我们提出了一种新颖的机器学习体系结构，双光谱神经网络（BNNS），用于学习数据的数据表示，这些数据是对定义信号的空间中组的行为不变的。该模型结合了双光谱的ANSATZ，这是一个完整的分析定义的组不变的，也就是说，它保留了所有信号结构，同时仅删除了由于组动作而造成的变化。在这里，我们证明了BNN能够在数据中发现任意的交换群体结构，并且训练有素的模型学习了组的不可减至表示，从而可以恢复组Cayley表。值得注意的是，受过训练的网络学会了对这些组的双偏见，因此具有分析对象的稳健性，完整性和通用性。

用于神经形态计算的生物学启发的尖峰神经元是具有动态状态变量的非线性滤波器 - 与深度学习中使用的无状态神经元模型非常不同。 Notel Intel的神经形态研究处理器Loihi 2的下一个版本支持各种具有完全可编程动态的最有状态尖峰神经元模型。在这里，我们展示了先进的尖峰神经元模型，可用于有效地处理仿真Loihi 2硬件的仿真实验中的流数据。在一个示例中，共振和火（RF）神经元用于计算短时间傅里叶变换（STFT），其具有类似的计算复杂度，但是输出带宽的47倍而不是传统的STFT。在另一个例子中，我们描述了一种使用时间率RF神经元的光学流量估计算法，其需要比传统的基于DNN的解决方案超过90倍。我们还展示了有前途的初步结果，使用BackPropagation培训RF神经元进行音频分类任务。最后，我们表明，跳跃的血管谐振器 - RF神经元的变体 - 重复耳蜗的新特性，并激励一种有效的基于尖峰的谱图编码器。

Machine learning models are typically evaluated by computing similarity with reference annotations and trained by maximizing similarity with such. Especially in the bio-medical domain, annotations are subjective and suffer from low inter- and intra-rater reliability. Since annotations only reflect the annotation entity's interpretation of the real world, this can lead to sub-optimal predictions even though the model achieves high similarity scores. Here, the theoretical concept of Peak Ground Truth (PGT) is introduced. PGT marks the point beyond which an increase in similarity with the reference annotation stops translating to better Real World Model Performance (RWMP). Additionally, a quantitative technique to approximate PGT by computing inter- and intra-rater reliability is proposed. Finally, three categories of PGT-aware strategies to evaluate and improve model performance are reviewed.

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.

We test grip strength and shock absorption properties of various granular material in granular jamming robotic components. The granular material comprises a range of natural, manufactured, and 3D printed material encompassing a wide range of shapes, sizes, and Shore hardness. Two main experiments are considered, both representing compelling use cases for granular jamming in soft robotics. The first experiment measures grip strength (retention force measured in Newtons) when we fill a latex balloon with the chosen grain type and use it as a granular jamming gripper to pick up a range of test objects. The second experiment measures shock absorption properties recorded by an Inertial Measurement Unit which is suspended in an envelope of granular material and dropped from a set height. Our results highlight a range of shape, size and softness effects, including that grain deformability is a key determinant of grip strength, and interestingly, that larger grain sizes in 3D printed grains create better shock absorbing materials.

Accurate uncertainty measurement is a key step to building robust and reliable machine learning systems. Conformal prediction is a distribution-free uncertainty quantification algorithm popular for its ease of implementation, statistical coverage guarantees, and versatility for underlying forecasters. However, existing conformal prediction algorithms for time series are limited to single-step prediction without considering the temporal dependency. In this paper we propose a Copula Conformal Prediction algorithm for multivariate, multi-step Time Series forecasting, CopulaCPTS. On several synthetic and real-world multivariate time series datasets, we show that CopulaCPTS produces more calibrated and sharp confidence intervals for multi-step prediction tasks than existing techniques.

For conceptual design, engineers rely on conventional iterative (often manual) techniques. Emerging parametric models facilitate design space exploration based on quantifiable performance metrics, yet remain time-consuming and computationally expensive. Pure optimisation methods, however, ignore qualitative aspects (e.g. aesthetics or construction methods). This paper provides a performance-driven design exploration framework to augment the human designer through a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE), which serves as forward performance predictor for given design features as well as an inverse design feature predictor conditioned on a set of performance requests. The CVAE is trained on 18'000 synthetically generated instances of a pedestrian bridge in Switzerland. Sensitivity analysis is employed for explainability and informing designers about (i) relations of the model between features and/or performances and (ii) structural improvements under user-defined objectives. A case study proved our framework's potential to serve as a future co-pilot for conceptual design studies of pedestrian bridges and beyond.

The 1$^{\text{st}}$ Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2023 focused on maritime computer vision for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), and organized several subchallenges in this domain: (i) UAV-based Maritime Object Detection, (ii) UAV-based Maritime Object Tracking, (iii) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Segmentation and (iv) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Detection. The subchallenges were based on the SeaDronesSee and MODS benchmarks. This report summarizes the main findings of the individual subchallenges and introduces a new benchmark, called SeaDronesSee Object Detection v2, which extends the previous benchmark by including more classes and footage. We provide statistical and qualitative analyses, and assess trends in the best-performing methodologies of over 130 submissions. The methods are summarized in the appendix. The datasets, evaluation code and the leaderboard are publicly available at https://seadronessee.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/macvi.

Many high-level skills that are required for computer vision tasks, such as parsing questions, comparing and contrasting semantics, and writing descriptions, are also required in other domains such as natural language processing. In this paper, we ask whether this makes it possible to learn those skills from text data and then use them to complete vision tasks without ever training on visual training data. Key to our approach is exploiting the joint embedding space of contrastively trained vision and language encoders. In practice, there can be systematic differences between embedding spaces for different modalities in contrastive models, and we analyze how these differences affect our approach and study a variety of strategies to mitigate this concern. We produce models using only text training data on three tasks: image captioning, visual entailment and visual question answering, and evaluate them on standard benchmarks using images. We find that this kind of transfer is possible and results in only a small drop in performance relative to models trained on images. We also showcase a variety of stylistic image captioning models that were trained using no image data and no human-curated language data, but instead text data from books, the web, or language models.

We describe the AGReE system, which takes user-submitted passages as input and automatically generates grammar practice exercises that can be completed while reading. Multiple-choice practice items are generated for a variety of different grammar constructs: punctuation, articles, conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, verbs, and nouns. We also conducted a large-scale human evaluation with around 4,500 multiple-choice practice items. We notice for 95% of items, a majority of raters out of five were able to identify the correct answer and for 85% of cases, raters agree that there is only one correct answer among the choices. Finally, the error analysis shows that raters made the most mistakes for punctuation and conjunctions.