In this paper, we present PARTIME, a software library written in Python and based on PyTorch, designed specifically to speed up neural networks whenever data is continuously streamed over time, for both learning and inference. Existing libraries are designed to exploit data-level parallelism, assuming that samples are batched, a condition that is not naturally met in applications that are based on streamed data. Differently, PARTIME starts processing each data sample at the time in which it becomes available from the stream. PARTIME wraps the code that implements a feed-forward multi-layer network and it distributes the layer-wise processing among multiple devices, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Thanks to its pipeline-based computational scheme, PARTIME allows the devices to perform computations in parallel. At inference time this results in scaling capabilities that are theoretically linear with respect to the number of devices. During the learning stage, PARTIME can leverage the non-i.i.d. nature of the streamed data with samples that are smoothly evolving over time for efficient gradient computations. Experiments are performed in order to empirically compare PARTIME with classic non-parallel neural computations in online learning, distributing operations on up to 8 NVIDIA GPUs, showing significant speedups that are almost linear in the number of devices, mitigating the impact of the data transfer overhead.

在过去的几年中，计算机视觉的显着进步总的来说是归因于深度学习，这是由于大量标记数据的可用性所推动的，并与GPU范式的爆炸性增长配对。在订阅这一观点的同时，本书批评了该领域中所谓的科学进步，并在基于信息的自然法则的框架内提出了对愿景的调查。具体而言，目前的作品提出了有关视觉的基本问题，这些问题尚未被理解，引导读者走上了一个由新颖挑战引起的与机器学习基础共鸣的旅程。中心论点是，要深入了解视觉计算过程，有必要超越通用机器学习算法的应用，而要专注于考虑到视觉信号的时空性质的适当学习理论。

随着全球的太阳能能力继续增长，越来越意识到先进的检验系统正度重视安排智能干预措施并最大限度地减少停机时间。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种新的自动多级模型，以通过使用YOLOV3网络和计算机视觉技术来检测由无人机捕获的空中图像上的面板缺陷。该模型结合了面板和缺陷的检测来改进其精度。主要的Noveltize由其多功能性来处理热量或可见图像，并检测各种缺陷及其对屋顶和地面安装的光伏系统和不同面板类型的缺陷。拟议的模型已在意大利南部的两个大型光伏工厂验证，优秀的AP至0.5超过98％，对于面板检测，卓越的AP@0.4（AP@0.5）大约为88.3％（66.95％）的热点红外热成像和MAP@0.5在可见光谱中近70％，用于检测通过污染和鸟粪诱导，分层，水坑的存在和覆盖屋顶板诱导的面板遮蔽的异常谱。还预测了对污染覆盖的估计。最后讨论了对不同yolov3的输出尺度对检测的影响的分析。

本文维持了当时征服真正人类的语境中的视觉技能的学习机的位置，其中少数人类对象监督仅由声乐相互作用和指向辅助辅助。这可能需要关于愿景的计算过程的新基础，并通过在简单的人机语言相互作用下在自己的视觉环境中涉及视觉描述的任务中的最终目的。挑战由开发机器组成，该计算机学会在不需要处理视觉数据库的情况下。这可能会向真正正交的竞争轨道打开大门，关于视觉的深度学习技术，不依赖于庞大的视觉数据库的积累。

Computational units in artificial neural networks follow a simplified model of biological neurons. In the biological model, the output signal of a neuron runs down the axon, splits following the many branches at its end, and passes identically to all the downward neurons of the network. Each of the downward neurons will use their copy of this signal as one of many inputs dendrites, integrate them all and fire an output, if above some threshold. In the artificial neural network, this translates to the fact that the nonlinear filtering of the signal is performed in the upward neuron, meaning that in practice the same activation is shared between all the downward neurons that use that signal as their input. Dendrites thus play a passive role. We propose a slightly more complex model for the biological neuron, where dendrites play an active role: the activation in the output of the upward neuron becomes optional, and instead the signals going through each dendrite undergo independent nonlinear filterings, before the linear combination. We implement this new model into a ReLU computational unit and discuss its biological plausibility. We compare this new computational unit with the standard one and describe it from a geometrical point of view. We provide a Keras implementation of this unit into fully connected and convolutional layers and estimate their FLOPs and weights change. We then use these layers in ResNet architectures on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Imagenette, and Imagewoof, obtaining performance improvements over standard ResNets up to 1.73%. Finally, we prove a universal representation theorem for continuous functions on compact sets and show that this new unit has more representational power than its standard counterpart.

Fruit is a key crop in worldwide agriculture feeding millions of people. The standard supply chain of fruit products involves quality checks to guarantee freshness, taste, and, most of all, safety. An important factor that determines fruit quality is its stage of ripening. This is usually manually classified by experts in the field, which makes it a labor-intensive and error-prone process. Thus, there is an arising need for automation in the process of fruit ripeness classification. Many automatic methods have been proposed that employ a variety of feature descriptors for the food item to be graded. Machine learning and deep learning techniques dominate the top-performing methods. Furthermore, deep learning can operate on raw data and thus relieve the users from having to compute complex engineered features, which are often crop-specific. In this survey, we review the latest methods proposed in the literature to automatize fruit ripeness classification, highlighting the most common feature descriptors they operate on.

Artificial neural networks can learn complex, salient data features to achieve a given task. On the opposite end of the spectrum, mathematically grounded methods such as topological data analysis allow users to design analysis pipelines fully aware of data constraints and symmetries. We introduce a class of persistence-based neural network layers. Persistence-based layers allow the users to easily inject knowledge about symmetries (equivariance) respected by the data, are equipped with learnable weights, and can be composed with state-of-the-art neural architectures.

In this work we introduce reinforcement learning techniques for solving lexicographic multi-objective problems. These are problems that involve multiple reward signals, and where the goal is to learn a policy that maximises the first reward signal, and subject to this constraint also maximises the second reward signal, and so on. We present a family of both action-value and policy gradient algorithms that can be used to solve such problems, and prove that they converge to policies that are lexicographically optimal. We evaluate the scalability and performance of these algorithms empirically, demonstrating their practical applicability. As a more specific application, we show how our algorithms can be used to impose safety constraints on the behaviour of an agent, and compare their performance in this context with that of other constrained reinforcement learning algorithms.

In contextual linear bandits, the reward function is assumed to be a linear combination of an unknown reward vector and a given embedding of context-arm pairs. In practice, the embedding is often learned at the same time as the reward vector, thus leading to an online representation learning problem. Existing approaches to representation learning in contextual bandits are either very generic (e.g., model-selection techniques or algorithms for learning with arbitrary function classes) or specialized to particular structures (e.g., nested features or representations with certain spectral properties). As a result, the understanding of the cost of representation learning in contextual linear bandit is still limited. In this paper, we take a systematic approach to the problem and provide a comprehensive study through an instance-dependent perspective. We show that representation learning is fundamentally more complex than linear bandits (i.e., learning with a given representation). In particular, learning with a given set of representations is never simpler than learning with the worst realizable representation in the set, while we show cases where it can be arbitrarily harder. We complement this result with an extensive discussion of how it relates to existing literature and we illustrate positive instances where representation learning is as complex as learning with a fixed representation and where sub-logarithmic regret is achievable.

Relation extraction (RE) is a sub-discipline of information extraction (IE) which focuses on the prediction of a relational predicate from a natural-language input unit (such as a sentence, a clause, or even a short paragraph consisting of multiple sentences and/or clauses). Together with named-entity recognition (NER) and disambiguation (NED), RE forms the basis for many advanced IE tasks such as knowledge-base (KB) population and verification. In this work, we explore how recent approaches for open information extraction (OpenIE) may help to improve the task of RE by encoding structured information about the sentences' principal units, such as subjects, objects, verbal phrases, and adverbials, into various forms of vectorized (and hence unstructured) representations of the sentences. Our main conjecture is that the decomposition of long and possibly convoluted sentences into multiple smaller clauses via OpenIE even helps to fine-tune context-sensitive language models such as BERT (and its plethora of variants) for RE. Our experiments over two annotated corpora, KnowledgeNet and FewRel, demonstrate the improved accuracy of our enriched models compared to existing RE approaches. Our best results reach 92% and 71% of F1 score for KnowledgeNet and FewRel, respectively, proving the effectiveness of our approach on competitive benchmarks.