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.

我们提出了CX-TOM，简短于与理论的理论，一种新的可解释的AI（XAI）框架，用于解释深度卷积神经网络（CNN）制定的决定。与生成解释的XAI中的当前方法形成对比，我们将说明作为迭代通信过程，即对话框，机器和人类用户之间。更具体地说，我们的CX-TOM框架通过调解机器和人类用户的思想之间的差异，在对话中生成解释顺序。为此，我们使用思想理论（汤姆），帮助我们明确地建模人类的意图，通过人类的推断，通过机器推断出人类的思想。此外，大多数最先进的XAI框架提供了基于注意的（或热图）的解释。在我们的工作中，我们表明，这些注意力的解释不足以增加人类信任在潜在的CNN模型中。在CX-TOM中，我们使用命名为您定义的故障行的反事实解释：给定CNN分类模型M预测C_PRED的CNN分类模型M的输入图像I，错误线识别最小的语义级别特征（例如，斑马上的条纹，狗的耳朵），称为可解释的概念，需要从I添加或删除，以便将m的分类类别改变为另一个指定的c_alt。我们认为，由于CX-TOM解释的迭代，概念和反事本质，我们的框架对于专家和非专家用户来说是实用的，更加自然，以了解复杂的深度学习模式的内部运作。广泛的定量和定性实验验证了我们的假设，展示了我们的CX-TOM显着优于最先进的可解释的AI模型。

Large-scale diffusion models have achieved state-of-the-art results on text-to-image synthesis (T2I) tasks. Despite their ability to generate high-quality yet creative images, we observe that attribution-binding and compositional capabilities are still considered major challenging issues, especially when involving multiple objects. In this work, we improve the compositional skills of T2I models, specifically more accurate attribute binding and better image compositions. To do this, we incorporate linguistic structures with the diffusion guidance process based on the controllable properties of manipulating cross-attention layers in diffusion-based T2I models. We observe that keys and values in cross-attention layers have strong semantic meanings associated with object layouts and content. Therefore, we can better preserve the compositional semantics in the generated image by manipulating the cross-attention representations based on linguistic insights. Built upon Stable Diffusion, a SOTA T2I model, our structured cross-attention design is efficient that requires no additional training samples. We achieve better compositional skills in qualitative and quantitative results, leading to a 5-8% advantage in head-to-head user comparison studies. Lastly, we conduct an in-depth analysis to reveal potential causes of incorrect image compositions and justify the properties of cross-attention layers in the generation process.

Prompt tuning is a new few-shot transfer learning technique that only tunes the learnable prompt for pre-trained vision and language models such as CLIP. However, existing prompt tuning methods tend to learn spurious or entangled representations, which leads to poor generalization to unseen concepts. Towards non-spurious and efficient prompt learning from limited examples, this paper presents a novel \underline{\textbf{C}}ounterfactual \underline{\textbf{P}}rompt \underline{\textbf{L}}earning (CPL) method for vision and language models, which simultaneously employs counterfactual generation and contrastive learning in a joint optimization framework. Particularly, CPL constructs counterfactual by identifying minimal non-spurious feature change between semantically-similar positive and negative samples that causes concept change, and learns more generalizable prompt representation from both factual and counterfactual examples via contrastive learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CPL can obtain superior few-shot performance on different vision and language tasks than previous prompt tuning methods on CLIP. On image classification, we achieve 3.55\% average relative improvement on unseen classes across seven datasets; on image-text retrieval and visual question answering, we gain up to 4.09\% and 25.08\% relative improvements across three few-shot scenarios on unseen test sets respectively.

在全球范围内消除语言障碍的目标的驱动下，机器翻译已巩固自己是当今人工智能研究的关键重点。但是，这样的努力围绕着一小部分语言结合在一起，留下了绝大多数低资源的语言。在确保安全，高质量的结果的同时，在牢记道德考虑的同时，打破200个语言障碍需要什么？没有留下的语言，我们首先通过与母语人士的探索性访谈来解决对低资源语言翻译支持的必要性来应对这一挑战。然后，我们创建了旨在缩小低资源和高资源语言之间的性能差距的数据集和模型。更具体地说，我们开发了一种有条件的计算模型，基于专家的稀疏混合物，该模型经过针对针对低资源语言量身定制的新颖有效的数据挖掘技术培训的。我们提出了多次建筑和培训改进，以抵消数千个任务的培训。至关重要的是，我们使用人类翻译的基准，Flores-200评估了40,000多种不同的翻译方向的性能，并将人类评估与新型毒性基准相结合，涵盖Flores-200的所有语言，以评估翻译安全性。我们的模型相对于先前的最新技术，实现了44％BLEU的改善，为实现通用翻译系统奠定了重要的基础。最后，我们开源此工作中描述的所有贡献，可在https://github.com/facebookresearch/fairseq/tree/nllb上访问。

The recent increase in public and academic interest in preserving biodiversity has led to the growth of the field of conservation technology. This field involves designing and constructing tools that utilize technology to aid in the conservation of wildlife. In this article, we will use case studies to demonstrate the importance of designing conservation tools with human-wildlife interaction in mind and provide a framework for creating successful tools. These case studies include a range of complexities, from simple cat collars to machine learning and game theory methodologies. Our goal is to introduce and inform current and future researchers in the field of conservation technology and provide references for educating the next generation of conservation technologists. Conservation technology not only has the potential to benefit biodiversity but also has broader impacts on fields such as sustainability and environmental protection. By using innovative technologies to address conservation challenges, we can find more effective and efficient solutions to protect and preserve our planet's resources.

A Digital Twin (DT) is a simulation of a physical system that provides information to make decisions that add economic, social or commercial value. The behaviour of a physical system changes over time, a DT must therefore be continually updated with data from the physical systems to reflect its changing behaviour. For resource-constrained systems, updating a DT is non-trivial because of challenges such as on-board learning and the off-board data transfer. This paper presents a framework for updating data-driven DTs of resource-constrained systems geared towards system health monitoring. The proposed solution consists of: (1) an on-board system running a light-weight DT allowing the prioritisation and parsimonious transfer of data generated by the physical system; and (2) off-board robust updating of the DT and detection of anomalous behaviours. Two case studies are considered using a production gas turbine engine system to demonstrate the digital representation accuracy for real-world, time-varying physical systems.

We consider infinite horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with fast-slow structure, meaning that certain parts of the state space move "fast" (and in a sense, are more influential) while other parts transition more "slowly." Such structure is common in real-world problems where sequential decisions need to be made at high frequencies, yet information that varies at a slower timescale also influences the optimal policy. Examples include: (1) service allocation for a multi-class queue with (slowly varying) stochastic costs, (2) a restless multi-armed bandit with an environmental state, and (3) energy demand response, where both day-ahead and real-time prices play a role in the firm's revenue. Models that fully capture these problems often result in MDPs with large state spaces and large effective time horizons (due to frequent decisions), rendering them computationally intractable. We propose an approximate dynamic programming algorithmic framework based on the idea of "freezing" the slow states, solving a set of simpler finite-horizon MDPs (the lower-level MDPs), and applying value iteration (VI) to an auxiliary MDP that transitions on a slower timescale (the upper-level MDP). We also extend the technique to a function approximation setting, where a feature-based linear architecture is used. On the theoretical side, we analyze the regret incurred by each variant of our frozen-state approach. Finally, we give empirical evidence that the frozen-state approach generates effective policies using just a fraction of the computational cost, while illustrating that simply omitting slow states from the decision modeling is often not a viable heuristic.

While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aimed to fast track the development of autonomous exploration systems by evaluating their performance in real-world underground search-and-rescue scenarios. Subterranean environments present a plethora of challenges for robotic systems, such as limited communications, complex topology, visually-degraded sensing, and harsh terrain. The presented solution enables long-term autonomy with minimal human supervision by combining a powerful and independent single-agent autonomy stack, with higher level mission management operating over a flexible mesh network. The autonomy suite deployed on quadruped and wheeled robots was fully independent, freeing the human supervision to loosely supervise the mission and make high-impact strategic decisions. We also discuss lessons learned from fielding our system at the SubT Final Event, relating to vehicle versatility, system adaptability, and re-configurable communications.

Machine learning is the dominant approach to artificial intelligence, through which computers learn from data and experience. In the framework of supervised learning, for a computer to learn from data accurately and efficiently, some auxiliary information about the data distribution and target function should be provided to it through the learning model. This notion of auxiliary information relates to the concept of regularization in statistical learning theory. A common feature among real-world datasets is that data domains are multiscale and target functions are well-behaved and smooth. In this paper, we propose a learning model that exploits this multiscale data structure and discuss its statistical and computational benefits. The hierarchical learning model is inspired by the logical and progressive easy-to-hard learning mechanism of human beings and has interpretable levels. The model apportions computational resources according to the complexity of data instances and target functions. This property can have multiple benefits, including higher inference speed and computational savings in training a model for many users or when training is interrupted. We provide a statistical analysis of the learning mechanism using multiscale entropies and show that it can yield significantly stronger guarantees than uniform convergence bounds.