We propose Multivariate Quantile Function Forecaster (MQF$^2$), a global probabilistic forecasting method constructed using a multivariate quantile function and investigate its application to multi-horizon forecasting. Prior approaches are either autoregressive, implicitly capturing the dependency structure across time but exhibiting error accumulation with increasing forecast horizons, or multi-horizon sequence-to-sequence models, which do not exhibit error accumulation, but also do typically not model the dependency structure across time steps. MQF$^2$ combines the benefits of both approaches, by directly making predictions in the form of a multivariate quantile function, defined as the gradient of a convex function which we parametrize using input-convex neural networks. By design, the quantile function is monotone with respect to the input quantile levels and hence avoids quantile crossing. We provide two options to train MQF$^2$: with energy score or with maximum likelihood. Experimental results on real-world and synthetic datasets show that our model has comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods in terms of single time step metrics while capturing the time dependency structure.

定量回归是一种有效的技术，可以量化不确定性，符合挑战的潜在分布，并且通常通过在多个分位数水平上的联合学习提供完全概率预测。然而，这些关节分位数回归的常见缺点是\ textit {stantile交叉}，其违反了条件分位式函数的理想单调属性。在这项工作中，我们提出了增量（样条曲线）量子函数I（S）QF，灵活和有效的无分布定量位估计框架，其解决了与简单的神经网络层的定量交叉。此外，I（s）QF Inter /外推预测与底层训练不同的任意定量水平。配备了对I（S）QF表示的连续排名概率得分的分析评估，我们将方法应用于基于NN的时间系列预测案例，其中尤其是昂达训练的分位数的昂贵重新培训成本的节省重大。我们还提供了在序列到序列设置下我们提出的方法的泛化误差分析。最后，广泛的实验证明了在其他基线上提高了一致性和准确性误差。

In this paper, we study the problem of knowledge-intensive text-to-SQL, in which domain knowledge is necessary to parse expert questions into SQL queries over domain-specific tables. We formalize this scenario by building a new Chinese benchmark KnowSQL consisting of domain-specific questions covering various domains. We then address this problem by presenting formulaic knowledge, rather than by annotating additional data examples. More concretely, we construct a formulaic knowledge bank as a domain knowledge base and propose a framework (ReGrouP) to leverage this formulaic knowledge during parsing. Experiments using ReGrouP demonstrate a significant 28.2% improvement overall on KnowSQL.

Complex and contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks, particularly those that involve multi-fingered hands and underactuated object manipulation, present a significant challenge to any control method. Methods based on reinforcement learning offer an appealing choice for such settings, as they can enable robots to learn to delicately balance contact forces and dexterously reposition objects without strong modeling assumptions. However, running reinforcement learning on real-world dexterous manipulation systems often requires significant manual engineering. This negates the benefits of autonomous data collection and ease of use that reinforcement learning should in principle provide. In this paper, we describe a system for vision-based dexterous manipulation that provides a "programming-free" approach for users to define new tasks and enable robots with complex multi-fingered hands to learn to perform them through interaction. The core principle underlying our system is that, in a vision-based setting, users should be able to provide high-level intermediate supervision that circumvents challenges in teleoperation or kinesthetic teaching which allow a robot to not only learn a task efficiently but also to autonomously practice. Our system includes a framework for users to define a final task and intermediate sub-tasks with image examples, a reinforcement learning procedure that learns the task autonomously without interventions, and experimental results with a four-finger robotic hand learning multi-stage object manipulation tasks directly in the real world, without simulation, manual modeling, or reward engineering.

Reference-based Super-Resolution (Ref-SR) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm to enhance a low-resolution (LR) input image or video by introducing an additional high-resolution (HR) reference image. Existing Ref-SR methods mostly rely on implicit correspondence matching to borrow HR textures from reference images to compensate for the information loss in input images. However, performing local transfer is difficult because of two gaps between input and reference images: the transformation gap (e.g., scale and rotation) and the resolution gap (e.g., HR and LR). To tackle these challenges, we propose C2-Matching in this work, which performs explicit robust matching crossing transformation and resolution. 1) To bridge the transformation gap, we propose a contrastive correspondence network, which learns transformation-robust correspondences using augmented views of the input image. 2) To address the resolution gap, we adopt teacher-student correlation distillation, which distills knowledge from the easier HR-HR matching to guide the more ambiguous LR-HR matching. 3) Finally, we design a dynamic aggregation module to address the potential misalignment issue between input images and reference images. In addition, to faithfully evaluate the performance of Reference-based Image Super-Resolution under a realistic setting, we contribute the Webly-Referenced SR (WR-SR) dataset, mimicking the practical usage scenario. We also extend C2-Matching to Reference-based Video Super-Resolution task, where an image taken in a similar scene serves as the HR reference image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed C2-Matching significantly outperforms state of the arts on the standard CUFED5 benchmark and also boosts the performance of video SR by incorporating the C2-Matching component into Video SR pipelines.

Accompanying rapid industrialization, humans are suffering from serious air pollution problems. The demand for air quality prediction is becoming more and more important to the government's policy-making and people's daily life. In this paper, We propose GreenEyes -- a deep neural network model, which consists of a WaveNet-based backbone block for learning representations of sequences and an LSTM with a Temporal Attention module for capturing the hidden interactions between features of multi-channel inputs. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we carry out several experiments including an ablation study on our collected and preprocessed air quality data near HKUST. The experimental results show our model can effectively predict the air quality level of the next timestamp given any segment of the air quality data from the data set. We have also released our standalone dataset at https://github.com/AI-Huang/IAQI_Dataset The model and code for this paper are publicly available at https://github.com/AI-Huang/AirEvaluation

Dynamic evaluation of language models (LMs) adapts model parameters at test time using gradient information from previous tokens and substantially improves LM performance. However, it requires over 3x more compute than standard inference. We present Fast Weight Layers (FWLs), a neural component that provides the benefits of dynamic evaluation much more efficiently by expressing gradient updates as linear attention. A key improvement over dynamic evaluation is that FWLs can also be applied at training time so the model learns to make good use of gradient updates. FWLs can easily be added on top of existing transformer models, require relatively little extra compute or memory to run, and significantly improve language modeling perplexity.

Conditional variational models, using either continuous or discrete latent variables, are powerful for open-domain dialogue response generation. However, previous works show that continuous latent variables tend to reduce the coherence of generated responses. In this paper, we also found that discrete latent variables have difficulty capturing more diverse expressions. To tackle these problems, we combine the merits of both continuous and discrete latent variables and propose a Hybrid Latent Variable (HLV) method. Specifically, HLV constrains the global semantics of responses through discrete latent variables and enriches responses with continuous latent variables. Thus, we diversify the generated responses while maintaining relevance and coherence. In addition, we propose Conditional Hybrid Variational Transformer (CHVT) to construct and to utilize HLV with transformers for dialogue generation. Through fine-grained symbolic-level semantic information and additive Gaussian mixing, we construct the distribution of continuous variables, prompting the generation of diverse expressions. Meanwhile, to maintain the relevance and coherence, the discrete latent variable is optimized by self-separation training. Experimental results on two dialogue generation datasets (DailyDialog and Opensubtitles) show that CHVT is superior to traditional transformer-based variational mechanism w.r.t. diversity, relevance and coherence metrics. Moreover, we also demonstrate the benefit of applying HLV to fine-tuning two pre-trained dialogue models (PLATO and BART-base).

Complex dialogue mappings (CDM), including one-to-many and many-to-one mappings, tend to make dialogue models generate incoherent or dull responses, and modeling these mappings remains a huge challenge for neural dialogue systems. To alleviate these problems, methods like introducing external information, reconstructing the optimization function, and manipulating data samples are proposed, while they primarily focus on avoiding training with CDM, inevitably weakening the model's ability of understanding CDM in human conversations and limiting further improvements in model performance. This paper proposes a Sentence Semantic \textbf{Seg}mentation guided \textbf{C}onditional \textbf{V}ariational \textbf{A}uto-\textbf{E}ncoder (SegCVAE) method which can model and take advantages of the CDM data. Specifically, to tackle the incoherent problem caused by one-to-many, SegCVAE uses response-related prominent semantics to constrained the latent variable. To mitigate the non-diverse problem brought by many-to-one, SegCVAE segments multiple prominent semantics to enrich the latent variables. Three novel components, Internal Separation, External Guidance, and Semantic Norms, are proposed to achieve SegCVAE. On dialogue generation tasks, both the automatic and human evaluation results show that SegCVAE achieves new state-of-the-art performance.

Gait has been used in clinical and healthcare applications to assess the physical and cognitive health of older adults. Acoustic based gait detection is a promising approach to collect gait data of older adults passively and non-intrusively. However, there has been limited work in developing acoustic based gait detectors that can operate in noisy polyphonic acoustic scenes of homes and care homes. We attribute this to the lack of good quality gait datasets from the real-world to train a gait detector on. In this paper, we put forward a novel machine learning based filter which can triage gait audio samples suitable for training machine learning models for gait detection. The filter achieves this by eliminating noisy samples at an f(1) score of 0.85 and prioritising gait samples with distinct spectral features and minimal noise. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the filter, we train and evaluate a deep learning model on gait datasets collected from older adults with and without applying the filter. The model registers an increase of 25 points in its f(1) score on unseen real-word gait data when trained with the filtered gait samples. The proposed filter will help automate the task of manual annotation of gait samples for training acoustic based gait detection models for older adults in indoor environments.