对于工业规模的广告系统，对广告点击率（CTR）的预测是一个核心问题。广告点击构成了一类重要的用户参与，通常用作广告对用户有用的主要信号。此外，在每次点击收费的广告系统中，单击费用期望值直接输入价值估计。因此，对于大多数互联网广告公司而言，CTR模型开发是一项重大投资。此类问题的工程需要许多适合在线学习的机器学习（ML）技术，这些技术远远超出了传统的准确性改进，尤其是有关效率，可重复性，校准，信用归因。我们介绍了Google搜索广告CTR模型中部署的实用技术的案例研究。本文提供了一项行业案例研究，该研究强调了当前的ML研究的重要领域，并说明了如何评估有影响力的新ML方法并在大型工业环境中有用。

We initiate a formal study of reproducibility in optimization. We define a quantitative measure of reproducibility of optimization procedures in the face of noisy or error-prone operations such as inexact or stochastic gradient computations or inexact initialization. We then analyze several convex optimization settings of interest such as smooth, non-smooth, and strongly-convex objective functions and establish tight bounds on the limits of reproducibility in each setting. Our analysis reveals a fundamental trade-off between computation and reproducibility: more computation is necessary (and sufficient) for better reproducibility.

辍学通常用于量化预测不确定性，即给定输入示例上模型预测的变化。但是，在实践中使用辍学可能是昂贵的，因为它需要多次运行辍学推理。在本文中，我们研究了如何以资源有效的方式估计辍学的预测不确定性。我们证明，我们可以使用神经元激活强度来估计不同辍学设置下的辍学预测不确定性，并使用三个大型数据集（Movielens，Criteo和Emnist）进行多种任务。我们的方法提供了一种推理方法，将辍学预测不确定性视为廉价辅助任务。我们还证明，使用来自神经网络层的一个子集的激活特征足以达到不确定性估计性能几乎可以与使用所有层的激活特征相当，从而进一步降低了不确定性估计的资源。

We introduce anchored radial observations (ARO), a novel shape encoding for learning neural field representation of shapes that is category-agnostic and generalizable amid significant shape variations. The main idea behind our work is to reason about shapes through partial observations from a set of viewpoints, called anchors. We develop a general and unified shape representation by employing a fixed set of anchors, via Fibonacci sampling, and designing a coordinate-based deep neural network to predict the occupancy value of a query point in space. Differently from prior neural implicit models, that use global shape feature, our shape encoder operates on contextual, query-specific features. To predict point occupancy, locally observed shape information from the perspective of the anchors surrounding the input query point are encoded and aggregated through an attention module, before implicit decoding is performed. We demonstrate the quality and generality of our network, coined ARO-Net, on surface reconstruction from sparse point clouds, with tests on novel and unseen object categories, "one-shape" training, and comparisons to state-of-the-art neural and classical methods for reconstruction and tessellation.

Action recognition models have achieved impressive results by incorporating scene-level annotations, such as objects, their relations, 3D structure, and more. However, obtaining annotations of scene structure for videos requires a significant amount of effort to gather and annotate, making these methods expensive to train. In contrast, synthetic datasets generated by graphics engines provide powerful alternatives for generating scene-level annotations across multiple tasks. In this work, we propose an approach to leverage synthetic scene data for improving video understanding. We present a multi-task prompt learning approach for video transformers, where a shared video transformer backbone is enhanced by a small set of specialized parameters for each task. Specifically, we add a set of ``task prompts'', each corresponding to a different task, and let each prompt predict task-related annotations. This design allows the model to capture information shared among synthetic scene tasks as well as information shared between synthetic scene tasks and a real video downstream task throughout the entire network. We refer to this approach as ``Promptonomy'', since the prompts model a task-related structure. We propose the PromptonomyViT model (PViT), a video transformer that incorporates various types of scene-level information from synthetic data using the ``Promptonomy'' approach. PViT shows strong performance improvements on multiple video understanding tasks and datasets.

Enhancing resilience in distributed networks in the face of malicious agents is an important problem for which many key theoretical results and applications require further development and characterization. This work focuses on the problem of distributed optimization in multi-agent cyberphysical systems, where a legitimate agent's dynamic is influenced both by the values it receives from potentially malicious neighboring agents, and by its own self-serving target function. We develop a new algorithmic and analytical framework to achieve resilience for the class of problems where stochastic values of trust between agents exist and can be exploited. In this case we show that convergence to the true global optimal point can be recovered, both in mean and almost surely, even in the presence of malicious agents. Furthermore, we provide expected convergence rate guarantees in the form of upper bounds on the expected squared distance to the optimal value. Finally, we present numerical results that validate the analytical convergence guarantees we present in this paper even when the malicious agents compose the majority of agents in the network.

Understanding the 3D world from 2D images involves more than detection and segmentation of the objects within the scene. It also includes the interpretation of the structure and arrangement of the scene elements. Such understanding is often rooted in recognizing the physical world and its limitations, and in prior knowledge as to how similar typical scenes are arranged. In this research we pose a new challenge for neural network (or other) scene understanding algorithms - can they distinguish between plausible and implausible scenes? Plausibility can be defined both in terms of physical properties and in terms of functional and typical arrangements. Hence, we define plausibility as the probability of encountering a given scene in the real physical world. We build a dataset of synthetic images containing both plausible and implausible scenes, and test the success of various vision models in the task of recognizing and understanding plausibility.

Video synthesis methods rapidly improved in recent years, allowing easy creation of synthetic humans. This poses a problem, especially in the era of social media, as synthetic videos of speaking humans can be used to spread misinformation in a convincing manner. Thus, there is a pressing need for accurate and robust deepfake detection methods, that can detect forgery techniques not seen during training. In this work, we explore whether this can be done by leveraging a multi-modal, out-of-domain backbone trained in a self-supervised manner, adapted to the video deepfake domain. We propose FakeOut; a novel approach that relies on multi-modal data throughout both the pre-training phase and the adaption phase. We demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of FakeOut in detecting various types of deepfakes, especially manipulations which were not seen during training. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in cross-manipulation and cross-dataset generalization. This study shows that, perhaps surprisingly, training on out-of-domain videos (i.e., videos with no speaking humans), can lead to better deepfake detection systems. Code is available on GitHub.

In this paper, we present a method for converting a given scene image into a sketch using different types and multiple levels of abstraction. We distinguish between two types of abstraction. The first considers the fidelity of the sketch, varying its representation from a more precise portrayal of the input to a looser depiction. The second is defined by the visual simplicity of the sketch, moving from a detailed depiction to a sparse sketch. Using an explicit disentanglement into two abstraction axes -- and multiple levels for each one -- provides users additional control over selecting the desired sketch based on their personal goals and preferences. To form a sketch at a given level of fidelity and simplification, we train two MLP networks. The first network learns the desired placement of strokes, while the second network learns to gradually remove strokes from the sketch without harming its recognizability and semantics. Our approach is able to generate sketches of complex scenes including those with complex backgrounds (e.g., natural and urban settings) and subjects (e.g., animals and people) while depicting gradual abstractions of the input scene in terms of fidelity and simplicity.

Effective conservation of maritime environments and wildlife management of endangered species require the implementation of efficient, accurate and scalable solutions for environmental monitoring. Ecoacoustics offers the advantages of non-invasive, long-duration sampling of environmental sounds and has the potential to become the reference tool for biodiversity surveying. However, the analysis and interpretation of acoustic data is a time-consuming process that often requires a great amount of human supervision. This issue might be tackled by exploiting modern techniques for automatic audio signal analysis, which have recently achieved impressive performance thanks to the advances in deep learning research. In this paper we show that convolutional neural networks can indeed significantly outperform traditional automatic methods in a challenging detection task: identification of dolphin whistles from underwater audio recordings. The proposed system can detect signals even in the presence of ambient noise, at the same time consistently reducing the likelihood of producing false positives and false negatives. Our results further support the adoption of artificial intelligence technology to improve the automatic monitoring of marine ecosystems.