In this position paper, we argue that the classical evaluation on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks using annotated benchmarks is in trouble. The worst kind of data contamination happens when a Large Language Model (LLM) is trained on the test split of a benchmark, and then evaluated in the same benchmark. The extent of the problem is unknown, as it is not straightforward to measure. Contamination causes an overestimation of the performance of a contaminated model in a target benchmark and associated task with respect to their non-contaminated counterparts. The consequences can be very harmful, with wrong scientific conclusions being published while other correct ones are discarded. This position paper defines different levels of data contamination and argues for a community effort, including the development of automatic and semi-automatic measures to detect when data from a benchmark was exposed to a model, and suggestions for flagging papers with conclusions that are compromised by data contamination.
This paper utilizes finite Fourier series to represent a time-continuous motion and proposes a novel planning method that adjusts the motion harmonics of each manipulator joint. Primarily, we sum the potential energy for collision detection and the kinetic energy up to calculate the Hamiltonian of the manipulator motion harmonics. Though the adaptive interior-point method is designed to modify the harmonics in its finite frequency domain, we still encounter the local minima due to the non-convexity of the collision field. In this way, we learn the collision field through a support vector machine with a Gaussian kernel, which is highly convex. The learning-based collision field is applied for Hamiltonian, and the experiment results show our method's high reliability and efficiency.
In this paper, we investigate a novel reconfigurable distributed antennas and reflecting surface (RDARS) aided multi-user massive MIMO system with imperfect CSI and propose a practical two-timescale (TTS) transceiver design to reduce the communication overhead and computational complexity of the system. In the RDARS-aided system, not only distribution gain but also reflection gain can be obtained by a flexible combination of the distributed antennas and reflecting surface, which differentiates the system from the others and also makes the TTS design challenging. To enable the optimal TTS transceiver design, the achievable rate of the system is first derived in closed-form. Then the TTS design aiming at the weighted sum rate maximization is considered. To solve the challenging non-convex optimization problem with high-order design variables, i.e., the transmit powers and the phase shifts at the RDARS, a block coordinate descent based method is proposed to find the optimal solutions in semi-closed forms iteratively. Specifically, two efficient algorithms are proposed with provable convergence for the optimal phase shift design, i.e., Riemannian Gradient Ascent based algorithm by exploiting the unit-modulus constraints, and Two-Tier Majorization-Minimization based algorithm with closed-form optimal solutions in each iteration. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and demonstrate the superiority of deploying RDARS in massive MIMO systems to provide substantial rate improvement with a significantly reduced total number of active antennas/RF chains and lower transmit power when compared to the DAS and RIS-aided systems.
In this paper, we consider an infinite horizon average reward Markov Decision Process (MDP). Distinguishing itself from existing works within this context, our approach harnesses the power of the general policy gradient-based algorithm, liberating it from the constraints of assuming a linear MDP structure. We propose a policy gradient-based algorithm and show its global convergence property. We then prove that the proposed algorithm has $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}({T}^{3/4})$ regret. Remarkably, this paper marks a pioneering effort by presenting the first exploration into regret-bound computation for the general parameterized policy gradient algorithm in the context of average reward scenarios.
In this paper we describe the Portuguese-language podcast dataset we have released for academic research purposes. We give an overview of how the data was sampled, descriptive statistics over the collection, as well as information about the distribution over Brazilian and Portuguese dialects. We give results from experiments on multi-lingual summarization, showing that summarizing podcast transcripts can be performed well by a system supporting both English and Portuguese. We also show experiments on Portuguese podcast genre classification using text metadata. Combining this collection with previously released English-language collection opens up the potential for multi-modal, multi-lingual and multi-dialect podcast information access research.
In this paper, we introduce a large-scale and high-quality audio-visual speaker verification dataset, named VoxBlink. We propose an innovative and robust automatic audio-visual data mining pipeline to curate this dataset, which contains 1.45M utterances from 38K speakers. Due to the inherent nature of automated data collection, introducing noisy data is inevitable. Therefore, we also utilize a multi-modal purification step to generate a cleaner version of the VoxBlink, named VoxBlink-clean, comprising 18K identities and 1.02M utterances. In contrast to the VoxCeleb, the VoxBlink sources from short videos of ordinary users, and the covered scenarios can better align with real-life situations. To our best knowledge, the VoxBlink dataset is one of the largest publicly available speaker verification datasets. Leveraging the VoxCeleb and VoxBlink-clean datasets together, we employ diverse speaker verification models with multiple architectural backbones to conduct comprehensive evaluations on the VoxCeleb test sets. Experimental results indicate a substantial enhancement in performance,ranging from 12% to 30% relatively, across various backbone architectures upon incorporating the VoxBlink-clean into the training process. The details of the dataset can be found on //voxblink.github.io
In this paper, we identify the criteria for the selection of the minimal and most efficient covariate adjustment sets for the regression calibration method developed by Carroll, Rupert and Stefanski (CRS, 1992), used to correct bias due to continuous exposure measurement error. We utilize directed acyclic graphs to illustrate how subject matter knowledge can aid in the selection of such adjustment sets. Valid measurement error correction requires the collection of data on any (1) common causes of true exposure and outcome and (2) common causes of measurement error and outcome, in both the main study and validation study. For the CRS regression calibration method to be valid, researchers need to minimally adjust for covariate set (1) in both the measurement error model (MEM) and the outcome model and adjust for covariate set (2) at least in the MEM. In practice, we recommend including the minimal covariate adjustment set in both the MEM and the outcome model. In contrast with the regression calibration method developed by Rosner, Spiegelman and Willet, it is valid and more efficient to adjust for correlates of the true exposure or of measurement error that are not risk factors in the MEM only under CRS method. We applied the proposed covariate selection approach to the Health Professional Follow-up Study, examining the effect of fiber intake on cardiovascular incidence. In this study, we demonstrated potential issues with a data-driven approach to building the MEM that is agnostic to the structural assumptions. We extend the originally proposed estimators to settings where effect modification by a covariate is allowed. Finally, we caution against the use of the regression calibration method to calibrate the true nutrition intake using biomarkers.
In this paper, we propose a novel personalized decision support system that combines Theory of Mind (ToM) modeling and explainable Reinforcement Learning (XRL) to provide effective and interpretable interventions. Our method leverages DRL to provide expert action recommendations while incorporating ToM modeling to understand users' mental states and predict their future actions, enabling appropriate timing for intervention. To explain interventions, we use counterfactual explanations based on RL's feature importance and users' ToM model structure. Our proposed system generates accurate and personalized interventions that are easily interpretable by end-users. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through a series of crowd-sourcing experiments in a simulated team decision-making task, where our system outperforms control baselines in terms of task performance. Our proposed approach is agnostic to task environment and RL model structure, therefore has the potential to be generalized to a wide range of applications.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
In this paper, we proposed to apply meta learning approach for low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR). We formulated ASR for different languages as different tasks, and meta-learned the initialization parameters from many pretraining languages to achieve fast adaptation on unseen target language, via recently proposed model-agnostic meta learning algorithm (MAML). We evaluated the proposed approach using six languages as pretraining tasks and four languages as target tasks. Preliminary results showed that the proposed method, MetaASR, significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art multitask pretraining approach on all target languages with different combinations of pretraining languages. In addition, since MAML's model-agnostic property, this paper also opens new research direction of applying meta learning to more speech-related applications.
In this paper, we introduce the Reinforced Mnemonic Reader for machine reading comprehension tasks, which enhances previous attentive readers in two aspects. First, a reattention mechanism is proposed to refine current attentions by directly accessing to past attentions that are temporally memorized in a multi-round alignment architecture, so as to avoid the problems of attention redundancy and attention deficiency. Second, a new optimization approach, called dynamic-critical reinforcement learning, is introduced to extend the standard supervised method. It always encourages to predict a more acceptable answer so as to address the convergence suppression problem occurred in traditional reinforcement learning algorithms. Extensive experiments on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results. Meanwhile, our model outperforms previous systems by over 6% in terms of both Exact Match and F1 metrics on two adversarial SQuAD datasets.