We study estimation and testing in the Poisson regression model with noisy high dimensional covariates, which has wide applications in analyzing noisy big data. Correcting for the estimation bias due to the covariate noise leads to a non-convex target function to minimize. Treating the high dimensional issue further leads us to augment an amenable penalty term to the target function. We propose to estimate the regression parameter through minimizing the penalized target function. We derive the L1 and L2 convergence rates of the estimator and prove the variable selection consistency. We further establish the asymptotic normality of any subset of the parameters, where the subset can have infinitely many components as long as its cardinality grows sufficiently slow. We develop Wald and score tests based on the asymptotic normality of the estimator, which permits testing of linear functions of the members if the subset. We examine the finite sample performance of the proposed tests by extensive simulation. Finally, the proposed method is successfully applied to the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative study, which motivated this work initially.

Long document retrieval aims to fetch query-relevant documents from a large-scale collection, where knowledge distillation has become de facto to improve a retriever by mimicking a heterogeneous yet powerful cross-encoder. However, in contrast to passages or sentences, retrieval on long documents suffers from the scope hypothesis that a long document may cover multiple topics. This maximizes their structure heterogeneity and poses a granular-mismatch issue, leading to an inferior distillation efficacy. In this work, we propose a new learning framework, fine-grained distillation (FGD), for long-document retrievers. While preserving the conventional dense retrieval paradigm, it first produces global-consistent representations crossing different fine granularity and then applies multi-granular aligned distillation merely during training. In experiments, we evaluate our framework on two long-document retrieval benchmarks, which show state-of-the-art performance.

The 1$^{\text{st}}$ Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2023 focused on maritime computer vision for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), and organized several subchallenges in this domain: (i) UAV-based Maritime Object Detection, (ii) UAV-based Maritime Object Tracking, (iii) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Segmentation and (iv) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Detection. The subchallenges were based on the SeaDronesSee and MODS benchmarks. This report summarizes the main findings of the individual subchallenges and introduces a new benchmark, called SeaDronesSee Object Detection v2, which extends the previous benchmark by including more classes and footage. We provide statistical and qualitative analyses, and assess trends in the best-performing methodologies of over 130 submissions. The methods are summarized in the appendix. The datasets, evaluation code and the leaderboard are publicly available at https://seadronessee.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/macvi.

With the success of the prompt-tuning paradigm in Natural Language Processing (NLP), various prompt templates have been proposed to further stimulate specific knowledge for serving downstream tasks, e.g., machine translation, text generation, relation extraction, and so on. Existing prompt templates are mainly shared among all training samples with the information of task description. However, training samples are quite diverse. The sharing task description is unable to stimulate the unique task-related information in each training sample, especially for tasks with the finite-label space. To exploit the unique task-related information, we imitate the human decision process which aims to find the contrastive attributes between the objective factual and their potential counterfactuals. Thus, we propose the \textbf{C}ounterfactual \textbf{C}ontrastive \textbf{Prompt}-Tuning (CCPrompt) approach for many-class classification, e.g., relation classification, topic classification, and entity typing. Compared with simple classification tasks, these tasks have more complex finite-label spaces and are more rigorous for prompts. First of all, we prune the finite label space to construct fact-counterfactual pairs. Then, we exploit the contrastive attributes by projecting training instances onto every fact-counterfactual pair. We further set up global prototypes corresponding with all contrastive attributes for selecting valid contrastive attributes as additional tokens in the prompt template. Finally, a simple Siamese representation learning is employed to enhance the robustness of the model. We conduct experiments on relation classification, topic classification, and entity typing tasks in both fully supervised setting and few-shot setting. The results indicate that our model outperforms former baselines.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are receiving increasing attention due to their low power consumption and strong bio-plausibility. Optimization of SNNs is a challenging task. Two main methods, artificial neural network (ANN)-to-SNN conversion and spike-based backpropagation (BP), both have their advantages and limitations. For ANN-to-SNN conversion, it requires a long inference time to approximate the accuracy of ANN, thus diminishing the benefits of SNN. With spike-based BP, training high-precision SNNs typically consumes dozens of times more computational resources and time than their ANN counterparts. In this paper, we propose a novel SNN training approach that combines the benefits of the two methods. We first train a single-step SNN by approximating the neural potential distribution with random noise, then convert the single-step SNN to a multi-step SNN losslessly. The introduction of Gaussian distributed noise leads to a significant gain in accuracy after conversion. The results show that our method considerably reduces the training and inference times of SNNs while maintaining their high accuracy. Compared to the previous two methods, ours can reduce training time by 65%-75% and achieves more than 100 times faster inference speed. We also argue that the neuron model augmented with noise makes it more bio-plausible.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

Image super-resolution is a common task on mobile and IoT devices, where one often needs to upscale and enhance low-resolution images and video frames. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem in the past, they are usually not compatible with low-power mobile NPUs having many computational and memory constraints. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an efficient quantized image super-resolution solution that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile NPUs. The participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained INT8 models to do a high-quality 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated edge NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 60 FPS rate when reconstructing Full HD resolution images. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

链接的语音实体旨在识别和消除语言中的命名实体。常规方法严重遭受了不受限制的语音样式和ASR系统产生的嘈杂笔录。在本文中，我们提出了一种名为“知识增强命名实体识别”（KENER）的新颖方法，该方法致力于通过在实体识别阶段无痛地纳入适当的知识来改善鲁棒性，从而改善实体联系的整体性能。肯纳（Kener）首先检索未提及的句子的候选实体，然后利用实体描述作为额外的信息来帮助识别提及。当输入短或嘈杂时，由密集检索模块检索的候选实体特别有用。此外，我们研究了各种数据采样策略和设计有效的损失功能，以提高识别和歧义阶段中检索实体的质量。最后，将与过滤模块的链接作为最终保障措施应用，从而可以过滤出错误认可的提及。我们的系统在NLPCC-2022共享任务2的轨道1中获得第一名，并在轨道1中获得第一名。

在本文中，我们研究了从许多嘈杂的随机线性测量值中恢复低级别基质的问题。我们考虑以下设置的设置，即基地矩阵的等级是未知的，并使用矩阵变量的过度指定的分组表示，其中全局最佳解决方案过拟合，并且与基础基础真相不符。然后，我们使用梯度下降和小的随机初始化解决了相关的非凸问题。我们表明，只要测量运算符能够满足受限的等轴测特性（RIP），其等级参数缩放具有地面真相矩阵等级，而不是使用过度指定的矩阵变量进行缩放，那么梯度下降迭代就会在特定的轨迹上朝向地面。 - 正确矩阵并在适当停止时获得了几乎信息理论上的最佳恢复。然后，我们提出了一种基于共同持有方法的有效的早期停止策略，并表明它可以检测到几乎最佳的估计量。此外，实验表明，所提出的验证方法也可以有效地用于图像恢复，并具有深层图像先验，从而使图像过度参与了深层网络。

联合学习（FL）是一种机器学习范式，允许分散的客户在不共享其私人数据的情况下进行协作学习。但是，过度的计算和沟通要求对当前的FL框架构成挑战，尤其是在训练大型模型时。为了防止这些问题阻碍FL系统的部署，我们提出了一个轻巧的框架，客户共同学习融合由多个固定预训练的模型生成的表示形式，而不是从SCRATCH培训大型模型。这通过考虑如何从预先训练的模型中捕获更多特定于客户的信息，并共同提高每个客户利用这些现成模型的能力，从而导致我们解决了一个更实用的FL问题。在这项工作中，我们设计了一种联合原型对比度学习（FEDPCL）方法，该方法通过其类原型共享客户的知识，并以原型对比度方式构建特定于客户的表示。共享原型而不是可学习的模型参数可以使每个客户以个性化的方式融合表示表示，同时以紧凑的形式保持共享知识以进行有效的通信。我们在轻量级框架中对拟议的FEDPCL进行了彻底的评估，以测量和可视化其在流行的FL数据集上融合各种预训练模型的能力。