Conditional variational models, using either continuous or discrete latent variables, are powerful for open-domain dialogue response generation. However, previous works show that continuous latent variables tend to reduce the coherence of generated responses. In this paper, we also found that discrete latent variables have difficulty capturing more diverse expressions. To tackle these problems, we combine the merits of both continuous and discrete latent variables and propose a Hybrid Latent Variable (HLV) method. Specifically, HLV constrains the global semantics of responses through discrete latent variables and enriches responses with continuous latent variables. Thus, we diversify the generated responses while maintaining relevance and coherence. In addition, we propose Conditional Hybrid Variational Transformer (CHVT) to construct and to utilize HLV with transformers for dialogue generation. Through fine-grained symbolic-level semantic information and additive Gaussian mixing, we construct the distribution of continuous variables, prompting the generation of diverse expressions. Meanwhile, to maintain the relevance and coherence, the discrete latent variable is optimized by self-separation training. Experimental results on two dialogue generation datasets (DailyDialog and Opensubtitles) show that CHVT is superior to traditional transformer-based variational mechanism w.r.t. diversity, relevance and coherence metrics. Moreover, we also demonstrate the benefit of applying HLV to fine-tuning two pre-trained dialogue models (PLATO and BART-base).

Complex dialogue mappings (CDM), including one-to-many and many-to-one mappings, tend to make dialogue models generate incoherent or dull responses, and modeling these mappings remains a huge challenge for neural dialogue systems. To alleviate these problems, methods like introducing external information, reconstructing the optimization function, and manipulating data samples are proposed, while they primarily focus on avoiding training with CDM, inevitably weakening the model's ability of understanding CDM in human conversations and limiting further improvements in model performance. This paper proposes a Sentence Semantic \textbf{Seg}mentation guided \textbf{C}onditional \textbf{V}ariational \textbf{A}uto-\textbf{E}ncoder (SegCVAE) method which can model and take advantages of the CDM data. Specifically, to tackle the incoherent problem caused by one-to-many, SegCVAE uses response-related prominent semantics to constrained the latent variable. To mitigate the non-diverse problem brought by many-to-one, SegCVAE segments multiple prominent semantics to enrich the latent variables. Three novel components, Internal Separation, External Guidance, and Semantic Norms, are proposed to achieve SegCVAE. On dialogue generation tasks, both the automatic and human evaluation results show that SegCVAE achieves new state-of-the-art performance.

脑小血管疾病的成像标记提供了有关脑部健康的宝贵信息，但是它们的手动评估既耗时又受到实质性内部和间际变异性的阻碍。自动化评级可能受益于生物医学研究以及临床评估，但是现有算法的诊断可靠性尚不清楚。在这里，我们介绍了\ textIt {血管病变检测和分割}（\ textit {v textit {where valdo？}）挑战，该挑战是在国际医学图像计算和计算机辅助干预措施（MICCAI）的卫星事件中运行的挑战（MICCAI） 2021.这一挑战旨在促进大脑小血管疾病的小而稀疏成像标记的自动检测和分割方法的开发，即周围空间扩大（EPVS）（任务1），脑微粒（任务2）和预先塑造的鞋类血管起源（任务3），同时利用弱和嘈杂的标签。总体而言，有12个团队参与了针对一个或多个任务的解决方案的挑战（任务1 -EPVS 4，任务2 -Microbleeds的9个，任务3 -lacunes的6个）。多方数据都用于培训和评估。结果表明，整个团队和跨任务的性能都有很大的差异，对于任务1- EPV和任务2-微型微型且对任务3 -lacunes尚无实际的结果，其结果尤其有望。它还强调了可能阻止个人级别使用的情况的性能不一致，同时仍证明在人群层面上有用。

Nine language-vision AI models trained on web scrapes with the Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) objective are evaluated for evidence of a bias studied by psychologists: the sexual objectification of girls and women, which occurs when a person's human characteristics are disregarded and the person is treated as a body or a collection of body parts. A first experiment uses standardized images of women from the Sexual OBjectification and EMotion Database, and finds that, commensurate with prior research in psychology, human characteristics are disassociated from images of objectified women: the model's recognition of emotional state is mediated by whether the subject is fully or partially clothed. Embedding association tests (EATs) return significant effect sizes for both anger (d >.8) and sadness (d >.5). A second experiment measures the effect in a representative application: an automatic image captioner (Antarctic Captions) includes words denoting emotion less than 50% as often for images of partially clothed women than for images of fully clothed women. A third experiment finds that images of female professionals (scientists, doctors, executives) are likely to be associated with sexual descriptions relative to images of male professionals. A fourth experiment shows that a prompt of "a [age] year old girl" generates sexualized images (as determined by an NSFW classifier) up to 73% of the time for VQGAN-CLIP (age 17), and up to 40% of the time for Stable Diffusion (ages 14 and 18); the corresponding rate for boys never surpasses 9%. The evidence indicates that language-vision AI models trained on automatically collected web scrapes learn biases of sexual objectification, which propagate to downstream applications.

Recently, a large number of tuning strategies have been proposed to adapt pre-trained language models to downstream tasks. In this paper, we perform an extensive empirical evaluation of various tuning strategies for multilingual learning, particularly in the context of text summarization. Specifically, we explore the relative advantages of three families of multilingual tuning strategies (a total of five models) and empirically evaluate them for summarization over 45 languages. Experimentally, we not only established a new state-of-the-art on the XL-Sum dataset but also derive a series of observations that hopefully can provide hints for future research on the design of multilingual tuning strategies.

Modern embedding-based metrics for evaluation of generated text generally fall into one of two paradigms: discriminative metrics that are trained to directly predict which outputs are of higher quality according to supervised human annotations, and generative metrics that are trained to evaluate text based on the probabilities of a generative model. Both have their advantages; discriminative metrics are able to directly optimize for the problem of distinguishing between good and bad outputs, while generative metrics can be trained using abundant raw text. In this paper, we present a framework that combines the best of both worlds, using both supervised and unsupervised signals from whatever data we have available. We operationalize this idea by training T5Score, a metric that uses these training signals with mT5 as the backbone. We perform an extensive empirical comparison with other existing metrics on 5 datasets, 19 languages and 280 systems, demonstrating the utility of our method. Experimental results show that: T5Score achieves the best performance on all datasets against existing top-scoring metrics at the segment level. We release our code and models at https://github.com/qinyiwei/T5Score.

Prior work has looked at applying reinforcement learning and imitation learning approaches to autonomous driving scenarios, but either the safety or the efficiency of the algorithm is compromised. With the use of control barrier functions embedded into the reinforcement learning policy, we arrive at safe policies to optimize the performance of the autonomous driving vehicle. However, control barrier functions need a good approximation of the model of the car. We use probabilistic control barrier functions as an estimate of the model uncertainty. The algorithm is implemented as an online version in the CARLA (Dosovitskiy et al., 2017) Simulator and as an offline version on a dataset extracted from the NGSIM Database. The proposed algorithm is not just a safe ramp merging algorithm but a safe autonomous driving algorithm applied to address ramp merging on highways.

Air pollution is a crucial issue affecting human health and livelihoods, as well as one of the barriers to economic and social growth. Forecasting air quality has become an increasingly important endeavor with significant social impacts, especially in emerging countries like China. In this paper, we present a novel Transformer architecture termed AirFormer to collectively predict nationwide air quality in China, with an unprecedented fine spatial granularity covering thousands of locations. AirFormer decouples the learning process into two stages -- 1) a bottom-up deterministic stage that contains two new types of self-attention mechanisms to efficiently learn spatio-temporal representations; 2) a top-down stochastic stage with latent variables to capture the intrinsic uncertainty of air quality data. We evaluate AirFormer with 4-year data from 1,085 stations in the Chinese Mainland. Compared to the state-of-the-art model, AirFormer reduces prediction errors by 5%~8% on 72-hour future predictions. Our source code is available at https://github.com/yoshall/airformer.

Pretrained language models have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in language generation. However, real-world tasks often require controlling the distribution of generated text in order to mitigate bias, promote fairness, and achieve personalization. Existing techniques for controlling the distribution of generated text only work with quantified distributions, which require pre-defined categories, proportions of the distribution, or an existing corpus following the desired distributions. However, many important distributions, such as personal preferences, are unquantified. In this work, we tackle the problem of generating text following arbitrary distributions (quantified and unquantified) by proposing Nano, a few-shot human-in-the-loop training algorithm that continuously learns from human feedback. Nano achieves state-of-the-art results on single topic/attribute as well as quantified distribution control compared to previous works. We also show that Nano is able to learn unquantified distributions, achieves personalization, and captures differences between different individuals' personal preferences with high sample efficiency.

在本文中，我们介绍了蒙面的多步多变量预测（MMMF），这是一个新颖而普遍的自我监督学习框架，用于时间序列预测，并提供已知的未来信息。在许多真实世界的预测情况下，已知一些未来的信息，例如，在进行短期到中期的电力需求预测或进行飞机出发预测时的油价预测时，天气信息。现有的机器学习预测框架可以分为（1）基于样本的方法，在此方法中进行每个预测，以及（2）时间序列回归方法，其中未来信息未完全合并。为了克服现有方法的局限性，我们提出了MMMF，这是一个培训能够生成一系列输出的神经网络模型的框架，将过去的时间信息和有关未来的已知信息结合在一起，以做出更好的预测。实验在两个现实世界数据集上进行（1）中期电力需求预测，以及（2）前两个月的飞行偏离预测。他们表明，所提出的MMMF框架的表现不仅优于基于样本的方法，而且具有与完全相同的基本模型的现有时间序列预测模型。此外，一旦通过MMMF进行了神经网络模型，其推理速度与接受传统回归配方训练的相同模型的推理速度相似，从而使MMMF成为现有回归训练的时间序列的更好替代品，如果有一些可用的未来，信息。