The world is making rapid progress in the areas of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. These are the core drivers of what many analysts have come to refer to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, epitomised by the increased whittling away of the boundaries that hitherto existed between the physical, digital and biological worlds. There is a clear imperative for pharmacists, pharmaceutical scientists and medical professionals in the field of research and development in developing countries like Nigeria, to increasingly tap into this world of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and partake of the revolution that is happening before our very eyes. And the reason is simple. Artificial Intelligence is helping to make pharmaceutical research and new drug discovery less expensive and definitely more productive. Researchers realise that in the time that it would have taken to test the efficacy of say a handful of chemical molecules manually, with AI, it is possible to test several hundreds of different chemical molecules.

Computer vision is a field of artificial intelligence that teaches computers to interpret and understand the visual world. Its applications are critical for the development of AI-powered technologies such as self-driving cars, autonomous drones, industrial robots, and augmented reality headsets, among numerous other technologies. Companies that are into the development of critical components of computer vision systems are in all rights computer vision companies. This includes computer vision chip makers and companies offering full computer vision solutions. The continuous increase in computer vision technologies also provides an excellent opportunity for investors to make fortunes by investing in recession-proof computer vision stocks.

Massive data corpora like WebText, Wikipedia, Conceptual Captions, WebImageText, and LAION have propelled recent dramatic progress in AI. Large neural models trained on such datasets produce impressive results and top many of today's benchmarks. A notable omission within this family of large-scale datasets is 3D data. Despite considerable interest and potential applications in 3D vision, datasets of high-fidelity 3D models continue to be mid-sized with limited diversity of object categories. Addressing this gap, we present Objaverse 1.0, a large dataset of objects with 800K+ (and growing) 3D models with descriptive captions, tags, and animations. Objaverse improves upon present day 3D repositories in terms of scale, number of categories, and in the visual diversity of instances within a category. We demonstrate the large potential of Objaverse via four diverse applications: training generative 3D models, improving tail category segmentation on the LVIS benchmark, training open-vocabulary object-navigation models for Embodied AI, and creating a new benchmark for robustness analysis of vision models. Objaverse can open new directions for research and enable new applications across the field of AI.

Transformer models have achieved superior performance in various natural language processing tasks. However, the quadratic computational cost of the attention mechanism limits its practicality for long sequences. There are existing attention variants that improve the computational efficiency, but they have limited ability to effectively compute global information. In parallel to Transformer models, state space models (SSMs) are tailored for long sequences, but they are not flexible enough to capture complicated local information. We propose SPADE, short for $\underline{\textbf{S}}$tate s$\underline{\textbf{P}}$ace $\underline{\textbf{A}}$ugmente$\underline{\textbf{D}}$ Transform$\underline{\textbf{E}}$r. Specifically, we augment a SSM into the bottom layer of SPADE, and we employ efficient local attention methods for the other layers. The SSM augments global information, which complements the lack of long-range dependency issue in local attention methods. Experimental results on the Long Range Arena benchmark and language modeling tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. To further demonstrate the scalability of SPADE, we pre-train large encoder-decoder models and present fine-tuning results on natural language understanding and natural language generation tasks.

When used in complex engineered systems, such as communication networks, artificial intelligence (AI) models should be not only as accurate as possible, but also well calibrated. A well-calibrated AI model is one that can reliably quantify the uncertainty of its decisions, assigning high confidence levels to decisions that are likely to be correct and low confidence levels to decisions that are likely to be erroneous. This paper investigates the application of conformal prediction as a general framework to obtain AI models that produce decisions with formal calibration guarantees. Conformal prediction transforms probabilistic predictors into set predictors that are guaranteed to contain the correct answer with a probability chosen by the designer. Such formal calibration guarantees hold irrespective of the true, unknown, distribution underlying the generation of the variables of interest, and can be defined in terms of ensemble or time-averaged probabilities. In this paper, conformal prediction is applied for the first time to the design of AI for communication systems in conjunction to both frequentist and Bayesian learning, focusing on demodulation, modulation classification, and channel prediction.

With the advent of deep learning, a huge number of text-to-speech (TTS) models which produce human-like speech have emerged. Recently, by introducing syntactic and semantic information w.r.t the input text, various approaches have been proposed to enrich the naturalness and expressiveness of TTS models. Although these strategies showed impressive results, they still have some limitations in utilizing language information. First, most approaches only use graph networks to utilize syntactic and semantic information without considering linguistic features. Second, most previous works do not explicitly consider adjacent words when encoding syntactic and semantic information, even though it is obvious that adjacent words are usually meaningful when encoding the current word. To address these issues, we propose Relation-aware Word Encoding Network (RWEN), which effectively allows syntactic and semantic information based on two modules (i.e., Semantic-level Relation Encoding and Adjacent Word Relation Encoding). Experimental results show substantial improvements compared to previous works.

Cross-Entropy Method (CEM) is commonly used for planning in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) where a centralized approach is typically utilized to update the sampling distribution based on only the top-$k$ operation's results on samples. In this paper, we show that such a centralized approach makes CEM vulnerable to local optima, thus impairing its sample efficiency. To tackle this issue, we propose Decentralized CEM (DecentCEM), a simple but effective improvement over classical CEM, by using an ensemble of CEM instances running independently from one another, and each performing a local improvement of its own sampling distribution. We provide both theoretical and empirical analysis to demonstrate the effectiveness of this simple decentralized approach. We empirically show that, compared to the classical centralized approach using either a single or even a mixture of Gaussian distributions, our DecentCEM finds the global optimum much more consistently thus improves the sample efficiency. Furthermore, we plug in our DecentCEM in the planning problem of MBRL, and evaluate our approach in several continuous control environments, with comparison to the state-of-art CEM based MBRL approaches (PETS and POPLIN). Results show sample efficiency improvement by simply replacing the classical CEM module with our DecentCEM module, while only sacrificing a reasonable amount of computational cost. Lastly, we conduct ablation studies for more in-depth analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/vincentzhang/decentCEM

Accurate airway extraction from computed tomography (CT) images is a critical step for planning navigation bronchoscopy and quantitative assessment of airway-related chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The existing methods are challenging to sufficiently segment the airway, especially the high-generation airway, with the constraint of the limited label and cannot meet the clinical use in COPD. We propose a novel two-stage 3D contextual transformer-based U-Net for airway segmentation using CT images. The method consists of two stages, performing initial and refined airway segmentation. The two-stage model shares the same subnetwork with different airway masks as input. Contextual transformer block is performed both in the encoder and decoder path of the subnetwork to finish high-quality airway segmentation effectively. In the first stage, the total airway mask and CT images are provided to the subnetwork, and the intrapulmonary airway mask and corresponding CT scans to the subnetwork in the second stage. Then the predictions of the two-stage method are merged as the final prediction. Extensive experiments were performed on in-house and multiple public datasets. Quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrate that our proposed method extracted much more branches and lengths of the tree while accomplishing state-of-the-art airway segmentation performance. The code is available at https://github.com/zhaozsq/airway_segmentation.

Designing powerful adversarial attacks is of paramount importance for the evaluation of $\ell_p$-bounded adversarial defenses. Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) is one of the most effective and conceptually simple algorithms to generate such adversaries. The search space of PGD is dictated by the steepest ascent directions of an objective. Despite the plethora of objective function choices, there is no universally superior option and robustness overestimation may arise from ill-suited objective selection. Driven by this observation, we postulate that the combination of different objectives through a simple loss alternating scheme renders PGD more robust towards design choices. We experimentally verify this assertion on a synthetic-data example and by evaluating our proposed method across 25 different $\ell_{\infty}$-robust models and 3 datasets. The performance improvement is consistent, when compared to the single loss counterparts. In the CIFAR-10 dataset, our strongest adversarial attack outperforms all of the white-box components of AutoAttack (AA) ensemble, as well as the most powerful attacks existing on the literature, achieving state-of-the-art results in the computational budget of our study ($T=100$, no restarts).

We present a novel corpus for French dialect identification comprising 413,522 French text samples collected from public news websites in Belgium, Canada, France and Switzerland. To ensure an accurate estimation of the dialect identification performance of models, we designed the corpus to eliminate potential biases related to topic, writing style, and publication source. More precisely, the training, validation and test splits are collected from different news websites, while searching for different keywords (topics). This leads to a French cross-domain (FreCDo) dialect identification task. We conduct experiments with four competitive baselines, a fine-tuned CamemBERT model, an XGBoost based on fine-tuned CamemBERT features, a Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifier based on fine-tuned CamemBERT features, and an SVM based on word n-grams. Aside from presenting quantitative results, we also make an analysis of the most discriminative features learned by CamemBERT. Our corpus is available at https://github.com/MihaelaGaman/FreCDo.