The acquisition of high-quality human annotations through crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is more challenging than expected. The annotation quality might be affected by various aspects like annotation instructions, Human Intelligence Task (HIT) design, and wages paid to annotators, etc. To avoid potentially low-quality annotations which could mislead the evaluation of automatic summarization system outputs, we investigate the recruitment of high-quality MTurk workers via a three-step qualification pipeline. We show that we can successfully filter out bad workers before they carry out the evaluations and obtain high-quality annotations while optimizing the use of resources. This paper can serve as basis for the recruitment of qualified annotators in other challenging annotation tasks.

通常通过过去的选择来告知机器学习中的评估，例如要使用哪些数据集或指标。该标准化可以使用排行榜对平等基础进行比较，但是随着出现更好的替代方案，评估选择变得不佳。这个问题在自然语言生成中尤其相关，该语言需要不断改善的数据集，指标和人类评估以提出确定性的主张。为了使遵循最佳模型评估实践更加容易，我们介绍了GEMV2。新版本的一代，评估和指标基准为数据集，模型和指标开发人员提供了模块化基础架构，以使彼此受益。GEMV2支持40种记录的数据集中51种语言。所有数据集的模型都可以在线评估，我们的交互式数据卡创建和渲染工具使得在Living Benchmark中添加新数据集变得更加容易。

数据增强是自然语言处理（NLP）模型的鲁棒性评估的重要组成部分，以及增强他们培训的数据的多样性。在本文中，我们呈现NL-Cogmenter，这是一种新的参与式Python的自然语言增强框架，它支持创建两个转换（对数据的修改）和过滤器（根据特定功能的数据拆分）。我们描述了框架和初始的117个变换和23个过滤器，用于各种自然语言任务。我们通过使用其几个转换来分析流行自然语言模型的鲁棒性来证明NL-Upmenter的功效。基础架构，Datacards和稳健性分析结果在NL-Augmenter存储库上公开可用（\ url {https://github.com/gem-benchmark/nl-augmenter}）。

New architecture GPUs like A100 are now equipped with multi-instance GPU (MIG) technology, which allows the GPU to be partitioned into multiple small, isolated instances. This technology provides more flexibility for users to support both deep learning training and inference workloads, but efficiently utilizing it can still be challenging. The vision of this paper is to provide a more comprehensive and practical benchmark study for MIG in order to eliminate the need for tedious manual benchmarking and tuning efforts. To achieve this vision, the paper presents MIGPerf, an open-source tool that streamlines the benchmark study for MIG. Using MIGPerf, the authors conduct a series of experiments, including deep learning training and inference characterization on MIG, GPU sharing characterization, and framework compatibility with MIG. The results of these experiments provide new insights and guidance for users to effectively employ MIG, and lay the foundation for further research on the orchestration of hybrid training and inference workloads on MIGs. The code and results are released on https://github.com/MLSysOps/MIGProfiler. This work is still in progress and more results will be published soon.

Tobacco origin identification is significantly important in tobacco industry. Modeling analysis for sensor data with near infrared spectroscopy has become a popular method for rapid detection of internal features. However, for sensor data analysis using traditional artificial neural network or deep network models, the training process is extremely time-consuming. In this paper, a novel broad learning system with Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy subsystem is proposed for rapid identification of tobacco origin. Incremental learning is employed in the proposed method, which obtains the weight matrix of the network after a very small amount of computation, resulting in much shorter training time for the model, with only about 3 seconds for the extra step training. The experimental results show that the TS fuzzy subsystem can extract features from the near infrared data and effectively improve the recognition performance. The proposed method can achieve the highest prediction accuracy (95.59 %) in comparison to the traditional classification algorithms, artificial neural network, and deep convolutional neural network, and has a great advantage in the training time with only about 128 seconds.

Accurate modeling of ship performance is crucial for the shipping industry to optimize fuel consumption and subsequently reduce emissions. However, predicting the speed-power relation in real-world conditions remains a challenge. In this study, we used in-service monitoring data from multiple vessels with different hull shapes to compare the accuracy of data-driven machine learning (ML) algorithms to traditional methods for assessing ship performance. Our analysis consists of two main parts: (1) a comparison of sea trial curves with calm-water curves fitted on operational data, and (2) a benchmark of multiple added wave resistance theories with an ML-based approach. Our results showed that a simple neural network outperformed established semi-empirical formulas following first principles. The neural network only required operational data as input, while the traditional methods required extensive ship particulars that are often unavailable. These findings suggest that data-driven algorithms may be more effective for predicting ship performance in practical applications.

As a common appearance defect of concrete bridges, cracks are important indices for bridge structure health assessment. Although there has been much research on crack identification, research on the evolution mechanism of bridge cracks is still far from practical applications. In this paper, the state-of-the-art research on intelligent theories and methodologies for intelligent feature extraction, data fusion and crack detection based on data-driven approaches is comprehensively reviewed. The research is discussed from three aspects: the feature extraction level of the multimodal parameters of bridge cracks, the description level and the diagnosis level of the bridge crack damage states. We focus on previous research concerning the quantitative characterization problems of multimodal parameters of bridge cracks and their implementation in crack identification, while highlighting some of their major drawbacks. In addition, the current challenges and potential future research directions are discussed.

Two approaches to AI, neural networks and symbolic systems, have been proven very successful for an array of AI problems. However, neither has been able to achieve the general reasoning ability required for human-like intelligence. It has been argued that this is due to inherent weaknesses in each approach. Luckily, these weaknesses appear to be complementary, with symbolic systems being adept at the kinds of things neural networks have trouble with and vice-versa. The field of neural-symbolic AI attempts to exploit this asymmetry by combining neural networks and symbolic AI into integrated systems. Often this has been done by encoding symbolic knowledge into neural networks. Unfortunately, although many different methods for this have been proposed, there is no common definition of an encoding to compare them. We seek to rectify this problem by introducing a semantic framework for neural-symbolic AI, which is then shown to be general enough to account for a large family of neural-symbolic systems. We provide a number of examples and proofs of the application of the framework to the neural encoding of various forms of knowledge representation and neural network. These, at first sight disparate approaches, are all shown to fall within the framework's formal definition of what we call semantic encoding for neural-symbolic AI.

Diffusion models have shown a great ability at bridging the performance gap between predictive and generative approaches for speech enhancement. We have shown that they may even outperform their predictive counterparts for non-additive corruption types or when they are evaluated on mismatched conditions. However, diffusion models suffer from a high computational burden, mainly as they require to run a neural network for each reverse diffusion step, whereas predictive approaches only require one pass. As diffusion models are generative approaches they may also produce vocalizing and breathing artifacts in adverse conditions. In comparison, in such difficult scenarios, predictive models typically do not produce such artifacts but tend to distort the target speech instead, thereby degrading the speech quality. In this work, we present a stochastic regeneration approach where an estimate given by a predictive model is provided as a guide for further diffusion. We show that the proposed approach uses the predictive model to remove the vocalizing and breathing artifacts while producing very high quality samples thanks to the diffusion model, even in adverse conditions. We further show that this approach enables to use lighter sampling schemes with fewer diffusion steps without sacrificing quality, thus lifting the computational burden by an order of magnitude. Source code and audio examples are available online (https://uhh.de/inf-sp-storm).

Market sentiment analysis on social media content requires knowledge of both financial markets and social media jargon, which makes it a challenging task for human raters. The resulting lack of high-quality labeled data stands in the way of conventional supervised learning methods. Instead, we approach this problem using semi-supervised learning with a large language model (LLM). Our pipeline generates weak financial sentiment labels for Reddit posts with an LLM and then uses that data to train a small model that can be served in production. We find that prompting the LLM to produce Chain-of-Thought summaries and forcing it through several reasoning paths helps generate more stable and accurate labels, while using a regression loss further improves distillation quality. With only a handful of prompts, the final model performs on par with existing supervised models. Though production applications of our model are limited by ethical considerations, the model's competitive performance points to the great potential of using LLMs for tasks that otherwise require skill-intensive annotation.