Articles

Self-driving vehicles must reliably detect the drivable area in front of them in any weather condition. An actively developed sensor approach is camera-based road segmentation, but it is limited by the visible spectrum. Radar-based approaches are a promising alternative and a new method extracts the drivable area from raw radar data by training a deep neural network using paired camera data, which can be labelled automatically using pretrained computer vision models.

Organic chemical reactions can be divided into classes that allow chemists to use the knowledge they have about optimal conditions for specific reactions in the context of other reactions of similar type. Schwaller et al. present here an efficient method based on transformer neural networks that learns a chemical space in which reactions of a similar class are grouped together.

Computational augmentation of microscopic images aims at reducing the need to chemically label or stain cells to extract information. The popular U-Net model often employed for these tasks uses mostly local information. A new method for augmenting microscopic images is presented that allows for global information to be used at each step of the process.

Autonomous flight is challenging for small flying robots, given the limited space for sensors and on-board processing capabilities, but a promising approach is to mimic optical-flow-based strategies of flying insects. A new development improves this technique, enabling smoother landings and better obstacle avoidance, by giving robots the ability to learn to estimate distances to objects by their visual appearance.

To remove artefacts from medical imaging, machine learning can be a useful tool, but supervised approaches need examples of the same image with and without artefacts. Liu et al. present a method to train an artefact removal network without needing matching images of corrupted and uncorrupted images.

The transcription process of DNA is highly complex and while short DNA sequence motifs recognized by transcription factors are well known, less is known about the context in the DNA sequence that determines whether a transcription factor will actually bind its motif. Zheng and colleagues present a method that uses convolutional neural networks to identify sequence features that help predict whether transcribing proteins can bind to their target sequences in DNA.

Microrobotics offers great potential for precise drug delivery as medication can be released in the bloodstream only where it is needed. But the dynamic environment of the bloodstream is a challenge for navigation. An approach presented by Ahmed and colleagues combines magnetic and acoustic fields to allow swarms of particles to swim against a current.

The annotation of the visual signs of emotions can be important for psychological studies and even human–computer interactions. Instead of only ascribing discrete emotions, Toisoul and colleagues use a single neural network that predicts emotional labels on a spectrum of valence and arousal without separate face-alignment steps.

Reticular frameworks are crystalline porous materials with desirable properties such as gas separation, but their large design space presents a challenge. An automated nanoporous materials discovery platform powered by a supramolecular variational autoencoder can efficiently explore this space.

Turbulence modelling is an essential flow simulation tool, but is typically dependent on physical insight and engineering intuition. Novati et al. develop a multi-agent reinforcement learning approach for learning turbulence models that can generalize across grid sizes and flow conditions.

Many approved drugs can be used to treat diseases other than the one they were developed for, which has the added benefit that the safety of the drug has already been tested. To identify possible candidates for re-purposing trials, Liu et al. have developed a method to use existing electronic patient data to simulate clinical trials and identify drugs that influence the progression of diseases with which they were not previously associated.

Bertens and Lee propose an evolvable neural unit, a recurrent neural network-based module that can evolve individual somatic and synaptic compartment models of neurons. By constructing networks of these evolvable neural units, they can evolve agents that learn synaptic update rules and the spiking dynamics of neurons.

A set of predictive models can exist that predict equally well; however, the specific variables underlying these models may be important to some of them but not to others. Jiayun Dong and Cynthia Rudin demonstrate a method to visualize and quantify this effect of variable importance.

There is much interest in ‘explainable’ AI, but most efforts concern post hoc methods. Instead, a neural network can be made inherently interpretable, with an approach that involves making human-understandable concepts (aeroplane, bed, lamp and so on) align along the axes of its latent space.

The wealth of data generated by single-cell RNA sequencing can be used to identify gene sets across cells, as well as to identify specific cells. Lukassen and colleagues propose a method combining matrix factorization and variational auto encoders that can capture both cross-cell and cell-specific information.

Inspired by many examples in nature where organisms change shape to concur environments, there is much interest in designing robots that are capable of shape change. Shah et al. demonstrate a method for automatically discovering shape and gait changes for soft robots that can adapt to different terrains.

Autonomous drones can help find injured or missing people when a large or hard to traverse area has to be searched, but their view can be obscured in dense forests. David Schedl and colleagues have developed a method to reveal humans in thermal imaging recordings, even in the presence of dense foliage.

Neoantigens play a critical role in cancer immunotherapy. Tran et al. show how training a personalized deep learning model for each individual patient can improve the accuracy and identification rate of mutated neoantigens.

A hallmark of intelligent behaviour is the ability to learn abstract strategies that can be transferred across different tasks, but it has been challenging to incorporate this ability in artificial systems. The authors present a modular architecture for the learning of algorithmic solutions, and demonstrate generalization and scaling on 11 diverse algorithms.

Microrobots are usually too small to contain traditional computing substrates that could control their behaviour. Dekanovsky and colleagues have developed a microrobot swarm that removes hormonal pollutants when it senses a chemical signal in its environment.