Characterization of partial wetting by CMAS droplets using multiphase many-body dissipative particle dynamics and data-driven discovery based on PINNs

The molten sand, a mixture of calcia, magnesia, alumina, and silicate, known as CMAS, is characterized by its high viscosity, density, and surface tension. The unique properties of CMAS make it a challenging material to deal with in high-temperature applications, requiring innovative solutions and materials to prevent its buildup and damage to critical equipment. Here, we use multiphase many-body dissipative particle dynamics (mDPD) simulations to study the wetting dynamics of highly viscous molten CMAS droplets. The simulations are performed in three dimensions, with varying initial droplet sizes and equilibrium contact angles. We propose a coarse parametric ordinary differential equation (ODE) that captures the spreading radius behavior of the CMAS droplets. The ODE parameters are then identified based on the Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) framework. Subsequently, the closed form dependency of parameter values found by PINN on the initial radii and contact angles are given using symbolic regression. Finally, we employ Bayesian PINNs (B-PINNs) to assess and quantify the uncertainty associated with the discovered parameters. In brief, this study provides insight into spreading dynamics of CMAS droplets by fusing simple parametric ODE modeling and state-of-the-art machine learning techniques.

SkeletonMAE: Graph-based Masked Autoencoder for Skeleton Sequence Pre-training

Skeleton sequence representation learning has shown great advantages for action recognition due to its promising ability to model human joints and topology. However, the current methods usually require sufficient labeled data for training computationally expensive models, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Moreover, these methods ignore how to utilize the fine-grained dependencies among different skeleton joints to pre-train an efficient skeleton sequence learning model that can generalize well across different datasets. In this paper, we propose an efficient skeleton sequence learning framework, named Skeleton Sequence Learning (SSL). To comprehensively capture the human pose and obtain discriminative skeleton sequence representation, we build an asymmetric graph-based encoder-decoder pre-training architecture named SkeletonMAE, which embeds skeleton joint sequence into Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and reconstructs the masked skeleton joints and edges based on the prior human topology knowledge. Then, the pre-trained SkeletonMAE encoder is integrated with the Spatial-Temporal Representation Learning (STRL) module to build the SSL framework. Extensive experimental results show that our SSL generalizes well across different datasets and outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition methods on FineGym, Diving48, NTU 60 and NTU 120 datasets. Additionally, we obtain comparable performance to some fully supervised methods. The code is avaliable at https://github.com/HongYan1123/SkeletonMAE.

YONA: You Only Need One Adjacent Reference-frame for Accurate and Fast Video Polyp Detection

Accurate polyp detection is essential for assisting clinical rectal cancer diagnoses. Colonoscopy videos contain richer information than still images, making them a valuable resource for deep learning methods. Great efforts have been made to conduct video polyp detection through multi-frame temporal/spatial aggregation. However, unlike common fixed-camera video, the camera-moving scene in colonoscopy videos can cause rapid video jitters, leading to unstable training for existing video detection models. Additionally, the concealed nature of some polyps and the complex background environment further hinder the performance of existing video detectors. In this paper, we propose the \textbf{YONA} (\textbf{Y}ou \textbf{O}nly \textbf{N}eed one \textbf{A}djacent Reference-frame) method, an efficient end-to-end training framework for video polyp detection. YONA fully exploits the information of one previous adjacent frame and conducts polyp detection on the current frame without multi-frame collaborations. Specifically, for the foreground, YONA adaptively aligns the current frame's channel activation patterns with its adjacent reference frames according to their foreground similarity. For the background, YONA conducts background dynamic alignment guided by inter-frame difference to eliminate the invalid features produced by drastic spatial jitters. Moreover, YONA applies cross-frame contrastive learning during training, leveraging the ground truth bounding box to improve the model's perception of polyp and background. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on three public challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed YONA outperforms previous state-of-the-art competitors by a large margin in both accuracy and speed.

SR-OOD: Out-of-Distribution Detection via Sample Repairing

It is widely reported that deep generative models can classify out-of-distribution (OOD) samples as in-distribution with high confidence. In this work, we propose a hypothesis that this phenomenon is due to the reconstruction task, which can cause the generative model to focus too much on low-level features and not enough on semantic information. To address this issue, we introduce SR-OOD, an OOD detection framework that utilizes sample repairing to encourage the generative model to learn more than just an identity map. By focusing on semantics, our framework improves OOD detection performance without external data and label information. Our experimental results demonstrate the competitiveness of our approach in detecting OOD samples.

Small Total-Cost Constraints in Contextual Bandits with Knapsacks, with Application to Fairness

We consider contextual bandit problems with knapsacks [CBwK], a problem where at each round, a scalar reward is obtained and vector-valued costs are suffered. The learner aims to maximize the cumulative rewards while ensuring that the cumulative costs are lower than some predetermined cost constraints. We assume that contexts come from a continuous set, that costs can be signed, and that the expected reward and cost functions, while unknown, may be uniformly estimated -- a typical assumption in the literature. In this setting, total cost constraints had so far to be at least of order $T^{3/4}$, where $T$ is the number of rounds, and were even typically assumed to depend linearly on $T$. We are however motivated to use CBwK to impose a fairness constraint of equalized average costs between groups: the budget associated with the corresponding cost constraints should be as close as possible to the natural deviations, of order $\sqrt{T}$. To that end, we introduce a dual strategy based on projected-gradient-descent updates, that is able to deal with total-cost constraints of the order of $\sqrt{T}$ up to poly-logarithmic terms. This strategy is more direct and simpler than existing strategies in the literature. It relies on a careful, adaptive, tuning of the step size.

Deep Learning based Forecasting: a case study from the online fashion industry

Demand forecasting in the online fashion industry is particularly amendable to global, data-driven forecasting models because of the industry's set of particular challenges. These include the volume of data, the irregularity, the high amount of turn-over in the catalog and the fixed inventory assumption. While standard deep learning forecasting approaches cater for many of these, the fixed inventory assumption requires a special treatment via controlling the relationship between price and demand closely. In this case study, we describe the data and our modelling approach for this forecasting problem in detail and present empirical results that highlight the effectiveness of our approach.

Differential Convolutional Fuzzy Time Series Forecasting

Fuzzy time series forecasting (FTSF) is a typical forecasting method with wide application. Traditional FTSF is regarded as an expert system which leads to lose the ability to recognize undefined feature. The mentioned is main reason of poor forecasting with FTSF. To solve the problem, the proposed model Differential Fuzzy Convolutional Neural Network (DFCNN) utilizes convolution neural network to re-implement FTSF with learnable ability. DFCNN is capable of recognizing the potential information and improve the forecasting accuracy. Thanks to learnable ability of neural network, length of fuzzy rules established in FTSF is expended to arbitrary length which expert is not able to be handle by expert system. At the same time, FTSF usually cannot achieve satisfactory performance of non-stationary time series due to trend of non-stationary time series. The trend of non-stationary time series causes the fuzzy set established by FTSF to invalid and cause the forecasting to fail. DFCNN utilizes the Difference algorithm to weaken the non-stationarity of time series, so that DFCNN can forecast the non-stationary time series with low error that FTSF cannot forecast in satisfactory performance. After mass of experiments, DFCNN has excellent prediction effect, which is ahead of the existing FTSF and common time series forecasting algorithms. Finally, DFCNN provides further ideas for improving FTSF and holds continued research value.

Autonomous Navigation for Robot-assisted Intraluminal and Endovascular Procedures: A Systematic Review

Increased demand for less invasive procedures has accelerated the adoption of Intraluminal Procedures (IP) and Endovascular Interventions (EI) performed through body lumens and vessels. As navigation through lumens and vessels is quite complex, interest grows to establish autonomous navigation techniques for IP and EI for reaching the target area. Current research efforts are directed toward increasing the Level of Autonomy (LoA) during the navigation phase. One key ingredient for autonomous navigation is Motion Planning (MP) techniques. This paper provides an overview of MP techniques categorizing them based on LoA. Our analysis investigates advances for the different clinical scenarios. Through a systematic literature analysis using the PRISMA method, the study summarizes relevant works and investigates the clinical aim, LoA, adopted MP techniques, and validation types. We identify the limitations of the corresponding MP methods and provide directions to improve the robustness of the algorithms in dynamic intraluminal environments. MP for IP and EI can be classified into four subgroups: node, sampling, optimization, and learning-based techniques, with a notable rise in learning-based approaches in recent years. One of the review's contributions is the identification of the limiting factors in IP and EI robotic systems hindering higher levels of autonomous navigation. In the future, navigation is bound to become more autonomous, placing the clinician in a supervisory position to improve control precision and reduce workload.

Hierarchical Weight Averaging for Deep Neural Networks

Despite the simplicity, stochastic gradient descent (SGD)-like algorithms are successful in training deep neural networks (DNNs). Among various attempts to improve SGD, weight averaging (WA), which averages the weights of multiple models, has recently received much attention in the literature. Broadly, WA falls into two categories: 1) online WA, which averages the weights of multiple models trained in parallel, is designed for reducing the gradient communication overhead of parallel mini-batch SGD, and 2) offline WA, which averages the weights of one model at different checkpoints, is typically used to improve the generalization ability of DNNs. Though online and offline WA are similar in form, they are seldom associated with each other. Besides, these methods typically perform either offline parameter averaging or online parameter averaging, but not both. In this work, we firstly attempt to incorporate online and offline WA into a general training framework termed Hierarchical Weight Averaging (HWA). By leveraging both the online and offline averaging manners, HWA is able to achieve both faster convergence speed and superior generalization performance without any fancy learning rate adjustment. Besides, we also analyze the issues faced by existing WA methods, and how our HWA address them, empirically. Finally, extensive experiments verify that HWA outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly.

Decouple Non-parametric Knowledge Distillation For End-to-end Speech Translation

Existing techniques often attempt to make knowledge transfer from a powerful machine translation (MT) to speech translation (ST) model with some elaborate techniques, which often requires transcription as extra input during training. However, transcriptions are not always available, and how to improve the ST model performance without transcription, i.e., data efficiency, has rarely been studied in the literature. In this paper, we propose Decoupled Non-parametric Knowledge Distillation (DNKD) from data perspective to improve the data efficiency. Our method follows the knowledge distillation paradigm. However, instead of obtaining the teacher distribution from a sophisticated MT model, we construct it from a non-parametric datastore via k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN) retrieval, which removes the dependence on transcription and MT model. Then we decouple the classic knowledge distillation loss into target and non-target distillation to enhance the effect of the knowledge among non-target logits, which is the prominent "dark knowledge". Experiments on MuST-C corpus show that, the proposed method can achieve consistent improvement over the strong baseline without requiring any transcription.