广告分配涉及将广告和有机项目分配给有限的饲料插槽，以最大化平台收入，已成为研究热点。请注意，电子商务平台通常有多个针对不同类别的入口，并且某些入口几乎没有访问。这些入口的数据覆盖范围较低，这使得代理很难学习。为了应对这一挑战，我们提出了基于相似性的ADS分配（SHTAA）的混合转移，该转移有效地将样本和知识从数据富裕的入口转移到数据贫乏的入口。具体而言，我们为MDP定义了不确定性感知的相似性，以估计不同入口的MDP的相似性。基于这种相似性，我们设计了一种混合转移方法，包括实例传输和策略传输，以有效地将样本和知识从一个入口传递到另一个入口。 Meituan食品交付平台上的离线和在线实验都表明，该建议的方法可以在数据贫困的入口方面获得更好的性能并增加平台的收入。

随着强化学习（RL）的最新流行率，在推荐平台（例如电子商务和新闻提要网站）中利用RL来利用RL进行广泛的兴趣。为了获得更好的分配，将最近基于RL的广告分配方法的输入从点单项目升级到列表项目的布置。但是，这也导致了国家行动对的高维空间，因此很难以良好的概括能力学习列表表示。这进一步阻碍了RL药物的探索，并导致样本效率差。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一种基于RL的新方法，用于广告分配，该方法通过利用Meituan食品交付平台上的任务特定信号来学习更好的列表表示形式。具体而言，我们根据对ADS分配的先前领域知识分别提出基于重建，预测和对比度学习的三个不同的辅助任务。我们在Meituan食品输送平台上进行了广泛的实验，以评估拟议的辅助任务的有效性。离线和在线实验结果都表明，与最先进的基线相比，提出的方法可以学习更好的列表表示形式，并获得更高的平台收入。

Interview has been regarded as one of the most crucial step for recruitment. To fully prepare for the interview with the recruiters, job seekers usually practice with mock interviews between each other. However, such a mock interview with peers is generally far away from the real interview experience: the mock interviewers are not guaranteed to be professional and are not likely to behave like a real interviewer. Due to the rapid growth of online recruitment in recent years, recruiters tend to have online interviews, which makes it possible to collect real interview data from real interviewers. In this paper, we propose a novel application named EZInterviewer, which aims to learn from the online interview data and provides mock interview services to the job seekers. The task is challenging in two ways: (1) the interview data are now available but still of low-resource; (2) to generate meaningful and relevant interview dialogs requires thorough understanding of both resumes and job descriptions. To address the low-resource challenge, EZInterviewer is trained on a very small set of interview dialogs. The key idea is to reduce the number of parameters that rely on interview dialogs by disentangling the knowledge selector and dialog generator so that most parameters can be trained with ungrounded dialogs as well as the resume data that are not low-resource. Evaluation results on a real-world job interview dialog dataset indicate that we achieve promising results to generate mock interviews. With the help of EZInterviewer, we hope to make mock interview practice become easier for job seekers.

General nonlinear sieve learnings are classes of nonlinear sieves that can approximate nonlinear functions of high dimensional variables much more flexibly than various linear sieves (or series). This paper considers general nonlinear sieve quasi-likelihood ratio (GN-QLR) based inference on expectation functionals of time series data, where the functionals of interest are based on some nonparametric function that satisfy conditional moment restrictions and are learned using multilayer neural networks. While the asymptotic normality of the estimated functionals depends on some unknown Riesz representer of the functional space, we show that the optimally weighted GN-QLR statistic is asymptotically Chi-square distributed, regardless whether the expectation functional is regular (root-$n$ estimable) or not. This holds when the data are weakly dependent beta-mixing condition. We apply our method to the off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, by formulating the Bellman equation into the conditional moment restriction framework, so that we can make inference about the state-specific value functional using the proposed GN-QLR method with time series data. In addition, estimating the averaged partial means and averaged partial derivatives of nonparametric instrumental variables and quantile IV models are also presented as leading examples. Finally, a Monte Carlo study shows the finite sample performance of the procedure

This paper presents a safety-critical locomotion control framework for quadrupedal robots. Our goal is to enable quadrupedal robots to safely navigate in cluttered environments. To tackle this, we introduce exponential Discrete Control Barrier Functions (exponential DCBFs) with duality-based obstacle avoidance constraints into a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) with Whole-Body Control (WBC) framework for quadrupedal locomotion control. This enables us to use polytopes to describe the shapes of the robot and obstacles for collision avoidance while doing locomotion control of quadrupedal robots. Compared to most prior work, especially using CBFs, that utilize spherical and conservative approximation for obstacle avoidance, this work demonstrates a quadrupedal robot autonomously and safely navigating through very tight spaces in the real world. (Our open-source code is available at github.com/HybridRobotics/quadruped_nmpc_dcbf_duality, and the video is available at youtu.be/p1gSQjwXm1Q.)

Video semantic segmentation (VSS) is beneficial for dealing with dynamic scenes due to the continuous property of the real-world environment. On the one hand, some methods alleviate the predicted inconsistent problem between continuous frames. On the other hand, other methods employ the previous frame as the prior information to assist in segmenting the current frame. Although the previous methods achieve superior performances on the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) data, they can not generalize well on other unseen domains. Thus, we explore a new task, the video generalizable semantic segmentation (VGSS) task that considers both continuous frames and domain generalization. In this paper, we propose a class-wise non-salient region generalized (CNSG) framework for the VGSS task. Concretely, we first define the class-wise non-salient feature, which describes features of the class-wise non-salient region that carry more generalizable information. Then, we propose a class-wise non-salient feature reasoning strategy to select and enhance the most generalized channels adaptively. Finally, we propose an inter-frame non-salient centroid alignment loss to alleviate the predicted inconsistent problem in the VGSS task. We also extend our video-based framework to the image-based generalizable semantic segmentation (IGSS) task. Experiments demonstrate that our CNSG framework yields significant improvement in the VGSS and IGSS tasks.

In this paper, we improve the kernel alignment regret bound for online kernel learning in the regime of the Hinge loss function. Previous algorithm achieves a regret of $O((\mathcal{A}_TT\ln{T})^{\frac{1}{4}})$ at a computational complexity (space and per-round time) of $O(\sqrt{\mathcal{A}_TT\ln{T}})$, where $\mathcal{A}_T$ is called \textit{kernel alignment}. We propose an algorithm whose regret bound and computational complexity are better than previous results. Our results depend on the decay rate of eigenvalues of the kernel matrix. If the eigenvalues of the kernel matrix decay exponentially, then our algorithm enjoys a regret of $O(\sqrt{\mathcal{A}_T})$ at a computational complexity of $O(\ln^2{T})$. Otherwise, our algorithm enjoys a regret of $O((\mathcal{A}_TT)^{\frac{1}{4}})$ at a computational complexity of $O(\sqrt{\mathcal{A}_TT})$. We extend our algorithm to batch learning and obtain a $O(\frac{1}{T}\sqrt{\mathbb{E}[\mathcal{A}_T]})$ excess risk bound which improves the previous $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ bound.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Modeling noise transition matrix is a kind of promising method for learning with label noise. Based on the estimated noise transition matrix and the noisy posterior probabilities, the clean posterior probabilities, which are jointly called Label Distribution (LD) in this paper, can be calculated as the supervision. To reliably estimate the noise transition matrix, some methods assume that anchor points are available during training. Nonetheless, if anchor points are invalid, the noise transition matrix might be poorly learned, resulting in poor performance. Consequently, other methods treat reliable data points, extracted from training data, as pseudo anchor points. However, from a statistical point of view, the noise transition matrix can be inferred from data with noisy labels under the clean-label-domination assumption. Therefore, we aim to estimate the noise transition matrix without (pseudo) anchor points. There is evidence showing that samples are more likely to be mislabeled as other similar class labels, which means the mislabeling probability is highly correlated with the inter-class correlation. Inspired by this observation, we propose an instance-specific Label Distribution Regularization (LDR), in which the instance-specific LD is estimated as the supervision, to prevent DCNNs from memorizing noisy labels. Specifically, we estimate the noisy posterior under the supervision of noisy labels, and approximate the batch-level noise transition matrix by estimating the inter-class correlation matrix with neither anchor points nor pseudo anchor points. Experimental results on two synthetic noisy datasets and two real-world noisy datasets demonstrate that our LDR outperforms existing methods.

With the development of gene sequencing technology, an explosive growth of gene data has been witnessed. And the storage of gene data has become an important issue. Traditional gene data compression methods rely on general software like G-zip, which fails to utilize the interrelation of nucleotide sequence. Recently, many researchers begin to investigate deep learning based gene data compression method. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based gene compression method named GeneFormer. Specifically, we first introduce a modified transformer structure to fully explore the nucleotide sequence dependency. Then, we propose fixed-length parallel grouping to accelerate the decoding speed of our autoregressive model. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that our method saves 29.7% bit rate compared with the state-of-the-art method, and the decoding speed is significantly faster than all existing learning-based gene compression methods.