The task of automatic text summarization produces a concise and fluent text summary while preserving key information and overall meaning. Recent approaches to document-level summarization have seen significant improvements in recent years by using models based on the Transformer architecture. However, the quadratic memory and time complexities with respect to the sequence length make them very expensive to use, especially with long sequences, as required by document-level summarization. Our work addresses the problem of document-level summarization by studying how efficient Transformer techniques can be used to improve the automatic summarization of very long texts. In particular, we will use the arXiv dataset, consisting of several scientific papers and the corresponding abstracts, as baselines for this work. Then, we propose a novel retrieval-enhanced approach based on the architecture which reduces the cost of generating a summary of the entire document by processing smaller chunks. The results were below the baselines but suggest a more efficient memory a consumption and truthfulness.

The goal of autonomous vehicles is to navigate public roads safely and comfortably. To enforce safety, traditional planning approaches rely on handcrafted rules to generate trajectories. Machine learning-based systems, on the other hand, scale with data and are able to learn more complex behaviors. However, they often ignore that agents and self-driving vehicle trajectory distributions can be leveraged to improve safety. In this paper, we propose modeling a distribution over multiple future trajectories for both the self-driving vehicle and other road agents, using a unified neural network architecture for prediction and planning. During inference, we select the planning trajectory that minimizes a cost taking into account safety and the predicted probabilities. Our approach does not depend on any rule-based planners for trajectory generation or optimization, improves with more training data and is simple to implement. We extensively evaluate our method through a realistic simulator and show that the predicted trajectory distribution corresponds to different driving profiles. We also successfully deploy it on a self-driving vehicle on urban public roads, confirming that it drives safely without compromising comfort. The code for training and testing our model on a public prediction dataset and the video of the road test are available at https://woven.mobi/safepathnet

It is indisputable that physical activity is vital for an individual's health and wellness. However, a global prevalence of physical inactivity has induced significant personal and socioeconomic implications. In recent years, a significant amount of work has showcased the capabilities of self-tracking technology to create positive health behavior change. This work is motivated by the potential of personalized and adaptive goal-setting techniques in encouraging physical activity via self-tracking. To this end, we propose UBIWEAR, an end-to-end framework for intelligent physical activity prediction, with the ultimate goal to empower data-driven goal-setting interventions. To achieve this, we experiment with numerous machine learning and deep learning paradigms as a robust benchmark for physical activity prediction tasks. To train our models, we utilize, "MyHeart Counts", an open, large-scale dataset collected in-the-wild from thousands of users. We also propose a prescriptive framework for self-tracking aggregated data preprocessing, to facilitate data wrangling of real-world, noisy data. Our best model achieves a MAE of 1087 steps, 65% lower than the state of the art in terms of absolute error, proving the feasibility of the physical activity prediction task, and paving the way for future research.

Deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer the promise of low-power artificial intelligence. However, training deep SNNs from scratch or converting deep artificial neural networks to SNNs without loss of performance has been a challenge. Here we propose an exact mapping from a network with Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs) to an SNN that fires exactly one spike per neuron. For our constructive proof, we assume that an arbitrary multi-layer ReLU network with or without convolutional layers, batch normalization and max pooling layers was trained to high performance on some training set. Furthermore, we assume that we have access to a representative example of input data used during training and to the exact parameters (weights and biases) of the trained ReLU network. The mapping from deep ReLU networks to SNNs causes zero percent drop in accuracy on CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and the ImageNet-like data sets Places365 and PASS. More generally our work shows that an arbitrary deep ReLU network can be replaced by an energy-efficient single-spike neural network without any loss of performance.

Building a quantum analog of classical deep neural networks represents a fundamental challenge in quantum computing. A key issue is how to address the inherent non-linearity of classical deep learning, a problem in the quantum domain due to the fact that the composition of an arbitrary number of quantum gates, consisting of a series of sequential unitary transformations, is intrinsically linear. This problem has been variously approached in the literature, principally via the introduction of measurements between layers of unitary transformations. In this paper, we introduce the Quantum Path Kernel, a formulation of quantum machine learning capable of replicating those aspects of deep machine learning typically associated with superior generalization performance in the classical domain, specifically, hierarchical feature learning. Our approach generalizes the notion of Quantum Neural Tangent Kernel, which has been used to study the dynamics of classical and quantum machine learning models. The Quantum Path Kernel exploits the parameter trajectory, i.e. the curve delineated by model parameters as they evolve during training, enabling the representation of differential layer-wise convergence behaviors, or the formation of hierarchical parametric dependencies, in terms of their manifestation in the gradient space of the predictor function. We evaluate our approach with respect to variants of the classification of Gaussian XOR mixtures - an artificial but emblematic problem that intrinsically requires multilevel learning in order to achieve optimal class separation.

Recent work has reported that AI classifiers trained on audio recordings can accurately predict severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV2) infection status. Here, we undertake a large scale study of audio-based deep learning classifiers, as part of the UK governments pandemic response. We collect and analyse a dataset of audio recordings from 67,842 individuals with linked metadata, including reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test outcomes, of whom 23,514 tested positive for SARS CoV 2. Subjects were recruited via the UK governments National Health Service Test-and-Trace programme and the REal-time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT) randomised surveillance survey. In an unadjusted analysis of our dataset AI classifiers predict SARS-CoV-2 infection status with high accuracy (Receiver Operating Characteristic Area Under the Curve (ROCAUC) 0.846 [0.838, 0.854]) consistent with the findings of previous studies. However, after matching on measured confounders, such as age, gender, and self reported symptoms, our classifiers performance is much weaker (ROC-AUC 0.619 [0.594, 0.644]). Upon quantifying the utility of audio based classifiers in practical settings, we find them to be outperformed by simple predictive scores based on user reported symptoms.

Since early in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, there has been interest in using artificial intelligence methods to predict COVID-19 infection status based on vocal audio signals, for example cough recordings. However, existing studies have limitations in terms of data collection and of the assessment of the performances of the proposed predictive models. This paper rigorously assesses state-of-the-art machine learning techniques used to predict COVID-19 infection status based on vocal audio signals, using a dataset collected by the UK Health Security Agency. This dataset includes acoustic recordings and extensive study participant meta-data. We provide guidelines on testing the performance of methods to classify COVID-19 infection status based on acoustic features and we discuss how these can be extended more generally to the development and assessment of predictive methods based on public health datasets.

The UK COVID-19 Vocal Audio Dataset is designed for the training and evaluation of machine learning models that classify SARS-CoV-2 infection status or associated respiratory symptoms using vocal audio. The UK Health Security Agency recruited voluntary participants through the national Test and Trace programme and the REACT-1 survey in England from March 2021 to March 2022, during dominant transmission of the Alpha and Delta SARS-CoV-2 variants and some Omicron variant sublineages. Audio recordings of volitional coughs, exhalations, and speech were collected in the 'Speak up to help beat coronavirus' digital survey alongside demographic, self-reported symptom and respiratory condition data, and linked to SARS-CoV-2 test results. The UK COVID-19 Vocal Audio Dataset represents the largest collection of SARS-CoV-2 PCR-referenced audio recordings to date. PCR results were linked to 70,794 of 72,999 participants and 24,155 of 25,776 positive cases. Respiratory symptoms were reported by 45.62% of participants. This dataset has additional potential uses for bioacoustics research, with 11.30% participants reporting asthma, and 27.20% with linked influenza PCR test results.

This paper describes the 5th edition of the Predicting Video Memorability Task as part of MediaEval2022. This year we have reorganised and simplified the task in order to lubricate a greater depth of inquiry. Similar to last year, two datasets are provided in order to facilitate generalisation, however, this year we have replaced the TRECVid2019 Video-to-Text dataset with the VideoMem dataset in order to remedy underlying data quality issues, and to prioritise short-term memorability prediction by elevating the Memento10k dataset as the primary dataset. Additionally, a fully fledged electroencephalography (EEG)-based prediction sub-task is introduced. In this paper, we outline the core facets of the task and its constituent sub-tasks; describing the datasets, evaluation metrics, and requirements for participant submissions.

The Predicting Media Memorability task in the MediaEval evaluation campaign has been running annually since 2018 and several different tasks and data sets have been used in this time. This has allowed us to compare the performance of many memorability prediction techniques on the same data and in a reproducible way and to refine and improve on those techniques. The resources created to compute media memorability are now being used by researchers well beyond the actual evaluation campaign. In this paper we present a summary of the task, including the collective lessons we have learned for the research community.