成的任何架构。我们展示了我们在场景，建筑和人类综合任务上的方法，跨越三个不同的数据集。代码可在https://github.com/vita-epfl/semdisc上获得。

现在是车辆轨迹预测是自动驾驶汽车的基本支柱。行业和研究社区都通过运行公共基准来承认这一柱的需求。而最先进的方法令人印象深刻，即，他们没有越野预测，他们对基准之外的城市的概括是未知的。在这项工作中，我们表明这些方法不会概括为新场景。我们提出了一种新颖的方法，可自动生成逼真的场景，导致最先进的模型越野。我们通过对抗场景生成的镜头来框架问题。我们推广基于原子场景生成功能的简单而有效的生成模型以及物理约束。我们的实验表明，可以在制作预测方法失败的方式中修改来自当前基准的超过60 000 \％$ 60 \％。我们进一步表明（i）生成的场景是现实的，因为它们确实存在于现实世界中，并且（ii）可用于使现有型号强大30-40％。代码可在https://sattack.github.io/处获得。

Compliance in actuation has been exploited to generate highly dynamic maneuvers such as throwing that take advantage of the potential energy stored in joint springs. However, the energy storage and release could not be well-timed yet. On the contrary, for multi-link systems, the natural system dynamics might even work against the actual goal. With the introduction of variable stiffness actuators, this problem has been partially addressed. With a suitable optimal control strategy, the approximate decoupling of the motor from the link can be achieved to maximize the energy transfer into the distal link prior to launch. However, such continuous stiffness variation is complex and typically leads to oscillatory swing-up motions instead of clear launch sequences. To circumvent this issue, we investigate decoupling for speed maximization with a dedicated novel actuator concept denoted Bi-Stiffness Actuation. With this, it is possible to fully decouple the link from the joint mechanism by a switch-and-hold clutch and simultaneously keep the elastic energy stored. We show that with this novel paradigm, it is not only possible to reach the same optimal performance as with power-equivalent variable stiffness actuation, but even directly control the energy transfer timing. This is a major step forward compared to previous optimal control approaches, which rely on optimizing the full time-series control input.

Recent advances in deep learning have enabled us to address the curse of dimensionality (COD) by solving problems in higher dimensions. A subset of such approaches of addressing the COD has led us to solving high-dimensional PDEs. This has resulted in opening doors to solving a variety of real-world problems ranging from mathematical finance to stochastic control for industrial applications. Although feasible, these deep learning methods are still constrained by training time and memory. Tackling these shortcomings, Tensor Neural Networks (TNN) demonstrate that they can provide significant parameter savings while attaining the same accuracy as compared to the classical Dense Neural Network (DNN). In addition, we also show how TNN can be trained faster than DNN for the same accuracy. Besides TNN, we also introduce Tensor Network Initializer (TNN Init), a weight initialization scheme that leads to faster convergence with smaller variance for an equivalent parameter count as compared to a DNN. We benchmark TNN and TNN Init by applying them to solve the parabolic PDE associated with the Heston model, which is widely used in financial pricing theory.

In a sequential decision-making problem, having a structural dependency amongst the reward distributions associated with the arms makes it challenging to identify a subset of alternatives that guarantees the optimal collective outcome. Thus, besides individual actions' reward, learning the causal relations is essential to improve the decision-making strategy. To solve the two-fold learning problem described above, we develop the 'combinatorial semi-bandit framework with causally related rewards', where we model the causal relations by a directed graph in a stationary structural equation model. The nodal observation in the graph signal comprises the corresponding base arm's instantaneous reward and an additional term resulting from the causal influences of other base arms' rewards. The objective is to maximize the long-term average payoff, which is a linear function of the base arms' rewards and depends strongly on the network topology. To achieve this objective, we propose a policy that determines the causal relations by learning the network's topology and simultaneously exploits this knowledge to optimize the decision-making process. We establish a sublinear regret bound for the proposed algorithm. Numerical experiments using synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method compared to several benchmarks.

An oft-cited open problem of federated learning is the existence of data heterogeneity at the clients. One pathway to understanding the drastic accuracy drop in federated learning is by scrutinizing the behavior of the clients' deep models on data with different levels of "difficulty", which has been left unaddressed. In this paper, we investigate a different and rarely studied dimension of FL: ordered learning. Specifically, we aim to investigate how ordered learning principles can contribute to alleviating the heterogeneity effects in FL. We present theoretical analysis and conduct extensive empirical studies on the efficacy of orderings spanning three kinds of learning: curriculum, anti-curriculum, and random curriculum. We find that curriculum learning largely alleviates non-IIDness. Interestingly, the more disparate the data distributions across clients the more they benefit from ordered learning. We provide analysis explaining this phenomenon, specifically indicating how curriculum training appears to make the objective landscape progressively less convex, suggesting fast converging iterations at the beginning of the training procedure. We derive quantitative results of convergence for both convex and nonconvex objectives by modeling the curriculum training on federated devices as local SGD with locally biased stochastic gradients. Also, inspired by ordered learning, we propose a novel client selection technique that benefits from the real-world disparity in the clients. Our proposed approach to client selection has a synergic effect when applied together with ordered learning in FL.

Remote state estimation of large-scale distributed dynamic processes plays an important role in Industry 4.0 applications. In this paper, we focus on the transmission scheduling problem of a remote estimation system. First, we derive some structural properties of the optimal sensor scheduling policy over fading channels. Then, building on these theoretical guidelines, we develop a structure-enhanced deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework for optimal scheduling of the system to achieve the minimum overall estimation mean-square error (MSE). In particular, we propose a structure-enhanced action selection method, which tends to select actions that obey the policy structure. This explores the action space more effectively and enhances the learning efficiency of DRL agents. Furthermore, we introduce a structure-enhanced loss function to add penalties to actions that do not follow the policy structure. The new loss function guides the DRL to converge to the optimal policy structure quickly. Our numerical experiments illustrate that the proposed structure-enhanced DRL algorithms can save the training time by 50% and reduce the remote estimation MSE by 10% to 25% when compared to benchmark DRL algorithms. In addition, we show that the derived structural properties exist in a wide range of dynamic scheduling problems that go beyond remote state estimation.

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.

In this paper, we perform an exhaustive evaluation of different representations to address the intent classification problem in a Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) setup. We benchmark three types of systems to perform the SLU intent detection task: 1) text-based, 2) lattice-based, and a novel 3) multimodal approach. Our work provides a comprehensive analysis of what could be the achievable performance of different state-of-the-art SLU systems under different circumstances, e.g., automatically- vs. manually-generated transcripts. We evaluate the systems on the publicly available SLURP spoken language resource corpus. Our results indicate that using richer forms of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) outputs allows SLU systems to improve in comparison to the 1-best setup (4% relative improvement). However, crossmodal approaches, i.e., learning from acoustic and text embeddings, obtains performance similar to the oracle setup, and a relative improvement of 18% over the 1-best configuration. Thus, crossmodal architectures represent a good alternative to overcome the limitations of working purely automatically generated textual data.