最近的工作表明，学习的图像压缩策略可以倾销标准的手工制作压缩算法，这些压缩算法已经开发了几十年的速率 - 失真折衷的研究。随着计算机视觉的不断增长的应用，来自可压缩表示的高质量图像重建通常是次要目标。压缩，可确保计算机视觉任务等高精度，例如图像分割，分类和检测，因此具有跨各种设置的显着影响的可能性。在这项工作中，我们开发了一个框架，它产生适合人类感知和机器感知的压缩格式。我们表明可以了解到表示，同时优化核心视觉任务的压缩和性能。我们的方法允许直接从压缩表示培训模型，并且这种方法会产生新任务和低拍学习设置的性能。我们呈现出与标准高质量JPG相比细分和检测性能提高的结果，但是在每像素的比特方面，表示表示的表示性比率为4至10倍。此外，与天真的压缩方法不同，在比标准JEPG的十倍小的级别，我们格式培训的分段和检测模型仅在性能下遭受轻微的降级。

在全球范围内消除语言障碍的目标的驱动下，机器翻译已巩固自己是当今人工智能研究的关键重点。但是，这样的努力围绕着一小部分语言结合在一起，留下了绝大多数低资源的语言。在确保安全，高质量的结果的同时，在牢记道德考虑的同时，打破200个语言障碍需要什么？没有留下的语言，我们首先通过与母语人士的探索性访谈来解决对低资源语言翻译支持的必要性来应对这一挑战。然后，我们创建了旨在缩小低资源和高资源语言之间的性能差距的数据集和模型。更具体地说，我们开发了一种有条件的计算模型，基于专家的稀疏混合物，该模型经过针对针对低资源语言量身定制的新颖有效的数据挖掘技术培训的。我们提出了多次建筑和培训改进，以抵消数千个任务的培训。至关重要的是，我们使用人类翻译的基准，Flores-200评估了40,000多种不同的翻译方向的性能，并将人类评估与新型毒性基准相结合，涵盖Flores-200的所有语言，以评估翻译安全性。我们的模型相对于先前的最新技术，实现了44％BLEU的改善，为实现通用翻译系统奠定了重要的基础。最后，我们开源此工作中描述的所有贡献，可在https://github.com/facebookresearch/fairseq/tree/nllb上访问。

Non-linear state-space models, also known as general hidden Markov models, are ubiquitous in statistical machine learning, being the most classical generative models for serial data and sequences in general. The particle-based, rapid incremental smoother PaRIS is a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) technique allowing for efficient online approximation of expectations of additive functionals under the smoothing distribution in these models. Such expectations appear naturally in several learning contexts, such as likelihood estimation (MLE) and Markov score climbing (MSC). PARIS has linear computational complexity, limited memory requirements and comes with non-asymptotic bounds, convergence results and stability guarantees. Still, being based on self-normalised importance sampling, the PaRIS estimator is biased. Our first contribution is to design a novel additive smoothing algorithm, the Parisian particle Gibbs PPG sampler, which can be viewed as a PaRIS algorithm driven by conditional SMC moves, resulting in bias-reduced estimates of the targeted quantities. We substantiate the PPG algorithm with theoretical results, including new bounds on bias and variance as well as deviation inequalities. Our second contribution is to apply PPG in a learning framework, covering MLE and MSC as special examples. In this context, we establish, under standard assumptions, non-asymptotic bounds highlighting the value of bias reduction and the implicit Rao--Blackwellization of PPG. These are the first non-asymptotic results of this kind in this setting. We illustrate our theoretical results with numerical experiments supporting our claims.

This report summarizes the work carried out by the authors during the Twelfth Montreal Industrial Problem Solving Workshop, held at Universit\'e de Montr\'eal in August 2022. The team tackled a problem submitted by CBC/Radio-Canada on the theme of Automatic Text Simplification (ATS).

In order for artificial neural networks to begin accurately mimicking biological ones, they must be able to adapt to new exigencies without forgetting what they have learned from previous training. Lifelong learning approaches to artificial neural networks attempt to strive towards this goal, yet have not progressed far enough to be realistically deployed for natural language processing tasks. The proverbial roadblock of catastrophic forgetting still gate-keeps researchers from an adequate lifelong learning model. While efforts are being made to quell catastrophic forgetting, there is a lack of research that looks into the importance of class ordering when training on new classes for incremental learning. This is surprising as the ordering of "classes" that humans learn is heavily monitored and incredibly important. While heuristics to develop an ideal class order have been researched, this paper examines class ordering as it relates to priming as a scheme for incremental class learning. By examining the connections between various methods of priming found in humans and how those are mimicked yet remain unexplained in life-long machine learning, this paper provides a better understanding of the similarities between our biological systems and the synthetic systems while simultaneously improving current practices to combat catastrophic forgetting. Through the merging of psychological priming practices with class ordering, this paper is able to identify a generalizable method for class ordering in NLP incremental learning tasks that consistently outperforms random class ordering.

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions, a.k.a. instruction-tuning, improves their zero and few-shot generalization to unseen tasks. However, there is a limited understanding of the performance trade-offs of different decisions made during the instruction-tuning process. These decisions include the scale and diversity of the instruction-tuning benchmark, different task sampling strategies, fine-tuning with and without demonstrations, training using specialized datasets for reasoning and dialogue, and finally, the fine-tuning objectives themselves. In this paper, we characterize the effect of instruction-tuning decisions on downstream task performance when scaling both model and benchmark sizes. To this end, we create OPT-IML Bench: a large benchmark for Instruction Meta-Learning (IML) of 2000 NLP tasks consolidated into task categories from 8 existing benchmarks, and prepare an evaluation framework to measure three types of model generalizations: to tasks from fully held-out categories, to held-out tasks from seen categories, and to held-out instances from seen tasks. Through the lens of this framework, we first present insights about instruction-tuning decisions as applied to OPT-30B and further exploit these insights to train OPT-IML 30B and 175B, which are instruction-tuned versions of OPT. OPT-IML demonstrates all three generalization abilities at both scales on four different evaluation benchmarks with diverse tasks and input formats -- PromptSource, FLAN, Super-NaturalInstructions, and UnifiedSKG. Not only does it significantly outperform OPT on all benchmarks but is also highly competitive with existing models fine-tuned on each specific benchmark. We release OPT-IML at both scales, together with the OPT-IML Bench evaluation framework.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) are emerging as a ubiquitous scene representation that allows for novel view synthesis. Increasingly, NeRFs will be shareable with other people. Before sharing a NeRF, though, it might be desirable to remove personal information or unsightly objects. Such removal is not easily achieved with the current NeRF editing frameworks. We propose a framework to remove objects from a NeRF representation created from an RGB-D sequence. Our NeRF inpainting method leverages recent work in 2D image inpainting and is guided by a user-provided mask. Our algorithm is underpinned by a confidence based view selection procedure. It chooses which of the individual 2D inpainted images to use in the creation of the NeRF, so that the resulting inpainted NeRF is 3D consistent. We show that our method for NeRF editing is effective for synthesizing plausible inpaintings in a multi-view coherent manner. We validate our approach using a new and still-challenging dataset for the task of NeRF inpainting.

Traditional approaches to RL have focused on learning decision policies directly from episodic decisions, while slowly and implicitly learning the semantics of compositional representations needed for generalization. While some approaches have been adopted to refine representations via auxiliary self-supervised losses while simultaneously learning decision policies, learning compositional representations from hand-designed and context-independent self-supervised losses (multi-view) still adapts relatively slowly to the real world, which contains many non-IID subspaces requiring rapid distribution shift in both time and spatial attention patterns at varying levels of abstraction. In contrast, supervised language model cascades have shown the flexibility to adapt to many diverse manifolds, and hints of self-learning needed for autonomous task transfer. However, to date, transfer methods for language models like few-shot learning and fine-tuning still require human supervision and transfer learning using self-learning methods has been underexplored. We propose a self-supervised loss policy called contrastive distillation which manifests latent variables with high mutual information with both source and target tasks from weights to tokens. We show how this outperforms common methods of transfer learning and suggests a useful design axis of trading off compute for generalizability for online transfer. Contrastive distillation is improved through sampling from memory and suggests a simple algorithm for more efficiently sampling negative examples for contrastive losses than random sampling.

Generalisation to unseen contexts remains a challenge for embodied navigation agents. In the context of semantic audio-visual navigation (SAVi) tasks, the notion of generalisation should include both generalising to unseen indoor visual scenes as well as generalising to unheard sounding objects. However, previous SAVi task definitions do not include evaluation conditions on truly novel sounding objects, resorting instead to evaluating agents on unheard sound clips of known objects; meanwhile, previous SAVi methods do not include explicit mechanisms for incorporating domain knowledge about object and region semantics. These weaknesses limit the development and assessment of models' abilities to generalise their learned experience. In this work, we introduce the use of knowledge-driven scene priors in the semantic audio-visual embodied navigation task: we combine semantic information from our novel knowledge graph that encodes object-region relations, spatial knowledge from dual Graph Encoder Networks, and background knowledge from a series of pre-training tasks -- all within a reinforcement learning framework for audio-visual navigation. We also define a new audio-visual navigation sub-task, where agents are evaluated on novel sounding objects, as opposed to unheard clips of known objects. We show improvements over strong baselines in generalisation to unseen regions and novel sounding objects, within the Habitat-Matterport3D simulation environment, under the SoundSpaces task.

This paper analyzes $\ell_1$ regularized linear regression under the challenging scenario of having only adversarially corrupted data for training. We use the primal-dual witness paradigm to provide provable performance guarantees for the support of the estimated regression parameter vector to match the actual parameter. Our theoretical analysis shows the counter-intuitive result that an adversary can influence sample complexity by corrupting the irrelevant features, i.e., those corresponding to zero coefficients of the regression parameter vector, which, consequently, do not affect the dependent variable. As any adversarially robust algorithm has its limitations, our theoretical analysis identifies the regimes under which the learning algorithm and adversary can dominate over each other. It helps us to analyze these fundamental limits and address critical scientific questions of which parameters (like mutual incoherence, the maximum and minimum eigenvalue of the covariance matrix, and the budget of adversarial perturbation) play a role in the high or low probability of success of the LASSO algorithm. Also, the derived sample complexity is logarithmic with respect to the size of the regression parameter vector, and our theoretical claims are validated by empirical analysis on synthetic and real-world datasets.