目标：探索深度学习算法进一步简化和优化尿道板（UP）质量评估的能力，使用板客观评分工具（POST），旨在提高Hypospadias修复中提高评估的客观性和可重复性。方法：五个关键的邮政地标是由专家在691图像数据集中的专家标记，该数据集接受了原发性杂质修复的青春期前男孩。然后，该数据集用于开发和验证基于深度学习的地标检测模型。提出的框架始于瞥见和检测，其中输入图像是使用预测的边界框裁剪的。接下来，使用深层卷积神经网络（CNN）体系结构来预测五个邮政标记的坐标。然后，这些预测的地标用于评估远端催化性远端的质量。结果：所提出的模型准确地定位了gan区域，平均平均精度（地图）为99.5％，总体灵敏度为99.1％。在预测地标的坐标时，达到了0.07152的归一化平均误差（NME），平均平方误差（MSE）为0.001，在0.1 nme的阈值下为20.2％的故障率。结论：此深度学习应用程序在使用邮政评估质量时表现出鲁棒性和高精度。使用国际多中心基于图像的数据库进行进一步评估。外部验证可以使深度学习算法受益，并导致更好的评估，决策和对手术结果的预测。

We derive a set of causal deep neural networks whose architectures are a consequence of tensor (multilinear) factor analysis. Forward causal questions are addressed with a neural network architecture composed of causal capsules and a tensor transformer. The former estimate a set of latent variables that represent the causal factors, and the latter governs their interaction. Causal capsules and tensor transformers may be implemented using shallow autoencoders, but for a scalable architecture we employ block algebra and derive a deep neural network composed of a hierarchy of autoencoders. An interleaved kernel hierarchy preprocesses the data resulting in a hierarchy of kernel tensor factor models. Inverse causal questions are addressed with a neural network that implements multilinear projection and estimates the causes of effects. As an alternative to aggressive bottleneck dimension reduction or regularized regression that may camouflage an inherently underdetermined inverse problem, we prescribe modeling different aspects of the mechanism of data formation with piecewise tensor models whose multilinear projections are well-defined and produce multiple candidate solutions. Our forward and inverse neural network architectures are suitable for asynchronous parallel computation.

Uncertainty quantification is crucial to inverse problems, as it could provide decision-makers with valuable information about the inversion results. For example, seismic inversion is a notoriously ill-posed inverse problem due to the band-limited and noisy nature of seismic data. It is therefore of paramount importance to quantify the uncertainties associated to the inversion process to ease the subsequent interpretation and decision making processes. Within this framework of reference, sampling from a target posterior provides a fundamental approach to quantifying the uncertainty in seismic inversion. However, selecting appropriate prior information in a probabilistic inversion is crucial, yet non-trivial, as it influences the ability of a sampling-based inference in providing geological realism in the posterior samples. To overcome such limitations, we present a regularized variational inference framework that performs posterior inference by implicitly regularizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence loss with a CNN-based denoiser by means of the Plug-and-Play methods. We call this new algorithm Plug-and-Play Stein Variational Gradient Descent (PnP-SVGD) and demonstrate its ability in producing high-resolution, trustworthy samples representative of the subsurface structures, which we argue could be used for post-inference tasks such as reservoir modelling and history matching. To validate the proposed method, numerical tests are performed on both synthetic and field post-stack seismic data.

User equipment is one of the main bottlenecks facing the gaming industry nowadays. The extremely realistic games which are currently available trigger high computational requirements of the user devices to run games. As a consequence, the game industry has proposed the concept of Cloud Gaming, a paradigm that improves gaming experience in reduced hardware devices. To this end, games are hosted on remote servers, relegating users' devices to play only the role of a peripheral for interacting with the game. However, this paradigm overloads the communication links connecting the users with the cloud. Therefore, service experience becomes highly dependent on network connectivity. To overcome this, Cloud Gaming will be boosted by the promised performance of 5G and future 6G networks, together with the flexibility provided by mobility in multi-RAT scenarios, such as WiFi. In this scope, the present work proposes a framework for measuring and estimating the main E2E metrics of the Cloud Gaming service, namely KQIs. In addition, different machine learning techniques are assessed for predicting KQIs related to Cloud Gaming user's experience. To this end, the main key quality indicators (KQIs) of the service such as input lag, freeze percent or perceived video frame rate are collected in a real environment. Based on these, results show that machine learning techniques provide a good estimation of these indicators solely from network-based metrics. This is considered a valuable asset to guide the delivery of Cloud Gaming services through cellular communications networks even without access to the user's device, as it is expected for telecom operators.

Several self-supervised representation learning methods have been proposed for reinforcement learning (RL) with rich observations. For real-world applications of RL, recovering underlying latent states is crucial, particularly when sensory inputs contain irrelevant and exogenous information. In this work, we study how information bottlenecks can be used to construct latent states efficiently in the presence of task-irrelevant information. We propose architectures that utilize variational and discrete information bottlenecks, coined as RepDIB, to learn structured factorized representations. Exploiting the expressiveness bought by factorized representations, we introduce a simple, yet effective, bottleneck that can be integrated with any existing self-supervised objective for RL. We demonstrate this across several online and offline RL benchmarks, along with a real robot arm task, where we find that compressed representations with RepDIB can lead to strong performance improvements, as the learned bottlenecks help predict only the relevant state while ignoring irrelevant information.

Dataset scaling, also known as normalization, is an essential preprocessing step in a machine learning pipeline. It is aimed at adjusting attributes scales in a way that they all vary within the same range. This transformation is known to improve the performance of classification models, but there are several scaling techniques to choose from, and this choice is not generally done carefully. In this paper, we execute a broad experiment comparing the impact of 5 scaling techniques on the performances of 20 classification algorithms among monolithic and ensemble models, applying them to 82 publicly available datasets with varying imbalance ratios. Results show that the choice of scaling technique matters for classification performance, and the performance difference between the best and the worst scaling technique is relevant and statistically significant in most cases. They also indicate that choosing an inadequate technique can be more detrimental to classification performance than not scaling the data at all. We also show how the performance variation of an ensemble model, considering different scaling techniques, tends to be dictated by that of its base model. Finally, we discuss the relationship between a model's sensitivity to the choice of scaling technique and its performance and provide insights into its applicability on different model deployment scenarios. Full results and source code for the experiments in this paper are available in a GitHub repository.\footnote{https://github.com/amorimlb/scaling\_matters}

Recently, Person Re-Identification (Re-ID) has received a lot of attention. Large datasets containing labeled images of various individuals have been released, allowing researchers to develop and test many successful approaches. However, when such Re-ID models are deployed in new cities or environments, the task of searching for people within a network of security cameras is likely to face an important domain shift, thus resulting in decreased performance. Indeed, while most public datasets were collected in a limited geographic area, images from a new city present different features (e.g., people's ethnicity and clothing style, weather, architecture, etc.). In addition, the whole frames of the video streams must be converted into cropped images of people using pedestrian detection models, which behave differently from the human annotators who created the dataset used for training. To better understand the extent of this issue, this paper introduces a complete methodology to evaluate Re-ID approaches and training datasets with respect to their suitability for unsupervised deployment for live operations. This method is used to benchmark four Re-ID approaches on three datasets, providing insight and guidelines that can help to design better Re-ID pipelines in the future.

Automated plot generation is the challenge of generating a sequence of events that will be perceived by readers as the plot of a coherent story. Traditional symbolic planners plan a story from a goal state and guarantee logical causal plot coherence but rely on a library of hand-crafted actions with their preconditions and effects. This closed world setting limits the length and diversity of what symbolic planners can generate. On the other hand, pre-trained neural language models can generate stories with great diversity, while being generally incapable of ending a story in a specified manner and can have trouble maintaining coherence. In this paper, we present an approach to story plot generation that unifies causal planning with neural language models. We propose to use commonsense knowledge extracted from large language models to recursively expand a story plot in a backward chaining fashion. Specifically, our system infers the preconditions for events in the story and then events that will cause those conditions to become true. We performed automatic evaluation to measure narrative coherence as indicated by the ability to answer questions about whether different events in the story are causally related to other events. Results indicate that our proposed method produces more coherent plotlines than several strong baselines.

Autonomous vehicles are suited for continuous area patrolling problems. However, finding an optimal patrolling strategy can be challenging for many reasons. Firstly, patrolling environments are often complex and can include unknown and evolving environmental factors. Secondly, autonomous vehicles can have failures or hardware constraints such as limited battery lives. Importantly, patrolling large areas often requires multiple agents that need to collectively coordinate their actions. In this work, we consider these limitations and propose an approach based on a distributed, model-free deep reinforcement learning based multi-agent patrolling strategy. In this approach, agents make decisions locally based on their own environmental observations and on shared information. In addition, agents are trained to automatically recharge themselves when required to support continuous collective patrolling. A homogeneous multi-agent architecture is proposed, where all patrolling agents have an identical policy. This architecture provides a robust patrolling system that can tolerate agent failures and allow supplementary agents to be added to replace failed agents or to increase the overall patrol performance. This performance is validated through experiments from multiple perspectives, including the overall patrol performance, the efficiency of the battery recharging strategy, the overall robustness of the system, and the agents' ability to adapt to environment dynamics.

Science tests competing theories or models by evaluating the similarity of their predictions against observational experience. Thus, how we measure similarity fundamentally determines what we learn. In machine learning and scientific modeling, similarity metrics are used as objective functions. A classic example being mean squared error, which is the optimal measure of similarity when errors are normally distributed and independent and identically distributed (iid). In many cases, however, the error distribution is neither normal nor iid, so it is left to the scientist to determine an appropriate objective. Here, we review how information theory can guide that selection, then demonstrate the approach with a simple hydrologic model.