近似组合优化已成为量子计算机最有前途的应用领域之一，特别是近期的应用领域之一。在这项工作中，我们专注于求解最大切割问题的量子近似优化算法（QAOA）。具体而言，我们解决了QAOA中的两个问题，如何选择初始参数，以及如何随后培训参数以找到最佳解决方案。对于前者来说，我们将图形神经网络（GNN）作为QAOA参数的初始化例程，在热启动技术中添加到文献。我们不仅显示了GNN方法概括，而且不仅可以增加图形尺寸，还可以增加图形大小，这是其他热启动技术无法使用的功能。为了培训QAOA，我们测试了几个优化员以获得MaxCut问题。这些包括在文献中提出的量子感知/不可知论者，我们还包括机器学习技术，如加强和元学习。通过纳入这些初始化和优化工具包，我们展示了如何培训QAOA作为端到端可分散的管道。

操作网络通常依靠机器学习模型来进行许多任务，包括检测异常，推断应用程序性能和预测需求。然而，不幸的是，模型精度会因概念漂移而降低，从而，由于从软件升级到季节性到用户行为的变化，功能和目标预测之间的关系会发生变化。因此，缓解概念漂移是操作机器学习模型的重要组成部分，尽管它很重要，但在网络或一般的回归模型的背景下，概念漂移并未得到广泛的探索。因此，对于当前依赖机器学习模型的许多常见网络管理任务，如何检测或减轻它并不是一件好事。不幸的是，正如我们所展示的那样，通过使用新可用的数据经常重新培训模型可以充分缓解概念漂移，甚至可以进一步降低模型的准确性。在本文中，我们表征了美国主要大都市地区的大型蜂窝网络中的概念漂移。我们发现，概念漂移发生在许多重要的关键性能指标（KPI）上，独立于模型，训练集大小和时间间隔，因此需要采用实用方法来检测，解释和减轻它。为此，我们开发了特征（叶）的局部误差近似。叶检测到漂移；解释最有助于漂移的功能和时间间隔；并使用遗忘和过度采样来减轻漂移。我们使用超过四年的蜂窝KPI数据来评估叶子与行业标准的缓解方法。在美国，我们对主要的细胞提供商进行的初步测试表明，LEAF在各种KPI和模型上都是有效的。叶子始终优于周期性，并触发重新培训，同时还要降低昂贵的重新经营操作。

推理是绘制关于未观察变量的结论的任务，给出了相关变量的观察。应用范围从鉴定症状的疾病从价格转移到分类经济制度。遗憾的是，执行精确的推论通常是棘手的。一种替代方案是变分推理，其中优化了候选概率分布以近似于未观察变量的后部分布。为了良好的近似，希望灵活和高度表现力的候选分布。在这项工作中，我们将量子出生的机器用作离散变量的变形分布。我们应用操作员变异推理的框架来实现这一目标。特别是，我们采用了两种特定的实现：一个具有对抗的目标，一个基于肠道斯坦的差异。我们使用贝叶斯网络的示例进行了数控展示了方法，并在IBM量子计算机上实施实验。我们的技术能够实现高效的变分推理，其分布在经典计算机上有效地表示的分布。

Remote sensing imagery provides comprehensive views of the Earth, where different sensors collect complementary data at different spatial scales. Large, pretrained models are commonly finetuned with imagery that is heavily augmented to mimic different conditions and scales, with the resulting models used for various tasks with imagery from a range of spatial scales. Such models overlook scale-specific information in the data. In this paper, we present Scale-MAE, a pretraining method that explicitly learns relationships between data at different, known scales throughout the pretraining process. Scale-MAE pretrains a network by masking an input image at a known input scale, where the area of the Earth covered by the image determines the scale of the ViT positional encoding, not the image resolution. Scale-MAE encodes the masked image with a standard ViT backbone, and then decodes the masked image through a bandpass filter to reconstruct low/high frequency images at lower/higher scales. We find that tasking the network with reconstructing both low/high frequency images leads to robust multiscale representations for remote sensing imagery. Scale-MAE achieves an average of a $5.0\%$ non-parametric kNN classification improvement across eight remote sensing datasets compared to current state-of-the-art and obtains a $0.9$ mIoU to $3.8$ mIoU improvement on the SpaceNet building segmentation transfer task for a range of evaluation scales.

Traditional screening practices for anxiety and depression pose an impediment to monitoring and treating these conditions effectively. However, recent advances in NLP and speech modelling allow textual, acoustic, and hand-crafted language-based features to jointly form the basis of future mental health screening and condition detection. Speech is a rich and readily available source of insight into an individual's cognitive state and by leveraging different aspects of speech, we can develop new digital biomarkers for depression and anxiety. To this end, we propose a multi-modal system for the screening of depression and anxiety from self-administered speech tasks. The proposed model integrates deep-learned features from audio and text, as well as hand-crafted features that are informed by clinically-validated domain knowledge. We find that augmenting hand-crafted features with deep-learned features improves our overall classification F1 score comparing to a baseline of hand-crafted features alone from 0.58 to 0.63 for depression and from 0.54 to 0.57 for anxiety. The findings of our work suggest that speech-based biomarkers for depression and anxiety hold significant promise in the future of digital health.

This paper addresses the kinodynamic motion planning for non-holonomic robots in dynamic environments with both static and dynamic obstacles -- a challenging problem that lacks a universal solution yet. One of the promising approaches to solve it is decomposing the problem into the smaller sub problems and combining the local solutions into the global one. The crux of any planning method for non-holonomic robots is the generation of motion primitives that generates solutions to local planning sub-problems. In this work we introduce a novel learnable steering function (policy), which takes into account kinodynamic constraints of the robot and both static and dynamic obstacles. This policy is efficiently trained via the policy optimization. Empirically, we show that our steering function generalizes well to unseen problems. We then plug in the trained policy into the sampling-based and lattice-based planners, and evaluate the resultant POLAMP algorithm (Policy Optimization that Learns Adaptive Motion Primitives) in a range of challenging setups that involve a car-like robot operating in the obstacle-rich parking-lot environments. We show that POLAMP is able to plan collision-free kinodynamic trajectories with success rates higher than 92%, when 50 simultaneously moving obstacles populate the environment showing better performance than the state-of-the-art competitors.

Most deep-learning-based continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) models share a similar backbone consisting of a visual module, a sequential module, and an alignment module. However, due to limited training samples, a connectionist temporal classification loss may not train such CSLR backbones sufficiently. In this work, we propose three auxiliary tasks to enhance the CSLR backbones. The first task enhances the visual module, which is sensitive to the insufficient training problem, from the perspective of consistency. Specifically, since the information of sign languages is mainly included in signers' facial expressions and hand movements, a keypoint-guided spatial attention module is developed to enforce the visual module to focus on informative regions, i.e., spatial attention consistency. Second, noticing that both the output features of the visual and sequential modules represent the same sentence, to better exploit the backbone's power, a sentence embedding consistency constraint is imposed between the visual and sequential modules to enhance the representation power of both features. We name the CSLR model trained with the above auxiliary tasks as consistency-enhanced CSLR, which performs well on signer-dependent datasets in which all signers appear during both training and testing. To make it more robust for the signer-independent setting, a signer removal module based on feature disentanglement is further proposed to remove signer information from the backbone. Extensive ablation studies are conducted to validate the effectiveness of these auxiliary tasks. More remarkably, with a transformer-based backbone, our model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on five benchmarks, PHOENIX-2014, PHOENIX-2014-T, PHOENIX-2014-SI, CSL, and CSL-Daily.

The xView2 competition and xBD dataset spurred significant advancements in overhead building damage detection, but the competition's pixel level scoring can lead to reduced solution performance in areas with tight clusters of buildings or uninformative context. We seek to advance automatic building damage assessment for disaster relief by proposing an auxiliary challenge to the original xView2 competition. This new challenge involves a new dataset and metrics indicating solution performance when damage is more local and limited than in xBD. Our challenge measures a network's ability to identify individual buildings and their damage level without excessive reliance on the buildings' surroundings. Methods that succeed on this challenge will provide more fine-grained, precise damage information than original xView2 solutions. The best-performing xView2 networks' performances dropped noticeably in our new limited/local damage detection task. The common causes of failure observed are that (1) building objects and their classifications are not separated well, and (2) when they are, the classification is strongly biased by surrounding buildings and other damage context. Thus, we release our augmented version of the dataset with additional object-level scoring metrics https://gitlab.kitware.com/dennis.melamed/xfbd to test independence and separability of building objects, alongside the pixel-level performance metrics of the original competition. We also experiment with new baseline models which improve independence and separability of building damage predictions. Our results indicate that building damage detection is not a fully-solved problem, and we invite others to use and build on our dataset augmentations and metrics.

We investigate how humans perform the task of dubbing video content from one language into another, leveraging a novel corpus of 319.57 hours of video from 54 professionally produced titles. This is the first such large-scale study we are aware of. The results challenge a number of assumptions commonly made in both qualitative literature on human dubbing and machine-learning literature on automatic dubbing, arguing for the importance of vocal naturalness and translation quality over commonly emphasized isometric (character length) and lip-sync constraints, and for a more qualified view of the importance of isochronic (timing) constraints. We also find substantial influence of the source-side audio on human dubs through channels other than the words of the translation, pointing to the need for research on ways to preserve speech characteristics, as well as semantic transfer such as emphasis/emotion, in automatic dubbing systems.

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions, a.k.a. instruction-tuning, improves their zero and few-shot generalization to unseen tasks. However, there is a limited understanding of the performance trade-offs of different decisions made during the instruction-tuning process. These decisions include the scale and diversity of the instruction-tuning benchmark, different task sampling strategies, fine-tuning with and without demonstrations, training using specialized datasets for reasoning and dialogue, and finally, the fine-tuning objectives themselves. In this paper, we characterize the effect of instruction-tuning decisions on downstream task performance when scaling both model and benchmark sizes. To this end, we create OPT-IML Bench: a large benchmark for Instruction Meta-Learning (IML) of 2000 NLP tasks consolidated into task categories from 8 existing benchmarks, and prepare an evaluation framework to measure three types of model generalizations: to tasks from fully held-out categories, to held-out tasks from seen categories, and to held-out instances from seen tasks. Through the lens of this framework, we first present insights about instruction-tuning decisions as applied to OPT-30B and further exploit these insights to train OPT-IML 30B and 175B, which are instruction-tuned versions of OPT. OPT-IML demonstrates all three generalization abilities at both scales on four different evaluation benchmarks with diverse tasks and input formats -- PromptSource, FLAN, Super-NaturalInstructions, and UnifiedSKG. Not only does it significantly outperform OPT on all benchmarks but is also highly competitive with existing models fine-tuned on each specific benchmark. We release OPT-IML at both scales, together with the OPT-IML Bench evaluation framework.