Controlled automated story generation seeks to generate natural language stories satisfying constraints from natural language critiques or preferences. Existing methods to control for story preference utilize prompt engineering which is labor intensive and often inconsistent. They may also use logit-manipulation methods which require annotated datasets to exist for the desired attributes. To address these issues, we first train a contrastive bi-encoder model to align stories with corresponding human critiques, named CARP, building a general purpose preference model. This is subsequently used as a reward function to fine-tune a generative language model via reinforcement learning. However, simply fine-tuning a generative language model with a contrastive reward model does not always reliably result in a story generation system capable of generating stories that meet user preferences. To increase story generation robustness we further fine-tune the contrastive reward model using a prompt-learning technique. A human participant study is then conducted comparing generations from our full system, ablations, and two baselines. We show that the full fine-tuning pipeline results in a story generator preferred over a LLM 20x as large as well as logit-based methods. This motivates the use of contrastive learning for general purpose human preference modeling.

从开放式域文本提示中生成和编辑图像是迄今为止需要昂贵且经过特殊训练的型号的一项挑战性的任务。我们为这两个任务展示了一种新颖的方法，该方法能够通过使用多模式编码器来指导图像世代，从而从具有显着语义复杂性的文本提示中产生高视觉质量的图像。我们在各种任务上说明了如何使用夹[37]引导VQGAN [11]产生的视觉质量输出比先前的较不灵活的方法，例如DALL-E [38]，Glide [33]和Open-Edit [24]，尽管没有接受培训的任务。我们的代码在公共存储库中可用。

基于神经语言模型的自动化故事生成方法遭受了两个重要的限制。首先，基于语言模型的故事生成器通常不适用于给定的目标或结束。其次，当故事变长时，他们经常失去一致。我们提出了一种新的自动化故事生成方法，将问题视为生成的问答之一。我们所提出的故事生成系统从封装故事的最终事件的句子开始。然后系统迭代地（1）分析描述最新事件的文本，（2）生成关于“为什么”一个字符正在执行他们在事件中执行的事情的问题，然后（3）尝试生成另一个前面的回答这个问题的事件。

Recent work has shown the benefits of synthetic data for use in computer vision, with applications ranging from autonomous driving to face landmark detection and reconstruction. There are a number of benefits of using synthetic data from privacy preservation and bias elimination to quality and feasibility of annotation. Generating human-centered synthetic data is a particular challenge in terms of realism and domain-gap, though recent work has shown that effective machine learning models can be trained using synthetic face data alone. We show that this can be extended to include the full body by building on the pipeline of Wood et al. to generate synthetic images of humans in their entirety, with ground-truth annotations for computer vision applications. In this report we describe how we construct a parametric model of the face and body, including articulated hands; our rendering pipeline to generate realistic images of humans based on this body model; an approach for training DNNs to regress a dense set of landmarks covering the entire body; and a method for fitting our body model to dense landmarks predicted from multiple views.

Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has attracted considerable attention as a gradient-based Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method. Since the introduction of DARTS, there has been little work done on adapting the action space based on state-of-art architecture design principles for CNNs. In this work, we aim to address this gap by incrementally augmenting the DARTS search space with micro-design changes inspired by ConvNeXt and studying the trade-off between accuracy, evaluation layer count, and computational cost. To this end, we introduce the Pseudo-Inverted Bottleneck conv block intending to reduce the computational footprint of the inverted bottleneck block proposed in ConvNeXt. Our proposed architecture is much less sensitive to evaluation layer count and outperforms a DARTS network with similar size significantly, at layer counts as small as 2. Furthermore, with less layers, not only does it achieve higher accuracy with lower GMACs and parameter count, GradCAM comparisons show that our network is able to better detect distinctive features of target objects compared to DARTS.

Meta Learning automates the search for learning algorithms. At the same time, it creates a dependency on human engineering on the meta-level, where meta learning algorithms need to be designed. In this paper, we investigate self-referential meta learning systems that modify themselves without the need for explicit meta optimization. We discuss the relationship of such systems to in-context and memory-based meta learning and show that self-referential neural networks require functionality to be reused in the form of parameter sharing. Finally, we propose fitness monotonic execution (FME), a simple approach to avoid explicit meta optimization. A neural network self-modifies to solve bandit and classic control tasks, improves its self-modifications, and learns how to learn, purely by assigning more computational resources to better performing solutions.

There are two important things in science: (A) Finding answers to given questions, and (B) Coming up with good questions. Our artificial scientists not only learn to answer given questions, but also continually invent new questions, by proposing hypotheses to be verified or falsified through potentially complex and time-consuming experiments, including thought experiments akin to those of mathematicians. While an artificial scientist expands its knowledge, it remains biased towards the simplest, least costly experiments that still have surprising outcomes, until they become boring. We present an empirical analysis of the automatic generation of interesting experiments. In the first setting, we investigate self-invented experiments in a reinforcement-providing environment and show that they lead to effective exploration. In the second setting, pure thought experiments are implemented as the weights of recurrent neural networks generated by a neural experiment generator. Initially interesting thought experiments may become boring over time.

Recent advances in language modeling have enabled new conversational systems. In particular, it is often desirable for people to make choices among specified options when using such systems. We address the problem of reference resolution, when people use natural expressions to choose between real world entities. For example, given the choice `Should we make a Simnel cake or a Pandan cake?' a natural response from a non-expert may be indirect: `let's make the green one'. Reference resolution has been little studied with natural expressions, thus robustly understanding such language has large potential for improving naturalness in dialog, recommendation, and search systems. We create AltEntities (Alternative Entities), a new public dataset of entity pairs and utterances, and develop models for the disambiguation problem. Consisting of 42K indirect referring expressions across three domains, it enables for the first time the study of how large language models can be adapted to this task. We find they achieve 82%-87% accuracy in realistic settings, which while reasonable also invites further advances.

A typical product or place often has hundreds of reviews, and summarization of these texts is an important and challenging problem. Recent progress on abstractive summarization in domains such as news has been driven by supervised systems trained on hundreds of thousands of news articles paired with human-written summaries. However for opinion texts, such large scale datasets are rarely available. Unsupervised methods, self-training, and few-shot learning approaches bridge that gap. In this work, we present a novel self-training approach, OpineSum, for abstractive opinion summarization. The summaries in this approach are built using a novel application of textual entailment and capture the consensus of opinions across the various reviews for an item. This method can be used to obtain silver-standard summaries on a large scale and train both unsupervised and few-shot abstractive summarization systems. OpineSum achieves state-of-the-art performance in both settings.

We consider the problem of automatically generating stories in multiple languages. Compared to prior work in monolingual story generation, crosslingual story generation allows for more universal research on story planning. We propose to use Prompting Large Language Models with Plans to study which plan is optimal for story generation. We consider 4 types of plans and systematically analyse how the outputs differ for different planning strategies. The study demonstrates that formulating the plans as question-answer pairs leads to more coherent generated stories while the plan gives more control to the story creators.