本文报告了建立在线语言学习工具的进步，以通过使用对话系统作为对话实践伙伴为学习者提供对话体验。我们的系统可以随时适应用户的语言水平。我们还提供自动语法错误反馈，以帮助用户从错误中学习。根据我们的第一个采用者，我们的系统娱乐和有用。此外，我们将为学习技术社区提供有关语言学习和语法校正的大规模对话数据集。我们的下一步是通过使用强化学习算法使我们的系统更适应用户配置文件。

使用良好形成的书面文本编译了当前可用的语法错误校正（GEC）数据集，将这些数据集的适用性限制为其他域，例如非正式的写作和对话框。在本文中，我们介绍了从开放式Chatbot对话中汲取的新颖平行GEC数据集;此数据集是我们的知识，将第一个GEC数据集定为会话设置。为了演示数据集的实用程序，我们使用注释的数据来微调最先进的GEC模型，从而提高了模型精度的16点。这在GEC模型中特别重要，因为模型精度被认为比GEC任务中的召回更重要，因为误报可能导致语言学习者的严重混乱。我们还提出了一个详细的注释方案，通过对可靠性的影响来排名错误，使我们的数据集两个可重复和可扩展。实验结果表明，我们的数据在提高了GEC模型性能方面的效果。

The ability for an agent to continuously learn new skills without catastrophically forgetting existing knowledge is of critical importance for the development of generally intelligent agents. Most methods devised to address this problem depend heavily on well-defined task boundaries, and thus depend on human supervision. Our task-agnostic method, Self-Activating Neural Ensembles (SANE), uses a modular architecture designed to avoid catastrophic forgetting without making any such assumptions. At the beginning of each trajectory, a module in the SANE ensemble is activated to determine the agent's next policy. During training, new modules are created as needed and only activated modules are updated to ensure that unused modules remain unchanged. This system enables our method to retain and leverage old skills, while growing and learning new ones. We demonstrate our approach on visually rich procedurally generated environments.

Real-world datasets exhibit imbalances of varying types and degrees. Several techniques based on re-weighting and margin adjustment of loss are often used to enhance the performance of neural networks, particularly on minority classes. In this work, we analyze the class-imbalanced learning problem by examining the loss landscape of neural networks trained with re-weighting and margin-based techniques. Specifically, we examine the spectral density of Hessian of class-wise loss, through which we observe that the network weights converge to a saddle point in the loss landscapes of minority classes. Following this observation, we also find that optimization methods designed to escape from saddle points can be effectively used to improve generalization on minority classes. We further theoretically and empirically demonstrate that Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a recent technique that encourages convergence to a flat minima, can be effectively used to escape saddle points for minority classes. Using SAM results in a 6.2\% increase in accuracy on the minority classes over the state-of-the-art Vector Scaling Loss, leading to an overall average increase of 4\% across imbalanced datasets. The code is available at: https://github.com/val-iisc/Saddle-LongTail.

In this paper, we present the Circular Accessible Depth (CAD), a robust traversability representation for an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to learn traversability in various scenarios containing irregular obstacles. To predict CAD, we propose a neural network, namely CADNet, with an attention-based multi-frame point cloud fusion module, Stability-Attention Module (SAM), to encode the spatial features from point clouds captured by LiDAR. CAD is designed based on the polar coordinate system and focuses on predicting the border of traversable area. Since it encodes the spatial information of the surrounding environment, which enables a semi-supervised learning for the CADNet, and thus desirably avoids annotating a large amount of data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAD outperforms baselines in terms of robustness and precision. We also implement our method on a real UGV and show that it performs well in real-world scenarios.

The high feature dimensionality is a challenge in music emotion recognition. There is no common consensus on a relation between audio features and emotion. The MER system uses all available features to recognize emotion; however, this is not an optimal solution since it contains irrelevant data acting as noise. In this paper, we introduce a feature selection approach to eliminate redundant features for MER. We created a Selected Feature Set (SFS) based on the feature selection algorithm (FSA) and benchmarked it by training with two models, Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Random Forest (RF) and comparing them against with using the Complete Feature Set (CFS). The result indicates that the performance of MER has improved for both Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Regression (SVR) models by using SFS. We found using FSA can improve performance in all scenarios, and it has potential benefits for model efficiency and stability for MER task.

Salient object detection (SOD) aims to determine the most visually attractive objects in an image. With the development of virtual reality technology, 360{\deg} omnidirectional image has been widely used, but the SOD task in 360{\deg} omnidirectional image is seldom studied due to its severe distortions and complex scenes. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Projection Fusion and Refinement Network (MPFR-Net) to detect the salient objects in 360{\deg} omnidirectional image. Different from the existing methods, the equirectangular projection image and four corresponding cube-unfolding images are embedded into the network simultaneously as inputs, where the cube-unfolding images not only provide supplementary information for equirectangular projection image, but also ensure the object integrity of the cube-map projection. In order to make full use of these two projection modes, a Dynamic Weighting Fusion (DWF) module is designed to adaptively integrate the features of different projections in a complementary and dynamic manner from the perspective of inter and intra features. Furthermore, in order to fully explore the way of interaction between encoder and decoder features, a Filtration and Refinement (FR) module is designed to suppress the redundant information between the feature itself and the feature. Experimental results on two omnidirectional datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

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.

Recent methods in self-supervised learning have demonstrated that masking-based pretext tasks extend beyond NLP, serving as useful pretraining objectives in computer vision. However, existing approaches apply random or ad hoc masking strategies that limit the difficulty of the reconstruction task and, consequently, the strength of the learnt representations. We improve upon current state-of-the-art work in learning adversarial masks by proposing a new framework that generates masks in a sequential fashion with different constraints on the adversary. This leads to improvements in performance on various downstream tasks, such as classification on ImageNet100, STL10, and CIFAR10/100 and segmentation on Pascal VOC. Our results further demonstrate the promising capabilities of masking-based approaches for SSL in computer vision.

As AI systems become more capable, we would like to enlist their help to supervise other AIs. We experiment with methods for training a harmless AI assistant through self-improvement, without any human labels identifying harmful outputs. The only human oversight is provided through a list of rules or principles, and so we refer to the method as 'Constitutional AI'. The process involves both a supervised learning and a reinforcement learning phase. In the supervised phase we sample from an initial model, then generate self-critiques and revisions, and then finetune the original model on revised responses. In the RL phase, we sample from the finetuned model, use a model to evaluate which of the two samples is better, and then train a preference model from this dataset of AI preferences. We then train with RL using the preference model as the reward signal, i.e. we use 'RL from AI Feedback' (RLAIF). As a result we are able to train a harmless but non-evasive AI assistant that engages with harmful queries by explaining its objections to them. Both the SL and RL methods can leverage chain-of-thought style reasoning to improve the human-judged performance and transparency of AI decision making. These methods make it possible to control AI behavior more precisely and with far fewer human labels.