大脑通过其复杂的尖峰网络的网络有效地执行非线性计算，但这是如何难以捉摸的。虽然可以在尖峰神经网络中成功实现非线性计算，但这需要监督培训，并且产生的连接可能很难解释。相反，可以用尖峰编码网络（SCN）框架直接导出和理解线性动力系统形式的任何计算的所需连通性。这些网络还具有生物学上的现实活动模式，对细胞死亡具有高度稳健的。在这里，我们将SCN框架扩展到直接实施任何多项式动态系统，而无需培训。这导致需要混合突触类型（快速，慢，乘法）的网络，我们术语乘以乘法峰值编码网络（MSCN）。使用MSCN，我们演示了如何直接导出几个非线性动态系统所需的连通性。我们还展示了如何执行高阶多项式，其中耦合网络仅使用配对乘法突触，并为每个突触类型提供预期的连接数。总体而言，我们的作品展示了一种新的用于在尖峰神经网络中实现非线性计算的新方法，同时保持标准SCNS（鲁棒性，现实活动模式和可解释连接）的吸引力特征。最后，我们讨论了我们方法的生物合理性，以及这种方法的高准确度和鲁棒性如何对神经形态计算感兴趣。

Existing automated techniques for software documentation typically attempt to reason between two main sources of information: code and natural language. However, this reasoning process is often complicated by the lexical gap between more abstract natural language and more structured programming languages. One potential bridge for this gap is the Graphical User Interface (GUI), as GUIs inherently encode salient information about underlying program functionality into rich, pixel-based data representations. This paper offers one of the first comprehensive empirical investigations into the connection between GUIs and functional, natural language descriptions of software. First, we collect, analyze, and open source a large dataset of functional GUI descriptions consisting of 45,998 descriptions for 10,204 screenshots from popular Android applications. The descriptions were obtained from human labelers and underwent several quality control mechanisms. To gain insight into the representational potential of GUIs, we investigate the ability of four Neural Image Captioning models to predict natural language descriptions of varying granularity when provided a screenshot as input. We evaluate these models quantitatively, using common machine translation metrics, and qualitatively through a large-scale user study. Finally, we offer learned lessons and a discussion of the potential shown by multimodal models to enhance future techniques for automated software documentation.

Background: Image analysis applications in digital pathology include various methods for segmenting regions of interest. Their identification is one of the most complex steps, and therefore of great interest for the study of robust methods that do not necessarily rely on a machine learning (ML) approach. Method: A fully automatic and optimized segmentation process for different datasets is a prerequisite for classifying and diagnosing Indirect ImmunoFluorescence (IIF) raw data. This study describes a deterministic computational neuroscience approach for identifying cells and nuclei. It is far from the conventional neural network approach, but it is equivalent to their quantitative and qualitative performance, and it is also solid to adversative noise. The method is robust, based on formally correct functions, and does not suffer from tuning on specific data sets. Results: This work demonstrates the robustness of the method against the variability of parameters, such as image size, mode, and signal-to-noise ratio. We validated the method on two datasets (Neuroblastoma and NucleusSegData) using images annotated by independent medical doctors. Conclusions: The definition of deterministic and formally correct methods, from a functional to a structural point of view, guarantees the achievement of optimized and functionally correct results. The excellent performance of our deterministic method (NeuronalAlg) to segment cells and nuclei from fluorescence images was measured with quantitative indicators and compared with those achieved by three published ML approaches.

Detecting anomalous data within time series is a very relevant task in pattern recognition and machine learning, with many possible applications that range from disease prevention in medicine, e.g., detecting early alterations of the health status before it can clearly be defined as "illness" up to monitoring industrial plants. Regarding this latter application, detecting anomalies in an industrial plant's status firstly prevents serious damages that would require a long interruption of the production process. Secondly, it permits optimal scheduling of maintenance interventions by limiting them to urgent situations. At the same time, they typically follow a fixed prudential schedule according to which components are substituted well before the end of their expected lifetime. This paper describes a case study regarding the monitoring of the status of Laser-guided Vehicles (LGVs) batteries, on which we worked as our contribution to project SUPER (Supercomputing Unified Platform, Emilia Romagna) aimed at establishing and demonstrating a regional High-Performance Computing platform that is going to represent the main Italian supercomputing environment for both computing power and data volume.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on graph-structured data across numerous domains. Their underlying ability to represent nodes as summaries of their vicinities has proven effective for homophilous graphs in particular, in which same-type nodes tend to connect. On heterophilous graphs, in which different-type nodes are likely connected, GNNs perform less consistently, as neighborhood information might be less representative or even misleading. On the other hand, GNN performance is not inferior on all heterophilous graphs, and there is a lack of understanding of what other graph properties affect GNN performance. In this work, we highlight the limitations of the widely used homophily ratio and the recent Cross-Class Neighborhood Similarity (CCNS) metric in estimating GNN performance. To overcome these limitations, we introduce 2-hop Neighbor Class Similarity (2NCS), a new quantitative graph structural property that correlates with GNN performance more strongly and consistently than alternative metrics. 2NCS considers two-hop neighborhoods as a theoretically derived consequence of the two-step label propagation process governing GCN's training-inference process. Experiments on one synthetic and eight real-world graph datasets confirm consistent improvements over existing metrics in estimating the accuracy of GCN- and GAT-based architectures on the node classification task.

Building a quantum analog of classical deep neural networks represents a fundamental challenge in quantum computing. A key issue is how to address the inherent non-linearity of classical deep learning, a problem in the quantum domain due to the fact that the composition of an arbitrary number of quantum gates, consisting of a series of sequential unitary transformations, is intrinsically linear. This problem has been variously approached in the literature, principally via the introduction of measurements between layers of unitary transformations. In this paper, we introduce the Quantum Path Kernel, a formulation of quantum machine learning capable of replicating those aspects of deep machine learning typically associated with superior generalization performance in the classical domain, specifically, hierarchical feature learning. Our approach generalizes the notion of Quantum Neural Tangent Kernel, which has been used to study the dynamics of classical and quantum machine learning models. The Quantum Path Kernel exploits the parameter trajectory, i.e. the curve delineated by model parameters as they evolve during training, enabling the representation of differential layer-wise convergence behaviors, or the formation of hierarchical parametric dependencies, in terms of their manifestation in the gradient space of the predictor function. We evaluate our approach with respect to variants of the classification of Gaussian XOR mixtures - an artificial but emblematic problem that intrinsically requires multilevel learning in order to achieve optimal class separation.

Objective: Accurate visual classification of bladder tissue during Trans-Urethral Resection of Bladder Tumor (TURBT) procedures is essential to improve early cancer diagnosis and treatment. During TURBT interventions, White Light Imaging (WLI) and Narrow Band Imaging (NBI) techniques are used for lesion detection. Each imaging technique provides diverse visual information that allows clinicians to identify and classify cancerous lesions. Computer vision methods that use both imaging techniques could improve endoscopic diagnosis. We address the challenge of tissue classification when annotations are available only in one domain, in our case WLI, and the endoscopic images correspond to an unpaired dataset, i.e. there is no exact equivalent for every image in both NBI and WLI domains. Method: We propose a semi-surprised Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based method composed of three main components: a teacher network trained on the labeled WLI data; a cycle-consistency GAN to perform unpaired image-to-image translation, and a multi-input student network. To ensure the quality of the synthetic images generated by the proposed GAN we perform a detailed quantitative, and qualitative analysis with the help of specialists. Conclusion: The overall average classification accuracy, precision, and recall obtained with the proposed method for tissue classification are 0.90, 0.88, and 0.89 respectively, while the same metrics obtained in the unlabeled domain (NBI) are 0.92, 0.64, and 0.94 respectively. The quality of the generated images is reliable enough to deceive specialists. Significance: This study shows the potential of using semi-supervised GAN-based classification to improve bladder tissue classification when annotations are limited in multi-domain data.

Computational notebooks, such as Jupyter notebooks, are interactive computing environments that are ubiquitous among data scientists to perform data wrangling and analytic tasks. To measure the performance of AI pair programmers that automatically synthesize programs for those tasks given natural language (NL) intents from users, we build ARCADE, a benchmark of 1082 code generation problems using the pandas data analysis framework in data science notebooks. ARCADE features multiple rounds of NL-to-code problems from the same notebook. It requires a model to understand rich multi-modal contexts, such as existing notebook cells and their execution states as well as previous turns of interaction. To establish a strong baseline on this challenging task, we develop PaChiNCo, a 62B code language model (LM) for Python computational notebooks, which significantly outperforms public code LMs. Finally, we explore few-shot prompting strategies to elicit better code with step-by-step decomposition and NL explanation, showing the potential to improve the diversity and explainability of model predictions.

We propose a new self-supervised method for pre-training the backbone of deep perception models operating on point clouds. The core idea is to train the model on a pretext task which is the reconstruction of the surface on which the 3D points are sampled, and to use the underlying latent vectors as input to the perception head. The intuition is that if the network is able to reconstruct the scene surface, given only sparse input points, then it probably also captures some fragments of semantic information, that can be used to boost an actual perception task. This principle has a very simple formulation, which makes it both easy to implement and widely applicable to a large range of 3D sensors and deep networks performing semantic segmentation or object detection. In fact, it supports a single-stream pipeline, as opposed to most contrastive learning approaches, allowing training on limited resources. We conducted extensive experiments on various autonomous driving datasets, involving very different kinds of lidars, for both semantic segmentation and object detection. The results show the effectiveness of our method to learn useful representations without any annotation, compared to existing approaches. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/valeoai/ALSO}{github.com/valeoai/ALSO}

This paper presents the OPUS ecosystem with a focus on the development of open machine translation models and tools, and their integration into end-user applications, development platforms and professional workflows. We discuss our on-going mission of increasing language coverage and translation quality, and also describe on-going work on the development of modular translation models and speed-optimized compact solutions for real-time translation on regular desktops and small devices.