This paper presents a novel federated reinforcement learning (Fed-RL) methodology to enhance the cyber resiliency of networked microgrids. We formulate a resilient reinforcement learning (RL) training setup which (a) generates episodic trajectories injecting adversarial actions at primary control reference signals of the grid forming (GFM) inverters and (b) trains the RL agents (or controllers) to alleviate the impact of the injected adversaries. To circumvent data-sharing issues and concerns for proprietary privacy in multi-party-owned networked grids, we bring in the aspects of federated machine learning and propose a novel Fed-RL algorithm to train the RL agents. To this end, the conventional horizontal Fed-RL approaches using decoupled independent environments fail to capture the coupled dynamics in a networked microgrid, which leads us to propose a multi-agent vertically federated variation of actor-critic algorithms, namely federated soft actor-critic (FedSAC) algorithm. We created a customized simulation setup encapsulating microgrid dynamics in the GridLAB-D/HELICS co-simulation platform compatible with the OpenAI Gym interface for training RL agents. Finally, the proposed methodology is validated with numerical examples of modified IEEE 123-bus benchmark test systems consisting of three coupled microgrids.

Most research on task oriented dialog modeling is based on written text input. However, users interact with practical dialog systems often using speech as input. Typically, systems convert speech into text using an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system, introducing errors. Furthermore, these systems do not address the differences in written and spoken language. The research on this topic is stymied by the lack of a public corpus. Motivated by these considerations, our goal in hosting the speech-aware dialog state tracking challenge was to create a public corpus or task which can be used to investigate the performance gap between the written and spoken forms of input, develop models that could alleviate this gap, and establish whether Text-to-Speech-based (TTS) systems is a reasonable surrogate to the more-labor intensive human data collection. We created three spoken versions of the popular written-domain MultiWoz task -- (a) TTS-Verbatim: written user inputs were converted into speech waveforms using a TTS system, (b) Human-Verbatim: humans spoke the user inputs verbatim, and (c) Human-paraphrased: humans paraphrased the user inputs. Additionally, we provided different forms of ASR output to encourage wider participation from teams that may not have access to state-of-the-art ASR systems. These included ASR transcripts, word time stamps, and latent representations of the audio (audio encoder outputs). In this paper, we describe the corpus, report results from participating teams, provide preliminary analyses of their results, and summarize the current state-of-the-art in this domain.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Open Information Extraction (OIE) methods extract a large number of OIE triples (noun phrase, relation phrase, noun phrase) from text, which compose large Open Knowledge Bases (OKBs). However, noun phrases (NPs) and relation phrases (RPs) in OKBs are not canonicalized and often appear in different paraphrased textual variants, which leads to redundant and ambiguous facts. To address this problem, there are two related tasks: OKB canonicalization (i.e., convert NPs and RPs to canonicalized form) and OKB linking (i.e., link NPs and RPs with their corresponding entities and relations in a curated Knowledge Base (e.g., DBPedia). These two tasks are tightly coupled, and one task can benefit significantly from the other. However, they have been studied in isolation so far. In this paper, we explore the task of joint OKB canonicalization and linking for the first time, and propose a novel framework JOCL based on factor graph model to make them reinforce each other. JOCL is flexible enough to combine different signals from both tasks, and able to extend to fit any new signals. A thorough experimental study over two large scale OIE triple data sets shows that our framework outperforms all the baseline methods for the task of OKB canonicalization (OKB linking) in terms of average F1 (accuracy).

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation is typically inspired by class activation maps, which serve as pseudo masks with class-discriminative regions highlighted. Although tremendous efforts have been made to recall precise and complete locations for each class, existing methods still commonly suffer from the unsolicited Out-of-Candidate (OC) error predictions that not belongs to the label candidates, which could be avoidable since the contradiction with image-level class tags is easy to be detected. In this paper, we develop a group ranking-based Out-of-Candidate Rectification (OCR) mechanism in a plug-and-play fashion. Firstly, we adaptively split the semantic categories into In-Candidate (IC) and OC groups for each OC pixel according to their prior annotation correlation and posterior prediction correlation. Then, we derive a differentiable rectification loss to force OC pixels to shift to the IC group. Incorporating our OCR with seminal baselines (e.g., AffinityNet, SEAM, MCTformer), we can achieve remarkable performance gains on both Pascal VOC (+3.2%, +3.3%, +0.8% mIoU) and MS COCO (+1.0%, +1.3%, +0.5% mIoU) datasets with negligible extra training overhead, which justifies the effectiveness and generality of our OCR.

Recently, discrete latent variable models have received a surge of interest in both Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), attributed to their comparable performance to the continuous counterparts in representation learning, while being more interpretable in their predictions. In this paper, we develop a topic-informed discrete latent variable model for semantic textual similarity, which learns a shared latent space for sentence-pair representation via vector quantization. Compared with previous models limited to local semantic contexts, our model can explore richer semantic information via topic modeling. We further boost the performance of semantic similarity by injecting the quantized representation into a transformer-based language model with a well-designed semantic-driven attention mechanism. We demonstrate, through extensive experiments across various English language datasets, that our model is able to surpass several strong neural baselines in semantic textual similarity tasks.

近年来，将多光谱数据集成在对象检测中，尤其是可见的和红外图像。由于可见（RGB）和红外（IR）图像可以提供互补的信息来处理光变化，因此在许多领域中使用了配对图像，例如多光谱的行人检测，RGB-IR人群计数和RGB-IR显着对象检测。与天然RGB-IR图像相比，我们发现空中RGB-IR图像中的检测遭受跨模式弱的未对准问题，这些问题表现在同一物体的位置，大小和角度偏差。在本文中，我们主要解决了空中RGB-IR图像中跨模式弱未对准的挑战。具体而言，我们首先解释和分析了弱错位问题的原因。然后，我们提出了一个翻译尺度的反向对齐（TSRA）模块，以通过校准这两种方式的特征图来解决问题。该模块通过对齐过程预测了两个模式对象之间的偏差，并利用模态选择（MS）策略来提高对齐的性能。最后，基于TSRA模块的两流特征比对检测器（TSFADET）是为空中图像中的RGB-IR对象检测构建的。通过对公共无人机数据集进行的全面实验，我们验证我们的方法是否降低了交叉模式未对准的效果并实现了可靠的检测结果。

在最新的社交网络中，越来越多的人喜欢通过文字，语音和丰富的面部表情在视频中表达自己的情绪。多模式的视频情感分析技术可以根据图像中的人类表情和手势，声音和公认的自然语言自动理解用户的内部世界。但是，在现有研究中，与视觉和文本方式相比，声学方式长期以来一直处于边缘位置。也就是说，改善声学方式对整个多模式识别任务的贡献往往更加困难。此外，尽管可以通过引入常见的深度学习方法来获得更好的性能，但是这些训练模型的复杂结构始终会导致推理效率低，尤其是在暴露于高分辨率和长长视频时。此外，缺乏完全端到端的多模式视频情感识别系统阻碍了其应用。在本文中，我们为快速而有效的识别推断设计了一个完全多模式的视频对情感系统（名称为FV2E），其好处是三倍：（1）在声音中，通过有限的贡献，采用了层次结构注意方法。在声学模态上，在IEMOCAP和CMU-MOSEI数据集上胜过现有模型的性能； （2）引入视觉提取的多尺度的想法，而单一用于推理的想法会带来更高的效率，并同时保持预测准确性； （3）将预处理数据的数据进一步集成到对齐的多模式学习模型中，可以显着降低计算成本和存储空间。

持续学习的现有工作（CL）的重点是减轻灾难性遗忘，即学习新任务时过去任务的模型绩效恶化。但是，CL系统的训练效率不足，这限制了CL系统在资源有限的方案下的现实应用。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个名为“稀疏持续学习”（SPARCL）的新颖框架，这是第一个利用稀疏性以使边缘设备上具有成本效益的持续学习的研究。 SPARCL通过三个方面的协同作用来实现训练加速度和准确性保护：体重稀疏性，数据效率和梯度稀疏性。具体而言，我们建议在整个CL过程中学习一个稀疏网络，动态数据删除（DDR），以删除信息较少的培训数据和动态梯度掩盖（DGM），以稀疏梯度更新。他们每个人不仅提高了效率，而且进一步减轻了灾难性的遗忘。 SPARCL始终提高现有最新CL方法（SOTA）CL方法的训练效率最多减少了训练失败，而且令人惊讶的是，SOTA的准确性最多最多提高了1.7％。 SPARCL还优于通过将SOTA稀疏训练方法适应CL设置的效率和准确性获得的竞争基线。我们还评估了SPARCL在真实手机上的有效性，进一步表明了我们方法的实际潜力。

在过去的十年中，AI AID毒品发现（AIDD）的计算方法和数据集策划的繁荣发展。但是，现实世界中的药物数据集经常表现出高度不平衡的分布，这在很大程度上被当前的文献忽略了，但可能会严重损害机器学习应用程序的公平性和概括。在这一观察结果的激励下，我们介绍了Imdrug，这是一个全面的基准标准，其开源python库由4个不平衡设置，11个AI-Ready数据集，54个学习任务和16种为不平衡学习量身定制的基线算法。它为涵盖广泛的药物发现管道（例如分子建模，药物靶标相互作用和逆合合成）的问题和解决方案提供了可访问且可定制的测试床。我们通过新的评估指标进行广泛的实证研究，以证明现有算法在数据不平衡情况下无法解决药物和药物挑战。我们认为，Imdrug为未来的研究和发展开辟了途径，在AIDD和深度不平衡学习的交集中对现实世界中的挑战开辟了道路。