Articles

Stochastic reaction networks involve solving a system of ordinary differential equations, which becomes challenging as the number of reactive species grows, but a new approach based on evolving a variational autoregressive neural network provides an efficient way to track time evolution of the joint probability distribution for general reaction networks.

Computational models can help predict metabolic profiles of microbial communities such as human gut microbiomes or environmental microbiomes, but they lack generalizability and interpretability. To address this challenge, Wang et al. report a deep learning approach for metabolic profile prediction called mNODE that incorporates a neural network module with hidden layers described by ordinary differential equations.

Various post-hoc interpretability methods exist to evaluate the results of machine learning classification and prediction tasks. To better understand the performance and reliability of such methods, which is particularly necessary in high-risk applications, Turbe et al. have developed a framework for quantitative comparison of post-hoc interpretability approaches in time-series classification.

Metal–organic frameworks are of high interest for a range of energy and environmental applications due to their stable gas storage properties. A new machine learning approach based on a pre-trained multi-modal transformer can be fine-tuned with small datasets to predict structure-property relationships and design new metal-organic frameworks for a range of specific tasks.

Neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence approaches display both perception and reasoning capabilities, but inherit the limitations of their individual deep learning and symbolic artificial intelligence components. By combining neural networks and vector-symbolic architectures, Hersche and colleagues propose a neuro-vector-symbolic framework that can solve Raven’s progressive matrices tests faster and more accurately than other state-of-the-art methods.

Explanatory interactive machine learning methods have been developed to facilitate the learning process between the machine and the user. Friedrich et al. provide a unification of various explanatory interactive machine learning methods into a single typology, and present benchmarks for evaluating such methods.

Machine learning methods can predict and recognize binding patterns between T-cell receptors and human antigens, but they struggle with antigens for which no or little data exist regarding interactions with the immune system. A new method called PanPep based on meta-learning can learn quickly on new binding prediction tasks and accurately predicts pairing between T-cell receptors and new antigens.

High-quality annotation of datasets is critical for machine-learning-based biomedical image analysis. However, a detailed examination of recent image competitions reveals a gap between annotators’ needs and quality of labelling instructions. It is also found that annotator performance can be substantially improved by providing exemplary images.

Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique to learn complex behaviours, but in the context of self-driving vehicles it might result in unsafe behaviour in previously unseen situations. Cao et al. create a confidence-aware method that improves through reinforcement learning but reverts to safe behaviour when a situation is new.

Developing proprioception systems for flexible structures such as soft robots is a challenge. Hu et al. report a stretchable e-skin for soft robot proprioception. Combined with deep learning, the e-skin enables high-resolution 3D geometry reconstruction of the soft robot and can be applied in many scenarios, such as human–robot interaction.

The mechanical signals of the laryngeal vocal organ have not been well utilized by human speech processing technology. The authors develop a prototype of a wearable artificial throat that can sense speech- and vocalization-related actions. The results suggest a new technological pathway for speech recognition and interaction systems.

When learning a causal model from data, deriving counterfactual examples from the model can help to evaluate how plausible the mechanisms are and create hypotheses that can be tested with new data. Vlontzos and colleagues develop a deep learning-based method for answering counterfactual queries that can deal with categorical variables, rather than only binary ones, using the notion of ‘counterfactual ordering’.

Co-designing hardware platforms and neural network software can help improve the computational efficiency and training affordability of deep learning implementations. A new approach designed for graph learning with echo state neural networks makes use of in-memory computing with resistive memory and shows up to a 35 times improvement in the energy efficiency and 99% reduction in training cost for graph classification on large datasets.

Disease phenotypes can be predicted from genetic profiles, but diseases with complex, non-additive interactions between genes are hard to disentangle. An approach called DiseaseCapsule makes use of capsule networks to identify the hierarchical structure in genomic data and can predict complex diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis with high accuracy.

Predicting drug–target interaction with computational models has attracted a lot of attention, but it is a difficult problem to generalize across domains to out-of-distribution data. Bai et al. present here a method that aims to model local interactions of proteins and drug molecules while being interpretable and provide cross-domain generalization.

In situations where some risk of injury is unavoidable for self-driving vehicles, how risk is distributed becomes an ethical question. Geisslinger and colleagues have developed a planning algorithm that takes five ethical principles into account and aims to comply with the emerging EU regulatory recommendations.

Olfactory navigation is a well-studied topic in insect behaviour, but many aspects of the challenging task of odour plume tracking are unknown. In a deep reinforcement learning approach, artificial agents are trained to produce (in silico) trajectories to localize the source of an odour plume, showing dynamics that mimic real insect behaviours.

When it comes to reasoning about the motion of physical objects, humans have natural intuitive physics knowledge. To test how good artificial learning agents are in similar predictive abilities, Xue and colleagues present a benchmark based on a two-dimensional physics environment in which 15 physical reasoning skills are measured.

AI language modelling and generation approaches have developed fast in the last decade, opening promising new directions in human–AI collaboration. An AI-in-the loop conversational system called HAILEY is developed to empower peer supporters in providing empathic responses to mental health support seekers.

The reconstruction of spatially resolved information of an extended object from an observed intensity diffraction pattern in holographic imaging is a challenging problem. By incorporating an explicit physical model, Lee and colleagues propose a deep learning method that can be used in holographic image reconstruction under physical perturbations and which generalizes well beyond object-to-sensor distances and pixel sizes seen during training.