自动生物医学图像分析的领域至关重要地取决于算法验证的可靠和有意义的性能指标。但是，当前的度量使用通常是不明智的，并且不能反映基本的域名。在这里，我们提出了一个全面的框架，该框架指导研究人员以问题意识的方式选择绩效指标。具体而言，我们专注于生物医学图像分析问题，这些问题可以解释为图像，对象或像素级别的分类任务。该框架首先编译域兴趣 - 目标结构 - ，数据集和算法与输出问题相关的属性的属性与问题指纹相关，同时还将其映射到适当的问题类别，即图像级分类，语义分段，实例，实例细分或对象检测。然后，它指导用户选择和应用一组适当的验证指标的过程，同时使他们意识到与个人选择相关的潜在陷阱。在本文中，我们描述了指标重新加载推荐框架的当前状态，目的是从图像分析社区获得建设性的反馈。当前版本是在由60多个图像分析专家的国际联盟中开发的，将在社区驱动的优化之后公开作为用户友好的工具包提供。

原始的“七个图案”阐述了科学计算领域的基本方法的路线图，其中图案是一种捕获计算和数据移动模式的算法方法。我们介绍了“仿真智力的九个主题”，是一种开发和整合的路线图，以合并科学计算，科学模拟和人工智能所必需的基本算法。我们称之为合并模拟智能（SI），短暂。我们认为模拟智能的主题是相互连接的和相互依存的，很像操作系统层中的组件一样。使用这种隐喻，我们探讨了模拟智能操作系统堆栈（Si-Stack）和其中图案的各层的性质：（1）多种物理和多尺度建模; （2）替代建模和仿真; （3）基于仿真的推理; （4）因果建模和推理; （5）基于代理的建模; （6）概率编程; （7）可微分的编程; （8）开放式优化; （9）机器编程。我们相信图案之间的协调努力提供了加速科学发现的巨大机会，从综合生物和气候科学中解决逆问题，指导核能实验，并预测社会经济环境中的紧急行为。我们详细说明了Si-stack的每层，详细说明了最先进的方法，提出了示例以突出挑战和机遇，并倡导具体的方法来推进主题和与其组合的协同作用。推进和整合这些技术可以实现稳健且有效的假设仿真 - 分析类型的科学方法，我们用几种使用案例为人机组合和自动化学介绍。

尽管自动图像分析的重要性不断增加，但最近的元研究揭示了有关算法验证的主要缺陷。性能指标对于使用的自动算法的有意义，客观和透明的性能评估和验证尤其是关键，但是在使用特定的指标进行给定的图像分析任务时，对实际陷阱的关注相对较少。这些通常与（1）无视固有的度量属性，例如在存在类不平衡或小目标结构的情况下的行为，（2）无视固有的数据集属性，例如测试的非独立性案例和（3）无视指标应反映的实际生物医学领域的兴趣。该动态文档的目的是说明图像分析领域通常应用的性能指标的重要局限性。在这种情况下，它重点介绍了可以用作图像级分类，语义分割，实例分割或对象检测任务的生物医学图像分析问题。当前版本是基于由全球60多家机构的国际图像分析专家进行的关于指标的Delphi流程。

Modeling lies at the core of both the financial and the insurance industry for a wide variety of tasks. The rise and development of machine learning and deep learning models have created many opportunities to improve our modeling toolbox. Breakthroughs in these fields often come with the requirement of large amounts of data. Such large datasets are often not publicly available in finance and insurance, mainly due to privacy and ethics concerns. This lack of data is currently one of the main hurdles in developing better models. One possible option to alleviating this issue is generative modeling. Generative models are capable of simulating fake but realistic-looking data, also referred to as synthetic data, that can be shared more freely. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is such a model that increases our capacity to fit very high-dimensional distributions of data. While research on GANs is an active topic in fields like computer vision, they have found limited adoption within the human sciences, like economics and insurance. Reason for this is that in these fields, most questions are inherently about identification of causal effects, while to this day neural networks, which are at the center of the GAN framework, focus mostly on high-dimensional correlations. In this paper we study the causal preservation capabilities of GANs and whether the produced synthetic data can reliably be used to answer causal questions. This is done by performing causal analyses on the synthetic data, produced by a GAN, with increasingly more lenient assumptions. We consider the cross-sectional case, the time series case and the case with a complete structural model. It is shown that in the simple cross-sectional scenario where correlation equals causation the GAN preserves causality, but that challenges arise for more advanced analyses.

KL-regularized reinforcement learning from expert demonstrations has proved successful in improving the sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning algorithms, allowing them to be applied to challenging physical real-world tasks. However, we show that KL-regularized reinforcement learning with behavioral reference policies derived from expert demonstrations can suffer from pathological training dynamics that can lead to slow, unstable, and suboptimal online learning. We show empirically that the pathology occurs for commonly chosen behavioral policy classes and demonstrate its impact on sample efficiency and online policy performance. Finally, we show that the pathology can be remedied by non-parametric behavioral reference policies and that this allows KL-regularized reinforcement learning to significantly outperform state-of-the-art approaches on a variety of challenging locomotion and dexterous hand manipulation tasks.

Scientists and philosophers have debated whether humans can trust advanced artificial intelligence (AI) agents to respect humanity's best interests. Yet what about the reverse? Will advanced AI agents trust humans? Gauging an AI agent's trust in humans is challenging because--absent costs for dishonesty--such agents might respond falsely about their trust in humans. Here we present a method for incentivizing machine decisions without altering an AI agent's underlying algorithms or goal orientation. In two separate experiments, we then employ this method in hundreds of trust games between an AI agent (a Large Language Model (LLM) from OpenAI) and a human experimenter (author TJ). In our first experiment, we find that the AI agent decides to trust humans at higher rates when facing actual incentives than when making hypothetical decisions. Our second experiment replicates and extends these findings by automating game play and by homogenizing question wording. We again observe higher rates of trust when the AI agent faces real incentives. Across both experiments, the AI agent's trust decisions appear unrelated to the magnitude of stakes. Furthermore, to address the possibility that the AI agent's trust decisions reflect a preference for uncertainty, the experiments include two conditions that present the AI agent with a non-social decision task that provides the opportunity to choose a certain or uncertain option; in those conditions, the AI agent consistently chooses the certain option. Our experiments suggest that one of the most advanced AI language models to date alters its social behavior in response to incentives and displays behavior consistent with trust toward a human interlocutor when incentivized.

The cooperation of a human pilot with an autonomous agent during flight control realizes parallel autonomy. A parallel-autonomous system acts as a guardian that significantly enhances the robustness and safety of flight operations in challenging circumstances. Here, we propose an air-guardian concept that facilitates cooperation between an artificial pilot agent and a parallel end-to-end neural control system. Our vision-based air-guardian system combines a causal continuous-depth neural network model with a cooperation layer to enable parallel autonomy between a pilot agent and a control system based on perceived differences in their attention profile. The attention profiles are obtained by computing the networks' saliency maps (feature importance) through the VisualBackProp algorithm. The guardian agent is trained via reinforcement learning in a fixed-wing aircraft simulated environment. When the attention profile of the pilot and guardian agents align, the pilot makes control decisions. If the attention map of the pilot and the guardian do not align, the air-guardian makes interventions and takes over the control of the aircraft. We show that our attention-based air-guardian system can balance the trade-off between its level of involvement in the flight and the pilot's expertise and attention. We demonstrate the effectivness of our methods in simulated flight scenarios with a fixed-wing aircraft and on a real drone platform.

As demand for large corpora increases with the size of current state-of-the-art language models, using web data as the main part of the pre-training corpus for these models has become a ubiquitous practice. This, in turn, has introduced an important challenge for NLP practitioners, as they are now confronted with the task of developing highly optimized models and pipelines for pre-processing large quantities of textual data, which implies, effectively classifying and filtering multilingual, heterogeneous and noisy data, at web scale. One of the main components of this pre-processing step for the pre-training corpora of large language models, is the removal of adult and harmful content. In this paper we explore different methods for detecting adult and harmful of content in multilingual heterogeneous web data. We first show how traditional methods in harmful content detection, that seemingly perform quite well in small and specialized datasets quickly break down when confronted with heterogeneous noisy web data. We then resort to using a perplexity based approach but with a twist: Instead of using a so-called "clean" corpus to train a small language model and then use perplexity so select the documents with low perplexity, i.e., the documents that resemble this so-called "clean" corpus the most. We train solely with adult and harmful textual data, and then select the documents having a perplexity value above a given threshold. This approach will virtually cluster our documents into two distinct groups, which will greatly facilitate the choice of the threshold for the perplexity and will also allow us to obtain higher precision than with the traditional classification methods for detecting adult and harmful content.

Quantization methods reduce the number of bits required to represent each parameter in a model, trading accuracy for smaller memory footprints and inference latencies. However, the final model size depends on both the number of parameters of the original model and the rate of compression. For example, a 30B 8-bit model and a 60B 4-bit model have the same number of bits but may have very different zero-shot accuracies. In this work, we study this trade-off by developing inference scaling laws of zero-shot performance in Large Language Models (LLMs) to determine the bit-precision and model size that maximizes zero-shot performance. We run more than 35,000 zero-shot experiments with 16-bit inputs and k-bit parameters to examine which quantization methods improve scaling for 3 to 8-bit precision at scales of 19M to 66B parameters across the LLM families BLOOM, OPT, NeoX/Pythia, and GPT-2. We find that it is challenging to improve the bit-level scaling trade-off, with the only improvements being the use of a small block size -- splitting the parameters into small independently quantized blocks -- and the quantization data type being used (e.g., Int vs Float). Overall, our findings show that 4-bit precision is almost universally optimal for total model bits and zero-shot accuracy.

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.