The quality of knowledge retrieval is crucial in knowledge-intensive conversations. Two common strategies to improve the retrieval quality are finetuning the retriever or generating a self-contained query, while they encounter heavy burdens on expensive computation and elaborate annotations. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised query enhanced approach for knowledge-intensive conversations, namely QKConv. There are three modules in QKConv: a query generator, an off-the-shelf knowledge selector, and a response generator. Without extra supervision, the end-to-end joint training of QKConv explores multiple candidate queries and utilizes corresponding selected knowledge to yield the target response. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted comprehensive experiments on conversational question-answering, task-oriented dialogue, and knowledge-grounded conversation. Experimental results demonstrate that QKConv achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to unsupervised methods and competitive performance compared to supervised methods.

Pseudo supervision is regarded as the core idea in semi-supervised learning for semantic segmentation, and there is always a tradeoff between utilizing only the high-quality pseudo labels and leveraging all the pseudo labels. Addressing that, we propose a novel learning approach, called Conservative-Progressive Collaborative Learning (CPCL), among which two predictive networks are trained in parallel, and the pseudo supervision is implemented based on both the agreement and disagreement of the two predictions. One network seeks common ground via intersection supervision and is supervised by the high-quality labels to ensure a more reliable supervision, while the other network reserves differences via union supervision and is supervised by all the pseudo labels to keep exploring with curiosity. Thus, the collaboration of conservative evolution and progressive exploration can be achieved. To reduce the influences of the suspicious pseudo labels, the loss is dynamic re-weighted according to the prediction confidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CPCL achieves state-of-the-art performance for semi-supervised semantic segmentation.

While federated learning has shown strong results in optimizing a machine learning model without direct access to the original data, its performance may be hindered by intermittent client availability which slows down the convergence and biases the final learned model. There are significant challenges to achieve both stable and bias-free training under arbitrary client availability. To address these challenges, we propose a framework named Federated Graph-based Sampling (FedGS), to stabilize the global model update and mitigate the long-term bias given arbitrary client availability simultaneously. First, we model the data correlations of clients with a Data-Distribution-Dependency Graph (3DG) that helps keep the sampled clients data apart from each other, which is theoretically shown to improve the approximation to the optimal model update. Second, constrained by the far-distance in data distribution of the sampled clients, we further minimize the variance of the numbers of times that the clients are sampled, to mitigate long-term bias. To validate the effectiveness of FedGS, we conduct experiments on three datasets under a comprehensive set of seven client availability modes. Our experimental results confirm FedGS's advantage in both enabling a fair client-sampling scheme and improving the model performance under arbitrary client availability. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/WwZzz/FedGS}.

通过社交媒体评论预先培训的许多开放域对话模型都可以产生连贯的答复，但在与真实用户互动时会产生引人入胜的答复。这种现象可能主要是由于注释的人类对话的不足以及与人类偏爱的未对准。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖而有效的方法，以增强开放域聊天机器人，其中有两种人类反馈（包括明确的演示和隐性偏好），并利用了。通过要求注释者选择或修改模型生成的候选响应，Diamante有效地收集了人类证明的响应并构建了中国聊天数据集。为了增强与人类偏好的一致性，Diamante利用数据收集过程中的隐含偏好，并引入了生成评估联合培训。全面的实验表明，Diamante数据集和联合培训范式可以显着提高中国预训练的对话模型的性能。

生成的开放域对话系统可以从外部知识中受益，但是缺乏外部知识资源和寻找相关知识的困难限制了该技术的发展。为此，我们使用动态服务信息提出了一个知识驱动的对话任务。具体而言，我们使用大量的服务API，可以作为外部知识来源提供高覆盖范围和时空敏感性。对话系统生成查询以请求外部服务以及用户信息，获取相关知识，并基于此知识生成响应。为了实现此方法，我们收集并发布了第一个开放式域中国服务知识对话数据集Dusinc。同时，我们构建了一个基线模型柏拉图 - 线，该模型实现了对话的自动利用。自动评估和人类评估都表明，我们提出的新方法可以显着改善开放域对话的效果，并且与对话预培训模型Plato-2相比，人类评估中的会话级总数提高了59.29％。数据集和基准模型将被开源。

面向任务导向的对话系统已经受到获得大规模和高质量的注释对话的困难困扰。此外，大多数公开的数据集仅包括书面对话，这不足以反映实际口头对话系统中的实际人类行为。在本文中，我们提出了面向任务的对话数据增强（TOD-DA），这是一种新型模型 - 不可知的数据增强范例，以提高面向任务对话建模的鲁棒性。 TOD-DA由两个模块组成：1）对话丰富，以扩展关于易于执行数据稀疏性的任务对话的培训数据，用于宽松数据稀疏性和2）口语对话模拟器，以模仿各种粒度的口语样式表达和语音识别错误，以弥合书面之间的差距和口头对话。通过这样的设计，我们的方法在DSTC10 Track2的两个任务中排名第一，这是针对口语对话的任务对话建模的基准，展示了我们提出的TOD-DA的优势和有效性。

Modern autonomous driving system is characterized as modular tasks in sequential order, i.e., perception, prediction and planning. As sensors and hardware get improved, there is trending popularity to devise a system that can perform a wide diversity of tasks to fulfill higher-level intelligence. Contemporary approaches resort to either deploying standalone models for individual tasks, or designing a multi-task paradigm with separate heads. These might suffer from accumulative error or negative transfer effect. Instead, we argue that a favorable algorithm framework should be devised and optimized in pursuit of the ultimate goal, i.e. planning of the self-driving-car. Oriented at this goal, we revisit the key components within perception and prediction. We analyze each module and prioritize the tasks hierarchically, such that all these tasks contribute to planning (the goal). To this end, we introduce Unified Autonomous Driving (UniAD), the first comprehensive framework up-to-date that incorporates full-stack driving tasks in one network. It is exquisitely devised to leverage advantages of each module, and provide complementary feature abstractions for agent interaction from a global perspective. Tasks are communicated with unified query design to facilitate each other toward planning. We instantiate UniAD on the challenging nuScenes benchmark. With extensive ablations, the effectiveness of using such a philosophy is proven to surpass previous state-of-the-arts by a large margin in all aspects. The full suite of codebase and models would be available to facilitate future research in the community.

End-to-end Speech Translation (E2E ST) aims to translate source speech into target translation without generating the intermediate transcript. However, existing approaches for E2E ST degrade considerably when only limited ST data are available. We observe that an ST model's performance strongly correlates with its embedding similarity from speech and transcript. In this paper, we propose Word-Aligned COntrastive learning (WACO), a novel method for few-shot speech-to-text translation. Our key idea is bridging word-level representations for both modalities via contrastive learning. We evaluate WACO and other methods on the MuST-C dataset, a widely used ST benchmark. Our experiments demonstrate that WACO outperforms the best baseline methods by 0.7-8.5 BLEU points with only 1-hour parallel data. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/WACO .

Instance segmentation in videos, which aims to segment and track multiple objects in video frames, has garnered a flurry of research attention in recent years. In this paper, we present a novel weakly supervised framework with \textbf{S}patio-\textbf{T}emporal \textbf{C}ollaboration for instance \textbf{Seg}mentation in videos, namely \textbf{STC-Seg}. Concretely, STC-Seg demonstrates four contributions. First, we leverage the complementary representations from unsupervised depth estimation and optical flow to produce effective pseudo-labels for training deep networks and predicting high-quality instance masks. Second, to enhance the mask generation, we devise a puzzle loss, which enables end-to-end training using box-level annotations. Third, our tracking module jointly utilizes bounding-box diagonal points with spatio-temporal discrepancy to model movements, which largely improves the robustness to different object appearances. Finally, our framework is flexible and enables image-level instance segmentation methods to operate the video-level task. We conduct an extensive set of experiments on the KITTI MOTS and YT-VIS datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves strong performance and even outperforms fully supervised TrackR-CNN and MaskTrack R-CNN. We believe that STC-Seg can be a valuable addition to the community, as it reflects the tip of an iceberg about the innovative opportunities in the weakly supervised paradigm for instance segmentation in videos.

How can we extend a pre-trained model to many language understanding tasks, without labeled or additional unlabeled data? Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been effective for a wide range of NLP tasks. However, existing approaches either require fine-tuning on downstream labeled datasets or manually constructing proper prompts. In this paper, we propose nonparametric prompting PLM (NPPrompt) for fully zero-shot language understanding. Unlike previous methods, NPPrompt uses only pre-trained language models and does not require any labeled data or additional raw corpus for further fine-tuning, nor does it rely on humans to construct a comprehensive set of prompt label words. We evaluate NPPrompt against previous major few-shot and zero-shot learning methods on diverse NLP tasks: including text classification, text entailment, similar text retrieval, and paraphrasing. Experimental results demonstrate that our NPPrompt outperforms the previous best fully zero-shot method by big margins, with absolute gains of 12.8% in accuracy on text classification and 18.9% on the GLUE benchmark.