对于场景重建和新型视图综合的数量表示形式的普及最近，人们的普及使重点放在以高视觉质量和实时为实时的体积内容动画上。尽管基于学习功能的隐性变形方法可以产生令人印象深刻的结果，但它们是艺术家和内容创建者的“黑匣子”，但它们需要大量的培训数据才能有意义地概括，并且在培训数据之外不会产生现实的外推。在这项工作中，我们通过引入实时的音量变形方法来解决这些问题，该方法是实时的，易于使用现成的软件编辑，并且可以令人信服地推断出来。为了证明我们方法的多功能性，我们将其应用于两种情况：基于物理的对象变形和触发性，其中使用Blendshapes控制着头像。我们还进行了彻底的实验，表明我们的方法与两种体积方法相比，结合了基于网格变形的隐式变形和方法。

在许多游戏中，动作包括玩家制作的若干决定。这些决定可以被视为单独的动作，这在效率原因的多动作游戏中已经是一个常见的做法。播放器的这种划分进入一系列更简单/较低级别的移动，称为\ emph {拆分}。到目前为止，分裂移动已仅在顾问的直接案件中应用，此外，几乎没有研究揭示其对代理商的影响力量的影响。采取知识的视角，我们的目标是回答如何在Monte-Carlo树搜索（MCT）中有效地使用分裂移动，以及分裂设计对代理的实际影响是什么。本文提出了与任意分裂的动作有用的MCT的概括。我们设计了算法的几种变体，并尝试分别测量分离移动的影响，以分别对效率，MCT，模拟和基于动作的启发式的效率。测试是在一组棋盘游戏上进行，并使用常规的主台综合游戏进行播放形式主义进行，其中可以基于游戏的抽象描述自动派生不同粒度的分裂策略。结果以不同方式使用分流设计的代理行为概述。我们得出结论，拆分设计可能对单一以及多动作游戏有很大的利益。

我们扩展了神经3D表示，以允许直观和可解释的用户控制超出新颖视图渲染（即相机控制）。我们允许用户注释一个希望在训练图像中只用少量掩模注释来控制的场景的哪个部分。我们的主要思想是将属性视为给定场景编码的神经网络回归的潜在变量。这导致了几次拍摄的学习框架，当未提供注释时，框架会自动发现属性。我们将我们的方法应用于具有不同类型的可控属性的各种场景（例如，人类面上的表达式控制，或在无生命对象的移动中的状态控制）。总体而言，我们据我们所知，我们的知识展示了第一次新颖的视图和新颖的属性从单一视频重新渲染场景。

合理和可控3D人类运动动画的创建是一个长期存在的问题，需要对技术人员艺术家进行手动干预。目前的机器学习方法可以半自动化该过程，然而，它们以显着的方式受到限制：它们只能处理预期运动的单个轨迹，该轨迹排除了对输出的细粒度控制。为了缓解该问题，我们在多个轨迹表示为具有缺失关节的姿势的空间和时间内将未来姿态预测的问题重构为姿势完成。我们表明这种框架可以推广到设计用于未来姿态预测的其他神经网络。曾经在该框架中培训，模型能够从任何数量的轨迹预测序列。我们提出了一种新颖的变形金刚架构，Trajevae，在这个想法上建立了一个，为3D人类动画提供了一个多功能框架。我们展示了Trajevae提供比基于轨迹的参考方法和方法基于过去的姿势。我们还表明，即使仅提供初始姿势，它也可以预测合理的未来姿势。

This paper presents the Crowd Score, a novel method to assess the funniness of jokes using large language models (LLMs) as AI judges. Our method relies on inducing different personalities into the LLM and aggregating the votes of the AI judges into a single score to rate jokes. We validate the votes using an auditing technique that checks if the explanation for a particular vote is reasonable using the LLM. We tested our methodology on 52 jokes in a crowd of four AI voters with different humour types: affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive and self-defeating. Our results show that few-shot prompting leads to better results than zero-shot for the voting question. Personality induction showed that aggressive and self-defeating voters are significantly more inclined to find more jokes funny of a set of aggressive/self-defeating jokes than the affiliative and self-enhancing voters. The Crowd Score follows the same trend as human judges by assigning higher scores to jokes that are also considered funnier by human judges. We believe that our methodology could be applied to other creative domains such as story, poetry, slogans, etc. It could both help the adoption of a flexible and accurate standard approach to compare different work in the CC community under a common metric and by minimizing human participation in assessing creative artefacts, it could accelerate the prototyping of creative artefacts and reduce the cost of hiring human participants to rate creative artefacts.

Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) are promising models that provide reliable policies under ambiguities in model parameters. As opposed to nominal Markov decision processes (MDPs), however, the state-of-the-art solution methods for RMDPs are limited to value-based methods, such as value iteration and policy iteration. This paper proposes Double-Loop Robust Policy Gradient (DRPG), the first generic policy gradient method for RMDPs with a global convergence guarantee in tabular problems. Unlike value-based methods, DRPG does not rely on dynamic programming techniques. In particular, the inner-loop robust policy evaluation problem is solved via projected gradient descent. Finally, our experimental results demonstrate the performance of our algorithm and verify our theoretical guarantees.

This paper presents a conversational AI platform called Flowstorm. Flowstorm is an open-source SaaS project suitable for creating, running, and analyzing conversational applications. Thanks to the fast and fully automated build process, the dialogues created within the platform can be executed in seconds. Furthermore, we propose a novel dialogue architecture that uses a combination of tree structures with generative models. The tree structures are also used for training NLU models suitable for specific dialogue scenarios. However, the generative models are globally used across applications and extend the functionality of the dialogue trees. Moreover, the platform functionality benefits from out-of-the-box components, such as the one responsible for extracting data from utterances or working with crawled data. Additionally, it can be extended using a custom code directly in the platform. One of the essential features of the platform is the possibility to reuse the created assets across applications. There is a library of prepared assets where each developer can contribute. All of the features are available through a user-friendly visual editor.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Entrainment is the phenomenon by which an interlocutor adapts their speaking style to align with their partner in conversations. It has been found in different dimensions as acoustic, prosodic, lexical or syntactic. In this work, we explore and utilize the entrainment phenomenon to improve spoken dialogue systems for voice assistants. We first examine the existence of the entrainment phenomenon in human-to-human dialogues in respect to acoustic feature and then extend the analysis to emotion features. The analysis results show strong evidence of entrainment in terms of both acoustic and emotion features. Based on this findings, we implement two entrainment policies and assess if the integration of entrainment principle into a Text-to-Speech (TTS) system improves the synthesis performance and the user experience. It is found that the integration of the entrainment principle into a TTS system brings performance improvement when considering acoustic features, while no obvious improvement is observed when considering emotion features.

Large language models demonstrate an emergent ability to learn a new task from a small number of input-output demonstrations, referred to as in-context few-shot learning. However, recent work shows that in such settings, models mainly learn to mimic the new task distribution, instead of the mechanics of the new task. We argue that the commonly-used evaluation settings of few-shot models utilizing a random selection of in-context demonstrations is not able to disentangle models' ability to learn new skills from demonstrations, as most of the such-selected demonstrations are not informative for prediction beyond exposing the new task's input and output distribution. Therefore, we introduce an evaluation technique that disentangles few-shot learners' gain from in-context learning by picking the demonstrations sharing a specific, informative concept with the predicted sample, in addition to the performance reached by mainly non-informative samples. We find that regardless of the model size, existing few-shot learners are not able to benefit from observing such informative concepts in demonstrations. We also find that such ability may not be obtained trivially by exposing the informative demonstrations in the training process, leaving the challenge of training true in-context learners open.