上下文化的单词嵌入会导致自然语言理解中最新的表演。最近，诸如BERT之类的预先训练的深层上下文化的文本编码器显示了其在改善包括抽象性摘要在内的自然语言任务方面的潜力。对话摘要中的现有方法着重于将大型语言模型纳入摘要任务，该任务是在大规模语料库中培训的，这些任务由新闻文章组成，而不是多个演讲者的对话。在本文中，我们介绍了自我监督的方法，以补偿培训对话摘要模型的缺点。我们的原则是使用借口对话文本检测不一致的信息流，以增强伯特对对话文本表示形式的上下文能力。我们使用增强的BERT在共享的编码器架构上构建并微调一个抽象的对话摘要模型。我们通过Samsum语料库（Samsum copus）进行了验证评估我们的抽象对话摘要，这是一个最近介绍的带有抽象性对话摘要的数据集。我们所有的方法都为在胭脂分数中测得的抽象摘要做出了改进。通过一项广泛的消融研究，我们还向关键模型超参数，切换话语和掩盖对话者的概率提出了灵敏度分析。

组合优化的神经方法（CO）配备了一种学习机制，以发现解决复杂现实世界问题的强大启发式方法。尽管出现了能够在单一镜头中使用高质量解决方案的神经方法，但最先进的方法通常无法充分利用他们可用的解决时间。相比之下，手工制作的启发式方法可以很好地执行高效的搜索并利用给他们的计算时间，但包含启发式方法，这些启发式方法很难适应要解决的数据集。为了为神经CO方法提供强大的搜索程序，我们提出了模拟引导的光束搜索（SGB），该搜索（SGB）在固定宽度的树搜索中检查了候选解决方案，既是神经网络学习的政策又是模拟（推出）确定有希望的。我们将SGB与有效的主动搜索（EAS）进一步融合，其中SGB提高了EAS中反向传播的解决方案的质量，EAS提高了SGB中使用的策略的质量。我们评估了有关众所周知的CO基准的方法，并表明SGB可显着提高在合理的运行时假设下发现的解决方案的质量。

While the brain connectivity network can inform the understanding and diagnosis of developmental dyslexia, its cause-effect relationships have not yet enough been examined. Employing electroencephalography signals and band-limited white noise stimulus at 4.8 Hz (prosodic-syllabic frequency), we measure the phase Granger causalities among channels to identify differences between dyslexic learners and controls, thereby proposing a method to calculate directional connectivity. As causal relationships run in both directions, we explore three scenarios, namely channels' activity as sources, as sinks, and in total. Our proposed method can be used for both classification and exploratory analysis. In all scenarios, we find confirmation of the established right-lateralized Theta sampling network anomaly, in line with the temporal sampling framework's assumption of oscillatory differences in the Theta and Gamma bands. Further, we show that this anomaly primarily occurs in the causal relationships of channels acting as sinks, where it is significantly more pronounced than when only total activity is observed. In the sink scenario, our classifier obtains 0.84 and 0.88 accuracy and 0.87 and 0.93 AUC for the Theta and Gamma bands, respectively.

There are multiple scales of abstraction from which we can describe the same image, depending on whether we are focusing on fine-grained details or a more global attribute of the image. In brain mapping, learning to automatically parse images to build representations of both small-scale features (e.g., the presence of cells or blood vessels) and global properties of an image (e.g., which brain region the image comes from) is a crucial and open challenge. However, most existing datasets and benchmarks for neuroanatomy consider only a single downstream task at a time. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new dataset, annotations, and multiple downstream tasks that provide diverse ways to readout information about brain structure and architecture from the same image. Our multi-task neuroimaging benchmark (MTNeuro) is built on volumetric, micrometer-resolution X-ray microtomography images spanning a large thalamocortical section of mouse brain, encompassing multiple cortical and subcortical regions. We generated a number of different prediction challenges and evaluated several supervised and self-supervised models for brain-region prediction and pixel-level semantic segmentation of microstructures. Our experiments not only highlight the rich heterogeneity of this dataset, but also provide insights into how self-supervised approaches can be used to learn representations that capture multiple attributes of a single image and perform well on a variety of downstream tasks. Datasets, code, and pre-trained baseline models are provided at: https://mtneuro.github.io/ .

The ability to convert reciprocating, i.e., alternating, actuation into rotary motion using linkages is hindered fundamentally by their poor torque transmission capability around kinematic singularity configurations. Here, we harness the elastic potential energy of a linear spring attached to the coupler link of four-bar mechanisms to manipulate force transmission around the kinematic singularities. We developed a theoretical model to explore the parameter space for proper force transmission in slider-crank and rocker-crank four-bar kinematics. Finally, we verified the proposed model and methodology by building and testing a macro-scale prototype of a slider-crank mechanism. We expect this approach to enable the development of small-scale rotary engines and robotic devices with closed kinematic chains dealing with serial kinematic singularities, such as linkages and parallel manipulators.

This paper considers a combination of actuation tendons and measurement strings to achieve accurate shape sensing and direct kinematics of continuum robots. Assuming general string routing, a methodical Lie group formulation for the shape sensing of these robots is presented. The shape kinematics is expressed using arc-length-dependent curvature distributions parameterized by modal functions, and the Magnus expansion for Lie group integration is used to express the shape as a product of exponentials. The tendon and string length kinematic constraints are solved for the modal coefficients and the configuration space and body Jacobian are derived. The noise amplification index for the shape reconstruction problem is defined and used for optimizing the string/tendon routing paths, and a planar simulation study shows the minimal number of strings/tendons needed for accurate shape reconstruction. A torsionally stiff continuum segment is used for experimental evaluation, demonstrating mean (maximal) end-effector absolute position error of less than 2% (5%) of total length. Finally, a simulation study of a torsionally compliant segment demonstrates the approach for general deflections and string routings. We believe that the methods of this paper can benefit the design process, sensing and control of continuum and soft robots.

Image classification with small datasets has been an active research area in the recent past. However, as research in this scope is still in its infancy, two key ingredients are missing for ensuring reliable and truthful progress: a systematic and extensive overview of the state of the art, and a common benchmark to allow for objective comparisons between published methods. This article addresses both issues. First, we systematically organize and connect past studies to consolidate a community that is currently fragmented and scattered. Second, we propose a common benchmark that allows for an objective comparison of approaches. It consists of five datasets spanning various domains (e.g., natural images, medical imagery, satellite data) and data types (RGB, grayscale, multispectral). We use this benchmark to re-evaluate the standard cross-entropy baseline and ten existing methods published between 2017 and 2021 at renowned venues. Surprisingly, we find that thorough hyper-parameter tuning on held-out validation data results in a highly competitive baseline and highlights a stunted growth of performance over the years. Indeed, only a single specialized method dating back to 2019 clearly wins our benchmark and outperforms the baseline classifier.

The availability of frequent and cost-free satellite images is in growing demand in the research world. Such satellite constellations as Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 provide a massive amount of valuable data daily. However, the discrepancy in the sensors' characteristics of these satellites makes it senseless to use a segmentation model trained on either dataset and applied to another, which is why domain adaptation techniques have recently become an active research area in remote sensing. In this paper, an experiment of domain adaptation through style-transferring is conducted using the HRSemI2I model to narrow the sensor discrepancy between Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2. This paper's main contribution is analyzing the expediency of that approach by comparing the results of segmentation using domain-adapted images with those without adaptation. The HRSemI2I model, adjusted to work with 6-band imagery, shows significant intersection-over-union performance improvement for both mean and per class metrics. A second contribution is providing different schemes of generalization between two label schemes - NALCMS 2015 and CORINE. The first scheme is standardization through higher-level land cover classes, and the second is through harmonization validation in the field.

In this paper, we address the problem of multimodal emotion recognition from multiple physiological signals. We demonstrate that a Transformer-based approach is suitable for this task. In addition, we present how such models may be pretrained in a multimodal scenario to improve emotion recognition performances. We evaluate the benefits of using multimodal inputs and pre-training with our approach on a state-ofthe-art dataset.

We present in this paper a family of generalized simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (G-SPSA) estimators that estimate the gradient of the objective using noisy function measurements, but where the number of function measurements and the form of the gradient estimator is guided by the desired estimator bias. In particular, estimators with more function measurements are seen to result in lower bias. We provide an analysis of convergence of the generalized SPSA algorithm, and point to possible future directions.