Score-based diffusion models have captured widespread attention and funded fast progress of recent vision generative tasks. In this paper, we focus on diffusion model backbone which has been much neglected before. We systematically explore vision Transformers as diffusion learners for various generative tasks. With our improvements the performance of vanilla ViT-based backbone (IU-ViT) is boosted to be on par with traditional U-Net-based methods. We further provide a hypothesis on the implication of disentangling the generative backbone as an encoder-decoder structure and show proof-of-concept experiments verifying the effectiveness of a stronger encoder for generative tasks with ASymmetriC ENcoder Decoder (ASCEND). Our improvements achieve competitive results on CIFAR-10, CelebA, LSUN, CUB Bird and large-resolution text-to-image tasks. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to successfully train a single diffusion model on text-to-image task beyond 64x64 resolution. We hope this will motivate people to rethink the modeling choices and the training pipelines for diffusion-based generative models.

We propose AnyTOD, an end-to-end task-oriented dialog (TOD) system with zero-shot capability for unseen tasks. We view TOD as a program executed by a language model (LM), where program logic and ontology is provided by a designer in the form of a schema. To enable generalization onto unseen schemas and programs without prior training, AnyTOD adopts a neuro-symbolic approach. A neural LM keeps track of events that occur during a conversation, and a symbolic program implementing the dialog policy is executed to recommend next actions AnyTOD should take. This approach drastically reduces data annotation and model training requirements, addressing a long-standing challenge in TOD research: rapidly adapting a TOD system to unseen tasks and domains. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on the STAR and ABCD benchmarks, as well as AnyTOD's strong zero-shot transfer capability in low-resource settings. In addition, we release STARv2, an updated version of the STAR dataset with richer data annotations, for benchmarking zero-shot end-to-end TOD models.

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.

This work explores an efficient approach to establish a foundational video-text model for tasks including open-vocabulary video classification, text-to-video retrieval, video captioning and video question-answering. We present VideoCoCa that reuses a pretrained image-text contrastive captioner (CoCa) model and adapt it to video-text tasks with minimal extra training. While previous works adapt image-text models with various cross-frame fusion modules (for example, cross-frame attention layer or perceiver resampler) and finetune the modified architecture on video-text data, we surprisingly find that the generative attentional pooling and contrastive attentional pooling layers in the image-text CoCa design are instantly adaptable to ``flattened frame embeddings'', yielding a strong zero-shot transfer baseline for many video-text tasks. Specifically, the frozen image encoder of a pretrained image-text CoCa takes each video frame as inputs and generates \(N\) token embeddings per frame for totally \(T\) video frames. We flatten \(N \times T\) token embeddings as a long sequence of frozen video representation and apply CoCa's generative attentional pooling and contrastive attentional pooling on top. All model weights including pooling layers are directly loaded from an image-text CoCa pretrained model. Without any video or video-text data, VideoCoCa's zero-shot transfer baseline already achieves state-of-the-art results on zero-shot video classification on Kinetics 400/600/700, UCF101, HMDB51, and Charades, as well as zero-shot text-to-video retrieval on MSR-VTT and ActivityNet Captions. We also explore lightweight finetuning on top of VideoCoCa, and achieve strong results on video question-answering (iVQA, MSRVTT-QA, MSVD-QA) and video captioning (MSR-VTT, ActivityNet, Youcook2). Our approach establishes a simple and effective video-text baseline for future research.

With the increasing popularity of telehealth, it becomes critical to ensure that basic physiological signals can be monitored accurately at home, with minimal patient overhead. In this paper, we propose a contactless approach for monitoring patients' blood oxygen at home, simply by analyzing the radio signals in the room, without any wearable devices. We extract the patients' respiration from the radio signals that bounce off their bodies and devise a novel neural network that infers a patient's oxygen estimates from their breathing signal. Our model, called \emph{Gated BERT-UNet}, is designed to adapt to the patient's medical indices (e.g., gender, sleep stages). It has multiple predictive heads and selects the most suitable head via a gate controlled by the person's physiological indices. Extensive empirical results show that our model achieves high accuracy on both medical and radio datasets.

Despite recent progress on trajectory planning of multiple robots and path planning of a single tethered robot, planning of multiple tethered robots to reach their individual targets without entanglements remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we present a complete approach to address this problem. Firstly, we propose a multi-robot tether-aware representation of homotopy, using which we can efficiently evaluate the feasibility and safety of a potential path in terms of (1) the cable length required to reach a target following the path, and (2) the risk of entanglements with the cables of other robots. Then, the proposed representation is applied in a decentralized and online planning framework that includes a graph-based kinodynamic trajectory finder and an optimization-based trajectory refinement, to generate entanglement-free, collision-free and dynamically feasible trajectories. The efficiency of the proposed homotopy representation is compared against existing single and multiple tethered robot planning approaches. Simulations with up to 8 UAVs show the effectiveness of the approach in entanglement prevention and its real-time capabilities. Flight experiments using 3 tethered UAVs verify the practicality of the presented approach.

Hashing has been widely researched to solve the large-scale approximate nearest neighbor search problem owing to its time and storage superiority. In recent years, a number of online hashing methods have emerged, which can update the hash functions to adapt to the new stream data and realize dynamic retrieval. However, existing online hashing methods are required to update the whole database with the latest hash functions when a query arrives, which leads to low retrieval efficiency with the continuous increase of the stream data. On the other hand, these methods ignore the supervision relationship among the examples, especially in the multi-label case. In this paper, we propose a novel Fast Online Hashing (FOH) method which only updates the binary codes of a small part of the database. To be specific, we first build a query pool in which the nearest neighbors of each central point are recorded. When a new query arrives, only the binary codes of the corresponding potential neighbors are updated. In addition, we create a similarity matrix which takes the multi-label supervision information into account and bring in the multi-label projection loss to further preserve the similarity among the multi-label data. The experimental results on two common benchmarks show that the proposed FOH can achieve dramatic superiority on query time up to 6.28 seconds less than state-of-the-art baselines with competitive retrieval accuracy.

Query-focused summarization has been considered as an important extension for text summarization. It aims to generate a concise highlight for a given query. Different from text summarization, query-focused summarization has long been plagued by the problem of lacking high-quality large-scale datasets. In this paper, we investigate the idea that whether we can integrate and transfer the knowledge of text summarization and question answering to assist the few-shot learning in query-focused summarization. Here, we propose prefix-merging, a prefix-based pretraining strategy for few-shot learning in query-focused summarization. Drawn inspiration from prefix-tuning, we are allowed to integrate the task knowledge from text summarization and question answering into a properly designed prefix and apply the merged prefix to query-focused summarization. With only a small amount of trainable parameters, prefix-merging outperforms fine-tuning on query-focused summarization. We further discuss the influence of different prefix designs and propose a visualized explanation for how prefix-merging works.

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is the task of automatically detecting and correcting errors in text. The task not only includes the correction of grammatical errors, such as missing prepositions and mismatched subject-verb agreement, but also orthographic and semantic errors, such as misspellings and word choice errors respectively. The field has seen significant progress in the last decade, motivated in part by a series of five shared tasks, which drove the development of rule-based methods, statistical classifiers, statistical machine translation, and finally neural machine translation systems which represent the current dominant state of the art. In this survey paper, we condense the field into a single article and first outline some of the linguistic challenges of the task, introduce the most popular datasets that are available to researchers (for both English and other languages), and summarise the various methods and techniques that have been developed with a particular focus on artificial error generation. We next describe the many different approaches to evaluation as well as concerns surrounding metric reliability, especially in relation to subjective human judgements, before concluding with an overview of recent progress and suggestions for future work and remaining challenges. We hope that this survey will serve as comprehensive resource for researchers who are new to the field or who want to be kept apprised of recent developments.

Traditional machine learning follows a close-set assumption that the training and test set share the same label space. While in many practical scenarios, it is inevitable that some test samples belong to unknown classes (open-set). To fix this issue, Open-Set Recognition (OSR), whose goal is to make correct predictions on both close-set samples and open-set samples, has attracted rising attention. In this direction, the vast majority of literature focuses on the pattern of open-set samples. However, how to evaluate model performance in this challenging task is still unsolved. In this paper, a systematic analysis reveals that most existing metrics are essentially inconsistent with the aforementioned goal of OSR: (1) For metrics extended from close-set classification, such as Open-set F-score, Youden's index, and Normalized Accuracy, a poor open-set prediction can escape from a low performance score with a superior close-set prediction. (2) Novelty detection AUC, which measures the ranking performance between close-set and open-set samples, ignores the close-set performance. To fix these issues, we propose a novel metric named OpenAUC. Compared with existing metrics, OpenAUC enjoys a concise pairwise formulation that evaluates open-set performance and close-set performance in a coupling manner. Further analysis shows that OpenAUC is free from the aforementioned inconsistency properties. Finally, an end-to-end learning method is proposed to minimize the OpenAUC risk, and the experimental results on popular benchmark datasets speak to its effectiveness.