Mixup is a popular data augmentation technique for training deep neural networks where additional samples are generated by linearly interpolating pairs of inputs and their labels. This technique is known to improve the generalization performance in many learning paradigms and applications. In this work, we first analyze Mixup and show that it implicitly regularizes infinitely many directional derivatives of all orders. We then propose a new method to improve Mixup based on the novel insight. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct experiments across various domains such as images, tabular data, speech, and graphs. Our results show that the proposed method improves Mixup across various datasets using a variety of architectures, for instance, exhibiting an improvement over Mixup by 0.8% in ImageNet top-1 accuracy.

当前的深度学习方法显示出良好的分布概括性能，但在分布外的概括方面挣扎。正如我们在许多智能测试中所发现的那样，在涉及抽象关系（例如识别序列中的规则）的任务中尤其如此。最近的工作探索了如何强迫关系表示与感觉表示的区别，这在大脑中似乎是这种情况，可以帮助人工系统。在这项工作的基础上，我们进一步探索并正式化了关系和感官细节的“分区”表示所提供的优势，以及这种归纳偏见如何帮助在新遇到的环境中重新组建学习的关系结构。我们介绍了一个基于相似性分数的简单体系结构，我们将其命名为组成关系网络（Corelnet）。使用此模型，我们研究了一系列的归纳偏见，以确保从感觉数据中学习并明显地了解抽象关系，并探索它们对一系列关系心理物理学任务的分布概括的影响。我们发现，简单的体系结构选择可以超越现有的模型，而在分布式概括中。总之，这些结果表明，从其他信息流中分配关系表示形式可能是一种简单的方法，可以在执行分布外的关系计算时增强现有网络体系结构的鲁棒性。

在连续时间域上表示为随机微分方程的基于扩散的方法最近已证明是一种非对抗性生成模型。培训此类模型依赖于denoising得分匹配，可以将其视为多尺度的Denoising自动编码器。在这里，我们扩大了Denoising分数匹配框架，以实现表示无监督信号的表示。 GAN和VAE通过将潜在代码直接转换为数据样本来学习表示形式。相比之下，引入的基于扩散的表示学习依赖于Denoisising分数匹配目标的新公式，因此编码了DeNoising所需的信息。我们说明了这种差异如何允许对表示中编码的细节级别进行手动控制。使用相同的方法，我们建议学习无限维度的潜在代码，该代码可在半监督图像分类中改善最先进的模型。我们还将扩散评分匹配的学术表示表示与自动编码器等其他方法的质量进行比较，并通过其在下游任务上的性能进行对比训练的系统。

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.

Multi-Scale and U-shaped Networks are widely used in various image restoration problems, including deblurring. Keeping in mind the wide range of applications, we present a comparison of these architectures and their effects on image deblurring. We also introduce a new block called as NFResblock. It consists of a Fast Fourier Transformation layer and a series of modified Non-Linear Activation Free Blocks. Based on these architectures and additions, we introduce NFResnet and NFResnet+, which are modified multi-scale and U-Net architectures, respectively. We also use three different loss functions to train these architectures: Charbonnier Loss, Edge Loss, and Frequency Reconstruction Loss. Extensive experiments on the Deep Video Deblurring dataset, along with ablation studies for each component, have been presented in this paper. The proposed architectures achieve a considerable increase in Peak Signal to Noise (PSNR) ratio and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) value.

Bio-inspired learning has been gaining popularity recently given that Backpropagation (BP) is not considered biologically plausible. Many algorithms have been proposed in the literature which are all more biologically plausible than BP. However, apart from overcoming the biological implausibility of BP, a strong motivation for using Bio-inspired algorithms remains lacking. In this study, we undertake a holistic comparison of BP vs. multiple Bio-inspired algorithms to answer the question of whether Bio-learning offers additional benefits over BP, rather than just biological plausibility. We test Bio-algorithms under different design choices such as access to only partial training data, resource constraints in terms of the number of training epochs, sparsification of the neural network parameters and addition of noise to input samples. Through these experiments, we notably find two key advantages of Bio-algorithms over BP. Firstly, Bio-algorithms perform much better than BP when the entire training dataset is not supplied. Four of the five Bio-algorithms tested outperform BP by upto 5% accuracy when only 20% of the training dataset is available. Secondly, even when the full dataset is available, Bio-algorithms learn much quicker and converge to a stable accuracy in far lesser training epochs than BP. Hebbian learning, specifically, is able to learn in just 5 epochs compared to around 100 epochs required by BP. These insights present practical reasons for utilising Bio-learning rather than just its biological plausibility and also point towards interesting new directions for future work on Bio-learning.

A major direction in differentially private machine learning is differentially private fine-tuning: pretraining a model on a source of "public data" and transferring the extracted features to downstream tasks. This is an important setting because many industry deployments fine-tune publicly available feature extractors on proprietary data for downstream tasks. In this paper, we use features extracted from state-of-the-art open source models to solve benchmark tasks in computer vision and natural language processing using differentially private fine-tuning. Our key insight is that by accelerating training, we can quickly drive the model parameters to regions in parameter space where the impact of noise is minimized. In doing so, we recover the same performance as non-private fine-tuning for realistic values of epsilon in [0.01, 1.0] on benchmark image classification datasets including CIFAR100.

Nostradamus, inspired by the French astrologer and reputed seer, is a detailed study exploring relations between environmental factors and changes in the stock market. In this paper, we analyze associative correlation and causation between environmental elements and stock prices based on the US financial market, global climate trends, and daily weather records to demonstrate significant relationships between climate and stock price fluctuation. Our analysis covers short and long-term rises and dips in company stock performances. Lastly, we take four natural disasters as a case study to observe their effect on the emotional state of people and their influence on the stock market.

Autonomous driving requires efficient reasoning about the location and appearance of the different agents in the scene, which aids in downstream tasks such as object detection, object tracking, and path planning. The past few years have witnessed a surge in approaches that combine the different taskbased modules of the classic self-driving stack into an End-toEnd(E2E) trainable learning system. These approaches replace perception, prediction, and sensor fusion modules with a single contiguous module with shared latent space embedding, from which one extracts a human-interpretable representation of the scene. One of the most popular representations is the Birds-eye View (BEV), which expresses the location of different traffic participants in the ego vehicle frame from a top-down view. However, a BEV does not capture the chromatic appearance information of the participants. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel representation that captures various traffic participants appearance and occupancy information from an array of monocular cameras covering 360 deg field of view (FOV). We use a learned image embedding of all camera images to generate a BEV of the scene at any instant that captures both appearance and occupancy of the scene, which can aid in downstream tasks such as object tracking and executing language-based commands. We test the efficacy of our approach on synthetic dataset generated from CARLA. The code, data set, and results can be found at https://rebrand.ly/APP OCC-results.

The presence of bias in deep models leads to unfair outcomes for certain demographic subgroups. Research in bias focuses primarily on facial recognition and attribute prediction with scarce emphasis on face detection. Existing studies consider face detection as binary classification into 'face' and 'non-face' classes. In this work, we investigate possible bias in the domain of face detection through facial region localization which is currently unexplored. Since facial region localization is an essential task for all face recognition pipelines, it is imperative to analyze the presence of such bias in popular deep models. Most existing face detection datasets lack suitable annotation for such analysis. Therefore, we web-curate the Fair Face Localization with Attributes (F2LA) dataset and manually annotate more than 10 attributes per face, including facial localization information. Utilizing the extensive annotations from F2LA, an experimental setup is designed to study the performance of four pre-trained face detectors. We observe (i) a high disparity in detection accuracies across gender and skin-tone, and (ii) interplay of confounding factors beyond demography. The F2LA data and associated annotations can be accessed at http://iab-rubric.org/index.php/F2LA.