Long document retrieval aims to fetch query-relevant documents from a large-scale collection, where knowledge distillation has become de facto to improve a retriever by mimicking a heterogeneous yet powerful cross-encoder. However, in contrast to passages or sentences, retrieval on long documents suffers from the scope hypothesis that a long document may cover multiple topics. This maximizes their structure heterogeneity and poses a granular-mismatch issue, leading to an inferior distillation efficacy. In this work, we propose a new learning framework, fine-grained distillation (FGD), for long-document retrievers. While preserving the conventional dense retrieval paradigm, it first produces global-consistent representations crossing different fine granularity and then applies multi-granular aligned distillation merely during training. In experiments, we evaluate our framework on two long-document retrieval benchmarks, which show state-of-the-art performance.

To improve the performance of the dual-encoder retriever, one effective approach is knowledge distillation from the cross-encoder ranker. Existing works construct the candidate passages following the supervised learning setting where a query is paired with a positive passage and a batch of negatives. However, through empirical observation, we find that even the hard negatives from advanced methods are still too trivial for the teacher to distinguish, preventing the teacher from transferring abundant dark knowledge to the student through its soft label. To alleviate this issue, we propose ADAM, a knowledge distillation framework that can better transfer the dark knowledge held in the teacher with Adaptive Dark exAMples. Different from previous works that only rely on one positive and hard negatives as candidate passages, we create dark examples that all have moderate relevance to the query through mixing-up and masking in discrete space. Furthermore, as the quality of knowledge held in different training instances varies as measured by the teacher's confidence score, we propose a self-paced distillation strategy that adaptively concentrates on a subset of high-quality instances to conduct our dark-example-based knowledge distillation to help the student learn better. We conduct experiments on two widely-used benchmarks and verify the effectiveness of our method.

Responding with multi-modal content has been recognized as an essential capability for an intelligent conversational agent. In this paper, we introduce the MMDialog dataset to better facilitate multi-modal conversation. MMDialog is composed of a curated set of 1.08 million real-world dialogues with 1.53 million unique images across 4,184 topics. MMDialog has two main and unique advantages. First, it is the largest multi-modal conversation dataset by the number of dialogues by 8x. Second, it contains massive topics to generalize the open-domain. To build engaging dialogue system with this dataset, we propose and normalize two response producing tasks based on retrieval and generative scenarios. In addition, we build two baselines for above tasks with state-of-the-art techniques and report their experimental performance. We also propose a novel evaluation metric MM-Relevance to measure the multi-modal responses. Our dataset and scripts are available in https://github.com/victorsungo/MMDialog.

基于语义空间中密集表示的检索模型已成为第一阶段检索的必不可少的分支。这些检索员受益于代表学习朝着压缩全球序列级嵌入的进步。但是，它们很容易忽略本地的显着短语和实体在文本中提到的，这些短语通常在第一阶段的检索中扮演枢轴角色。为了减轻这种弱点，我们提议使一个密集的检索器对齐一个表现出色的词典意识代表模型。对齐方式是通过弱化的知识蒸馏来实现的，以通过两个方面来启发猎犬 - 1）词汇扬声的对比目标，以挑战密集编码器和2）一个配对的等级正规化，以使密集的模型的行为倾向于其他人的行为。我们在三个公共基准上评估了我们的模型，这表明，凭借可比的词典觉得回收犬作为老师，我们提议的密集人可以带来一致而重大的改进，甚至超过教师。此外，我们发现我们对密集猎犬的改进是与标准排名蒸馏的补充，这可以进一步提高最先进的性能。

本文着重于几次NLP任务的文本数据增强。现有的数据增强算法要么使用一个小型培训集来生成新的合成数据，要么利用与任务无关的启发式规则（例如，同义词替代）或微调通用预训练的语言模型（例如GPT2）。因此，这些方法具有特定于任务的知识，并且仅限于在简单任务中为弱基线产生低质量的合成数据。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了知识混合数据增强模型（KNOWDA）：使用知识混合培训（KOMT）在不同的NLP任务的混合物上预测的编码器LM。 KOMT是一种培训程序，将各种异质NLP任务的输入示例重新定义为统一的文本到文本格式，并采用不同粒度的目标，以学习生成部分或完整的样本。在KOMT的帮助下，Knowda可以隐含地将所需的特定于任务的知识从任务的混合中隐含地结合在一起，并通过一些给定的实例迅速掌握目标任务的固有综合定律。据我们所知，我们是首次尝试将任务数量扩展到多任务共同培训以进行数据扩展。广泛的实验表明，i）Knowda成功地通过少量基准的基准成功地提高了Albert和Deberta的表现，表现优于先前的最新数据增强基线； ii）KNOWDA还可以改善少数弹药任务的模型性能，这是KOMT中未包含的固定任务类型。

排名者在事实上的“检索和rerank”管道中起着必不可少的作用，但其训练仍然落后 - 从中​​度的负面因素或/和/和/和作为回收者的辅助模块中学习。在这项工作中，我们首先确定了强大的排名者的两个主要障碍，即是由训练有素的回猎犬和非理想的负面负面的固有标签噪声，该噪声是为高能力的排名所采样的。因此，我们提出多个检索器，因为负面发电机改善了排名者的鲁棒性，其中i）涉及广泛的分发标签噪声，使排名者与每个噪声分布相对，而ii）与排名相对较接近排名负分配，导致更具挑战性的培训。为了评估我们的强大排名者（称为r $^2 $ anker），我们在各种环境中进行了有关流行通道检索基准测试的各种实验，包括BM25级，全等级，回收者蒸馏等。经验结果验证了新的州 - 新州 - 新州 - 我们模型的效果。

As one of the most important psychic stress reactions, micro-expressions (MEs), are spontaneous and transient facial expressions that can reveal the genuine emotions of human beings. Thus, recognizing MEs (MER) automatically is becoming increasingly crucial in the field of affective computing, and provides essential technical support in lie detection, psychological analysis and other areas. However, the lack of abundant ME data seriously restricts the development of cutting-edge data-driven MER models. Despite the recent efforts of several spontaneous ME datasets to alleviate this problem, it is still a tiny amount of work. To solve the problem of ME data hunger, we construct a dynamic spontaneous ME dataset with the largest current ME data scale, called DFME (Dynamic Facial Micro-expressions), which includes 7,526 well-labeled ME videos induced by 671 participants and annotated by more than 20 annotators throughout three years. Afterwards, we adopt four classical spatiotemporal feature learning models on DFME to perform MER experiments to objectively verify the validity of DFME dataset. In addition, we explore different solutions to the class imbalance and key-frame sequence sampling problems in dynamic MER respectively on DFME, so as to provide a valuable reference for future research. The comprehensive experimental results show that our DFME dataset can facilitate the research of automatic MER, and provide a new benchmark for MER. DFME will be published via https://mea-lab-421.github.io.

Interview has been regarded as one of the most crucial step for recruitment. To fully prepare for the interview with the recruiters, job seekers usually practice with mock interviews between each other. However, such a mock interview with peers is generally far away from the real interview experience: the mock interviewers are not guaranteed to be professional and are not likely to behave like a real interviewer. Due to the rapid growth of online recruitment in recent years, recruiters tend to have online interviews, which makes it possible to collect real interview data from real interviewers. In this paper, we propose a novel application named EZInterviewer, which aims to learn from the online interview data and provides mock interview services to the job seekers. The task is challenging in two ways: (1) the interview data are now available but still of low-resource; (2) to generate meaningful and relevant interview dialogs requires thorough understanding of both resumes and job descriptions. To address the low-resource challenge, EZInterviewer is trained on a very small set of interview dialogs. The key idea is to reduce the number of parameters that rely on interview dialogs by disentangling the knowledge selector and dialog generator so that most parameters can be trained with ungrounded dialogs as well as the resume data that are not low-resource. Evaluation results on a real-world job interview dialog dataset indicate that we achieve promising results to generate mock interviews. With the help of EZInterviewer, we hope to make mock interview practice become easier for job seekers.

Panoptic Part Segmentation (PPS) unifies panoptic segmentation and part segmentation into one task. Previous works utilize separated approaches to handle thing, stuff, and part predictions without shared computation and task association. We aim to unify these tasks at the architectural level, designing the first end-to-end unified framework named Panoptic-PartFormer. Moreover, we find the previous metric PartPQ biases to PQ. To handle both issues, we make the following contributions: Firstly, we design a meta-architecture that decouples part feature and things/stuff feature, respectively. We model things, stuff, and parts as object queries and directly learn to optimize all three forms of prediction as a unified mask prediction and classification problem. We term our model as Panoptic-PartFormer. Secondly, we propose a new metric Part-Whole Quality (PWQ) to better measure such task from both pixel-region and part-whole perspectives. It can also decouple the error for part segmentation and panoptic segmentation. Thirdly, inspired by Mask2Former, based on our meta-architecture, we propose Panoptic-PartFormer++ and design a new part-whole cross attention scheme to further boost part segmentation qualities. We design a new part-whole interaction method using masked cross attention. Finally, the extensive ablation studies and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of both Panoptic-PartFormer and Panoptic-PartFormer++. Compared with previous Panoptic-PartFormer, our Panoptic-PartFormer++ achieves 2% PartPQ and 3% PWQ improvements on the Cityscapes PPS dataset and 5% PartPQ on the Pascal Context PPS dataset. On both datasets, Panoptic-PartFormer++ achieves new state-of-the-art results with a significant cost drop of 70% on GFlops and 50% on parameters. Our models can serve as a strong baseline and aid future research in PPS. Code will be available.

In contrast to the control-theoretic methods, the lack of stability guarantee remains a significant problem for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Jointly learning a policy and a Lyapunov function has recently become a promising approach to ensuring the whole system with a stability guarantee. However, the classical Lyapunov constraints researchers introduced cannot stabilize the system during the sampling-based optimization. Therefore, we propose the Adaptive Stability Certification (ASC), making the system reach sampling-based stability. Because the ASC condition can search for the optimal policy heuristically, we design the Adaptive Lyapunov-based Actor-Critic (ALAC) algorithm based on the ASC condition. Meanwhile, our algorithm avoids the optimization problem that a variety of constraints are coupled into the objective in current approaches. When evaluated on ten robotic tasks, our method achieves lower accumulated cost and fewer stability constraint violations than previous studies.