在本文中，提出了一种新的方法，该方法允许基于神经网络（NN）均衡器的低复杂性发展，以缓解高速相干光学传输系统中的损伤。在这项工作中，我们提供了已应用于馈电和经常性NN设计的各种深层模型压缩方法的全面描述和比较。此外，我们评估了这些策略对每个NN均衡器的性能的影响。考虑量化，重量聚类，修剪和其他用于模型压缩的尖端策略。在这项工作中，我们提出并评估贝叶斯优化辅助压缩，其中选择了压缩的超参数以同时降低复杂性并提高性能。总之，通过使用模拟和实验数据来评估每种压缩方法的复杂性及其性能之间的权衡，以完成分析。通过利用最佳压缩方法，我们表明可以设计基于NN的均衡器，该均衡器比传统的数字背部传播（DBP）均衡器具有更好的性能，并且只有一个步骤。这是通过减少使用加权聚类和修剪算法后在NN均衡器中使用的乘数数量来完成的。此外，我们证明了基于NN的均衡器也可以实现卓越的性能，同时仍然保持与完整的电子色色散补偿块相同的复杂性。我们通过强调开放问题和现有挑战以及未来的研究方向来结束分析。

人工神经网络的许多现代应用随之而来的是大量层，使传统的数字实施越来越复杂。光学神经网络在高带宽处提供并行处理，但面临噪声积累的挑战。我们在这里提出了一种新型的神经网络，使用随机共振作为体系结构的固有部分，并证明了以给定性能准确性大量减少所需神经元数量的可能性。我们还表明，这种神经网络对噪声的影响更强大。

Numerous works use word embedding-based metrics to quantify societal biases and stereotypes in texts. Recent studies have found that word embeddings can capture semantic similarity but may be affected by word frequency. In this work we study the effect of frequency when measuring female vs. male gender bias with word embedding-based bias quantification methods. We find that Skip-gram with negative sampling and GloVe tend to detect male bias in high frequency words, while GloVe tends to return female bias in low frequency words. We show these behaviors still exist when words are randomly shuffled. This proves that the frequency-based effect observed in unshuffled corpora stems from properties of the metric rather than from word associations. The effect is spurious and problematic since bias metrics should depend exclusively on word co-occurrences and not individual word frequencies. Finally, we compare these results with the ones obtained with an alternative metric based on Pointwise Mutual Information. We find that this metric does not show a clear dependence on frequency, even though it is slightly skewed towards male bias across all frequencies.

Neural Representations have recently been shown to effectively reconstruct a wide range of signals from 3D meshes and shapes to images and videos. We show that, when adapted correctly, neural representations can be used to directly represent the weights of a pre-trained convolutional neural network, resulting in a Neural Representation for Neural Networks (NeRN). Inspired by coordinate inputs of previous neural representation methods, we assign a coordinate to each convolutional kernel in our network based on its position in the architecture, and optimize a predictor network to map coordinates to their corresponding weights. Similarly to the spatial smoothness of visual scenes, we show that incorporating a smoothness constraint over the original network's weights aids NeRN towards a better reconstruction. In addition, since slight perturbations in pre-trained model weights can result in a considerable accuracy loss, we employ techniques from the field of knowledge distillation to stabilize the learning process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of NeRN in reconstructing widely used architectures on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet. Finally, we present two applications using NeRN, demonstrating the capabilities of the learned representations.

This report summarizes the work carried out by the authors during the Twelfth Montreal Industrial Problem Solving Workshop, held at Universit\'e de Montr\'eal in August 2022. The team tackled a problem submitted by CBC/Radio-Canada on the theme of Automatic Text Simplification (ATS).

Feature acquisition algorithms address the problem of acquiring informative features while balancing the costs of acquisition to improve the learning performances of ML models. Previous approaches have focused on calculating the expected utility values of features to determine the acquisition sequences. Other approaches formulated the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and applied reinforcement learning based algorithms. In comparison to previous approaches, we focus on 1) formulating the feature acquisition problem as a MDP and applying Monte Carlo Tree Search, 2) calculating the intermediary rewards for each acquisition step based on model improvements and acquisition costs and 3) simultaneously optimizing model improvement and acquisition costs with multi-objective Monte Carlo Tree Search. With Proximal Policy Optimization and Deep Q-Network algorithms as benchmark, we show the effectiveness of our proposed approach with experimental study.

360-degree panoramic videos have gained considerable attention in recent years due to the rapid development of head-mounted displays (HMDs) and panoramic cameras. One major problem in streaming panoramic videos is that panoramic videos are much larger in size compared to traditional ones. Moreover, the user devices are often in a wireless environment, with limited battery, computation power, and bandwidth. To reduce resource consumption, researchers have proposed ways to predict the users' viewports so that only part of the entire video needs to be transmitted from the server. However, the robustness of such prediction approaches has been overlooked in the literature: it is usually assumed that only a few models, pre-trained on past users' experiences, are applied for prediction to all users. We observe that those pre-trained models can perform poorly for some users because they might have drastically different behaviors from the majority, and the pre-trained models cannot capture the features in unseen videos. In this work, we propose a novel meta learning based viewport prediction paradigm to alleviate the worst prediction performance and ensure the robustness of viewport prediction. This paradigm uses two machine learning models, where the first model predicts the viewing direction, and the second model predicts the minimum video prefetch size that can include the actual viewport. We first train two meta models so that they are sensitive to new training data, and then quickly adapt them to users while they are watching the videos. Evaluation results reveal that the meta models can adapt quickly to each user, and can significantly increase the prediction accuracy, especially for the worst-performing predictions.

This paper presents a corpus annotated for the task of direct-speech extraction in Croatian. The paper focuses on the annotation of the quotation, co-reference resolution, and sentiment annotation in SETimes news corpus in Croatian and on the analysis of its language-specific differences compared to English. From this, a list of the phenomena that require special attention when performing these annotations is derived. The generated corpus with quotation features annotations can be used for multiple tasks in the field of Natural Language Processing.

With the ever-growing popularity of the field of NLP, the demand for datasets in low resourced-languages follows suit. Following a previously established framework, in this paper, we present the UNER dataset, a multilingual and hierarchical parallel corpus annotated for named-entities. We describe in detail the developed procedure necessary to create this type of dataset in any language available on Wikipedia with DBpedia information. The three-step procedure extracts entities from Wikipedia articles, links them to DBpedia, and maps the DBpedia sets of classes to the UNER labels. This is followed by a post-processing procedure that significantly increases the number of identified entities in the final results. The paper concludes with a statistical and qualitative analysis of the resulting dataset.

This article presents the application of the Universal Named Entity framework to generate automatically annotated corpora. By using a workflow that extracts Wikipedia data and meta-data and DBpedia information, we generated an English dataset which is described and evaluated. Furthermore, we conducted a set of experiments to improve the annotations in terms of precision, recall, and F1-measure. The final dataset is available and the established workflow can be applied to any language with existing Wikipedia and DBpedia. As part of future research, we intend to continue improving the annotation process and extend it to other languages.