Visual recognition in low-data regimes requires deep neural networks to learn generalized representations from limited training samples. Recently, CLIP-based methods have shown promising few-shot performance benefited from the contrastive language-image pre-training. We then question, if the more diverse pre-training knowledge can be cascaded to further assist few-shot representation learning. In this paper, we propose CaFo, a Cascade of Foundation models that incorporates diverse prior knowledge of various pre-training paradigms for better few-shot learning. Our CaFo incorporates CLIP's language-contrastive knowledge, DINO's vision-contrastive knowledge, DALL-E's vision-generative knowledge, and GPT-3's language-generative knowledge. Specifically, CaFo works by 'Prompt, Generate, then Cache'. Firstly, we leverage GPT-3 to produce textual inputs for prompting CLIP with rich downstream linguistic semantics. Then, we generate synthetic images via DALL-E to expand the few-shot training data without any manpower. At last, we introduce a learnable cache model to adaptively blend the predictions from CLIP and DINO. By such collaboration, CaFo can fully unleash the potential of different pre-training methods and unify them to perform state-of-the-art for few-shot classification. Code is available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/CaFo.

Most of the major databases on the semantic web have links to Princeton WordNet (PWN) synonym set (synset) identifiers, which differ for each PWN release, and are thus incompatible between versions. On the other hand, both PWN and the more recent Open English Wordnet (OEWN) provide permanent word sense identifiers (the sense keys), which can solve this interoperability problem. We present an algorithm that runs in linear time, to automatically derive a synset mapping between any pair of Wordnet versions that use PWN sense keys. This allows to update old WordNet links, and seamlessly interoperate with newer English Wordnet versions for which no prior mapping exists. By applying the proposed algorithm on the fly, at load time, we combine the Open Multilingual Wordnet (OMW 1.4, which uses old PWN 3.0 identifiers) with OEWN Edition 2021, and obtain almost perfect precision and recall. We compare the results of our approach using respectively synset offsets, versus the Collaborative InterLingual Index (CILI version 1.0) as synset identifiers, and find that the synset offsets perform better than CILI 1.0 in all cases, except a few ties.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to improve the transparency of machine learning (ML) pipelines. We systematize the increasingly growing (but fragmented) microcosm of studies that develop and utilize XAI methods for defensive and offensive cybersecurity tasks. We identify 3 cybersecurity stakeholders, i.e., model users, designers, and adversaries, who utilize XAI for 4 distinct objectives within an ML pipeline, namely 1) XAI-enabled user assistance, 2) XAI-enabled model verification, 3) explanation verification & robustness, and 4) offensive use of explanations. Our analysis of the literature indicates that many of the XAI applications are designed with little understanding of how they might be integrated into analyst workflows -- user studies for explanation evaluation are conducted in only 14% of the cases. The security literature sometimes also fails to disentangle the role of the various stakeholders, e.g., by providing explanations to model users and designers while also exposing them to adversaries. Additionally, the role of model designers is particularly minimized in the security literature. To this end, we present an illustrative tutorial for model designers, demonstrating how XAI can help with model verification. We also discuss scenarios where interpretability by design may be a better alternative. The systematization and the tutorial enable us to challenge several assumptions, and present open problems that can help shape the future of XAI research within cybersecurity.

Deep Neural Networks achieve state-of-the-art results in many different problem settings by exploiting vast amounts of training data. However, collecting, storing and - in the case of supervised learning - labelling the data is expensive and time-consuming. Additionally, assessing the networks' generalization abilities or predicting how the inferred output changes under input transformations is complicated since the networks are usually treated as a black box. Both of these problems can be mitigated by incorporating prior knowledge into the neural network. One promising approach, inspired by the success of convolutional neural networks in computer vision tasks, is to incorporate knowledge about symmetric geometrical transformations of the problem to solve that affect the output in a predictable way. This promises an increased data efficiency and more interpretable network outputs. In this survey, we try to give a concise overview about different approaches that incorporate geometrical prior knowledge into neural networks. Additionally, we connect those methods to 3D object detection for autonomous driving, where we expect promising results when applying those methods.

When I was young, I was in the car with my dad and best friend, driving from Johannesburg to Durban. I remember we were talking in the back seat when my friend said he is sad that everything has already been invented. My dad immediately responded, "You can't think like that", and proceeded to explain to us that people who thought like never had any ideas. At the start of LSD, which was early 2000, we installed Linux. That was it, just Linux.

Israeli settlers rampage through Palestinian villages, Syria's president is getting friendly with several Arab states, and attacks against African migrants in Tunisia. Here's your round up of our coverage, written by Abubakr Al-Shamahi, Al Jazeera Digital's Middle East and North Africa editor. With the backing of the United States, Israeli and Palestinian officials met at a Jordanian resort on Sunday in an attempt to reach a deal to end more than a year of intense violence. By the end of it, the two sides said they had agreed to work closely together, to bring about a "de-escalation on the ground". And, according to a joint statement, Israel even said it would suspend the building of any new settlement units in the occupied West Bank.

This paper presents methods for dramatically improving the performance of sampling-based kinodynamic planners. The key component is the first-known complete, exact steering method that produces a time-optimal trajectory between any states for a vector of synchronized double integrators. This method is applied in three ways: 1) to generate RRT edges that quickly solve the two-point boundary-value problems, 2) to produce a (quasi)metric for more accurate Voronoi bias in RRTs, and 3) to iteratively time-optimize a given collision-free trajectory. Experiments are performed for state spaces with up to 2000 dimensions, resulting in improved computed trajectories and orders of magnitude computation time improvements over using ordinary metrics and constant controls.

Semiparametric language models (LMs) have shown promise in continuously learning from new text data by combining a parameterized neural LM with a growable non-parametric memory for memorizing new content. However, conventional semiparametric LMs will finally become prohibitive for computing and storing if they are applied to continual learning over streaming data, because the non-parametric memory grows linearly with the amount of data they learn from over time. To address the issue of scalability, we present a simple and intuitive approach called Selective Memorization (SeMem), which only memorizes difficult samples that the model is likely to struggle with. We demonstrate that SeMem improves the scalability of semiparametric LMs for continual learning over streaming data in two ways: (1) data-wise scalability: as the model becomes stronger through continual learning, it will encounter fewer difficult cases that need to be memorized, causing the growth of the non-parametric memory to slow down over time rather than growing at a linear rate with the size of training data; (2) model-wise scalability: SeMem allows a larger model to memorize fewer samples than its smaller counterpart because it is rarer for a larger model to encounter incomprehensible cases, resulting in a non-parametric memory that does not scale linearly with model size. We conduct extensive experiments in language modeling and downstream tasks to test SeMem's results, showing SeMem enables a semiparametric LM to be a scalable continual learner with little forgetting.

We address the problem of improving the performance and in particular the sample complexity of deep neural networks by enforcing and guaranteeing invariances to symmetry transformations rather than learning them from data. Group-equivariant convolutions are a popular approach to obtain equivariant representations. The desired corresponding invariance is then imposed using pooling operations. For rotations, it has been shown that using invariant integration instead of pooling further improves the sample complexity. In this contribution, we first expand invariant integration beyond rotations to flips and scale transformations. We then address the problem of incorporating multiple desired invariances into a single network. For this purpose, we propose a multi-stream architecture, where each stream is invariant to a different transformation such that the network can simultaneously benefit from multiple invariances. We demonstrate our approach with successful experiments on Scaled-MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR-10 and STL-10.

Grid-centric perception is a crucial field for mobile robot perception and navigation. Nonetheless, grid-centric perception is less prevalent than object-centric perception for autonomous driving as autonomous vehicles need to accurately perceive highly dynamic, large-scale outdoor traffic scenarios and the complexity and computational costs of grid-centric perception are high. The rapid development of deep learning techniques and hardware gives fresh insights into the evolution of grid-centric perception and enables the deployment of many real-time algorithms. Current industrial and academic research demonstrates the great advantages of grid-centric perception, such as comprehensive fine-grained environmental representation, greater robustness to occlusion, more efficient sensor fusion, and safer planning policies. Given the lack of current surveys for this rapidly expanding field, we present a hierarchically-structured review of grid-centric perception for autonomous vehicles. We organize previous and current knowledge of occupancy grid techniques and provide a systematic in-depth analysis of algorithms in terms of three aspects: feature representation, data utility, and applications in autonomous driving systems. Lastly, we present a summary of the current research trend and provide some probable future outlooks.