Visual language such as charts and plots is ubiquitous in the human world. Comprehending plots and charts requires strong reasoning skills. Prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) models require at least tens of thousands of training examples and their reasoning capabilities are still much limited, especially on complex human-written queries. This paper presents the first one-shot solution to visual language reasoning. We decompose the challenge of visual language reasoning into two steps: (1) plot-to-text translation, and (2) reasoning over the translated text. The key in this method is a modality conversion module, named as DePlot, which translates the image of a plot or chart to a linearized table. The output of DePlot can then be directly used to prompt a pretrained large language model (LLM), exploiting the few-shot reasoning capabilities of LLMs. To obtain DePlot, we standardize the plot-to-table task by establishing unified task formats and metrics, and train DePlot end-to-end on this task. DePlot can then be used off-the-shelf together with LLMs in a plug-and-play fashion. Compared with a SOTA model finetuned on more than >28k data points, DePlot+LLM with just one-shot prompting achieves a 24.0% improvement over finetuned SOTA on human-written queries from the task of chart QA.

Visual language data such as plots, charts, and infographics are ubiquitous in the human world. However, state-of-the-art vision-language models do not perform well on these data. We propose MatCha (Math reasoning and Chart derendering pretraining) to enhance visual language models' capabilities in jointly modeling charts/plots and language data. Specifically, we propose several pretraining tasks that cover plot deconstruction and numerical reasoning which are the key capabilities in visual language modeling. We perform the MatCha pretraining starting from Pix2Struct, a recently proposed image-to-text visual language model. On standard benchmarks such as PlotQA and ChartQA, the MatCha model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by as much as nearly 20%. We also examine how well MatCha pretraining transfers to domains such as screenshots, textbook diagrams, and document figures and observe overall improvement, verifying the usefulness of MatCha pretraining on broader visual language tasks.

在原始文本中训练的语言模型（LMS）无法直接访问物理世界。 Gordon和Van Durme（2013）指出，LMS因此可能会遭受报告偏见的困扰：文本很少报告常见事实，而是关注情况的异常方面。如果LMS仅接受文本语料库的培训，并天真地记住当地的同时出现统计数据，那么他们自然会学会对物理世界的偏见。虽然先前的研究反复验证了较小尺度的LM（例如Roberta，GPT-2）放大了报告偏差，但在模型扩展时，这种趋势是否继续。我们从较大语言模型（LLM）（例如Palm和GPT-3）中从颜色的角度研究报告偏见。具体而言，我们查询llms对物体的典型颜色，这是一种简单的感知扎根的物理常识。令人惊讶的是，我们发现LLM在确定对象的典型颜色和更紧密地跟踪人类判断方面的表现明显优于较小的LMS，而不是过于适应文本中存储的表面图案。这表明，仅凭语言的大型语言模型就能克服以局部共发生为特征的某些类型的报告偏差。

我们引入了一种新的文化学习范式，以测量在推理过程中学习新颖单词的大型语言模型（LLMS）。特别是，我们通过用一个合成但合理的词代替关键概念词来重写Winograd风格的共同参考分辨率问题，该词必须理解该模型以完成任务。解决此任务需要模型来利用提示中给出的新单词的字典定义。这个基准介绍了单词获取，这是折磨llms已知的历时降解的一个重要方面。由于LLM在训练的那一刻及时被冻结，因此通常无法反映语言随着时间的变化方式。我们表明，与原始Winograd任务相比，LLM的准确性在我们的基准测试中从根本上降低，从而确定了当前模型的局限性，并提供了基准来衡量LLMS的未来改善LLMS进行内在学习的能力。

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.

Besides the recent impressive results on reinforcement learning (RL), safety is still one of the major research challenges in RL. RL is a machine-learning approach to determine near-optimal policies in Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this paper, we consider the setting where the safety-relevant fragment of the MDP together with a temporal logic safety specification is given and many safety violations can be avoided by planning ahead a short time into the future. We propose an approach for online safety shielding of RL agents. During runtime, the shield analyses the safety of each available action. For any action, the shield computes the maximal probability to not violate the safety specification within the next $k$ steps when executing this action. Based on this probability and a given threshold, the shield decides whether to block an action from the agent. Existing offline shielding approaches compute exhaustively the safety of all state-action combinations ahead of time, resulting in huge computation times and large memory consumption. The intuition behind online shielding is to compute at runtime the set of all states that could be reached in the near future. For each of these states, the safety of all available actions is analysed and used for shielding as soon as one of the considered states is reached. Our approach is well suited for high-level planning problems where the time between decisions can be used for safety computations and it is sustainable for the agent to wait until these computations are finished. For our evaluation, we selected a 2-player version of the classical computer game SNAKE. The game represents a high-level planning problem that requires fast decisions and the multiplayer setting induces a large state space, which is computationally expensive to analyse exhaustively.

为了改善对步态辅助的可穿戴机器人技术的控制，我们提出了一种基于包括时间历史信息的人工神经网络的连续运动模式识别以及步态阶段和楼梯坡度估算的方法。输入功能仅由处理变量组成，这些变量可以通过单个柄安装的惯性测量单元进行测量。我们引入了可穿戴设备，以获取现实世界环境测试数据，以证明该方法的性能和鲁棒性。确定平均绝对误差（步态相，楼梯斜率）和准确性（运动模式），以进行稳定的步行和稳定的楼梯移动。使用来自不同传感器硬件，传感器固定，移动环境和受试者的测试数据评估鲁棒性。步态阶段稳定步态测试数据的平均绝对误差为2.0-3.5％，对于楼梯斜率估计，步态阶段的平均绝对误差为3.3-3.8 {\ deg}。在测试数据上使用时间历史记录信息的利用在98.51％和99.67％之间的测试数据上正确的运动模式的准确性。结果表明，在稳定步态期间，持续预测步态阶段，楼梯斜率和运动模式的高性能和鲁棒性。如假设的那样，时间历史信息改善了运动模式识别。但是，尽管步射阶段在运动模式之间未经训练的过渡方面表现良好，但我们的定性分析表明，将过渡数据纳入神经网络的训练以改善斜率和运动模式的预测可能是有益的。我们的结果表明，人工神经网络可用于对可穿戴下肢机器人技术的高水平控制。

我们介绍了ThreedWorld（TDW），是交互式多模态物理模拟的平台。 TDW能够模拟高保真感官数据和富裕的3D环境中的移动代理和对象之间的物理交互。独特的属性包括：实时近光 - 真实图像渲染;对象和环境库，以及他们定制的例程;有效构建新环境课程的生成程序;高保真音频渲染;各种材料类型的现实物理相互作用，包括布料，液体和可变形物体;可定制的代理体现AI代理商;并支持与VR设备的人类交互。 TDW的API使多个代理能够在模拟中进行交互，并返回一系列表示世界状态的传感器和物理数据。我们在计算机视觉，机器学习和认知科学中的新兴的研究方向上提供了通过TDW的初始实验，包括多模态物理场景理解，物理动态预测，多代理交互，像孩子一样学习的模型，并注意研究人类和神经网络。

Researchers have demonstrated that neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples and subtle environment changes, both of which one can view as a form of distribution shift. To humans, the resulting errors can look like blunders, eroding trust in these agents. In prior games research, agent evaluation often focused on the in-practice game outcomes. While valuable, such evaluation typically fails to evaluate robustness to worst-case outcomes. Prior research in computer poker has examined how to assess such worst-case performance, both exactly and approximately. Unfortunately, exact computation is infeasible with larger domains, and existing approximations rely on poker-specific knowledge. We introduce ISMCTS-BR, a scalable search-based deep reinforcement learning algorithm for learning a best response to an agent, thereby approximating worst-case performance. We demonstrate the technique in several two-player zero-sum games against a variety of agents, including several AlphaZero-based agents.

The performance of the Deep Learning (DL) models depends on the quality of labels. In some areas, the involvement of human annotators may lead to noise in the data. When these corrupted labels are blindly regarded as the ground truth (GT), DL models suffer from performance deficiency. This paper presents a method that aims to learn a confident model in the presence of noisy labels. This is done in conjunction with estimating the uncertainty of multiple annotators. We robustly estimate the predictions given only the noisy labels by adding entropy or information-based regularizer to the classifier network. We conduct our experiments on a noisy version of MNIST, CIFAR-10, and FMNIST datasets. Our empirical results demonstrate the robustness of our method as it outperforms or performs comparably to other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. In addition, we evaluated the proposed method on the curated dataset, where the noise type and level of various annotators depend on the input image style. We show that our approach performs well and is adept at learning annotators' confusion. Moreover, we demonstrate how our model is more confident in predicting GT than other baselines. Finally, we assess our approach for segmentation problem and showcase its effectiveness with experiments.