在过去的十年中，在杂交无人驾驶空中水下车辆的研究中努力，机器人可以轻松飞行和潜入水中的机械适应水平。然而，大多数文献集中在物理设计，建筑物的实际问题上，最近，低水平的控制策略。在高级情报的背景下，如运动规划和与现实世界的互动的情况下已经完成。因此，我们在本文中提出了一种轨迹规划方法，允许避免避免未知的障碍和空中媒体之间的平滑过渡。我们的方法基于经典迅速探索随机树的变体，其主要优点是处理障碍，复杂的非线性动力学，模型不确定性和外部干扰的能力。该方法使用\ Hydrone的动态模型，提出具有高水下性能的混合动力车辆，但我们认为它可以很容易地推广到其他类型的空中/水生平台。在实验部分中，我们在充满障碍物的环境中显示了模拟结果，其中机器人被命令执行不同的媒体运动，展示了我们的策略的适用性。

Real-world robotic grasping can be done robustly if a complete 3D Point Cloud Data (PCD) of an object is available. However, in practice, PCDs are often incomplete when objects are viewed from few and sparse viewpoints before the grasping action, leading to the generation of wrong or inaccurate grasp poses. We propose a novel grasping strategy, named 3DSGrasp, that predicts the missing geometry from the partial PCD to produce reliable grasp poses. Our proposed PCD completion network is a Transformer-based encoder-decoder network with an Offset-Attention layer. Our network is inherently invariant to the object pose and point's permutation, which generates PCDs that are geometrically consistent and completed properly. Experiments on a wide range of partial PCD show that 3DSGrasp outperforms the best state-of-the-art method on PCD completion tasks and largely improves the grasping success rate in real-world scenarios. The code and dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

Model estimates obtained from traditional subspace identification methods may be subject to significant variance. This elevated variance is aggravated in the cases of large models or of a limited sample size. Common solutions to reduce the effect of variance are regularized estimators, shrinkage estimators and Bayesian estimation. In the current work we investigate the latter two solutions, which have not yet been applied to subspace identification. Our experimental results show that our proposed estimators may reduce the estimation risk up to $40\%$ of that of traditional subspace methods.

This report summarizes the work carried out by the authors during the Twelfth Montreal Industrial Problem Solving Workshop, held at Universit\'e de Montr\'eal in August 2022. The team tackled a problem submitted by CBC/Radio-Canada on the theme of Automatic Text Simplification (ATS).

Counterfactual explanation is a common class of methods to make local explanations of machine learning decisions. For a given instance, these methods aim to find the smallest modification of feature values that changes the predicted decision made by a machine learning model. One of the challenges of counterfactual explanation is the efficient generation of realistic counterfactuals. To address this challenge, we propose VCNet-Variational Counter Net-a model architecture that combines a predictor and a counterfactual generator that are jointly trained, for regression or classification tasks. VCNet is able to both generate predictions, and to generate counterfactual explanations without having to solve another minimisation problem. Our contribution is the generation of counterfactuals that are close to the distribution of the predicted class. This is done by learning a variational autoencoder conditionally to the output of the predictor in a join-training fashion. We present an empirical evaluation on tabular datasets and across several interpretability metrics. The results are competitive with the state-of-the-art method.

Foundation models are redefining how AI systems are built. Practitioners now follow a standard procedure to build their machine learning solutions: download a copy of a foundation model, and fine-tune it using some in-house data about the target task of interest. Consequently, the Internet is swarmed by a handful of foundation models fine-tuned on many diverse tasks. Yet, these individual fine-tunings often lack strong generalization and exist in isolation without benefiting from each other. In our opinion, this is a missed opportunity, as these specialized models contain diverse features. Based on this insight, we propose model recycling, a simple strategy that leverages multiple fine-tunings of the same foundation model on diverse auxiliary tasks, and repurposes them as rich and diverse initializations for the target task. Specifically, model recycling fine-tunes in parallel each specialized model on the target task, and then averages the weights of all target fine-tunings into a final model. Empirically, we show that model recycling maximizes model diversity by benefiting from diverse auxiliary tasks, and achieves a new state of the art on the reference DomainBed benchmark for out-of-distribution generalization. Looking forward, model recycling is a contribution to the emerging paradigm of updatable machine learning where, akin to open-source software development, the community collaborates to incrementally and reliably update machine learning models.

Compared to conventional bilingual translation systems, massively multilingual machine translation is appealing because a single model can translate into multiple languages and benefit from knowledge transfer for low resource languages. On the other hand, massively multilingual models suffer from the curse of multilinguality, unless scaling their size massively, which increases their training and inference costs. Sparse Mixture-of-Experts models are a way to drastically increase model capacity without the need for a proportional amount of computing. The recently released NLLB-200 is an example of such a model. It covers 202 languages but requires at least four 32GB GPUs just for inference. In this work, we propose a pruning method that allows the removal of up to 80\% of experts with a negligible loss in translation quality, which makes it feasible to run the model on a single 32GB GPU. Further analysis suggests that our pruning metrics allow to identify language-specific experts and prune non-relevant experts for a given language pair.

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.

End-to-End speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) is generally evaluated with text-based metrics. This means that generated speech has to be automatically transcribed, making the evaluation dependent on the availability and quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In this paper, we propose a text-free evaluation metric for end-to-end S2ST, named BLASER, to avoid the dependency on ASR systems. BLASER leverages a multilingual multimodal encoder to directly encode the speech segments for source input, translation output and reference into a shared embedding space and computes a score of the translation quality that can be used as a proxy to human evaluation. To evaluate our approach, we construct training and evaluation sets from more than 40k human annotations covering seven language directions. The best results of BLASER are achieved by training with supervision from human rating scores. We show that when evaluated at the sentence level, BLASER correlates significantly better with human judgment compared to ASR-dependent metrics including ASR-SENTBLEU in all translation directions and ASR-COMET in five of them. Our analysis shows combining speech and text as inputs to BLASER does not increase the correlation with human scores, but best correlations are achieved when using speech, which motivates the goal of our research. Moreover, we show that using ASR for references is detrimental for text-based metrics.

Transformers have proved to be very effective for visual recognition tasks. In particular, vision transformers construct compressed global representations through self-attention and learnable class tokens. Multi-resolution transformers have shown recent successes in semantic segmentation but can only capture local interactions in high-resolution feature maps. This paper extends the notion of global tokens to build GLobal Attention Multi-resolution (GLAM) transformers. GLAM is a generic module that can be integrated into most existing transformer backbones. GLAM includes learnable global tokens, which unlike previous methods can model interactions between all image regions, and extracts powerful representations during training. Extensive experiments show that GLAM-Swin or GLAM-Swin-UNet exhibit substantially better performances than their vanilla counterparts on ADE20K and Cityscapes. Moreover, GLAM can be used to segment large 3D medical images, and GLAM-nnFormer achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the BCV dataset.