With the development of technology and sharing economy, Airbnb as a famous short-term rental platform, has become the first choice for many young people to select. The issue of Airbnb's pricing has always been a problem worth studying. While the previous studies achieve promising results, there are exists deficiencies to solve. Such as, (1) the feature attributes of rental are not rich enough; (2) the research on rental text information is not deep enough; (3) there are few studies on predicting the rental price combined with the point of interest(POI) around the house. To address the above challenges, we proposes a multi-source information embedding(MSIE) model to predict the rental price of Airbnb. Specifically, we first selects the statistical feature to embed the original rental data. Secondly, we generates the word feature vector and emotional score combination of three different text information to form the text feature embedding. Thirdly, we uses the points of interest(POI) around the rental house information generates a variety of spatial network graphs, and learns the embedding of the network to obtain the spatial feature embedding. Finally, this paper combines the three modules into multi source rental representations, and uses the constructed fully connected neural network to predict the price. The analysis of the experimental results shows the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Structured tabular data exist across nearly all fields. Reasoning task over these data aims to answer questions or determine the truthiness of hypothesis sentences by understanding the semantic meaning of a table. While previous works have devoted significant efforts to the tabular reasoning task, they always assume there are sufficient labeled data. However, constructing reasoning samples over tables (and related text) is labor-intensive, especially when the reasoning process is complex. When labeled data is insufficient, the performance of models will suffer an unendurable decline. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for unsupervised complex tabular reasoning (UCTR), which generates sufficient and diverse synthetic data with complex logic for tabular reasoning tasks, assuming no human-annotated data at all. We first utilize a random sampling strategy to collect diverse programs of different types and execute them on tables based on a "Program-Executor" module. To bridge the gap between the programs and natural language sentences, we design a powerful "NL-Generator" module to generate natural language sentences with complex logic from these programs. Since a table often occurs with its surrounding texts, we further propose novel "Table-to-Text" and "Text-to-Table" operators to handle joint table-text reasoning scenarios. This way, we can adequately exploit the unlabeled table resources to obtain a well-performed reasoning model under an unsupervised setting. Our experiments cover different tasks (question answering and fact verification) and different domains (general and specific), showing that our unsupervised methods can achieve at most 93% performance compared to supervised models. We also find that it can substantially boost the supervised performance in low-resourced domains as a data augmentation technique. Our code is available at https://github.com/leezythu/UCTR.

Recent years have witnessed the rapid progress of image captioning. However, the demands for large memory storage and heavy computational burden prevent these captioning models from being deployed on mobile devices. The main obstacles lie in the heavyweight visual feature extractors (i.e., object detectors) and complicated cross-modal fusion networks. To this end, we propose LightCap, a lightweight image captioner for resource-limited devices. The core design is built on the recent CLIP model for efficient image captioning. To be specific, on the one hand, we leverage the CLIP model to extract the compact grid features without relying on the time-consuming object detectors. On the other hand, we transfer the image-text retrieval design of CLIP to image captioning scenarios by devising a novel visual concept extractor and a cross-modal modulator. We further optimize the cross-modal fusion model and parallel prediction heads via sequential and ensemble distillations. With the carefully designed architecture, our model merely contains 40M parameters, saving the model size by more than 75% and the FLOPs by more than 98% in comparison with the current state-of-the-art methods. In spite of the low capacity, our model still exhibits state-of-the-art performance on prevalent datasets, e.g., 136.6 CIDEr on COCO Karpathy test split. Testing on the smartphone with only a single CPU, the proposed LightCap exhibits a fast inference speed of 188ms per image, which is ready for practical applications.

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.

Despite the remarkable progress of image captioning, existing captioners typically lack the controllable capability to generate desired image captions, e.g., describing the image in a rough or detailed manner, in a factual or emotional view, etc. In this paper, we show that a unified model is qualified to perform well in diverse domains and freely switch among multiple styles. Such a controllable capability is achieved by embedding the prompt learning into the image captioning framework. To be specific, we design a set of prompts to fine-tune the pre-trained image captioner. These prompts allow the model to absorb stylized data from different domains for joint training, without performance degradation in each domain. Furthermore, we optimize the prompts with learnable vectors in the continuous word embedding space, avoiding the heuristic prompt engineering and meanwhile exhibiting superior performance. In the inference stage, our model is able to generate desired stylized captions by choosing the corresponding prompts. Extensive experiments verify the controllable capability of the proposed method. Notably, we achieve outstanding performance on two diverse image captioning benchmarks including COCO Karpathy split and TextCaps using a unified model.

Many Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction works focused on designing advanced architectures to model complex feature interactions but neglected the importance of feature representation learning, e.g., adopting a plain embedding layer for each feature, which results in sub-optimal feature representations and thus inferior CTR prediction performance. For instance, low frequency features, which account for the majority of features in many CTR tasks, are less considered in standard supervised learning settings, leading to sub-optimal feature representations. In this paper, we introduce self-supervised learning to produce high-quality feature representations directly and propose a model-agnostic Contrastive Learning for CTR (CL4CTR) framework consisting of three self-supervised learning signals to regularize the feature representation learning: contrastive loss, feature alignment, and field uniformity. The contrastive module first constructs positive feature pairs by data augmentation and then minimizes the distance between the representations of each positive feature pair by the contrastive loss. The feature alignment constraint forces the representations of features from the same field to be close, and the field uniformity constraint forces the representations of features from different fields to be distant. Extensive experiments verify that CL4CTR achieves the best performance on four datasets and has excellent effectiveness and compatibility with various representative baselines.

Alignment between image and text has shown promising improvements on patch-level pre-trained document image models. However, investigating more effective or finer-grained alignment techniques during pre-training requires a large amount of computation cost and time. Thus, a question naturally arises: Could we fine-tune the pre-trained models adaptive to downstream tasks with alignment objectives and achieve comparable or better performance? In this paper, we propose a new model architecture with alignment-enriched tuning (dubbed AETNet) upon pre-trained document image models, to adapt downstream tasks with the joint task-specific supervised and alignment-aware contrastive objective. Specifically, we introduce an extra visual transformer as the alignment-ware image encoder and an extra text transformer as the alignment-ware text encoder before multimodal fusion. We consider alignment in the following three aspects: 1) document-level alignment by leveraging the cross-modal and intra-modal contrastive loss; 2) global-local alignment for modeling localized and structural information in document images; and 3) local-level alignment for more accurate patch-level information. Experiments on various downstream tasks show that AETNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks. Notably, AETNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art pre-trained models, such as LayoutLMv3 with fine-tuning techniques, on three different downstream tasks.

Metric-based meta-learning is one of the de facto standards in few-shot learning. It composes of representation learning and metrics calculation designs. Previous works construct class representations in different ways, varying from mean output embedding to covariance and distributions. However, using embeddings in space lacks expressivity and cannot capture class information robustly, while statistical complex modeling poses difficulty to metric designs. In this work, we use tensor fields (``areas'') to model classes from the geometrical perspective for few-shot learning. We present a simple and effective method, dubbed hypersphere prototypes (HyperProto), where class information is represented by hyperspheres with dynamic sizes with two sets of learnable parameters: the hypersphere's center and the radius. Extending from points to areas, hyperspheres are much more expressive than embeddings. Moreover, it is more convenient to perform metric-based classification with hypersphere prototypes than statistical modeling, as we only need to calculate the distance from a data point to the surface of the hypersphere. Following this idea, we also develop two variants of prototypes under other measurements. Extensive experiments and analysis on few-shot learning tasks across NLP and CV and comparison with 20+ competitive baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Temporal action localization (TAL) aims to detect the boundary and identify the class of each action instance in a long untrimmed video. Current approaches treat video frames homogeneously, and tend to give background and key objects excessive attention. This limits their sensitivity to localize action boundaries. To this end, we propose a prior-enhanced temporal action localization method (PETAL), which only takes in RGB input and incorporates action subjects as priors. This proposal leverages action subjects' information with a plug-and-play subject-aware spatial attention module (SA-SAM) to generate an aggregated and subject-prioritized representation. Experimental results on THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-1.3 datasets demonstrate that the proposed PETAL achieves competitive performance using only RGB features, e.g., boosting mAP by 2.41% or 0.25% over the state-of-the-art approach that uses RGB features or with additional optical flow features on the THUMOS-14 dataset.

We present SpeechMatrix, a large-scale multilingual corpus of speech-to-speech translations mined from real speech of European Parliament recordings. It contains speech alignments in 136 language pairs with a total of 418 thousand hours of speech. To evaluate the quality of this parallel speech, we train bilingual speech-to-speech translation models on mined data only and establish extensive baseline results on EuroParl-ST, VoxPopuli and FLEURS test sets. Enabled by the multilinguality of SpeechMatrix, we also explore multilingual speech-to-speech translation, a topic which was addressed by few other works. We also demonstrate that model pre-training and sparse scaling using Mixture-of-Experts bring large gains to translation performance. The mined data and models are freely available.