Powerful generative models have led to recent progress in question generation (QG). However, it is difficult to measure advances in QG research since there are no standardized resources that allow a uniform comparison among approaches. In this paper, we introduce QG-Bench, a multilingual and multidomain benchmark for QG that unifies existing question answering datasets by converting them to a standard QG setting. It includes general-purpose datasets such as SQuAD for English, datasets from ten domains and two styles, as well as datasets in eight different languages. Using QG-Bench as a reference, we perform an extensive analysis of the capabilities of language models for the task. First, we propose robust QG baselines based on fine-tuning generative language models. Then, we complement automatic evaluation based on standard metrics with an extensive manual evaluation, which in turn sheds light on the difficulty of evaluating QG models. Finally, we analyse both the domain adaptability of these models as well as the effectiveness of multilingual models in languages other than English. QG-Bench is released along with the fine-tuned models presented in the paper https://github.com/asahi417/lm-question-generation, which are also available as a demo https://autoqg.net/.

Advances in computer vision and machine learning techniques have led to significant development in 2D and 3D human pose estimation from RGB cameras, LiDAR, and radars. However, human pose estimation from images is adversely affected by occlusion and lighting, which are common in many scenarios of interest. Radar and LiDAR technologies, on the other hand, need specialized hardware that is expensive and power-intensive. Furthermore, placing these sensors in non-public areas raises significant privacy concerns. To address these limitations, recent research has explored the use of WiFi antennas (1D sensors) for body segmentation and key-point body detection. This paper further expands on the use of the WiFi signal in combination with deep learning architectures, commonly used in computer vision, to estimate dense human pose correspondence. We developed a deep neural network that maps the phase and amplitude of WiFi signals to UV coordinates within 24 human regions. The results of the study reveal that our model can estimate the dense pose of multiple subjects, with comparable performance to image-based approaches, by utilizing WiFi signals as the only input. This paves the way for low-cost, broadly accessible, and privacy-preserving algorithms for human sensing.

Periocular refers to the region of the face that surrounds the eye socket. This is a feature-rich area that can be used by itself to determine the identity of an individual. It is especially useful when the iris or the face cannot be reliably acquired. This can be the case of unconstrained or uncooperative scenarios, where the face may appear partially occluded, or the subject-to-camera distance may be high. However, it has received revived attention during the pandemic due to masked faces, leaving the ocular region as the only visible facial area, even in controlled scenarios. This paper discusses the state-of-the-art of periocular biometrics, giving an overall framework of its most significant research aspects.

Traditionally, data analysis and theory have been viewed as separate disciplines, each feeding into fundamentally different types of models. Modern deep learning technology is beginning to unify these two disciplines and will produce a new class of predictively powerful space weather models that combine the physical insights gained by data and theory. We call on NASA to invest in the research and infrastructure necessary for the heliophysics' community to take advantage of these advances.

Multi-class ensemble classification remains a popular focus of investigation within the research community. The popularization of cloud services has sped up their adoption due to the ease of deploying large-scale machine-learning models. It has also drawn the attention of the industrial sector because of its ability to identify common problems in production. However, there are challenges to conform an ensemble classifier, namely a proper selection and effective training of the pool of classifiers, the definition of a proper architecture for multi-class classification, and uncertainty quantification of the ensemble classifier. The robustness and effectiveness of the ensemble classifier lie in the selection of the pool of classifiers, as well as in the learning process. Hence, the selection and the training procedure of the pool of classifiers play a crucial role. An (ensemble) classifier learns to detect the classes that were used during the supervised training. However, when injecting data with unknown conditions, the trained classifier will intend to predict the classes learned during the training. To this end, the uncertainty of the individual and ensemble classifier could be used to assess the learning capability. We present a novel approach for novel detection using ensemble classification and evidence theory. A pool selection strategy is presented to build a solid ensemble classifier. We present an architecture for multi-class ensemble classification and an approach to quantify the uncertainty of the individual classifiers and the ensemble classifier. We use uncertainty for the anomaly detection approach. Finally, we use the benchmark Tennessee Eastman to perform experiments to test the ensemble classifier's prediction and anomaly detection capabilities.

This paper is about the design of an automated machine to cut turbot fish specimens. Machine vision is a key part of this project as it is used to compute a cutting curve for the specimen head. This task is impossible to be carried out by mechanical means. Machine vision is used to detect head boundary and a robot is used to cut the head. Binarization and mathematical morphology are used to detect fish boundary and this boundary is subsequently analyzed (using Hough transform and convex hull) to detect key points and thus defining the cutting curve. Afterwards, mechanical systems are used to slice fish to get an easy presentation for end consumer (as fish fillets than can be easily marketed and consumed).

Chatbots are expected to be knowledgeable across multiple domains, e.g. for daily chit-chat, exchange of information, and grounding in emotional situations. To effectively measure the quality of such conversational agents, a model-based automatic dialogue evaluation metric (ADEM) is expected to perform well across multiple domains. Despite significant progress, an ADEM that works well in one domain does not necessarily generalize to another. This calls for a dedicated network architecture for domain generalization. To tackle the multi-domain dialogue evaluation task, we propose a Panel of Experts (PoE), a multitask network that consists of a shared transformer encoder and a collection of lightweight adapters. The shared encoder captures the general knowledge of dialogues across domains, while each adapter specializes in one specific domain and serves as a domain expert. To validate the idea, we construct a high-quality multi-domain dialogue dataset leveraging data augmentation and pseudo-labeling. The PoE network is comprehensively assessed on 16 dialogue evaluation datasets spanning a wide range of dialogue domains. It achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of mean Spearman correlation over all the evaluation datasets. It exhibits better zero-shot generalization than existing state-of-the-art ADEMs and the ability to easily adapt to new domains with few-shot transfer learning.

Early recognition of clinical deterioration (CD) has vital importance in patients' survival from exacerbation or death. Electronic health records (EHRs) data have been widely employed in Early Warning Scores (EWS) to measure CD risk in hospitalized patients. Recently, EHRs data have been utilized in Machine Learning (ML) models to predict mortality and CD. The ML models have shown superior performance in CD prediction compared to EWS. Since EHRs data are structured and tabular, conventional ML models are generally applied to them, and less effort is put into evaluating the artificial neural network's performance on EHRs data. Thus, in this article, an extremely boosted neural network (XBNet) is used to predict CD, and its performance is compared to eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and random forest (RF) models. For this purpose, 103,105 samples from thirteen Brazilian hospitals are used to generate the models. Moreover, the principal component analysis (PCA) is employed to verify whether it can improve the adopted models' performance. The performance of ML models and Modified Early Warning Score (MEWS), an EWS candidate, are evaluated in CD prediction regarding the accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and geometric mean (G-mean) metrics in a 10-fold cross-validation approach. According to the experiments, the XGBoost model obtained the best results in predicting CD among Brazilian hospitals' data.

Workplace injuries are common in today's society due to a lack of adequately worn safety equipment. A system that only admits appropriately equipped personnel can be created to improve working conditions. The goal is thus to develop a system that will improve workers' safety using a camera that will detect the usage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). To this end, we collected and labeled appropriate data from several public sources, which have been used to train and evaluate several models based on the popular YOLOv4 object detector. Our focus, driven by a collaborating industrial partner, is to implement our system into an entry control point where workers must present themselves to obtain access to a restricted area. Combined with facial identity recognition, the system would ensure that only authorized people wearing appropriate equipment are granted access. A novelty of this work is that we increase the number of classes to five objects (hardhat, safety vest, safety gloves, safety glasses, and hearing protection), whereas most existing works only focus on one or two classes, usually hardhats or vests. The AI model developed provides good detection accuracy at a distance of 3 and 5 meters in the collaborative environment where we aim at operating (mAP of 99/89%, respectively). The small size of some objects or the potential occlusion by body parts have been identified as potential factors that are detrimental to accuracy, which we have counteracted via data augmentation and cropping of the body before applying PPE detection.

One of the biggest challenges in machine learning is data collection. Training data is an important part since it determines how the model will behave. In object classification, capturing a large number of images per object and in different conditions is not always possible and can be very time-consuming and tedious. Accordingly, this work explores the creation of artificial images using a game engine to cope with limited data in the training dataset. We combine real and synthetic data to train the object classification engine, a strategy that has shown to be beneficial to increase confidence in the decisions made by the classifier, which is often critical in industrial setups. To combine real and synthetic data, we first train the classifier on a massive amount of synthetic data, and then we fine-tune it on real images. Another important result is that the amount of real images needed for fine-tuning is not very high, reaching top accuracy with just 12 or 24 images per class. This substantially reduces the requirements of capturing a great amount of real data.