在过去的几年中，不同类型的数据驱动的人工智能（AI）技术已在科学的各个领域广泛采用，用于生成预测的黑盒模型。但是，由于其黑框的性质，在接受这些模型之前对这些模型建立信任至关重要。实现这一目标的一种方法是实施事后解释方案，该方案可以提出黑框模型预测背后的原因。在这项工作中，我们为此目的提出了一种经典的热力学启发方法：AI和其他黑盒范式（TERP）的热力学解释表示。 TERP通过构建线性的局部替代模型来起作用，该模型在所解释的实例周围的小社区中近似黑框模型的行为。通过采用简单的前向特征选择蒙特卡洛算法，TERP为所有可能的替代模型分配了解释性自由能评分，以选择最佳解释。此外，我们通过成功解释来自来自相关领域的数据集的四种不同类别的黑盒模型，将TERP验证为一种通常适用的方法，包括对图像进行分类，预测心脏病和分类生物分子构象。

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/ .

Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most prevalent chronic joint disease worldwide, where knee OA takes more than 80% of commonly affected joints. Knee OA is not a curable disease yet, and it affects large columns of patients, making it costly to patients and healthcare systems. Etiology, diagnosis, and treatment of knee OA might be argued by variability in its clinical and physical manifestations. Although knee OA carries a list of well-known terminology aiming to standardize the nomenclature of the diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and clinical outcomes of the chronic joint disease, in practice there is a wide range of terminology associated with knee OA across different data sources, including but not limited to biomedical literature, clinical notes, healthcare literacy, and health-related social media. Among these data sources, the scientific articles published in the biomedical literature usually make a principled pipeline to study disease. Rapid yet, accurate text mining on large-scale scientific literature may discover novel knowledge and terminology to better understand knee OA and to improve the quality of knee OA diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. The present works aim to utilize artificial neural network strategies to automatically extract vocabularies associated with knee OA diseases. Our finding indicates the feasibility of developing word embedding neural networks for autonomous keyword extraction and abstraction of knee OA.

Fine-tuning a Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) on a specific downstream task has been a well-known paradigm in Natural Language Processing. However, with the ever-growing size of PLMs, training the entire model on several downstream tasks becomes very expensive and resource-hungry. Recently, different Parameter Efficient Tuning (PET) techniques are proposed to improve the efficiency of fine-tuning PLMs. One popular category of PET methods is the low-rank adaptation methods which insert learnable truncated SVD modules into the original model either sequentially or in parallel. However, low-rank decomposition suffers from limited representation power. In this work, we address this problem using the Kronecker product instead of the low-rank representation. We introduce KronA, a Kronecker product-based adapter module for efficient fine-tuning of Transformer-based PLMs. We apply the proposed methods for fine-tuning T5 on the GLUE benchmark to show that incorporating the Kronecker-based modules can outperform state-of-the-art PET methods.

Prior work has shown that coupling sequential latent variable models with semantic ontological knowledge can improve the representational capabilities of event modeling approaches. In this work, we present a novel, doubly hierarchical, semi-supervised event modeling framework that provides structural hierarchy while also accounting for ontological hierarchy. Our approach consists of multiple layers of structured latent variables, where each successive layer compresses and abstracts the previous layers. We guide this compression through the injection of structured ontological knowledge that is defined at the type level of events: importantly, our model allows for partial injection of semantic knowledge and it does not depend on observing instances at any particular level of the semantic ontology. Across two different datasets and four different evaluation metrics, we demonstrate that our approach is able to out-perform the previous state-of-the-art approaches, demonstrating the benefits of structured and semantic hierarchical knowledge for event modeling.

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.

Climate change is expected to intensify and increase extreme events in the weather cycle. Since this has a significant impact on various sectors of our life, recent works are concerned with identifying and predicting such extreme events from Earth observations. This paper proposes a 2D/3D two-branch convolutional neural network (CNN) for wildfire danger forecasting. To use a unified framework, previous approaches duplicate static variables along the time dimension and neglect the intrinsic differences between static and dynamic variables. Furthermore, most existing multi-branch architectures lose the interconnections between the branches during the feature learning stage. To address these issues, we propose a two-branch architecture with a Location-aware Adaptive Denormalization layer (LOADE). Using LOADE as a building block, we can modulate the dynamic features conditional on their geographical location. Thus, our approach considers feature properties as a unified yet compound 2D/3D model. Besides, we propose using an absolute temporal encoding for time-related forecasting problems. Our experimental results show a better performance of our approach than other baselines on the challenging FireCube dataset.

Scaling up neural networks has led to remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. Moreover, performance often follows reliable scaling laws as a function of training set size, model size, and compute, which offers valuable guidance as large-scale experiments are becoming increasingly expensive. However, previous work on scaling laws has primarily used private data \& models or focused on uni-modal language or vision learning. To address these limitations, we investigate scaling laws for contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) with the public LAION dataset and the open-source OpenCLIP repository. Our large-scale experiments involve models trained on up to two billion image-text pairs and identify power law scaling for multiple downstream tasks including zero-shot classification, retrieval, linear probing, and end-to-end fine-tuning. We find that the training distribution plays a key role in scaling laws as the OpenAI and OpenCLIP models exhibit different scaling behavior despite identical model architectures and similar training recipes. We open-source our evaluation workflow and all models, including the largest public CLIP models, to ensure reproducibility and make scaling laws research more accessible. Source code and instructions to reproduce this study will be available at https://github.com/LAION-AI/scaling-laws-openclip

Metaverse over wireless networks is an emerging use case of the sixth generation (6G) wireless systems, posing unprecedented challenges in terms of its multi-modal data transmissions with stringent latency and reliability requirements. Towards enabling this wireless metaverse, in this article we propose a novel semantic communication (SC) framework by decomposing the metaverse into human/machine agent-specific semantic multiverses (SMs). An SM stored at each agent comprises a semantic encoder and a generator, leveraging recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI). To improve communication efficiency, the encoder learns the semantic representations (SRs) of multi-modal data, while the generator learns how to manipulate them for locally rendering scenes and interactions in the metaverse. Since these learned SMs are biased towards local environments, their success hinges on synchronizing heterogeneous SMs in the background while communicating SRs in the foreground, turning the wireless metaverse problem into the problem of semantic multiverse communication (SMC). Based on this SMC architecture, we propose several promising algorithmic and analytic tools for modeling and designing SMC, ranging from distributed learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to signaling games and symbolic AI.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has been extensively used for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks to improve a small model's (a student) generalization by transferring the knowledge from a larger model (a teacher). Although KD methods achieve state-of-the-art performance in numerous settings, they suffer from several problems limiting their performance. It is shown in the literature that the capacity gap between the teacher and the student networks can make KD ineffective. Additionally, existing KD techniques do not mitigate the noise in the teacher's output: modeling the noisy behaviour of the teacher can distract the student from learning more useful features. We propose a new KD method that addresses these problems and facilitates the training compared to previous techniques. Inspired by continuation optimization, we design a training procedure that optimizes the highly non-convex KD objective by starting with the smoothed version of this objective and making it more complex as the training proceeds. Our method (Continuation-KD) achieves state-of-the-art performance across various compact architectures on NLU (GLUE benchmark) and computer vision tasks (CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100).