Generalized linear models with nonlinear feature transformations are widely used for large-scale regression and classification problems with sparse inputs. Memorization of feature interactions through a wide set of cross-product feature transformations are effective and interpretable, while generalization requires more feature engineering effort. With less feature engineering, deep neural networks can generalize better to unseen feature combinations through low-dimensional dense embeddings learned for the sparse features. However, deep neural networks with embeddings can over-generalize and recommend less relevant items when the user-item interactions are sparse and high-rank. In this paper, we present Wide & Deep learning-jointly trained wide linear models and deep neural networks-to combine the benefits of memorization and generalization for recommender systems. We productionized and evaluated the system on Google Play, a commercial mobile app store with over one billion active users and over one million apps. Online experiment results show that Wide & Deep significantly increased app acquisitions compared with wide-only and deep-only models. We have also open-sourced our implementation in TensorFlow.

Recent work has shown that large language models are capable of generating natural language reasoning steps or Chains-of-Thoughts (CoT) to answer a multi-step question when prompted to do so. This is insufficient, however, when the necessary knowledge is not available or up-to-date within a model's parameters. A straightforward approach to address this is to retrieve text from an external knowledge source using the question as a query and prepend it as context to the model's input. This, however, is also insufficient for multi-step QA where \textit{what to retrieve} depends on \textit{what has already been derived}. To address this issue we propose IRCoT, a new approach that interleaves retrieval with CoT for multi-step QA, guiding the retrieval with CoT and in turn using retrieved results to improve CoT. Our experiments with GPT3 show substantial improvements in retrieval (up to 22 points) and downstream QA (up to 16 points) over the baselines on four datasets: HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA, MuSiQue, and IIRC. Notably, our method also works well for much smaller models such as T5-Flan-large (0.7B) without any additional training.

Context is vital for commonsense moral reasoning. "Lying to a friend" is wrong if it is meant to deceive them, but may be morally okay if it is intended to protect them. Such nuanced but salient contextual information can potentially flip the moral judgment of an action. Thus, we present ClarifyDelphi, an interactive system that elicits missing contexts of a moral situation by generating clarification questions such as "Why did you lie to your friend?". Our approach is inspired by the observation that questions whose potential answers lead to diverging moral judgments are the most informative. We learn to generate questions using Reinforcement Learning, by maximizing the divergence between moral judgements of hypothetical answers to a question. Human evaluation shows that our system generates more relevant, informative and defeasible questions compared to other question generation baselines. ClarifyDelphi assists informed moral reasoning processes by seeking additional morally consequential context to disambiguate social and moral situations.

Pre-trained language models, despite their rapid advancements powered by scale, still fall short of robust commonsense capabilities. And yet, scale appears to be the winning recipe; after all, the largest models seem to have acquired the largest amount of commonsense capabilities. Or is it? In this paper, we investigate the possibility of a seemingly impossible match: can smaller language models with dismal commonsense capabilities (i.e., GPT-2), ever win over models that are orders of magnitude larger and better (i.e., GPT-3), if the smaller models are powered with novel commonsense distillation algorithms? The key intellectual question we ask here is whether it is possible, if at all, to design a learning algorithm that does not benefit from scale, yet leads to a competitive level of commonsense acquisition. In this work, we study the generative models of commonsense knowledge, focusing on the task of generating generics, statements of commonsense facts about everyday concepts, e.g., birds can fly. We introduce a novel commonsense distillation framework, I2D2, that loosely follows the Symbolic Knowledge Distillation of West et al. but breaks the dependence on the extreme-scale models as the teacher model by two innovations: (1) the novel adaptation of NeuroLogic Decoding to enhance the generation quality of the weak, off-the-shelf language models, and (2) self-imitation learning to iteratively learn from the model's own enhanced commonsense acquisition capabilities. Empirical results suggest that scale is not the only way, as novel algorithms can be a promising alternative. Moreover, our study leads to a new corpus of generics, Gen-A-Tomic, that is of the largest and highest quality available to date.

Metric learning aims to learn distances from the data, which enhances the performance of similarity-based algorithms. An author style detection task is a metric learning problem, where learning style features with small intra-class variations and larger inter-class differences is of great importance to achieve better performance. Recently, metric learning based on softmax loss has been used successfully for style detection. While softmax loss can produce separable representations, its discriminative power is relatively poor. In this work, we propose NBC-Softmax, a contrastive loss based clustering technique for softmax loss, which is more intuitive and able to achieve superior performance. Our technique meets the criterion for larger number of samples, thus achieving block contrastiveness, which is proven to outperform pair-wise losses. It uses mini-batch sampling effectively and is scalable. Experiments on 4 darkweb social forums, with NBCSAuthor that uses the proposed NBC-Softmax for author and sybil detection, shows that our negative block contrastive approach constantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods using the same network architecture. Our code is publicly available at : https://github.com/gayanku/NBC-Softmax

Fusing camera with LiDAR is a promising technique to improve the accuracy of 3D detection due to the complementary physical properties. While most existing methods focus on fusing camera features directly with raw LiDAR point clouds or shallow 3D features, it is observed that direct deep 3D feature fusion achieves inferior accuracy due to feature misalignment. The misalignment that originates from the feature aggregation across large receptive fields becomes increasingly severe for deep network stages. In this paper, we propose PathFusion to enable path-consistent LiDAR-camera deep feature fusion. PathFusion introduces a path consistency loss between shallow and deep features, which encourages the 2D backbone and its fusion path to transform 2D features in a way that is semantically aligned with the transform of the 3D backbone. We apply PathFusion to the prior-art fusion baseline, Focals Conv, and observe more than 1.2\% mAP improvements on the nuScenes test split consistently with and without testing-time augmentations. Moreover, PathFusion also improves KITTI AP3D (R11) by more than 0.6% on moderate level.

With advances in deep learning model training strategies, the training of Point cloud classification methods is significantly improving. For example, PointNeXt, which adopts prominent training techniques and InvResNet layers into PointNet++, achieves over 7% improvement on the real-world ScanObjectNN dataset. However, most of these models use point coordinates features of neighborhood points mapped to higher dimensional space while ignoring the neighborhood point features computed before feeding to the network layers. In this paper, we revisit the PointNeXt model to study the usage and benefit of such neighborhood point features. We train and evaluate PointNeXt on ModelNet40 (synthetic), ScanObjectNN (real-world), and a recent large-scale, real-world grocery dataset, i.e., 3DGrocery100. In addition, we provide an additional inference strategy of weight averaging the top two checkpoints of PointNeXt to improve classification accuracy. Together with the abovementioned ideas, we gain 0.5%, 1%, 4.8%, 3.4%, and 1.6% overall accuracy on the PointNeXt model with real-world datasets, ScanObjectNN (hardest variant), 3DGrocery100's Apple10, Fruits, Vegetables, and Packages subsets, respectively. We also achieve a comparable 0.2% accuracy gain on ModelNet40.

Emerging real-time multi-model ML (RTMM) workloads such as AR/VR and drone control often involve dynamic behaviors in various levels; task, model, and layers (or, ML operators) within a model. Such dynamic behaviors are new challenges to the system software in an ML system because the overall system load is unpredictable unlike traditional ML workloads. Also, the real-time processing requires to meet deadlines, and multi-model workloads involve highly heterogeneous models. As RTMM workloads often run on resource-constrained devices (e.g., VR headset), developing an effective scheduler is an important research problem. Therefore, we propose a new scheduler, SDRM3, that effectively handles various dynamicity in RTMM style workloads targeting multi-accelerator systems. To make scheduling decisions, SDRM3 quantifies the unique requirements for RTMM workloads and utilizes the quantified scores to drive scheduling decisions, considering the current system load and other inference jobs on different models and input frames. SDRM3 has tunable parameters that provide fast adaptivity to dynamic workload changes based on a gradient descent-like online optimization, which typically converges within five steps for new workloads. In addition, we also propose a method to exploit model level dynamicity based on Supernet for exploiting the trade-off between the scheduling effectiveness and model performance (e.g., accuracy), which dynamically selects a proper sub-network in a Supernet based on the system loads. In our evaluation on five realistic RTMM workload scenarios, SDRM3 reduces the overall UXCost, which is a energy-delay-product (EDP)-equivalent metric for real-time applications defined in the paper, by 37.7% and 53.2% on geometric mean (up to 97.6% and 97.1%) compared to state-of-the-art baselines, which shows the efficacy of our scheduling methodology.

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful tool for point cloud generation. A key component that drives the impressive performance for generating high-quality samples from noise is iteratively denoise for thousands of steps. While beneficial, the complexity of learning steps has limited its applications to many 3D real-world. To address this limitation, we propose Point Straight Flow (PSF), a model that exhibits impressive performance using one step. Our idea is based on the reformulation of the standard diffusion model, which optimizes the curvy learning trajectory into a straight path. Further, we develop a distillation strategy to shorten the straight path into one step without a performance loss, enabling applications to 3D real-world with latency constraints. We perform evaluations on multiple 3D tasks and find that our PSF performs comparably to the standard diffusion model, outperforming other efficient 3D point cloud generation methods. On real-world applications such as point cloud completion and training-free text-guided generation in a low-latency setup, PSF performs favorably.

Generative models learned from training using deep learning methods can be used as priors in inverse under-determined inverse problems, including imaging from sparse set of measurements. In this paper, we present a novel hierarchical deep-generative model MrSARP for SAR imagery that can synthesize SAR images of a target at different resolutions jointly. MrSARP is trained in conjunction with a critic that scores multi resolution images jointly to decide if they are realistic images of a target at different resolutions. We show how this deep generative model can be used to retrieve the high spatial resolution image from low resolution images of the same target. The cost function of the generator is modified to improve its capability to retrieve the input parameters for a given set of resolution images. We evaluate the model's performance using the three standard error metrics used for evaluating super-resolution performance on simulated data and compare it to upsampling and sparsity based image sharpening approaches.