我们介绍了在Neurips'22接受的Chalearn Meta学习系列中的新挑战的设计和基线结果，重点是“跨域”元学习。元学习旨在利用从以前的任务中获得的经验，以有效地解决新任务（即具有更好的性能，较少的培训数据和/或适度的计算资源）。尽管该系列中的先前挑战集中在域内几乎没有学习问题，但目的是有效地学习n-way K-shot任务（即N级培训示例的N班级分类问题），这项竞赛挑战了参与者的解决方案。从各种领域（医疗保健，生态学，生物学，制造业等）提出的“任何通道”和“任何镜头”问题，他们是为了人道主义和社会影响而被选为。为此，我们创建了Meta-Album，这是来自10个域的40个图像分类数据集的元数据，从中，我们从中以任何数量的“方式”（在2-20范围内）和任何数量的“镜头”来解释任务”（在1-20范围内）。竞争是由代码提交的，在Codalab挑战平台上进行了完全盲目测试。获奖者的代码将是开源的，从而使自动化机器学习解决方案的部署可以在几个域中进行几次图像分类。

尽管深度神经网络能够在各种任务上实现优于人类的表现，但他们臭名昭著，因为他们需要大量的数据和计算资源，将其成功限制在可用的这些资源的领域。金属学习方法可以通过从相关任务中转移知识来解决此问题，从而减少学习新任务所需的数据和计算资源的数量。我们组织了元数据竞赛系列，该系列为世界各地的研究小组提供了创建和实验评估实际问题的新元学习解决方案的机会。在本文中，我们在竞争组织者和排名最高的参与者之间进行了合作，我们描述了竞争的设计，数据集，最佳实验结果以及Neurips 2021挑战中最高的方法，这些方法吸引了15进入最后阶段的活跃团队（通过表现优于基线），在反馈阶段进行了100多次代码提交。顶级参与者的解决方案是开源的。汲取的经验教训包括学习良好的表示对于有效的转移学习至关重要。

Non-linear state-space models, also known as general hidden Markov models, are ubiquitous in statistical machine learning, being the most classical generative models for serial data and sequences in general. The particle-based, rapid incremental smoother PaRIS is a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) technique allowing for efficient online approximation of expectations of additive functionals under the smoothing distribution in these models. Such expectations appear naturally in several learning contexts, such as likelihood estimation (MLE) and Markov score climbing (MSC). PARIS has linear computational complexity, limited memory requirements and comes with non-asymptotic bounds, convergence results and stability guarantees. Still, being based on self-normalised importance sampling, the PaRIS estimator is biased. Our first contribution is to design a novel additive smoothing algorithm, the Parisian particle Gibbs PPG sampler, which can be viewed as a PaRIS algorithm driven by conditional SMC moves, resulting in bias-reduced estimates of the targeted quantities. We substantiate the PPG algorithm with theoretical results, including new bounds on bias and variance as well as deviation inequalities. Our second contribution is to apply PPG in a learning framework, covering MLE and MSC as special examples. In this context, we establish, under standard assumptions, non-asymptotic bounds highlighting the value of bias reduction and the implicit Rao--Blackwellization of PPG. These are the first non-asymptotic results of this kind in this setting. We illustrate our theoretical results with numerical experiments supporting our claims.

We address the challenge of building domain-specific knowledge models for industrial use cases, where labelled data and taxonomic information is initially scarce. Our focus is on inductive link prediction models as a basis for practical tools that support knowledge engineers with exploring text collections and discovering and linking new (so-called open-world) entities to the knowledge graph. We argue that - though neural approaches to text mining have yielded impressive results in the past years - current benchmarks do not reflect the typical challenges encountered in the industrial wild properly. Therefore, our first contribution is an open benchmark coined IRT2 (inductive reasoning with text) that (1) covers knowledge graphs of varying sizes (including very small ones), (2) comes with incidental, low-quality text mentions, and (3) includes not only triple completion but also ranking, which is relevant for supporting experts with discovery tasks. We investigate two neural models for inductive link prediction, one based on end-to-end learning and one that learns from the knowledge graph and text data in separate steps. These models compete with a strong bag-of-words baseline. The results show a significant advance in performance for the neural approaches as soon as the available graph data decreases for linking. For ranking, the results are promising, and the neural approaches outperform the sparse retriever by a wide margin.

Nowadays, the current neural network models of dialogue generation(chatbots) show great promise for generating answers for chatty agents. But they are short-sighted in that they predict utterances one at a time while disregarding their impact on future outcomes. Modelling a dialogue's future direction is critical for generating coherent, interesting dialogues, a need that has led traditional NLP dialogue models that rely on reinforcement learning. In this article, we explain how to combine these objectives by using deep reinforcement learning to predict future rewards in chatbot dialogue. The model simulates conversations between two virtual agents, with policy gradient methods used to reward sequences that exhibit three useful conversational characteristics: the flow of informality, coherence, and simplicity of response (related to forward-looking function). We assess our model based on its diversity, length, and complexity with regard to humans. In dialogue simulation, evaluations demonstrated that the proposed model generates more interactive responses and encourages a more sustained successful conversation. This work commemorates a preliminary step toward developing a neural conversational model based on the long-term success of dialogues.

Three-dimensional (3D) technologies have been developing rapidly recent years, and have influenced industrial, medical, cultural, and many other fields. In this paper, we introduce an automatic 3D human head scanning-printing system, which provides a complete pipeline to scan, reconstruct, select, and finally print out physical 3D human heads. To enhance the accuracy of our system, we developed a consumer-grade composite sensor (including a gyroscope, an accelerometer, a digital compass, and a Kinect v2 depth sensor) as our sensing device. This sensing device is then mounted on a robot, which automatically rotates around the human subject with approximate 1-meter radius, to capture the full-view information. The data streams are further processed and fused into a 3D model of the subject using a tablet located on the robot. In addition, an automatic selection method, based on our specific system configurations, is proposed to select the head portion. We evaluated the accuracy of the proposed system by comparing our generated 3D head models, from both standard human head model and real human subjects, with the ones reconstructed from FastSCAN and Cyberware commercial laser scanning systems through computing and visualizing Hausdorff distances. Computational cost is also provided to further assess our proposed system.

We propose a 6D RGB-D odometry approach that finds the relative camera pose between consecutive RGB-D frames by keypoint extraction and feature matching both on the RGB and depth image planes. Furthermore, we feed the estimated pose to the highly accurate KinectFusion algorithm, which uses a fast ICP (Iterative Closest Point) to fine-tune the frame-to-frame relative pose and fuse the depth data into a global implicit surface. We evaluate our method on a publicly available RGB-D SLAM benchmark dataset by Sturm et al. The experimental results show that our proposed reconstruction method solely based on visual odometry and KinectFusion outperforms the state-of-the-art RGB-D SLAM system accuracy. Moreover, our algorithm outputs a ready-to-use polygon mesh (highly suitable for creating 3D virtual worlds) without any postprocessing steps.

In this paper, a Kinect-based distributed and real-time motion capture system is developed. A trigonometric method is applied to calculate the relative position of Kinect v2 sensors with a calibration wand and register the sensors' positions automatically. By combining results from multiple sensors with a nonlinear least square method, the accuracy of the motion capture is optimized. Moreover, to exclude inaccurate results from sensors, a computational geometry is applied in the occlusion approach, which discovers occluded joint data. The synchronization approach is based on an NTP protocol that synchronizes the time between the clocks of a server and clients dynamically, ensuring that the proposed system is a real-time system. Experiments for validating the proposed system are conducted from the perspective of calibration, occlusion, accuracy, and efficiency. Furthermore, to demonstrate the practical performance of our system, a comparison of previously developed motion capture systems (the linear trilateration approach and the geometric trilateration approach) with the benchmark OptiTrack system is conducted, therein showing that the accuracy of our proposed system is $38.3\%$ and 24.1% better than the two aforementioned trilateration systems, respectively.

With the increase in health consciousness, noninvasive body monitoring has aroused interest among researchers. As one of the most important pieces of physiological information, researchers have remotely estimated the heart rate (HR) from facial videos in recent years. Although progress has been made over the past few years, there are still some limitations, like the processing time increasing with accuracy and the lack of comprehensive and challenging datasets for use and comparison. Recently, it was shown that HR information can be extracted from facial videos by spatial decomposition and temporal filtering. Inspired by this, a new framework is introduced in this paper to remotely estimate the HR under realistic conditions by combining spatial and temporal filtering and a convolutional neural network. Our proposed approach shows better performance compared with the benchmark on the MMSE-HR dataset in terms of both the average HR estimation and short-time HR estimation. High consistency in short-time HR estimation is observed between our method and the ground truth.

3D pose estimation is a challenging problem in computer vision. Most of the existing neural-network-based approaches address color or depth images through convolution networks (CNNs). In this paper, we study the task of 3D human pose estimation from depth images. Different from the existing CNN-based human pose estimation method, we propose a deep human pose network for 3D pose estimation by taking the point cloud data as input data to model the surface of complex human structures. We first cast the 3D human pose estimation from 2D depth images to 3D point clouds and directly predict the 3D joint position. Our experiments on two public datasets show that our approach achieves higher accuracy than previous state-of-art methods. The reported results on both ITOP and EVAL datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the targeted tasks.