IoT sensors, especially video cameras, are ubiquitously deployed around the world to perform a variety of computer vision tasks in several verticals including retail, healthcare, safety and security, transportation, manufacturing, etc. To amortize their high deployment effort and cost, it is desirable to perform multiple video analytics tasks, which we refer to as Analytical Units (AUs), off the video feed coming out of every camera. In this paper, we first show that in a multi-AU setting, changing the camera setting has disproportionate impact on different AUs performance. In particular, the optimal setting for one AU may severely degrade the performance for another AU, and further the impact on different AUs varies as the environmental condition changes. We then present Elixir, a system to enhance the video stream quality for multiple analytics on a video stream. Elixir leverages Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL), where the RL agent caters to the objectives from different AUs and adjusts the camera setting to simultaneously enhance the performance of all AUs. To define the multiple objectives in MORL, we develop new AU-specific quality estimator values for each individual AU. We evaluate Elixir through real-world experiments on a testbed with three cameras deployed next to each other (overlooking a large enterprise parking lot) running Elixir and two baseline approaches, respectively. Elixir correctly detects 7.1% (22,068) and 5.0% (15,731) more cars, 94% (551) and 72% (478) more faces, and 670.4% (4975) and 158.6% (3507) more persons than the default-setting and time-sharing approaches, respectively. It also detects 115 license plates, far more than the time-sharing approach (7) and the default setting (0).

将视频视为一系列图像（框架），并重新使用Deep Neur网络模型，这是一种常见的做法，这些模型仅在视频上的图像上接受图像进行培训。在本文中，我们表明，这种信念的飞跃是，在图像上运作良好的深度学习模型也将在视频上效果很好。我们表明，即使摄像机正在查看没有以任何可察觉的方式变化的场景，并且我们控制了视频压缩和环境（照明）等外部因素，视频分析应用程序的准确性也会显着波动。发生这些波动是因为摄像机产生的连续帧可能在视觉上看起来相似，但是视频分析应用程序对这些帧的看法却大不相同。我们观察到这些波动的根本原因是摄像机自动进行的动态摄像头参数更改，以捕获和生成视觉上令人愉悦的视频。摄像机无意间充当无意的对手，因为如我们所示，连续帧中图像像素值的这些微小变化对从视频分析任务中重新使用图像训练的深度学习模型的见解的准确性产生了显着不利影响。为了从相机中解决这种无意的对抗效应，我们探讨了转移学习技术通过从图像分析任务中学习的知识转移来改善视频分析任务中的学习。特别是，我们表明，我们新训练的Yolov5模型在跨帧的对象检测中减少了波动，从而可以更好地跟踪对象（跟踪中的错误少40％）。我们的论文还提供了新的方向和技术，以减轻相机对用于视频分析应用程序的深度学习模型的对抗性影响。

视频分析系统批判性地依赖于摄像机，捕获高质量的视频帧，以实现高分辨率的精度。虽然现代视频摄像机经常暴露数十个可配置的参数设置，但是可以通过最终用户设置的，但今天监控摄像机的部署通常使用固定的一组参数设置，因为最终用户缺少能够重新配置这些参数的技能或理解。在本文中，我们首先表明，在典型的监视摄像机部署中，环境条件变化可能会显着影响人员检测，面部检测和面部识别等分析单元的准确性，以及如何通过动态调整相机设置来减轻这种不利影响。然后我们提出了Camtuner，这是一个可以轻松应用于现有视频分析管道（VAP）的框架，以实现复杂相机设置的自动和动态调整，以改变环境条件，并自主优化VAP中分析单元（AU）的准确性。 Camtuner基于Sarsa加固学习（RL），它包含两种新型组件：轻量级分析质量估算器和虚拟相机。 Camtuner在一个具有轴监控摄像头的系统中实现，几个VAP（具有各种AUS），在机场入口处加工了日常客户视频。我们的评估表明Camtuner可以快速适应更改环境。我们将Camtuner与使用静态相机设置的两种替代方法进行比较，或者每小时手动更改摄像机设置的草兵方法（基于人类对质量）。我们观察到，对于面部检测和人检测AU，与两种方法中最好的相比，Camtuner分别可以获得高达13.8％和9.2％的更高的准确性（两个AUS的8％的平均提高）。

Reading comprehension of legal text can be a particularly challenging task due to the length and complexity of legal clauses and a shortage of expert-annotated datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce the Merger Agreement Understanding Dataset (MAUD), an expert-annotated reading comprehension dataset based on the American Bar Association's 2021 Public Target Deal Points Study, with over 39,000 examples and over 47,000 total annotations. Our fine-tuned Transformer baselines show promising results, with models performing well above random on most questions. However, on a large subset of questions, there is still room for significant improvement. As the only expert-annotated merger agreement dataset, MAUD is valuable as a benchmark for both the legal profession and the NLP community.

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.

Many problems involve the use of models which learn probability distributions or incorporate randomness in some way. In such problems, because computing the true expected gradient may be intractable, a gradient estimator is used to update the model parameters. When the model parameters directly affect a probability distribution, the gradient estimator will involve score function terms. This paper studies baselines, a variance reduction technique for score functions. Motivated primarily by reinforcement learning, we derive for the first time an expression for the optimal state-dependent baseline, the baseline which results in a gradient estimator with minimum variance. Although we show that there exist examples where the optimal baseline may be arbitrarily better than a value function baseline, we find that the value function baseline usually performs similarly to an optimal baseline in terms of variance reduction. Moreover, the value function can also be used for bootstrapping estimators of the return, leading to additional variance reduction. Our results give new insight and justification for why value function baselines and the generalized advantage estimator (GAE) work well in practice.

We propose a fairness-aware learning framework that mitigates intersectional subgroup bias associated with protected attributes. Prior research has primarily focused on mitigating one kind of bias by incorporating complex fairness-driven constraints into optimization objectives or designing additional layers that focus on specific protected attributes. We introduce a simple and generic bias mitigation approach that prevents models from learning relationships between protected attributes and output variable by reducing mutual information between them. We demonstrate that our approach is effective in reducing bias with little or no drop in accuracy. We also show that the models trained with our learning framework become causally fair and insensitive to the values of protected attributes. Finally, we validate our approach by studying feature interactions between protected and non-protected attributes. We demonstrate that these interactions are significantly reduced when applying our bias mitigation.

Automatic segmentation is essential for the brain tumor diagnosis, disease prognosis, and follow-up therapy of patients with gliomas. Still, accurate detection of gliomas and their sub-regions in multimodal MRI is very challenging due to the variety of scanners and imaging protocols. Over the last years, the BraTS Challenge has provided a large number of multi-institutional MRI scans as a benchmark for glioma segmentation algorithms. This paper describes our contribution to the BraTS 2022 Continuous Evaluation challenge. We propose a new ensemble of multiple deep learning frameworks namely, DeepSeg, nnU-Net, and DeepSCAN for automatic glioma boundaries detection in pre-operative MRI. It is worth noting that our ensemble models took first place in the final evaluation on the BraTS testing dataset with Dice scores of 0.9294, 0.8788, and 0.8803, and Hausdorf distance of 5.23, 13.54, and 12.05, for the whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed ensemble method ranked first in the final ranking on another unseen test dataset, namely Sub-Saharan Africa dataset, achieving mean Dice scores of 0.9737, 0.9593, and 0.9022, and HD95 of 2.66, 1.72, 3.32 for the whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor, respectively. The docker image for the winning submission is publicly available at (https://hub.docker.com/r/razeineldin/camed22).

As language models (LMs) scale, they develop many novel behaviors, good and bad, exacerbating the need to evaluate how they behave. Prior work creates evaluations with crowdwork (which is time-consuming and expensive) or existing data sources (which are not always available). Here, we automatically generate evaluations with LMs. We explore approaches with varying amounts of human effort, from instructing LMs to write yes/no questions to making complex Winogender schemas with multiple stages of LM-based generation and filtering. Crowdworkers rate the examples as highly relevant and agree with 90-100% of labels, sometimes more so than corresponding human-written datasets. We generate 154 datasets and discover new cases of inverse scaling where LMs get worse with size. Larger LMs repeat back a dialog user's preferred answer ("sycophancy") and express greater desire to pursue concerning goals like resource acquisition and goal preservation. We also find some of the first examples of inverse scaling in RL from Human Feedback (RLHF), where more RLHF makes LMs worse. For example, RLHF makes LMs express stronger political views (on gun rights and immigration) and a greater desire to avoid shut down. Overall, LM-written evaluations are high-quality and let us quickly discover many novel LM behaviors.

Often clickbait articles have a title that is phrased as a question or vague teaser that entices the user to click on the link and read the article to find the explanation. We developed a system that will automatically find the answer or explanation of the clickbait hook from the website text so that the user does not need to read through the text themselves. We fine-tune an extractive question and answering model (RoBERTa) and an abstractive one (T5), using data scraped from the 'StopClickbait' Facebook pages and Reddit's 'SavedYouAClick' subforum. We find that both extractive and abstractive models improve significantly after finetuning. We find that the extractive model performs slightly better according to ROUGE scores, while the abstractive one has a slight edge in terms of BERTscores.