We aim to bridge the gap between our common-sense few-sample human learning and large-data machine learning. We derive a theory of human-like few-shot learning from von-Neuman-Landauer's principle. modelling human learning is difficult as how people learn varies from one to another. Under commonly accepted definitions, we prove that all human or animal few-shot learning, and major models including Free Energy Principle and Bayesian Program Learning that model such learning, approximate our theory, under Church-Turing thesis. We find that deep generative model like variational autoencoder (VAE) can be used to approximate our theory and perform significantly better than baseline models including deep neural networks, for image recognition, low resource language processing, and character recognition.

Existing measures and representations for trajectories have two longstanding fundamental shortcomings, i.e., they are computationally expensive and they can not guarantee the `uniqueness' property of a distance function: dist(X,Y) = 0 if and only if X=Y, where $X$ and $Y$ are two trajectories. This paper proposes a simple yet powerful way to represent trajectories and measure the similarity between two trajectories using a distributional kernel to address these shortcomings. It is a principled approach based on kernel mean embedding which has a strong theoretical underpinning. It has three distinctive features in comparison with existing approaches. (1) A distributional kernel is used for the very first time for trajectory representation and similarity measurement. (2) It does not rely on point-to-point distances which are used in most existing distances for trajectories. (3) It requires no learning, unlike existing learning and deep learning approaches. We show the generality of this new approach in three applications: (a) trajectory anomaly detection, (b) anomalous sub-trajectory detection, and (c) trajectory pattern mining. We identify that the distributional kernel has (i) a unique data-dependent property and the above uniqueness property which are the key factors that lead to its superior task-specific performance; and (ii) runtime orders of magnitude faster than existing distance measures.

Recent studies have shown that using an external Language Model (LM) benefits the end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, predicting tokens that appear less frequently in the training set is still quite challenging. The long-tail prediction problems have been widely studied in many applications, but only been addressed by a few studies for ASR and LMs. In this paper, we propose a new memory augmented lookup dictionary based Transformer architecture for LM. The newly introduced lookup dictionary incorporates rich contextual information in training set, which is vital to correctly predict long-tail tokens. With intensive experiments on Chinese and English data sets, our proposed method is proved to outperform the baseline Transformer LM by a great margin on both word/character error rate and tail tokens error rate. This is achieved without impact on the decoding efficiency. Overall, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in boosting the ASR decoding performance, especially for long-tail tokens.

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.

High-dimensional data can often display heterogeneity due to heteroscedastic variance or inhomogeneous covariate effects. Penalized quantile and expectile regression methods offer useful tools to detect heteroscedasticity in high-dimensional data. The former is computationally challenging due to the non-smooth nature of the check loss, and the latter is sensitive to heavy-tailed error distributions. In this paper, we propose and study (penalized) robust expectile regression (retire), with a focus on iteratively reweighted $\ell_1$-penalization which reduces the estimation bias from $\ell_1$-penalization and leads to oracle properties. Theoretically, we establish the statistical properties of the retire estimator under two regimes: (i) low-dimensional regime in which $d \ll n$; (ii) high-dimensional regime in which $s\ll n\ll d$ with $s$ denoting the number of significant predictors. In the high-dimensional setting, we carefully characterize the solution path of the iteratively reweighted $\ell_1$-penalized retire estimation, adapted from the local linear approximation algorithm for folded-concave regularization. Under a mild minimum signal strength condition, we show that after as many as $\log(\log d)$ iterations the final iterate enjoys the oracle convergence rate. At each iteration, the weighted $\ell_1$-penalized convex program can be efficiently solved by a semismooth Newton coordinate descent algorithm. Numerical studies demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed procedure compared with either non-robust or quantile regression based alternatives.

Recently, human pose estimation mainly focuses on how to design a more effective and better deep network structure as human features extractor, and most designed feature extraction networks only introduce the position of each anatomical keypoint to guide their training process. However, we found that some human anatomical keypoints kept their topology invariance, which can help to localize them more accurately when detecting the keypoints on the feature map. But to the best of our knowledge, there is no literature that has specifically studied it. Thus, in this paper, we present a novel 2D human pose estimation method with explicit anatomical keypoints structure constraints, which introduces the topology constraint term that consisting of the differences between the distance and direction of the keypoint-to-keypoint and their groundtruth in the loss object. More importantly, our proposed model can be plugged in the most existing bottom-up or top-down human pose estimation methods and improve their performance. The extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset: COCO keypoint dataset, show that our methods perform favorably against the most existing bottom-up and top-down human pose estimation methods, especially for Lite-HRNet, when our model is plugged into it, its AP scores separately raise by 2.9\% and 3.3\% on COCO val2017 and test-dev2017 datasets.

This paper describes the submission of the RoyalFlush neural machine translation system for the WMT 2022 translation efficiency task. Unlike the commonly used autoregressive translation system, we adopted a two-stage translation paradigm called Hybrid Regression Translation (HRT) to combine the advantages of autoregressive and non-autoregressive translation. Specifically, HRT first autoregressively generates a discontinuous sequence (e.g., make a prediction every $k$ tokens, $k>1$) and then fills in all previously skipped tokens at once in a non-autoregressive manner. Thus, we can easily trade off the translation quality and speed by adjusting $k$. In addition, by integrating other modeling techniques (e.g., sequence-level knowledge distillation and deep-encoder-shallow-decoder layer allocation strategy) and a mass of engineering efforts, HRT improves 80\% inference speed and achieves equivalent translation performance with the same-capacity AT counterpart. Our fastest system reaches 6k+ words/second on the GPU latency setting, estimated to be about 3.1x faster than the last year's winner.

Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) 3D Object Detection is a crucial multi-view technique for autonomous driving systems. Recently, plenty of works are proposed, following a similar paradigm consisting of three essential components, i.e., camera feature extraction, BEV feature construction, and task heads. Among the three components, BEV feature construction is BEV-specific compared with 2D tasks. Existing methods aggregate the multi-view camera features to the flattened grid in order to construct the BEV feature. However, flattening the BEV space along the height dimension fails to emphasize the informative features of different heights. For example, the barrier is located at a low height while the truck is located at a high height. In this paper, we propose a novel method named BEV Slice Attention Network (BEV-SAN) for exploiting the intrinsic characteristics of different heights. Instead of flattening the BEV space, we first sample along the height dimension to build the global and local BEV slices. Then, the features of BEV slices are aggregated from the camera features and merged by the attention mechanism. Finally, we fuse the merged local and global BEV features by a transformer to generate the final feature map for task heads. The purpose of local BEV slices is to emphasize informative heights. In order to find them, we further propose a LiDAR-guided sampling strategy to leverage the statistical distribution of LiDAR to determine the heights of local slices. Compared with uniform sampling, LiDAR-guided sampling can determine more informative heights. We conduct detailed experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of BEV-SAN. Code will be released.

Behavior constrained policy optimization has been demonstrated to be a successful paradigm for tackling Offline Reinforcement Learning. By exploiting historical transitions, a policy is trained to maximize a learned value function while constrained by the behavior policy to avoid a significant distributional shift. In this paper, we propose our closed-form policy improvement operators. We make a novel observation that the behavior constraint naturally motivates the use of first-order Taylor approximation, leading to a linear approximation of the policy objective. Additionally, as practical datasets are usually collected by heterogeneous policies, we model the behavior policies as a Gaussian Mixture and overcome the induced optimization difficulties by leveraging the LogSumExp's lower bound and Jensen's Inequality, giving rise to a closed-form policy improvement operator. We instantiate offline RL algorithms with our novel policy improvement operators and empirically demonstrate their effectiveness over state-of-the-art algorithms on the standard D4RL benchmark.

In this work, we propose a family of novel quantum kernels, namely the Hierarchical Aligned Quantum Jensen-Shannon Kernels (HAQJSK), for un-attributed graphs. Different from most existing classical graph kernels, the proposed HAQJSK kernels can incorporate hierarchical aligned structure information between graphs and transform graphs of random sizes into fixed-sized aligned graph structures, i.e., the Hierarchical Transitive Aligned Adjacency Matrix of vertices and the Hierarchical Transitive Aligned Density Matrix of the Continuous-Time Quantum Walk (CTQW). For a pair of graphs to hand, the resulting HAQJSK kernels are defined by measuring the Quantum Jensen-Shannon Divergence (QJSD) between their transitive aligned graph structures. We show that the proposed HAQJSK kernels not only reflect richer intrinsic global graph characteristics in terms of the CTQW, but also address the drawback of neglecting structural correspondence information arising in most existing R-convolution kernels. Furthermore, unlike the previous Quantum Jensen-Shannon Kernels associated with the QJSD and the CTQW, the proposed HAQJSK kernels can simultaneously guarantee the properties of permutation invariant and positive definiteness, explaining the theoretical advantages of the HAQJSK kernels. Experiments indicate the effectiveness of the proposed kernels.