社交媒体帖子包含有关医疗条件和与健康相关行为的潜在有价值的信息。生物重建VII任务3专注于通过识别推文中的药物和膳食补充剂的提及来挖掘这些信息。我们通过精细调整多个BERT样式语言模型来执行此任务以执行令牌级分类，并将它们组合成集合以生成最终预测。我们最好的系统由五个Megatron-Bert-345M型号组成，在看不见的测试数据上实现了0.764的严格F1得分。

生物重建VII Track-2挑战包括命名实体识别，实体链接（或实体 - 归一化），主题索引任务 - 与实体和主题限制为这项挑战的化学品。命名实体识别是一个完善的问题，我们通过基于Bert的生物群体模型实现了我们的最佳性能。我们将基于BERT的方法扩展到实体链接任务。在预先预订Biobert的第二阶段，通过称为自对准预先训练（SAP）的度量学习损失策略，我们将基于其SAP-Biobert Word Embeddings之间的余弦相似性链接实体。尽管我们的命名实体识别实验取得了成功，但我们发现化学指数任务一般更具挑战性。除了传统的NER方法之外，我们还尝试使用基于新颖的文本或“提示”方法的命名实体识别和实体链接，该方法使用生成语言模型，例如T5和GPT。我们通过这种新方法实现了令人鼓舞的结果。

在Bircocrive VII的Track-1中，要求参与者识别药物/化学品和蛋白质之间的相互作用。提供每个药物/化学和蛋白质的内部名称实体注释，必须自动预测14个不同的相互作用中的一种。对于此关系提取任务，我们尝试两种基于BERT的句子分类方法，以及使用T5模型的更新文本到文本方法。我们发现基于BERT的模型一般表现更好，我们的生物综太基模型实现了所有指标的最高分，实现了0.74 F1得分。虽然我们的小说T5文本到文本方法没有表现出基于BERT的大多数模型，但它表现出在类似数据上培训的那些，呈现出有希望的结果，实现0.65 F1得分。我们认为，与关系提取的文本文本方法有一些竞争优势，并且有很多研究进步的空间。

本文概述了NVIDIA Nemo的神经电机翻译系统，用于WMT21新闻和生物医学共享翻译任务的受限数据跟踪。我们的新闻任务提交英语 - 德语（EN-DE）和英语 - 俄语（EN-RU）是基于基于基于基线变换器的序列到序列模型之上。具体而言，我们使用1）检查点平均2）模型缩放3）模型缩放3）与从左右分解模型的逆转传播和知识蒸馏的数据增强4）从前一年的测试集上的FINETUNING 5）型号集合6）浅融合解码变压器语言模型和7）嘈杂的频道重新排名。此外，我们的BioMedical任务提交的英语 - 俄语使用生物学偏见的词汇表，并从事新闻任务数据的划痕，从新闻任务数据集中策划的医学相关文本以及共享任务提供的生物医学数据。我们的新闻系统在WMT'20 en-de试验中实现了39.5的Sacrebleu得分优于去年任务38.8的最佳提交。我们的生物医学任务ru-en和en-ru系统分别在WMT'20生物医学任务测试集中达到43.8和40.3的Bleu分数，优于上一年的最佳提交。

The United States coastline spans 95,471 miles; a distance that cannot be effectively patrolled or secured by manual human effort alone. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with infrared cameras and deep-learning based algorithms represent a more efficient alternative for identifying and segmenting objects of interest - namely, ships. However, standard approaches to training these algorithms require large-scale datasets of densely labeled infrared maritime images. Such datasets are not publicly available and manually annotating every pixel in a large-scale dataset would have an extreme labor cost. In this work we demonstrate that, in the context of segmenting ships in infrared imagery, weakly-supervising an algorithm with sparsely labeled data can drastically reduce data labeling costs with minimal impact on system performance. We apply weakly-supervised learning to an unlabeled dataset of 7055 infrared images sourced from the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD). We find that by sparsely labeling only 32 points per image, weakly-supervised segmentation models can still effectively detect and segment ships, with a Jaccard score of up to 0.756.

Hyperparameter tuning is critical to the success of federated learning applications. Unfortunately, appropriately selecting hyperparameters is challenging in federated networks. Issues of scale, privacy, and heterogeneity introduce noise in the tuning process and make it difficult to evaluate the performance of various hyperparameters. In this work, we perform the first systematic study on the effect of noisy evaluation in federated hyperparameter tuning. We first identify and rigorously explore key sources of noise, including client subsampling, data and systems heterogeneity, and data privacy. Surprisingly, our results indicate that even small amounts of noise can significantly impact tuning methods-reducing the performance of state-of-the-art approaches to that of naive baselines. To address noisy evaluation in such scenarios, we propose a simple and effective approach that leverages public proxy data to boost the evaluation signal. Our work establishes general challenges, baselines, and best practices for future work in federated hyperparameter tuning.

This work studies networked agents cooperating to track a dynamical state of nature under partial information. The proposed algorithm is a distributed Bayesian filtering algorithm for finite-state hidden Markov models (HMMs). It can be used for sequential state estimation tasks, as well as for modeling opinion formation over social networks under dynamic environments. We show that the disagreement with the optimal centralized solution is asymptotically bounded for the class of geometrically ergodic state transition models, which includes rapidly changing models. We also derive recursions for calculating the probability of error and establish convergence under Gaussian observation models. Simulations are provided to illustrate the theory and to compare against alternative approaches.

Privacy noise may negate the benefits of using adaptive optimizers in differentially private model training. Prior works typically address this issue by using auxiliary information (e.g., public data) to boost the effectiveness of adaptive optimization. In this work, we explore techniques to estimate and efficiently adapt to gradient geometry in private adaptive optimization without auxiliary data. Motivated by the observation that adaptive methods can tolerate stale preconditioners, we propose differentially private adaptive training with delayed preconditioners (DP^2), a simple method that constructs delayed but less noisy preconditioners to better realize the benefits of adaptivity. Theoretically, we provide convergence guarantees for our method for both convex and non-convex problems, and analyze trade-offs between delay and privacy noise reduction. Empirically, we explore DP^2 across several real-world datasets, demonstrating that it can improve convergence speed by as much as 4x relative to non-adaptive baselines and match the performance of state-of-the-art optimization methods that require auxiliary data.

Scene text images have different shapes and are subjected to various distortions, e.g. perspective distortions. To handle these challenges, the state-of-the-art methods rely on a rectification network, which is connected to the text recognition network. They form a linear pipeline which uses text rectification on all input images, even for images that can be recognized without it. Undoubtedly, the rectification network improves the overall text recognition performance. However, in some cases, the rectification network generates unnecessary distortions on images, resulting in incorrect predictions in images that would have otherwise been correct without it. In order to alleviate the unnecessary distortions, the portmanteauing of features is proposed. The portmanteau feature, inspired by the portmanteau word, is a feature containing information from both the original text image and the rectified image. To generate the portmanteau feature, a non-linear input pipeline with a block matrix initialization is presented. In this work, the transformer is chosen as the recognition network due to its utilization of attention and inherent parallelism, which can effectively handle the portmanteau feature. The proposed method is examined on 6 benchmarks and compared with 13 state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on various of the benchmarks.

Scene text recognition (STR) involves the task of reading text in cropped images of natural scenes. Conventional models in STR employ convolutional neural network (CNN) followed by recurrent neural network in an encoder-decoder framework. In recent times, the transformer architecture is being widely adopted in STR as it shows strong capability in capturing long-term dependency which appears to be prominent in scene text images. Many researchers utilized transformer as part of a hybrid CNN-transformer encoder, often followed by a transformer decoder. However, such methods only make use of the long-term dependency mid-way through the encoding process. Although the vision transformer (ViT) is able to capture such dependency at an early stage, its utilization remains largely unexploited in STR. This work proposes the use of a transformer-only model as a simple baseline which outperforms hybrid CNN-transformer models. Furthermore, two key areas for improvement were identified. Firstly, the first decoded character has the lowest prediction accuracy. Secondly, images of different original aspect ratios react differently to the patch resolutions while ViT only employ one fixed patch resolution. To explore these areas, Pure Transformer with Integrated Experts (PTIE) is proposed. PTIE is a transformer model that can process multiple patch resolutions and decode in both the original and reverse character orders. It is examined on 7 commonly used benchmarks and compared with over 20 state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms them and obtains state-of-the-art results in most benchmarks.