最近的体积三维重建方法可以产生非常精确的结果，即使对于未观察的表面，也可以具有合理的几何形状。然而，当涉及多视图融合时，它们面临着不希望的权衡。它们可以通过全局平均来熔断所有可用视图信息，从而丢失精细的细节，或者他们可以启发式群集对本地融合的群集视图，从而限制他们共同考虑所有视图的能力。我们的关键洞察力是通过在摄像机姿势和图像内容上学习视图融合功能，可以在不限制视图多样性的情况下保留更详细的详细信息。我们建议使用变压器学习此多视图融合。为此，我们使用变压器介绍Vortx，一个端到端的体积3D重建网络，用于宽基线，多视图功能融合。我们的模型是遮挡感知的，利用变压器架构来预测初始投影场景几何估计。该估计用于避免将反射图像特征通过曲面到遮挡区域。我们在Scannet上培训我们的模型，并显示它比最先进的方法产生更好的重建。我们还展示了概括，没有任何微调，优于两个其他数据集，Tum-RGBD和ICL-Nuim的相同最先进的方法。

我们呈现3DVNET，一种新型多视图立体声（MVS）深度预测方法，该方法结合了基于深度和体积的MVS方法的优点。我们的关键思想是使用3D场景建模网络，可迭代地更新一组粗略深度预测，从而产生高度准确的预测，它达成底层场景几何形状。与现有的深度预测技术不同，我们的方法使用体积3D卷积神经网络（CNN），该网络（CNN）在所有深度图中共同地在世界空间上运行。因此，网络可以学习有意义的场景级别。此外，与现有的体积MVS技术不同，我们的3D CNN在特征增强点云上运行，允许有效地聚合多视图信息和灵活的深度映射的迭代细化。实验结果表明，我们的方法超过了Scannet DataSet的深度预测和3D重建度量的最先进的准确性，以及来自Tum-RGBD和ICL-Nuim数据集的一系列场景。这表明我们的方法既有效又推广到新设置。

多模式分类是人类以人为本的机器学习中的核心任务。我们观察到信息跨多模式融合在多模式融合之前，信息在偶像中具有高度互补的信息，因此在多模式融合之前可以彻底稀释。为此，我们呈现稀疏的融合变压器（SFT），一种用于现有最先进的方法的变压器的新型多模式融合方法，同时具有大大降低了内存占用和计算成本。我们想法的关键是稀疏池块，可在跨模式建模之前减少单峰令牌集合。评估在多个多模式基准数据集上进行，用于广泛的分类任务。在类似的实验条件下的多个基准上获得最先进的性能，同时报告计算成本和内存要求降低六倍。广泛的消融研究展示了在天真的方法中结合稀疏和多式化学习的好处。这铺平了在低资源设备上实现多模级学习的方式。

Effective management of public shared spaces such as car parking space, is one challenging transformational aspect for many cities, especially in the developing World. By leveraging sensing technologies, cloud computing, and Artificial Intelligence, Cities are increasingly being managed smartly. Smart Cities not only bring convenience to City dwellers, but also improve their quality of life as advocated for by United Nations in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal on Sustainable Cities and Communities. Through integration of Internet of Things and Cloud Computing, this paper presents a successful proof-of-concept implementation of a framework for managing public car parking spaces. Reservation of parking slots is done through a cloud-hosted application, while access to and out of the parking slot is enabled through Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology which in real-time, accordingly triggers update of the parking slot availability in the cloud-hosted database. This framework could bring considerable convenience to City dwellers since motorists only have to drive to a parking space when sure of a vacant parking slot, an important stride towards realization of sustainable smart cities and communities.

Despite recent success in large language model (LLM) reasoning, LLMs still struggle with hierarchical multi-step reasoning like generating complex programs. In these cases, humans often start with a high-level algorithmic design and implement each part gradually. We introduce Parsel, a framework enabling automatic implementation and validation of complex algorithms with code LLMs, based on hierarchical function descriptions in natural language. Parsel can be used across domains requiring hierarchical reasoning, e.g. code synthesis, theorem proving, and robotic planning. We demonstrate Parsel's capabilities by using it to generate complex programs that cannot currently be automatically implemented from one description and backtranslating Python programs in the APPS dataset. Beyond modeling capabilities, Parsel allows problem-solving with high-level algorithmic designs, benefiting both students and professional programmers.

Current image generation models struggle to reliably produce well-formed visual text. In this paper, we investigate a key contributing factor: popular text-to-image models lack character-level input features, making it much harder to predict a word's visual makeup as a series of glyphs. To quantify the extent of this effect, we conduct a series of controlled experiments comparing character-aware vs. character-blind text encoders. In the text-only domain, we find that character-aware models provide large gains on a novel spelling task (WikiSpell). Transferring these learnings onto the visual domain, we train a suite of image generation models, and show that character-aware variants outperform their character-blind counterparts across a range of novel text rendering tasks (our DrawText benchmark). Our models set a much higher state-of-the-art on visual spelling, with 30+ point accuracy gains over competitors on rare words, despite training on far fewer examples.

Large "instruction-tuned" language models (finetuned to respond to instructions) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to generalize zero-shot to new tasks. Nevertheless, they depend heavily on human-written instruction data that is limited in quantity, diversity, and creativity, therefore hindering the generality of the tuned model. We introduce Self-Instruct, a framework for improving the instruction-following capabilities of pretrained language models by bootstrapping off its own generations. Our pipeline generates instruction, input, and output samples from a language model, then prunes them before using them to finetune the original model. Applying our method to vanilla GPT3, we demonstrate a 33% absolute improvement over the original model on Super-NaturalInstructions, on par with the performance of InstructGPT_001, which is trained with private user data and human annotations. For further evaluation, we curate a set of expert-written instructions for novel tasks, and show through human evaluation that tuning GPT3 with Self-Instruct outperforms using existing public instruction datasets by a large margin, leaving only a 5% absolute gap behind InstructGPT_001. Self-Instruct provides an almost annotation-free method for aligning pre-trained language models with instructions, and we release our large synthetic dataset to facilitate future studies on instruction tuning.

Language models have recently achieved strong performance across a wide range of NLP benchmarks. However, unlike benchmarks, real world tasks are often poorly specified, and agents must deduce the user's intended behavior from a combination of context, instructions, and examples. We investigate how both humans and models behave in the face of such task ambiguity by proposing AmbiBench, a new benchmark of six ambiguously-specified classification tasks. We evaluate humans and models on AmbiBench by seeing how well they identify the intended task using 1) instructions with varying degrees of ambiguity, and 2) different numbers of labeled examples. We find that the combination of model scaling (to 175B parameters) and training with human feedback data enables models to approach or exceed the accuracy of human participants across tasks, but that either one alone is not sufficient. In addition, we show how to dramatically improve the accuracy of language models trained without large-scale human feedback training by finetuning on a small number of ambiguous in-context examples, providing a promising direction for teaching models to generalize well in the face of ambiguity.

We introduce INSTRUCTOR, a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions: every text input is embedded together with instructions explaining the use case (e.g., task and domain descriptions). Unlike encoders from prior work that are more specialized, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddings tailored to different downstream tasks and domains, without any further training. We first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture with a contrastive loss. We evaluate INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks (66 of which are unseen during training), ranging from classification and information retrieval to semantic textual similarity and text generation evaluation. INSTRUCTOR, while having an order of magnitude fewer parameters than the previous best model, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 3.4% compared to the previous best results on the 70 diverse datasets. Our analysis suggests that INSTRUCTOR is robust to changes in instructions, and that instruction finetuning mitigates the challenge of training a single model on diverse datasets.

What role do augmentations play in contrastive learning? Recent work suggests that good augmentations are label-preserving with respect to a specific downstream task. We complicate this picture by showing that label-destroying augmentations can be useful in the foundation model setting, where the goal is to learn diverse, general-purpose representations for multiple downstream tasks. We perform contrastive learning experiments on a range of image and audio datasets with multiple downstream tasks (e.g. for digits superimposed on photographs, predicting the class of one vs. the other). We find that Viewmaker Networks, a recently proposed model for learning augmentations for contrastive learning, produce label-destroying augmentations that stochastically destroy features needed for different downstream tasks. These augmentations are interpretable (e.g. altering shapes, digits, or letters added to images) and surprisingly often result in better performance compared to expert-designed augmentations, despite not preserving label information. To support our empirical results, we theoretically analyze a simple contrastive learning setting with a linear model. In this setting, label-destroying augmentations are crucial for preventing one set of features from suppressing the learning of features useful for another downstream task. Our results highlight the need for analyzing the interaction between multiple downstream tasks when trying to explain the success of foundation models.