In digital pathology tasks, transformers have achieved state-of-the-art results, surpassing convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, transformers are usually complex and resource intensive. In this study, we developed a novel and efficient digital pathology classifier called DPSeq, to predict cancer biomarkers through fine-tuning a sequencer architecture integrating horizon and vertical bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) networks. Using hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained histopathological images of colorectal cancer (CRC) from two international datasets: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Molecular and Cellular Oncology (MCO), the predictive performance of DPSeq was evaluated in series of experiments. DPSeq demonstrated exceptional performance for predicting key biomarkers in CRC (MSI status, Hypermutation, CIMP status, BRAF mutation, TP53 mutation and chromosomal instability [CING]), outperforming most published state-of-the-art classifiers in a within-cohort internal validation and a cross-cohort external validation. Additionally, under the same experimental conditions using the same set of training and testing datasets, DPSeq surpassed 4 CNN (ResNet18, ResNet50, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNet) and 2 transformer (ViT and Swin-T) models, achieving the highest AUROC and AUPRC values in predicting MSI status, BRAF mutation, and CIMP status. Furthermore, DPSeq required less time for both training and prediction due to its simple architecture. Therefore, DPSeq appears to be the preferred choice over transformer and CNN models for predicting cancer biomarkers.

Contrast maximization (CMax) techniques are widely used in event-based vision systems to estimate the motion parameters of the camera and generate high-contrast images. However, these techniques are noise-intolerance and suffer from the multiple extrema problem which arises when the scene contains more noisy events than structure, causing the contrast to be higher at multiple locations. This makes the task of estimating the camera motion extremely challenging, which is a problem for neuromorphic earth observation, because, without a proper estimation of the motion parameters, it is not possible to generate a map with high contrast, causing important details to be lost. Similar methods that use CMax addressed this problem by changing or augmenting the objective function to enable it to converge to the correct motion parameters. Our proposed solution overcomes the multiple extrema and noise-intolerance problems by correcting the warped event before calculating the contrast and offers the following advantages: it does not depend on the event data, it does not require a prior about the camera motion, and keeps the rest of the CMax pipeline unchanged. This is to ensure that the contrast is only high around the correct motion parameters. Our approach enables the creation of better motion-compensated maps through an analytical compensation technique using a novel dataset from the International Space Station (ISS). Code is available at \url{https://github.com/neuromorphicsystems/event_warping}

Constructing decision trees online is a classical machine learning problem. Existing works often assume that features are readily available for each incoming data point. However, in many real world applications, both feature values and the labels are unknown a priori and can only be obtained at a cost. For example, in medical diagnosis, doctors have to choose which tests to perform (i.e., making costly feature queries) on a patient in order to make a diagnosis decision (i.e., predicting labels). We provide a fresh perspective to tackle this practical challenge. Our framework consists of an active planning oracle embedded in an online learning scheme for which we investigate several information acquisition functions. Specifically, we employ a surrogate information acquisition function based on adaptive submodularity to actively query feature values with a minimal cost, while using a posterior sampling scheme to maintain a low regret for online prediction. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our framework via extensive experiments on various real-world datasets. Our framework also naturally adapts to the challenging setting of online learning with concept drift and is shown to be competitive with baseline models while being more flexible.

Clustering is at the very core of machine learning, and its applications proliferate with the increasing availability of data. However, as datasets grow, comparing clusterings with an adjustment for chance becomes computationally difficult, preventing unbiased ground-truth comparisons and solution selection. We propose FastAMI, a Monte Carlo-based method to efficiently approximate the Adjusted Mutual Information (AMI) and extend it to the Standardized Mutual Information (SMI). The approach is compared with the exact calculation and a recently developed variant of the AMI based on pairwise permutations, using both synthetic and real data. In contrast to the exact calculation our method is fast enough to enable these adjusted information-theoretic comparisons for large datasets while maintaining considerably more accurate results than the pairwise approach.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused substantial damage to global health. Even though three years have passed, the world continues to struggle with the virus. Concerns are growing about the impact of COVID-19 on the mental health of infected individuals, who are more likely to experience depression, which can have long-lasting consequences for both the affected individuals and the world. Detection and intervention at an early stage can reduce the risk of depression in COVID-19 patients. In this paper, we investigated the relationship between COVID-19 infection and depression through social media analysis. Firstly, we managed a dataset of COVID-19 patients that contains information about their social media activity both before and after infection. Secondly,We conducted an extensive analysis of this dataset to investigate the characteristic of COVID-19 patients with a higher risk of depression. Thirdly, we proposed a deep neural network for early prediction of depression risk. This model considers daily mood swings as a psychiatric signal and incorporates textual and emotional characteristics via knowledge distillation. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms baselines in detecting depression risk, with an AUROC of 0.9317 and an AUPRC of 0.8116. Our model has the potential to enable public health organizations to initiate prompt intervention with high-risk patients

Wow." Phone calls with law professors about regulatory actions don't normally start with unprompted expressions of amazement, but regulatory actions don't normally come like this. Anne Witt, professor of law and member of the EDHEC Augmented Law Institute, had been expecting to have a very different conversation when we spoke last Wednesday. But then, just minutes before we were due to talk, the UK's competition regulator blocked Microsoft's attempted $68.7bn acquisition of megadeveloper Activision Blizzard, the sprawling corporation behind games including Candy Crush Saga, World of Warcraft, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and, most importantly, Call of Duty. Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is just one of a number of international regulators which was investigating the proposed acquisition. In the US, the Federal Trade Commision (FTC) had already sued to block the takeover in December, with the case due in court later this year. The European Union is investigating, and has given itself a deadline of 22 May to make a decision, while Australia has paused its own investigation while it engages with overseas regulators. One of those regulators had already given the deal a pass. In March, the Japan Fair Trade Commission ruled that it was "unlikely to result in substantially restraining competition", and approved it to go ahead. Japan's justification for allowing the merger was also behind Witt's expectation it would be approved. "For 30 years or so, competition agencies, very much influenced by the US school, have taken the view that'vertical mergers' are rarely dangerous," she explained, once the shock had worn off. "If you have a'horizontal merger' – if Microsoft had bought up a competitor – it is very evident that that will have a direct effect on competition, because it eliminates one player in the market.

The man often touted as the godfather of AI has quit Google, citing concerns over the flood of fake information, videos and photos online and the possibility for AI to upend the job market. Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who with two of his students at the University of Toronto built a neural net in 2012, quit Google this week, the New York Times reported. Hinton, 75, said he quit to speak freely about the dangers of AI, and in part regrets his contribution to the field. He was brought on by Google a decade ago to help develop the company's AI technology. Hinton's research led the way for current systems like ChatGPT.

Pre-trained language models (LMs) are used for knowledge intensive tasks like question answering, but their knowledge gets continuously outdated as the world changes. Prior work has studied targeted updates to LMs, injecting individual facts and evaluating whether the model learns these facts while not changing predictions on other contexts. We take a step forward and study LMs' abilities to make inferences based on injected facts (or propagate those facts): for example, after learning that something is a TV show, does an LM predict that you can watch it? We study this with two cloze-style tasks: an existing dataset of real-world sentences about novel entities (ECBD) as well as a new controlled benchmark with manually designed templates requiring varying levels of inference about injected knowledge. Surprisingly, we find that existing methods for updating knowledge (gradient-based fine-tuning and modifications of this approach) show little propagation of injected knowledge. These methods improve performance on cloze instances only when there is lexical overlap between injected facts and target inferences. Yet, prepending entity definitions in an LM's context improves performance across all settings, suggesting that there is substantial headroom for parameter-updating approaches for knowledge injection.

We consider the coordinated escort problem, where a decentralised team of supporting robots implicitly assist the mission of higher-value principal robots. The defining challenge is how to evaluate the effect of supporting robots' actions on the principal robots' mission. To capture this effect, we define two novel auxiliary reward functions for supporting robots called satisfaction improvement and satisfaction entropy, which computes the improvement in probability of mission success, or the uncertainty thereof. Given these reward functions, we coordinate the entire team of principal and supporting robots using decentralised cross entropy method (Dec-CEM), a new extension of CEM to multi-agent systems based on the product distribution approximation. In a simulated object avoidance scenario, our planning framework demonstrates up to two-fold improvement in task satisfaction against conventional decoupled information gathering.The significance of our results is to introduce a new family of algorithmic problems that will enable important new practical applications of heterogeneous multi-robot systems.

Video text spotting refers to localizing, recognizing, and tracking textual elements such as captions, logos, license plates, signs, and other forms of text within consecutive video frames. However, current datasets available for this task rely on quadrilateral ground truth annotations, which may result in including excessive background content and inaccurate text boundaries. Furthermore, methods trained on these datasets often produce prediction results in the form of quadrilateral boxes, which limits their ability to handle complex scenarios such as dense or curved text. To address these issues, we propose a scalable mask annotation pipeline called SAMText for video text spotting. SAMText leverages the SAM model [15] to generate mask annotations for scene text images or video frames at scale. Using SAMText, we have created a large-scale dataset, SAMText-9M, that contains over 2,400 video clips sourced from existing datasets and over 9 million mask annotations. We have also conducted a thorough statistical analysis of the generated masks and their quality, identifying several research topics that could be further explored based on this dataset. The code and dataset will be released at SAMText.