We introduce distributed NLI, a new NLU task with a goal to predict the distribution of human judgements for natural language inference. We show that models can capture human judgement distribution by applying additional distribution estimation methods, namely, Monte Carlo (MC) Dropout, Deep Ensemble, Re-Calibration, and Distribution Distillation. All four of these methods substantially outperform the softmax baseline. We show that MC Dropout is able to achieve decent performance without any distribution annotations while Re-Calibration can further give substantial improvements when extra distribution annotations are provided, suggesting the value of multiple annotations for the example in modeling the distribution of human judgements. Moreover, MC Dropout and Re-Calibration can achieve decent transfer performance on out-of-domain data. Despite these improvements, the best results are still far below estimated human upper-bound, indicating that the task of predicting the distribution of human judgements is still an open, challenging problem with large room for future improvements. We showcase the common errors for MC Dropout and Re-Calibration. Finally, we give guidelines on the usage of these methods with different levels of data availability and encourage future work on modeling the human opinion distribution for language reasoning.

Finding the best mathematical equation to deal with the different challenges found in complex scenarios requires a thorough understanding of the scenario and a trial and error process carried out by experts. In recent years, most state-of-the-art equation discovery methods have been widely applied in modeling and identification systems. However, equation discovery approaches can be very useful in computer vision, particularly in the field of feature extraction. In this paper, we focus on recent AI advances to present a novel framework for automatically discovering equations from scratch with little human intervention to deal with the different challenges encountered in real-world scenarios. In addition, our proposal can reduce human bias by proposing a search space design through generative network instead of hand-designed. As a proof of concept, the equations discovered by our framework are used to distinguish moving objects from the background in video sequences. Experimental results show the potential of the proposed approach and its effectiveness in discovering the best equation in video sequences.

The past decade has witnessed a groundbreaking rise of machine learning for human language analysis, with current methods capable of automatically accurately recovering various aspects of syntax and semantics - including sentence structure and grounded word meaning - from large data collections. Recent research showed the promise of such tools for analyzing acoustic communication in nonhuman species. We posit that machine learning will be the cornerstone of future collection, processing, and analysis of multimodal streams of data in animal communication studies, including bioacoustic, behavioral, biological, and environmental data. Cetaceans are unique non-human model species as they possess sophisticated acoustic communications, but utilize a very different encoding system that evolved in an aquatic rather than terrestrial medium. Sperm whales, in particular, with their highly-developed neuroanatomical features, cognitive abilities, social structures, and discrete click-based encoding make for an excellent starting point for advanced machine learning tools that can be applied to other animals in the future. This paper details a roadmap toward this goal based on currently existing technology and multidisciplinary scientific community effort. We outline the key elements required for the collection and processing of massive bioacoustic data of sperm whales, detecting their basic communication units and language-like higher-level structures, and validating these models through interactive playback experiments. The technological capabilities developed by such an undertaking are likely to yield cross-applications and advancements in broader communities investigating non-human communication and animal behavioral research.

In this work we explore an auxiliary loss useful for reinforcement learning in environments where strong performing agents are required to be able to navigate a spatial environment. The auxiliary loss proposed is to minimize the classification error of a neural network classifier that predicts whether or not a pair of states sampled from the agents current episode trajectory are in order. The classifier takes as input a pair of states as well as the agent's memory. The motivation for this auxiliary loss is that there is a strong correlation with which of a pair of states is more recent in the agents episode trajectory and which of the two states is spatially closer to the agent. Our hypothesis is that learning features to answer this question encourages the agent to learn and internalize in memory representations of states that facilitate spatial reasoning. We tested this auxiliary loss on a navigation task in a gridworld and achieved 9.6% increase in accumulative episode reward compared to a strong baseline approach.

Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGEs) have been intensively explored in recent years due to their promise for a wide range of applications. However, existing studies focus on improving the final model performance without acknowledging the computational cost of the proposed approaches, in terms of execution time and environmental impact. This paper proposes a simple yet effective KGE framework which can reduce the training time and carbon footprint by orders of magnitudes compared with state-of-the-art approaches, while producing competitive performance. We highlight three technical innovations: full batch learning via relational matrices, closed-form Orthogonal Procrustes Analysis for KGEs, and non-negative-sampling training. In addition, as the first KGE method whose entity embeddings also store full relation information, our trained models encode rich semantics and are highly interpretable. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies involving 13 strong baselines and two standard datasets verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm.

Medtech driven by data collection and AI has significantly enhanced the scope of treatment and care, especially since it emerged as a lifesaver during the pandemic. More sophisticated and smarter machines started making appearances in hospitals to provide contactless care and also in public spaces to enforce social distancing. The Middle East has already seen medical practitioners guide robots towards removal of tumours, but now it seems the machines are ready to take control. Israeli firm Memic has launched a surgical robot which is the first of its kind, since it's a lot more like human beings and can replicate techniques of real doctors. The humanoid has arms which allow it to perform surgeries like any other medical professional, and the artificial limbs are designed to imitate a doctor's arms, down to the movement of shoulders, elbows and wrists.

Back in November, the computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Geoffrey Hinton had a hunch. After a half-century's worth of attempts--some wildly successful--he'd arrived at another promising insight into how the brain works and how to replicate its circuitry in a computer. "It's my current best bet about how things fit together," Hinton says from his home office in Toronto, where he's been sequestered during the pandemic. If his bet pays off, it might spark the next generation of artificial neural networks--mathematical computing systems, loosely inspired by the brain's neurons and synapses, that are at the core of today's artificial intelligence. His "honest motivation," as he puts it, is curiosity. But the practical motivation--and, ideally, the consequence--is more reliable and more trustworthy AI.

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm that protects privacy and tackles the problem of isolated data islands. At present, there are two main communication strategies of FL: synchronous FL and asynchronous FL. The advantages of synchronous FL are that the model has high precision and fast convergence speed. However, this synchronous communication strategy has the risk that the central server waits too long for the devices, namely, the straggler effect which has a negative impact on some time-critical applications. Asynchronous FL has a natural advantage in mitigating the straggler effect, but there are threats of model quality degradation and server crash. Therefore, we combine the advantages of these two strategies to propose a clustered semi-asynchronous federated learning (CSAFL) framework. We evaluate CSAFL based on four imbalanced federated datasets in a non-IID setting and compare CSAFL to the baseline methods. The experimental results show that CSAFL significantly improves test accuracy by more than +5% on the four datasets compared to TA-FedAvg. In particular, CSAFL improves absolute test accuracy by +34.4% on non-IID FEMNIST compared to TA-FedAvg.

Automated seizure detection and classification from electroencephalography (EEG) can greatly improve the diagnosis and treatment of seizures. While prior studies mainly used convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that assume image-like structure in EEG signals or spectrograms, this modeling choice does not reflect the natural geometry of or connectivity between EEG electrodes. In this study, we propose modeling EEGs as graphs and present a graph neural network for automated seizure detection and classification. In addition, we leverage unlabeled EEG data using a self-supervised pre-training strategy. Our graph model with self-supervised pre-training significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art CNN and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models by 6.3 points (7.8%) in Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUROC) for seizure detection and 6.3 points (9.2%) in weighted F1-score for seizure type classification. Ablation studies show that our graph-based modeling approach significantly outperforms existing CNN or LSTM models, and that self-supervision helps further improve the model performance. Moreover, we find that self-supervised pre-training substantially improves model performance on combined tonic seizures, a low-prevalence seizure type. Furthermore, our model interpretability analysis suggests that our model is better at identifying seizure regions compared to an existing CNN. In summary, our graph-based modeling approach integrates domain knowledge about EEG, sets a new state-of-the-art for seizure detection and classification on a large public dataset (5,499 EEG files), and provides better ability to identify seizure regions.

Significant number of researches have been developed recently around intelligent system for traffic management, especially, OCR based license plate recognition, as it is considered as a main step for any automatic traffic management system. Good quality data sets are increasingly needed and produced by the research community to improve the performance of those algorithms. Furthermore, a special need of data is noted for countries having special characters on their licence plates, like Morocco, where Arabic Alphabet is used. In this work, we present a labeled open data set of circulation plates taken in Morocco, for different type of vehicles, namely cars, trucks and motorcycles. This data was collected manually and consists of 705 unique and different images. Furthermore this data was labeled for plate segmentation and for matriculation number OCR. Also, As we show in this paper, the data can be enriched using data augmentation techniques to create training sets with few thousands of images for different machine leaning and AI applications. We present and compare a set of models built on this data. Also, we publish this data as an open access data to encourage innovation and applications in the field of OCR and image processing for traffic control and other applications for transportation and heterogeneous vehicle management.