基于人工智能的肺超声成像分析已被证明是整个Covid-19大流行中快速诊断决策支持的有效技术。但是，这种技术可能需要几天或几周的训练过程和超参数调整，以开发智能的深度学习图像分析模型。这项工作的重点是利用“现成”预培训的模型，作为以最小的训练时间为疾病严重程度得分的深度提取器。我们建议在简单和紧凑的神经网络之前使用现有方法的预训练初始化，以减少对计算能力的依赖。在时间限制或资源约束的情况下，例如大流行的早期阶段，计算能力的降低至关重要。在由49位患者组成的数据集中，包括20,000多个图像，我们证明了现有方法作为特征提取器的使用会导致有效分类COVID-19与COVID相关的肺炎严重程度，同时只需几分钟的训练时间。与专家注释的地面真相相比，我们的方法可以在4级的严重程度评分量表上达到超过0.93的准确性，并提供可比的人均区域和全球分数。这些结果表明，在COVID-19患者的临床实践中以及其他呼吸道疾病中，在临床实践中以及在其他呼吸道疾病中的临床实践中快速部署和使用这种最小化适应方法的能力。

通过学习，已经提出了神经网络进行医学图像注册，并具有大量的培训数据，以及图像对之间的最佳转换。这些训练有素的网络可以进一步优化一对测试图像 - 称为测试时间优化。这项工作将图像注册作为一种元学习算法。可以通过对齐训练图像对，同时提高测试时间优化功效来对此网络进行训练；以前被视为两个独立培训和优化过程的任务。假设所提出的元注册以最大化测试时间优化在网络的“外部”元优化中的效率和有效性。对于通常是时间关键但训练数据中限制的图像引导应用程序，将潜在的速度和准确性与经典注册算法，无元学习的注册网络以及没有测试时间优化数据的单对优化进行了比较。本文使用来自108名前列腺癌患者的临床超声超声图像数据进行了实验。这些实验证明了元注册方案的有效性，该方案相对于现有基于学习的方法而产生的性能显着提高。此外，由于其快速的测试时间优化过程，元注册在一小部分时间内与经典迭代方法相当。

自由点变压器（FPT）已被提出为使用深神经网络的数据驱动的，非刚性点设置的注册方法。由于fpt不基于点附近或对应关系假设约束，因此可以通过根据倒角距离最大程度地减少无监督的损失来简单训练它。这使得fpt可以适应现实世界中的医学成像应用，在这些应用程序中可能无法获得地面变形，或者在仅在要对齐的点集中只有不同程度的完整性的情况下。为了测试FPT及其对培训数据集的依赖性的对应关系的限制，这项工作探讨了FPT从良好策划的非医学数据集到医学成像数据集的普遍性。首先，我们在ModelNet40数据集上训练FPT，以证明其有效性和FPT的出色注册性能，而不是基于迭代和学习的点设置注册方法。其次，我们证明了缺少数据的刚性和非刚性注册和鲁棒性的卓越性能。最后，我们通过在没有额外的训练的情况下注册了重建的脊柱和通用脊柱模型的徒手超声扫描，强调了模型网训练的FPT的有趣概括性，从而在13位患者的情况下，对地面真相曲率的平均差异为1.3度。

Course load analytics (CLA) inferred from LMS and enrollment features can offer a more accurate representation of course workload to students than credit hours and potentially aid in their course selection decisions. In this study, we produce and evaluate the first machine-learned predictions of student course load ratings and generalize our model to the full 10,000 course catalog of a large public university. We then retrospectively analyze longitudinal differences in the semester load of student course selections throughout their degree. CLA by semester shows that a student's first semester at the university is among their highest load semesters, as opposed to a credit hour-based analysis, which would indicate it is among their lowest. Investigating what role predicted course load may play in program retention, we find that students who maintain a semester load that is low as measured by credit hours but high as measured by CLA are more likely to leave their program of study. This discrepancy in course load is particularly pertinent in STEM and associated with high prerequisite courses. Our findings have implications for academic advising, institutional handling of the freshman experience, and student-facing analytics to help students better plan, anticipate, and prepare for their selected courses.

We present a differentiable formulation of rigid-body contact dynamics for objects and robots represented as compositions of convex primitives. Existing optimization-based approaches simulating contact between convex primitives rely on a bilevel formulation that separates collision detection and contact simulation. These approaches are unreliable in realistic contact simulation scenarios because isolating the collision detection problem introduces contact location non-uniqueness. Our approach combines contact simulation and collision detection into a unified single-level optimization problem. This disambiguates the collision detection problem in a physics-informed manner. Compared to previous differentiable simulation approaches, our formulation features improved simulation robustness and a reduction in computational complexity by more than an order of magnitude. We illustrate the contact and collision differentiability on a robotic manipulation task requiring optimization-through-contact. We provide a numerically efficient implementation of our formulation in the Julia language called Silico.jl.

As Artificial and Robotic Systems are increasingly deployed and relied upon for real-world applications, it is important that they exhibit the ability to continually learn and adapt in dynamically-changing environments, becoming Lifelong Learning Machines. Continual/lifelong learning (LL) involves minimizing catastrophic forgetting of old tasks while maximizing a model's capability to learn new tasks. This paper addresses the challenging lifelong reinforcement learning (L2RL) setting. Pushing the state-of-the-art forward in L2RL and making L2RL useful for practical applications requires more than developing individual L2RL algorithms; it requires making progress at the systems-level, especially research into the non-trivial problem of how to integrate multiple L2RL algorithms into a common framework. In this paper, we introduce the Lifelong Reinforcement Learning Components Framework (L2RLCF), which standardizes L2RL systems and assimilates different continual learning components (each addressing different aspects of the lifelong learning problem) into a unified system. As an instantiation of L2RLCF, we develop a standard API allowing easy integration of novel lifelong learning components. We describe a case study that demonstrates how multiple independently-developed LL components can be integrated into a single realized system. We also introduce an evaluation environment in order to measure the effect of combining various system components. Our evaluation environment employs different LL scenarios (sequences of tasks) consisting of Starcraft-2 minigames and allows for the fair, comprehensive, and quantitative comparison of different combinations of components within a challenging common evaluation environment.

Rearrangement puzzles are variations of rearrangement problems in which the elements of a problem are potentially logically linked together. To efficiently solve such puzzles, we develop a motion planning approach based on a new state space that is logically factored, integrating the capabilities of the robot through factors of simultaneously manipulatable joints of an object. Based on this factored state space, we propose less-actions RRT (LA-RRT), a planner which optimizes for a low number of actions to solve a puzzle. At the core of our approach lies a new path defragmentation method, which rearranges and optimizes consecutive edges to minimize action cost. We solve six rearrangement scenarios with a Fetch robot, involving planar table puzzles and an escape room scenario. LA-RRT significantly outperforms the next best asymptotically-optimal planner by 4.01 to 6.58 times improvement in final action cost.

Measuring growth rates of apple fruitlets is important because it allows apple growers to determine when to apply chemical thinners to their crops to optimize yield. The current practice of obtaining growth rates involves using calipers to record sizes of fruitlets across multiple days. Due to the number of fruitlets needed to be sized, this method is laborious, time-consuming, and prone to human error. In this paper, we present a computer vision approach to measure the sizes and growth rates of apple fruitlets. With images collected by a hand-held stereo camera, our system detects, segments, and fits ellipses to fruitlets to measure their diameters. To measure growth rates, we utilize an Attentional Graph Neural Network to associate fruitlets across different days. We provide quantitative results on data collected in an apple orchard, and demonstrate that our system is able to predict abscise rates within 3% of the current method with a 7 times improvement in speed, while requiring significantly less manual effort. Moreover, we provide results on images captured by a robotic system in the field, and discuss the next steps to make the process fully autonomous.

Practitioners prune neural networks for efficiency gains and generalization improvements, but few scrutinize the factors determining the prunability of a neural network the maximum fraction of weights that pruning can remove without compromising the model's test accuracy. In this work, we study the properties of input data that may contribute to the prunability of a neural network. For high dimensional input data such as images, text, and audio, the manifold hypothesis suggests that these high dimensional inputs approximately lie on or near a significantly lower dimensional manifold. Prior work demonstrates that the underlying low dimensional structure of the input data may affect the sample efficiency of learning. In this paper, we investigate whether the low dimensional structure of the input data affects the prunability of a neural network.

Diffusion models have emerged as the state-of-the-art for image generation, among other tasks. Here, we present an efficient diffusion-based model for 3D-aware generation of neural fields. Our approach pre-processes training data, such as ShapeNet meshes, by converting them to continuous occupancy fields and factoring them into a set of axis-aligned triplane feature representations. Thus, our 3D training scenes are all represented by 2D feature planes, and we can directly train existing 2D diffusion models on these representations to generate 3D neural fields with high quality and diversity, outperforming alternative approaches to 3D-aware generation. Our approach requires essential modifications to existing triplane factorization pipelines to make the resulting features easy to learn for the diffusion model. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on 3D generation on several object classes from ShapeNet.