许多现实世界问题需要综合应用采用合适的抽象，致辞认识和创造性的解决问题策略的多种推理能力。为了帮助推进AI系统实现这种能力，我们提出了一个新的推理挑战，即费银问题（FPS），这是答案只能估计的问题，因为它们的精确计算是不切实际或不可能的。例如，“如果世界上所有的冰融化，那么海平面会增加多少海平面？” FPS通常用于测验和访谈，以发出和评估人类的创造性推理能力。为AI系统做同样的事情，我们展示了两个数据集：1）来自测验和奥林匹克的1K现实世界FPS的集合; 2）一个10K的中间复杂合成FPS的银行，作为较难的真实挑战的沙箱。除问题答案对之外，数据集还包含可执行计划形式的详细解决方案，并提供支持事实，帮助监督和评估中间步骤。我们展示了甚至广泛的微调大规模语言模型在这些数据集上表现不佳，平均估计是由两个数量级的估计值。因此，我们的贡献是几个未解决的AI问题的结晶，以至于我们希望将促进可以推理的建筑系统进一步前进。

Agile robotics presents a difficult challenge with robots moving at high speeds requiring precise and low-latency sensing and control. Creating agile motion that accomplishes the task at hand while being safe to execute is a key requirement for agile robots to gain human trust. This requires designing new approaches that are flexible and maintain knowledge over world constraints. In this paper, we consider the problem of building a flexible and adaptive controller for a challenging agile mobile manipulation task of hitting ground strokes on a wheelchair tennis robot. We propose and evaluate an extension to work done on learning striking behaviors using a probabilistic movement primitive (ProMP) framework by (1) demonstrating the safe execution of learned primitives on an agile mobile manipulator setup, and (2) proposing an online primitive refinement procedure that utilizes evaluative feedback from humans on the executed trajectories.

In optimization-based approaches to inverse problems and to statistical estimation, it is common to augment the objective with a regularizer to address challenges associated with ill-posedness. The choice of a suitable regularizer is typically driven by prior domain information and computational considerations. Convex regularizers are attractive as they are endowed with certificates of optimality as well as the toolkit of convex analysis, but exhibit a computational scaling that makes them ill-suited beyond moderate-sized problem instances. On the other hand, nonconvex regularizers can often be deployed at scale, but do not enjoy the certification properties associated with convex regularizers. In this paper, we seek a systematic understanding of the power and the limitations of convex regularization by investigating the following questions: Given a distribution, what are the optimal regularizers, both convex and nonconvex, for data drawn from the distribution? What properties of a data source govern whether it is amenable to convex regularization? We address these questions for the class of continuous and positively homogenous regularizers for which convex and nonconvex regularizers correspond, respectively, to convex bodies and star bodies. By leveraging dual Brunn-Minkowski theory, we show that a radial function derived from a data distribution is the key quantity for identifying optimal regularizers and for assessing the amenability of a data source to convex regularization. Using tools such as $\Gamma$-convergence, we show that our results are robust in the sense that the optimal regularizers for a sample drawn from a distribution converge to their population counterparts as the sample size grows large. Finally, we give generalization guarantees that recover previous results for polyhedral regularizers (i.e., dictionary learning) and lead to new ones for semidefinite regularizers.

Abstractive dialogue summarization has long been viewed as an important standalone task in natural language processing, but no previous work has explored the possibility of whether abstractive dialogue summarization can also be used as a means to boost an NLP system's performance on other important dialogue comprehension tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel type of dialogue summarization task - STRUctured DiaLoguE Summarization - that can help pre-trained language models to better understand dialogues and improve their performance on important dialogue comprehension tasks. We further collect human annotations of STRUDEL summaries over 400 dialogues and introduce a new STRUDEL dialogue comprehension modeling framework that integrates STRUDEL into a graph-neural-network-based dialogue reasoning module over transformer encoder language models to improve their dialogue comprehension abilities. In our empirical experiments on two important downstream dialogue comprehension tasks - dialogue question answering and dialogue response prediction - we show that our STRUDEL dialogue comprehension model can significantly improve the dialogue comprehension performance of transformer encoder language models.

Recent work leverages the expressive power of generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate labeled synthetic datasets. These dataset generation methods often require new annotations of synthetic images, which forces practitioners to seek out annotators, curate a set of synthetic images, and ensure the quality of generated labels. We introduce the HandsOff framework, a technique capable of producing an unlimited number of synthetic images and corresponding labels after being trained on less than 50 pre-existing labeled images. Our framework avoids the practical drawbacks of prior work by unifying the field of GAN inversion with dataset generation. We generate datasets with rich pixel-wise labels in multiple challenging domains such as faces, cars, full-body human poses, and urban driving scenes. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in semantic segmentation, keypoint detection, and depth estimation compared to prior dataset generation approaches and transfer learning baselines. We additionally showcase its ability to address broad challenges in model development which stem from fixed, hand-annotated datasets, such as the long-tail problem in semantic segmentation.

Creativity is an indispensable part of human cognition and also an inherent part of how we make sense of the world. Metaphorical abstraction is fundamental in communicating creative ideas through nuanced relationships between abstract concepts such as feelings. While computer vision benchmarks and approaches predominantly focus on understanding and generating literal interpretations of images, metaphorical comprehension of images remains relatively unexplored. Towards this goal, we introduce MetaCLUE, a set of vision tasks on visual metaphor. We also collect high-quality and rich metaphor annotations (abstract objects, concepts, relationships along with their corresponding object boxes) as there do not exist any datasets that facilitate the evaluation of these tasks. We perform a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art models in vision and language based on our annotations, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of current approaches in visual metaphor Classification, Localization, Understanding (retrieval, question answering, captioning) and gEneration (text-to-image synthesis) tasks. We hope this work provides a concrete step towards developing AI systems with human-like creative capabilities.

Counterfactual explanations have emerged as a popular solution for the eXplainable AI (XAI) problem of elucidating the predictions of black-box deep-learning systems due to their psychological validity, flexibility across problem domains and proposed legal compliance. While over 100 counterfactual methods exist, claiming to generate plausible explanations akin to those preferred by people, few have actually been tested on users ($\sim7\%$). So, the psychological validity of these counterfactual algorithms for effective XAI for image data is not established. This issue is addressed here using a novel methodology that (i) gathers ground truth human-generated counterfactual explanations for misclassified images, in two user studies and, then, (ii) compares these human-generated ground-truth explanations to computationally-generated explanations for the same misclassifications. Results indicate that humans do not "minimally edit" images when generating counterfactual explanations. Instead, they make larger, "meaningful" edits that better approximate prototypes in the counterfactual class.

Reinforcement learning can enable robots to navigate to distant goals while optimizing user-specified reward functions, including preferences for following lanes, staying on paved paths, or avoiding freshly mowed grass. However, online learning from trial-and-error for real-world robots is logistically challenging, and methods that instead can utilize existing datasets of robotic navigation data could be significantly more scalable and enable broader generalization. In this paper, we present ReViND, the first offline RL system for robotic navigation that can leverage previously collected data to optimize user-specified reward functions in the real-world. We evaluate our system for off-road navigation without any additional data collection or fine-tuning, and show that it can navigate to distant goals using only offline training from this dataset, and exhibit behaviors that qualitatively differ based on the user-specified reward function.

Exploratory data analytics (EDA) is a sequential decision making process where analysts choose subsequent queries that might lead to some interesting insights based on the previous queries and corresponding results. Data processing systems often execute the queries on samples to produce results with low latency. Different downsampling strategy preserves different statistics of the data and have different magnitude of latency reductions. The optimum choice of sampling strategy often depends on the particular context of the analysis flow and the hidden intent of the analyst. In this paper, we are the first to consider the impact of sampling in interactive data exploration settings as they introduce approximation errors. We propose a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based framework which can optimize the sample selection in order to keep the analysis and insight generation flow intact. Evaluations with 3 real datasets show that our technique can preserve the original insight generation flow while improving the interaction latency, compared to baseline methods.

The General Associative Memory Model (GAMM) has a constant state-dependant energy surface that leads the output dynamics to fixed points, retrieving single memories from a collection of memories that can be asynchronously preloaded. We introduce a new class of General Sequential Episodic Memory Models (GSEMM) that, in the adiabatic limit, exhibit temporally changing energy surface, leading to a series of meta-stable states that are sequential episodic memories. The dynamic energy surface is enabled by newly introduced asymmetric synapses with signal propagation delays in the network's hidden layer. We study the theoretical and empirical properties of two memory models from the GSEMM class, differing in their activation functions. LISEM has non-linearities in the feature layer, whereas DSEM has non-linearity in the hidden layer. In principle, DSEM has a storage capacity that grows exponentially with the number of neurons in the network. We introduce a learning rule for the synapses based on the energy minimization principle and show it can learn single memories and their sequential relationships online. This rule is similar to the Hebbian learning algorithm and Spike-Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP), which describe conditions under which synapses between neurons change strength. Thus, GSEMM combines the static and dynamic properties of episodic memory under a single theoretical framework and bridges neuroscience, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.