Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has attracted considerable attention as a gradient-based Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method. Since the introduction of DARTS, there has been little work done on adapting the action space based on state-of-art architecture design principles for CNNs. In this work, we aim to address this gap by incrementally augmenting the DARTS search space with micro-design changes inspired by ConvNeXt and studying the trade-off between accuracy, evaluation layer count, and computational cost. To this end, we introduce the Pseudo-Inverted Bottleneck conv block intending to reduce the computational footprint of the inverted bottleneck block proposed in ConvNeXt. Our proposed architecture is much less sensitive to evaluation layer count and outperforms a DARTS network with similar size significantly, at layer counts as small as 2. Furthermore, with less layers, not only does it achieve higher accuracy with lower GMACs and parameter count, GradCAM comparisons show that our network is able to better detect distinctive features of target objects compared to DARTS.

We study estimation and testing in the Poisson regression model with noisy high dimensional covariates, which has wide applications in analyzing noisy big data. Correcting for the estimation bias due to the covariate noise leads to a non-convex target function to minimize. Treating the high dimensional issue further leads us to augment an amenable penalty term to the target function. We propose to estimate the regression parameter through minimizing the penalized target function. We derive the L1 and L2 convergence rates of the estimator and prove the variable selection consistency. We further establish the asymptotic normality of any subset of the parameters, where the subset can have infinitely many components as long as its cardinality grows sufficiently slow. We develop Wald and score tests based on the asymptotic normality of the estimator, which permits testing of linear functions of the members if the subset. We examine the finite sample performance of the proposed tests by extensive simulation. Finally, the proposed method is successfully applied to the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative study, which motivated this work initially.

Visual perception plays an important role in autonomous driving. One of the primary tasks is object detection and identification. Since the vision sensor is rich in color and texture information, it can quickly and accurately identify various road information. The commonly used technique is based on extracting and calculating various features of the image. The recent development of deep learning-based method has better reliability and processing speed and has a greater advantage in recognizing complex elements. For depth estimation, vision sensor is also used for ranging due to their small size and low cost. Monocular camera uses image data from a single viewpoint as input to estimate object depth. In contrast, stereo vision is based on parallax and matching feature points of different views, and the application of deep learning also further improves the accuracy. In addition, Simultaneous Location and Mapping (SLAM) can establish a model of the road environment, thus helping the vehicle perceive the surrounding environment and complete the tasks. In this paper, we introduce and compare various methods of object detection and identification, then explain the development of depth estimation and compare various methods based on monocular, stereo, and RDBG sensors, next review and compare various methods of SLAM, and finally summarize the current problems and present the future development trends of vision technologies.

Morality in dialogue systems has raised great attention in research recently. A moral dialogue system could better connect users and enhance conversation engagement by gaining users' trust. In this paper, we propose a framework, MoralDial to train and evaluate moral dialogue systems. In our framework, we first explore the communication mechanisms of morality and resolve expressed morality into four sub-modules. The sub-modules indicate the roadmap for building a moral dialogue system. Based on that, we design a simple yet effective method: constructing moral discussions from Rules of Thumb (RoTs) between simulated specific users and the dialogue system. The constructed discussion consists of expressing, explaining, and revising the moral views in dialogue exchanges, which makes conversational models learn morality well in a natural manner. Furthermore, we propose a novel evaluation method in the framework. We evaluate the multiple aspects of morality by judging the relation between dialogue responses and RoTs in discussions, where the multifaceted nature of morality is particularly considered. Automatic and manual experiments demonstrate that our framework is promising to train and evaluate moral dialogue systems.

Modern virtual assistants use internal semantic parsing engines to convert user utterances to actionable commands. However, prior work has demonstrated that semantic parsing is a difficult multilingual transfer task with low transfer efficiency compared to other tasks. In global markets such as India and Latin America, this is a critical issue as switching between languages is prevalent for bilingual users. In this work we dramatically improve the zero-shot performance of a multilingual and codeswitched semantic parsing system using two stages of multilingual alignment. First, we show that constrastive alignment pretraining improves both English performance and transfer efficiency. We then introduce a constrained optimization approach for hyperparameter-free adversarial alignment during finetuning. Our Doubly Aligned Multilingual Parser (DAMP) improves mBERT transfer performance by 3x, 6x, and 81x on the Spanglish, Hinglish and Multilingual Task Oriented Parsing benchmarks respectively and outperforms XLM-R and mT5-Large using 3.2x fewer parameters.

Photometric differences are widely used as supervision signals to train neural networks for estimating depth and camera pose from unlabeled monocular videos. However, this approach is detrimental for model optimization because occlusions and moving objects in a scene violate the underlying static scenario assumption. In addition, pixels in textureless regions or less discriminative pixels hinder model training. To solve these problems, in this paper, we deal with moving objects and occlusions utilizing the difference of the flow fields and depth structure generated by affine transformation and view synthesis, respectively. Secondly, we mitigate the effect of textureless regions on model optimization by measuring differences between features with more semantic and contextual information without adding networks. In addition, although the bidirectionality component is used in each sub-objective function, a pair of images are reasoned about only once, which helps reduce overhead. Extensive experiments and visual analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which outperform existing state-of-the-art self-supervised methods under the same conditions and without introducing additional auxiliary information.

The success of deep learning is partly attributed to the availability of massive data downloaded freely from the Internet. However, it also means that users' private data may be collected by commercial organizations without consent and used to train their models. Therefore, it's important and necessary to develop a method or tool to prevent unauthorized data exploitation. In this paper, we propose ConfounderGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) that can make personal image data unlearnable to protect the data privacy of its owners. Specifically, the noise produced by the generator for each image has the confounder property. It can build spurious correlations between images and labels, so that the model cannot learn the correct mapping from images to labels in this noise-added dataset. Meanwhile, the discriminator is used to ensure that the generated noise is small and imperceptible, thereby remaining the normal utility of the encrypted image for humans. The experiments are conducted in six image classification datasets, consisting of three natural object datasets and three medical datasets. The results demonstrate that our method not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods in standard settings, but can also be applied to fast encryption scenarios. Moreover, we show a series of transferability and stability experiments to further illustrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.

Incorporating external knowledge into the response generation process is essential to building more helpful and reliable dialog agents. However, collecting knowledge-grounded conversations is often costly, calling for a better pre-trained model for grounded dialog generation that generalizes well w.r.t. different types of knowledge. In this work, we propose KPT (Keyword-guided Pre-Training), a novel self-supervised pre-training method for grounded dialog generation without relying on extra knowledge annotation. Specifically, we use a pre-trained language model to extract the most uncertain tokens in the dialog as keywords. With these keywords, we construct two kinds of knowledge and pre-train a knowledge-grounded response generation model, aiming at handling two different scenarios: (1) the knowledge should be faithfully grounded; (2) it can be selectively used. For the former, the grounding knowledge consists of keywords extracted from the response. For the latter, the grounding knowledge is additionally augmented with keywords extracted from other utterances in the same dialog. Since the knowledge is extracted from the dialog itself, KPT can be easily performed on a large volume and variety of dialogue data. We considered three data sources (open-domain, task-oriented, conversational QA) with a total of 2.5M dialogues. We conduct extensive experiments on various few-shot knowledge-grounded generation tasks, including grounding on dialog acts, knowledge graphs, persona descriptions, and Wikipedia passages. Our comprehensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that KPT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on these tasks with diverse grounding knowledge.

Data uncertainty is commonly observed in the images for face recognition (FR). However, deep learning algorithms often make predictions with high confidence even for uncertain or irrelevant inputs. Intuitively, FR algorithms can benefit from both the estimation of uncertainty and the detection of out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. Taking a probabilistic view of the current classification model, the temperature scalar is exactly the scale of uncertainty noise implicitly added in the softmax function. Meanwhile, the uncertainty of images in a dataset should follow a prior distribution. Based on the observation, a unified framework for uncertainty modeling and FR, Random Temperature Scaling (RTS), is proposed to learn a reliable FR algorithm. The benefits of RTS are two-fold. (1) In the training phase, it can adjust the learning strength of clean and noisy samples for stability and accuracy. (2) In the test phase, it can provide a score of confidence to detect uncertain, low-quality and even OOD samples, without training on extra labels. Extensive experiments on FR benchmarks demonstrate that the magnitude of variance in RTS, which serves as an OOD detection metric, is closely related to the uncertainty of the input image. RTS can achieve top performance on both the FR and OOD detection tasks. Moreover, the model trained with RTS can perform robustly on datasets with noise. The proposed module is light-weight and only adds negligible computation cost to the model.

Solving math word problems is the task that analyses the relation of quantities and requires an accurate understanding of contextual natural language information. Recent studies show that current models rely on shallow heuristics to predict solutions and could be easily misled by small textual perturbations. To address this problem, we propose a Textual Enhanced Contrastive Learning framework, which enforces the models to distinguish semantically similar examples while holding different mathematical logic. We adopt a self-supervised manner strategy to enrich examples with subtle textual variance by textual reordering or problem re-construction. We then retrieve the hardest to differentiate samples from both equation and textual perspectives and guide the model to learn their representations. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art on both widely used benchmark datasets and also exquisitely designed challenge datasets in English and Chinese. \footnote{Our code and data is available at \url{https://github.com/yiyunya/Textual_CL_MWP}