The Elo algorithm, due to its simplicity, is widely used for rating in sports competitions as well as in other applications where the rating/ranking is a useful tool for predicting future results. However, despite its widespread use, a detailed understanding of the convergence properties of the Elo algorithm is still lacking. Aiming to fill this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive (stochastic) analysis of the Elo algorithm, considering round-robin (one-on-one) competitions. Specifically, analytical expressions are derived characterizing the behavior/evolution of the skills and of important performance metrics. Then, taking into account the relationship between the behavior of the algorithm and the step-size value, which is a hyperparameter that can be controlled, some design guidelines as well as discussions about the performance of the algorithm are provided. To illustrate the applicability of the theoretical findings, experimental results are shown, corroborating the very good match between analytical predictions and those obtained from the algorithm using real-world data (from the Italian SuperLega, Volleyball League).

尽管高容量计算平台的可用性日益增长，但实施复杂性仍然是神经网络现实部署的重要问题。这种关注并不仅仅是由于最先进的网络体系结构的巨大成本，也是由于最近朝着边缘智能和嵌入式应用中使用神经网络的使用。在这种情况下，网络压缩技术由于能够降低部署成本的能力，同时将推断准确性保持在令人满意的水平，因此引起了兴趣。本文致力于开发针对神经网络的新型压缩方案。为此，首先开发了一种新的$ \ ell_0 $ -norm正规化方法，该方法能够在培训期间诱导网络中的强烈稀疏性。然后，可以通过修剪技术来瞄准训练有素的网络的较小权重，可以获得较小但高效的网络。提出的压缩方案还涉及使用$ \ ell_2 $ -Norm正则化以避免过度拟合以及进行微调以提高修剪网络的性能。提出了实验结果，目的是显示拟议方案的有效性，并与竞争方法进行比较。

We aim to bridge the gap between our common-sense few-sample human learning and large-data machine learning. We derive a theory of human-like few-shot learning from von-Neuman-Landauer's principle. modelling human learning is difficult as how people learn varies from one to another. Under commonly accepted definitions, we prove that all human or animal few-shot learning, and major models including Free Energy Principle and Bayesian Program Learning that model such learning, approximate our theory, under Church-Turing thesis. We find that deep generative model like variational autoencoder (VAE) can be used to approximate our theory and perform significantly better than baseline models including deep neural networks, for image recognition, low resource language processing, and character recognition.

Interview has been regarded as one of the most crucial step for recruitment. To fully prepare for the interview with the recruiters, job seekers usually practice with mock interviews between each other. However, such a mock interview with peers is generally far away from the real interview experience: the mock interviewers are not guaranteed to be professional and are not likely to behave like a real interviewer. Due to the rapid growth of online recruitment in recent years, recruiters tend to have online interviews, which makes it possible to collect real interview data from real interviewers. In this paper, we propose a novel application named EZInterviewer, which aims to learn from the online interview data and provides mock interview services to the job seekers. The task is challenging in two ways: (1) the interview data are now available but still of low-resource; (2) to generate meaningful and relevant interview dialogs requires thorough understanding of both resumes and job descriptions. To address the low-resource challenge, EZInterviewer is trained on a very small set of interview dialogs. The key idea is to reduce the number of parameters that rely on interview dialogs by disentangling the knowledge selector and dialog generator so that most parameters can be trained with ungrounded dialogs as well as the resume data that are not low-resource. Evaluation results on a real-world job interview dialog dataset indicate that we achieve promising results to generate mock interviews. With the help of EZInterviewer, we hope to make mock interview practice become easier for job seekers.

Dynamic treatment regimes assign personalized treatments to patients sequentially over time based on their baseline information and time-varying covariates. In mobile health applications, these covariates are typically collected at different frequencies over a long time horizon. In this paper, we propose a deep spectral Q-learning algorithm, which integrates principal component analysis (PCA) with deep Q-learning to handle the mixed frequency data. In theory, we prove that the mean return under the estimated optimal policy converges to that under the optimal one and establish its rate of convergence. The usefulness of our proposal is further illustrated via simulations and an application to a diabetes dataset.

Nowadays, time-stamped web documents related to a general news query floods spread throughout the Internet, and timeline summarization targets concisely summarizing the evolution trajectory of events along the timeline. Unlike traditional document summarization, timeline summarization needs to model the time series information of the input events and summarize important events in chronological order. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Unified Timeline Summarizer (UTS) that can generate abstractive and extractive timeline summaries in time order. Concretely, in the encoder part, we propose a graph-based event encoder that relates multiple events according to their content dependency and learns a global representation of each event. In the decoder part, to ensure the chronological order of the abstractive summary, we propose to extract the feature of event-level attention in its generation process with sequential information remained and use it to simulate the evolutionary attention of the ground truth summary. The event-level attention can also be used to assist in extracting summary, where the extracted summary also comes in time sequence. We augment the previous Chinese large-scale timeline summarization dataset and collect a new English timeline dataset. Extensive experiments conducted on these datasets and on the out-of-domain Timeline 17 dataset show that UTS achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic and human evaluations.

Nearest-Neighbor (NN) classification has been proven as a simple and effective approach for few-shot learning. The query data can be classified efficiently by finding the nearest support class based on features extracted by pretrained deep models. However, NN-based methods are sensitive to the data distribution and may produce false prediction if the samples in the support set happen to lie around the distribution boundary of different classes. To solve this issue, we present P3DC-Shot, an improved nearest-neighbor based few-shot classification method empowered by prior-driven data calibration. Inspired by the distribution calibration technique which utilizes the distribution or statistics of the base classes to calibrate the data for few-shot tasks, we propose a novel discrete data calibration operation which is more suitable for NN-based few-shot classification. Specifically, we treat the prototypes representing each base class as priors and calibrate each support data based on its similarity to different base prototypes. Then, we perform NN classification using these discretely calibrated support data. Results from extensive experiments on various datasets show our efficient non-learning based method can outperform or at least comparable to SOTA methods which need additional learning steps.

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging aims to reconstruct the three-dimensional hidden scenes from the data measured in the line-of-sight, which uses photon time-of-flight information encoded in light after multiple diffuse reflections. The under-sampled scanning data can facilitate fast imaging. However, the resulting reconstruction problem becomes a serious ill-posed inverse problem, the solution of which is of high possibility to be degraded due to noises and distortions. In this paper, we propose two novel NLOS reconstruction models based on curvature regularization, i.e., the object-domain curvature regularization model and the dual (i.e., signal and object)-domain curvature regularization model. Fast numerical optimization algorithms are developed relying on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with the backtracking stepsize rule, which are further accelerated by GPU implementation. We evaluate the proposed algorithms on both synthetic and real datasets, which achieve state-of-the-art performance, especially in the compressed sensing setting. All our codes and data are available at https://github.com/Duanlab123/CurvNLOS.

In this paper, we present a novel visual SLAM and long-term localization benchmark for autonomous driving in challenging conditions based on the large-scale 4Seasons dataset. The proposed benchmark provides drastic appearance variations caused by seasonal changes and diverse weather and illumination conditions. While significant progress has been made in advancing visual SLAM on small-scale datasets with similar conditions, there is still a lack of unified benchmarks representative of real-world scenarios for autonomous driving. We introduce a new unified benchmark for jointly evaluating visual odometry, global place recognition, and map-based visual localization performance which is crucial to successfully enable autonomous driving in any condition. The data has been collected for more than one year, resulting in more than 300 km of recordings in nine different environments ranging from a multi-level parking garage to urban (including tunnels) to countryside and highway. We provide globally consistent reference poses with up to centimeter-level accuracy obtained from the fusion of direct stereo-inertial odometry with RTK GNSS. We evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art visual odometry and visual localization baseline approaches on the benchmark and analyze their properties. The experimental results provide new insights into current approaches and show promising potential for future research. Our benchmark and evaluation protocols will be available at https://www.4seasons-dataset.com/.

Recent studies have shown that using an external Language Model (LM) benefits the end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, predicting tokens that appear less frequently in the training set is still quite challenging. The long-tail prediction problems have been widely studied in many applications, but only been addressed by a few studies for ASR and LMs. In this paper, we propose a new memory augmented lookup dictionary based Transformer architecture for LM. The newly introduced lookup dictionary incorporates rich contextual information in training set, which is vital to correctly predict long-tail tokens. With intensive experiments on Chinese and English data sets, our proposed method is proved to outperform the baseline Transformer LM by a great margin on both word/character error rate and tail tokens error rate. This is achieved without impact on the decoding efficiency. Overall, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in boosting the ASR decoding performance, especially for long-tail tokens.