对比度学习通常用作一种自我监督学习的方法，“锚”和“正”是给定输入图像的两个随机增强，而“负”是所有其他图像的集合。但是，对大批量和记忆库的需求使训练变得困难和缓慢。这促使有监督的对比方法的崛起通过使用带注释的数据来克服这些问题。我们希望通过基于其相似性进行排名，并观察人类偏见（以排名形式）对学习表示的影响，以进一步改善受监督的对比学习。我们认为这是一个重要的问题，因为学习良好的功能嵌入是在计算机视觉中长期以来一直追求的问题。

对比学习通常应用于自学的学习，并且已被证明超过了传统方法，例如三胞胎损失和n对损失。但是，对大批量和记忆库的需求使训练变得困难和缓慢。最近，已经开发出有监督的对比方法来克服这些问题。他们更多地专注于分别或在各个班级之间为每个班级学习一个良好的表示。在这项工作中，我们尝试使用用户定义的排名来基于相似性对类进行排名，以了解所有类之间的有效表示。我们观察到如何将人类偏见纳入学习过程可以改善参数空间中的学习表征。我们表明，我们的结果可与受监督的对比度学习用于图像分类和对象检测，并讨论其在OOD检测中的缺点

This paper proposes a novel self-supervised based Cut-and-Paste GAN to perform foreground object segmentation and generate realistic composite images without manual annotations. We accomplish this goal by a simple yet effective self-supervised approach coupled with the U-Net based discriminator. The proposed method extends the ability of the standard discriminators to learn not only the global data representations via classification (real/fake) but also learn semantic and structural information through pseudo labels created using the self-supervised task. The proposed method empowers the generator to create meaningful masks by forcing it to learn informative per-pixel as well as global image feedback from the discriminator. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the standard benchmark datasets.

Parkinson's disease is marked by altered and increased firing characteristics of pathological oscillations in the brain. In other words, it causes abnormal synchronous oscillations and suppression during neurological processing. In order to examine and regulate the synchronization and pathological oscillations in motor circuits, deep brain stimulators (DBS) are used. Although machine learning methods have been applied for the investigation of suppression, these models require large amounts of training data and computational power, both of which pose challenges to resource-constrained DBS. This research proposes a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework for suppressing the synchronization in neuronal activity during episodes of neurological disorders with less power consumption. The proposed RL algorithm comprises an ensemble of a temporal representation of stimuli and a twin-delayed deep deterministic (TD3) policy gradient algorithm. We quantify the stability of the proposed framework to noise and reduced synchrony using RL for three pathological signaling regimes: regular, chaotic, and bursting, and further eliminate the undesirable oscillations. Furthermore, metrics such as evaluation rewards, energy supplied to the ensemble, and the mean point of convergence were used and compared to other RL algorithms, specifically the Advantage actor critic (A2C), the Actor critic with Kronecker-featured trust region (ACKTR), and the Proximal policy optimization (PPO).

A canonical algorithm for log-concave sampling is the Langevin Algorithm, aka the Langevin Diffusion run with some discretization stepsize $\eta > 0$. This discretization leads the Langevin Algorithm to have a stationary distribution $\pi_{\eta}$ which differs from the stationary distribution $\pi$ of the Langevin Diffusion, and it is an important challenge to understand whether the well-known properties of $\pi$ extend to $\pi_{\eta}$. In particular, while concentration properties such as isoperimetry and rapidly decaying tails are classically known for $\pi$, the analogous properties for $\pi_{\eta}$ are open questions with direct algorithmic implications. This note provides a first step in this direction by establishing concentration results for $\pi_{\eta}$ that mirror classical results for $\pi$. Specifically, we show that for any nontrivial stepsize $\eta > 0$, $\pi_{\eta}$ is sub-exponential (respectively, sub-Gaussian) when the potential is convex (respectively, strongly convex). Moreover, the concentration bounds we show are essentially tight. Key to our analysis is the use of a rotation-invariant moment generating function (aka Bessel function) to study the stationary dynamics of the Langevin Algorithm. This technique may be of independent interest because it enables directly analyzing the discrete-time stationary distribution $\pi_{\eta}$ without going through the continuous-time stationary distribution $\pi$ as an intermediary.

The paper presents a cross-domain review analysis on four popular review datasets: Amazon, Yelp, Steam, IMDb. The analysis is performed using Hadoop and Spark, which allows for efficient and scalable processing of large datasets. By examining close to 12 million reviews from these four online forums, we hope to uncover interesting trends in sales and customer sentiment over the years. Our analysis will include a study of the number of reviews and their distribution over time, as well as an examination of the relationship between various review attributes such as upvotes, creation time, rating, and sentiment. By comparing the reviews across different domains, we hope to gain insight into the factors that drive customer satisfaction and engagement in different product categories.

Language models have recently achieved strong performance across a wide range of NLP benchmarks. However, unlike benchmarks, real world tasks are often poorly specified, and agents must deduce the user's intended behavior from a combination of context, instructions, and examples. We investigate how both humans and models behave in the face of such task ambiguity by proposing AmbiBench, a new benchmark of six ambiguously-specified classification tasks. We evaluate humans and models on AmbiBench by seeing how well they identify the intended task using 1) instructions with varying degrees of ambiguity, and 2) different numbers of labeled examples. We find that the combination of model scaling (to 175B parameters) and training with human feedback data enables models to approach or exceed the accuracy of human participants across tasks, but that either one alone is not sufficient. In addition, we show how to dramatically improve the accuracy of language models trained without large-scale human feedback training by finetuning on a small number of ambiguous in-context examples, providing a promising direction for teaching models to generalize well in the face of ambiguity.

IoT sensors, especially video cameras, are ubiquitously deployed around the world to perform a variety of computer vision tasks in several verticals including retail, healthcare, safety and security, transportation, manufacturing, etc. To amortize their high deployment effort and cost, it is desirable to perform multiple video analytics tasks, which we refer to as Analytical Units (AUs), off the video feed coming out of every camera. In this paper, we first show that in a multi-AU setting, changing the camera setting has disproportionate impact on different AUs performance. In particular, the optimal setting for one AU may severely degrade the performance for another AU, and further the impact on different AUs varies as the environmental condition changes. We then present Elixir, a system to enhance the video stream quality for multiple analytics on a video stream. Elixir leverages Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL), where the RL agent caters to the objectives from different AUs and adjusts the camera setting to simultaneously enhance the performance of all AUs. To define the multiple objectives in MORL, we develop new AU-specific quality estimator values for each individual AU. We evaluate Elixir through real-world experiments on a testbed with three cameras deployed next to each other (overlooking a large enterprise parking lot) running Elixir and two baseline approaches, respectively. Elixir correctly detects 7.1% (22,068) and 5.0% (15,731) more cars, 94% (551) and 72% (478) more faces, and 670.4% (4975) and 158.6% (3507) more persons than the default-setting and time-sharing approaches, respectively. It also detects 115 license plates, far more than the time-sharing approach (7) and the default setting (0).

Human activity recognition (HAR) using drone-mounted cameras has attracted considerable interest from the computer vision research community in recent years. A robust and efficient HAR system has a pivotal role in fields like video surveillance, crowd behavior analysis, sports analysis, and human-computer interaction. What makes it challenging are the complex poses, understanding different viewpoints, and the environmental scenarios where the action is taking place. To address such complexities, in this paper, we propose a novel Sparse Weighted Temporal Attention (SWTA) module to utilize sparsely sampled video frames for obtaining global weighted temporal attention. The proposed SWTA is comprised of two parts. First, temporal segment network that sparsely samples a given set of frames. Second, weighted temporal attention, which incorporates a fusion of attention maps derived from optical flow, with raw RGB images. This is followed by a basenet network, which comprises a convolutional neural network (CNN) module along with fully connected layers that provide us with activity recognition. The SWTA network can be used as a plug-in module to the existing deep CNN architectures, for optimizing them to learn temporal information by eliminating the need for a separate temporal stream. It has been evaluated on three publicly available benchmark datasets, namely Okutama, MOD20, and Drone-Action. The proposed model has received an accuracy of 72.76%, 92.56%, and 78.86% on the respective datasets thereby surpassing the previous state-of-the-art performances by a margin of 25.26%, 18.56%, and 2.94%, respectively.

This paper considers adaptive radar electronic counter-counter measures (ECCM) to mitigate ECM by an adversarial jammer. Our ECCM approach models the jammer-radar interaction as a Principal Agent Problem (PAP), a popular economics framework for interaction between two entities with an information imbalance. In our setup, the radar does not know the jammer's utility. Instead, the radar learns the jammer's utility adaptively over time using inverse reinforcement learning. The radar's adaptive ECCM objective is two-fold (1) maximize its utility by solving the PAP, and (2) estimate the jammer's utility by observing its response. Our adaptive ECCM scheme uses deep ideas from revealed preference in micro-economics and principal agent problem in contract theory. Our numerical results show that, over time, our adaptive ECCM both identifies and mitigates the jammer's utility.