While it has long been recognized that a team of individual learning agents can be greater than the sum of its parts, recent work has shown that larger teams are not necessarily more effective than smaller ones. In this paper, we study why and under which conditions certain team structures promote effective learning for a population of individual learning agents. We show that, depending on the environment, some team structures help agents learn to specialize into specific roles, resulting in more favorable global results. However, large teams create credit assignment challenges that reduce coordination, leading to large teams performing poorly compared to smaller ones. We support our conclusions with both theoretical analysis and empirical results.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have drawn widespread attention and research due to their astounding performance in tasks such as text generation and reasoning. Derivative products, like ChatGPT, have been extensively deployed and highly sought after. Meanwhile, the evaluation and optimization of LLMs in software engineering tasks, such as code generation, have become a research focus. However, there is still a lack of systematic research on the application and evaluation of LLMs in the field of software engineering. Therefore, this paper is the first to comprehensively investigate and collate the research and products combining LLMs with software engineering, aiming to answer two questions: (1) What are the current integrations of LLMs with software engineering? (2) Can LLMs effectively handle software engineering tasks? To find the answers, we have collected related literature as extensively as possible from seven mainstream databases, and selected 123 papers for analysis. We have categorized these papers in detail and reviewed the current research status of LLMs from the perspective of seven major software engineering tasks, hoping this will help researchers better grasp the research trends and address the issues when applying LLMs. Meanwhile, we have also organized and presented papers with evaluation content to reveal the performance and effectiveness of LLMs in various software engineering tasks, providing guidance for researchers and developers to optimize.
Following the successful debut of polyp detection and characterization, more advanced automation tools are being developed for colonoscopy. The new automation tasks, such as quality metrics or report generation, require understanding of the procedure flow that includes activities, events, anatomical landmarks, etc. In this work we present a method for automatic semantic parsing of colonoscopy videos. The method uses a novel DL multi-label temporal segmentation model trained in supervised and unsupervised regimes. We evaluate the accuracy of the method on a test set of over 300 annotated colonoscopy videos, and use ablation to explore the relative importance of various method's components.
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has recently emerged as a promising technology for beyond fifth-generation (B5G) and 6G networks conceived from metamaterials that smartly tunes the signal reflections via a large number of low-cost passive reflecting elements. However, the IRS-assisted communication model and the optimization of available resources needs to be improved further for more efficient communications. This paper investigates the enhancement of received power at the user end in an IRS assisted wireless communication by jointly optimizing the phase shifts at the IRS elements and its location. Employing the conventional Friss transmission model, the relationship between the transmitted power and reflected power is established. The expression of received power incorporates the free space loss, reflection loss factor, physical dimension of the IRS panel, and radiation pattern of the transmit signal. Also, the expression of reflection coefficient of IRS panel is obtained by exploiting the existing data of radar communications. Initially exploring a single IRS element within a two-ray reflection model, we extend it to a more complex multi-ray reflection model with multiple IRS elements in 3D Cartesian space. The received power expression is derived in a more tractable form, then, it is maximized by jointly optimizing the underlying underlying variables, the IRS location and the phase shifts. To realize the joint optimization of underlying variables, first, the phase shifts of the IRS elements are optimized to achieve constructive interference of received signal components at the user. Subsequently, the location of the IRS is optimized at the obtained optimal phase shifts. Numerical insights and performance comparison reveal that joint optimization leads to a substantial 37% enhancement in received power compared to the closest competitive benchmark scheme.
Unsupervised representation learning has recently helped automatic speech recognition (ASR) to tackle tasks with limited labeled data. Following this, hardware limitations and applications give rise to the question how to take advantage of large pre-trained models efficiently and reduce their complexity. In this work, we study a challenging low resource conversational telephony speech corpus from the medical domain in Vietnamese and German. We show the benefits of using unsupervised techniques beyond simple fine-tuning of large pre-trained models, discuss how to adapt them to a practical telephony task including bandwidth transfer and investigate different data conditions for pre-training and fine-tuning. We outperform the project baselines by 22% relative using pretraining techniques. Further gains of 29% can be achieved by refinements of architecture and training and 6% by adding 0.8 h of in-domain adaptation data.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
When is heterogeneity in the composition of an autonomous robotic team beneficial and when is it detrimental? We investigate and answer this question in the context of a minimally viable model that examines the role of heterogeneous speeds in perimeter defense problems, where defenders share a total allocated speed budget. We consider two distinct problem settings and develop strategies based on dynamic programming and on local interaction rules. We present a theoretical analysis of both approaches and our results are extensively validated using simulations. Interestingly, our results demonstrate that the viability of heterogeneous teams depends on the amount of information available to the defenders. Moreover, our results suggest a universality property: across a wide range of problem parameters the optimal ratio of the speeds of the defenders remains nearly constant.
In contrast to batch learning where all training data is available at once, continual learning represents a family of methods that accumulate knowledge and learn continuously with data available in sequential order. Similar to the human learning process with the ability of learning, fusing, and accumulating new knowledge coming at different time steps, continual learning is considered to have high practical significance. Hence, continual learning has been studied in various artificial intelligence tasks. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the recent progress of continual learning in computer vision. In particular, the works are grouped by their representative techniques, including regularization, knowledge distillation, memory, generative replay, parameter isolation, and a combination of the above techniques. For each category of these techniques, both its characteristics and applications in computer vision are presented. At the end of this overview, several subareas, where continuous knowledge accumulation is potentially helpful while continual learning has not been well studied, are discussed.
The rapid recent progress in machine learning (ML) has raised a number of scientific questions that challenge the longstanding dogma of the field. One of the most important riddles is the good empirical generalization of overparameterized models. Overparameterized models are excessively complex with respect to the size of the training dataset, which results in them perfectly fitting (i.e., interpolating) the training data, which is usually noisy. Such interpolation of noisy data is traditionally associated with detrimental overfitting, and yet a wide range of interpolating models -- from simple linear models to deep neural networks -- have recently been observed to generalize extremely well on fresh test data. Indeed, the recently discovered double descent phenomenon has revealed that highly overparameterized models often improve over the best underparameterized model in test performance. Understanding learning in this overparameterized regime requires new theory and foundational empirical studies, even for the simplest case of the linear model. The underpinnings of this understanding have been laid in very recent analyses of overparameterized linear regression and related statistical learning tasks, which resulted in precise analytic characterizations of double descent. This paper provides a succinct overview of this emerging theory of overparameterized ML (henceforth abbreviated as TOPML) that explains these recent findings through a statistical signal processing perspective. We emphasize the unique aspects that define the TOPML research area as a subfield of modern ML theory and outline interesting open questions that remain.
Over the past few years, we have seen fundamental breakthroughs in core problems in machine learning, largely driven by advances in deep neural networks. At the same time, the amount of data collected in a wide array of scientific domains is dramatically increasing in both size and complexity. Taken together, this suggests many exciting opportunities for deep learning applications in scientific settings. But a significant challenge to this is simply knowing where to start. The sheer breadth and diversity of different deep learning techniques makes it difficult to determine what scientific problems might be most amenable to these methods, or which specific combination of methods might offer the most promising first approach. In this survey, we focus on addressing this central issue, providing an overview of many widely used deep learning models, spanning visual, sequential and graph structured data, associated tasks and different training methods, along with techniques to use deep learning with less data and better interpret these complex models --- two central considerations for many scientific use cases. We also include overviews of the full design process, implementation tips, and links to a plethora of tutorials, research summaries and open-sourced deep learning pipelines and pretrained models, developed by the community. We hope that this survey will help accelerate the use of deep learning across different scientific domains.
Machine learning techniques have deeply rooted in our everyday life. However, since it is knowledge- and labor-intensive to pursue good learning performance, human experts are heavily involved in every aspect of machine learning. In order to make machine learning techniques easier to apply and reduce the demand for experienced human experts, automated machine learning (AutoML) has emerged as a hot topic with both industrial and academic interest. In this paper, we provide an up to date survey on AutoML. First, we introduce and define the AutoML problem, with inspiration from both realms of automation and machine learning. Then, we propose a general AutoML framework that not only covers most existing approaches to date but also can guide the design for new methods. Subsequently, we categorize and review the existing works from two aspects, i.e., the problem setup and the employed techniques. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of AutoML approaches and explain the reasons underneath their successful applications. We hope this survey can serve as not only an insightful guideline for AutoML beginners but also an inspiration for future research.