Unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) studies the problem of mitigating various biases from implicit user feedback data such as clicks, and has been receiving considerable attention recently. A popular ULTR approach for real-world applications uses a two-tower architecture, where click modeling is factorized into a relevance tower with regular input features, and a bias tower with bias-relevant inputs such as the position of a document. A successful factorization will allow the relevance tower to be exempt from biases. In this work, we identify a critical issue that existing ULTR methods ignored - the bias tower can be confounded with the relevance tower via the underlying true relevance. In particular, the positions were determined by the logging policy, i.e., the previous production model, which would possess relevance information. We give both theoretical analysis and empirical results to show the negative effects on relevance tower due to such a correlation. We then propose three methods to mitigate the negative confounding effects by better disentangling relevance and bias. Empirical results on both controlled public datasets and a large-scale industry dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

Our situated environment is full of uncertainty and highly dynamic, thus hindering the widespread adoption of machine-led Intelligent Decision-Making (IDM) in real world scenarios. This means IDM should have the capability of continuously learning new skills and efficiently generalizing across wider applications. IDM benefits from any new approaches and theoretical breakthroughs that exhibit Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) breaking the barriers between tasks and applications. Recent research has well-examined neural architecture, Transformer, as a backbone foundation model and its generalization to various tasks, including computer vision, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning. We therefore argue that a foundation decision model (FDM) can be established by formulating various decision-making tasks as a sequence decoding task using the Transformer architecture; this would be a promising solution to advance the applications of IDM in more complex real world tasks. In this paper, we elaborate on how a foundation decision model improves the efficiency and generalization of IDM. We also discuss potential applications of a FDM in multi-agent game AI, production scheduling, and robotics tasks. Finally, through a case study, we demonstrate our realization of the FDM, DigitalBrain (DB1) with 1.2 billion parameters, which achieves human-level performance over 453 tasks, including text generation, images caption, video games playing, robotic control, and traveling salesman problems. As a foundation decision model, DB1 would be a baby step towards more autonomous and efficient real world IDM applications.

In the field of antibody engineering, an essential task is to design a novel antibody whose paratopes bind to a specific antigen with correct epitopes. Understanding antibody structure and its paratope can facilitate a mechanistic understanding of its function. Therefore, antibody structure prediction from its sequence alone has always been a highly valuable problem for de novo antibody design. AlphaFold2, a breakthrough in the field of structural biology, provides a solution to predict protein structure based on protein sequences and computationally expensive coevolutionary multiple sequence alignments (MSAs). However, the computational efficiency and undesirable prediction accuracy of antibodies, especially on the complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) of antibodies limit their applications in the industrially high-throughput drug design. To learn an informative representation of antibodies, we employed a deep antibody language model (ALM) on curated sequences from the observed antibody space database via a transformer model. We also developed a novel model named xTrimoABFold to predict antibody structure from antibody sequence based on the pretrained ALM as well as efficient evoformers and structural modules. The model was trained end-to-end on the antibody structures in PDB by minimizing the ensemble loss of domain-specific focal loss on CDR and the frame-aligned point loss. xTrimoABFold outperforms AlphaFold2 and other protein language model based SOTAs, e.g., OmegaFold, HelixFold-Single, and IgFold with a large significant margin (30+\% improvement on RMSD) while performing 151 times faster than AlphaFold2. To the best of our knowledge, xTrimoABFold achieved state-of-the-art antibody structure prediction. Its improvement in both accuracy and efficiency makes it a valuable tool for de novo antibody design and could make further improvements in immuno-theory.

The image captioning task is typically realized by an auto-regressive method that decodes the text tokens one by one. We present a diffusion-based captioning model, dubbed the name DDCap, to allow more decoding flexibility. Unlike image generation, where the output is continuous and redundant with a fixed length, texts in image captions are categorical and short with varied lengths. Therefore, naively applying the discrete diffusion model to text decoding does not work well, as shown in our experiments. To address the performance gap, we propose several key techniques including best-first inference, concentrated attention mask, text length prediction, and image-free training. On COCO without additional caption pre-training, it achieves a CIDEr score of 117.8, which is +5.0 higher than the auto-regressive baseline with the same architecture in the controlled setting. It also performs +26.8 higher CIDEr score than the auto-regressive baseline (230.3 v.s.203.5) on a caption infilling task. With 4M vision-language pre-training images and the base-sized model, we reach a CIDEr score of 125.1 on COCO, which is competitive to the best well-developed auto-regressive frameworks. The code is available at https://github.com/buxiangzhiren/DDCap.

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.

The crystallization of modeling methods around the Transformer architecture has been a boon for practitioners. Simple, well-motivated architectural variations can transfer across tasks and scale, increasing the impact of modeling research. However, with the emergence of state-of-the-art 100B+ parameters models, large language models are increasingly expensive to accurately design and train. Notably, it can be difficult to evaluate how modeling decisions may impact emergent capabilities, given that these capabilities arise mainly from sheer scale alone. In the process of building BLOOM--the Big Science Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual language model--our goal is to identify an architecture and training setup that makes the best use of our 1,000,000 A100-GPU-hours budget. Specifically, we perform an ablation study at the billion-parameter scale comparing different modeling practices and their impact on zero-shot generalization. In addition, we study the impact of various popular pre-training corpora on zero-shot generalization. We also study the performance of a multilingual model and how it compares to the English-only one. Finally, we consider the scaling behaviour of Transformers to choose the target model size, shape, and training setup. All our models and code are open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/bigscience .

Finetuning language models on a collection of datasets phrased as instructions has been shown to improve model performance and generalization to unseen tasks. In this paper we explore instruction finetuning with a particular focus on (1) scaling the number of tasks, (2) scaling the model size, and (3) finetuning on chain-of-thought data. We find that instruction finetuning with the above aspects dramatically improves performance on a variety of model classes (PaLM, T5, U-PaLM), prompting setups (zero-shot, few-shot, CoT), and evaluation benchmarks (MMLU, BBH, TyDiQA, MGSM, open-ended generation). For instance, Flan-PaLM 540B instruction-finetuned on 1.8K tasks outperforms PALM 540B by a large margin (+9.4% on average). Flan-PaLM 540B achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks, such as 75.2% on five-shot MMLU. We also publicly release Flan-T5 checkpoints, which achieve strong few-shot performance even compared to much larger models, such as PaLM 62B. Overall, instruction finetuning is a general method for improving the performance and usability of pretrained language models.

双层金属管（BMT）在工程应用中起着极其至关重要的作用，旋转弯曲弯曲（RDB）可以实现高精度弯曲处理，但是，该产品将进一步弹回。由于BMT的复杂结构和数据集获取的高成本，基于机制研究和机器学习的现有方法无法满足Spresback预测的工程要求。根据初步机制分析，提出了物理逻辑增强网络（PE-NET）。该体系结构包括ES-NET等效BMT与单层管等效，SP-NET用于带有足够的单层管样品的浮回本的最终预测。具体而言，在第一阶段，通过理论驱动的预探测和数据驱动的预处理，ES-NET和SP-NET分别构建。在第二阶段，在物理逻辑下，PE-NET由ES-NET和SP-NET组装，然后与小样本BMT数据集和复合损耗函数进行微调。 FE模拟数据集，小样本数据集BMT BMT弹回角预测验证了所提出方法的有效性和稳定性，并证明了跨性别和工程应用程序的潜在方法。

在本文中，我们解决了物体的主动机器人3D重建问题。特别是，我们研究了带有武器摄像机的移动机器人如何选择有利数量的视图来有效地恢复对象的3D形状。与现有的问题解决方案相反，我们利用了流行的神经辐射字段的对象表示，最近对各种计算机视觉任务显示了令人印象深刻的结果。但是，直接推荐使用这种表示形式的对象的显式3D几何细节，这并不是很直接的，这使得对密度3D重建的下一最佳视图选择问题具有挑战性。本文介绍了基于射线的容积不确定性估计器，该估计量沿对象隐式神经表示的每个光线沿每个射线的重量分布计算重量分布的熵。我们表明，考虑到提出的估计量的新观点，可以推断基础3D几何形状的不确定性。然后，我们提出了一个由基于射线的体积不确定性在基于神经辐射字段的表示中的指导下进行的最佳视图选择策略。令人鼓舞的关于合成和现实世界数据的实验结果表明，本文提出的方法可以使新的研究方向在机器人视觉应用中使用隐式的3D对象表示对次要的观察问题，从而将我们的方法与现有方法区分开依赖于显式3D几何建模的方法。

我们介绍了Lavis，这是一个开源深度学习库，用于语言视觉研究和应用。拉维斯（Lavis）的目标是作为一个一站式综合图书馆，它为研究人员和从业人员提供了可访问语言视觉领域的最新进步，并赋予未来的研究和发展。它具有统一的界面，可轻松访问最新的图像语言，视频语言模型和常见数据集。 Lavis支持对各种任务的培训，评估和基准测试，包括多模式分类，检索，字幕，视觉问题答案，对话和预训练。同时，该库还高度可扩展且可配置，从而促进了未来的开发和定制。在此技术报告中，我们描述了图书馆的设计原理，关键组成部分和功能，并在常见的语言视觉任务中提出基准测试结果。该库可在以下网址获得：https：//github.com/salesforce/lavis。