预测器重要性是经典和量子机学习（QML）数据预处理管道的关键部分。这项工作介绍了此类研究的第一个研究，其中探索了对QML模型的重要性与其经典的机器学习（CML）等效物进行了对比。我们开发了一种混合量子式体系结构，其中训练了QML模型，并根据现实世界数据集上的经典算法计算特征重要性值。该体系结构已在ESPN幻想足球数据上使用Qiskit StateSvector模拟器和IBM量子硬件（例如IBMQ Mumbai和IBMQ Montreal Systems）实现。即使我们处于嘈杂的中间量子量子（NISQ）时代，物理量子计算结果还是有希望的。为了促进当前量子标尺，我们创建了一个数据分层，模型聚合和新颖的验证方法。值得注意的是，与经典模型相比，量子模型的特征重要性具有更高的变化。我们可以证明等效QML和CML模型通过多样性测量是互补的。 QML和CML之间的多样性表明，两种方法都可以以不同的方式促进解决方案。在本文中，我们关注量子支持向量分类器（QSVC），变分量子电路（VQC）及其经典对应物。 ESPN和IBM幻想足球贸易助理将高级统计分析与沃森发现的自然语言处理相结合，以提供公平的个性化贸易建议。在这里，已经考虑了每个播放器的播放器评估数据，并且可以扩展此工作以计算其他QML模型（例如Quantum Boltzmann机器）的特征重要性。

幻想运动让粉丝管理他们最喜欢的运动员团队并与朋友竞争。幻想平台对抗运动员的真实统计表现，幻想得分，稳步上升，估计每月有44亿球员的估计为910万名球员，2018 - 2019年的ESPN幻想足球平台。同时，体育媒体社区并行产生新闻报道，博客，论坛帖子，推文，视频，播客和幻想运动内外的曲目。然而，人类幻想足球运动员只能分析3.9个信息来源。我们的工作讨论了机器学习管道的结果来管理ESPN幻想足球队。每天使用训练有素的统计实体探测器和文档2Vector模型应用于超过100,000个新闻源和230万件文章，视频和播客使系统能够理解自然语言，这些自然语言具有100％和关键字测试精度为80％的类别。深度学习前馈神经网络提供了播放器分类，例如，如果玩家将是一个胸围，繁荣，用隐藏的伤害玩或玩有意义的触摸，累计72％的准确性。最后，多元回归集合使用深度学习输出和ESPN投影数据，为2018年为前500多个幻想足球运动员提供了一个点投影。点投影保持了6.78点的RMSE。选择来自一组24的最佳拟合概率密度函数以可视化分数扩展。在产品发布的前6周内，用户总数花了46年来观看我们的AI洞察力。我们模型的培训数据由2015年到2016年的Web档案提供，来自Webhose，ESPN统计和Rootowire损伤报告。我们使用2017年幻想足球数据作为测试集。

We introduce a new tool for stochastic convex optimization (SCO): a Reweighted Stochastic Query (ReSQue) estimator for the gradient of a function convolved with a (Gaussian) probability density. Combining ReSQue with recent advances in ball oracle acceleration [CJJJLST20, ACJJS21], we develop algorithms achieving state-of-the-art complexities for SCO in parallel and private settings. For a SCO objective constrained to the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we obtain the following results (up to polylogarithmic factors). We give a parallel algorithm obtaining optimization error $\epsilon_{\text{opt}}$ with $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3}$ gradient oracle query depth and $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3} + \epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2}$ gradient queries in total, assuming access to a bounded-variance stochastic gradient estimator. For $\epsilon_{\text{opt}} \in [d^{-1}, d^{-1/4}]$, our algorithm matches the state-of-the-art oracle depth of [BJLLS19] while maintaining the optimal total work of stochastic gradient descent. We give an $(\epsilon_{\text{dp}}, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm which, given $n$ samples of Lipschitz loss functions, obtains near-optimal optimization error and makes $\min(n, n^2\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^2 d^{-1}) + \min(n^{4/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{1/3}, (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1})$ queries to the gradients of these functions. In the regime $d \le n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{2}$, where privacy comes at no cost in terms of the optimal loss up to constants, our algorithm uses $n + (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1}$ queries and improves recent advancements of [KLL21, AFKT21]. In the moderately low-dimensional setting $d \le \sqrt n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{3/2}$, our query complexity is near-linear.

Despite the recent progress in language generation models, their outputs may not always meet user expectations. In this work, we study whether informational feedback in natural language can be leveraged to improve generation quality and user preference alignment. To this end, we consider factual consistency in summarization, the quality that the summary should only contain information supported by the input documents, for user preference alignment. We collect a high-quality dataset, DeFacto, containing human demonstrations and informational feedback in natural language consisting of corrective instructions, edited summaries, and explanations with respect to the factual consistency of the summary. Using our dataset, we study two natural language generation tasks: 1) editing a summary using the human feedback, and 2) generating human feedback from the original summary. Using the two tasks, we further evaluate if models can automatically correct factual inconsistencies in generated summaries. We show that the human-edited summaries we collected are more factually consistent, and pre-trained language models can leverage our dataset to improve the factual consistency of original system-generated summaries in our proposed generation tasks. We make the DeFacto dataset publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/DeFacto.

Complex and contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks, particularly those that involve multi-fingered hands and underactuated object manipulation, present a significant challenge to any control method. Methods based on reinforcement learning offer an appealing choice for such settings, as they can enable robots to learn to delicately balance contact forces and dexterously reposition objects without strong modeling assumptions. However, running reinforcement learning on real-world dexterous manipulation systems often requires significant manual engineering. This negates the benefits of autonomous data collection and ease of use that reinforcement learning should in principle provide. In this paper, we describe a system for vision-based dexterous manipulation that provides a "programming-free" approach for users to define new tasks and enable robots with complex multi-fingered hands to learn to perform them through interaction. The core principle underlying our system is that, in a vision-based setting, users should be able to provide high-level intermediate supervision that circumvents challenges in teleoperation or kinesthetic teaching which allow a robot to not only learn a task efficiently but also to autonomously practice. Our system includes a framework for users to define a final task and intermediate sub-tasks with image examples, a reinforcement learning procedure that learns the task autonomously without interventions, and experimental results with a four-finger robotic hand learning multi-stage object manipulation tasks directly in the real world, without simulation, manual modeling, or reward engineering.

Free-text rationales (FTRs) follow how humans communicate by explaining reasoning processes via natural language. A number of recent works have studied how to improve language model (LM) generalization by using FTRs to teach LMs the correct reasoning processes behind correct task outputs. These prior works aim to learn from FTRs by appending them to the LM input or target output, but this may introduce an input distribution shift or conflict with the task objective, respectively. We propose KNIFE, which distills FTR knowledge from an FTR-augmented teacher LM (takes both task input and FTR) to a student LM (takes only task input), which is used for inference. Crucially, the teacher LM's forward computation has a bottleneck stage in which all of its FTR states are masked out, which pushes knowledge from the FTR states into the task input/output states. Then, FTR knowledge is distilled to the student LM by training its task input/output states to align with the teacher LM's. On two question answering datasets, we show that KNIFE significantly outperforms existing FTR learning methods, in both fully-supervised and low-resource settings.

As information extraction (IE) systems have grown more capable at whole-document extraction, the classic task of \emph{template filling} has seen renewed interest as a benchmark for evaluating them. In this position paper, we call into question the suitability of template filling for this purpose. We argue that the task demands definitive answers to thorny questions of \emph{event individuation} -- the problem of distinguishing distinct events -- about which even human experts disagree. We show through annotation studies and error analysis that this raises concerns about the usefulness of template filling evaluation metrics, the quality of datasets for the task, and the ability of models to learn it. Finally, we consider possible solutions.

Targeted syntactic evaluations of language models ask whether models show stable preferences for syntactically acceptable content over minimal-pair unacceptable inputs. Most targeted syntactic evaluation datasets ask models to make these judgements with just a single context-free sentence as input. This does not match language models' training regime, in which input sentences are always highly contextualized by the surrounding corpus. This mismatch raises an important question: how robust are models' syntactic judgements in different contexts? In this paper, we investigate the stability of language models' performance on targeted syntactic evaluations as we vary properties of the input context: the length of the context, the types of syntactic phenomena it contains, and whether or not there are violations of grammaticality. We find that model judgements are generally robust when placed in randomly sampled linguistic contexts. However, they are substantially unstable for contexts containing syntactic structures matching those in the critical test content. Among all tested models (GPT-2 and five variants of OPT), we significantly improve models' judgements by providing contexts with matching syntactic structures, and conversely significantly worsen them using unacceptable contexts with matching but violated syntactic structures. This effect is amplified by the length of the context, except for unrelated inputs. We show that these changes in model performance are not explainable by simple features matching the context and the test inputs, such as lexical overlap and dependency overlap. This sensitivity to highly specific syntactic features of the context can only be explained by the models' implicit in-context learning abilities.

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.