Africa
Generative Meta-Learning for Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction
The zero-shot relation triplet extraction (ZeroRTE) task aims to extract relation triplets from a piece of text with unseen relation types. The seminal work adopts the pre-trained generative model to generate synthetic samples for new relations. However, current generative models lack the optimization process of model generalization on different tasks during training, and thus have limited generalization capability. For this reason, we propose a novel generative meta-learning framework which exploits the `learning-to-learn' ability of meta-learning to boost the generalization capability of generative models. Specifically, we first design a task-aware generative model which can learn the general knowledge by forcing the optimization process to be conducted across multiple tasks. Based on it, we then present three generative meta-learning approaches designated for three typical meta-learning categories. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves a new state-of-the-art performance for the ZeroRTE task.
Fashionpedia-Ads: Do Your Favorite Advertisements Reveal Your Fashion Taste?
Shi, Mengyun, Cardie, Claire, Belongie, Serge
Consumers are exposed to advertisements across many different domains on the internet, such as fashion, beauty, car, food, and others. On the other hand, fashion represents second highest e-commerce shopping category. Does consumer digital record behavior on various fashion ad images reveal their fashion taste? Does ads from other domains infer their fashion taste as well? In this paper, we study the correlation between advertisements and fashion taste. Towards this goal, we introduce a new dataset, Fashionpedia-Ads, which asks subjects to provide their preferences on both ad (fashion, beauty, car, and dessert) and fashion product (social network and e-commerce style) images. Furthermore, we exhaustively collect and annotate the emotional, visual and textual information on the ad images from multi-perspectives (abstractive level, physical level, captions, and brands). We open-source Fashionpedia-Ads to enable future studies and encourage more approaches to interpretability research between advertisements and fashion taste.
PlasmoFAB: A Benchmark to Foster Machine Learning for Plasmodium falciparum Protein Antigen Candidate Prediction
Ditz, Jonas Christian, Wistuba-Hamprecht, Jacqueline, Maier, Timo, Fendel, Rolf, Pfeifer, Nico, Reuter, Bernhard
Motivation: Machine learning methods can be used to support scientific discovery in healthcare-related research fields. However, these methods can only be reliably used if they can be trained on high-quality and curated datasets. Currently, no such dataset for the exploration of Plasmodium falciparum protein antigen candidates exists. The parasite Plasmodium falciparum causes the infectious disease malaria. Thus, identifying potential antigens is of utmost importance for the development of antimalarial drugs and vaccines. Since exploring antigen candidates experimentally is an expensive and time-consuming process, applying machine learning methods to support this process has the potential to accelerate the development of drugs and vaccines, which are needed for fighting and controlling malaria. Results: We developed PlasmoFAB, a curated benchmark that can be used to train machine learning methods for the exploration of Plasmodium falciparum protein antigen candidates. We combined an extensive literature search with domain expertise to create high-quality labels for Plasmodium falciparum specific proteins that distinguish between antigen candidates and intracellular proteins. Additionally, we used our benchmark to compare different well-known prediction models and available protein localization prediction services on the task of identifying protein antigen candidates. We show that available general-purpose services are unable to provide sufficient performance on identifying protein antigen candidates and are outperformed by our models that were trained on this tailored data. Availability: PlasmoFAB is publicly available on Zenodo with DOI 10.5281/zenodo.7433087. Furthermore, all scripts that were used in the creation of PlasmoFAB and the training and evaluation of machine learning models are open source and publicly available on GitHub here: https://github.com/msmdev/PlasmoFAB.
Density Invariant Contrast Maximization for Neuromorphic Earth Observations
Arja, Sami, Marcireau, Alexandre, Balthazor, Richard L., McHarg, Matthew G., Afshar, Saeed, Cohen, Gregory
Contrast maximization (CMax) techniques are widely used in event-based vision systems to estimate the motion parameters of the camera and generate high-contrast images. However, these techniques are noise-intolerance and suffer from the multiple extrema problem which arises when the scene contains more noisy events than structure, causing the contrast to be higher at multiple locations. This makes the task of estimating the camera motion extremely challenging, which is a problem for neuromorphic earth observation, because, without a proper estimation of the motion parameters, it is not possible to generate a map with high contrast, causing important details to be lost. Similar methods that use CMax addressed this problem by changing or augmenting the objective function to enable it to converge to the correct motion parameters. Our proposed solution overcomes the multiple extrema and noise-intolerance problems by correcting the warped event before calculating the contrast and offers the following advantages: it does not depend on the event data, it does not require a prior about the camera motion, and keeps the rest of the CMax pipeline unchanged. This is to ensure that the contrast is only high around the correct motion parameters. Our approach enables the creation of better motion-compensated maps through an analytical compensation technique using a novel dataset from the International Space Station (ISS). Code is available at \url{https://github.com/neuromorphicsystems/event_warping}
A map of every tree in Africa will help monitor deforestation
High-resolution satellite imagery has been used to map every single tree in Africa, demonstrating a technique that could help improve the monitoring of deforestation across the world. Florian Reiner at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and his colleagues used images from satellites operated by US firm Planet and machine-learning models to map canopy cover across the entire African continent. Modern satellites usually capture tree canopies at a resolution of 30 metres – fine for measuring the size of forests, but less good at mapping individual trees and small thickets. The satellite data Reiner and his colleagues used had a resolution of 3 metres, enabling the study to map all trees, including those not part of a forest. The results suggest that 30 per cent of all trees in Africa aren't in a forest, and instead are scattered across farmland, savannah and urban areas.
Self-supervised learning for infant cry analysis
Gorin, Arsenii, Subakan, Cem, Abdoli, Sajjad, Wang, Junhao, Latremouille, Samantha, Onu, Charles
In this paper, we explore self-supervised learning (SSL) for analyzing a first-of-its-kind database of cry recordings containing clinical indications of more than a thousand newborns. Specifically, we target cry-based detection of neurological injury as well as identification of cry triggers such as pain, hunger, and discomfort. Annotating a large database in the medical setting is expensive and time-consuming, typically requiring the collaboration of several experts over years. Leveraging large amounts of unlabeled audio data to learn useful representations can lower the cost of building robust models and, ultimately, clinical solutions. In this work, we experiment with self-supervised pre-training of a convolutional neural network on large audio datasets. We show that pre-training with SSL contrastive loss (SimCLR) performs significantly better than supervised pre-training for both neuro injury and cry triggers. In addition, we demonstrate further performance gains through SSL-based domain adaptation using unlabeled infant cries. We also show that using such SSL-based pre-training for adaptation to cry sounds decreases the need for labeled data of the overall system.
LidarCLIP or: How I Learned to Talk to Point Clouds
Hess, Georg, Tonderski, Adam, Petersson, Christoffer, Åström, Kalle, Svensson, Lennart
Research connecting text and images has recently seen several breakthroughs, with models like CLIP, DALL-E 2, and Stable Diffusion. However, the connection between text and other visual modalities, such as lidar data, has received less attention, prohibited by the lack of text-lidar datasets. In this work, we propose LidarCLIP, a mapping from automotive point clouds to a pre-existing CLIP embedding space. Using image-lidar pairs, we supervise a point cloud encoder with the image CLIP embeddings, effectively relating text and lidar data with the image domain as an intermediary. We show the effectiveness of LidarCLIP by demonstrating that lidar-based retrieval is generally on par with image-based retrieval, but with complementary strengths and weaknesses. By combining image and lidar features, we improve upon both single-modality methods and enable a targeted search for challenging detection scenarios under adverse sensor conditions. We also explore zero-shot classification and show that LidarCLIP outperforms existing attempts to use CLIP for point clouds by a large margin. Finally, we leverage our compatibility with CLIP to explore a range of applications, such as point cloud captioning and lidar-to-image generation, without any additional training. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/atonderski/lidarclip.
Can LMs Learn New Entities from Descriptions? Challenges in Propagating Injected Knowledge
Onoe, Yasumasa, Zhang, Michael J. Q., Padmanabhan, Shankar, Durrett, Greg, Choi, Eunsol
Pre-trained language models (LMs) are used for knowledge intensive tasks like question answering, but their knowledge gets continuously outdated as the world changes. Prior work has studied targeted updates to LMs, injecting individual facts and evaluating whether the model learns these facts while not changing predictions on other contexts. We take a step forward and study LMs' abilities to make inferences based on injected facts (or propagate those facts): for example, after learning that something is a TV show, does an LM predict that you can watch it? We study this with two cloze-style tasks: an existing dataset of real-world sentences about novel entities (ECBD) as well as a new controlled benchmark with manually designed templates requiring varying levels of inference about injected knowledge. Surprisingly, we find that existing methods for updating knowledge (gradient-based fine-tuning and modifications of this approach) show little propagation of injected knowledge. These methods improve performance on cloze instances only when there is lexical overlap between injected facts and target inferences. Yet, prepending entity definitions in an LM's context improves performance across all settings, suggesting that there is substantial headroom for parameter-updating approaches for knowledge injection.
Differentiable Bootstrap Particle Filters for Regime-Switching Models
Li, Wenhan, Chen, Xiongjie, Wang, Wenwu, Elvira, Víctor, Li, Yunpeng
Differentiable particle filters are an emerging class of particle filtering methods that use neural networks to construct and learn parametric state-space models. In real-world applications, both the state dynamics and measurements can switch between a set of candidate models. For instance, in target tracking, vehicles can idle, move through traffic, or cruise on motorways, and measurements are collected in different geographical or weather conditions. This paper proposes a new differentiable particle filter for regime-switching state-space models. The method can learn a set of unknown candidate dynamic and measurement models and track the state posteriors. We evaluate the performance of the novel algorithm in relevant models, showing its great performance compared to other competitive algorithms.
Uncertainty-Aware Vehicle Energy Efficiency Prediction using an Ensemble of Neural Networks
Khiari, Jihed, Olaverri-Monreal, Cristina
The transportation sector accounts for about 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, an improvement of energy efficiency in the traffic sector is crucial to reducing the carbon footprint. Efficiency is typically measured in terms of energy use per traveled distance, e.g. liters of fuel per kilometer. Leading factors that impact the energy efficiency are the type of vehicle, environment, driver behavior, and weather conditions. These varying factors introduce uncertainty in estimating the vehicles' energy efficiency. We propose in this paper an ensemble learning approach based on deep neural networks (ENN) that is designed to reduce the predictive uncertainty and to output measures of such uncertainty. We evaluated it using the publicly available Vehicle Energy Dataset (VED) and compared it with several baselines per vehicle and energy type. The results showed a high predictive performance and they allowed to output a measure of predictive uncertainty.