2,006 research outputs found
Neuromodulatory effects on early visual signal processing
Understanding how the brain processes information and generates simple to complex behavior constitutes one of the core objectives in systems neuroscience. However, when studying different neural circuits, their dynamics and interactions researchers often assume fixed connectivity, overlooking a crucial factor - the effect of neuromodulators. Neuromodulators can modulate circuit activity depending on several aspects, such as different brain states or sensory contexts. Therefore, considering the modulatory effects of neuromodulators on the functionality of neural circuits is an indispensable step towards a more complete picture of the brain’s ability to process information. Generally, this issue affects all neural systems; hence this thesis tries to address this with an experimental and computational approach to resolve neuromodulatory effects on cell type-level in a well-define system, the mouse retina. In the first study, we established and applied a machine-learning-based classification algorithm to identify individual functional retinal ganglion cell types, which enabled detailed cell type-resolved analyses. We applied the classifier to newly acquired data of light-evoked retinal ganglion cell responses and successfully identified their functional types. Here, the cell type-resolved analysis revealed that a particular principle of efficient coding applies to all types in a similar way. In a second study, we focused on the issue of inter-experimental variability that can occur during the process of pooling datasets. As a result, further downstream analyses may be complicated by the subtle variations between the individual datasets. To tackle this, we proposed a theoretical framework based on an adversarial autoencoder with the objective to remove inter-experimental variability from the pooled dataset, while preserving the underlying biological signal of interest. In the last study of this thesis, we investigated the functional effects of the neuromodulator nitric oxide on the retinal output signal. To this end, we used our previously developed retinal ganglion cell type classifier to unravel type-specific effects and established a paired recording protocol to account for type-specific time-dependent effects. We found that certain
retinal ganglion cell types showed adaptational type-specific changes and that nitric oxide had a distinct modulation of a particular group of retinal ganglion cells.
In summary, I first present several experimental and computational methods that allow to
study functional neuromodulatory effects on the retinal output signal in a cell type-resolved manner and, second, use these tools to demonstrate their feasibility to study the neuromodulator nitric oxide
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum
Analytical validation of innovative magneto-inertial outcomes: a controlled environment study.
peer reviewe
Nonlinear and Linearized Analysis of Vibrations of Loaded Anisotropic Beam/Plate/Shell Structures
L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen
Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion. Collected Works, Volume 5
This fifth volume on Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics, and is available in open-access. The collected contributions of this volume have either been published or presented after disseminating the fourth volume in 2015 in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals, or they are new. The contributions of each part of this volume are chronologically ordered.
First Part of this book presents some theoretical advances on DSmT, dealing mainly with modified Proportional Conflict Redistribution Rules (PCR) of combination with degree of intersection, coarsening techniques, interval calculus for PCR thanks to set inversion via interval analysis (SIVIA), rough set classifiers, canonical decomposition of dichotomous belief functions, fast PCR fusion, fast inter-criteria analysis with PCR, and improved PCR5 and PCR6 rules preserving the (quasi-)neutrality of (quasi-)vacuous belief assignment in the fusion of sources of evidence with their Matlab codes.
Because more applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the fourth book of DSmT in 2015, the second part of this volume is about selected applications of DSmT mainly in building change detection, object recognition, quality of data association in tracking, perception in robotics, risk assessment for torrent protection and multi-criteria decision-making, multi-modal image fusion, coarsening techniques, recommender system, levee characterization and assessment, human heading perception, trust assessment, robotics, biometrics, failure detection, GPS systems, inter-criteria analysis, group decision, human activity recognition, storm prediction, data association for autonomous vehicles, identification of maritime vessels, fusion of support vector machines (SVM), Silx-Furtif RUST code library for information fusion including PCR rules, and network for ship classification.
Finally, the third part presents interesting contributions related to belief functions in general published or presented along the years since 2015. These contributions are related with decision-making under uncertainty, belief approximations, probability transformations, new distances between belief functions, non-classical multi-criteria decision-making problems with belief functions, generalization of Bayes theorem, image processing, data association, entropy and cross-entropy measures, fuzzy evidence numbers, negator of belief mass, human activity recognition, information fusion for breast cancer therapy, imbalanced data classification, and hybrid techniques mixing deep learning with belief functions as well
Lessons learned from the 1st Ariel Machine Learning Challenge: Correcting transiting exoplanet light curves for stellar spots
The last decade has witnessed a rapid growth of the field of exoplanet discovery and characterisation. However, several big challenges remain, many of which could be addressed using machine learning methodology. For instance, the most prolific method for detecting exoplanets and inferring several of their characteristics, transit photometry, is very sensitive to the presence of stellar spots. The current practice in the literature is to identify the effects of spots visually and correct for them manually or discard the affected data. This paper explores a first step towards fully automating the efficient and precise derivation of transit depths from transit light curves in the presence of stellar spots. The primary focus of the paper is to present in detail a diverse arsenal of methods for doing so. The methods and results we present were obtained in the context of the 1st Machine Learning Challenge organized for the European Space Agency’s upcoming Ariel mission. We first present the problem, the simulated Ariel-like data and outline the Challenge while identifying best practices for organizing similar challenges in the future. Finally, we present the solutions obtained by the top-5 winning teams, provide their code and discuss their implications. Successful solutions either construct highly non-linear (w.r.t. the raw data) models with minimal preprocessing –deep neural networks and ensemble methods– or amount to obtaining meaningful statistics from the light curves, constructing linear models on which yields comparably good predictive performance
Modular lifelong machine learning
Deep learning has drastically improved the state-of-the-art in many important fields, including computer vision and natural language processing (LeCun et al., 2015). However, it is expensive to train a deep neural network on a machine learning problem. The overall training cost further increases when one wants to solve additional problems. Lifelong machine learning (LML) develops algorithms that aim to efficiently learn to solve a sequence of problems, which become available one at a time. New problems are solved with less resources by transferring previously learned knowledge. At the same time, an LML algorithm needs to retain good performance on all encountered problems, thus avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Current approaches do not possess all the desired properties of an LML algorithm. First, they primarily focus on preventing catastrophic forgetting (Diaz-Rodriguez et al., 2018; Delange et al., 2021). As a result, they neglect some knowledge transfer properties. Furthermore, they assume that all problems in a sequence share the same input space. Finally, scaling these methods to a large sequence of problems remains a challenge.
Modular approaches to deep learning decompose a deep neural network into sub-networks, referred to as modules. Each module can then be trained to perform an atomic transformation, specialised in processing a distinct subset of inputs. This modular approach to storing knowledge makes it easy to only reuse the subset of modules which are useful for the task at hand.
This thesis introduces a line of research which demonstrates the merits of a modular approach to lifelong machine learning, and its ability to address the aforementioned shortcomings of other methods. Compared to previous work, we show that a modular approach can be used to achieve more LML properties than previously demonstrated. Furthermore, we develop tools which allow modular LML algorithms to scale in order to retain said properties on longer sequences of problems.
First, we introduce HOUDINI, a neurosymbolic framework for modular LML. HOUDINI represents modular deep neural networks as functional programs and accumulates a library of pre-trained modules over a sequence of problems. Given a new problem, we use program synthesis to select a suitable neural architecture, as well as a high-performing combination of pre-trained and new modules. We show that our approach has most of the properties desired from an LML algorithm. Notably, it can perform forward transfer, avoid negative transfer and prevent catastrophic forgetting, even across problems with disparate input domains and problems which require different neural architectures.
Second, we produce a modular LML algorithm which retains the properties of HOUDINI but can also scale to longer sequences of problems. To this end, we fix the choice of a neural architecture and introduce a probabilistic search framework, PICLE, for searching through different module combinations. To apply PICLE, we introduce two probabilistic models over neural modules which allows us to efficiently identify promising module combinations.
Third, we phrase the search over module combinations in modular LML as black-box optimisation, which allows one to make use of methods from the setting of hyperparameter optimisation (HPO). We then develop a new HPO method which marries a multi-fidelity approach with model-based optimisation. We demonstrate that this leads to improvement in anytime performance in the HPO setting and discuss how this can in turn be used to augment modular LML methods.
Overall, this thesis identifies a number of important LML properties, which have not all been attained in past methods, and presents an LML algorithm which can achieve all of them, apart from backward transfer
Seamless Multimodal Biometrics for Continuous Personalised Wellbeing Monitoring
Artificially intelligent perception is increasingly present in the lives of
every one of us. Vehicles are no exception, (...) In the near future, pattern
recognition will have an even stronger role in vehicles, as self-driving cars
will require automated ways to understand what is happening around (and within)
them and act accordingly. (...) This doctoral work focused on advancing
in-vehicle sensing through the research of novel computer vision and pattern
recognition methodologies for both biometrics and wellbeing monitoring. The
main focus has been on electrocardiogram (ECG) biometrics, a trait well-known
for its potential for seamless driver monitoring. Major efforts were devoted to
achieving improved performance in identification and identity verification in
off-the-person scenarios, well-known for increased noise and variability. Here,
end-to-end deep learning ECG biometric solutions were proposed and important
topics were addressed such as cross-database and long-term performance,
waveform relevance through explainability, and interlead conversion. Face
biometrics, a natural complement to the ECG in seamless unconstrained
scenarios, was also studied in this work. The open challenges of masked face
recognition and interpretability in biometrics were tackled in an effort to
evolve towards algorithms that are more transparent, trustworthy, and robust to
significant occlusions. Within the topic of wellbeing monitoring, improved
solutions to multimodal emotion recognition in groups of people and
activity/violence recognition in in-vehicle scenarios were proposed. At last,
we also proposed a novel way to learn template security within end-to-end
models, dismissing additional separate encryption processes, and a
self-supervised learning approach tailored to sequential data, in order to
ensure data security and optimal performance. (...)Comment: Doctoral thesis presented and approved on the 21st of December 2022
to the University of Port
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