Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are widely used in digital learning systems, as they allow for automating the assessment process. However, due to the increased digital literacy of students and the advent of social media platforms, MCQ tests are widely shared online, and teachers are continuously challenged to create new questions, which is an expensive and time-consuming task. A particularly sensitive aspect of MCQ creation is to devise relevant distractors, i.e., wrong answers that are not easily identifiable as being wrong. This paper studies how a large existing set of manually created answers and distractors for questions over a variety of domains, subjects, and languages can be leveraged to help teachers in creating new MCQs, by the smart reuse of existing distractors. We built several data-driven models based on context-aware question and distractor representations, and compared them with static feature-based models. The proposed models are evaluated with automated metrics and in a realistic user test with teachers. Both automatic and human evaluations indicate that context-aware models consistently outperform a static feature-based approach. For our best-performing context-aware model, on average 3 distractors out of the 10 shown to teachers were rated as high-quality distractors. We create a performance benchmark, and make it public, to enable comparison between different approaches and to introduce a more standardized evaluation of the task. The benchmark contains a test of 298 educational questions covering multiple subjects & languages and a 77k multilingual pool of distractor vocabulary for future research.

半监督学习（SSL）在许多应用领域中已经取得了成功，但这种成功经常涉及任务特定的未标记数据的可用性。知识蒸馏（KD）能够有效地优化紧凑的神经网络，当通过新鲜任务特定的未标记数据蒸馏昂贵的网络时，实现了最佳结果。但是，任务特定的未标记数据可能具有挑战性，特别是对于NLP。我们调查使用生成模型在合成未标记数据中的使用，并呈现一个名为“生成，注释和学习（GAL）”的简单和一般框架。语言模型（LM）用于扫描域中的未标记数据。然后，分类器用于注释这样的数据。最后，综合生成和注释的数据用于推进SSL，KD和NLP和表格任务的几次拍摄学习。为了获得强大的任务特定的LM，我们要么微调来自特定任务的输入的大LM，或者提示具有少数输入示例的大型LM，并且有条件地生成更明显的示例。它还为胶水排行榜上的6层变压器产生了一种新的最先进的。最后，使用GAL的自我训练从UCI存储库的四个表格任务上提供大的收益。

Books are a rich source of both fine-grained information, how a character, an object or a scene looks like, as well as high-level semantics, what someone is thinking, feeling and how these states evolve through a story. This paper aims to align books to their movie releases in order to provide rich descriptive explanations for visual content that go semantically far beyond the captions available in current datasets.To align movies and books we exploit a neural sentence embedding that is trained in an unsupervised way from a large corpus of books, as well as a video-text neural embedding for computing similarities between movie clips and sentences in the book. We propose a context-aware CNN to combine information from multiple sources. We demonstrate good quantitative performance for movie/book alignment and show several qualitative examples that showcase the diversity of tasks our model can be used for.

Bayesian optimization is an effective methodology for the global optimization of functions with expensive evaluations. It relies on querying a distribution over functions defined by a relatively cheap surrogate model. An accurate model for this distribution over functions is critical to the effectiveness of the approach, and is typically fit using Gaussian processes (GPs). However, since GPs scale cubically with the number of observations, it has been challenging to handle objectives whose optimization requires many evaluations, and as such, massively parallelizing the optimization.In this work, we explore the use of neural networks as an alternative to GPs to model distributions over functions. We show that performing adaptive basis function regression with a neural network as the parametric form performs competitively with state-of-the-art GP-based approaches, but scales linearly with the number of data rather than cubically. This allows us to achieve a previously intractable degree of parallelism, which we apply to large scale hyperparameter optimization, rapidly finding competitive models on benchmark object recognition tasks using convolutional networks, and image caption generation using neural language models.

Inspired by recent work in machine translation and object detection, we introduce an attention based model that automatically learns to describe the content of images. We describe how we can train this model in a deterministic manner using standard backpropagation techniques and stochastically by maximizing a variational lower bound. We also show through visualization how the model is able to automatically learn to fix its gaze on salient objects while generating the corresponding words in the output sequence. We validate the use of attention with state-of-theart performance on three benchmark datasets: Flickr8k, Flickr30k and MS COCO.