We address the problem of distance metric learning (DML), defined as learning a distance consistent with a notion of semantic similarity. Traditionally, for this problem supervision is expressed in the form of sets of points that follow an ordinal relationship -an anchor point x is similar to a set of positive points Y , and dissimilar to a set of negative points Z, and a loss defined over these distances is minimized. While the specifics of the optimization differ, in this work we collectively call this type of supervision Triplets and all methods that follow this pattern Triplet-Based methods. These methods are challenging to optimize. A main issue is the need for finding informative triplets, which is usually achieved by a variety of tricks such as increasing the batch size, hard or semi-hard triplet mining, etc. Even with these tricks, the convergence rate of such methods is slow. In this paper we propose to optimize the triplet loss on a different space of triplets, consisting of an anchor data point and similar and dissimilar proxy points which are learned as well. These proxies approximate the original data points, so that a triplet loss over the proxies is a tight upper bound of the original loss. This proxy-based loss is empirically better behaved. As a result, the proxy-loss improves on state-of-art results for three standard zero-shot learning datasets, by up to 15% points, while converging three times as fast as other triplet-based losses.

State space models (SSMs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art sequence modeling performance in some modalities, but underperform attention in language modeling. Moreover, despite scaling nearly linearly in sequence length instead of quadratically, SSMs are still slower than Transformers due to poor hardware utilization. In this paper, we make progress on understanding the expressivity gap between SSMs and attention in language modeling, and on reducing the hardware barrier between SSMs and attention. First, we use synthetic language modeling tasks to understand the gap between SSMs and attention. We find that existing SSMs struggle with two capabilities: recalling earlier tokens in the sequence and comparing tokens across the sequence. To understand the impact on language modeling, we propose a new SSM layer, H3, that is explicitly designed for these abilities. H3 matches attention on the synthetic languages and comes within 0.4 PPL of Transformers on OpenWebText. Furthermore, a hybrid 125M-parameter H3-attention model that retains two attention layers surprisingly outperforms Transformers on OpenWebText by 1.0 PPL. Next, to improve the efficiency of training SSMs on modern hardware, we propose FlashConv. FlashConv uses a fused block FFT algorithm to improve efficiency on sequences up to 8K, and introduces a novel state passing algorithm that exploits the recurrent properties of SSMs to scale to longer sequences. FlashConv yields 2$\times$ speedup on the long-range arena benchmark and allows hybrid language models to generate text 1.6$\times$ faster than Transformers. Using FlashConv, we scale hybrid H3-attention language models up to 1.3B parameters on the Pile and find promising initial results, achieving lower perplexity than Transformers and outperforming Transformers in zero- and few-shot learning on a majority of tasks in the SuperGLUE benchmark.

Objective: Imbalances of the electrolyte concentration levels in the body can lead to catastrophic consequences, but accurate and accessible measurements could improve patient outcomes. While blood tests provide accurate measurements, they are invasive and the laboratory analysis can be slow or inaccessible. In contrast, an electrocardiogram (ECG) is a widely adopted tool which is quick and simple to acquire. However, the problem of estimating continuous electrolyte concentrations directly from ECGs is not well-studied. We therefore investigate if regression methods can be used for accurate ECG-based prediction of electrolyte concentrations. Methods: We explore the use of deep neural networks (DNNs) for this task. We analyze the regression performance across four electrolytes, utilizing a novel dataset containing over 290000 ECGs. For improved understanding, we also study the full spectrum from continuous predictions to binary classification of extreme concentration levels. To enhance clinical usefulness, we finally extend to a probabilistic regression approach and evaluate different uncertainty estimates. Results: We find that the performance varies significantly between different electrolytes, which is clinically justified in the interplay of electrolytes and their manifestation in the ECG. We also compare the regression accuracy with that of traditional machine learning models, demonstrating superior performance of DNNs. Conclusion: Discretization can lead to good classification performance, but does not help solve the original problem of predicting continuous concentration levels. While probabilistic regression demonstrates potential practical usefulness, the uncertainty estimates are not particularly well-calibrated. Significance: Our study is a first step towards accurate and reliable ECG-based prediction of electrolyte concentration levels.

In this work, we demonstrate the offline FPGA realization of both recurrent and feedforward neural network (NN)-based equalizers for nonlinearity compensation in coherent optical transmission systems. First, we present a realization pipeline showing the conversion of the models from Python libraries to the FPGA chip synthesis and implementation. Then, we review the main alternatives for the hardware implementation of nonlinear activation functions. The main results are divided into three parts: a performance comparison, an analysis of how activation functions are implemented, and a report on the complexity of the hardware. The performance in Q-factor is presented for the cases of bidirectional long-short-term memory coupled with convolutional NN (biLSTM + CNN) equalizer, CNN equalizer, and standard 1-StpS digital back-propagation (DBP) for the simulation and experiment propagation of a single channel dual-polarization (SC-DP) 16QAM at 34 GBd along 17x70km of LEAF. The biLSTM+CNN equalizer provides a similar result to DBP and a 1.7 dB Q-factor gain compared with the chromatic dispersion compensation baseline in the experimental dataset. After that, we assess the Q-factor and the impact of hardware utilization when approximating the activation functions of NN using Taylor series, piecewise linear, and look-up table (LUT) approximations. We also show how to mitigate the approximation errors with extra training and provide some insights into possible gradient problems in the LUT approximation. Finally, to evaluate the complexity of hardware implementation to achieve 400G throughput, fixed-point NN-based equalizers with approximated activation functions are developed and implemented in an FPGA.

The precise control of soft and continuum robots requires knowledge of their shape. The shape of these robots has, in contrast to classical rigid robots, infinite degrees of freedom. To partially reconstruct the shape, proprioceptive techniques use built-in sensors resulting in inaccurate results and increased fabrication complexity. Exteroceptive methods so far rely on placing reflective markers on all tracked components and triangulating their position using multiple motion-tracking cameras. Tracking systems are expensive and infeasible for deformable robots interacting with the environment due to marker occlusion and damage. Here, we present a regression approach for 3D shape estimation using a convolutional neural network. The proposed approach takes advantage of data-driven supervised learning and is capable of real-time marker-less shape estimation during inference. Two images of a robotic system are taken simultaneously at 25 Hz from two different perspectives, and are fed to the network, which returns for each pair the parameterized shape. The proposed approach outperforms marker-less state-of-the-art methods by a maximum of 4.4\% in estimation accuracy while at the same time being more robust and requiring no prior knowledge of the shape. The approach can be easily implemented due to only requiring two color cameras without depth and not needing an explicit calibration of the extrinsic parameters. Evaluations on two types of soft robotic arms and a soft robotic fish demonstrate our method's accuracy and versatility on highly deformable systems in real-time. The robust performance of the approach against different scene modifications (camera alignment and brightness) suggests its generalizability to a wider range of experimental setups, which will benefit downstream tasks such as robotic grasping and manipulation.

Many scientific domains gather sufficient labels to train machine algorithms through human-in-the-loop techniques provided by the Zooniverse.org citizen science platform. As the range of projects, task types and data rates increase, acceleration of model training is of paramount concern to focus volunteer effort where most needed. The application of Transfer Learning (TL) between Zooniverse projects holds promise as a solution. However, understanding the effectiveness of TL approaches that pretrain on large-scale generic image sets vs. images with similar characteristics possibly from similar tasks is an open challenge. We apply a generative segmentation model on two Zooniverse project-based data sets: (1) to identify fat droplets in liver cells (FatChecker; FC) and (2) the identification of kelp beds in satellite images (Floating Forests; FF) through transfer learning from the first project. We compare and contrast its performance with a TL model based on the COCO image set, and subsequently with baseline counterparts. We find that both the FC and COCO TL models perform better than the baseline cases when using >75% of the original training sample size. The COCO-based TL model generally performs better than the FC-based one, likely due to its generalized features. Our investigations provide important insights into usage of TL approaches on multi-domain data hosted across different Zooniverse projects, enabling future projects to accelerate task completion.

Human behavior emerges from planning over elaborate decompositions of tasks into goals, subgoals, and low-level actions. How are these decompositions created and used? Here, we propose and evaluate a normative framework for task decomposition based on the simple idea that people decompose tasks to reduce the overall cost of planning while maintaining task performance. Analyzing 11,117 distinct graph-structured planning tasks, we find that our framework justifies several existing heuristics for task decomposition and makes predictions that can be distinguished from two alternative normative accounts. We report a behavioral study of task decomposition ($N=806$) that uses 30 randomly sampled graphs, a larger and more diverse set than that of any previous behavioral study on this topic. We find that human responses are more consistent with our framework for task decomposition than alternative normative accounts and are most consistent with a heuristic -- betweenness centrality -- that is justified by our approach. Taken together, our results provide new theoretical insight into the computational principles underlying the intelligent structuring of goal-directed behavior.

濒危语言的用户努力在数字化介导的世界中蓬勃发展。我们开发了一种自动化方法，用于评估ISO 639认可的每种语言在数字语言支持方面的表现。该评估是基于从143个数字工具的网站上删除支持语言的名称，以代表数字技术可以支持语言的各种方式。该方法使用Mokken量表分析来生成可解释的模型，以量化数字语言支持并在全球范围内监视它。

在本文中，提出了一种新的方法，该方法允许基于神经网络（NN）均衡器的低复杂性发展，以缓解高速相干光学传输系统中的损伤。在这项工作中，我们提供了已应用于馈电和经常性NN设计的各种深层模型压缩方法的全面描述和比较。此外，我们评估了这些策略对每个NN均衡器的性能的影响。考虑量化，重量聚类，修剪和其他用于模型压缩的尖端策略。在这项工作中，我们提出并评估贝叶斯优化辅助压缩，其中选择了压缩的超参数以同时降低复杂性并提高性能。总之，通过使用模拟和实验数据来评估每种压缩方法的复杂性及其性能之间的权衡，以完成分析。通过利用最佳压缩方法，我们表明可以设计基于NN的均衡器，该均衡器比传统的数字背部传播（DBP）均衡器具有更好的性能，并且只有一个步骤。这是通过减少使用加权聚类和修剪算法后在NN均衡器中使用的乘数数量来完成的。此外，我们证明了基于NN的均衡器也可以实现卓越的性能，同时仍然保持与完整的电子色色散补偿块相同的复杂性。我们通过强调开放问题和现有挑战以及未来的研究方向来结束分析。

软机器人技术有可能改变机器人运动，特别是软机器人游泳者提供了一种微创和自适应的解决方案，以探索和保存我们的海洋。不幸的是，当前的软机器人游泳者非常劣于进化的生物游泳者，尤其是在可控性，效率，可操作性和寿命方面。此外，设计软机器人所需的乏味的迭代制造和经验测试阻碍了它们的优化。在这项工作中，我们通过为设计和制造配备静电驱动的软机器人游泳者提供高效且直接的管道来应对这一挑战。我们简化了允许快速增材制造的过程，并显示如何使用可区分的模拟将简化模型与机器人游泳器的真实变形匹配。我们通过改变游泳者的拮抗肌肉的电压和驱动频率来对制造的游泳者进行多个实验。我们展示了在液态油中移动时的电压和频率如何改变游泳者的运动速度，并在前进的游泳速度下观察到明显的最佳选择。我们提出的可区分模拟模型具有各种下游应用，例如游泳者的控制和形状优化；通过我们的SIM到现实匹配，可以将优化结果直接映射回真实机器人。