In this paper, we carry out experimental research on Grammatical Error Correction, delving into the nuances of single-model systems, comparing the efficiency of ensembling and ranking methods, and exploring the application of large language models to GEC as single-model systems, as parts of ensembles, and as ranking methods. We set new state-of-the-art performance with F_0.5 scores of 72.8 on CoNLL-2014-test and 81.4 on BEA-test, respectively. To support further advancements in GEC and ensure the reproducibility of our research, we make our code, trained models, and systems' outputs publicly available.
Safe deployment of AI models requires proactive detection of failures to prevent costly errors. To this end, we study the important problem of detecting failures in deep regression models. Existing approaches rely on epistemic uncertainty estimates or inconsistency w.r.t the training data to identify failure. Interestingly, we find that while uncertainties are necessary they are insufficient to accurately characterize failure in practice. Hence, we introduce PAGER (Principled Analysis of Generalization Errors in Regressors), a framework to systematically detect and characterize failures in deep regressors. Built upon the principle of anchored training in deep models, PAGER unifies both epistemic uncertainty and complementary manifold non-conformity scores to accurately organize samples into different risk regimes.
In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation technique called GenMix, which combines generative and mixture approaches to leverage the strengths of both methods. While generative models excel at creating new data patterns, they face challenges such as mode collapse in GANs and difficulties in training diffusion models, especially with limited medical imaging data. On the other hand, mixture models enhance class boundary regions but tend to favor the major class in scenarios with class imbalance. To address these limitations, GenMix integrates both approaches to complement each other. GenMix operates in two stages: (1) training a generative model to produce synthetic images, and (2) performing mixup between synthetic and real data. This process improves the quality and diversity of synthetic data while simultaneously benefiting from the new pattern learning of generative models and the boundary enhancement of mixture models. We validate the effectiveness of our method on the task of classifying focal liver lesions (FLLs) in CT images. Our results demonstrate that GenMix enhances the performance of various generative models, including DCGAN, StyleGAN, Textual Inversion, and Diffusion Models. Notably, the proposed method with Textual Inversion outperforms other methods without fine-tuning diffusion model on the FLL dataset.
There has been considerable recent interest in estimating heterogeneous causal effects. In this paper, we study conditional average partial causal effects (CAPCE) to reveal the heterogeneity of causal effects with continuous treatment. We provide conditions for identifying CAPCE in an instrumental variable setting. Notably, CAPCE is identifiable under a weaker assumption than required by a commonly used measure for estimating heterogeneous causal effects of continuous treatment. We develop three families of CAPCE estimators: sieve, parametric, and reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS)-based, and analyze their statistical properties. We illustrate the proposed CAPCE estimators on synthetic and real-world data.
In this paper, we introduce 4DHands, a robust approach to recovering interactive hand meshes and their relative movement from monocular inputs. Our approach addresses two major limitations of previous methods: lacking a unified solution for handling various hand image inputs and neglecting the positional relationship of two hands within images. To overcome these challenges, we develop a transformer-based architecture with novel tokenization and feature fusion strategies. Specifically, we propose a Relation-aware Two-Hand Tokenization (RAT) method to embed positional relation information into the hand tokens. In this way, our network can handle both single-hand and two-hand inputs and explicitly leverage relative hand positions, facilitating the reconstruction of intricate hand interactions in real-world scenarios. As such tokenization indicates the relative relationship of two hands, it also supports more effective feature fusion. To this end, we further develop a Spatio-temporal Interaction Reasoning (SIR) module to fuse hand tokens in 4D with attention and decode them into 3D hand meshes and relative temporal movements. The efficacy of our approach is validated on several benchmark datasets. The results on in-the-wild videos and real-world scenarios demonstrate the superior performances of our approach for interactive hand reconstruction. More video results can be found on the project page: //4dhands.github.io.
In this paper, we focus on single-demonstration imitation learning (IL), a practical approach for real-world applications where acquiring multiple expert demonstrations is costly or infeasible and the ground truth reward function is not available. In contrast to typical IL settings with multiple demonstrations, single-demonstration IL involves an agent having access to only one expert trajectory. We highlight the issue of sparse reward signals in this setting and propose to mitigate this issue through our proposed Transition Discriminator-based IL (TDIL) method. TDIL is an IRL method designed to address reward sparsity by introducing a denser surrogate reward function that considers environmental dynamics. This surrogate reward function encourages the agent to navigate towards states that are proximal to expert states. In practice, TDIL trains a transition discriminator to differentiate between valid and non-valid transitions in a given environment to compute the surrogate rewards. The experiments demonstrate that TDIL outperforms existing IL approaches and achieves expert-level performance in the single-demonstration IL setting across five widely adopted MuJoCo benchmarks as well as the "Adroit Door" robotic environment.
In this study, we introduce the DriveEnv-NeRF framework, which leverages Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to enable the validation and faithful forecasting of the efficacy of autonomous driving agents in a targeted real-world scene. Standard simulator-based rendering often fails to accurately reflect real-world performance due to the sim-to-real gap, which represents the disparity between virtual simulations and real-world conditions. To mitigate this gap, we propose a workflow for building a high-fidelity simulation environment of the targeted real-world scene using NeRF. This approach is capable of rendering realistic images from novel viewpoints and constructing 3D meshes for emulating collisions. The validation of these capabilities through the comparison of success rates in both simulated and real environments demonstrates the benefits of using DriveEnv-NeRF as a real-world performance indicator. Furthermore, the DriveEnv-NeRF framework can serve as a training environment for autonomous driving agents under various lighting conditions. This approach enhances the robustness of the agents and reduces performance degradation when deployed to the target real scene, compared to agents fully trained using the standard simulator rendering pipeline.
This white paper introduces Interactive Digital Narratives (IDN) as a powerful tool for tackling the complex challenges we face in today's society. In the scope of COST Action 18230 - Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representation (INDCOR), a group of researchers dedicated to studying media selected five case studies of IDNs, including educational games and news media, that confront and challenge the existing traditional media landscape. These case studies cover a wide range of important societal issues, such as racism, coloniality, cultural heritage, war, and disinformation. By exploring this broad range of examples, we aim to demonstrate how IDN can effectively address social complexity in an interactive, participatory, and engaging manner. We encourage you to examine these cases and discover for yourself how IDN can be used as a creative tool to address complex societal issues. This white paper might be inspiring for journalists, digital content creators, game designers, developers, educators using information and communication technologies in the classroom, or anyone interested in learning how to use IDN tools to tackle complex societal issues. In this sense, along with key scientific references, we offer key takeaways at the end of this white paper that might be helpful for media practitioners at large, in two main ways: 1) Designing IDNs to address complex societal issues and 2) Using IDNs to engage audiences with complex societal issues.
In this paper, we introduce a two-level attention schema, Poolingformer, for long document modeling. Its first level uses a smaller sliding window pattern to aggregate information from neighbors. Its second level employs a larger window to increase receptive fields with pooling attention to reduce both computational cost and memory consumption. We first evaluate Poolingformer on two long sequence QA tasks: the monolingual NQ and the multilingual TyDi QA. Experimental results show that Poolingformer sits atop three official leaderboards measured by F1, outperforming previous state-of-the-art models by 1.9 points (79.8 vs. 77.9) on NQ long answer, 1.9 points (79.5 vs. 77.6) on TyDi QA passage answer, and 1.6 points (67.6 vs. 66.0) on TyDi QA minimal answer. We further evaluate Poolingformer on a long sequence summarization task. Experimental results on the arXiv benchmark continue to demonstrate its superior performance.
Recent years have seen important advances in the quality of state-of-the-art models, but this has come at the expense of models becoming less interpretable. This survey presents an overview of the current state of Explainable AI (XAI), considered within the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP). We discuss the main categorization of explanations, as well as the various ways explanations can be arrived at and visualized. We detail the operations and explainability techniques currently available for generating explanations for NLP model predictions, to serve as a resource for model developers in the community. Finally, we point out the current gaps and encourage directions for future work in this important research area.
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.