Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to extract and integrate semantic information collected from multiple modalities to recognize the expressed emotions and sentiment in multimodal data. This research area's major concern lies in developing an extraordinary fusion scheme that can extract and integrate key information from various modalities. However, one issue that may restrict previous work to achieve a higher level is the lack of proper modeling for the dynamics of the competition between the independence and relevance among modalities, which could deteriorate fusion outcomes by causing the collapse of modality-specific feature space or introducing extra noise. To mitigate this, we propose the Bi-Bimodal Fusion Network (BBFN), a novel end-to-end network that performs fusion (relevance increment) and separation (difference increment) on pairwise modality representations. The two parts are trained simultaneously such that the combat between them is simulated. The model takes two bimodal pairs as input due to the known information imbalance among modalities. In addition, we leverage a gated control mechanism in the Transformer architecture to further improve the final output. Experimental results on three datasets (CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and UR-FUNNY) verifies that our model significantly outperforms the SOTA. The implementation of this work is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/BBFN.

Several approaches have been developed to answer specific questions that a user may have about an AI system that can plan and act. However, the problems of identifying which questions to ask and that of computing a user-interpretable symbolic description of the overall capabilities of the system have remained largely unaddressed. This paper presents an approach for addressing these problems by learning user-interpretable symbolic descriptions of the limits and capabilities of a black-box AI system using low-level simulators. It uses a hierarchical active querying paradigm to generate questions and to learn a user-interpretable model of the AI system based on its responses. In contrast to prior work, we consider settings where imprecision of the user's conceptual vocabulary precludes a direct expression of the agent's capabilities. Furthermore, our approach does not require assumptions about the internal design of the target AI system or about the methods that it may use to compute or learn task solutions. Empirical evaluation on several game-based simulator domains shows that this approach can efficiently learn symbolic models of AI systems that use a deterministic black-box policy in fully observable scenarios.

This paper surveys and organizes research works in a new paradigm in natural language processing, which we dub "prompt-based learning". Unlike traditional supervised learning, which trains a model to take in an input x and predict an output y as P(y|x), prompt-based learning is based on language models that model the probability of text directly. To use these models to perform prediction tasks, the original input x is modified using a template into a textual string prompt x' that has some unfilled slots, and then the language model is used to probabilistically fill the unfilled information to obtain a final string x, from which the final output y can be derived. This framework is powerful and attractive for a number of reasons: it allows the language model to be pre-trained on massive amounts of raw text, and by defining a new prompting function the model is able to perform few-shot or even zero-shot learning, adapting to new scenarios with few or no labeled data. In this paper we introduce the basics of this promising paradigm, describe a unified set of mathematical notations that can cover a wide variety of existing work, and organize existing work along several dimensions, e.g.the choice of pre-trained models, prompts, and tuning strategies. To make the field more accessible to interested beginners, we not only make a systematic review of existing works and a highly structured typology of prompt-based concepts, but also release other resources, e.g., a website http://pretrain.nlpedia.ai/ including constantly-updated survey, and paperlist.

Countless research works of deep neural networks (DNNs) in the task of credit card fraud detection have focused on improving the accuracy of point predictions and mitigating unwanted biases by building different network architectures or learning models. Quantifying uncertainty accompanied by point estimation is essential because it mitigates model unfairness and permits practitioners to develop trustworthy systems which abstain from suboptimal decisions due to low confidence. Explicitly, assessing uncertainties associated with DNNs predictions is critical in real-world card fraud detection settings for characteristic reasons, including (a) fraudsters constantly change their strategies, and accordingly, DNNs encounter observations that are not generated by the same process as the training distribution, (b) owing to the time-consuming process, very few transactions are timely checked by professional experts to update DNNs. Therefore, this study proposes three uncertainty quantification (UQ) techniques named Monte Carlo dropout, ensemble, and ensemble Monte Carlo dropout for card fraud detection applied on transaction data. Moreover, to evaluate the predictive uncertainty estimates, UQ confusion matrix and several performance metrics are utilized. Through experimental results, we show that the ensemble is more effective in capturing uncertainty corresponding to generated predictions. Additionally, we demonstrate that the proposed UQ methods provide extra insight to the point predictions, leading to elevate the fraud prevention process.

As the proportion of road accidents increases each year, driver distraction continues to be an important risk component in road traffic injuries and deaths. The distractions caused by the increasing use of mobile phones and other wireless devices pose a potential risk to road safety. Our current study aims to aid the already existing techniques in driver posture recognition by improving the performance in the driver distraction classification problem. We present an approach using a genetic algorithm-based ensemble of six independent deep neural architectures, namely, AlexNet, VGG-16, EfficientNet B0, Vanilla CNN, Modified DenseNet, and InceptionV3 + BiLSTM. We test it on two comprehensive datasets, the AUC Distracted Driver Dataset, on which our technique achieves an accuracy of 96.37%, surpassing the previously obtained 95.98%, and on the State Farm Driver Distraction Dataset, on which we attain an accuracy of 99.75%. The 6-Model Ensemble gave an inference time of 0.024 seconds as measured on our machine with Ubuntu 20.04(64-bit) and GPU as GeForce GTX 1080.

The abundance of clouds, located both spatially and temporally, often makes remote sensing (RS) applications with optical images difficult or even impossible to perform. Traditional cloud removing techniques have been studied for years, and recently, Machine Learning (ML)-based approaches have also been considered. In this manuscript, a novel method for the restoration of clouds-corrupted optical images is presented, able to generate the whole optical scene of interest, not only the cloudy pixels, and based on a Joint Data Fusion paradigm, where three deep neural networks are hierarchically combined. Spatio-temporal features are separately extracted by a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) and by a Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM), from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data and optical time-series of data respectively, and then combined with a U-shaped network. The use of time-series of data has been rarely explored in the state of the art for this peculiar objective, and moreover existing models do not combine both spatio-temporal domains and SAR-optical imagery. Quantitative and qualitative results have shown a good ability of the proposed method in producing cloud-free images, by also preserving the details and outperforming the cGAN and the ConvLSTM when individually used. Both the code and the dataset have been implemented from scratch and made available to interested researchers for further analysis and investigation.

Sense8 was an eight-hour Netflix Original series created by Lana and Andy Wachowski, and J. Michael Straczynski. The science fiction series starred eight characters worldwide, connected by a bond that can be felt through every sense. Sense8 follows the inhabitants of Chicago, who are all connected by more than just two or three senses; they are experiencing everything that their counterparts are seeing, sensing, hearing, and feeling. The series is a love story between two characters, and as they become more connected to their sense counterparts, they begin to feel their partners' pain. They also carry the responsibility of protecting their loved ones that are constantly in danger and fighting for freedom from some sort of outside threat.

In this post, we summarise the final three invited talks from the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). These presentations covered: how machine learning can complement randomised controlled trials, encoding and decoding speech, and molecular science. Esther's work centres on the use of randomised controlled trials (RCT) and she runs policy experiments with the aim of understanding which policies work and which don't. Her work is particularly focussed on reducing poverty. Work of this type involves many causal questions, for which there are often many competing ideas. Such is the field that there is no real guidance for theory; experiments are needed to determine successful policies.

Recent advances in the areas of multimodal machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the development of challenging tasks at the intersection of Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and Embodied AI. Whereas many approaches and previous survey pursuits have characterised one or two of these dimensions, there has not been a holistic analysis at the center of all three. Moreover, even when combinations of these topics are considered, more focus is placed on describing, e.g., current architectural methods, as opposed to also illustrating high-level challenges and opportunities for the field. In this survey paper, we discuss Embodied Vision-Language Planning (EVLP) tasks, a family of prominent embodied navigation and manipulation problems that jointly use computer vision and natural language. We propose a taxonomy to unify these tasks and provide an in-depth analysis and comparison of the new and current algorithmic approaches, metrics, simulated environments, as well as the datasets used for EVLP tasks. Finally, we present the core challenges that we believe new EVLP works should seek to address, and we advocate for task construction that enables model generalizability and furthers real-world deployment.

Predictive coding offers a potentially unifying account of cortical function -- postulating that the core function of the brain is to minimize prediction errors with respect to a generative model of the world. The theory is closely related to the Bayesian brain framework and, over the last two decades, has gained substantial influence in the fields of theoretical and cognitive neuroscience. A large body of research has arisen based on both empirically testing improved and extended theoretical and mathematical models of predictive coding, as well as in evaluating their potential biological plausibility for implementation in the brain and the concrete neurophysiological and psychological predictions made by the theory. Despite this enduring popularity, however, no comprehensive review of predictive coding theory, and especially of recent developments in this field, exists. Here, we provide a comprehensive review both of the core mathematical structure and logic of predictive coding, thus complementing recent tutorials in the literature. We also review a wide range of classic and recent work within the framework, ranging from the neurobiologically realistic microcircuits that could implement predictive coding, to the close relationship between predictive coding and the widely-used backpropagation of error algorithm, as well as surveying the close relationships between predictive coding and modern machine learning techniques.