This paper proposes a question-answering system that can answer questions whose supporting evidence is spread over multiple (potentially long) documents. The system, called Visconde, uses a three-step pipeline to perform the task: decompose, retrieve, and aggregate. The first step decomposes the question into simpler questions using a few-shot large language model (LLM). Then, a state-of-the-art search engine is used to retrieve candidate passages from a large collection for each decomposed question. In the final step, we use the LLM in a few-shot setting to aggregate the contents of the passages into the final answer. The system is evaluated on three datasets: IIRC, Qasper, and StrategyQA. Results suggest that current retrievers are the main bottleneck and that readers are already performing at the human level as long as relevant passages are provided. The system is also shown to be more effective when the model is induced to give explanations before answering a question. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/neuralmind-ai/visconde}.

石油场和地震成像的储层模拟被称为石油和天然气（O＆G）行业中高性能计算（HPC）最苛刻的工作量。模拟器数值参数的优化起着至关重要的作用，因为它可以节省大量的计算工作。最先进的优化技术基于运行大量模拟，特定于该目的，以找到良好的参数候选者。但是，在时间和计算资源方面，使用这种方法的成本高昂。这项工作提出了金枪鱼，这是一种新方法，可增强使用性能模型的储层流仿真的最佳数值参数的搜索。在O＆G行业中，通常使用不同工作流程中的模型合奏来减少与预测O＆G生产相关的不确定性。我们利用此类工作流程中这些合奏的运行来从每个模拟中提取信息，并在其后续运行中优化数值参数。为了验证该方法，我们在历史匹配（HM）过程中实现了它，该过程使用Kalman滤波器算法来调整储层模型的集合以匹配实际字段中观察到的数据。我们从许多具有不同数值配置的模拟中挖掘了过去的执行日志，并根据数据提取的功能构建机器学习模型。这些功能包括储层模型本身的属性，例如活动单元的数量，即模拟行为的统计数据，例如线性求解器的迭代次数。采样技术用于查询甲骨文以找到可以减少经过的时间的数值参数，而不会显着影响结果的质量。我们的实验表明，预测可以平均将HM工作流程运行时提高31％。

环境场景的重建对于自动机器人应用引起了极大的兴趣，因为必须准确表示环境以确保与机器人的安全互动。同样重要的是，确保机器人与其控制器之间的可靠通信也至关重要。大型智能表面（LIS）是一项由于其通信能力而被广泛研究的技术。此外，由于天线元件的数量，这些表面是无线电传感的有力解决方案。本文提出了一种新颖的方法，可以将LIS在其区域散布的散射器建造的室内环境中获得的无线电环境图转换为室内环境的平面图。利用了基于最小二乘（LS）的方法，U-NET（UN）和条件生成对抗网络（CGAN）来执行此任务。我们表明，可以使用本地和全球测量值正确重建平面图。

Candidate axiom scoring is the task of assessing the acceptability of a candidate axiom against the evidence provided by known facts or data. The ability to score candidate axioms reliably is required for automated schema or ontology induction, but it can also be valuable for ontology and/or knowledge graph validation. Accurate axiom scoring heuristics are often computationally expensive, which is an issue if you wish to use them in iterative search techniques like level-wise generate-and-test or evolutionary algorithms, which require scoring a large number of candidate axioms. We address the problem of developing a predictive model as a substitute for reasoning that predicts the possibility score of candidate class axioms and is quick enough to be employed in such situations. We use a semantic similarity measure taken from an ontology's subsumption structure for this purpose. We show that the approach provided in this work can accurately learn the possibility scores of candidate OWL class axioms and that it can do so for a variety of OWL class axioms.

Heteroscedastic regression models a Gaussian variable's mean and variance as a function of covariates. Parametric methods that employ neural networks for these parameter maps can capture complex relationships in the data. Yet, optimizing network parameters via log likelihood gradients can yield suboptimal mean and uncalibrated variance estimates. Current solutions side-step this optimization problem with surrogate objectives or Bayesian treatments. Instead, we make two simple modifications to optimization. Notably, their combination produces a heteroscedastic model with mean estimates that are provably as accurate as those from its homoscedastic counterpart (i.e.~fitting the mean under squared error loss). For a wide variety of network and task complexities, we find that mean estimates from existing heteroscedastic solutions can be significantly less accurate than those from an equivalently expressive mean-only model. Our approach provably retains the accuracy of an equally flexible mean-only model while also offering best-in-class variance calibration. Lastly, we show how to leverage our method to recover the underlying heteroscedastic noise variance.

A systematic review on machine-learning strategies for improving generalizability (cross-subjects and cross-sessions) electroencephalography (EEG) based in emotion classification was realized. In this context, the non-stationarity of EEG signals is a critical issue and can lead to the Dataset Shift problem. Several architectures and methods have been proposed to address this issue, mainly based on transfer learning methods. 418 papers were retrieved from the Scopus, IEEE Xplore and PubMed databases through a search query focusing on modern machine learning techniques for generalization in EEG-based emotion assessment. Among these papers, 75 were found eligible based on their relevance to the problem. Studies lacking a specific cross-subject and cross-session validation strategy and making use of other biosignals as support were excluded. On the basis of the selected papers' analysis, a taxonomy of the studies employing Machine Learning (ML) methods was proposed, together with a brief discussion on the different ML approaches involved. The studies with the best results in terms of average classification accuracy were identified, supporting that transfer learning methods seem to perform better than other approaches. A discussion is proposed on the impact of (i) the emotion theoretical models and (ii) psychological screening of the experimental sample on the classifier performances.

Plastic shopping bags that get carried away from the side of roads and tangled on cotton plants can end up at cotton gins if not removed before the harvest. Such bags may not only cause problem in the ginning process but might also get embodied in cotton fibers reducing its quality and marketable value. Therefore, it is required to detect, locate, and remove the bags before cotton is harvested. Manually detecting and locating these bags in cotton fields is labor intensive, time-consuming and a costly process. To solve these challenges, we present application of four variants of YOLOv5 (YOLOv5s, YOLOv5m, YOLOv5l and YOLOv5x) for detecting plastic shopping bags using Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)-acquired RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) images. We also show fixed effect model tests of color of plastic bags as well as YOLOv5-variant on average precision (AP), mean average precision (mAP@50) and accuracy. In addition, we also demonstrate the effect of height of plastic bags on the detection accuracy. It was found that color of bags had significant effect (p < 0.001) on accuracy across all the four variants while it did not show any significant effect on the AP with YOLOv5m (p = 0.10) and YOLOv5x (p = 0.35) at 95% confidence level. Similarly, YOLOv5-variant did not show any significant effect on the AP (p = 0.11) and accuracy (p = 0.73) of white bags, but it had significant effects on the AP (p = 0.03) and accuracy (p = 0.02) of brown bags including on the mAP@50 (p = 0.01) and inference speed (p < 0.0001). Additionally, height of plastic bags had significant effect (p < 0.0001) on overall detection accuracy. The findings reported in this paper can be useful in speeding up removal of plastic bags from cotton fields before harvest and thereby reducing the amount of contaminants that end up at cotton gins.

Bi-encoders and cross-encoders are widely used in many state-of-the-art retrieval pipelines. In this work we study the generalization ability of these two types of architectures on a wide range of parameter count on both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. We find that the number of parameters and early query-document interactions of cross-encoders play a significant role in the generalization ability of retrieval models. Our experiments show that increasing model size results in marginal gains on in-domain test sets, but much larger gains in new domains never seen during fine-tuning. Furthermore, we show that cross-encoders largely outperform bi-encoders of similar size in several tasks. In the BEIR benchmark, our largest cross-encoder surpasses a state-of-the-art bi-encoder by more than 4 average points. Finally, we show that using bi-encoders as first-stage retrievers provides no gains in comparison to a simpler retriever such as BM25 on out-of-domain tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/guilhermemr04/scaling-zero-shot-retrieval.git

AI-based code generators are an emerging solution for automatically writing programs starting from descriptions in natural language, by using deep neural networks (Neural Machine Translation, NMT). In particular, code generators have been used for ethical hacking and offensive security testing by generating proof-of-concept attacks. Unfortunately, the evaluation of code generators still faces several issues. The current practice uses automatic metrics, which compute the textual similarity of generated code with ground-truth references. However, it is not clear what metric to use, and which metric is most suitable for specific contexts. This practical experience report analyzes a large set of output similarity metrics on offensive code generators. We apply the metrics on two state-of-the-art NMT models using two datasets containing offensive assembly and Python code with their descriptions in the English language. We compare the estimates from the automatic metrics with human evaluation and provide practical insights into their strengths and limitations.

The understanding capabilities of current state-of-the-art 3D models are limited by datasets with a small number of annotated data and a pre-defined set of categories. In its 2D counterpart, recent advances have shown that similar problems can be significantly alleviated by employing knowledge from other modalities, such as language. Inspired by this, leveraging multimodal information for 3D modality could be promising to improve 3D understanding under the restricted data regime, but this line of research is not well studied. Therefore, we introduce ULIP to learn a unified representation of image, text, and 3D point cloud by pre-training with object triplets from the three modalities. To overcome the shortage of training triplets, ULIP leverages a pre-trained vision-language model that has already learned a common visual and textual space by training with massive image-text pairs. Then, ULIP learns a 3D representation space aligned with the common image-text space, using a small number of automatically synthesized triplets. ULIP is agnostic to 3D backbone networks and can easily be integrated into any 3D architecture. Experiments show that ULIP effectively improves the performance of multiple recent 3D backbones by simply pre-training them on ShapeNet55 using our framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both standard 3D classification and zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN. ULIP also improves the performance of PointMLP by around 3% in 3D classification on ScanObjectNN, and outperforms PointCLIP by 28.8% on top-1 accuracy for zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40. Our code and pre-trained models will be released.