To facilitate the analysis of human actions, interactions and emotions, we compute a 3D model of human body pose, hand pose, and facial expression from a single monocular image. To achieve this, we use thousands of 3D scans to train a new, unified, 3D model of the human body, SMPL-X, that extends SMPL with fully articulated hands and an expressive face. Learning to regress the parameters of SMPL-X directly from images is challenging without paired images and 3D ground truth. Consequently, we follow the approach of SMPLify, which estimates 2D features and then optimizes model parameters to fit the features. We improve on SMPLify in several significant ways: (1) we detect 2D features corresponding to the face, hands, and feet and fit the full SMPL-X model to these; (2) we train a new neural network pose prior using a large MoCap dataset; (3) we define a new interpenetration penalty that is both fast and accurate; (4) we automatically detect gender and the appropriate body models (male, female, or neutral); (5) our PyTorch implementation achieves a speedup of more than 8× over Chumpy. We use the new method, SMPLify-X, to fit SMPL-X to both controlled images and images in the wild. We evaluate 3D accuracy on a new curated dataset comprising 100 images with pseudo ground-truth. This is a step towards automatic expressive human capture from monocular RGB data. The models, code, and data are available for research purposes at https://smpl-x.is.tue.mpg.de.

Recent advances in upper limb prostheses have led to significant improvements in the number of movements provided by the robotic limb. However, the method for controlling multiple degrees of freedom via user-generated signals remains challenging. To address this issue, various machine learning controllers have been developed to better predict movement intent. As these controllers become more intelligent and take on more autonomy in the system, the traditional approach of representing the human-machine interface as a human controlling a tool becomes limiting. One possible approach to improve the understanding of these interfaces is to model them as collaborative, multi-agent systems through the lens of joint action. The field of joint action has been commonly applied to two human partners who are trying to work jointly together to achieve a task, such as singing or moving a table together, by effecting coordinated change in their shared environment. In this work, we compare different prosthesis controllers (proportional electromyography with sequential switching, pattern recognition, and adaptive switching) in terms of how they present the hallmarks of joint action. The results of the comparison lead to a new perspective for understanding how existing myoelectric systems relate to each other, along with recommendations for how to improve these systems by increasing the collaborative communication between each partner.

Nowadays, the current neural network models of dialogue generation(chatbots) show great promise for generating answers for chatty agents. But they are short-sighted in that they predict utterances one at a time while disregarding their impact on future outcomes. Modelling a dialogue's future direction is critical for generating coherent, interesting dialogues, a need that has led traditional NLP dialogue models that rely on reinforcement learning. In this article, we explain how to combine these objectives by using deep reinforcement learning to predict future rewards in chatbot dialogue. The model simulates conversations between two virtual agents, with policy gradient methods used to reward sequences that exhibit three useful conversational characteristics: the flow of informality, coherence, and simplicity of response (related to forward-looking function). We assess our model based on its diversity, length, and complexity with regard to humans. In dialogue simulation, evaluations demonstrated that the proposed model generates more interactive responses and encourages a more sustained successful conversation. This work commemorates a preliminary step toward developing a neural conversational model based on the long-term success of dialogues.

In this work, we introduce a hypergraph representation learning framework called Hypergraph Neural Networks (HNN) that jointly learns hyperedge embeddings along with a set of hyperedge-dependent embeddings for each node in the hypergraph. HNN derives multiple embeddings per node in the hypergraph where each embedding for a node is dependent on a specific hyperedge of that node. Notably, HNN is accurate, data-efficient, flexible with many interchangeable components, and useful for a wide range of hypergraph learning tasks. We evaluate the effectiveness of the HNN framework for hyperedge prediction and hypergraph node classification. We find that HNN achieves an overall mean gain of 7.72% and 11.37% across all baseline models and graphs for hyperedge prediction and hypergraph node classification, respectively.

The issue of left before treatment complete (LBTC) patients is common in emergency departments (EDs). This issue represents a medico-legal risk and may cause a revenue loss. Thus, understanding the factors that cause patients to leave before treatment is complete is vital to mitigate and potentially eliminate these adverse effects. This paper proposes a framework for studying the factors that affect LBTC outcomes in EDs. The framework integrates machine learning, metaheuristic optimization, and model interpretation techniques. Metaheuristic optimization is used for hyperparameter optimization--one of the main challenges of machine learning model development. Three metaheuristic optimization algorithms are employed for optimizing the parameters of extreme gradient boosting (XGB), which are simulated annealing (SA), adaptive simulated annealing (ASA), and adaptive tabu simulated annealing (ATSA). The optimized XGB models are used to predict the LBTC outcomes for the patients under treatment in ED. The designed algorithms are trained and tested using four data groups resulting from the feature selection phase. The model with the best predictive performance is interpreted using SHaply Additive exPlanations (SHAP) method. The findings show that ATSA-XGB outperformed other mode configurations with an accuracy, area under the curve (AUC), sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score of 86.61%, 87.50%, 85.71%, 87.51%, and 86.60%, respectively. The degree and the direction of effects of each feature were determined and explained using the SHAP method.

This article presents a novel review of Active SLAM (A-SLAM) research conducted in the last decade. We discuss the formulation, application, and methodology applied in A-SLAM for trajectory generation and control action selection using information theory based approaches. Our extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis highlights the approaches, scenarios, configurations, types of robots, sensor types, dataset usage, and path planning approaches of A-SLAM research. We conclude by presenting the limitations and proposing future research possibilities. We believe that this survey will be helpful to researchers in understanding the various methods and techniques applied to A-SLAM formulation.

Deploying machine learning models in production may allow adversaries to infer sensitive information about training data. There is a vast literature analyzing different types of inference risks, ranging from membership inference to reconstruction attacks. Inspired by the success of games (i.e., probabilistic experiments) to study security properties in cryptography, some authors describe privacy inference risks in machine learning using a similar game-based style. However, adversary capabilities and goals are often stated in subtly different ways from one presentation to the other, which makes it hard to relate and compose results. In this paper, we present a game-based framework to systematize the body of knowledge on privacy inference risks in machine learning.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Accurate recognition of food items along with quality assessment is of paramount importance in the agricultural industry. Such automated systems can speed up the wheel of the food processing sector and save tons of manual labor. In this connection, the recent advancement of Deep learning-based architectures has introduced a wide variety of solutions offering remarkable performance in several classification tasks. In this work, we have exploited the concept of Densely Connected Convolutional Neural Networks (DenseNets) for fruit quality assessment. The feature propagation towards the deeper layers has enabled the network to tackle the vanishing gradient problems and ensured the reuse of features to learn meaningful insights. Evaluating on a dataset of 19,526 images containing six fruits having three quality grades for each, the proposed pipeline achieved a remarkable accuracy of 99.67%. The robustness of the model was further tested for fruit classification and quality assessment tasks where the model produced a similar performance, which makes it suitable for real-life applications.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.