Active learning presents a promising avenue for training high-performance models with minimal labeled data, achieved by judiciously selecting the most informative instances to label and incorporating them into the task learner. Despite notable advancements in active learning for image recognition, metrics devised or learned to gauge the information gain of data, crucial for query strategy design, do not consistently align with task model performance metrics, such as Mean Average Precision (MeanAP) in object detection tasks. This paper introduces MeanAP-Guided Reinforced Active Learning for Object Detection (MAGRAL), a novel approach that directly utilizes the MeanAP metric of the task model to devise a sampling strategy employing a reinforcement learning-based sampling agent. Built upon LSTM architecture, the agent efficiently explores and selects subsequent training instances, and optimizes the process through policy gradient with MeanAP serving as reward. Recognizing the time-intensive nature of MeanAP computation at each step, we propose fast look-up tables to expedite agent training. We assess MAGRAL's efficacy across popular benchmarks, PASCAL VOC and MS COCO, utilizing different backbone architectures. Empirical findings substantiate MAGRAL's superiority over recent state-of-the-art methods, showcasing substantial performance gains. MAGRAL establishes a robust baseline for reinforced active object detection, signifying its potential in advancing the field.

The quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) is typically measured by word error rate (WER). WER estimation is a task aiming to predict the WER of an ASR system, given a speech utterance and a transcription. This task has gained increasing attention while advanced ASR systems are trained on large amounts of data. In this case, WER estimation becomes necessary in many scenarios, for example, selecting training data with unknown transcription quality or estimating the testing performance of an ASR system without ground truth transcriptions. Facing large amounts of data, the computation efficiency of a WER estimator becomes essential in practical applications. However, previous works usually did not consider it as a priority. In this paper, a Fast WER estimator (Fe-WER) using self-supervised learning representation (SSLR) is introduced. The estimator is built upon SSLR aggregated by average pooling. The results show that Fe-WER outperformed the e-WER3 baseline relatively by 19.69% and 7.16% on Ted-Lium3 in both evaluation metrics of root mean square error and Pearson correlation coefficient, respectively. Moreover, the estimation weighted by duration was 10.43% when the target was 10.88%. Lastly, the inference speed was about 4x in terms of a real-time factor.

Plan-and-Write is a common hierarchical approach in long-form narrative text generation, which first creates a plan to guide the narrative writing. Following this approach, several studies rely on simply prompting large language models for planning, which often yields suboptimal results. In this paper, we propose a new framework called Evaluation-guided Iterative Plan Extraction for long-form narrative text generation (EIPE-text), which extracts plans from the corpus of narratives and utilizes the extracted plans to construct a better planner. EIPE-text has three stages: plan extraction, learning, and inference. In the plan extraction stage, it iteratively extracts and improves plans from the narrative corpus and constructs a plan corpus. We propose a question answer (QA) based evaluation mechanism to automatically evaluate the plans and generate detailed plan refinement instructions to guide the iterative improvement. In the learning stage, we build a better planner by fine-tuning with the plan corpus or in-context learning with examples in the plan corpus. Finally, we leverage a hierarchical approach to generate long-form narratives. We evaluate the effectiveness of EIPE-text in the domains of novels and storytelling. Both GPT-4-based evaluations and human evaluations demonstrate that our method can generate more coherent and relevant long-form narratives. Our code will be released in the future.

Foundation models (FM) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks (especially in the fields of natural language processing and computer vision), primarily attributed to their ability to comprehend instructions and access extensive, high-quality data. This not only showcases their current effectiveness but also sets a promising trajectory towards the development of artificial general intelligence. Unfortunately, due to multiple constraints, the raw data of the model used for large model training are often inaccessible, so the use of end-to-end models for downstream tasks has become a new research trend, which we call Learn From Model (LFM) in this article. LFM focuses on the research, modification, and design of FM based on the model interface, so as to better understand the model structure and weights (in a black box environment), and to generalize the model to downstream tasks. The study of LFM techniques can be broadly categorized into five major areas: model tuning, model distillation, model reuse, meta learning and model editing. Each category encompasses a repertoire of methods and strategies that aim to enhance the capabilities and performance of FM. This paper gives a comprehensive review of the current methods based on FM from the perspective of LFM, in order to help readers better understand the current research status and ideas. To conclude, we summarize the survey by highlighting several critical areas for future exploration and addressing open issues that require further attention from the research community. The relevant papers we investigated in this article can be accessed at .

Clickbait spoiling aims to generate a short text to satisfy the curiosity induced by a clickbait post. As it is a newly introduced task, the dataset is only available in English so far. Our contributions include the construction of manually labeled clickbait spoiling corpus in Indonesian and an evaluation on using cross-lingual zero-shot question answering-based models to tackle clikcbait spoiling for low-resource language like Indonesian. We utilize selection of multilingual language models. The experimental results suggest that XLM-RoBERTa (large) model outperforms other models for phrase and passage spoilers, meanwhile, mDeBERTa (base) model outperforms other models for multipart spoilers.

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) is an active area of research in natural language processing (NLP) concerned with identifying and extracting relationships between entities beyond sentence boundaries. Compared to the more traditional sentence-level relation extraction, DocRE provides a broader context for analysis and is more challenging because it involves identifying relationships that may span multiple sentences or paragraphs. This task has gained increased interest as a viable solution to build and populate knowledge bases automatically from unstructured large-scale documents (e.g., scientific papers, legal contracts, or news articles), in order to have a better understanding of relationships between entities. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of recent advances in this field, highlighting its different applications in comparison to sentence-level relation extraction.

Decision trees are interpretable models that are well-suited to non-linear learning problems. Much work has been done on extending decision tree learning algorithms with differential privacy, a system that guarantees the privacy of samples within the training data. However, current state-of-the-art algorithms for this purpose sacrifice much utility for a small privacy benefit. These solutions create random decision nodes that reduce decision tree accuracy or spend an excessive share of the privacy budget on labeling leaves. Moreover, many works do not support continuous features or leak information about them. We propose a new method called PrivaTree based on private histograms that chooses good splits while consuming a small privacy budget. The resulting trees provide a significantly better privacy-utility trade-off and accept mixed numerical and categorical data without leaking information about numerical features. Finally, while it is notoriously hard to give robustness guarantees against data poisoning attacks, we demonstrate bounds for the expected accuracy and success rates of backdoor attacks against differentially-private learners. By leveraging the better privacy-utility trade-off of PrivaTree we are able to train decision trees with significantly better robustness against backdoor attacks compared to regular decision trees and with meaningful theoretical guarantees.

In recent years, computer vision tasks like target tracking and human pose estimation have immensely benefited from synthetic data generation and novel rendering techniques. On the other hand, methods in robotics, especially for robot perception, have been slow to leverage these techniques. This is because state-of-the-art simulation frameworks for robotics lack either complete control, integration with the Robot Operating System (ROS), realistic physics or photorealism. To solve this, we present a fully customizable framework for generating realistic animated dynamic environments (GRADE) for robotics research, focused primarily at robot perception. The framework can be used either to generate ground truth data for robotic vision-related tasks and offline processing, or to experiment with robots online in dynamic environments. We build upon the Nvidia Isaac Sim to allow control of custom robots. We provide methods to include assets, populate and control the simulation, and process the data. Using autonomous robots in GRADE, we generate video datasets of an indoor dynamic environment. First, we use it to demonstrate the framework's visual realism by evaluating the sim-to-real gap through experiments with YOLO and Mask R-CNN. Second, we benchmark dynamic SLAM algorithms with this dataset. This not only shows that GRADE can significantly improve training performance and generalization to real sequences, but also highlights how current dynamic SLAM methods over-rely on known benchmarks, failing to generalize. We also introduce a method to precisely repeat a previously recorded experiment, while allowing changes in the surroundings of the robot. Code and data are provided as open-source at https://grade.is.tue.mpg.de.

Adversarial imitation learning (AIL) has become a popular alternative to supervised imitation learning that reduces the distribution shift suffered by the latter. However, AIL requires effective exploration during an online reinforcement learning phase. In this work, we show that the standard, naive approach to exploration can manifest as a suboptimal local maximum if a policy learned with AIL sufficiently matches the expert distribution without fully learning the desired task. This can be particularly catastrophic for manipulation tasks, where the difference between an expert and a non-expert state-action pair is often subtle. We present Learning from Guided Play (LfGP), a framework in which we leverage expert demonstrations of multiple exploratory, auxiliary tasks in addition to a main task. The addition of these auxiliary tasks forces the agent to explore states and actions that standard AIL may learn to ignore. Additionally, this particular formulation allows for the reusability of expert data between main tasks. Our experimental results in a challenging multitask robotic manipulation domain indicate that LfGP significantly outperforms both AIL and behaviour cloning, while also being more expert sample efficient than these baselines. To explain this performance gap, we provide further analysis of a toy problem that highlights the coupling between a local maximum and poor exploration, and also visualize the differences between the learned models from AIL and LfGP.

Abstract--Although it has been demonstrated that Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms are vulnerable to deliberate attacks, the question of whether such weaknesses can lead to software security threats is under-explored. To bridge this gap, we conducted vulnerability tests on Text-to-SQL systems that are commonly used to create natural language interfaces to databases. We showed that the Text-to-SQL modules within six commercial applications can be manipulated to produce malicious code, potentially leading to data breaches and Denial of Service attacks. This is the first demonstration that NLP (a) DoS attack: affecting the utility of one cloud server. In addition, experiments using four open-source language models verified that straightforward backdoor attacks on Text-to-SQL systems achieve a 100% success rate without affecting their performance. The aim of this work is to draw the community's attention to potential software security issues associated with NLP algorithms and encourage exploration of methods to mitigate against them.