We present an approach for safe trajectory planning, where a strategic task related to autonomous racing is learned sample-efficient within a simulation environment. A high-level policy, represented as a neural network, outputs a reward specification that is used within the cost function of a parametric nonlinear model predictive controller (NMPC). By including constraints and vehicle kinematics in the NLP, we are able to guarantee safe and feasible trajectories related to the used model. Compared to classical reinforcement learning (RL), our approach restricts the exploration to safe trajectories, starts with a good prior performance and yields full trajectories that can be passed to a tracking lowest-level controller. We do not address the lowest-level controller in this work and assume perfect tracking of feasible trajectories. We show the superior performance of our algorithm on simulated racing tasks that include high-level decision making. The vehicle learns to efficiently overtake slower vehicles and to avoid getting overtaken by blocking faster vehicles.

时间序列数据的生成和分析与许多从经济学到流体力学的定量字段相关。在物理科学中，诸如亚稳态和连贯的组的结构，慢松弛过程，集体变量显性过渡途径或歧管流动流动的概率流动可能非常重视理解和表征系统的动力动力学和机械性质。 Deeptime是一种通用Python库，提供各种工具来估计基于时间序列数据的动态模型，包括传统的线性学习方法，例如马尔可夫状态模型（MSM），隐藏的马尔可夫模型和Koopman模型，以及内核和深度学习方法如vampnets和深msms。该库主要兼容Scikit-Searn，为这些不同的模型提供一系列估计器类，但与Scikit-Ge劳说相比，还提供了深度模型类，例如，在MSM的情况下，提供了多种分析方法来计算有趣的热力学，动力学和动态量，例如自由能，松弛时间和过渡路径。图书馆专为易于使用而设计，而且易于维护和可扩展的代码。在本文中，我们介绍了Deeptime软件的主要特征和结构。

With the advent of Neural Style Transfer (NST), stylizing an image has become quite popular. A convenient way for extending stylization techniques to videos is by applying them on a per-frame basis. However, such per-frame application usually lacks temporal-consistency expressed by undesirable flickering artifacts. Most of the existing approaches for enforcing temporal-consistency suffers from one or more of the following drawbacks. They (1) are only suitable for a limited range of stylization techniques, (2) can only be applied in an offline fashion requiring the complete video as input, (3) cannot provide consistency for the task of stylization, or (4) do not provide interactive consistency-control. Note that existing consistent video-filtering approaches aim to completely remove flickering artifacts and thus do not respect any specific consistency-control aspect. For stylization tasks, however, consistency-control is an essential requirement where a certain amount of flickering can add to the artistic look and feel. Moreover, making this control interactive is paramount from a usability perspective. To achieve the above requirements, we propose an approach that can stylize video streams while providing interactive consistency-control. Apart from stylization, our approach also supports various other image processing filters. For achieving interactive performance, we develop a lite optical-flow network that operates at 80 Frames per second (FPS) on desktop systems with sufficient accuracy. We show that the final consistent video-output using our flow network is comparable to that being obtained using state-of-the-art optical-flow network. Further, we employ an adaptive combination of local and global consistent features and enable interactive selection between the two. By objective and subjective evaluation, we show that our method is superior to state-of-the-art approaches.

This short paper discusses continually updated causal abstractions as a potential direction of future research. The key idea is to revise the existing level of causal abstraction to a different level of detail that is both consistent with the history of observed data and more effective in solving a given task.

Many researchers have voiced their support towards Pearl's counterfactual theory of causation as a stepping stone for AI/ML research's ultimate goal of intelligent systems. As in any other growing subfield, patience seems to be a virtue since significant progress on integrating notions from both fields takes time, yet, major challenges such as the lack of ground truth benchmarks or a unified perspective on classical problems such as computer vision seem to hinder the momentum of the research movement. This present work exemplifies how the Pearl Causal Hierarchy (PCH) can be understood on image data by providing insights on several intricacies but also challenges that naturally arise when applying key concepts from Pearlian causality to the study of image data.

In recent years, nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) has been extensively used for solving automotive motion control and planning tasks. In order to formulate the NMPC problem, different coordinate systems can be used with different advantages. We propose and compare formulations for the NMPC related optimization problem, involving a Cartesian and a Frenet coordinate frame (CCF/ FCF) in a single nonlinear program (NLP). We specify costs and collision avoidance constraints in the more advantageous coordinate frame, derive appropriate formulations and compare different obstacle constraints. With this approach, we exploit the simpler formulation of opponent vehicle constraints in the CCF, as well as road aligned costs and constraints related to the FCF. Comparisons to other approaches in a simulation framework highlight the advantages of the proposed approaches.

In recent years the applications of machine learning models have increased rapidly, due to the large amount of available data and technological progress.While some domains like web analysis can benefit from this with only minor restrictions, other fields like in medicine with patient data are strongerregulated. In particular \emph{data privacy} plays an important role as recently highlighted by the trustworthy AI initiative of the EU or general privacy regulations in legislation. Another major challenge is, that the required training \emph{data is} often \emph{distributed} in terms of features or samples and unavailable for classicalbatch learning approaches. In 2016 Google came up with a framework, called \emph{Federated Learning} to solve both of these problems. We provide a brief overview on existing Methods and Applications in the field of vertical and horizontal \emph{Federated Learning}, as well as \emph{Fderated Transfer Learning}.

Modelling the temperature of Electric Vehicle (EV) batteries is a fundamental task of EV manufacturing. Extreme temperatures in the battery packs can affect their longevity and power output. Although theoretical models exist for describing heat transfer in battery packs, they are computationally expensive to simulate. Furthermore, it is difficult to acquire data measurements from within the battery cell. In this work, we propose a data-driven surrogate model (LiFe-net) that uses readily accessible driving diagnostics for battery temperature estimation to overcome these limitations. This model incorporates Neural Operators with a traditional numerical integration scheme to estimate the temperature evolution. Moreover, we propose two further variations of the baseline model: LiFe-net trained with a regulariser and LiFe-net trained with time stability loss. We compared these models in terms of generalization error on test data. The results showed that LiFe-net trained with time stability loss outperforms the other two models and can estimate the temperature evolution on unseen data with a relative error of 2.77 % on average.

The success of Deep Learning applications critically depends on the quality and scale of the underlying training data. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) can generate arbitrary large datasets, but diversity and fidelity are limited, which has recently been addressed by denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) whose superiority has been demonstrated on natural images. In this study, we propose Medfusion, a conditional latent DDPM for medical images. We compare our DDPM-based model against GAN-based models, which constitute the current state-of-the-art in the medical domain. Medfusion was trained and compared with (i) StyleGan-3 on n=101,442 images from the AIROGS challenge dataset to generate fundoscopies with and without glaucoma, (ii) ProGAN on n=191,027 from the CheXpert dataset to generate radiographs with and without cardiomegaly and (iii) wGAN on n=19,557 images from the CRCMS dataset to generate histopathological images with and without microsatellite stability. In the AIROGS, CRMCS, and CheXpert datasets, Medfusion achieved lower (=better) FID than the GANs (11.63 versus 20.43, 30.03 versus 49.26, and 17.28 versus 84.31). Also, fidelity (precision) and diversity (recall) were higher (=better) for Medfusion in all three datasets. Our study shows that DDPM are a superior alternative to GANs for image synthesis in the medical domain.

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are becoming increasingly more important in assisted and automated driving. Using such entities which are obtained using machine learning is inevitable: tasks such as recognizing traffic signs cannot be developed reasonably using traditional software development methods. DNN however do have the problem that they are mostly black boxes and therefore hard to understand and debug. One particular problem is that they are prone to hidden backdoors. This means that the DNN misclassifies its input, because it considers properties that should not be decisive for the output. Backdoors may either be introduced by malicious attackers or by inappropriate training. In any case, detecting and removing them is important in the automotive area, as they might lead to safety violations with potentially severe consequences. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to remove backdoors. Our method works for both intentional as well as unintentional backdoors. We also do not require prior knowledge about the shape or distribution of backdoors. Experimental evidence shows that our method performs well on several medium-sized examples.