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.

学习（IL）是数据挖掘应用中广泛存在的重要问题。典型的IL方法利用直观的类努力重新采样或重新重量直接平衡训练集。然而，特定领域的一些最近的研究努力表明，在没有课堂上操纵的情况下可以实现类别不平衡的学习。这提示我们思考两种不同的IL战略之间的关系和班级不平衡的性质。从根本上说，它们对应于IL中存在的两个必要的不平衡：来自不同类别的示例之间的数量差异以及单个类中的易于和硬示例之间，即阶级和级别的帧内不平衡。现有工程未能明确地考虑不平衡，因此遭受次优绩效。鉴于此，我们呈现了双重平衡的集合，即杜博士，一个多功能的集合学习框架。与普遍方法不同，Dube直接执行级别的级别和级别的平衡，而无需依赖基于距离的距离的计算，这允许它在计算效率时实现竞争性能。我们还提出了关于基于杜博伊的不同间/内部平衡策略的优缺点的详细讨论和分析。广泛的实验验证了所提出的方法的有效性。代码和示例可在https://github.com/iCde20222sub/duplebalance获得。

Imbalanced-leasemble，缩写为IMBens，是一个开源Python工具箱，用于快速实现和部署类别 - 不平衡数据的集合学习算法。它提供对多个最先进的集合不平衡学习（EIL）方法，可视化器和公用事业功能的访问，以处理类别不平衡问题。这些集合方法包括基于重采样的，例如/过度采样，以及重量基于/过度采样，例如，敏感的学习。除了实现之外，我们还扩展了传统的二进制EIL算法，与多级支持和重采样调度程序等新功能，从而使它们能够处理更复杂的任务。该软件包是在简单的，良好的API设计中开发的，遵循Scikit-Gearn的易于使用。 IMBens在MIT开源许可证下发布，可以从Python包索引（PYPI）安装。 https://github.com/zhiningliu1998/imbalanced-ensemble可以使用源代码，二进制文件，详细文档和使用示例。

Masked image modeling (MIM) performs strongly in pre-training large vision Transformers (ViTs). However, small models that are critical for real-world applications cannot or only marginally benefit from this pre-training approach. In this paper, we explore distillation techniques to transfer the success of large MIM-based pre-trained models to smaller ones. We systematically study different options in the distillation framework, including distilling targets, losses, input, network regularization, sequential distillation, etc, revealing that: 1) Distilling token relations is more effective than CLS token- and feature-based distillation; 2) An intermediate layer of the teacher network as target perform better than that using the last layer when the depth of the student mismatches that of the teacher; 3) Weak regularization is preferred; etc. With these findings, we achieve significant fine-tuning accuracy improvements over the scratch MIM pre-training on ImageNet-1K classification, using all the ViT-Tiny, ViT-Small, and ViT-base models, with +4.2%/+2.4%/+1.4% gains, respectively. Our TinyMIM model of base size achieves 52.2 mIoU in AE20K semantic segmentation, which is +4.1 higher than the MAE baseline. Our TinyMIM model of tiny size achieves 79.6% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K image classification, which sets a new record for small vision models of the same size and computation budget. This strong performance suggests an alternative way for developing small vision Transformer models, that is, by exploring better training methods rather than introducing inductive biases into architectures as in most previous works. Code is available at https://github.com/OliverRensu/TinyMIM.

Given the increasingly intricate forms of partial differential equations (PDEs) in physics and related fields, computationally solving PDEs without analytic solutions inevitably suffers from the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Recent advances in neural operators, a kind of mesh-independent neural-network-based PDE solvers, have suggested the dawn of overcoming this challenge. In this emerging direction, Koopman neural operator (KNO) is a representative demonstration and outperforms other state-of-the-art alternatives in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Here we present KoopmanLab, a self-contained and user-friendly PyTorch module of the Koopman neural operator family for solving partial differential equations. Beyond the original version of KNO, we develop multiple new variants of KNO based on different neural network architectures to improve the general applicability of our module. These variants are validated by mesh-independent and long-term prediction experiments implemented on representative PDEs (e.g., the Navier-Stokes equation and the Bateman-Burgers equation) and ERA5 (i.e., one of the largest high-resolution data sets of global-scale climate fields). These demonstrations suggest the potential of KoopmanLab to be considered in diverse applications of partial differential equations.

In this chapter, we review and discuss the transformation of AI technology in HCI/UX work and assess how AI technology will change how we do the work. We first discuss how AI can be used to enhance the result of user research and design evaluation. We then discuss how AI technology can be used to enhance HCI/UX design. Finally, we discuss how AI-enabled capabilities can improve UX when users interact with computing systems, applications, and services.

Adversarial robustness assessment for video recognition models has raised concerns owing to their wide applications on safety-critical tasks. Compared with images, videos have much high dimension, which brings huge computational costs when generating adversarial videos. This is especially serious for the query-based black-box attacks where gradient estimation for the threat models is usually utilized, and high dimensions will lead to a large number of queries. To mitigate this issue, we propose to simultaneously eliminate the temporal and spatial redundancy within the video to achieve an effective and efficient gradient estimation on the reduced searching space, and thus query number could decrease. To implement this idea, we design the novel Adversarial spatial-temporal Focus (AstFocus) attack on videos, which performs attacks on the simultaneously focused key frames and key regions from the inter-frames and intra-frames in the video. AstFocus attack is based on the cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework. One agent is responsible for selecting key frames, and another agent is responsible for selecting key regions. These two agents are jointly trained by the common rewards received from the black-box threat models to perform a cooperative prediction. By continuously querying, the reduced searching space composed of key frames and key regions is becoming precise, and the whole query number becomes less than that on the original video. Extensive experiments on four mainstream video recognition models and three widely used action recognition datasets demonstrate that the proposed AstFocus attack outperforms the SOTA methods, which is prevenient in fooling rate, query number, time, and perturbation magnitude at the same.

Reading comprehension of legal text can be a particularly challenging task due to the length and complexity of legal clauses and a shortage of expert-annotated datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce the Merger Agreement Understanding Dataset (MAUD), an expert-annotated reading comprehension dataset based on the American Bar Association's 2021 Public Target Deal Points Study, with over 39,000 examples and over 47,000 total annotations. Our fine-tuned Transformer baselines show promising results, with models performing well above random on most questions. However, on a large subset of questions, there is still room for significant improvement. As the only expert-annotated merger agreement dataset, MAUD is valuable as a benchmark for both the legal profession and the NLP community.

Rankings are widely collected in various real-life scenarios, leading to the leakage of personal information such as users' preferences on videos or news. To protect rankings, existing works mainly develop privacy protection on a single ranking within a set of ranking or pairwise comparisons of a ranking under the $\epsilon$-differential privacy. This paper proposes a novel notion called $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy for protecting ranks. We establish the connection between the Mallows model (Mallows, 1957) and the proposed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. This allows us to develop a multistage ranking algorithm to generate synthetic rankings while satisfying the developed $\epsilon$-ranking differential privacy. Theoretical results regarding the utility of synthetic rankings in the downstream tasks, including the inference attack and the personalized ranking tasks, are established. For the inference attack, we quantify how $\epsilon$ affects the estimation of the true ranking based on synthetic rankings. For the personalized ranking task, we consider varying privacy preferences among users and quantify how their privacy preferences affect the consistency in estimating the optimal ranking function. Extensive numerical experiments are carried out to verify the theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed synthetic ranking algorithm.

Feature selection helps reduce data acquisition costs in ML, but the standard approach is to train models with static feature subsets. Here, we consider the dynamic feature selection (DFS) problem where a model sequentially queries features based on the presently available information. DFS is often addressed with reinforcement learning (RL), but we explore a simpler approach of greedily selecting features based on their conditional mutual information. This method is theoretically appealing but requires oracle access to the data distribution, so we develop a learning approach based on amortized optimization. The proposed method is shown to recover the greedy policy when trained to optimality and outperforms numerous existing feature selection methods in our experiments, thus validating it as a simple but powerful approach for this problem.