个性化交互式系统（例如推荐系统）需要选择取决于上下文的相关项目。生产系统需要从非常大的目录中迅速识别这些项目，这些目录可以使用最大的内部产品搜索技术有效地解决。通过放松离散问题，可以实现最大内部产品搜索的离线优化，从而导致政策学习或增强样式学习算法。不幸的是，这种放松步骤需要在整个目录上计算一个总和，从而使梯度评估的复杂性（因此每个随机梯度下降迭代）在目录大小中线性线性。在许多现实世界中，该计算是站不住脚的示例，例如大型目录推荐系统严重限制了该方法在实践中的实用性。在本文中，我们展示了如何产生这些政策学习算法的出色近似值，以对数与目录大小进行对数。我们的贡献是基于结合三个新颖想法的结合：对政策梯度，自我正常化的重要性采样估计器以及在训练时使用快速最大内部产品搜索的新蒙特卡洛估计。广泛的实验表明，我们的算法比幼稚的方法更快，但产生同样好的策略。

Real-world robotic grasping can be done robustly if a complete 3D Point Cloud Data (PCD) of an object is available. However, in practice, PCDs are often incomplete when objects are viewed from few and sparse viewpoints before the grasping action, leading to the generation of wrong or inaccurate grasp poses. We propose a novel grasping strategy, named 3DSGrasp, that predicts the missing geometry from the partial PCD to produce reliable grasp poses. Our proposed PCD completion network is a Transformer-based encoder-decoder network with an Offset-Attention layer. Our network is inherently invariant to the object pose and point's permutation, which generates PCDs that are geometrically consistent and completed properly. Experiments on a wide range of partial PCD show that 3DSGrasp outperforms the best state-of-the-art method on PCD completion tasks and largely improves the grasping success rate in real-world scenarios. The code and dataset will be made available upon acceptance.

Model estimates obtained from traditional subspace identification methods may be subject to significant variance. This elevated variance is aggravated in the cases of large models or of a limited sample size. Common solutions to reduce the effect of variance are regularized estimators, shrinkage estimators and Bayesian estimation. In the current work we investigate the latter two solutions, which have not yet been applied to subspace identification. Our experimental results show that our proposed estimators may reduce the estimation risk up to $40\%$ of that of traditional subspace methods.

This report summarizes the work carried out by the authors during the Twelfth Montreal Industrial Problem Solving Workshop, held at Universit\'e de Montr\'eal in August 2022. The team tackled a problem submitted by CBC/Radio-Canada on the theme of Automatic Text Simplification (ATS).

Counterfactual explanation is a common class of methods to make local explanations of machine learning decisions. For a given instance, these methods aim to find the smallest modification of feature values that changes the predicted decision made by a machine learning model. One of the challenges of counterfactual explanation is the efficient generation of realistic counterfactuals. To address this challenge, we propose VCNet-Variational Counter Net-a model architecture that combines a predictor and a counterfactual generator that are jointly trained, for regression or classification tasks. VCNet is able to both generate predictions, and to generate counterfactual explanations without having to solve another minimisation problem. Our contribution is the generation of counterfactuals that are close to the distribution of the predicted class. This is done by learning a variational autoencoder conditionally to the output of the predictor in a join-training fashion. We present an empirical evaluation on tabular datasets and across several interpretability metrics. The results are competitive with the state-of-the-art method.

Foundation models are redefining how AI systems are built. Practitioners now follow a standard procedure to build their machine learning solutions: download a copy of a foundation model, and fine-tune it using some in-house data about the target task of interest. Consequently, the Internet is swarmed by a handful of foundation models fine-tuned on many diverse tasks. Yet, these individual fine-tunings often lack strong generalization and exist in isolation without benefiting from each other. In our opinion, this is a missed opportunity, as these specialized models contain diverse features. Based on this insight, we propose model recycling, a simple strategy that leverages multiple fine-tunings of the same foundation model on diverse auxiliary tasks, and repurposes them as rich and diverse initializations for the target task. Specifically, model recycling fine-tunes in parallel each specialized model on the target task, and then averages the weights of all target fine-tunings into a final model. Empirically, we show that model recycling maximizes model diversity by benefiting from diverse auxiliary tasks, and achieves a new state of the art on the reference DomainBed benchmark for out-of-distribution generalization. Looking forward, model recycling is a contribution to the emerging paradigm of updatable machine learning where, akin to open-source software development, the community collaborates to incrementally and reliably update machine learning models.

Compared to conventional bilingual translation systems, massively multilingual machine translation is appealing because a single model can translate into multiple languages and benefit from knowledge transfer for low resource languages. On the other hand, massively multilingual models suffer from the curse of multilinguality, unless scaling their size massively, which increases their training and inference costs. Sparse Mixture-of-Experts models are a way to drastically increase model capacity without the need for a proportional amount of computing. The recently released NLLB-200 is an example of such a model. It covers 202 languages but requires at least four 32GB GPUs just for inference. In this work, we propose a pruning method that allows the removal of up to 80\% of experts with a negligible loss in translation quality, which makes it feasible to run the model on a single 32GB GPU. Further analysis suggests that our pruning metrics allow to identify language-specific experts and prune non-relevant experts for a given language pair.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

End-to-End speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) is generally evaluated with text-based metrics. This means that generated speech has to be automatically transcribed, making the evaluation dependent on the availability and quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. In this paper, we propose a text-free evaluation metric for end-to-end S2ST, named BLASER, to avoid the dependency on ASR systems. BLASER leverages a multilingual multimodal encoder to directly encode the speech segments for source input, translation output and reference into a shared embedding space and computes a score of the translation quality that can be used as a proxy to human evaluation. To evaluate our approach, we construct training and evaluation sets from more than 40k human annotations covering seven language directions. The best results of BLASER are achieved by training with supervision from human rating scores. We show that when evaluated at the sentence level, BLASER correlates significantly better with human judgment compared to ASR-dependent metrics including ASR-SENTBLEU in all translation directions and ASR-COMET in five of them. Our analysis shows combining speech and text as inputs to BLASER does not increase the correlation with human scores, but best correlations are achieved when using speech, which motivates the goal of our research. Moreover, we show that using ASR for references is detrimental for text-based metrics.

Transformers have proved to be very effective for visual recognition tasks. In particular, vision transformers construct compressed global representations through self-attention and learnable class tokens. Multi-resolution transformers have shown recent successes in semantic segmentation but can only capture local interactions in high-resolution feature maps. This paper extends the notion of global tokens to build GLobal Attention Multi-resolution (GLAM) transformers. GLAM is a generic module that can be integrated into most existing transformer backbones. GLAM includes learnable global tokens, which unlike previous methods can model interactions between all image regions, and extracts powerful representations during training. Extensive experiments show that GLAM-Swin or GLAM-Swin-UNet exhibit substantially better performances than their vanilla counterparts on ADE20K and Cityscapes. Moreover, GLAM can be used to segment large 3D medical images, and GLAM-nnFormer achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the BCV dataset.