We study the performance of monolingual and multilingual language models on the task of question-answering (QA) on three diverse languages: English, Finnish and Japanese. We develop models for the tasks of (1) determining if a question is answerable given the context and (2) identifying the answer texts within the context using IOB tagging. Furthermore, we attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of a pre-trained multilingual encoder (Multilingual BERT) on cross-language zero-shot learning for both the answerability and IOB sequence classifiers.

Large Language Models are affected by the phenomena of memorizing and forgetting their training data. But how do these vary by model size? We work towards this question by investigating how the model size affects the model's ability to discriminate a word's meaning in a given context. We introduce a dataset called DeltaWords, which evaluates a model's ability to follow instructions to select a sentence which replaces the target word with its antonym. We show a weak inverse scaling trend, where task accuracy degrades as model size increase, under extremely few-shot prompting regimes. We show that increasing the number of examples tend to disproportionately benefit larger models than smaller models.

Flooding is one of the most disastrous natural hazards, responsible for substantial economic losses. A predictive model for flood-induced financial damages is useful for many applications such as climate change adaptation planning and insurance underwriting. This research assesses the predictive capability of regressors constructed on the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) dataset using neural networks (Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks), decision trees (Extreme Gradient Boosting), and kernel-based regressors (Gaussian Process). The assessment highlights the most informative predictors for regression. The distribution for claims amount inference is modeled with a Burr distribution permitting the introduction of a bias correction scheme and increasing the regressor's predictive capability. Aiming to study the interaction with physical variables, we incorporate Daymet rainfall estimation to NFIP as an additional predictor. A study on the coastal counties in the eight US South-West states resulted in an $R^2=0.807$. Further analysis of 11 counties with a significant number of claims in the NFIP dataset reveals that Extreme Gradient Boosting provides the best results, that bias correction significantly improves the similarity with the reference distribution, and that the rainfall predictor strengthens the regressor performance.

A digital twin is defined as a virtual representation of a physical asset enabled through data and simulators for real-time prediction, optimization, monitoring, controlling, and improved decision-making. Unfortunately, the term remains vague and says little about its capability. Recently, the concept of capability level has been introduced to address this issue. Based on its capability, the concept states that a digital twin can be categorized on a scale from zero to five, referred to as standalone, descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive, and autonomous, respectively. The current work introduces the concept in the context of the built environment. It demonstrates the concept by using a modern house as a use case. The house is equipped with an array of sensors that collect timeseries data regarding the internal state of the house. Together with physics-based and data-driven models, these data are used to develop digital twins at different capability levels demonstrated in virtual reality. The work, in addition to presenting a blueprint for developing digital twins, also provided future research directions to enhance the technology.

We report on experiments for the fingerprint modality conducted during the First BioSecure Residential Workshop. Two reference systems for fingerprint verification have been tested together with two additional non-reference systems. These systems follow different approaches of fingerprint processing and are discussed in detail. Fusion experiments I volving different combinations of the available systems are presented. The experimental results show that the best recognition strategy involves both minutiae-based and correlation-based measurements. Regarding the fusion experiments, the best relative improvement is obtained when fusing systems that are based on heterogeneous strategies for feature extraction and/or matching. The best combinations of two/three/four systems always include the best individual systems whereas the best verification performance is obtained when combining all the available systems.

This letter focuses on the task of Multi-Target Multi-Camera vehicle tracking. We propose to associate single-camera trajectories into multi-camera global trajectories by training a Graph Convolutional Network. Our approach simultaneously processes all cameras providing a global solution, and it is also robust to large cameras unsynchronizations. Furthermore, we design a new loss function to deal with class imbalance. Our proposal outperforms the related work showing better generalization and without requiring ad-hoc manual annotations or thresholds, unlike compared approaches.

灾难性的遗忘是阻碍在持续学习环境中部署深度学习算法的一个重大问题。已经提出了许多方法来解决灾难性的遗忘问题，在学习新任务时，代理商在旧任务中失去了其旧任务的概括能力。我们提出了一项替代策略，可以通过知识合并（CFA）处理灾难性遗忘，该策略从多个专门从事以前任务的多个异构教师模型中学习了学生网络，并可以应用于当前的离线方法。知识融合过程以单头方式进行，只有选定数量的记忆样本，没有注释。教师和学生不需要共享相同的网络结构，可以使异质任务适应紧凑或稀疏的数据表示。我们将我们的方法与不同策略的竞争基线进行比较，证明了我们的方法的优势。

极化成像已应用于越来越多的机器人视觉应用中（例如，水下导航，眩光去除，脱落，对象分类和深度估计）。可以在市场RGB极化摄像机上找到可以在单个快照中捕获颜色和偏振状态的摄像头。由于传感器的特性分散和镜头的使用，至关重要的是校准这些类型的相机以获得正确的极化测量。到目前为止开发的校准方法要么不适合这种类型的相机，要么需要在严格的设置中进行复杂的设备和耗时的实验。在本文中，我们提出了一种新方法来克服对复杂的光学系统有效校准这些相机的需求。我们表明，所提出的校准方法具有多个优点，例如任何用户都可以使用统一的线性极化光源轻松校准相机，而无需任何先验地了解其偏振状态，并且收购数量有限。我们将公开提供校准代码。

在本文中，我们的目标是在测试时调整预训练的卷积神经网络对域的变化。我们在没有标签的情况下，不断地使用传入的测试批次流。现有文献主要是基于通过测试图像的对抗扰动获得的人工偏移。在此激励的情况下，我们在域转移的两个现实和挑战的来源（即背景和语义转移）上评估了艺术的状态。上下文移动与环境类型相对应，例如，在室内上下文上预先训练的模型必须适应Core-50上的户外上下文[7]。语义转移对应于捕获类型，例如，在自然图像上预先训练的模型必须适应域网上的剪贴画，草图和绘画[10]。我们在分析中包括了最近的技术，例如预测时间批归一化（BN）[8]，测试熵最小化（帐篷）[16]和持续的测试时间适应（CottA）[17]。我们的发现是三个方面的：i）测试时间适应方法的表现更好，并且与语义转移相比，在上下文转移方面忘记了更少的忘记，ii）帐篷在短期适应方面的表现优于其他方法，而Cotta则超过了其他关于长期适应的方法， iii）bn是最可靠和强大的。

基于物理学的模型已成为流体动力学的主流，用于开发预测模型。近年来，由于数据科学，处理单元，基于神经网络的技术和传感器适应性的快速发展，机器学习为流体社区提供了复兴。到目前为止，在流体动力学中的许多应用中，机器学习方法主要集中在标准过程上，该过程需要将培训数据集中在指定机器或数据中心上。在这封信中，我们提出了一种联合机器学习方法，该方法使本地化客户能够协作学习一个汇总和共享的预测模型，同时将所有培训数据保留在每个边缘设备上。我们证明了这种分散学习方法的可行性和前景，并努力为重建时空领域建立深度学习的替代模型。我们的结果表明，联合机器学习可能是设计与流体动力学相关的高度准确预测分散的数字双胞胎的可行工具。