由于其物理能力，模拟的类人动物是一个吸引人的研究领域。尽管如此，他们也在控制方面具有挑战性，因为政策必须推动不稳定，不连续和高维物理系统。一种经过广泛研究的方法是利用运动捕获（MOCAP）数据来教授类人动物的低水平技能（例如，站立，步行和跑步），然后可以重新使用以综合高级行为。但是，即使使用MOCAP数据，控制模拟的类人动物仍然非常困难，因为MOCAP数据仅提供运动学信息。寻找物理控制输入以实现所示动作需要计算密集型方法，例如增强学习。因此，尽管有公开可用的MOCAP数据，但其效用仍限于具有大规模计算的机构。在这项工作中，我们通过训练和释放高质量的代理，可以大大降低有关该主题的生产研究的障碍，这些代理可以在基于DM_Control物理学的环境中跟踪三个小时的MOCAP数据以上的MOCAP数据。我们释放Mocapact（动作动作捕获），这些专家代理的数据集及其推出，其中包含本体感受观察和动作。我们通过使用它来训练单个层次结构策略来证明MOCAPACT的实用性，该策略能够跟踪DM_Control中的整个MOCAP数据集并显示学习学到的低级组件可以被重新使用以有效地学习下游高级任务。最后，我们使用MoCapact训练自动回旋GPT模型，并表明它可以控制模拟的类人动物以在运动提示下执行自然运动完成。结果和指向代码和数据集的链接的视频可在https://microsoft.github.io/mocapact上获得。

我们提供了一种通过从域知识或离线数据构建的启发式提供加强学习（RL）算法的框架。 Tabula RAS RL算法需要与顺序决策任务的地平线相比的环境相互作用或计算。使用我们的框架，我们展示了启发式引导的RL如何引导更短的地平次数，可从而解决原始任务。我们的框架可以被视为基于地平线的正则化，用于在有限互动预算下控制RL中的偏差和方差。在理论方面，我们表征了良好启发式的特性及其对RL加速的影响。特别是，我们介绍了一种新颖的启发式的概念，一种启发式，允许RL代理外推超出其先前知识。在实证方面，我们实例化了我们的框架，以加速模拟机器人控制任务和程序生成的游戏中的若干最先进的算法。我们的框架在热启动RL与专家演示或探索数据集中的丰富文学补充，并引入了一种用于将先验知识注入RL的原则方法。

t-SNE remains one of the most popular embedding techniques for visualizing high-dimensional data. Most standard packages of t-SNE, such as scikit-learn, use the Barnes-Hut t-SNE (BH t-SNE) algorithm for large datasets. However, existing CPU implementations of this algorithm are inefficient. In this work, we accelerate the BH t-SNE on CPUs via cache optimizations, SIMD, parallelizing sequential steps, and improving parallelization of multithreaded steps. Our implementation (Acc-t-SNE) is up to 261x and 4x faster than scikit-learn and the state-of-the-art BH t-SNE implementation from daal4py, respectively, on a 32-core Intel(R) Icelake cloud instance.

The ultimate goal of artificial intelligence is to mimic the human brain to perform decision-making and control directly from high-dimensional sensory input. All-optical diffractive neural networks provide a promising solution for realizing artificial intelligence with high-speed and low-power consumption. To date, most of the reported diffractive neural networks focus on single or multiple tasks that do not involve interaction with the environment, such as object recognition and image classification, while the networks that can perform decision-making and control, to our knowledge, have not been developed yet. Here, we propose to use deep reinforcement learning to realize diffractive neural networks that enable imitating the human-level capability of decision-making and control. Such networks allow for finding optimal control policies through interaction with the environment and can be readily realized with the dielectric metasurfaces. The superior performances of these networks are verified by engaging three types of classic games, Tic-Tac-Toe, Super Mario Bros., and Car Racing, and achieving the same or even higher levels comparable to human players. Our work represents a solid step of advancement in diffractive neural networks, which promises a fundamental shift from the target-driven control of a pre-designed state for simple recognition or classification tasks to the high-level sensory capability of artificial intelligence. It may find exciting applications in autonomous driving, intelligent robots, and intelligent manufacturing.

Often clickbait articles have a title that is phrased as a question or vague teaser that entices the user to click on the link and read the article to find the explanation. We developed a system that will automatically find the answer or explanation of the clickbait hook from the website text so that the user does not need to read through the text themselves. We fine-tune an extractive question and answering model (RoBERTa) and an abstractive one (T5), using data scraped from the 'StopClickbait' Facebook pages and Reddit's 'SavedYouAClick' subforum. We find that both extractive and abstractive models improve significantly after finetuning. We find that the extractive model performs slightly better according to ROUGE scores, while the abstractive one has a slight edge in terms of BERTscores.

Transformers have become the state-of-the-art neural network architecture across numerous domains of machine learning. This is partly due to their celebrated ability to transfer and to learn in-context based on few examples. Nevertheless, the mechanisms by which Transformers become in-context learners are not well understood and remain mostly an intuition. Here, we argue that training Transformers on auto-regressive tasks can be closely related to well-known gradient-based meta-learning formulations. We start by providing a simple weight construction that shows the equivalence of data transformations induced by 1) a single linear self-attention layer and by 2) gradient-descent (GD) on a regression loss. Motivated by that construction, we show empirically that when training self-attention-only Transformers on simple regression tasks either the models learned by GD and Transformers show great similarity or, remarkably, the weights found by optimization match the construction. Thus we show how trained Transformers implement gradient descent in their forward pass. This allows us, at least in the domain of regression problems, to mechanistically understand the inner workings of optimized Transformers that learn in-context. Furthermore, we identify how Transformers surpass plain gradient descent by an iterative curvature correction and learn linear models on deep data representations to solve non-linear regression tasks. Finally, we discuss intriguing parallels to a mechanism identified to be crucial for in-context learning termed induction-head (Olsson et al., 2022) and show how it could be understood as a specific case of in-context learning by gradient descent learning within Transformers.

Content scanning systems employ perceptual hashing algorithms to scan user content for illegal material, such as child pornography or terrorist recruitment flyers. Perceptual hashing algorithms help determine whether two images are visually similar while preserving the privacy of the input images. Several efforts from industry and academia propose to conduct content scanning on client devices such as smartphones due to the impending roll out of end-to-end encryption that will make server-side content scanning difficult. However, these proposals have met with strong criticism because of the potential for the technology to be misused and re-purposed. Our work informs this conversation by experimentally characterizing the potential for one type of misuse -- attackers manipulating the content scanning system to perform physical surveillance on target locations. Our contributions are threefold: (1) we offer a definition of physical surveillance in the context of client-side image scanning systems; (2) we experimentally characterize this risk and create a surveillance algorithm that achieves physical surveillance rates of >40% by poisoning 5% of the perceptual hash database; (3) we experimentally study the trade-off between the robustness of client-side image scanning systems and surveillance, showing that more robust detection of illegal material leads to increased potential for physical surveillance.

Generative adversarial networks are a promising tool for image generation in the astronomy domain. Of particular interest are conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs), which allow you to divide images into several classes according to the value of some property of the image, and then specify the required class when generating new images. In the case of images from Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs), an important property is the total brightness of all image pixels (image size), which is in direct correlation with the energy of primary particles. We used a cGAN technique to generate images similar to whose obtained in the TAIGA-IACT experiment. As a training set, we used a set of two-dimensional images generated using the TAIGA Monte Carlo simulation software. We artificiallly divided the training set into 10 classes, sorting images by size and defining the boundaries of the classes so that the same number of images fall into each class. These classes were used while training our network. The paper shows that for each class, the size distribution of the generated images is close to normal with the mean value located approximately in the middle of the corresponding class. We also show that for the generated images, the total image size distribution obtained by summing the distributions over all classes is close to the original distribution of the training set. The results obtained will be useful for more accurate generation of realistic synthetic images similar to the ones taken by IACTs.

Decentralized learning with private data is a central problem in machine learning. We propose a novel distillation-based decentralized learning technique that allows multiple agents with private non-iid data to learn from each other, without having to share their data, weights or weight updates. Our approach is communication efficient, utilizes an unlabeled public dataset and uses multiple auxiliary heads for each client, greatly improving training efficiency in the case of heterogeneous data. This approach allows individual models to preserve and enhance performance on their private tasks while also dramatically improving their performance on the global aggregated data distribution. We study the effects of data and model architecture heterogeneity and the impact of the underlying communication graph topology on learning efficiency and show that our agents can significantly improve their performance compared to learning in isolation.

This paper focuses on the uncertainty estimation of white matter lesions (WML) segmentation in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). On one side, voxel-scale segmentation errors cause the erroneous delineation of the lesions; on the other side, lesion-scale detection errors lead to wrong lesion counts. Both of these factors are clinically relevant for the assessment of multiple sclerosis patients. This work aims to compare the ability of different voxel- and lesion- scale uncertainty measures to capture errors related to segmentation and lesion detection respectively. Our main contributions are (i) proposing new measures of lesion-scale uncertainty that do not utilise voxel-scale uncertainties; (ii) extending an error retention curves analysis framework for evaluation of lesion-scale uncertainty measures. Our results obtained on the multi-center testing set of 58 patients demonstrate that the proposed lesion-scale measures achieves the best performance among the analysed measures. All code implementations are provided at https://github.com/NataliiaMolch/MS_WML_uncs