In contrast to the control-theoretic methods, the lack of stability guarantee remains a significant problem for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Jointly learning a policy and a Lyapunov function has recently become a promising approach to ensuring the whole system with a stability guarantee. However, the classical Lyapunov constraints researchers introduced cannot stabilize the system during the sampling-based optimization. Therefore, we propose the Adaptive Stability Certification (ASC), making the system reach sampling-based stability. Because the ASC condition can search for the optimal policy heuristically, we design the Adaptive Lyapunov-based Actor-Critic (ALAC) algorithm based on the ASC condition. Meanwhile, our algorithm avoids the optimization problem that a variety of constraints are coupled into the objective in current approaches. When evaluated on ten robotic tasks, our method achieves lower accumulated cost and fewer stability constraint violations than previous studies.

Code generation models have achieved impressive performance. However, they tend to be brittle as slight edits to a prompt could lead to very different generations; these robustness properties, critical for user experience when deployed in real-life applications, are not well understood. Most existing works on robustness in text or code tasks have focused on classification, while robustness in generation tasks is an uncharted area and to date there is no comprehensive benchmark for robustness in code generation. In this paper, we propose ReCode, a comprehensive robustness evaluation benchmark for code generation models. We customize over 30 transformations specifically for code on docstrings, function and variable names, code syntax, and code format. They are carefully designed to be natural in real-life coding practice, preserve the original semantic meaning, and thus provide multifaceted assessments of a model's robustness performance. With human annotators, we verified that over 90% of the perturbed prompts do not alter the semantic meaning of the original prompt. In addition, we define robustness metrics for code generation models considering the worst-case behavior under each type of perturbation, taking advantage of the fact that executing the generated code can serve as objective evaluation. We demonstrate ReCode on SOTA models using HumanEval, MBPP, as well as function completion tasks derived from them. Interesting observations include: better robustness for CodeGen over InCoder and GPT-J; models are most sensitive to syntax perturbations; more challenging robustness evaluation on MBPP over HumanEval.

Logical reasoning of text is an important ability that requires understanding the information present in the text, their interconnections, and then reasoning through them to infer new conclusions. Prior works on improving the logical reasoning ability of language models require complex processing of training data (e.g., aligning symbolic knowledge to text), yielding task-specific data augmentation solutions that restrict the learning of general logical reasoning skills. In this work, we propose APOLLO, an adaptively pretrained language model that has improved logical reasoning abilities. We select a subset of Wikipedia, based on a set of logical inference keywords, for continued pretraining of a language model. We use two self-supervised loss functions: a modified masked language modeling loss where only specific parts-of-speech words, that would likely require more reasoning than basic language understanding, are masked, and a sentence-level classification loss that teaches the model to distinguish between entailment and contradiction types of sentences. The proposed training paradigm is both simple and independent of task formats. We demonstrate the effectiveness of APOLLO by comparing it with prior baselines on two logical reasoning datasets. APOLLO performs comparably on ReClor and outperforms baselines on LogiQA.

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.

Single-frame InfraRed Small Target (SIRST) detection has been a challenging task due to a lack of inherent characteristics, imprecise bounding box regression, a scarcity of real-world datasets, and sensitive localization evaluation. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive solution to these challenges. First, we find that the existing anchor-free label assignment method is prone to mislabeling small targets as background, leading to their omission by detectors. To overcome this issue, we propose an all-scale pseudo-box-based label assignment scheme that relaxes the constraints on scale and decouples the spatial assignment from the size of the ground-truth target. Second, motivated by the structured prior of feature pyramids, we introduce the one-stage cascade refinement network (OSCAR), which uses the high-level head as soft proposals for the low-level refinement head. This allows OSCAR to process the same target in a cascade coarse-to-fine manner. Finally, we present a new research benchmark for infrared small target detection, consisting of the SIRST-V2 dataset of real-world, high-resolution single-frame targets, the normalized contrast evaluation metric, and the DeepInfrared toolkit for detection. We conduct extensive ablation studies to evaluate the components of OSCAR and compare its performance to state-of-the-art model-driven and data-driven methods on the SIRST-V2 benchmark. Our results demonstrate that a top-down cascade refinement framework can improve the accuracy of infrared small target detection without sacrificing efficiency. The DeepInfrared toolkit, dataset, and trained models are available at https://github.com/YimianDai/open-deepinfrared to advance further research in this field.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) recently emerged as a promising tool for analyzing and solving complex differential equations arising in science and engineering applications. Alternative to traditional numerical schemes, learning-based solvers utilize the representation power of DNNs to approximate the input-output relations in an automated manner. However, the lack of physics-in-the-loop often makes it difficult to construct a neural network solver that simultaneously achieves high accuracy, low computational burden, and interpretability. In this work, focusing on a class of evolutionary PDEs characterized by having decomposable operators, we show that the classical ``operator splitting'' numerical scheme of solving these equations can be exploited to design neural network architectures. This gives rise to a learning-based PDE solver, which we name Deep Operator-Splitting Network (DOSnet). Such non-black-box network design is constructed from the physical rules and operators governing the underlying dynamics contains learnable parameters, and is thus more flexible than the standard operator splitting scheme. Once trained, it enables the fast solution of the same type of PDEs. To validate the special structure inside DOSnet, we take the linear PDEs as the benchmark and give the mathematical explanation for the weight behavior. Furthermore, to demonstrate the advantages of our new AI-enhanced PDE solver, we train and validate it on several types of operator-decomposable differential equations. We also apply DOSnet to nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations (NLSE) which have important applications in the signal processing for modern optical fiber transmission systems, and experimental results show that our model has better accuracy and lower computational complexity than numerical schemes and the baseline DNNs.

Image instance segmentation is a fundamental research topic in autonomous driving, which is crucial for scene understanding and road safety. Advanced learning-based approaches often rely on the costly 2D mask annotations for training. In this paper, we present a more artful framework, LiDAR-guided Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation (LWSIS), which leverages the off-the-shelf 3D data, i.e., Point Cloud, together with the 3D boxes, as natural weak supervisions for training the 2D image instance segmentation models. Our LWSIS not only exploits the complementary information in multimodal data during training, but also significantly reduces the annotation cost of the dense 2D masks. In detail, LWSIS consists of two crucial modules, Point Label Assignment (PLA) and Graph-based Consistency Regularization (GCR). The former module aims to automatically assign the 3D point cloud as 2D point-wise labels, while the latter further refines the predictions by enforcing geometry and appearance consistency of the multimodal data. Moreover, we conduct a secondary instance segmentation annotation on the nuScenes, named nuInsSeg, to encourage further research on multimodal perception tasks. Extensive experiments on the nuInsSeg, as well as the large-scale Waymo, show that LWSIS can substantially improve existing weakly supervised segmentation models by only involving 3D data during training. Additionally, LWSIS can also be incorporated into 3D object detectors like PointPainting to boost the 3D detection performance for free. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Serenos/LWSIS.

A common scenario of Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) is that each translation task arrives in a sequential manner, and the training data of previous tasks is unavailable. In this scenario, the current methods suffer heavily from catastrophic forgetting (CF). To alleviate the CF, we investigate knowledge distillation based life-long learning methods. Specifically, in one-tomany scenario, we propose a multilingual distillation method to make the new model (student) jointly learn multilingual output from old model (teacher) and new task. In many-to one scenario, we find that direct distillation faces the extreme partial distillation problem, and we propose two different methods to address it: pseudo input distillation and reverse teacher distillation. The experimental results on twelve translation tasks show that the proposed methods can better consolidate the previous knowledge and sharply alleviate the CF.

Although synthetic aperture imaging (SAI) can achieve the seeing-through effect by blurring out off-focus foreground occlusions while recovering in-focus occluded scenes from multi-view images, its performance is often deteriorated by dense occlusions and extreme lighting conditions. To address the problem, this paper presents an Event-based SAI (E-SAI) method by relying on the asynchronous events with extremely low latency and high dynamic range acquired by an event camera. Specifically, the collected events are first refocused by a Refocus-Net module to align in-focus events while scattering out off-focus ones. Following that, a hybrid network composed of spiking neural networks (SNNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is proposed to encode the spatio-temporal information from the refocused events and reconstruct a visual image of the occluded targets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed E-SAI method can achieve remarkable performance in dealing with very dense occlusions and extreme lighting conditions and produce high-quality images from pure events. Codes and datasets are available at https://dvs-whu.cn/projects/esai/.

To enable the pre-trained models to be fine-tuned with local data on edge devices without sharing data with the cloud, we design an efficient split fine-tuning (SFT) framework for edge and cloud collaborative learning. We propose three novel techniques in this framework. First, we propose a matrix decomposition-based method to compress the intermediate output of a neural network to reduce the communication volume between the edge device and the cloud server. Second, we eliminate particular links in the model without affecting the convergence performance in fine-tuning. Third, we implement our system atop PyTorch to allow users to easily extend their existing training scripts to enjoy the efficient edge and cloud collaborative learning. Experiments results on 9 NLP datasets show that our framework can reduce the communication traffic by 96 times with little impact on the model accuracy.