JamPatoisNLI provides the first dataset for natural language inference in a creole language, Jamaican Patois. Many of the most-spoken low-resource languages are creoles. These languages commonly have a lexicon derived from a major world language and a distinctive grammar reflecting the languages of the original speakers and the process of language birth by creolization. This gives them a distinctive place in exploring the effectiveness of transfer from large monolingual or multilingual pretrained models. While our work, along with previous work, shows that transfer from these models to low-resource languages that are unrelated to languages in their training set is not very effective, we would expect stronger results from transfer to creoles. Indeed, our experiments show considerably better results from few-shot learning of JamPatoisNLI than for such unrelated languages, and help us begin to understand how the unique relationship between creoles and their high-resource base languages affect cross-lingual transfer. JamPatoisNLI, which consists of naturally-occurring premises and expert-written hypotheses, is a step towards steering research into a traditionally underserved language and a useful benchmark for understanding cross-lingual NLP.

We introduce Transformer Grammars (TGs), a novel class of Transformer language models that combine (i) the expressive power, scalability, and strong performance of Transformers and (ii) recursive syntactic compositions, which here are implemented through a special attention mask and deterministic transformation of the linearized tree. We find that TGs outperform various strong baselines on sentence-level language modeling perplexity, as well as on multiple syntax-sensitive language modeling evaluation metrics. Additionally, we find that the recursive syntactic composition bottleneck which represents each sentence as a single vector harms perplexity on document-level language modeling, providing evidence that a different kind of memory mechanism -- one that is independent of composed syntactic representations -- plays an important role in current successful models of long text.

Avodah, a transformative SaaS company powering artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that operates healthcare division AvodahMed, added four new members to the AvodahMed Medical Advisory Council. "We are delighted to welcome Dr. Koppel, Dr. Lytle, Will, and Tony to our multidisciplinary team of the most established and distinguished professionals" Mark Koppel, M.D., Bruce Lytle, M.D., Will Rideout, and Anthony Black will join existing Council members whose collective role is to provide strategic guidance, clinical leadership, and scientific and ethical direction to advance AvodahMed. The Council members will focus on the company's Nsight conversational AI solution's development roadmap designed to detect and boost a medical practice's care management, cost savings, and revenue-boosting opportunities. The solution is also aimed at reducing physician burnout. Mark Koppel, M.D., is a seasoned executive with nearly 20 years of experience in the business of medicine and healthcare.

World Cup 2022 has produced some incredible football and shocks. The group stages provided endless high-octane thrillers, all laced with an air of unpredictability. With 14 goals scored in the first four knockout matches, this tournament has continued to deliver. But behind the captivating lure of this footballing spectacle, there has been an existential battle taking place at the Al Jazeera offices. The question: Who can predict a football game better?

Federated Deep Learning frameworks can be used strategically to monitor Land Use locally and infer environmental impacts globally. Distributed data from across the world would be needed to build a global model for Land Use classification. The need for a Federated approach in this application domain would be to avoid transfer of data from distributed locations and save network bandwidth to reduce communication cost. We use a Federated UNet model for Semantic Segmentation of satellite and street view images. The novelty of the proposed architecture is the integration of Knowledge Distillation to reduce communication cost and response time. The accuracy obtained was above 95% and we also brought in a significant model compression to over 17 times and 62 times for street View and satellite images respectively. Our proposed framework has the potential to be a game-changer in real-time tracking of climate change across the planet.

The post-training quantization (PTQ) challenge of bringing quantized neural net accuracy close to original has drawn much attention driven by industry demand. Many of the methods emphasize optimization of a specific degree-of-freedom (DoF), such as quantization step size, preconditioning factors, bias fixing, often chained to others in multi-step solutions. Here we rethink quantized network parameterization in HW-aware fashion, towards a unified analysis of all quantization DoF, permitting for the first time their joint end-to-end finetuning. Our single-step simple and extendable method, dubbed quantization-aware finetuning (QFT), achieves 4-bit weight quantization results on-par with SoTA within PTQ constraints of speed and resource.

Strategic test allocation plays a major role in the control of both emerging and existing pandemics (e.g., COVID-19, HIV). Widespread testing supports effective epidemic control by (1) reducing transmission via identifying cases, and (2) tracking outbreak dynamics to inform targeted interventions. However, infectious disease surveillance presents unique statistical challenges. For instance, the true outcome of interest - one's positive infectious status, is often a latent variable. In addition, presence of both network and temporal dependence reduces the data to a single observation. As testing entire populations regularly is neither efficient nor feasible, standard approaches to testing recommend simple rule-based testing strategies (e.g., symptom based, contact tracing), without taking into account individual risk. In this work, we study an adaptive sequential design involving n individuals over a period of {\tau} time-steps, which allows for unspecified dependence among individuals and across time. Our causal target parameter is the mean latent outcome we would have obtained after one time-step, if, starting at time t given the observed past, we had carried out a stochastic intervention that maximizes the outcome under a resource constraint. We propose an Online Super Learner for adaptive sequential surveillance that learns the optimal choice of tests strategies over time while adapting to the current state of the outbreak. Relying on a series of working models, the proposed method learns across samples, through time, or both: based on the underlying (unknown) structure in the data. We present an identification result for the latent outcome in terms of the observed data, and demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed strategy in a simulation modeling a residential university environment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Matrix factorization is an important mathematical problem encountered in the context of dictionary learning, recommendation systems and machine learning. We introduce a new `decimation' scheme that maps it to neural network models of associative memory and provide a detailed theoretical analysis of its performance, showing that decimation is able to factorize extensive-rank matrices and to denoise them efficiently. We introduce a decimation algorithm based on ground-state search of the neural network, which shows performances that match the theoretical prediction.

Learning effective joint embedding for cross-modal data has always been a focus in the field of multimodal machine learning. We argue that during multimodal fusion, the generated multimodal embedding may be redundant, and the discriminative unimodal information may be ignored, which often interferes with accurate prediction and leads to a higher risk of overfitting. Moreover, unimodal representations also contain noisy information that negatively influences the learning of cross-modal dynamics. To this end, we introduce the multimodal information bottleneck (MIB), aiming to learn a powerful and sufficient multimodal representation that is free of redundancy and to filter out noisy information in unimodal representations. Specifically, inheriting from the general information bottleneck (IB), MIB aims to learn the minimal sufficient representation for a given task by maximizing the mutual information between the representation and the target and simultaneously constraining the mutual information between the representation and the input data. Different from general IB, our MIB regularizes both the multimodal and unimodal representations, which is a comprehensive and flexible framework that is compatible with any fusion methods. We develop three MIB variants, namely, early-fusion MIB, late-fusion MIB, and complete MIB, to focus on different perspectives of information constraints. Experimental results suggest that the proposed method reaches state-of-the-art performance on the tasks of multimodal sentiment analysis and multimodal emotion recognition across three widely used datasets. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/TmacMai/Multimodal-Information-Bottleneck}.

Gender-inclusive language is important for achieving gender equality in languages with gender inflections, such as German. While stirring some controversy, it is increasingly adopted by companies and political institutions. A handful of tools have been developed to help people use gender-inclusive language by identifying instances of the generic masculine and providing suggestions for more inclusive reformulations. In this report, we define the underlying tasks in terms of natural language processing, and present a dataset and measures for benchmarking them. We also present a model that implements these tasks, by combining an inclusive language database with an elaborate sequence of processing steps via standard pre-trained models. Our model achieves a recall of 0.89 and a precision of 0.82 in our benchmark for identifying exclusive language; and one of its top five suggestions is chosen in real-world texts in 44% of cases. We sketch how the area could be further advanced by training end-to-end models and using large language models; and we urge the community to include more gender-inclusive texts in their training data in order to not present an obstacle to the adoption of gender-inclusive language. Through these efforts, we hope to contribute to restoring justice in language and, to a small extent, in reality.