We present SLATE, a sequence labeling approach for extracting tasks from free-form content such as digitally handwritten (or "inked") notes on a virtual whiteboard. Our approach allows us to create a single, low-latency model to simultaneously perform sentence segmentation and classification of these sentences into task/non-task sentences. SLATE greatly outperforms a baseline two-model (sentence segmentation followed by classification model) approach, achieving a task F1 score of 84.4\%, a sentence segmentation (boundary similarity) score of 88.4% and three times lower latency compared to the baseline. Furthermore, we provide insights into tackling challenges of performing NLP on the inking domain. We release both our code and dataset for this novel task.

A fundamental characteristic common to both human vision and natural language is their compositional nature. Yet, despite the performance gains contributed by large vision and language pretraining, we find that - across 6 architectures trained with 4 algorithms on massive datasets - they exhibit little compositionality. To arrive at this conclusion, we introduce a new compositionality evaluation benchmark CREPE which measures two important aspects of compositionality identified by cognitive science literature: systematicity and productivity. To measure systematicity, CREPE consists of three test datasets. The three test sets are designed to test models trained on three of the popular training datasets: CC-12M, YFCC-15M, and LAION-400M. They contain 385K, 385K, and 373K image-text pairs and 237K, 210K, and 178K hard negative captions. To test productivity, CREPE contains 17K image-text pairs with nine different complexities plus 246K hard negative captions with atomic, swapping, and negation foils. The datasets are generated by repurposing the Visual Genome scene graphs and region descriptions and applying handcrafted templates and GPT-3. For systematicity, we find that model performance decreases consistently when novel compositions dominate the retrieval set, with Recall@1 dropping by up to 8%. For productivity, models' retrieval success decays as complexity increases, frequently nearing random chance at high complexity. These results hold regardless of model and training dataset size.

This paper proposes embedded Gaussian Process Barrier States (GP-BaS), a methodology to safely control unmodeled dynamics of nonlinear system using Bayesian learning. Gaussian Processes (GPs) are used to model the dynamics of the safety-critical system, which is subsequently used in the GP-BaS model. We derive the barrier state dynamics utilizing the GP posterior, which is used to construct a safety embedded Gaussian process dynamical model (GPDM). We show that the safety-critical system can be controlled to remain inside the safe region as long as we can design a controller that renders the BaS-GPDM's trajectories bounded (or asymptotically stable). The proposed approach overcomes various limitations in early attempts at combining GPs with barrier functions due to the abstention of restrictive assumptions such as linearity of the system with respect to control, relative degree of the constraints and number or nature of constraints. This work is implemented on various examples for trajectory optimization and control including optimal stabilization of unstable linear system and safe trajectory optimization of a Dubins vehicle navigating through an obstacle course and on a quadrotor in an obstacle avoidance task using GP differentiable dynamic programming (GP-DDP). The proposed framework is capable of maintaining safe optimization and control of unmodeled dynamics and is purely data driven.

The use of emojis affords a visual modality to, often private, textual communication. The task of predicting emojis however provides a challenge for machine learning as emoji use tends to cluster into the frequently used and the rarely used emojis. Much of the machine learning research on emoji use has focused on high resource languages and has conceptualised the task of predicting emojis around traditional server-side machine learning approaches. However, traditional machine learning approaches for private communication can introduce privacy concerns, as these approaches require all data to be transmitted to a central storage. In this paper, we seek to address the dual concerns of emphasising high resource languages for emoji prediction and risking the privacy of people's data. We introduce a new dataset of $118$k tweets (augmented from $25$k unique tweets) for emoji prediction in Hindi, and propose a modification to the federated learning algorithm, CausalFedGSD, which aims to strike a balance between model performance and user privacy. We show that our approach obtains comparative scores with more complex centralised models while reducing the amount of data required to optimise the models and minimising risks to user privacy.

Damage to the inferior frontal gyrus (Broca's area) can cause agrammatic aphasia wherein patients, although able to comprehend, lack the ability to form complete sentences. This inability leads to communication gaps which cause difficulties in their daily lives. The usage of assistive devices can help in mitigating these issues and enable the patients to communicate effectively. However, due to lack of large scale studies of linguistic deficits in aphasia, research on such assistive technology is relatively limited. In this work, we present two contributions that aim to re-initiate research and development in this field. Firstly, we propose a model that uses linguistic features from small scale studies on aphasia patients and generates large scale datasets of synthetic aphasic utterances from grammatically correct datasets. We show that the mean length of utterance, the noun/verb ratio, and the simple/complex sentence ratio of our synthetic datasets correspond to the reported features of aphasic speech. Further, we demonstrate how the synthetic datasets may be utilized to develop assistive devices for aphasia patients. The pre-trained T5 transformer is fine-tuned using the generated dataset to suggest 5 corrected sentences given an aphasic utterance as input. We evaluate the efficacy of the T5 model using the BLEU and cosine semantic similarity scores. Affirming results with BLEU score of 0.827/1.00 and semantic similarity of 0.904/1.00 were obtained. These results provide a strong foundation for the concept that a synthetic dataset based on small scale studies on aphasia can be used to develop effective assistive technology.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

我们在室外环境中自动驾驶的背景下研究了视觉和语言导航（VLN）问题。我们通过明确接地与Textual命令相对应的可通道区域来解决问题。在每个时间戳，该模型预测与中间或最终可通道区域相对应的分割掩码。我们的工作与VLN中的现有工作形成鲜明对比，VLN的现有工作将该任务置于节点选择问题，并且给定与环境相对应的离散连接图。我们不假定这种离散的地图的可用性。我们的工作朝着动作领域的连续性发展，通过视觉反馈提供了解释性，并允许在需要更精细的操作的命令上进行VLN，例如“两辆汽车之间的停车”。此外，我们提出了一种新型的元数据carla-nav，以允许有效的训练和验证。该数据集包括预录制的培训序列以及用于验证和测试的实时环境。我们提供广泛的定性和定量经验结果，以验证所提出的方法的功效。

机器学习（ML）算法在帮助不同学科和机构的科学社区解决大型和多样化的数据问题方面表现出了增长的趋势。但是，许多可用的ML工具在编程方面要求且计算成本高昂。 MlexChange项目旨在建立一个配备有能力工具的协作平台，该平台使科学家和设施使用者没有深刻的ML背景来使用ML和计算资源进行科学发现。在高水平上，我们针对完整的用户体验，在该体验中，可以通过Web应用程序可以轻松获得管理和交换ML算法，工作流和数据。到目前为止，我们已经构建了四个主要组件，即中央职位管理器，集中式内容注册表，用户门户和搜索引擎，并成功地将这些组件部署到了测试服务器上。由于每个组件都是一个独立的容器，因此可以轻松地在不同尺度的服务器上部署整个平台或其个人服务，从笔记本电脑（通常是单个用户）到高性能群集（HPC）（同时）通过许多用户。因此，MlexChange使用方案使灵活性变得灵活 - 用户可以从远程服务器访问服务和资源，也可以在其本地网络中运行整个平台或其个人服务。

培训和评估机器学习模型的迭代是提高其性能的重要过程。但是，尽管可教学的接口使盲人用户能够在其独特的环境中拍摄的照片训练和测试对象识别器，但训练迭代和评估步骤的可访问性很少受到关注。迭代假设训练照片的目视检查，对于盲人用户来说是无法访问的。我们通过MyCam探索了这一挑战，Mycam是一个移动应用程序，该应用程序合并了自动估计的描述符，以在用户培训集中对照片进行非视觉访问。我们探索盲人参与者（n = 12）如何通过他们的家中的评估研究与mycam和描述符相互作用。我们证明，实时照片级描述符使盲人用户能够用裁剪的对象减少照片，并且参与者可以通过迭代并访问其训练集的质量来增加更多的变化。此外，参与者发现该应用程序易于使用，表明他们可以有效地训练它，并且描述符很有用。但是，主观反应并未反映在其模型的性能中，部分原因是训练和混乱背景的变化很小。

由于缺乏对AI模型的安全性和鲁棒性的信任，近年来，深度学习模型（尤其是针对安全至关重要的系统）中的对抗性攻击正在越来越受到关注。然而，更原始的对抗性攻击可能是身体上不可行的，或者需要一些难以访问的资源，例如训练数据，这激发了斑块攻击的出现。在这项调查中，我们提供了全面的概述，以涵盖现有的对抗贴片攻击技术，旨在帮助感兴趣的研究人员迅速赶上该领域的进展。我们还讨论了针对对抗贴片的检测和防御措施的现有技术，旨在帮助社区更好地了解该领域及其在现实世界中的应用。