基于图形的大量系统的关键组成部分是能够检测轨迹中的环闭合以减少从探视法累积的漂移。大多数基于激光雷达的方法仅通过仅使用几何信息来实现此目标，而无视场景的语义。在这项工作中，我们介绍了Padloc，这是一种基于激光雷达的环路闭合检测和注册体系结构，其中包括共享的3D卷积特征提取主链，用于环路闭合检测的全局描述符，以及用于点云匹配和注册的新型变压器头。我们提出了多种方法，用于估计基于多样性指数的点匹配置信度。此外，为了提高前向后的一致性，我们建议使用两个共享匹配和注册头，并通过利用估计的相对转换必须相互倒数来交换其源和目标输入。此外，我们以新颖的损失函数的形式利用综合信息在培训期间，将匹配问题折叠为语义标签的分类任务，并作为实例标签的图形连接分配。我们在多个现实世界数据集上对PADLOC进行了广泛的评估，证明它可以实现最新的性能。我们的工作代码可在http://padloc.cs.uni-freiburg.de上公开获得。

在开放世界中运行的机器人会遇到各种不同的环境，这些环境可能彼此之间有很大的不同。该域差距也对同时本地化和映射（SLAM）构成了挑战，它是导航的基本任务之一。尤其是，已知基于学习的大满贯方法概括地概括了看不见的环境，阻碍了其一般采用。在这项工作中，我们介绍了连续猛击的新任务，即从单个动态变化的环境扩展到终生的概念到几个截然不同的环境中的顺序部署。为了解决这一任务，我们提出了CL-SLAM利用双NETWORK体系结构来适应新环境，并保留有关先前访问的环境的知识。我们将CL-SLAM与基于学习的和经典的大满贯方法进行比较，并显示了利用在线数据的优势。我们在三个不同的数据集上广泛评估CL-SLAM，并证明它的表现优于几个受到现有基于基于学习的视觉探测方法的基准。我们在http://continual-slam.cs.uni-freiburg.de上公开提供工作代码。

循环闭合检测是同时定位和映射（SLAM）系统的重要组成部分，这减少了随时间累积的漂移。多年来，已经提出了一些深入的学习方法来解决这项任务，但是与手工制作技术相比，他们的表现一直是SubPar，特别是在处理反向环的同时。在本文中，我们通过同时识别先前访问的位置并估计当前扫描与地图之间的6-DOF相对变换，有效地检测LIDAR点云中的LINAS点云中的环闭环的新颖LCDNET。 LCDNET由共享编码器组成，一个地方识别头提取全局描述符，以及估计两个点云之间的变换的相对姿势头。我们基于不平衡的最佳运输理论介绍一种新颖的相对姿势，我们以可分散的方式实现，以便实现端到端训练。在多个现实世界自主驾驶数据集中的LCDNET广泛评估表明我们的方法优于最先进的环路闭合检测和点云登记技术，特别是在处理反向环的同时。此外，我们将所提出的循环闭合检测方法集成到LIDAR SLAM库中，以提供完整的映射系统，并在看不见的城市中使用不同的传感器设置展示泛化能力。

Pre-trained language models (PLM) have advanced the state-of-the-art across NLP applications, but lack domain-specific knowledge that does not naturally occur in pre-training data. Previous studies augmented PLMs with symbolic knowledge for different downstream NLP tasks. However, knowledge bases (KBs) utilized in these studies are usually large-scale and static, in contrast to small, domain-specific, and modifiable knowledge bases that are prominent in real-world task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. In this paper, we showcase the advantages of injecting domain-specific knowledge prior to fine-tuning on TOD tasks. To this end, we utilize light-weight adapters that can be easily integrated with PLMs and serve as a repository for facts learned from different KBs. To measure the efficacy of proposed knowledge injection methods, we introduce Knowledge Probing using Response Selection (KPRS) -- a probe designed specifically for TOD models. Experiments on KPRS and the response generation task show improvements of knowledge injection with adapters over strong baselines.

The current trend of applying transfer learning from CNNs trained on large datasets can be an overkill when the target application is a custom and delimited problem with enough data to train a network from scratch. On the other hand, the training of custom and lighter CNNs requires expertise, in the from-scratch case, and or high-end resources, as in the case of hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW NAS), limiting access to the technology by non-habitual NN developers. For this reason, we present Colab NAS, an affordable HW NAS technique for producing lightweight task-specific CNNs. Its novel derivative-free search strategy, inspired by Occam's razor, allows it to obtain state-of-the-art results on the Visual Wake Word dataset in just 4.5 GPU hours using free online GPU services such as Google Colaboratory and Kaggle Kernel.

In this paper we propose a general approach to define a many-valued preferential interpretation of gradual argumentation semantics. The approach allows for conditional reasoning over arguments and boolean combination of arguments, with respect to a class of gradual semantics, through the verification of graded (strict or defeasible) implications over a preferential interpretation. As a proof of concept, in the finitely-valued case, an Answer set Programming approach is proposed for conditional reasoning in a many-valued argumentation semantics of weighted argumentation graphs. The paper also develops and discusses a probabilistic semantics for gradual argumentation, which builds on the many-valued conditional semantics.

Weather forecasting centers currently rely on statistical postprocessing methods to minimize forecast error. This improves skill but can lead to predictions that violate physical principles or disregard dependencies between variables, which can be problematic for downstream applications and for the trustworthiness of postprocessing models, especially when they are based on new machine learning approaches. Building on recent advances in physics-informed machine learning, we propose to achieve physical consistency in deep learning-based postprocessing models by integrating meteorological expertise in the form of analytic equations. Applied to the post-processing of surface weather in Switzerland, we find that constraining a neural network to enforce thermodynamic state equations yields physically-consistent predictions of temperature and humidity without compromising performance. Our approach is especially advantageous when data is scarce, and our findings suggest that incorporating domain expertise into postprocessing models allows to optimize weather forecast information while satisfying application-specific requirements.

We study the learning dynamics of self-predictive learning for reinforcement learning, a family of algorithms that learn representations by minimizing the prediction error of their own future latent representations. Despite its recent empirical success, such algorithms have an apparent defect: trivial representations (such as constants) minimize the prediction error, yet it is obviously undesirable to converge to such solutions. Our central insight is that careful designs of the optimization dynamics are critical to learning meaningful representations. We identify that a faster paced optimization of the predictor and semi-gradient updates on the representation, are crucial to preventing the representation collapse. Then in an idealized setup, we show self-predictive learning dynamics carries out spectral decomposition on the state transition matrix, effectively capturing information of the transition dynamics. Building on the theoretical insights, we propose bidirectional self-predictive learning, a novel self-predictive algorithm that learns two representations simultaneously. We examine the robustness of our theoretical insights with a number of small-scale experiments and showcase the promise of the novel representation learning algorithm with large-scale experiments.

Pretrained transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in many tasks and benchmarks recently. Many state-of-the-art Language Models (LMs), however, do not scale well above the threshold of 512 input tokens. In specialized domains though (such as legal, scientific or biomedical), models often need to process very long text (sometimes well above 10000 tokens). Even though many efficient transformers have been proposed (such as Longformer, BigBird or FNet), so far, only very few such efficient models are available for specialized domains. Additionally, since the pretraining process is extremely costly in general - but even more so as the sequence length increases - it is often only in reach of large research labs. One way of making pretraining cheaper is the Replaced Token Detection (RTD) task, by providing more signal during training, since the loss can be computed over all tokens. In this work, we train Longformer models with the efficient RTD task on legal data to showcase that pretraining efficient LMs is possible using much less compute. We evaluate the trained models on challenging summarization tasks requiring the model to summarize long texts to show to what extent the models can achieve good performance on downstream tasks. We find that both the small and base models outperform their baselines on the in-domain BillSum and out-of-domain PubMed tasks in their respective parameter range. We publish our code and models for research purposes.

Synthetic data generation has recently gained widespread attention as a more reliable alternative to traditional data anonymization. The involved methods are originally developed for image synthesis. Hence, their application to the typically tabular and relational datasets from healthcare, finance and other industries is non-trivial. While substantial research has been devoted to the generation of realistic tabular datasets, the study of synthetic relational databases is still in its infancy. In this paper, we combine the variational autoencoder framework with graph neural networks to generate realistic synthetic relational databases. We then apply the obtained method to two publicly available databases in computational experiments. The results indicate that real databases' structures are accurately preserved in the resulting synthetic datasets, even for large datasets with advanced data types.