反事实风险最小化是通过记录数据组成的脱机策略优化的框架，该数据由上下文，动作，倾向得分和每个样本点的奖励组成。在这项工作中，我们以此框架为基础，并为未观察到某些样本的奖励的设置提出了一种学习方法，因此记录的数据由具有未知奖励的样本子集和具有已知奖励的样本子集。此设置在许多应用领域，包括广告和医疗保健。虽然某些样本缺少奖励反馈，但可以利用未知的奖励样本来最大程度地降低风险，我们将此设置称为半遇到事实风险的最小化。为了解决这种学习问题，我们在反相反分数估计器下的真实风险中得出了新的上限。然后，我们基于这些界限，提出了一种正规化的反事实风险最小化方法，该方法仅基于已记录的未知奖励数据集；因此，这是奖励独立的。我们还提出了另一种算法，该算法基于为已记录的未知奖励数据集生成伪奖励。神经网络和基准数据集的实验结果表明，除了已记录已知的奖励数据集外，这些算法可以利用已记录的未知奖励数据集。

如果它使用所有可用数据同时学习预测器并通过在未见的数据上有效的统计证书证明其质量，则自我认证。最近的工作表明，通过优化PAC-Bayes界限训练的神经网络模型不仅可以提高准确的预测因子，而且涉及严格的风险证书，致力于实现自我认证的学习。在这种情况下，由于能够利用所有数据来学习后验并同时证明其风险，基于PAC-Bayes界的学习和认证策略尤其吸引力。在本文中，我们评估了Pac-Bayes灵感目标的概率神经网络中自我认证的进展。我们经验比较（在4个分类数据集）的经典测试集合，用于确定性预测器的界限和用于随机自我认证的预测器的PAC-Bayes。我们首先表明这两个概括界界不太远非出现超出样本测试集错误。然后我们认为，在数据饥饿制度中，保持测试集合的数据对泛化性能产生不利影响，而基于PAC-Bayes界限的自我认证策略不会遭受这种缺点，证明它们可能是适当的选择小数据制度。我们还发现Pac-Bayes的概率神经网络受到Pac-Bayes启发目标的启发目标导致证书可以令人惊讶地竞争常用的测试集合。

Retrieval-augmented in-context learning has emerged as a powerful approach for addressing knowledge-intensive tasks using frozen language models (LM) and retrieval models (RM). Existing work has combined these in simple "retrieve-then-read" pipelines in which the RM retrieves passages that are inserted into the LM prompt. To begin to fully realize the potential of frozen LMs and RMs, we propose Demonstrate-Search-Predict (DSP), a framework that relies on passing natural language texts in sophisticated pipelines between an LM and an RM. DSP can express high-level programs that bootstrap pipeline-aware demonstrations, search for relevant passages, and generate grounded predictions, systematically breaking down problems into small transformations that the LM and RM can handle more reliably. We have written novel DSP programs for answering questions in open-domain, multi-hop, and conversational settings, establishing in early evaluations new state-of-the-art in-context learning results and delivering 37-200%, 8-40%, and 80-290% relative gains against vanilla LMs, a standard retrieve-then-read pipeline, and a contemporaneous self-ask pipeline, respectively.

Over the last decade, an approach that has gained a lot of popularity to tackle non-parametric testing problems on general (i.e., non-Euclidean) domains is based on the notion of reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) embedding of probability distributions. The main goal of our work is to understand the optimality of two-sample tests constructed based on this approach. First, we show that the popular MMD (maximum mean discrepancy) two-sample test is not optimal in terms of the separation boundary measured in Hellinger distance. Second, we propose a modification to the MMD test based on spectral regularization by taking into account the covariance information (which is not captured by the MMD test) and prove the proposed test to be minimax optimal with a smaller separation boundary than that achieved by the MMD test. Third, we propose an adaptive version of the above test which involves a data-driven strategy to choose the regularization parameter and show the adaptive test to be almost minimax optimal up to a logarithmic factor. Moreover, our results hold for the permutation variant of the test where the test threshold is chosen elegantly through the permutation of the samples. Through numerical experiments on synthetic and real-world data, we demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed test in comparison to the MMD test.

When annotators label data, a key metric for quality assurance is inter-annotator agreement (IAA): the extent to which annotators agree on their labels. Though many IAA measures exist for simple categorical and ordinal labeling tasks, relatively little work has considered more complex labeling tasks, such as structured, multi-object, and free-text annotations. Krippendorff's alpha, best known for use with simpler labeling tasks, does have a distance-based formulation with broader applicability, but little work has studied its efficacy and consistency across complex annotation tasks. We investigate the design and evaluation of IAA measures for complex annotation tasks, with evaluation spanning seven diverse tasks: image bounding boxes, image keypoints, text sequence tagging, ranked lists, free text translations, numeric vectors, and syntax trees. We identify the difficulty of interpretability and the complexity of choosing a distance function as key obstacles in applying Krippendorff's alpha generally across these tasks. We propose two novel, more interpretable measures, showing they yield more consistent IAA measures across tasks and annotation distance functions.

Generating a chain of thought (CoT) can increase large language model (LLM) performance on a wide range of tasks. Zero-shot CoT evaluations, however, have been conducted primarily on logical tasks (e.g. arithmetic, commonsense QA). In this paper, we perform a controlled evaluation of zero-shot CoT across two sensitive domains: harmful questions and stereotype benchmarks. We find that using zero-shot CoT reasoning in a prompt can significantly increase a model's likelihood to produce undesirable output. Without future advances in alignment or explicit mitigation instructions, zero-shot CoT should be avoided on tasks where models can make inferences about marginalized groups or harmful topics.

Multi-object state estimation is a fundamental problem for robotic applications where a robot must interact with other moving objects. Typically, other objects' relevant state features are not directly observable, and must instead be inferred from observations. Particle filtering can perform such inference given approximate transition and observation models. However, these models are often unknown a priori, yielding a difficult parameter estimation problem since observations jointly carry transition and observation noise. In this work, we consider learning maximum-likelihood parameters using particle methods. Recent methods addressing this problem typically differentiate through time in a particle filter, which requires workarounds to the non-differentiable resampling step, that yield biased or high variance gradient estimates. By contrast, we exploit Fisher's identity to obtain a particle-based approximation of the score function (the gradient of the log likelihood) that yields a low variance estimate while only requiring stepwise differentiation through the transition and observation models. We apply our method to real data collected from autonomous vehicles (AVs) and show that it learns better models than existing techniques and is more stable in training, yielding an effective smoother for tracking the trajectories of vehicles around an AV.

Neural information retrieval (IR) systems have progressed rapidly in recent years, in large part due to the release of publicly available benchmarking tasks. Unfortunately, some dimensions of this progress are illusory: the majority of the popular IR benchmarks today focus exclusively on downstream task accuracy and thus conceal the costs incurred by systems that trade away efficiency for quality. Latency, hardware cost, and other efficiency considerations are paramount to the deployment of IR systems in user-facing settings. We propose that IR benchmarks structure their evaluation methodology to include not only metrics of accuracy, but also efficiency considerations such as a query latency and the corresponding cost budget for a reproducible hardware setting. For the popular IR benchmarks MS MARCO and XOR-TyDi, we show how the best choice of IR system varies according to how these efficiency considerations are chosen and weighed. We hope that future benchmarks will adopt these guidelines toward more holistic IR evaluation.

Reformulating the history matching problem from a least-square mathematical optimization problem into a Markov Decision Process introduces a method in which reinforcement learning can be utilized to solve the problem. This method provides a mechanism where an artificial deep neural network agent can interact with the reservoir simulator and find multiple different solutions to the problem. Such formulation allows for solving the problem in parallel by launching multiple concurrent environments enabling the agent to learn simultaneously from all the environments at once, achieving significant speed up.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.