创建可以自然与人类互动的代理是人工智能（AI）研究中的共同目标。但是，评估这些互动是具有挑战性的：收集在线人类代理相互作用缓慢而昂贵，但更快的代理指标通常与交互式评估相关。在本文中，我们评估了这些现有评估指标的优点，并提出了一种新颖的评估方法，称为标准化测试套件（STS）。 STS使用从真实人类交互数据中挖掘出的行为方案。代理商请参阅重播方案上下文，接收指令，然后将控制权控制以脱机完成交互。记录这些代理的延续并将其发送给人类注释者以将其标记为成功或失败，并且根据其成功的连续性比例对代理进行排名。最终的ST是自然主义相互作用的快速，控制，可解释的和代表的。总的来说，STS巩固了我们许多标准评估指标中所需的许多值，从而使我们能够加速研究进展，以生产可以自然与人类互动的代理。可以在https://youtu.be/yr1tnggorgq上找到视频。

来自科幻小说的普通愿景是机器人将有一天居住在我们的物理空间中，感知世界，才能协助我们的物理劳动力，并通过自然语言与我们沟通。在这里，我们研究如何使用虚拟环境的简化设计如何与人类自然交互的人工代理。我们表明，与自我监督学习的模拟世界中的人类交互的模仿学习足以产生我们称之为MIA的多模式互动剂，这成功与非对抗人类互动75％的时间。我们进一步确定了提高性能的架构和算法技术，例如分层动作选择。完全，我们的结果表明，模仿多模态，实时人类行为可以提供具有丰富的行为的富含性的令人生意的和令人惊讶的有效手段，然后可以为特定目的进行微调，从而铺设基础用于培训互动机器人或数字助理的能力。可以在https://youtu.be/zfgrif7my找到MIA的行为的视频

Interacting with a complex world involves continual learning, in which tasks and data distributions change over time. A continual learning system should demonstrate both plasticity (acquisition of new knowledge) and stability (preservation of old knowledge). Catastrophic forgetting is the failure of stability, in which new experience overwrites previous experience. In the brain, replay of past experience is widely believed to reduce forgetting, yet it has been largely overlooked as a solution to forgetting in deep reinforcement learning. Here, we introduce CLEAR, a replay-based method that greatly reduces catastrophic forgetting in multi-task reinforcement learning. CLEAR leverages off-policy learning and behavioral cloning from replay to enhance stability, as well as on-policy learning to preserve plasticity. We show that CLEAR performs better than state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for mitigating forgetting, despite being significantly less complicated and not requiring any knowledge of the individual tasks being learned.

We introduce a new tool for stochastic convex optimization (SCO): a Reweighted Stochastic Query (ReSQue) estimator for the gradient of a function convolved with a (Gaussian) probability density. Combining ReSQue with recent advances in ball oracle acceleration [CJJJLST20, ACJJS21], we develop algorithms achieving state-of-the-art complexities for SCO in parallel and private settings. For a SCO objective constrained to the unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we obtain the following results (up to polylogarithmic factors). We give a parallel algorithm obtaining optimization error $\epsilon_{\text{opt}}$ with $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3}$ gradient oracle query depth and $d^{1/3}\epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2/3} + \epsilon_{\text{opt}}^{-2}$ gradient queries in total, assuming access to a bounded-variance stochastic gradient estimator. For $\epsilon_{\text{opt}} \in [d^{-1}, d^{-1/4}]$, our algorithm matches the state-of-the-art oracle depth of [BJLLS19] while maintaining the optimal total work of stochastic gradient descent. We give an $(\epsilon_{\text{dp}}, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm which, given $n$ samples of Lipschitz loss functions, obtains near-optimal optimization error and makes $\min(n, n^2\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^2 d^{-1}) + \min(n^{4/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{1/3}, (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1})$ queries to the gradients of these functions. In the regime $d \le n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{2}$, where privacy comes at no cost in terms of the optimal loss up to constants, our algorithm uses $n + (nd)^{2/3}\epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{-1}$ queries and improves recent advancements of [KLL21, AFKT21]. In the moderately low-dimensional setting $d \le \sqrt n \epsilon_{\text{dp}}^{3/2}$, our query complexity is near-linear.

Periocular refers to the region of the face that surrounds the eye socket. This is a feature-rich area that can be used by itself to determine the identity of an individual. It is especially useful when the iris or the face cannot be reliably acquired. This can be the case of unconstrained or uncooperative scenarios, where the face may appear partially occluded, or the subject-to-camera distance may be high. However, it has received revived attention during the pandemic due to masked faces, leaving the ocular region as the only visible facial area, even in controlled scenarios. This paper discusses the state-of-the-art of periocular biometrics, giving an overall framework of its most significant research aspects.

Recently, Smart Video Surveillance (SVS) systems have been receiving more attention among scholars and developers as a substitute for the current passive surveillance systems. These systems are used to make the policing and monitoring systems more efficient and improve public safety. However, the nature of these systems in monitoring the public's daily activities brings different ethical challenges. There are different approaches for addressing privacy issues in implementing the SVS. In this paper, we are focusing on the role of design considering ethical and privacy challenges in SVS. Reviewing four policy protection regulations that generate an overview of best practices for privacy protection, we argue that ethical and privacy concerns could be addressed through four lenses: algorithm, system, model, and data. As an case study, we describe our proposed system and illustrate how our system can create a baseline for designing a privacy perseverance system to deliver safety to society. We used several Artificial Intelligence algorithms, such as object detection, single and multi camera re-identification, action recognition, and anomaly detection, to provide a basic functional system. We also use cloud-native services to implement a smartphone application in order to deliver the outputs to the end users.

As text generated by large language models proliferates, it becomes vital to understand how humans engage with such text, and whether or not they are able to detect when the text they are reading did not originate with a human writer. Prior work on human detection of generated text focuses on the case where an entire passage is either human-written or machine-generated. In this paper, we study a more realistic setting where text begins as human-written and transitions to being generated by state-of-the-art neural language models. We show that, while annotators often struggle at this task, there is substantial variance in annotator skill and that given proper incentives, annotators can improve at this task over time. Furthermore, we conduct a detailed comparison study and analyze how a variety of variables (model size, decoding strategy, fine-tuning, prompt genre, etc.) affect human detection performance. Finally, we collect error annotations from our participants and use them to show that certain textual genres influence models to make different types of errors and that certain sentence-level features correlate highly with annotator selection. We release the RoFT dataset: a collection of over 21,000 human annotations paired with error classifications to encourage future work in human detection and evaluation of generated text.

This thesis considers sequential decision problems, where the loss/reward incurred by selecting an action may not be inferred from observed feedback. A major part of this thesis focuses on the unsupervised sequential selection problem, where one can not infer the loss incurred for selecting an action from observed feedback. We also introduce a new setup named Censored Semi Bandits, where the loss incurred for selecting an action can be observed under certain conditions. Finally, we study the channel selection problem in the communication networks, where the reward for an action is only observed when no other player selects that action to play in the round. These problems find applications in many fields like healthcare, crowd-sourcing, security, adaptive resource allocation, among many others. This thesis aims to address the above-described sequential decision problems by exploiting specific structures these problems exhibit. We develop provably optimal algorithms for each of these setups with weak feedback and validate their empirical performance on different problem instances derived from synthetic and real datasets.

This thesis considers sequential decision problems, where the loss/reward incurred by selecting an action may not be inferred from observed feedback. A major part of this thesis focuses on the unsupervised sequential selection problem, where one can not infer the loss incurred for selecting an action from observed feedback. We also introduce a new setup named Censored Semi Bandits, where the loss incurred for selecting an action can be observed under certain conditions. Finally, we study the channel selection problem in the communication networks, where the reward for an action is only observed when no other player selects that action to play in the round. These problems find applications in many fields like healthcare, crowd-sourcing, security, adaptive resource allocation, among many others. This thesis aims to address the above-described sequential decision problems by exploiting specific structures these problems exhibit. We develop provably optimal algorithms for each of these setups with weak feedback and validate their empirical performance on different problem instances derived from synthetic and real datasets.

Foundation models are redefining how AI systems are built. Practitioners now follow a standard procedure to build their machine learning solutions: download a copy of a foundation model, and fine-tune it using some in-house data about the target task of interest. Consequently, the Internet is swarmed by a handful of foundation models fine-tuned on many diverse tasks. Yet, these individual fine-tunings often lack strong generalization and exist in isolation without benefiting from each other. In our opinion, this is a missed opportunity, as these specialized models contain diverse features. Based on this insight, we propose model recycling, a simple strategy that leverages multiple fine-tunings of the same foundation model on diverse auxiliary tasks, and repurposes them as rich and diverse initializations for the target task. Specifically, model recycling fine-tunes in parallel each specialized model on the target task, and then averages the weights of all target fine-tunings into a final model. Empirically, we show that model recycling maximizes model diversity by benefiting from diverse auxiliary tasks, and achieves a new state of the art on the reference DomainBed benchmark for out-of-distribution generalization. Looking forward, model recycling is a contribution to the emerging paradigm of updatable machine learning where, akin to open-source software development, the community collaborates to incrementally and reliably update machine learning models.