本文探讨了时间视频接地（TVG）的任务，在该任务中，给定未修剪的视频和查询句子，目标是在提供的自然语言查询描述的视频中识别和确定动作实例的时间界。最近的作品通过使用大型预训练的语言模型（PLM）直接编码查询来解决此任务。但是，很难隔离改进的语言表示的影响，因为这些作品还提出了视觉输入的改进。此外，这些PLM大大增加了训练TVG模型的计算成本。因此，本文研究了PLM在TVG任务中的影响，并根据适配器评估了NLP参数效率培训替代方案的适用性。我们将流行的PLM与选择现有方法和测试不同的适配器相结合，以减少其他参数的影响。我们在三个具有挑战性的数据集上的结果表明，当TVG模型对该任务进行微调时，可以从PLM中受益匪浅，并且适配器是完全微调的有效替代方法，即使它们并不适合我们的任务。具体而言，适配器有助于节省计算成本，从而使PLM集成在较大的TVG模型中，并提供与最先进模型相当的结果。最后，通过对TVG中不同类型的适配器进行基准测试，我们的结果阐明了哪种适配器最适合每个研究的情况。

Designing experiments often requires balancing between learning about the true treatment effects and earning from allocating more samples to the superior treatment. While optimal algorithms for the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem (MABP) provide allocation policies that optimally balance learning and earning, they tend to be computationally expensive. The Gittins Index (GI) is a solution to the MABP that can simultaneously attain optimality and computationally efficiency goals, and it has been recently used in experiments with Bernoulli and Gaussian rewards. For the first time, we present a modification of the GI rule that can be used in experiments with exponentially-distributed rewards. We report its performance in simulated 2- armed and 3-armed experiments. Compared to traditional non-adaptive designs, our novel GI modified design shows operating characteristics comparable in learning (e.g. statistical power) but substantially better in earning (e.g. direct benefits). This illustrates the potential that designs using a GI approach to allocate participants have to improve participant benefits, increase efficiencies, and reduce experimental costs in adaptive multi-armed experiments with exponential rewards.

Modelling and forecasting real-life human behaviour using online social media is an active endeavour of interest in politics, government, academia, and industry. Since its creation in 2006, Twitter has been proposed as a potential laboratory that could be used to gauge and predict social behaviour. During the last decade, the user base of Twitter has been growing and becoming more representative of the general population. Here we analyse this user base in the context of the 2021 Mexican Legislative Election. To do so, we use a dataset of 15 million election-related tweets in the six months preceding election day. We explore different election models that assign political preference to either the ruling parties or the opposition. We find that models using data with geographical attributes determine the results of the election with better precision and accuracy than conventional polling methods. These results demonstrate that analysis of public online data can outperform conventional polling methods, and that political analysis and general forecasting would likely benefit from incorporating such data in the immediate future. Moreover, the same Twitter dataset with geographical attributes is positively correlated with results from official census data on population and internet usage in Mexico. These findings suggest that we have reached a period in time when online activity, appropriately curated, can provide an accurate representation of offline behaviour.

Existing federated classification algorithms typically assume the local annotations at every client cover the same set of classes. In this paper, we aim to lift such an assumption and focus on a more general yet practical non-IID setting where every client can work on non-identical and even disjoint sets of classes (i.e., client-exclusive classes), and the clients have a common goal which is to build a global classification model to identify the union of these classes. Such heterogeneity in client class sets poses a new challenge: how to ensure different clients are operating in the same latent space so as to avoid the drift after aggregation? We observe that the classes can be described in natural languages (i.e., class names) and these names are typically safe to share with all parties. Thus, we formulate the classification problem as a matching process between data representations and class representations and break the classification model into a data encoder and a label encoder. We leverage the natural-language class names as the common ground to anchor the class representations in the label encoder. In each iteration, the label encoder updates the class representations and regulates the data representations through matching. We further use the updated class representations at each round to annotate data samples for locally-unaware classes according to similarity and distill knowledge to local models. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show that the proposed method can outperform various classical and state-of-the-art federated learning methods designed for learning with non-IID data.

This is paper for the smooth function approximation by neural networks (NN). Mathematical or physical functions can be replaced by NN models through regression. In this study, we get NNs that generate highly accurate and highly smooth function, which only comprised of a few weight parameters, through discussing a few topics about regression. First, we reinterpret inside of NNs for regression; consequently, we propose a new activation function--integrated sigmoid linear unit (ISLU). Then special charateristics of metadata for regression, which is different from other data like image or sound, is discussed for improving the performance of neural networks. Finally, the one of a simple hierarchical NN that generate models substituting mathematical function is presented, and the new batch concept ``meta-batch" which improves the performance of NN several times more is introduced. The new activation function, meta-batch method, features of numerical data, meta-augmentation with metaparameters, and a structure of NN generating a compact multi-layer perceptron(MLP) are essential in this study.

The existing methods for video anomaly detection mostly utilize videos containing identifiable facial and appearance-based features. The use of videos with identifiable faces raises privacy concerns, especially when used in a hospital or community-based setting. Appearance-based features can also be sensitive to pixel-based noise, straining the anomaly detection methods to model the changes in the background and making it difficult to focus on the actions of humans in the foreground. Structural information in the form of skeletons describing the human motion in the videos is privacy-protecting and can overcome some of the problems posed by appearance-based features. In this paper, we present a survey of privacy-protecting deep learning anomaly detection methods using skeletons extracted from videos. We present a novel taxonomy of algorithms based on the various learning approaches. We conclude that skeleton-based approaches for anomaly detection can be a plausible privacy-protecting alternative for video anomaly detection. Lastly, we identify major open research questions and provide guidelines to address them.

The Government of Kerala had increased the frequency of supply of free food kits owing to the pandemic, however, these items were static and not indicative of the personal preferences of the consumers. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of various clustering techniques on a scaled-down version of a real-world dataset obtained through a conjoint analysis-based survey. Clustering carried out by centroid-based methods such as k means is analyzed and the results are plotted along with SVD, and finally, a conclusion is reached as to which among the two is better. Once the clusters have been formulated, commodities are also decided upon for each cluster. Also, clustering is further enhanced by reassignment, based on a specific cluster loss threshold. Thus, the most efficacious clustering technique for designing a food kit tailored to the needs of individuals is finally obtained.

Machine learning-based segmentation in medical imaging is widely used in clinical applications from diagnostics to radiotherapy treatment planning. Segmented medical images with ground truth are useful for investigating the properties of different segmentation performance metrics to inform metric selection. Regular geometrical shapes are often used to synthesize segmentation errors and illustrate properties of performance metrics, but they lack the complexity of anatomical variations in real images. In this study, we present a tool to emulate segmentations by adjusting the reference (truth) masks of anatomical objects extracted from real medical images. Our tool is designed to modify the defined truth contours and emulate different types of segmentation errors with a set of user-configurable parameters. We defined the ground truth objects from 230 patient images in the Glioma Image Segmentation for Radiotherapy (GLIS-RT) database. For each object, we used our segmentation synthesis tool to synthesize 10 versions of segmentation (i.e., 10 simulated segmentors or algorithms), where each version has a pre-defined combination of segmentation errors. We then applied 20 performance metrics to evaluate all synthetic segmentations. We demonstrated the properties of these metrics, including their ability to capture specific types of segmentation errors. By analyzing the intrinsic properties of these metrics and categorizing the segmentation errors, we are working toward the goal of developing a decision-tree tool for assisting in the selection of segmentation performance metrics.

This paper studies the quantization of heavy-tailed data in some fundamental statistical estimation problems, where the underlying distributions have bounded moments of some order. We propose to truncate and properly dither the data prior to a uniform quantization. Our major standpoint is that (near) minimax rates of estimation error are achievable merely from the quantized data produced by the proposed scheme. In particular, concrete results are worked out for covariance estimation, compressed sensing, and matrix completion, all agreeing that the quantization only slightly worsens the multiplicative factor. Besides, we study compressed sensing where both covariate (i.e., sensing vector) and response are quantized. Under covariate quantization, although our recovery program is non-convex because the covariance matrix estimator lacks positive semi-definiteness, all local minimizers are proved to enjoy near optimal error bound. Moreover, by the concentration inequality of product process and covering argument, we establish near minimax uniform recovery guarantee for quantized compressed sensing with heavy-tailed noise.

A recent trend in deep learning research features the application of graph neural networks for mesh-based continuum mechanics simulations. Most of these frameworks operate on graphs in which each edge connects two nodes. Inspired by the data connectivity in the finite element method, we connect the nodes by elements rather than edges, effectively forming a hypergraph. We implement a message-passing network on such a node-element hypergraph and explore the capability of the network for the modeling of fluid flow. The network is tested on two common benchmark problems, namely the fluid flow around a circular cylinder and airfoil configurations. The results show that such a message-passing network defined on the node-element hypergraph is able to generate more stable and accurate temporal roll-out predictions compared to the baseline generalized message-passing network defined on a normal graph. Along with adjustments in activation function and training loss, we expect this work to set a new strong baseline for future explorations of mesh-based fluid simulations with graph neural networks.