在最近的工作中已显示出一种模式指导的对话管理方法，可以有效地创建能够充当友好同行或任务助理的强大定制虚拟代理。但是，这些方法在开放式，混合初始性领域中的成功应用仍然难以捉摸 - 尤其是在诸如虚拟标准化患者之类的医疗领域，在这种复杂的互动很常见的情况下 - 比以前的系统需要更广泛，更灵活的对话管理能力提供。在本文中，我们描述了用于开发索菲（Sophie）的通用架构指导的对话管理框架，Sophie是一种虚拟标准化的癌症患者，可让医生方便地练习与患者的互动。我们对医学生和索菲之间的对话进行了众包评估。我们的经纪人被认为是自然，情感上适当的反应，并且与她作为癌症患者的角色一致。此外，它大大优于对人类标准化患者语料库进行微调的端到端神经模型，这证明了模式引导方法的优势。

Support Vector Machines have been successfully used for one-class classification (OCSVM, SVDD) when trained on clean data, but they work much worse on dirty data: outliers present in the training data tend to become support vectors, and are hence considered "normal". In this article, we improve the effectiveness to detect outliers in dirty training data with a leave-out strategy: by temporarily omitting one candidate at a time, this point can be judged using the remaining data only. We show that this is more effective at scoring the outlierness of points than using the slack term of existing SVM-based approaches. Identified outliers can then be removed from the data, such that outliers hidden by other outliers can be identified, to reduce the problem of masking. Naively, this approach would require training N individual SVMs (and training $O(N^2)$ SVMs when iteratively removing the worst outliers one at a time), which is prohibitively expensive. We will discuss that only support vectors need to be considered in each step and that by reusing SVM parameters and weights, this incremental retraining can be accelerated substantially. By removing candidates in batches, we can further improve the processing time, although it obviously remains more costly than training a single SVM.

A major challenge when using k-means clustering often is how to choose the parameter k, the number of clusters. In this letter, we want to point out that it is very easy to draw poor conclusions from a common heuristic, the "elbow method". Better alternatives have been known in literature for a long time, and we want to draw attention to some of these easy to use options, that often perform better. This letter is a call to stop using the elbow method altogether, because it severely lacks theoretic support, and we want to encourage educators to discuss the problems of the method -- if introducing it in class at all -- and teach alternatives instead, while researchers and reviewers should reject conclusions drawn from the elbow method.

Adequately assigning credit to actions for future outcomes based on their contributions is a long-standing open challenge in Reinforcement Learning. The assumptions of the most commonly used credit assignment method are disadvantageous in tasks where the effects of decisions are not immediately evident. Furthermore, this method can only evaluate actions that have been selected by the agent, making it highly inefficient. Still, no alternative methods have been widely adopted in the field. Hindsight Credit Assignment is a promising, but still unexplored candidate, which aims to solve the problems of both long-term and counterfactual credit assignment. In this thesis, we empirically investigate Hindsight Credit Assignment to identify its main benefits, and key points to improve. Then, we apply it to factored state representations, and in particular to state representations based on the causal structure of the environment. In this setting, we propose a variant of Hindsight Credit Assignment that effectively exploits a given causal structure. We show that our modification greatly decreases the workload of Hindsight Credit Assignment, making it more efficient and enabling it to outperform the baseline credit assignment method on various tasks. This opens the way to other methods based on given or learned causal structures.

Active learning as a paradigm in deep learning is especially important in applications involving intricate perception tasks such as object detection where labels are difficult and expensive to acquire. Development of active learning methods in such fields is highly computationally expensive and time consuming which obstructs the progression of research and leads to a lack of comparability between methods. In this work, we propose and investigate a sandbox setup for rapid development and transparent evaluation of active learning in deep object detection. Our experiments with commonly used configurations of datasets and detection architectures found in the literature show that results obtained in our sandbox environment are representative of results on standard configurations. The total compute time to obtain results and assess the learning behavior can thereby be reduced by factors of up to 14 when comparing with Pascal VOC and up to 32 when comparing with BDD100k. This allows for testing and evaluating data acquisition and labeling strategies in under half a day and contributes to the transparency and development speed in the field of active learning for object detection.

The extensive surviving corpus of the ancient scholar Plutarch of Chaeronea (ca. 45-120 CE) also contains several texts which, according to current scholarly opinion, did not originate with him and are therefore attributed to an anonymous author Pseudo-Plutarch. These include, in particular, the work Placita Philosophorum (Quotations and Opinions of the Ancient Philosophers), which is extremely important for the history of ancient philosophy. Little is known about the identity of that anonymous author and its relation to other authors from the same period. This paper presents a BERT language model for Ancient Greek. The model discovers previously unknown statistical properties relevant to these literary, philosophical, and historical problems and can shed new light on this authorship question. In particular, the Placita Philosophorum, together with one of the other Pseudo-Plutarch texts, shows similarities with the texts written by authors from an Alexandrian context (2nd/3rd century CE).

聚类结果的评估很困难，高度依赖于评估的数据集和情人的观点。有许多不同的聚类质量度量，试图提供一般度量以验证聚类结果。一个非常流行的措施是轮廓。我们讨论轮廓的有效基于MEDOI的变体，对其性质进行理论分析，并为直接优化提供两个快速版本。我们将原始轮廓中的想法与著名的PAM算法及其最新改进的想法相结合。其中一个版本保证了与原始变体相等的结果，并提供了$ O（k^2）$的运行加速。在有关30000个样品和$ k $ = 100的真实数据实验中，我们观察到10464 $ \ times $速度与原始的Pammedsil算法相比。

将数据投射到线性子空间上的优点是从缩小尺寸降低中众所周知的。已经对子空间预测的最大保留（主要组件分析）的一个关键方面进行了彻底研究，并且随机线性投影对诸如固有维度之类的措施的影响仍然是一项持续的努力。在本文中，我们研究了较少探索的线性投影深度，这些尺寸的显式子空间以及随之而来的方差期望。结果是欧几里得距离和内部产品的新界限。我们展示了这些边界的质量，并研究了与内在维度估计的紧密关系。

抗原加工途径的硅硅建模准确性对于实现个性化表位疫苗设计至关重要。这种途径的一个重要步骤是，蛋白酶体将疫苗降解为较小的肽，其中一些将由MHC复合物呈现给T细胞。虽然最近预测MHC肽的表现引起了很多关注，但鉴于高通量质谱的MHC连接学的最新进展，蛋白酶体裂解预测仍然是一个相对未探索的区域。此外，由于这种实验技术不允许识别无法分裂的区域，因此最新的预测因子会在训练时会产生合成的负样本并将其视为真正的负面样本，即使其中一些实际上可能是肯定的。因此，在这项工作中，我们提出了一个新的预测指标，该预测因素通过扩展的数据集和稳固的未标记学习理论基础进行了培训，从而实现了蛋白酶体裂解预测的新最新。改进的预测能力反过来又可以使更精确的疫苗开发提高基于表位的疫苗的功效。可以在https://github.com/schubertlab/proteasomal-cleavage-puupl上获得代码和预估计的模型。

最近的基于变压器的离线视频实例细分（VIS）方法取得了令人鼓舞的结果，并明显胜过在线方法。但是，它们对整个视频的依赖以及由全时空的注意力引起的巨大计算复杂性限制了它们在现实生活中的应用中，例如处理冗长的视频。在本文中，我们提出了一个基于单级变压器的高效在线VIS框架，名为InstanceFormer，该框架特别适合长期挑战性的视频。我们提出了三个新的组件来建模短期和长期依赖性和时间连贯性。首先，我们传播了对短期更改建模的先前实例的表示形式，位置和语义信息。其次，我们在解码器中提出了一种新颖的记忆交叉注意，该记忆使网络可以在某个时间窗口内研究早期实例。最后，我们采用时间对比度损失，在所有框架的实例表示中施加连贯性。记忆注意力和时间连贯性特别有益于远程依赖建模，包括诸如遮挡等挑战的情况。所提出的实例形式优于以前的在线基准方法在多个数据集上的较大边距。最重要的是，InstanceFormer超过了挑战和长数据集（例如YouTube-Vis-2021和OVIS）的离线方法。代码可从https://github.com/rajatkoner08/instanceformer获得。