Although cameras are ubiquitous, robotic platforms typically rely on active sensors like LiDAR for direct 3D perception. In this work, we propose a novel self-supervised monocular depth estimation method combining geometry with a new deep network, PackNet, learned only from unlabeled monocular videos. Our architecture leverages novel symmetrical packing and unpacking blocks to jointly learn to compress and decompress detail-preserving representations using 3D convolutions. Although self-supervised, our method outperforms other self, semi, and fully supervised methods on the KITTI benchmark. The 3D inductive bias in PackNet enables it to scale with input resolution and number of parameters without overfitting, generalizing better on out-of-domain data such as the NuScenes dataset. Furthermore, it does not require large-scale supervised pretraining on ImageNet and can run in real-time. Finally, we release DDAD (Dense Depth for Automated Driving), a new urban driving dataset with more challenging and accurate depth evaluation, thanks to longer-range and denser ground-truth depth generated from high-density LiDARs mounted on a fleet of self-driving cars operating world-wide. †

Deep reinforcement learning has considerable potential to improve irrigation scheduling in many cropping systems by applying adaptive amounts of water based on various measurements over time. The goal is to discover an intelligent decision rule that processes information available to growers and prescribes sensible irrigation amounts for the time steps considered. Due to the technical novelty, however, the research on the technique remains sparse and impractical. To accelerate the progress, the paper proposes a general framework and actionable procedure that allow researchers to formulate their own optimisation problems and implement solution algorithms based on deep reinforcement learning. The effectiveness of the framework was demonstrated using a case study of irrigated wheat grown in a productive region of Australia where profits were maximised. Specifically, the decision rule takes nine state variable inputs: crop phenological stage, leaf area index, extractable soil water for each of the five top layers, cumulative rainfall and cumulative irrigation. It returns a probabilistic prescription over five candidate irrigation amounts (0, 10, 20, 30 and 40 mm) every day. The production system was simulated at Goondiwindi using the APSIM-Wheat crop model. After training in the learning environment using 1981--2010 weather data, the learned decision rule was tested individually for each year of 2011--2020. The results were compared against the benchmark profits obtained using irrigation schedules optimised individually for each of the considered years. The discovered decision rule prescribed daily irrigation amounts that achieved more than 96% of the benchmark profits. The framework is general and applicable to a wide range of cropping systems with realistic optimisation problems.

Understanding why a model makes certain predictions is crucial when adapting it for real world decision making. LIME is a popular model-agnostic feature attribution method for the tasks of classification and regression. However, the task of learning to rank in information retrieval is more complex in comparison with either classification or regression. In this work, we extend LIME to propose Rank-LIME, a model-agnostic, local, post-hoc linear feature attribution method for the task of learning to rank that generates explanations for ranked lists. We employ novel correlation-based perturbations, differentiable ranking loss functions and introduce new metrics to evaluate ranking based additive feature attribution models. We compare Rank-LIME with a variety of competing systems, with models trained on the MS MARCO datasets and observe that Rank-LIME outperforms existing explanation algorithms in terms of Model Fidelity and Explain-NDCG. With this we propose one of the first algorithms to generate additive feature attributions for explaining ranked lists.

We present the Recurrent Interface Network (RIN), a neural net architecture that allocates computation adaptively to the input according to the distribution of information, allowing it to scale to iterative generation of high-dimensional data. Hidden units of RINs are partitioned into the interface, which is locally connected to inputs, and latents, which are decoupled from inputs and can exchange information globally. The RIN block selectively reads from the interface into latents for high-capacity processing, with incremental updates written back to the interface. Stacking multiple blocks enables effective routing across local and global levels. While routing adds overhead, the cost can be amortized in recurrent computation settings where inputs change gradually while more global context persists, such as iterative generation using diffusion models. To this end, we propose a latent self-conditioning technique that "warm-starts" the latents at each iteration of the generation process. When applied to diffusion models operating directly on pixels, RINs yield state-of-the-art image and video generation without cascades or guidance, while being domain-agnostic and up to 10$\times$ more efficient compared to specialized 2D and 3D U-Nets.

Online ride-hailing services have become a prevalent transportation system across the world. In this paper, we study a challenging problem of how to direct vacant taxis around a city such that supplies and demands can be balanced in online ride-hailing services. We design a new reward scheme that considers multiple performance metrics of online ride-hailing services. We also propose a novel deep reinforcement learning method named Deep-Q-Network with Action Mask (AM-DQN) masking off unnecessary actions in various locations such that agents can learn much faster and more efficiently. We conduct extensive experiments using a city-scale dataset from Chicago. Several popular heuristic and learning methods are also implemented as baselines for comparison. The results of the experiments show that the AM-DQN attains the best performances of all methods with respect to average failure rate, average waiting time for customers, and average idle search time for vacant taxis.

There is considerable interest in predicting the pathogenicity of protein variants in human genes. Due to the sparsity of high quality labels, recent approaches turn to \textit{unsupervised} learning, using Multiple Sequence Alignments (MSAs) to train generative models of natural sequence variation within each gene. These generative models then predict variant likelihood as a proxy to evolutionary fitness. In this work we instead combine this evolutionary principle with pretrained protein language models (LMs), which have already shown promising results in predicting protein structure and function. Instead of training separate models per-gene, we find that a single protein LM trained on broad sequence datasets can score pathogenicity for any gene variant zero-shot, without MSAs or finetuning. We call this unsupervised approach \textbf{VELM} (Variant Effect via Language Models), and show that it achieves scoring performance comparable to the state of the art when evaluated on clinically labeled variants of disease-related genes.

Personal assistants, automatic speech recognizers and dialogue understanding systems are becoming more critical in our interconnected digital world. A clear example is air traffic control (ATC) communications. ATC aims at guiding aircraft and controlling the airspace in a safe and optimal manner. These voice-based dialogues are carried between an air traffic controller (ATCO) and pilots via very-high frequency radio channels. In order to incorporate these novel technologies into ATC (low-resource domain), large-scale annotated datasets are required to develop the data-driven AI systems. Two examples are automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU). In this paper, we introduce the ATCO2 corpus, a dataset that aims at fostering research on the challenging ATC field, which has lagged behind due to lack of annotated data. The ATCO2 corpus covers 1) data collection and pre-processing, 2) pseudo-annotations of speech data, and 3) extraction of ATC-related named entities. The ATCO2 corpus is split into three subsets. 1) ATCO2-test-set corpus contains 4 hours of ATC speech with manual transcripts and a subset with gold annotations for named-entity recognition (callsign, command, value). 2) The ATCO2-PL-set corpus consists of 5281 hours of unlabeled ATC data enriched with automatic transcripts from an in-domain speech recognizer, contextual information, speaker turn information, signal-to-noise ratio estimate and English language detection score per sample. Both available for purchase through ELDA at http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-S0484. 3) The ATCO2-test-set-1h corpus is a one-hour subset from the original test set corpus, that we are offering for free at https://www.atco2.org/data. We expect the ATCO2 corpus will foster research on robust ASR and NLU not only in the field of ATC communications but also in the general research community.

在许多行业中，客户流失预测是一项宝贵的任务。在电信中，鉴于数据的高维度以及确定潜在的挫败感签名是多么困难，这可能代表了关于未来流失行为的重要驱动因素。在这里，我们提出了一个新颖的贝叶斯分层联合模型，该模型能够根据不同电视观看旅程中发生的事件以及事件之间需要多长时间来表征客户资料。该模型大幅度地将数据的维度从每个客户的数千个观察值降低到11个客户级参数估计和随机效果。我们使用来自40个BT客户（有20名活跃和20名最终取消订阅的20人）的数据测试我们的方法，他们的电视观看行为是从2019年10月到2019年12月的，总计约为半百万。使用贝叶斯分层模型的参数估计和随机效应采用不同的机器学习技术，作为在验证中与100 \％真实的正率和14 \％的假正率相关的最高92 \％精度可预测流失的精度放。我们提出的方法是降低数据维度的有效方法，同时保持了高描述性和预测能力。我们提供代码以在https://github.com/rafamoral/profiling_tv_watching_behaviour上实现贝叶斯模型。

通过一系列联邦举措和命令，美国政府一直在努力确保美国在AI中的领导。这些广泛的战略文件影响了美国空军美国部（DAF）等组织。DAF-MIT AI加速器是DAF和MIT之间的一项计划，以弥合AI研究人员与DAF任务要求之间的差距。DAF-MIT AI加速器支持的几个项目正在开发公共挑战问题，这些问题解决了许多联邦AI研究的重点。这些挑战是通过公开可用的大型AI-Ready数据集，激励开源解决方案，并为可以激发进一步研究的双重使用技术创建需求信号，来针对优先事项。在本文中，我们描述了正在开发的这些公共挑战以及它们的应用如何促进科学进步。

最近，几种密集的检索（DR）模型已经证明了在搜索系统中无处不在的基于术语的检索的竞争性能。与基于术语的匹配相反，DR将查询和文档投影到密集的矢量空间中，并通过（大约）最近的邻居搜索检索结果。部署新系统（例如DR）不可避免地涉及其性能方面的权衡。通常，建立的检索系统按照效率和成本（例如查询延迟，索引吞吐量或存储要求）对其进行了良好的理解。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个具有一组标准的框架，这些框架超出了简单的有效性措施，可以彻底比较两个检索系统，并明确目标是评估一个系统的准备就绪，以取代另一个系统。这包括有效性和各种成本因素之间的仔细权衡考虑。此外，我们描述了护栏标准，因为即使是平均而言更好的系统，也可能会对少数查询产生系统性故障。护栏检查某些查询特性和新型故障类型的故障，这些故障仅在密集检索系统中才有可能。我们在网络排名方案上演示了我们的决策框架。在这种情况下，最先进的DR模型的结果令人惊讶，不仅是平均表现，而且通过一系列广泛的护栏测试，表现出不同的查询特性，词汇匹配，概括和回归次数的稳健性。无法预测将来博士是否会变得无处不在，但是这是一种可能的方法是通过重复应用决策过程（例如此处介绍的过程）。