As aerial robots are tasked to navigate environments of increased complexity, embedding collision tolerance in their design becomes important. In this survey we review the current state-of-the-art within the niche field of collision-tolerant micro aerial vehicles and present different design approaches identified in the literature, as well as methods that have focused on autonomy functionalities that exploit collision resilience. Subsequently, we discuss the relevance to biological systems and provide our view on key directions of future fruitful research.

We address the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation when the source domain differs from the target domain because of a shift in the distribution of a latent subgroup. When this subgroup confounds all observed data, neither covariate shift nor label shift assumptions apply. We show that the optimal target predictor can be non-parametrically identified with the help of concept and proxy variables available only in the source domain, and unlabeled data from the target. The identification results are constructive, immediately suggesting an algorithm for estimating the optimal predictor in the target. For continuous observations, when this algorithm becomes impractical, we propose a latent variable model specific to the data generation process at hand. We show how the approach degrades as the size of the shift changes, and verify that it outperforms both covariate and label shift adjustment.

Since early in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, there has been interest in using artificial intelligence methods to predict COVID-19 infection status based on vocal audio signals, for example cough recordings. However, existing studies have limitations in terms of data collection and of the assessment of the performances of the proposed predictive models. This paper rigorously assesses state-of-the-art machine learning techniques used to predict COVID-19 infection status based on vocal audio signals, using a dataset collected by the UK Health Security Agency. This dataset includes acoustic recordings and extensive study participant meta-data. We provide guidelines on testing the performance of methods to classify COVID-19 infection status based on acoustic features and we discuss how these can be extended more generally to the development and assessment of predictive methods based on public health datasets.

Plastic shopping bags that get carried away from the side of roads and tangled on cotton plants can end up at cotton gins if not removed before the harvest. Such bags may not only cause problem in the ginning process but might also get embodied in cotton fibers reducing its quality and marketable value. Therefore, it is required to detect, locate, and remove the bags before cotton is harvested. Manually detecting and locating these bags in cotton fields is labor intensive, time-consuming and a costly process. To solve these challenges, we present application of four variants of YOLOv5 (YOLOv5s, YOLOv5m, YOLOv5l and YOLOv5x) for detecting plastic shopping bags using Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)-acquired RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) images. We also show fixed effect model tests of color of plastic bags as well as YOLOv5-variant on average precision (AP), mean average precision (mAP@50) and accuracy. In addition, we also demonstrate the effect of height of plastic bags on the detection accuracy. It was found that color of bags had significant effect (p < 0.001) on accuracy across all the four variants while it did not show any significant effect on the AP with YOLOv5m (p = 0.10) and YOLOv5x (p = 0.35) at 95% confidence level. Similarly, YOLOv5-variant did not show any significant effect on the AP (p = 0.11) and accuracy (p = 0.73) of white bags, but it had significant effects on the AP (p = 0.03) and accuracy (p = 0.02) of brown bags including on the mAP@50 (p = 0.01) and inference speed (p < 0.0001). Additionally, height of plastic bags had significant effect (p < 0.0001) on overall detection accuracy. The findings reported in this paper can be useful in speeding up removal of plastic bags from cotton fields before harvest and thereby reducing the amount of contaminants that end up at cotton gins.

Nonconvex optimization is central in solving many machine learning problems, in which block-wise structure is commonly encountered. In this work, we propose cyclic block coordinate methods for nonconvex optimization problems with non-asymptotic gradient norm guarantees. Our convergence analysis is based on a gradient Lipschitz condition with respect to a Mahalanobis norm, inspired by a recent progress on cyclic block coordinate methods. In deterministic settings, our convergence guarantee matches the guarantee of (full-gradient) gradient descent, but with the gradient Lipschitz constant being defined w.r.t.~the Mahalanobis norm. In stochastic settings, we use recursive variance reduction to decrease the per-iteration cost and match the arithmetic operation complexity of current optimal stochastic full-gradient methods, with a unified analysis for both finite-sum and infinite-sum cases. We further prove the faster, linear convergence of our methods when a Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz (P{\L}) condition holds for the objective function. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to provide variance-reduced convergence guarantees for a cyclic block coordinate method. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed variance-reduced cyclic scheme in training deep neural nets.

Supervised machine learning-based medical image computing applications necessitate expert label curation, while unlabelled image data might be relatively abundant. Active learning methods aim to prioritise a subset of available image data for expert annotation, for label-efficient model training. We develop a controller neural network that measures priority of images in a sequence of batches, as in batch-mode active learning, for multi-class segmentation tasks. The controller is optimised by rewarding positive task-specific performance gain, within a Markov decision process (MDP) environment that also optimises the task predictor. In this work, the task predictor is a segmentation network. A meta-reinforcement learning algorithm is proposed with multiple MDPs, such that the pre-trained controller can be adapted to a new MDP that contains data from different institutes and/or requires segmentation of different organs or structures within the abdomen. We present experimental results using multiple CT datasets from more than one thousand patients, with segmentation tasks of nine different abdominal organs, to demonstrate the efficacy of the learnt prioritisation controller function and its cross-institute and cross-organ adaptability. We show that the proposed adaptable prioritisation metric yields converging segmentation accuracy for the novel class of kidney, unseen in training, using between approximately 40\% to 60\% of labels otherwise required with other heuristic or random prioritisation metrics. For clinical datasets of limited size, the proposed adaptable prioritisation offers a performance improvement of 22.6\% and 10.2\% in Dice score, for tasks of kidney and liver vessel segmentation, respectively, compared to random prioritisation and alternative active sampling strategies.

We study the use of model-based reinforcement learning methods, in particular, world models for continual reinforcement learning. In continual reinforcement learning, an agent is required to solve one task and then another sequentially while retaining performance and preventing forgetting on past tasks. World models offer a task-agnostic solution: they do not require knowledge of task changes. World models are a straight-forward baseline for continual reinforcement learning for three main reasons. Firstly, forgetting in the world model is prevented by persisting existing experience replay buffers across tasks, experience from previous tasks is replayed for learning the world model. Secondly, they are sample efficient. Thirdly and finally, they offer a task-agnostic exploration strategy through the uncertainty in the trajectories generated by the world model. We show that world models are a simple and effective continual reinforcement learning baseline. We study their effectiveness on Minigrid and Minihack continual reinforcement learning benchmarks and show that it outperforms state of the art task-agnostic continual reinforcement learning methods.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

由于异质访问点（APS）的性质，负载平衡（LB）是混合灯保真度（LIFI）和无线保真度（WIFI）网络（HLWNETS）的挑战性问题。机器学习有可能以近乎最佳的网络性能为培训过程提供复杂性的LB解决方案。但是，当网络环境（尤其是用户数量）更改时，需要进行最先进的（SOTA）学习辅助LB方法，这大大限制了其实用性。在本文中，提出了一个新颖的深神经网络（DNN）结构，称为自适应目标条件神经网络（A-TCNN），该结构在其他用户的条件下为一个目标用户进行AP选择。此外，开发了一种自适应机制，可以通过分配数据速率要求将较大数量的用户映射到较大的数字，而不会影响目标用户的AP选择结果。这使提出的方法可以处理不同数量的用户，而无需再进行重新培训。结果表明，A-TCNN实现了非常接近测试数据集的网络吞吐量，差距小于3％。还证明，A-TCNN可以获得与两个SOTA基准相当的网络吞吐量，同时最多将运行时降低了三个数量级。

Boll Weevil（Anthonomus Grandis L.）是一种严重的害虫，主要以棉花为食。由于亚热带气候条件，在德克萨斯州的下里奥格兰德山谷等地方，棉花植物可以全年生长，因此，收获期间上一个季节的剩下的种子可以在玉米中的旋转中继续生长（Zea Mays L.）和高粱（高粱双色L.）。这些野性或志愿棉花（VC）植物到达Pinhead平方阶段（5-6叶阶段）可以充当Boll Weevil Pest的宿主。得克萨斯州的鲍尔象鼻虫根除计划（TBWEP）雇用人们在道路或田野侧面生长的风险投资和消除旋转作物的田间生长，但在田野中生长的植物仍未被发现。在本文中，我们证明了基于您的计算机视觉（CV）算法的应用，仅在三个不同的生长阶段（V3，V6）（V3，V6）中检测出在玉米场中生长的VC植物，以检测在玉米场中生长的VC植物的应用。使用无人飞机系统（UAS）遥感图像。使用Yolov5（S，M，L和X）的所有四个变体，并根据分类精度，平均平均精度（MAP）和F1得分进行比较。发现Yolov5s可以在玉米的V6阶段检测到最大分类精度为98％，地图为96.3％，而Yolov5s和Yolov5m的地图为96.3％，而Yolov5m的分类精度为85％，Yolov5m和Yolov5m的分类准确性最小，而Yolov5L的分类精度最少。在VT阶段，在尺寸416 x 416像素的图像上为86.5％。开发的CV算法有可能有效地检测和定位在玉米场中间生长的VC植物，并加快TBWEP的管理方面。