Algorithms that involve both forecasting and optimization are at the core of solutions to many difficult real-world problems, such as in supply chains (inventory optimization), traffic, and in the transition towards carbon-free energy generation in battery/load/production scheduling in sustainable energy systems. Typically, in these scenarios we want to solve an optimization problem that depends on unknown future values, which therefore need to be forecast. As both forecasting and optimization are difficult problems in their own right, relatively few research has been done in this area. This paper presents the findings of the ``IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge on Predict+Optimize for Renewable Energy Scheduling," held in 2021. We present a comparison and evaluation of the seven highest-ranked solutions in the competition, to provide researchers with a benchmark problem and to establish the state of the art for this benchmark, with the aim to foster and facilitate research in this area. The competition used data from the Monash Microgrid, as well as weather data and energy market data. It then focused on two main challenges: forecasting renewable energy production and demand, and obtaining an optimal schedule for the activities (lectures) and on-site batteries that lead to the lowest cost of energy. The most accurate forecasts were obtained by gradient-boosted tree and random forest models, and optimization was mostly performed using mixed integer linear and quadratic programming. The winning method predicted different scenarios and optimized over all scenarios jointly using a sample average approximation method.

预测组合在预测社区中蓬勃发展，近年来，已经成为预测研究和活动主流的一部分。现在，由单个（目标）系列产生的多个预测组合通过整合来自不同来源收集的信息，从而提高准确性，从而减轻了识别单个“最佳”预测的风险。组合方案已从没有估计的简单组合方法演变为涉及时间变化的权重，非线性组合，组件之间的相关性和交叉学习的复杂方法。它们包括结合点预测和结合概率预测。本文提供了有关预测组合的广泛文献的最新评论，并参考可用的开源软件实施。我们讨论了各种方法的潜在和局限性，并突出了这些思想如何随着时间的推移而发展。还调查了有关预测组合实用性的一些重要问题。最后，我们以当前的研究差距和未来研究的潜在见解得出结论。

合奏的基本分支混合合奏在许多机器学习问题，尤其是回归中蓬勃发展。几项研究证实了多样性的重要性。但是，以前的合奏仅考虑在子模型训练阶段的多样性，与单个模型相比，改进有限。相反，本研究从异质模型池中选择和权重子模型。它使用内点过滤线性搜索算法解决了优化问题。这种优化问题创新地将负相关学习作为惩罚项，可以选择多种模型子集。实验结果显示了一些有意义的观点。模型池构造需要不同类别的模型，每个类别都作为子模型为所有可能的参数集。选择每个类的最佳子模型以构建基于NCL的合奏，该集合比子模型的平均值要好得多。此外，与经典常数和非恒定加权方法相比，基于NCL的合奏在几种预测指标中具有重要优势。实际上，由于模型不确定性，很难在事先结论数据集的最佳子模型。但是，我们的方法将获得可比较的精度作为RMSE度量的潜在最佳子模型。总之，这项研究的价值在于它的易用性和有效性，使混合团合奏可以接受多样性和准确性。

An unbiased scene graph generation (SGG) algorithm referred to as Skew Class-balanced Re-weighting (SCR) is proposed for considering the unbiased predicate prediction caused by the long-tailed distribution. The prior works focus mainly on alleviating the deteriorating performances of the minority predicate predictions, showing drastic dropping recall scores, i.e., losing the majority predicate performances. It has not yet correctly analyzed the trade-off between majority and minority predicate performances in the limited SGG datasets. In this paper, to alleviate the issue, the Skew Class-balanced Re-weighting (SCR) loss function is considered for the unbiased SGG models. Leveraged by the skewness of biased predicate predictions, the SCR estimates the target predicate weight coefficient and then re-weights more to the biased predicates for better trading-off between the majority predicates and the minority ones. Extensive experiments conducted on the standard Visual Genome dataset and Open Image V4 \& V6 show the performances and generality of the SCR with the traditional SGG models.

In the field of cross-modal retrieval, single encoder models tend to perform better than dual encoder models, but they suffer from high latency and low throughput. In this paper, we present a dual encoder model called BagFormer that utilizes a cross modal interaction mechanism to improve recall performance without sacrificing latency and throughput. BagFormer achieves this through the use of bag-wise interactions, which allow for the transformation of text to a more appropriate granularity and the incorporation of entity knowledge into the model. Our experiments demonstrate that BagFormer is able to achieve results comparable to state-of-the-art single encoder models in cross-modal retrieval tasks, while also offering efficient training and inference with 20.72 times lower latency and 25.74 times higher throughput.

Deep learning has been widely used for protein engineering. However, it is limited by the lack of sufficient experimental data to train an accurate model for predicting the functional fitness of high-order mutants. Here, we develop SESNet, a supervised deep-learning model to predict the fitness for protein mutants by leveraging both sequence and structure information, and exploiting attention mechanism. Our model integrates local evolutionary context from homologous sequences, the global evolutionary context encoding rich semantic from the universal protein sequence space and the structure information accounting for the microenvironment around each residue in a protein. We show that SESNet outperforms state-of-the-art models for predicting the sequence-function relationship on 26 deep mutational scanning datasets. More importantly, we propose a data augmentation strategy by leveraging the data from unsupervised models to pre-train our model. After that, our model can achieve strikingly high accuracy in prediction of the fitness of protein mutants, especially for the higher order variants (> 4 mutation sites), when finetuned by using only a small number of experimental mutation data (<50). The strategy proposed is of great practical value as the required experimental effort, i.e., producing a few tens of experimental mutation data on a given protein, is generally affordable by an ordinary biochemical group and can be applied on almost any protein.

Three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound imaging technique has been applied for scoliosis assessment, but current assessment method only uses coronal projection image and cannot illustrate the 3D deformity and vertebra rotation. The vertebra detection is essential to reveal 3D spine information, but the detection task is challenging due to complex data and limited annotations. We propose VertMatch, a two-step framework to detect vertebral structures in 3D ultrasound volume by utilizing unlabeled data in semi-supervised manner. The first step is to detect the possible positions of structures on transverse slice globally, and then the local patches are cropped based on detected positions. The second step is to distinguish whether the patches contain real vertebral structures and screen the predicted positions from the first step. VertMatch develops three novel components for semi-supervised learning: for position detection in the first step, (1) anatomical prior is used to screen pseudo labels generated from confidence threshold method; (2) multi-slice consistency is used to utilize more unlabeled data by inputting multiple adjacent slices; (3) for patch identification in the second step, the categories are rebalanced in each batch to solve imbalance problem. Experimental results demonstrate that VertMatch can detect vertebra accurately in ultrasound volume and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. VertMatch is also validated in clinical application on forty ultrasound scans, and it can be a promising approach for 3D assessment of scoliosis.

Image captioning is one of the straightforward tasks that can take advantage of large-scale web-crawled data which provides rich knowledge about the visual world for a captioning model. However, since web-crawled data contains image-text pairs that are aligned at different levels, the inherent noises (e.g., misaligned pairs) make it difficult to learn a precise captioning model. While the filtering strategy can effectively remove noisy data, however, it leads to a decrease in learnable knowledge and sometimes brings about a new problem of data deficiency. To take the best of both worlds, we propose a noise-aware learning framework, which learns rich knowledge from the whole web-crawled data while being less affected by the noises. This is achieved by the proposed quality controllable model, which is learned using alignment levels of the image-text pairs as an additional control signal during training. The alignment-conditioned training allows the model to generate high-quality captions of well-aligned by simply setting the control signal to desired alignment level at inference time. Through in-depth analysis, we show that our controllable captioning model is effective in handling noise. In addition, with two tasks of zero-shot captioning and text-to-image retrieval using generated captions (i.e., self-retrieval), we also demonstrate our model can produce high-quality captions in terms of descriptiveness and distinctiveness. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/kakaobrain/noc}.

Automatic image colorization is a particularly challenging problem. Due to the high illness of the problem and multi-modal uncertainty, directly training a deep neural network usually leads to incorrect semantic colors and low color richness. Existing transformer-based methods can deliver better results but highly depend on hand-crafted dataset-level empirical distribution priors. In this work, we propose DDColor, a new end-to-end method with dual decoders, for image colorization. More specifically, we design a multi-scale image decoder and a transformer-based color decoder. The former manages to restore the spatial resolution of the image, while the latter establishes the correlation between semantic representations and color queries via cross-attention. The two decoders incorporate to learn semantic-aware color embedding by leveraging the multi-scale visual features. With the help of these two decoders, our method succeeds in producing semantically consistent and visually plausible colorization results without any additional priors. In addition, a simple but effective colorfulness loss is introduced to further improve the color richness of generated results. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed DDColor achieves significantly superior performance to existing state-of-the-art works both quantitatively and qualitatively. Codes will be made publicly available.

Obtaining ground truth data in medical imaging has difficulties due to the fact that it requires a lot of annotating time from the experts in the field. Also, when trained with supervised learning, it detects only the cases included in the labels. In real practice, we want to also open to other possibilities than the named cases while examining the medical images. As a solution, the need for anomaly detection that can detect and localize abnormalities by learning the normal characteristics using only normal images is emerging. With medical image data, we can design either 2D or 3D networks of self-supervised learning for anomaly detection task. Although 3D networks, which learns 3D structures of the human body, show good performance in 3D medical image anomaly detection, they cannot be stacked in deeper layers due to memory problems. While 2D networks have advantage in feature detection, they lack 3D context information. In this paper, we develop a method for combining the strength of the 3D network and the strength of the 2D network through joint embedding. We also propose the pretask of self-supervised learning to make it possible for the networks to learn efficiently. Through the experiments, we show that the proposed method achieves better performance in both classification and segmentation tasks compared to the SoTA method.