In recent years, by leveraging more data, computation, and diverse tasks, learned optimizers have achieved remarkable success in supervised learning, outperforming classical hand-designed optimizers. Reinforcement learning (RL) is essentially different from supervised learning and in practice these learned optimizers do not work well even in simple RL tasks. We investigate this phenomenon and identity three issues. First, the gradients of an RL agent vary across a wide range in logarithms while their absolute values are in a small range, making neural networks hard to obtain accurate parameter updates. Second, the agent-gradient distribution is non-independent and identically distributed, leading to inefficient meta-training. Finally, due to highly stochastic agent-environment interactions, the agent-gradients have high bias and variance, which increase the difficulty of learning an optimizer for RL. We propose gradient processing, pipeline training, and a novel optimizer structure with good inductive bias to address these issues. By applying these techniques, for the first time, we show that learning an optimizer for RL from scratch is possible. Although only trained in toy tasks, our learned optimizer can generalize to unseen complex tasks in Brax.
In recent years, there has been a shift in computing architectures, moving away from centralized cloud computing towards decentralized edge and fog computing. This shift is driven by factors such as the increasing volume of data generated at the edge, the growing demand for real-time processing and low-latency applications, and the need for improved privacy and data locality. Although this new paradigm offers numerous advantages, it also introduces significant security and reliability challenges. This paper aims to review the architectures and technologies employed in fog computing and identify opportunities for developing novel security assessment and security hardening techniques. These techniques include secure configuration and debloating to enhance the security of middleware, testing techniques to assess secure communication mechanisms, and automated rehosting to speed up the security testing of embedded firmware.
Evolutionary computing (EC) is widely used in dealing with combinatorial optimization problems (COP). Traditional EC methods can only solve a single task in a single run, while real-life scenarios often need to solve multiple COPs simultaneously. In recent years, evolutionary multitasking optimization (EMTO) has become an emerging topic in the EC community. And many methods have been designed to deal with multiple COPs concurrently through exchanging knowledge. However, many-task optimization, cross-domain knowledge transfer, and negative transfer are still significant challenges in this field. A new evolutionary multitasking algorithm based on adaptive seed transfer (MTEA-AST) is developed for multitasking COPs in this work. First, a dimension unification strategy is proposed to unify the dimensions of different tasks. And then, an adaptive task selection strategy is designed to capture the similarity between the target task and other online optimization tasks. The calculated similarity is exploited to select suitable source tasks for the target one and determine the transfer strength. Next, a task transfer strategy is established to select seeds from source tasks and correct unsuitable knowledge in seeds to suppress negative transfer. Finally, the experimental results indicate that MTEA-AST can adaptively transfer knowledge in both same-domain and cross-domain many-task environments. And the proposed method shows competitive performance compared to other state-of-the-art EMTOs in experiments consisting of four COPs.
In clinical dictation, utterances after automatic speech recognition (ASR) without explicit punctuation marks may lead to the misunderstanding of dictated reports. To give a precise and understandable clinical report with ASR, automatic punctuation restoration is required. Considering a practical scenario, we propose a fast and light pre-trained model for Chinese medical punctuation restoration based on 'pretraining and fine-tuning' paradigm. In this work, we distill pre-trained models by incorporating supervised contrastive learning and a novel auxiliary pre-training task (Punctuation Mark Prediction) to make it well-suited for punctuation restoration. Our experiments on various distilled models reveal that our model can achieve 95% performance while 10% model size relative to state-of-the-art Chinese RoBERTa.
Along with the massive growth of the Internet from the 1990s until now, various innovative technologies have been created to bring users breathtaking experiences with more virtual interactions in cyberspace. Many virtual environments with thousands of services and applications, from social networks to virtual gaming worlds, have been developed with immersive experience and digital transformation, but most are incoherent instead of being integrated into a platform. In this context, metaverse, a term formed by combining meta and universe, has been introduced as a shared virtual world that is fueled by many emerging technologies, such as fifth-generation networks and beyond, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence (AI). Among such technologies, AI has shown the great importance of processing big data to enhance immersive experience and enable human-like intelligence of virtual agents. In this survey, we make a beneficial effort to explore the role of AI in the foundation and development of the metaverse. We first deliver a preliminary of AI, including machine learning algorithms and deep learning architectures, and its role in the metaverse. We then convey a comprehensive investigation of AI-based methods concerning six technical aspects that have potentials for the metaverse: natural language processing, machine vision, blockchain, networking, digital twin, and neural interface, and being potential for the metaverse. Subsequently, several AI-aided applications, such as healthcare, manufacturing, smart cities, and gaming, are studied to be deployed in the virtual worlds. Finally, we conclude the key contribution of this survey and open some future research directions in AI for the metaverse.
Data augmentation, the artificial creation of training data for machine learning by transformations, is a widely studied research field across machine learning disciplines. While it is useful for increasing the generalization capabilities of a model, it can also address many other challenges and problems, from overcoming a limited amount of training data over regularizing the objective to limiting the amount data used to protect privacy. Based on a precise description of the goals and applications of data augmentation (C1) and a taxonomy for existing works (C2), this survey is concerned with data augmentation methods for textual classification and aims to achieve a concise and comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners (C3). Derived from the taxonomy, we divided more than 100 methods into 12 different groupings and provide state-of-the-art references expounding which methods are highly promising (C4). Finally, research perspectives that may constitute a building block for future work are given (C5).
Deep neural models in recent years have been successful in almost every field, including extremely complex problem statements. However, these models are huge in size, with millions (and even billions) of parameters, thus demanding more heavy computation power and failing to be deployed on edge devices. Besides, the performance boost is highly dependent on redundant labeled data. To achieve faster speeds and to handle the problems caused by the lack of data, knowledge distillation (KD) has been proposed to transfer information learned from one model to another. KD is often characterized by the so-called `Student-Teacher' (S-T) learning framework and has been broadly applied in model compression and knowledge transfer. This paper is about KD and S-T learning, which are being actively studied in recent years. First, we aim to provide explanations of what KD is and how/why it works. Then, we provide a comprehensive survey on the recent progress of KD methods together with S-T frameworks typically for vision tasks. In general, we consider some fundamental questions that have been driving this research area and thoroughly generalize the research progress and technical details. Additionally, we systematically analyze the research status of KD in vision applications. Finally, we discuss the potentials and open challenges of existing methods and prospect the future directions of KD and S-T learning.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Incorporating knowledge graph into recommender systems has attracted increasing attention in recent years. By exploring the interlinks within a knowledge graph, the connectivity between users and items can be discovered as paths, which provide rich and complementary information to user-item interactions. Such connectivity not only reveals the semantics of entities and relations, but also helps to comprehend a user's interest. However, existing efforts have not fully explored this connectivity to infer user preferences, especially in terms of modeling the sequential dependencies within and holistic semantics of a path. In this paper, we contribute a new model named Knowledge-aware Path Recurrent Network (KPRN) to exploit knowledge graph for recommendation. KPRN can generate path representations by composing the semantics of both entities and relations. By leveraging the sequential dependencies within a path, we allow effective reasoning on paths to infer the underlying rationale of a user-item interaction. Furthermore, we design a new weighted pooling operation to discriminate the strengths of different paths in connecting a user with an item, endowing our model with a certain level of explainability. We conduct extensive experiments on two datasets about movie and music, demonstrating significant improvements over state-of-the-art solutions Collaborative Knowledge Base Embedding and Neural Factorization Machine.
Verifiability is one of the core editing principles in Wikipedia, where editors are encouraged to provide citations for the added statements. Statements can be any arbitrary piece of text, ranging from a sentence up to a paragraph. However, in many cases, citations are either outdated, missing, or link to non-existing references (e.g. dead URL, moved content etc.). In total, 20\% of the cases such citations refer to news articles and represent the second most cited source. Even in cases where citations are provided, there are no explicit indicators for the span of a citation for a given piece of text. In addition to issues related with the verifiability principle, many Wikipedia entity pages are incomplete, with relevant information that is already available in online news sources missing. Even for the already existing citations, there is often a delay between the news publication time and the reference time. In this thesis, we address the aforementioned issues and propose automated approaches that enforce the verifiability principle in Wikipedia, and suggest relevant and missing news references for further enriching Wikipedia entity pages.
Inspired by recent development of artificial satellite, remote sensing images have attracted extensive attention. Recently, noticeable progress has been made in scene classification and target detection.However, it is still not clear how to describe the remote sensing image content with accurate and concise sentences. In this paper, we investigate to describe the remote sensing images with accurate and flexible sentences. First, some annotated instructions are presented to better describe the remote sensing images considering the special characteristics of remote sensing images. Second, in order to exhaustively exploit the contents of remote sensing images, a large-scale aerial image data set is constructed for remote sensing image caption. Finally, a comprehensive review is presented on the proposed data set to fully advance the task of remote sensing caption. Extensive experiments on the proposed data set demonstrate that the content of the remote sensing image can be completely described by generating language descriptions. The data set is available at //github.com/2051/RSICD_optimal