Free-text rationales (FTRs) follow how humans communicate by explaining reasoning processes via natural language. A number of recent works have studied how to improve language model (LM) generalization by using FTRs to teach LMs the correct reasoning processes behind correct task outputs. These prior works aim to learn from FTRs by appending them to the LM input or target output, but this may introduce an input distribution shift or conflict with the task objective, respectively. We propose KNIFE, which distills FTR knowledge from an FTR-augmented teacher LM (takes both task input and FTR) to a student LM (takes only task input), which is used for inference. Crucially, the teacher LM's forward computation has a bottleneck stage in which all of its FTR states are masked out, which pushes knowledge from the FTR states into the task input/output states. Then, FTR knowledge is distilled to the student LM by training its task input/output states to align with the teacher LM's. On two question answering datasets, we show that KNIFE significantly outperforms existing FTR learning methods, in both fully-supervised and low-resource settings.

室外（OOD）检测是面向任务的对话框系统中的关键组件，旨在确定查询是否不在预定义的支持的意图集之外。事实证明，先前基于软磁性的检测算法对OOD样品被过度自信。在本文中，我们分析了过度自信的OOD来自由于训练和测试分布之间的不匹配而导致的分布不确定性，这使得该模型无法自信地做出预测，因此可能导致异常软磁得分。我们提出了一个贝叶斯OOD检测框架，以使用Monte-Carlo辍学来校准分布不确定性。我们的方法是灵活的，并且可以轻松地插入现有的基于软磁性的基线和增益33.33 \％OOD F1改进，而与MSP相比仅增加了0.41 \％的推理时间。进一步的分析表明，贝叶斯学习对OOD检测的有效性。

通常认为语言模型能够编码语法[Tenney等，2019； Jawahar等，2019； Hewitt和Manning，2019]。在本文中，我们提出了UPOA，这是一种无监督的组成分析模型，该模型仅基于以验证的语言模型学习为跨度分割的句法距离，仅基于自我发挥的权重矩阵来计算出OUT关联得分。我们进一步提出了一个增强的版本UPIO，该版本利用了内部关联和外部关联得分来估计跨度的可能性。使用UPOA和UPIO的实验揭示了自我注意机制中查询和密钥的线性投影矩阵在解析中起重要作用。因此，我们将无监督的模型扩展到了几个射击模型（FPOA，FPIO），这些模型使用一些注释的树来学习更好的线性投影矩阵进行解析。宾夕法尼亚河岸上的实验表明，我们的无监督解析模型UPIO实现了与短句子（长度<= 10）相当的结果。我们的几个解析模型FPIO接受了仅20棵带注释的树木的训练，优于前几种镜头解析方法，该方法接受了50棵带注释的树木的训练。交叉解析的实验表明，无监督和少数解析方法都比SPMRL大多数语言的先前方法都更好[Seddah等，2013]。

实现通用语言情报是自然语言处理的长期目标，标准评估基准发挥基本和指导作用。我们认为，对于通用语言智能评估，基准本身需要全面和系统。为此，我们提出了Cuge，一种中文语言理解和生成评估基准，具有以下特征：（1）分层基准框架，其中数据集主要选择和组织语言能力 - 任务数据集层次结构。 （2）多级评分策略，其中基于分层框架提供了不同级别的模型性能。为了促进CUGE，我们提供了一个公共排行榜，可以自定义，以支持灵活的模型判断标准。代表性预先训练的语言模型的评估结果表明了对通用语言智能的完善的充足空间。 Cuge在Cuge.baai.ac.cn上公开提供。

Increasing research interests focus on sequential recommender systems, aiming to model dynamic sequence representation precisely. However, the most commonly used loss function in state-of-the-art sequential recommendation models has essential limitations. To name a few, Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) loss suffers the vanishing gradient problem from numerous negative sampling and predictionbiases; Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) loss subjects to negative sampling numbers, thereby it is likely to ignore valuable negative examples and reduce the training efficiency; Cross-Entropy (CE) loss only focuses on the last timestamp of the training sequence, which causes low utilization of sequence information and results in inferior user sequence representation. To avoid these limitations, in this paper, we propose to calculate Cumulative Cross-Entropy (CCE) loss over the sequence. CCE is simple and direct, which enjoys the virtues of painless deployment, no negative sampling, and effective and efficient training. We conduct extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CCE. The results show that employing CCE loss on three state-of-the-art models GRU4Rec, SASRec, and S3-Rec can reach 125.63%, 69.90%, and 33.24% average improvement of full ranking NDCG@5, respectively. Using CCE, the performance curve of the models on the test data increases rapidly with the wall clock time, and is superior to that of other loss functions in almost the whole process of model training.

The growing interest in intelligent services and privacy protection for mobile devices has given rise to the widespread application of federated learning in Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). Diverse user behaviors call for personalized services with heterogeneous Machine Learning (ML) models on different devices. Federated Multi-task Learning (FMTL) is proposed to train related but personalized ML models for different devices, whereas previous works suffer from excessive communication overhead during training and neglect the model heterogeneity among devices in MEC. Introducing knowledge distillation into FMTL can simultaneously enable efficient communication and model heterogeneity among clients, whereas existing methods rely on a public dataset, which is impractical in reality. To tackle this dilemma, Federated MultI-task Distillation for Multi-access Edge CompuTing (FedICT) is proposed. FedICT direct local-global knowledge aloof during bi-directional distillation processes between clients and the server, aiming to enable multi-task clients while alleviating client drift derived from divergent optimization directions of client-side local models. Specifically, FedICT includes Federated Prior Knowledge Distillation (FPKD) and Local Knowledge Adjustment (LKA). FPKD is proposed to reinforce the clients' fitting of local data by introducing prior knowledge of local data distributions. Moreover, LKA is proposed to correct the distillation loss of the server, making the transferred local knowledge better match the generalized representation. Experiments on three datasets show that FedICT significantly outperforms all compared benchmarks in various data heterogeneous and model architecture settings, achieving improved accuracy with less than 1.2% training communication overhead compared with FedAvg and no more than 75% training communication round compared with FedGKT.

The utilization of large-scale distributed renewable energy promotes the development of the multi-microgrid (MMG), which raises the need of developing an effective energy management method to minimize economic costs and keep self energy-sufficiency. The multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) has been widely used for the energy management problem because of its real-time scheduling ability. However, its training requires massive energy operation data of microgrids (MGs), while gathering these data from different MGs would threaten their privacy and data security. Therefore, this paper tackles this practical yet challenging issue by proposing a federated multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (F-MADRL) algorithm via the physics-informed reward. In this algorithm, the federated learning (FL) mechanism is introduced to train the F-MADRL algorithm thus ensures the privacy and the security of data. In addition, a decentralized MMG model is built, and the energy of each participated MG is managed by an agent, which aims to minimize economic costs and keep self energy-sufficiency according to the physics-informed reward. At first, MGs individually execute the self-training based on local energy operation data to train their local agent models. Then, these local models are periodically uploaded to a server and their parameters are aggregated to build a global agent, which will be broadcasted to MGs and replace their local agents. In this way, the experience of each MG agent can be shared and the energy operation data is not explicitly transmitted, thus protecting the privacy and ensuring data security. Finally, experiments are conducted on Oak Ridge national laboratory distributed energy control communication lab microgrid (ORNL-MG) test system, and the comparisons are carried out to verify the effectiveness of introducing the FL mechanism and the outperformance of our proposed F-MADRL.

This paper presents a safety-critical locomotion control framework for quadrupedal robots. Our goal is to enable quadrupedal robots to safely navigate in cluttered environments. To tackle this, we introduce exponential Discrete Control Barrier Functions (exponential DCBFs) with duality-based obstacle avoidance constraints into a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) with Whole-Body Control (WBC) framework for quadrupedal locomotion control. This enables us to use polytopes to describe the shapes of the robot and obstacles for collision avoidance while doing locomotion control of quadrupedal robots. Compared to most prior work, especially using CBFs, that utilize spherical and conservative approximation for obstacle avoidance, this work demonstrates a quadrupedal robot autonomously and safely navigating through very tight spaces in the real world. (Our open-source code is available at github.com/HybridRobotics/quadruped_nmpc_dcbf_duality, and the video is available at youtu.be/p1gSQjwXm1Q.)

Three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound imaging technique has been applied for scoliosis assessment, but current assessment method only uses coronal projection image and cannot illustrate the 3D deformity and vertebra rotation. The vertebra detection is essential to reveal 3D spine information, but the detection task is challenging due to complex data and limited annotations. We propose VertMatch, a two-step framework to detect vertebral structures in 3D ultrasound volume by utilizing unlabeled data in semi-supervised manner. The first step is to detect the possible positions of structures on transverse slice globally, and then the local patches are cropped based on detected positions. The second step is to distinguish whether the patches contain real vertebral structures and screen the predicted positions from the first step. VertMatch develops three novel components for semi-supervised learning: for position detection in the first step, (1) anatomical prior is used to screen pseudo labels generated from confidence threshold method; (2) multi-slice consistency is used to utilize more unlabeled data by inputting multiple adjacent slices; (3) for patch identification in the second step, the categories are rebalanced in each batch to solve imbalance problem. Experimental results demonstrate that VertMatch can detect vertebra accurately in ultrasound volume and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. VertMatch is also validated in clinical application on forty ultrasound scans, and it can be a promising approach for 3D assessment of scoliosis.

With the development of natural language processing techniques(NLP), automatic diagnosis of eye diseases using ophthalmology electronic medical records (OEMR) has become possible. It aims to evaluate the condition of both eyes of a patient respectively, and we formulate it as a particular multi-label classification task in this paper. Although there are a few related studies in other diseases, automatic diagnosis of eye diseases exhibits unique characteristics. First, descriptions of both eyes are mixed up in OEMR documents, with both free text and templated asymptomatic descriptions, resulting in sparsity and clutter of information. Second, OEMR documents contain multiple parts of descriptions and have long document lengths. Third, it is critical to provide explainability to the disease diagnosis model. To overcome those challenges, we present an effective automatic eye disease diagnosis framework, NEEDED. In this framework, a preprocessing module is integrated to improve the density and quality of information. Then, we design a hierarchical transformer structure for learning the contextualized representations of each sentence in the OEMR document. For the diagnosis part, we propose an attention-based predictor that enables traceable diagnosis by obtaining disease-specific information. Experiments on the real dataset and comparison with several baseline models show the advantage and explainability of our framework.