Weeds are one of the major reasons for crop yield loss but current weeding practices fail to manage weeds in an efficient and targeted manner. Effective weed management is especially important for crops with high worldwide production such as maize, to maximize crop yield for meeting increasing global demands. Advances in near-sensing and computer vision enable the development of new tools for weed management. Specifically, state-of-the-art segmentation models, coupled with novel sensing technologies, can facilitate timely and accurate weeding and monitoring systems. However, learning-based approaches require annotated data and show a lack of generalization to aerial imaging for different crops. We present a novel dataset for semantic and instance segmentation of crops and weeds in agricultural maize fields. The multispectral UAV-based dataset contains images with RGB, red-edge, and nearinfrared bands, a large number of plant instances, dense annotations for maize and four weed classes, and is multitemporal. We provide extensive baseline results for both tasks, including probabilistic methods to quantify prediction uncertainty, improve model calibration, and demonstrate the approach's applicability to out-of-distribution data. The results show the effectiveness of the two additional bands compared to RGB only, and better performance in our target domain than models trained on existing datasets. We hope our dataset advances research on methods and operational systems for fine-grained weed identification, enhancing the robustness and applicability of UAVbased weed management. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/GFZ/weedsgalore.

We present a boosting-based method to learn additive Structural Equation Models (SEMs) from observational data, with a focus on the theoretical aspects of determining the causal order among variables. We introduce a family of score functions based on arbitrary regression techniques, for which we establish sufficient conditions that guarantee consistent identification of the true causal ordering. Our analysis reveals that boosting with early stopping meets these criteria and thus offers a consistent score function for causal orderings. To address the challenges posed by high-dimensional data sets, we adapt our approach through a component-wise gradient descent in the space of additive SEMs. Our simulation study supports the theoretical findings in low-dimensional settings and demonstrates that our high-dimensional adaptation is competitive with state-of-the-art methods. In addition, it exhibits robustness with respect to the choice of hyperparameters, thereby simplifying the tuning process.

Prior parameter distributions provide an elegant way to represent prior expert knowledge for informed learning. Previous work has shown that using such informative priors to regularize probabilistic deep learning (DL) models increases their performance and data efficiency. However, commonly used sampling-based approximations for probabilistic DL models can be computationally expensive, requiring multiple forward passes and longer training times. Promising alternatives are compute efficient last layer kernel approximations like spectral normalized Gaussian processes (SNGPs). We propose a novel regularization-based continual learning method for SNGPs, which enables the use of informative priors that represent prior knowledge learned from previous tasks. Our proposal builds upon well-established methods and requires no rehearsal memory or parameter expansion. We apply our informed SNGP model to the trajectory prediction problem in autonomous driving by integrating prior drivability knowledge. On two public datasets, we investigate its performance under diminishing training data and across locations, and thereby demonstrate an increase in data efficiency and robustness to location-transfers over non-informed and informed baselines.

Object detectors in real-world applications often fail to detect objects due to varying factors such as weather conditions and noisy input. Therefore, a process that mitigates false detections is crucial for both safety and accuracy. While uncertainty-based thresholding shows promise, previous works demonstrate an imperfect correlation between uncertainty and detection errors. This hinders ideal thresholding, prompting us to further investigate the correlation and associated cost with different types of uncertainty. We therefore propose a cost-sensitive framework for object detection tailored to user-defined budgets on the two types of errors, missing and false detections. We derive minimum thresholding requirements to prevent performance degradation and define metrics to assess the applicability of uncertainty for failure recognition. Furthermore, we automate and optimize the thresholding process to maximize the failure recognition rate w.r.t. the specified budget. Evaluation on three autonomous driving datasets demonstrates that our approach significantly enhances safety, particularly in challenging scenarios. Leveraging localization aleatoric uncertainty and softmax-based entropy only, our method boosts the failure recognition rate by 36-60% compared to conventional approaches. Code is available at https://mos-ks.github.io/publications.

We propose a novel method for predicting time-to-event data in the presence of cure fractions based on flexible survival models integrated into a deep neural network (DNN) framework. Our approach allows for nonlinear relationships and high-dimensional interactions between covariates and survival and is suitable for large-scale applications. To ensure the identifiability of the overall predictor formed of an additive decomposition of interpretable linear and nonlinear effects and potential higher-dimensional interactions captured through a DNN, we employ an orthogonalization layer. We demonstrate the usefulness and computational efficiency of our method via simulations and apply it to a large portfolio of U.S. mortgage loans. Here, we find not only a better predictive performance of our framework but also a more realistic picture of covariate effects.