Many problems can be viewed as forms of geospatial search aided by aerial imagery, with examples ranging from detecting poaching activity to human trafficking. We model this class of problems in a visual active search (VAS) framework, which takes as input an image of a broad area, and aims to identify as many examples of a target object as possible. It does this through a limited sequence of queries, each of which verifies whether an example is present in a given region. We propose a reinforcement learning approach for VAS that leverages a collection of fully annotated search tasks as training data to learn a search policy, and combines features of the input image with a natural representation of active search state. Additionally, we propose domain adaptation techniques to improve the policy at decision time when training data is not fully reflective of the test-time distribution of VAS tasks. Through extensive experiments on several satellite imagery datasets, we show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms several strong baselines. Code and data will be made public.

已经开发了几种事后解释方法来解释预训练的黑盒神经网络。但是，研究工作的差距仍存在差距，以设计固有解释的神经网络。在本文中，我们利用了最近提出的依据实例的事后因果解释方法，使现有的变压器体系结构固有地解释。经过培训后，我们的模型以在给定实例的输入空间中的顶部$ k $区域的形式提供了解释，从而有助于其决策。我们使用三个图像数据集评估了有关二进制分类任务的方法：MNIST，FMNIST和CIFAR。我们的结果表明，与基于因果关系的事后解释器模型相比，我们本来可以解释的模型可以实现更好的解释性结果，同时消除了训练单独的解释器模型的需求。我们的代码可在https://github.com/mvrl/cat-xplain上找到。

语言模型既展示了定量的改进，又展示了新的定性功能，随着规模的增加。尽管它们具有潜在的变革性影响，但这些新能力的特征却很差。为了为未来的研究提供信息，为破坏性的新模型能力做准备，并改善社会有害的效果，至关重要的是，我们必须了解目前和近乎未来的能力和语言模型的局限性。为了应对这一挑战，我们介绍了超越模仿游戏基准（Big Bench）。 Big Bench目前由204个任务组成，由132家机构的442位作者贡献。任务主题是多样的，从语言学，儿童发展，数学，常识性推理，生物学，物理学，社会偏见，软件开发等等。 Big-Bench专注于被认为超出当前语言模型的功能的任务。我们评估了OpenAI的GPT型号，Google内部密集变压器体系结构和大型基础上的开关稀疏变压器的行为，跨越了数百万到数十亿个参数。此外，一个人类专家评估者团队执行了所有任务，以提供强大的基准。研究结果包括：模型性能和校准都随规模改善，但绝对的术语（以及与评估者的性能相比）；在模型类中的性能非常相似，尽管带有稀疏性。逐渐和预测的任务通常涉及大量知识或记忆成分，而在临界规模上表现出“突破性”行为的任务通常涉及多个步骤或组成部分或脆性指标；社交偏见通常会随着含糊不清的环境而随着规模而增加，但这可以通过提示来改善。

A Digital Twin (DT) is a simulation of a physical system that provides information to make decisions that add economic, social or commercial value. The behaviour of a physical system changes over time, a DT must therefore be continually updated with data from the physical systems to reflect its changing behaviour. For resource-constrained systems, updating a DT is non-trivial because of challenges such as on-board learning and the off-board data transfer. This paper presents a framework for updating data-driven DTs of resource-constrained systems geared towards system health monitoring. The proposed solution consists of: (1) an on-board system running a light-weight DT allowing the prioritisation and parsimonious transfer of data generated by the physical system; and (2) off-board robust updating of the DT and detection of anomalous behaviours. Two case studies are considered using a production gas turbine engine system to demonstrate the digital representation accuracy for real-world, time-varying physical systems.

Feature selection helps reduce data acquisition costs in ML, but the standard approach is to train models with static feature subsets. Here, we consider the dynamic feature selection (DFS) problem where a model sequentially queries features based on the presently available information. DFS is often addressed with reinforcement learning (RL), but we explore a simpler approach of greedily selecting features based on their conditional mutual information. This method is theoretically appealing but requires oracle access to the data distribution, so we develop a learning approach based on amortized optimization. The proposed method is shown to recover the greedy policy when trained to optimality and outperforms numerous existing feature selection methods in our experiments, thus validating it as a simple but powerful approach for this problem.

We demonstrate how efficient autonomous drone swarms can be in detecting and tracking occluded targets in densely forested areas, such as lost people during search and rescue missions. Exploration and optimization of local viewing conditions, such as occlusion density and target view obliqueness, provide much faster and much more reliable results than previous, blind sampling strategies that are based on pre-defined waypoints. An adapted real-time particle swarm optimization and a new objective function are presented that are able to deal with dynamic and highly random through-foliage conditions. Synthetic aperture sensing is our fundamental sampling principle, and drone swarms are employed to approximate the optical signals of extremely wide and adaptable airborne lenses.

Sequential testing, always-valid $p$-values, and confidence sequences promise flexible statistical inference and on-the-fly decision making. However, unlike fixed-$n$ inference based on asymptotic normality, existing sequential tests either make parametric assumptions and end up under-covering/over-rejecting when these fail or use non-parametric but conservative concentration inequalities and end up over-covering/under-rejecting. To circumvent these issues, we sidestep exact at-least-$\alpha$ coverage and focus on asymptotically exact coverage and asymptotic optimality. That is, we seek sequential tests whose probability of ever rejecting a true hypothesis asymptotically approaches $\alpha$ and whose expected time to reject a false hypothesis approaches a lower bound on all tests with asymptotic coverage at least $\alpha$, both under an appropriate asymptotic regime. We permit observations to be both non-parametric and dependent and focus on testing whether the observations form a martingale difference sequence. We propose the universal sequential probability ratio test (uSPRT), a slight modification to the normal-mixture sequential probability ratio test, where we add a burn-in period and adjust thresholds accordingly. We show that even in this very general setting, the uSPRT is asymptotically optimal under mild generic conditions. We apply the results to stabilized estimating equations to test means, treatment effects, etc. Our results also provide corresponding guarantees for the implied confidence sequences. Numerical simulations verify our guarantees and the benefits of the uSPRT over alternatives.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but the quality bar for medical and clinical applications is high. Today, attempts to assess models' clinical knowledge typically rely on automated evaluations on limited benchmarks. There is no standard to evaluate model predictions and reasoning across a breadth of tasks. To address this, we present MultiMedQA, a benchmark combining six existing open question answering datasets spanning professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries; and HealthSearchQA, a new free-response dataset of medical questions searched online. We propose a framework for human evaluation of model answers along multiple axes including factuality, precision, possible harm, and bias. In addition, we evaluate PaLM (a 540-billion parameter LLM) and its instruction-tuned variant, Flan-PaLM, on MultiMedQA. Using a combination of prompting strategies, Flan-PaLM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on every MultiMedQA multiple-choice dataset (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, MMLU clinical topics), including 67.6% accuracy on MedQA (US Medical License Exam questions), surpassing prior state-of-the-art by over 17%. However, human evaluation reveals key gaps in Flan-PaLM responses. To resolve this we introduce instruction prompt tuning, a parameter-efficient approach for aligning LLMs to new domains using a few exemplars. The resulting model, Med-PaLM, performs encouragingly, but remains inferior to clinicians. We show that comprehension, recall of knowledge, and medical reasoning improve with model scale and instruction prompt tuning, suggesting the potential utility of LLMs in medicine. Our human evaluations reveal important limitations of today's models, reinforcing the importance of both evaluation frameworks and method development in creating safe, helpful LLM models for clinical applications.

Transformers have been essential to pretraining success in NLP. Other architectures have been used, but require attention layers to match benchmark accuracy. This work explores pretraining without attention. We test recently developed routing layers based on state-space models (SSM) and model architectures based on multiplicative gating. Used together these modeling choices have a large impact on pretraining accuracy. Empirically the proposed Bidirectional Gated SSM (BiGS) replicates BERT pretraining results without attention and can be extended to long-form pretraining of 4096 tokens without approximation.

In this paper, we present strong baselines for the task of Feedback Comment Generation for Writing Learning. Given a sentence and an error span, the task is to generate a feedback comment explaining the error. Sentences and feedback comments are both in English. We experiment with LLMs and also create multiple pseudo datasets for the task, investigating how it affects the performance of our system. We present our results for the task along with extensive analysis of the generated comments with the aim of aiding future studies in feedback comment generation for English language learners.