Learning dynamics is at the heart of many important applications of machine learning (ML), such as robotics and autonomous driving. In these settings, ML algorithms typically need to reason about a physical system using high dimensional observations, such as images, without access to the underlying state. Recently, several methods have proposed to integrate priors from classical mechanics into ML models to address the challenge of physical reasoning from images. In this work, we take a sober look at the current capabilities of these models. To this end, we introduce a suite consisting of 17 datasets with visual observations based on physical systems exhibiting a wide range of dynamics. We conduct a thorough and detailed comparison of the major classes of physically inspired methods alongside several strong baselines. While models that incorporate physical priors can often learn latent spaces with desirable properties, our results demonstrate that these methods fail to significantly improve upon standard techniques. Nonetheless, we find that the use of continuous and time-reversible dynamics benefits models of all classes.

Deep neural networks have shown impressive performance in supervised learning, enabled by their ability to fit well to the provided training data. However, their performance is largely dependent on the quality of the training data and often degrades in the presence of noise. We propose a principled approach for tackling label noise with the aim of assigning importance weights to individual instances and class labels. Our method works by formulating a class of constrained optimization problems that yield simple closed form updates for these importance weights. The proposed optimization problems are solved per mini-batch which obviates the need of storing and updating the weights over the full dataset. Our optimization framework also provides a theoretical perspective on existing label smoothing heuristics for addressing label noise (such as label bootstrapping). We evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets and observe considerable performance gains in the presence of label noise.

Adversarial training suffers from robust overfitting, a phenomenon where the robust test accuracy starts to decrease during training. In this paper, we focus on reducing robust overfitting by using common data augmentation schemes. We demonstrate that, contrary to previous findings, when combined with model weight averaging, data augmentation can significantly boost robust accuracy. Furthermore, we compare various augmentations techniques and observe that spatial composition techniques work the best for adversarial training. Finally, we evaluate our approach on CIFAR-10 against $\ell_\infty$ and $\ell_2$ norm-bounded perturbations of size $\epsilon = 8/255$ and $\epsilon = 128/255$, respectively. We show large absolute improvements of +2.93% and +2.16% in robust accuracy compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. In particular, against $\ell_\infty$ norm-bounded perturbations of size $\epsilon = 8/255$, our model reaches 60.07% robust accuracy without using any external data. We also achieve a significant performance boost with this approach while using other architectures and datasets such as CIFAR-100, SVHN and TinyImageNet.

Europe was hit by several, disastrous heat and drought events in recent summers. Besides thermodynamic influences, such hot and dry extremes are driven by certain atmospheric situations including anticyclonic conditions. Effects of climate change on atmospheric circulations are complex and many open research questions remain in this context, e.g., on future trends of anticyclonic conditions. Based on the combination of a catalog of labeled circulation patterns and spatial atmospheric variables, we propose a smoothed convolutional neural network classifier for six types of anticyclonic circulations that are associated with drought and heat. Our work can help to identify important drivers of hot and dry extremes in climate simulations, which allows to unveil the impact of climate change on these drivers. We address various challenges inherent to circulation pattern classification that are also present in other climate patterns, e.g., subjective labels and unambiguous transition periods.

Knowledge distillation is a promising learning paradigm for boosting the performance and reliability of resource-efficient graph neural networks (GNNs) using more expressive yet cumbersome teacher models. Past work on distillation for GNNs proposed the Local Structure Preserving loss (LSP), which matches local structural relationships across the student and teacher's node embedding spaces. In this paper, we make two key contributions: From a methodological perspective, we study whether preserving the global topology of how the teacher embeds graph data can be a more effective distillation objective for GNNs, as real-world graphs often contain latent interactions and noisy edges. The purely local LSP objective over pre-defined edges is unable to achieve this as it ignores relationships among disconnected nodes. We propose two new approaches which better preserve global topology: (1) Global Structure Preserving loss (GSP), which extends LSP to incorporate all pairwise interactions; and (2) Graph Contrastive Representation Distillation (G-CRD), which uses contrastive learning to align the student node embeddings to those of the teacher in a shared representation space. From an experimental perspective, we introduce an expanded set of benchmarks on large-scale real-world datasets where the performance gap between teacher and student GNNs is non-negligible. We believe this is critical for testing the efficacy and robustness of knowledge distillation, but was missing from the LSP study which used synthetic datasets with trivial performance gaps. Experiments across 4 datasets and 14 heterogeneous GNN architectures show that G-CRD consistently boosts the performance and robustness of lightweight GNN models, outperforming the structure preserving approaches, LSP and GSP, as well as baselines adapted from 2D computer vision.

Digital pathology plays a crucial role in the development of artificial intelligence in the medical field. The digital pathology platform can make the pathological resources digital and networked, and realize the permanent storage of visual data and the synchronous browsing processing without the limitation of time and space. It has been widely used in various fields of pathology. However, there is still a lack of an open and universal digital pathology platform to assist doctors in the management and analysis of digital pathological sections, as well as the management and structured description of relevant patient information. Most platforms cannot integrate image viewing, annotation and analysis, and text information management. To solve the above problems, we propose a comprehensive and extensible platform PIMIP. Our PIMIP has developed the image annotation functions based on the visualization of digital pathological sections. Our annotation functions support multi-user collaborative annotation and multi-device annotation, and realize the automation of some annotation tasks. In the annotation task, we invited a professional pathologist for guidance. We introduce a machine learning module for image analysis. The data we collected included public data from local hospitals and clinical examples. Our platform is more clinical and suitable for clinical use. In addition to image data, we also structured the management and display of text information. So our platform is comprehensive. The platform framework is built in a modular way to support users to add machine learning modules independently, which makes our platform extensible.

In recent years, machine learning neural network has penetrated deeply into people's life. As the price of convenience, people's private information also has the risk of disclosure. The "right to be forgotten" was introduced in a timely manner, stipulating that individuals have the right to withdraw their consent from personal information processing activities based on their consent. To solve this problem, machine unlearning is proposed, which allows the model to erase all memory of private information. Previous studies, including retraining and incremental learning to update models, often take up extra storage space or are difficult to apply to neural networks. Our method only needs to make a small perturbation of the weight of the target model and make it iterate in the direction of the model trained with the remaining data subset until the contribution of the unlearning data to the model is completely eliminated. In this paper, experiments on five datasets prove the effectiveness of our method for machine unlearning, and our method is 15 times faster than retraining.

Learning-based methods for training embodied agents typically require a large number of high-quality scenes that contain realistic layouts and support meaningful interactions. However, current simulators for Embodied AI (EAI) challenges only provide simulated indoor scenes with a limited number of layouts. This paper presents Luminous, the first research framework that employs state-of-the-art indoor scene synthesis algorithms to generate large-scale simulated scenes for Embodied AI challenges. Further, we automatically and quantitatively evaluate the quality of generated indoor scenes via their ability to support complex household tasks. Luminous incorporates a novel scene generation algorithm (Constrained Stochastic Scene Generation (CSSG)), which achieves competitive performance with human-designed scenes. Within Luminous, the EAI task executor, task instruction generation module, and video rendering toolkit can collectively generate a massive multimodal dataset of new scenes for the training and evaluation of Embodied AI agents. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the data generated by Luminous, enabling the comprehensive assessment of embodied agents on generalization and robustness.

While Attention has come to be an important mechanism in deep learning, there remains limited intuition for why it works so well. Here, we show that Transformer Attention can be closely related under certain data conditions to Kanerva's Sparse Distributed Memory (SDM), a biologically plausible associative memory model. We confirm that these conditions are satisfied in pre-trained GPT2 Transformer models. We discuss the implications of the Attention-SDM map and provide new computational and biological interpretations of Attention.

Recent deep learning research based on Transformer model architectures has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance across a variety of domains and tasks, mostly within the computer vision and natural language processing domains. While some recent studies have implemented Transformers for clinical tasks using electronic health records data, they are limited in scope, flexibility, and comprehensiveness. In this study, we propose a flexible Transformer-based EHR embedding pipeline and predictive model framework that introduces several novel modifications of existing workflows that capitalize on data attributes unique to the healthcare domain. We showcase the feasibility of our flexible design in a case study in the intensive care unit, where our models accurately predict seven clinical outcomes pertaining to readmission and patient mortality over multiple future time horizons.