一些研究人员推测智能强化学习（RL）代理商将被激励寻求资源和追求目标的权力。其他研究人员指出，RL代理商不需要具有人类的寻求技能本能。为了澄清这一讨论，我们开展了最优政策统计趋势的第一个正式理论。在马尔可夫决策过程的背景下，我们证明某些环境对称是足以实现对环境寻求权力的最佳政策。这些对称存在于许多环境中，其中代理可以关闭或销毁。我们证明，在这些环境中，大多数奖励功能使其通过保持一系列可用的选项来寻求电力，并在最大限度地提高平均奖励时，通过导航到更大的潜在终端状态。

High content imaging assays can capture rich phenotypic response data for large sets of compound treatments, aiding in the characterization and discovery of novel drugs. However, extracting representative features from high content images that can capture subtle nuances in phenotypes remains challenging. The lack of high-quality labels makes it difficult to achieve satisfactory results with supervised deep learning. Self-Supervised learning methods, which learn from automatically generated labels has shown great success on natural images, offer an attractive alternative also to microscopy images. However, we find that self-supervised learning techniques underperform on high content imaging assays. One challenge is the undesirable domain shifts present in the data known as batch effects, which may be caused by biological noise or uncontrolled experimental conditions. To this end, we introduce Cross-Domain Consistency Learning (CDCL), a novel approach that is able to learn in the presence of batch effects. CDCL enforces the learning of biological similarities while disregarding undesirable batch-specific signals, which leads to more useful and versatile representations. These features are organised according to their morphological changes and are more useful for downstream tasks - such as distinguishing treatments and mode of action.

Machine learning methods have seen increased application to geospatial environmental problems, such as precipitation nowcasting, haze forecasting, and crop yield prediction. However, many of the machine learning methods applied to mosquito population and disease forecasting do not inherently take into account the underlying spatial structure of the given data. In our work, we apply a spatially aware graph neural network model consisting of GraphSAGE layers to forecast the presence of West Nile virus in Illinois, to aid mosquito surveillance and abatement efforts within the state. More generally, we show that graph neural networks applied to irregularly sampled geospatial data can exceed the performance of a range of baseline methods including logistic regression, XGBoost, and fully-connected neural networks.

Large "instruction-tuned" language models (finetuned to respond to instructions) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to generalize zero-shot to new tasks. Nevertheless, they depend heavily on human-written instruction data that is limited in quantity, diversity, and creativity, therefore hindering the generality of the tuned model. We introduce Self-Instruct, a framework for improving the instruction-following capabilities of pretrained language models by bootstrapping off its own generations. Our pipeline generates instruction, input, and output samples from a language model, then prunes them before using them to finetune the original model. Applying our method to vanilla GPT3, we demonstrate a 33% absolute improvement over the original model on Super-NaturalInstructions, on par with the performance of InstructGPT_001, which is trained with private user data and human annotations. For further evaluation, we curate a set of expert-written instructions for novel tasks, and show through human evaluation that tuning GPT3 with Self-Instruct outperforms using existing public instruction datasets by a large margin, leaving only a 5% absolute gap behind InstructGPT_001. Self-Instruct provides an almost annotation-free method for aligning pre-trained language models with instructions, and we release our large synthetic dataset to facilitate future studies on instruction tuning.

Recent times have witnessed an increasing number of applications of deep neural networks towards solving tasks that require superior cognitive abilities, e.g., playing Go, generating art, question answering (such as ChatGPT), etc. Such a dramatic progress raises the question: how generalizable are neural networks in solving problems that demand broad skills? To answer this question, we propose SMART: a Simple Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning Task and the associated SMART-101 dataset, for evaluating the abstraction, deduction, and generalization abilities of neural networks in solving visuo-linguistic puzzles designed specifically for children in the 6-8 age group. Our dataset consists of 101 unique puzzles; each puzzle comprises a picture and a question, and their solution needs a mix of several elementary skills, including arithmetic, algebra, and spatial reasoning, among others. To scale our dataset towards training deep neural networks, we programmatically generate entirely new instances for each puzzle while retaining their solution algorithm. To benchmark the performance on the SMART-101 dataset, we propose a vision and language meta-learning model using varied state-of-the-art backbone neural networks. Our experiments reveal that while powerful deep models offer reasonable performances on puzzles that they are trained on, they are not better than random accuracy when analyzed for generalization. We also evaluate the recent ChatGPT large language model on a subset of our dataset and find that while ChatGPT produces convincing reasoning abilities, the answers are often incorrect.

The proliferation of automatic faithfulness metrics for summarization has produced a need for benchmarks to evaluate them. While existing benchmarks measure the correlation with human judgements of faithfulness on model-generated summaries, they are insufficient for diagnosing whether metrics are: 1) consistent, i.e., decrease as errors are introduced into a summary, 2) effective on human-written texts, and 3) sensitive to different error types (as summaries can contain multiple errors). To address these needs, we present a benchmark of unfaithful minimal pairs (BUMP), a dataset of 889 human-written, minimally different summary pairs, where a single error (from an ontology of 7 types) is introduced to a summary from the CNN/DailyMail dataset to produce an unfaithful summary. We find BUMP complements existing benchmarks in a number of ways: 1) the summaries in BUMP are harder to discriminate and less probable under SOTA summarization models, 2) BUMP enables measuring the consistency of metrics, and reveals that the most discriminative metrics tend not to be the most consistent, 3) BUMP enables the measurement of metrics' performance on individual error types and highlights areas of weakness for future work.

We introduce INSTRUCTOR, a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions: every text input is embedded together with instructions explaining the use case (e.g., task and domain descriptions). Unlike encoders from prior work that are more specialized, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddings tailored to different downstream tasks and domains, without any further training. We first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture with a contrastive loss. We evaluate INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks (66 of which are unseen during training), ranging from classification and information retrieval to semantic textual similarity and text generation evaluation. INSTRUCTOR, while having an order of magnitude fewer parameters than the previous best model, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 3.4% compared to the previous best results on the 70 diverse datasets. Our analysis suggests that INSTRUCTOR is robust to changes in instructions, and that instruction finetuning mitigates the challenge of training a single model on diverse datasets.

Open-textured terms in written rules are typically settled through interpretive argumentation. Ongoing work has attempted to catalogue the schemes used in such interpretive argumentation. But how can the use of these schemes affect the way in which people actually use and reason over the proper interpretations of open-textured terms? Using the interpretive argument-eliciting game Aporia as our framework, we carried out an empirical study to answer this question. Differing from previous work, we did not allow participants to argue for interpretations arbitrarily, but to only use arguments that fit with a given set of interpretive argument templates. Finally, we analyze the results captured by this new dataset, specifically focusing on practical implications for the development of interpretation-capable artificial reasoners.

Hyperparameter tuning is critical to the success of federated learning applications. Unfortunately, appropriately selecting hyperparameters is challenging in federated networks. Issues of scale, privacy, and heterogeneity introduce noise in the tuning process and make it difficult to evaluate the performance of various hyperparameters. In this work, we perform the first systematic study on the effect of noisy evaluation in federated hyperparameter tuning. We first identify and rigorously explore key sources of noise, including client subsampling, data and systems heterogeneity, and data privacy. Surprisingly, our results indicate that even small amounts of noise can significantly impact tuning methods-reducing the performance of state-of-the-art approaches to that of naive baselines. To address noisy evaluation in such scenarios, we propose a simple and effective approach that leverages public proxy data to boost the evaluation signal. Our work establishes general challenges, baselines, and best practices for future work in federated hyperparameter tuning.

Calorimeter shower simulations are often the bottleneck in simulation time for particle physics detectors. A lot of effort is currently spent on optimizing generative architectures for specific detector geometries, which generalize poorly. We develop a geometry-aware autoregressive model on a range of calorimeter geometries such that the model learns to adapt its energy deposition depending on the size and position of the cells. This is a key proof-of-concept step towards building a model that can generalize to new unseen calorimeter geometries with little to no additional training. Such a model can replace the hundreds of generative models used for calorimeter simulation in a Large Hadron Collider experiment. For the study of future detectors, such a model will dramatically reduce the large upfront investment usually needed to generate simulations.