树皮甲虫暴发会极大地影响世界各地的森林生态系统和服务。为了制定有效的森林政策和管理计划，至关重要的是对树木的早期发现至关重要。尽管树皮甲虫的侵扰存在视觉症状，但考虑到冠状叶子变色的树冠和非同质性，这项任务仍然具有挑战性。在这项工作中，提出了一种基于深度学习的方法，以有效地对单个树级别的树皮甲虫攻击的不同阶段进行分类。所提出的方法使用视网膜架构（利用预萃取良好的特征提取主链进行树冠检测）来训练浅子网络，以对无人机（无人驾驶汽车）捕获的图像的不同攻击阶段进行分类。此外，检查了各种数据增强策略以解决类不平衡问题，因此，选择仿射转换是为此目的最有效的。实验评估通过达到98.95％的平均准确性来证明该方法的有效性，使基线方法的表现高约10％。

在自然界中，动物的集体行为（例如飞鸟）由同一物种的个体之间的相互作用主导。但是，对鸟类物种中这种行为的研究是一个复杂的过程，即人类无法使用常规的视觉观察技术（例如自然界的焦点采样）进行。对于鸟类等社会动物，群体形成的机制可以帮助生态学家了解社交线索及其视觉特征随着时间的流逝（例如姿势和形状）之间的关系。但是，恢复飞行鸟类的不同姿势和形状是一个极具挑战性的问题。解决此瓶颈的一种广泛的解决方案是将姿势和形状从2D图像提取到3D对应关系。 3D视觉的最新进展导致了关于3D形状和姿势估计的许多令人印象深刻的作品，每项作品都有不同的利弊。据我们所知，这项工作是首次尝试概述基于单眼视觉的3D鸟重建的最新进展，使计算机视觉和生物学研究人员概述了现有方法，并比较其特征。

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.

Real-world robotic grasping can be done robustly if a complete 3D Point Cloud Data (PCD) of an object is available. However, in practice, PCDs are often incomplete when objects are viewed from few and sparse viewpoints before the grasping action, leading to the generation of wrong or inaccurate grasp poses. We propose a novel grasping strategy, named 3DSGrasp, that predicts the missing geometry from the partial PCD to produce reliable grasp poses. Our proposed PCD completion network is a Transformer-based encoder-decoder network with an Offset-Attention layer. Our network is inherently invariant to the object pose and point's permutation, which generates PCDs that are geometrically consistent and completed properly. Experiments on a wide range of partial PCD show that 3DSGrasp outperforms the best state-of-the-art method on PCD completion tasks and largely improves the grasping success rate in real-world scenarios. The code and dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

Practically all of the planning research is limited to states represented in terms of Boolean and numeric state variables. Many practical problems, for example, planning inside complex software systems, require far more complex data types, and even real-world planning in many cases requires concepts such as sets of objects, which are not convenient to express in modeling languages with scalar types only. In this work, we investigate a modeling language for complex software systems, which supports complex data types such as sets, arrays, records, and unions. We give a reduction of a broad range of complex data types and their operations to Boolean logic, and then map this representation further to PDDL to be used with domain-independent PDDL planners. We evaluate the practicality of this approach, and provide solutions to some of the issues that arise in the PDDL translation.

This paper deals with the problem of statistical and system heterogeneity in a cross-silo Federated Learning (FL) framework where there exist a limited number of Consumer Internet of Things (CIoT) devices in a smart building. We propose a novel Graph Signal Processing (GSP)-inspired aggregation rule based on graph filtering dubbed ``G-Fedfilt''. The proposed aggregator enables a structured flow of information based on the graph's topology. This behavior allows capturing the interconnection of CIoT devices and training domain-specific models. The embedded graph filter is equipped with a tunable parameter which enables a continuous trade-off between domain-agnostic and domain-specific FL. In the case of domain-agnostic, it forces G-Fedfilt to act similar to the conventional Federated Averaging (FedAvg) aggregation rule. The proposed G-Fedfilt also enables an intrinsic smooth clustering based on the graph connectivity without explicitly specified which further boosts the personalization of the models in the framework. In addition, the proposed scheme enjoys a communication-efficient time-scheduling to alleviate the system heterogeneity. This is accomplished by adaptively adjusting the amount of training data samples and sparsity of the models' gradients to reduce communication desynchronization and latency. Simulation results show that the proposed G-Fedfilt achieves up to $3.99\% $ better classification accuracy than the conventional FedAvg when concerning model personalization on the statistically heterogeneous local datasets, while it is capable of yielding up to $2.41\%$ higher accuracy than FedAvg in the case of testing the generalization of the models.

Solute transport in porous media is relevant to a wide range of applications in hydrogeology, geothermal energy, underground CO2 storage, and a variety of chemical engineering systems. Due to the complexity of solute transport in heterogeneous porous media, traditional solvers require high resolution meshing and are therefore expensive computationally. This study explores the application of a mesh-free method based on deep learning to accelerate the simulation of solute transport. We employ Physics-informed Neural Networks (PiNN) to solve solute transport problems in homogeneous and heterogeneous porous media governed by the advection-dispersion equation. Unlike traditional neural networks that learn from large training datasets, PiNNs only leverage the strong form mathematical models to simultaneously solve for multiple dependent or independent field variables (e.g., pressure and solute concentration fields). In this study, we construct PiNN using a periodic activation function to better represent the complex physical signals (i.e., pressure) and their derivatives (i.e., velocity). Several case studies are designed with the intention of investigating the proposed PiNN's capability to handle different degrees of complexity. A manual hyperparameter tuning method is used to find the best PiNN architecture for each test case. Point-wise error and mean square error (MSE) measures are employed to assess the performance of PiNNs' predictions against the ground truth solutions obtained analytically or numerically using the finite element method. Our findings show that the predictions of PiNN are in good agreement with the ground truth solutions while reducing computational complexity and cost by, at least, three orders of magnitude.

The JPEG standard is widely used in different image processing applications. One of the main components of the JPEG standard is the quantisation table (QT) since it plays a vital role in the image properties such as image quality and file size. In recent years, several efforts based on population-based metaheuristic (PBMH) algorithms have been performed to find the proper QT(s) for a specific image, although they do not take into consideration the user's opinion. Take an android developer as an example, who prefers a small-size image, while the optimisation process results in a high-quality image, leading to a huge file size. Another pitfall of the current works is a lack of comprehensive coverage, meaning that the QT(s) can not provide all possible combinations of file size and quality. Therefore, this paper aims to propose three distinct contributions. First, to include the user's opinion in the compression process, the file size of the output image can be controlled by a user in advance. Second, to tackle the lack of comprehensive coverage, we suggest a novel representation. Our proposed representation can not only provide more comprehensive coverage but also find the proper value for the quality factor for a specific image without any background knowledge. Both changes in representation and objective function are independent of the search strategies and can be used with any type of population-based metaheuristic (PBMH) algorithm. Therefore, as the third contribution, we also provide a comprehensive benchmark on 22 state-of-the-art and recently-introduced PBMH algorithms on our new formulation of JPEG image compression. Our extensive experiments on different benchmark images and in terms of different criteria show that our novel formulation for JPEG image compression can work effectively.

This paper presents a Temporal Graph Neural Network (TGNN) framework for detection and localization of false data injection and ramp attacks on the system state in smart grids. Capturing the topological information of the system through the GNN framework along with the state measurements can improve the performance of the detection mechanism. The problem is formulated as a classification problem through a GNN with message passing mechanism to identify abnormal measurements. The residual block used in the aggregation process of message passing and the gated recurrent unit can lead to improved computational time and performance. The performance of the proposed model has been evaluated through extensive simulations of power system states and attack scenarios showing promising performance. The sensitivity of the model to intensity and location of the attacks and model's detection delay versus detection accuracy have also been evaluated.

In this work, we propose a communication-efficient two-layer federated learning algorithm for distributed setups including a core server and multiple edge servers with clusters of devices. Assuming different learning tasks, clusters with a same task collaborate. To implement the algorithm over wireless links, we propose a scalable clustered over-the-air aggregation scheme for the uplink with a bandwidth-limited broadcast scheme for the downlink that requires only two single resource blocks for each algorithm iteration, independent of the number of edge servers and devices. This setup is faced with interference of devices in the uplink and interference of edge servers in the downlink that are to be modeled rigorously. We first develop a spatial model for the setup by modeling devices as a Poisson cluster process over the edge servers and quantify uplink and downlink error terms due to the interference. Accordingly, we present a comprehensive mathematical approach to derive the convergence bound for the proposed algorithm including any number of collaborating clusters in the setup and provide important special cases and design remarks. Finally, we show that despite the interference in the proposed uplink and downlink schemes, the proposed algorithm achieves high learning accuracy for a variety of parameters.