机器学习（ML）算法在帮助不同学科和机构的科学社区解决大型和多样化的数据问题方面表现出了增长的趋势。但是，许多可用的ML工具在编程方面要求且计算成本高昂。 MlexChange项目旨在建立一个配备有能力工具的协作平台，该平台使科学家和设施使用者没有深刻的ML背景来使用ML和计算资源进行科学发现。在高水平上，我们针对完整的用户体验，在该体验中，可以通过Web应用程序可以轻松获得管理和交换ML算法，工作流和数据。到目前为止，我们已经构建了四个主要组件，即中央职位管理器，集中式内容注册表，用户门户和搜索引擎，并成功地将这些组件部署到了测试服务器上。由于每个组件都是一个独立的容器，因此可以轻松地在不同尺度的服务器上部署整个平台或其个人服务，从笔记本电脑（通常是单个用户）到高性能群集（HPC）（同时）通过许多用户。因此，MlexChange使用方案使灵活性变得灵活 - 用户可以从远程服务器访问服务和资源，也可以在其本地网络中运行整个平台或其个人服务。

远程感知的地理空间数据对于包括精确农业，城市规划，灾害监测和反应以及气候变化研究等应用至关重要。对于在类似的计算机视觉任务中的深度神经网络的成功和可用的远程感测图像的纯粹体积的情况下，深入学习方法尤为前接受了许多遥感任务。然而，数据收集方法的方差和地理空间元数据的处理使得深度学习方法的应用成为远程感测的数据不动性。例如，卫星图像通常包括超出红色，绿色和蓝色的额外光谱频带，并且必须连接到可以具有不同坐标系，界限和分辨率的其他地理空间数据源。为了帮助实现遥感应用的深度学习的潜力，我们介绍了一个Pythono库的Torchgeo，用于将地理空间数据集成到Pytorch深度学习生态系统中。 Torchgeo为各种基准数据集，用于通用地理空间数据源的可组合数据集，用于地理空间数据的采样器以及使用多光谱图像的转换的数据加载器。 Torchgeo也是第一个为多光谱卫星图像提供预先训练的模型的库（例如，使用Sentinel 2卫星的所有频段的模型），允许在下游遥感任务上传输学习，其中包含有限的标记数据。我们使用Torchgeo在现有数据集上创建可重复的基准结果，并将我们的建议方法用于直通预处理地理空间图像。 Torchgeo是开源的，可在GitHub上提供：https://github.com/microsoft/torchgeo。

自从深度神经网络被广泛应用以来，计算病理学领域已经取得了巨大的进步。这些网络通常需要大量注释的数据来训练大量参数。但是，注释大型组织病理学数据集需要大量精力。我们引入了一个轻巧且可解释的模型，用于核检测和弱监督的分割。它仅需要在孤立的核上进行注释，而不是数据集中的所有核。此外，这是一个生成的组成模型，首先定位核的一部分，然后学习各部分的空间相关性，以进一步定位核。这个过程在预测中带来了可解释性。内部数据集的经验结果表明，在检测中，提出的方法比其深层网络对应物获得了可比性或更好的性能，尤其是在注释数据受到限制的情况下。它还优于流行的弱监督分割方法。提出的方法可能是深度学习方法渴望数据问题的替代解决方案。

为视频中的每个像素分配语义类和跟踪身份的任务称为视频Panoptic分段。我们的工作是第一个在真实世界中瞄准这项任务，需要在空间和时间域中的密集解释。由于此任务的地面真理难以获得，但是，现有数据集是合成构造的或仅在短视频剪辑中稀疏地注释。为了克服这一点，我们介绍了一个包含两个数据集，Kitti-Step和Motchallenge步骤的新基准。数据集包含长视频序列，提供具有挑战性的示例和用于研究长期像素精确分割和在真实条件下跟踪的测试床。我们进一步提出了一种新的评估度量分割和跟踪质量（STQ），其相当余额平衡该任务的语义和跟踪方面，并且更适合评估任意长度的序列。最后，我们提供了几个基线来评估此新具有挑战性数据集的现有方法的状态。我们已将我们的数据集，公制，基准服务器和基准公开提供，并希望这将激发未来的研究。

We consider the problem of estimating a multivariate function $f_0$ of bounded variation (BV), from noisy observations $y_i = f_0(x_i) + z_i$ made at random design points $x_i \in \mathbb{R}^d$, $i=1,\ldots,n$. We study an estimator that forms the Voronoi diagram of the design points, and then solves an optimization problem that regularizes according to a certain discrete notion of total variation (TV): the sum of weighted absolute differences of parameters $\theta_i,\theta_j$ (which estimate the function values $f_0(x_i),f_0(x_j)$) at all neighboring cells $i,j$ in the Voronoi diagram. This is seen to be equivalent to a variational optimization problem that regularizes according to the usual continuum (measure-theoretic) notion of TV, once we restrict the domain to functions that are piecewise constant over the Voronoi diagram. The regression estimator under consideration hence performs (shrunken) local averaging over adaptively formed unions of Voronoi cells, and we refer to it as the Voronoigram, following the ideas in Koenker (2005), and drawing inspiration from Tukey's regressogram (Tukey, 1961). Our contributions in this paper span both the conceptual and theoretical frontiers: we discuss some of the unique properties of the Voronoigram in comparison to TV-regularized estimators that use other graph-based discretizations; we derive the asymptotic limit of the Voronoi TV functional; and we prove that the Voronoigram is minimax rate optimal (up to log factors) for estimating BV functions that are essentially bounded.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used to create more sustainable production methods and model climate change, making it a valuable tool in the fight against environmental degradation. This paper describes the paradox of an energy-consuming technology serving the ecological challenges of tomorrow. The study provides an overview of the sectors that use AI-based solutions for environmental protection. It draws on numerous examples from AI for Green players to present use cases and concrete examples. In the second part of the study, the negative impacts of AI on the environment and the emerging technological solutions to support Green AI are examined. It is also shown that the research on less energy-consuming AI is motivated more by cost and energy autonomy constraints than by environmental considerations. This leads to a rebound effect that favors an increase in the complexity of models. Finally, the need to integrate environmental indicators into algorithms is discussed. The environmental dimension is part of the broader ethical problem of AI, and addressing it is crucial for ensuring the sustainability of AI in the long term.

Recent advances in language modeling have enabled new conversational systems. In particular, it is often desirable for people to make choices among specified options when using such systems. We address the problem of reference resolution, when people use natural expressions to choose between real world entities. For example, given the choice `Should we make a Simnel cake or a Pandan cake?' a natural response from a non-expert may be indirect: `let's make the green one'. Reference resolution has been little studied with natural expressions, thus robustly understanding such language has large potential for improving naturalness in dialog, recommendation, and search systems. We create AltEntities (Alternative Entities), a new public dataset of entity pairs and utterances, and develop models for the disambiguation problem. Consisting of 42K indirect referring expressions across three domains, it enables for the first time the study of how large language models can be adapted to this task. We find they achieve 82%-87% accuracy in realistic settings, which while reasonable also invites further advances.

Plastic shopping bags that get carried away from the side of roads and tangled on cotton plants can end up at cotton gins if not removed before the harvest. Such bags may not only cause problem in the ginning process but might also get embodied in cotton fibers reducing its quality and marketable value. Therefore, it is required to detect, locate, and remove the bags before cotton is harvested. Manually detecting and locating these bags in cotton fields is labor intensive, time-consuming and a costly process. To solve these challenges, we present application of four variants of YOLOv5 (YOLOv5s, YOLOv5m, YOLOv5l and YOLOv5x) for detecting plastic shopping bags using Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)-acquired RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) images. We also show fixed effect model tests of color of plastic bags as well as YOLOv5-variant on average precision (AP), mean average precision (mAP@50) and accuracy. In addition, we also demonstrate the effect of height of plastic bags on the detection accuracy. It was found that color of bags had significant effect (p < 0.001) on accuracy across all the four variants while it did not show any significant effect on the AP with YOLOv5m (p = 0.10) and YOLOv5x (p = 0.35) at 95% confidence level. Similarly, YOLOv5-variant did not show any significant effect on the AP (p = 0.11) and accuracy (p = 0.73) of white bags, but it had significant effects on the AP (p = 0.03) and accuracy (p = 0.02) of brown bags including on the mAP@50 (p = 0.01) and inference speed (p < 0.0001). Additionally, height of plastic bags had significant effect (p < 0.0001) on overall detection accuracy. The findings reported in this paper can be useful in speeding up removal of plastic bags from cotton fields before harvest and thereby reducing the amount of contaminants that end up at cotton gins.

The Graph Protocol indexes historical blockchain transaction data and makes it available for querying. As the protocol is decentralized, there are many independent Indexers that index and compete with each other for serving queries to the Consumers. One dimension along which Indexers compete is pricing. In this paper, we propose a bandit-based algorithm for maximization of Indexers' revenue via Consumer budget discovery. We present the design and the considerations we had to make for a dynamic pricing algorithm being used by multiple agents simultaneously. We discuss the results achieved by our dynamic pricing bandits both in simulation and deployed into production on one of the Indexers operating on Ethereum. We have open-sourced both the simulation framework and tools we created, which other Indexers have since started to adapt into their own workflows.

Score-based generative models are shown to achieve remarkable empirical performances in various applications such as image generation and audio synthesis. However, a theoretical understanding of score-based diffusion models is still incomplete. Recently, Song et al. showed that the training objective of score-based generative models is equivalent to minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence of the generated distribution from the data distribution. In this work, we show that score-based models also minimize the Wasserstein distance between them under suitable assumptions on the model. Specifically, we prove that the Wasserstein distance is upper bounded by the square root of the objective function up to multiplicative constants and a fixed constant offset. Our proof is based on a novel application of the theory of optimal transport, which can be of independent interest to the society. Our numerical experiments support our findings. By analyzing our upper bounds, we provide a few techniques to obtain tighter upper bounds.