Recently, there has been increasing interest in synthesizing data to improve downstream text-to-SQL tasks. In this paper, we first examined the existing synthesized datasets and discovered that state-of-the-art text-to-SQL algorithms did not further improve on popular benchmarks when trained with augmented synthetic data. We observed two shortcomings: illogical synthetic SQL queries from independent column sampling and arbitrary table joins. To address these issues, we propose a novel synthesis framework that incorporates key relationships from schema, imposes strong typing, and conducts schema-distance-weighted column sampling. We also adopt an intermediate representation (IR) for the SQL-to-text task to further improve the quality of the generated natural language questions. When existing powerful semantic parsers are pre-finetuned on our high-quality synthesized data, our experiments show that these models have significant accuracy boosts on popular benchmarks, including new state-of-the-art performance on Spider.

大型语言模型在各种问题答案（QA）基准测试方面取得了高度的性能，但其产出的解释性仍然难以捉摸。最近建议将结构化的解释称为“综合树”，以解释和检查质量检查系统的答案。为了更好地生成此类树木，我们提出了一种称为迭代检索生成推理​​器（IRGR）的架构。我们的模型能够通过系统地生成文本前提的分步解释来解释给定的假设。 IRGR模型迭代地搜索合适的场所，一次构建单个零件步骤。与以前的方法相反，我们的方法结合了生成步骤和房屋的检索，允许模型利用中间结论，并减轻基线编码器模型的输入大小限制。我们使用IntailmentBank数据集进行实验，在该数据集中，我们在前提检索和索引树上的现有基准优于现有的基准，总体正确性增长了约300％。

雇用无人驾驶航空公司（无人机）吸引了日益增长的兴趣，并成为互联网（物联网）网络中的数据收集技术的最先进技术。在本文中，目的是最大限度地减少UAV-IOT系统的总能耗，我们制定了联合设计了UAV的轨迹和选择IOT网络中的群集头作为受约束的组合优化问题的问题，该问题被归类为NP-努力解决。我们提出了一种新的深度加强学习（DRL），其具有顺序模型策略，可以通过无监督方式有效地学习由UAV的轨迹设计来实现由序列到序列神经网络表示的策略。通过广泛的模拟，所获得的结果表明，与其他基线算法相比，所提出的DRL方法可以找到无人机的轨迹，这些轨迹需要更少的能量消耗，并实现近乎最佳性能。此外，仿真结果表明，我们所提出的DRL算法的训练模型具有出色的概括能力，对更大的问题尺寸而没有必要恢复模型。

We investigate statistical uncertainty quantification for reinforcement learning (RL) and its implications in exploration policy. Despite ever-growing literature on RL applications, fundamental questions about inference and error quantification, such as large-sample behaviors, appear to remain quite open. In this paper, we fill in the literature gap by studying the central limit theorem behaviors of estimated Q-values and value functions under various RL settings. In particular, we explicitly identify closed-form expressions of the asymptotic variances, which allow us to efficiently construct asymptotically valid confidence regions for key RL quantities. Furthermore, we utilize these asymptotic expressions to design an effective exploration strategy, which we call Q-value-based Optimal Computing Budget Allocation (Q-OCBA). The policy relies on maximizing the relative discrepancies among the Q-value estimates. Numerical experiments show superior performances of our exploration strategy than other benchmark policies.

We introduce a novel framework to track multiple objects in overhead camera videos for airport checkpoint security scenarios where targets correspond to passengers and their baggage items. We propose a Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) technique to provide the model information about instance segmentation uncertainty from overhead images. Our SSL approach improves object detection by employing a test-time data augmentation and a regression-based, rotation-invariant pseudo-label refinement technique. Our pseudo-label generation method provides multiple geometrically-transformed images as inputs to a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), regresses the augmented detections generated by the network to reduce localization errors, and then clusters them using the mean-shift algorithm. The self-supervised detector model is used in a single-camera tracking algorithm to generate temporal identifiers for the targets. Our method also incorporates a multi-view trajectory association mechanism to maintain consistent temporal identifiers as passengers travel across camera views. An evaluation of detection, tracking, and association performances on videos obtained from multiple overhead cameras in a realistic airport checkpoint environment demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our results show that self-supervision improves object detection accuracy by up to $42\%$ without increasing the inference time of the model. Our multi-camera association method achieves up to $89\%$ multi-object tracking accuracy with an average computation time of less than $15$ ms.

The availability of frequent and cost-free satellite images is in growing demand in the research world. Such satellite constellations as Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 provide a massive amount of valuable data daily. However, the discrepancy in the sensors' characteristics of these satellites makes it senseless to use a segmentation model trained on either dataset and applied to another, which is why domain adaptation techniques have recently become an active research area in remote sensing. In this paper, an experiment of domain adaptation through style-transferring is conducted using the HRSemI2I model to narrow the sensor discrepancy between Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2. This paper's main contribution is analyzing the expediency of that approach by comparing the results of segmentation using domain-adapted images with those without adaptation. The HRSemI2I model, adjusted to work with 6-band imagery, shows significant intersection-over-union performance improvement for both mean and per class metrics. A second contribution is providing different schemes of generalization between two label schemes - NALCMS 2015 and CORINE. The first scheme is standardization through higher-level land cover classes, and the second is through harmonization validation in the field.

When a human communicates with a machine using natural language on the web and online, how can it understand the human's intention and semantic context of their talk? This is an important AI task as it enables the machine to construct a sensible answer or perform a useful action for the human. Meaning is represented at the sentence level, identification of which is known as intent detection, and at the word level, a labelling task called slot filling. This dual-level joint task requires innovative thinking about natural language and deep learning network design, and as a result, many approaches and models have been proposed and applied. This tutorial will discuss how the joint task is set up and introduce Spoken Language Understanding/Natural Language Understanding (SLU/NLU) with Deep Learning techniques. We will cover the datasets, experiments and metrics used in the field. We will describe how the machine uses the latest NLP and Deep Learning techniques to address the joint task, including recurrent and attention-based Transformer networks and pre-trained models (e.g. BERT). We will then look in detail at a network that allows the two levels of the task, intent classification and slot filling, to interact to boost performance explicitly. We will do a code demonstration of a Python notebook for this model and attendees will have an opportunity to watch coding demo tasks on this joint NLU to further their understanding.

Datacenter operators ensure fair and regular server maintenance by using automated processes to schedule maintenance jobs to complete within a strict time budget. Automating this scheduling problem is challenging because maintenance job duration varies based on both job type and hardware. While it is tempting to use prior machine learning techniques for predicting job duration, we find that the structure of the maintenance job scheduling problem creates a unique challenge. In particular, we show that prior machine learning methods that produce the lowest error predictions do not produce the best scheduling outcomes due to asymmetric costs. Specifically, underpredicting maintenance job duration has results in more servers being taken offline and longer server downtime than overpredicting maintenance job duration. The system cost of underprediction is much larger than that of overprediction. We present Acela, a machine learning system for predicting maintenance job duration, which uses quantile regression to bias duration predictions toward overprediction. We integrate Acela into a maintenance job scheduler and evaluate it on datasets from large-scale, production datacenters. Compared to machine learning based predictors from prior work, Acela reduces the number of servers that are taken offline by 1.87-4.28X, and reduces the server offline time by 1.40-2.80X.

We discuss pattern languages for closed pattern mining and learning of interval data and distributional data. We first introduce pattern languages relying on pairs of intersection-based constraints or pairs of inclusion based constraints, or both, applied to intervals. We discuss the encoding of such interval patterns as itemsets thus allowing to use closed itemsets mining and formal concept analysis programs. We experiment these languages on clustering and supervised learning tasks. Then we show how to extend the approach to address distributional data.

Reinforcement-learning agents seek to maximize a reward signal through environmental interactions. As humans, our contribution to the learning process is through designing the reward function. Like programmers, we have a behavior in mind and have to translate it into a formal specification, namely rewards. In this work, we consider the reward-design problem in tasks formulated as reaching desirable states and avoiding undesirable states. To start, we propose a strict partial ordering of the policy space. We prefer policies that reach the good states faster and with higher probability while avoiding the bad states longer. Next, we propose an environment-independent tiered reward structure and show it is guaranteed to induce policies that are Pareto-optimal according to our preference relation. Finally, we empirically evaluate tiered reward functions on several environments and show they induce desired behavior and lead to fast learning.