Virtual assistants such as Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri provide a conversational interface to a large number of services and APIs spanning multiple domains. Such systems need to support an ever-increasing number of services with possibly overlapping functionality. Furthermore, some of these services have little to no training data available. Existing public datasets for task-oriented dialogue do not sufficiently capture these challenges since they cover few domains and assume a single static ontology per domain. In this work, we introduce the the Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset, containing over 16k multi-domain conversations spanning 16 domains. Our dataset exceeds the existing task-oriented dialogue corpora in scale, while also highlighting the challenges associated with building large-scale virtual assistants. It provides a challenging testbed for a number of tasks including language understanding, slot filling, dialogue state tracking and response generation. Along the same lines, we present a schema-guided paradigm for task-oriented dialogue, in which predictions are made over a dynamic set of intents and slots, provided as input, using their natural language descriptions. This allows a single dialogue system to easily support a large number of services and facilitates simple integration of new services without requiring additional training data. Building upon the proposed paradigm, we release a model for dialogue state tracking capable of zero-shot generalization to new APIs, while remaining competitive in the regular setting.

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have brought a lot of advancements in sequence labeling tasks and sequence data. However, their effectiveness is limited when the observations in the sequence are irregularly sampled, where the observations arrive at irregular time intervals. To address this, continuous time variants of the RNNs were introduced based on neural ordinary differential equations (NODE). They learn a better representation of the data using the continuous transformation of hidden states over time, taking into account the time interval between the observations. However, they are still limited in their capability as they use the discrete transformations and a fixed discrete number of layers (depth) over an input in the sequence to produce the output observation. We intend to address this limitation by proposing RNNs based on differential equations which model continuous transformations over both depth and time to predict an output for a given input in the sequence. Specifically, we propose continuous depth recurrent neural differential equations (CDR-NDE) which generalizes RNN models by continuously evolving the hidden states in both the temporal and depth dimensions. CDR-NDE considers two separate differential equations over each of these dimensions and models the evolution in the temporal and depth directions alternatively. We also propose the CDR-NDE-heat model based on partial differential equations which treats the computation of hidden states as solving a heat equation over time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models by comparing against the state-of-the-art RNN models on real world sequence labeling problems and data.

Entity matching in Customer 360 is the task of determining if multiple records represent the same real world entity. Entities are typically people, organizations, locations, and events represented as attributed nodes in a graph, though they can also be represented as records in relational data. While probabilistic matching engines and artificial neural network models exist for this task, explaining entity matching has received less attention. In this demo, we present our Explainable Entity Matching (xEM) system and discuss the different AI/ML considerations that went into its implementation.

Vascular shunt insertion is a fundamental surgical procedure used to temporarily restore blood flow to tissues. It is often performed in the field after major trauma. We formulate a problem of automated vascular shunt insertion and propose a pipeline to perform Automated Vascular Shunt Insertion (AVSI) using a da Vinci Research Kit. The pipeline uses a learned visual model to estimate the locus of the vessel rim, plans a grasp on the rim, and moves to grasp at that point. The first robot gripper then pulls the rim to stretch open the vessel with a dilation motion. The second robot gripper then proceeds to insert a shunt into the vessel phantom (a model of the blood vessel) with a chamfer tilt followed by a screw motion. Results suggest that AVSI achieves a high success rate even with tight tolerances and varying vessel orientations up to 30{\deg}. Supplementary material, dataset, videos, and visualizations can be found at https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/autolab-avsi.

End-to-end speech recognition models trained using joint Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC)-Attention loss have gained popularity recently. In these models, a non-autoregressive CTC decoder is often used at inference time due to its speed and simplicity. However, such models are hard to personalize because of their conditional independence assumption that prevents output tokens from previous time steps to influence future predictions. To tackle this, we propose a novel two-way approach that first biases the encoder with attention over a predefined list of rare long-tail and out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words and then uses dynamic boosting and phone alignment network during decoding to further bias the subword predictions. We evaluate our approach on open-source VoxPopuli and in-house medical datasets to showcase a 60% improvement in F1 score on domain-specific rare words over a strong CTC baseline.

元加强学习（META-RL）是一种方法，即从解决各种任务中获得的经验被蒸馏成元政策。当仅适应一个小（或仅一个）数量的步骤时，元派利赛能够在新的相关任务上近距离执行。但是，采用这种方法来解决现实世界中的问题的主要挑战是，它们通常与稀疏的奖励功能相关联，这些功能仅表示任务是部分或完全完成的。我们考虑到某些数据可能由亚最佳代理生成的情况，可用于每个任务。然后，我们使用示范（EMRLD）开发了一类名为“增强元RL”的算法，即使在训练过程中获得了次优的指导，也可以利用此信息。我们展示了EMRLD如何共同利用RL和在离线数据上进行监督学习，以生成一个显示单调性能改进的元数据。我们还开发了一个称为EMRLD-WS的温暖开始的变体，该变体对于亚最佳演示数据特别有效。最后，我们表明，在包括移动机器人在内的各种稀疏奖励环境中，我们的EMRLD算法显着优于现有方法。

我们解决了在线顺序决策的问题，即在利用当前知识以最大程度地提高绩效和探索新信息以使用多武器的强盗框架获得长期利益之间的权衡平衡。汤普森采样是选择解决这一探索探索困境的动作的启发式方法之一。我们首先提出了一个通用框架，该框架可帮助启发性地调整汤普森采样中的探索与剥削权衡取舍，并使用后部分布中的多个样本进行调整。利用此框架，我们为多臂匪徒问题提出了两种算法，并为累积遗憾提供了理论界限。接下来，我们证明了拟议算法对汤普森采样的累积遗憾表现的经验改善。我们还显示了所提出的算法在现实世界数据集上的有效性。与现有方法相反，我们的框架提供了一种机制，可以根据手头的任务改变探索/开发量。为此，我们将框架扩展到两个其他问题，即，在土匪中最佳的ARM识别和时间敏感学习，并将我们的算法与现有方法进行比较。

Twenty20板球，有时是二十20，经常缩写为T20，是板球的一小部分。在一场二十二十比赛中，两支球员组成的两支球队都有一局，最多仅限20分。这个版本的板球尤其是不可预测的，这是它最近在近期越来越受欢迎的原因之一。但是，在本文中，我们尝试了四种不同的方法来预测T20板球比赛的结果。具体来说，我们要考虑：以前的竞争团队参与者的绩效统计数据，从知名的板球统计网站获得的球员的评分，以相似的性能统计数据和基于ELO基于ELO的方法来汇率玩家。我们通过使用逻辑回归，支持向量机，贝叶斯网络，决策树，随机森林来比较每种方法的性能。

样式是自然语言文本的重要组成部分，反映了文本语调的变化，同时保持基础信息相同。即使编程语言具有严格的语法规则，它们也具有风格。代码可以使用相同的功能编写，但使用不同的语言功能。但是，编程样式很难量化，因此，作为这项工作的一部分，我们定义了专门针对Python的样式属性。为了构建样式的定义，我们利用层次聚类来捕获样式定义，而无需指定转换。除了定义样式外，我们还探索了预训练的代码语言模型的功能，以捕获有关代码样式的信息。为此，我们微调了预训练的代码语言模型，并在代码样式转移任务中评估了其性能。

转置卷积在许多深度学习应用中都表现出突出。但是，由于在每个行和列中的每个元素之后添加零之后，特征映射的大小增加，因此转置卷积层在计算范围内都在计算密集型。因此，在扩展的输入特征图上进行的卷积操作导致硬件资源的利用率不佳。不必要的乘法操作的主要原因是在输入特征映射中的预定位置处的零。我们提出了一种算法级优化技术，用于有效的转置卷积实施以解决这些问题。基于内核激活，我们将原始内核隔离为四个子内核。该方案可以减少内存需求和不必要的乘法。我们提出的方法是使用Kaggle网站上的Flower DataSet使用Titan X GPU（Intel Dual Core CPU）的$ 3.09（3.02）\ Times $ $更快的计算。此外，提出的优化方法可以推广到现有设备，而无需其他硬件要求。一个简单的深度学习模型，其中包含一个转齿卷积层来评估优化方法。它显示出使用具有Intel双核CPU的MNIST数据集的$ 2.2 \ times $ $更快的培训。