即使在高度发达的国家，多达15-30％的人口只能理解使用基本词汇编写的文本。他们对日常文本的理解是有限的，这阻止了他们在社会中发挥积极作用，并就医疗保健，法律代表或民主选择做出明智的决定。词汇简化是一项自然语言处理任务，旨在通过更简单地替换复杂的词汇和表达方式来使每个人都可以理解文本，同时保留原始含义。在过去的20年中，它引起了极大的关注，并且已经针对各种语言提出了全自动词汇简化系统。该领域进步的主要障碍是缺乏用于构建和评估词汇简化系统的高质量数据集。我们提出了一个新的基准数据集，用于英语，西班牙语和（巴西）葡萄牙语中的词汇简化，并提供有关数据选择和注释程序的详细信息。这是第一个可直接比较三种语言的词汇简化系统的数据集。为了展示数据集的可用性，我们将两种具有不同体系结构（神经与非神经）的最先进的词汇简化系统适应所有三种语言（英语，西班牙语和巴西葡萄牙语），并评估他们的表演在我们的新数据集中。为了进行更公平的比较，我们使用多种评估措施来捕获系统功效的各个方面，并讨论其优势和缺点。我们发现，最先进的神经词汇简化系统优于所有三种语言中最先进的非神经词汇简化系统。更重要的是，我们发现最先进的神经词汇简化系统对英语的表现要比西班牙和葡萄牙语要好得多。

集中的动物饲养业务（CAFOS）对空气，水和公共卫生构成严重风险，但已被证明挑战规范。美国政府问责办公室注意到基本挑战是缺乏关于咖啡馆的全面的位置信息。我们使用美国农业部的国家农产病程（Naip）1M / Pixel Acial Imagerery来检测美国大陆的家禽咖啡馆。我们培养卷积神经网络（CNN）模型来识别单个家禽谷仓，并将最佳表现模型应用于超过42 TB的图像，以创建家禽咖啡座的第一个国家开源数据集。我们验证了来自加利福尼亚州的10个手标县的家禽咖啡馆设施的模型预测，并证明这种方法具有填补环境监测中差距的显着潜力。

The performance of inertial navigation systems is largely dependent on the stable flow of external measurements and information to guarantee continuous filter updates and bind the inertial solution drift. Platforms in different operational environments may be prevented at some point from receiving external measurements, thus exposing their navigation solution to drift. Over the years, a wide variety of works have been proposed to overcome this shortcoming, by exploiting knowledge of the system current conditions and turning it into an applicable source of information to update the navigation filter. This paper aims to provide an extensive survey of information aided navigation, broadly classified into direct, indirect, and model aiding. Each approach is described by the notable works that implemented its concept, use cases, relevant state updates, and their corresponding measurement models. By matching the appropriate constraint to a given scenario, one will be able to improve the navigation solution accuracy, compensate for the lost information, and uncover certain internal states, that would otherwise remain unobservable.

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.

In the present work we propose an unsupervised ensemble method consisting of oblique trees that can address the task of auto-encoding, namely Oblique Forest AutoEncoders (briefly OF-AE). Our method is a natural extension of the eForest encoder introduced in [1]. More precisely, by employing oblique splits consisting in multivariate linear combination of features instead of the axis-parallel ones, we will devise an auto-encoder method through the computation of a sparse solution of a set of linear inequalities consisting of feature values constraints. The code for reproducing our results is available at https://github.com/CDAlecsa/Oblique-Forest-AutoEncoders.

When robots learn reward functions using high capacity models that take raw state directly as input, they need to both learn a representation for what matters in the task -- the task ``features" -- as well as how to combine these features into a single objective. If they try to do both at once from input designed to teach the full reward function, it is easy to end up with a representation that contains spurious correlations in the data, which fails to generalize to new settings. Instead, our ultimate goal is to enable robots to identify and isolate the causal features that people actually care about and use when they represent states and behavior. Our idea is that we can tune into this representation by asking users what behaviors they consider similar: behaviors will be similar if the features that matter are similar, even if low-level behavior is different; conversely, behaviors will be different if even one of the features that matter differs. This, in turn, is what enables the robot to disambiguate between what needs to go into the representation versus what is spurious, as well as what aspects of behavior can be compressed together versus not. The notion of learning representations based on similarity has a nice parallel in contrastive learning, a self-supervised representation learning technique that maps visually similar data points to similar embeddings, where similarity is defined by a designer through data augmentation heuristics. By contrast, in order to learn the representations that people use, so we can learn their preferences and objectives, we use their definition of similarity. In simulation as well as in a user study, we show that learning through such similarity queries leads to representations that, while far from perfect, are indeed more generalizable than self-supervised and task-input alternatives.

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.

Deep learning models are known to put the privacy of their training data at risk, which poses challenges for their safe and ethical release to the public. Differentially private stochastic gradient descent is the de facto standard for training neural networks without leaking sensitive information about the training data. However, applying it to models for graph-structured data poses a novel challenge: unlike with i.i.d. data, sensitive information about a node in a graph cannot only leak through its gradients, but also through the gradients of all nodes within a larger neighborhood. In practice, this limits privacy-preserving deep learning on graphs to very shallow graph neural networks. We propose to solve this issue by training graph neural networks on disjoint subgraphs of a given training graph. We develop three random-walk-based methods for generating such disjoint subgraphs and perform a careful analysis of the data-generating distributions to provide strong privacy guarantees. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline on three large graphs, and matches or outperforms it on four smaller ones.

Machine learning models are typically evaluated by computing similarity with reference annotations and trained by maximizing similarity with such. Especially in the bio-medical domain, annotations are subjective and suffer from low inter- and intra-rater reliability. Since annotations only reflect the annotation entity's interpretation of the real world, this can lead to sub-optimal predictions even though the model achieves high similarity scores. Here, the theoretical concept of Peak Ground Truth (PGT) is introduced. PGT marks the point beyond which an increase in similarity with the reference annotation stops translating to better Real World Model Performance (RWMP). Additionally, a quantitative technique to approximate PGT by computing inter- and intra-rater reliability is proposed. Finally, three categories of PGT-aware strategies to evaluate and improve model performance are reviewed.

In this paper, we present a novel visual SLAM and long-term localization benchmark for autonomous driving in challenging conditions based on the large-scale 4Seasons dataset. The proposed benchmark provides drastic appearance variations caused by seasonal changes and diverse weather and illumination conditions. While significant progress has been made in advancing visual SLAM on small-scale datasets with similar conditions, there is still a lack of unified benchmarks representative of real-world scenarios for autonomous driving. We introduce a new unified benchmark for jointly evaluating visual odometry, global place recognition, and map-based visual localization performance which is crucial to successfully enable autonomous driving in any condition. The data has been collected for more than one year, resulting in more than 300 km of recordings in nine different environments ranging from a multi-level parking garage to urban (including tunnels) to countryside and highway. We provide globally consistent reference poses with up to centimeter-level accuracy obtained from the fusion of direct stereo-inertial odometry with RTK GNSS. We evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art visual odometry and visual localization baseline approaches on the benchmark and analyze their properties. The experimental results provide new insights into current approaches and show promising potential for future research. Our benchmark and evaluation protocols will be available at https://www.4seasons-dataset.com/.