上下文化的单词嵌入会导致自然语言理解中最新的表演。最近，诸如BERT之类的预先训练的深层上下文化的文本编码器显示了其在改善包括抽象性摘要在内的自然语言任务方面的潜力。对话摘要中的现有方法着重于将大型语言模型纳入摘要任务，该任务是在大规模语料库中培训的，这些任务由新闻文章组成，而不是多个演讲者的对话。在本文中，我们介绍了自我监督的方法，以补偿培训对话摘要模型的缺点。我们的原则是使用借口对话文本检测不一致的信息流，以增强伯特对对话文本表示形式的上下文能力。我们使用增强的BERT在共享的编码器架构上构建并微调一个抽象的对话摘要模型。我们通过Samsum语料库（Samsum copus）进行了验证评估我们的抽象对话摘要，这是一个最近介绍的带有抽象性对话摘要的数据集。我们所有的方法都为在胭脂分数中测得的抽象摘要做出了改进。通过一项广泛的消融研究，我们还向关键模型超参数，切换话语和掩盖对话者的概率提出了灵敏度分析。

Due to the high activation sparsity and use of accumulates (AC) instead of expensive multiply-and-accumulates (MAC), neuromorphic spiking neural networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising low-power alternative to traditional DNNs for several computer vision (CV) applications. However, most existing SNNs require multiple time steps for acceptable inference accuracy, hindering real-time deployment and increasing spiking activity and, consequently, energy consumption. Recent works proposed direct encoding that directly feeds the analog pixel values in the first layer of the SNN in order to significantly reduce the number of time steps. Although the overhead for the first layer MACs with direct encoding is negligible for deep SNNs and the CV processing is efficient using SNNs, the data transfer between the image sensors and the downstream processing costs significant bandwidth and may dominate the total energy. To mitigate this concern, we propose an in-sensor computing hardware-software co-design framework for SNNs targeting image recognition tasks. Our approach reduces the bandwidth between sensing and processing by 12-96x and the resulting total energy by 2.32x compared to traditional CV processing, with a 3.8% reduction in accuracy on ImageNet.

We describe PromptBoosting, a query-efficient procedure for building a text classifier from a neural language model (LM) without access to the LM's parameters, gradients, or hidden representations. This form of "black-box" classifier training has become increasingly important as the cost of training and inference in large-scale LMs grows. But existing black-box LM classifier learning approaches are themselves computationally inefficient, typically specializing LMs to the target task by searching in a large space of (discrete or continuous) prompts using zeroth-order optimization methods. Instead of directly optimizing in prompt space, PromptBoosting obtains a small pool of prompts via a gradient-free approach and then constructs a large pool of weak learners by pairing these prompts with different elements of the LM's output distribution. These weak learners are then ensembled using the AdaBoost algorithm. The entire learning process requires only a small number of forward passes and no backward pass. Experiments show that PromptBoosting achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple black-box few-shot classification tasks, and matches or outperforms full fine-tuning in both few-shot and standard learning paradigms, while training 10x faster than existing black-box methods.

Recently, there has been increasing interest in synthesizing data to improve downstream text-to-SQL tasks. In this paper, we first examined the existing synthesized datasets and discovered that state-of-the-art text-to-SQL algorithms did not further improve on popular benchmarks when trained with augmented synthetic data. We observed two shortcomings: illogical synthetic SQL queries from independent column sampling and arbitrary table joins. To address these issues, we propose a novel synthesis framework that incorporates key relationships from schema, imposes strong typing, and conducts schema-distance-weighted column sampling. We also adopt an intermediate representation (IR) for the SQL-to-text task to further improve the quality of the generated natural language questions. When existing powerful semantic parsers are pre-finetuned on our high-quality synthesized data, our experiments show that these models have significant accuracy boosts on popular benchmarks, including new state-of-the-art performance on Spider.

Since early in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, there has been interest in using artificial intelligence methods to predict COVID-19 infection status based on vocal audio signals, for example cough recordings. However, existing studies have limitations in terms of data collection and of the assessment of the performances of the proposed predictive models. This paper rigorously assesses state-of-the-art machine learning techniques used to predict COVID-19 infection status based on vocal audio signals, using a dataset collected by the UK Health Security Agency. This dataset includes acoustic recordings and extensive study participant meta-data. We provide guidelines on testing the performance of methods to classify COVID-19 infection status based on acoustic features and we discuss how these can be extended more generally to the development and assessment of predictive methods based on public health datasets.

Neuromorphic vision or event vision is an advanced vision technology, where in contrast to the visible camera that outputs pixels, the event vision generates neuromorphic events every time there is a brightness change which exceeds a specific threshold in the field of view (FOV). This study focuses on leveraging neuromorphic event data for roadside object detection. This is a proof of concept towards building artificial intelligence (AI) based pipelines which can be used for forward perception systems for advanced vehicular applications. The focus is on building efficient state-of-the-art object detection networks with better inference results for fast-moving forward perception using an event camera. In this article, the event-simulated A2D2 dataset is manually annotated and trained on two different YOLOv5 networks (small and large variants). To further assess its robustness, single model testing and ensemble model testing are carried out.

We present a method for providing statistical guarantees on runtime safety and goal reachability for integrated planning and control of a class of systems with unknown nonlinear stochastic underactuated dynamics. Specifically, given a dynamics dataset, our method jointly learns a mean dynamics model, a spatially-varying disturbance bound that captures the effect of noise and model mismatch, and a feedback controller based on contraction theory that stabilizes the learned dynamics. We propose a sampling-based planner that uses the mean dynamics model and simultaneously bounds the closed-loop tracking error via a learned disturbance bound. We employ techniques from Extreme Value Theory (EVT) to estimate, to a specified level of confidence, several constants which characterize the learned components and govern the size of the tracking error bound. This ensures plans are guaranteed to be safely tracked at runtime. We validate that our guarantees translate to empirical safety in simulation on a 10D quadrotor, and in the real world on a physical CrazyFlie quadrotor and Clearpath Jackal robot, whereas baselines that ignore the model error and stochasticity are unsafe.

We present a data-driven framework to automate the vectorization and machine interpretation of 2D engineering part drawings. In industrial settings, most manufacturing engineers still rely on manual reads to identify the topological and manufacturing requirements from drawings submitted by designers. The interpretation process is laborious and time-consuming, which severely inhibits the efficiency of part quotation and manufacturing tasks. While recent advances in image-based computer vision methods have demonstrated great potential in interpreting natural images through semantic segmentation approaches, the application of such methods in parsing engineering technical drawings into semantically accurate components remains a significant challenge. The severe pixel sparsity in engineering drawings also restricts the effective featurization of image-based data-driven methods. To overcome these challenges, we propose a deep learning based framework that predicts the semantic type of each vectorized component. Taking a raster image as input, we vectorize all components through thinning, stroke tracing, and cubic bezier fitting. Then a graph of such components is generated based on the connectivity between the components. Finally, a graph convolutional neural network is trained on this graph data to identify the semantic type of each component. We test our framework in the context of semantic segmentation of text, dimension and, contour components in engineering drawings. Results show that our method yields the best performance compared to recent image, and graph-based segmentation methods.

Remote sensing images are useful for a wide variety of environmental and earth monitoring tasks, including tracking deforestation, illegal fishing, urban expansion, and natural disasters. The earth is extremely diverse -- the amount of potential tasks in remote sensing images is massive, and the sizes of features range from several kilometers to just tens of centimeters. However, creating generalizable computer vision methods is a challenge in part due to the lack of a large-scale dataset that captures these diverse features for many tasks. In this paper, we present Satlas, a remote sensing dataset and benchmark that is large in both breadth, featuring all of the aforementioned applications and more, as well as scale, comprising 290M labels under 137 categories and seven label modalities. We evaluate eight baselines and a proposed method on Satlas, and find that there is substantial room for improvement in addressing research challenges specific to remote sensing, including processing image time series that consist of images from very different types of sensors, and taking advantage of long-range spatial context. We also find that pre-training on Satlas substantially improves performance on downstream tasks with few labeled examples, increasing average accuracy by 16% over ImageNet and 5% over the next best baseline.

Denoising diffusions are state-of-the-art generative models which exhibit remarkable empirical performance and come with theoretical guarantees. The core idea of these models is to progressively transform the empirical data distribution into a simple Gaussian distribution by adding noise using a diffusion. We obtain new samples whose distribution is close to the data distribution by simulating a "denoising" diffusion approximating the time reversal of this "noising" diffusion. This denoising diffusion relies on approximations of the logarithmic derivatives of the noised data densities, known as scores, obtained using score matching. Such models can be easily extended to perform approximate posterior simulation in high-dimensional scenarios where one can only sample from the prior and simulate synthetic observations from the likelihood. These methods have been primarily developed for data on $\mathbb{R}^d$ while extensions to more general spaces have been developed on a case-by-case basis. We propose here a general framework which not only unifies and generalizes this approach to a wide class of spaces but also leads to an original extension of score matching. We illustrate the resulting class of denoising Markov models on various applications.