Large-scale models require substantial computational resources for analysis and studying treatment conditions. Specifically, estimating treatment effects using simulations may require a lot of infeasible resources to allocate at every treatment condition. Therefore, it is essential to develop efficient methods to allocate computational resources for estimating treatment effects. Agent-based simulation allows us to generate highly realistic simulation samples. FRED (A Framework for Reconstructing Epidemiological Dynamics) is an agent-based modeling system with a geospatial perspective using a synthetic population constructed based on the U.S. census data. Given its synthetic population, FRED simulations present a baseline for comparable results from different treatment conditions and treatment conditions. In this paper, we show three other methods for estimating treatment effects. In the first method, we resort to brute-force allocation, where all treatment conditions have an equal number of samples with a relatively large number of simulation runs. In the second method, we try to reduce the number of simulation runs by customizing individual samples required for each treatment effect based on the width of confidence intervals around the mean estimates. In the third method, we use a regression model, which allows us to learn across the treatment conditions such that simulation samples allocated for a treatment condition will help better estimate treatment effects in other conditions. We show that the regression-based methods result in a comparable estimate of treatment effects with less computational resources. The reduced variability and faster convergence of model-based estimates come at the cost of increased bias, and the bias-variance trade-off can be controlled by adjusting the number of model parameters (e.g., including higher-order interaction terms in the regression model).

While most research into speech synthesis has focused on synthesizing high-quality speech for in-dataset speakers, an equally essential yet unsolved problem is synthesizing speech for unseen speakers who are out-of-dataset with limited reference data, i.e., speaker adaptive speech synthesis. Many studies have proposed zero-shot speaker adaptive text-to-speech and voice conversion approaches aimed at this task. However, most current approaches suffer from the degradation of naturalness and speaker similarity when synthesizing speech for unseen speakers (i.e., speakers not in the training dataset) due to the poor generalizability of the model in out-of-distribution data. To address this problem, we propose GZS-TV, a generalizable zero-shot speaker adaptive text-to-speech and voice conversion model. GZS-TV introduces disentangled representation learning for both speaker embedding extraction and timbre transformation to improve model generalization and leverages the representation learning capability of the variational autoencoder to enhance the speaker encoder. Our experiments demonstrate that GZS-TV reduces performance degradation on unseen speakers and outperforms all baseline models in multiple datasets.

We propose a novel master-slave architecture to solve the top-$K$ combinatorial multi-armed bandits problem with non-linear bandit feedback and diversity constraints, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first combinatorial bandits setting considering diversity constraints under bandit feedback. Specifically, to efficiently explore the combinatorial and constrained action space, we introduce six slave models with distinguished merits to generate diversified samples well balancing rewards and constraints as well as efficiency. Moreover, we propose teacher learning based optimization and the policy co-training technique to boost the performance of the multiple slave models. The master model then collects the elite samples provided by the slave models and selects the best sample estimated by a neural contextual UCB-based network to make a decision with a trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Thanks to the elaborate design of slave models, the co-training mechanism among slave models, and the novel interactions between the master and slave models, our approach significantly surpasses existing state-of-the-art algorithms in both synthetic and real datasets for recommendation tasks. The code is available at: \url{https://github.com/huanghanchi/Master-slave-Algorithm-for-Top-K-Bandits}.

Emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) is a crucial task for building human-like conversational agents. While substantial efforts have been devoted to ERC for chit-chat dialogues, the task-oriented counterpart is largely left unattended. Directly applying chit-chat ERC models to task-oriented dialogues (ToDs) results in suboptimal performance as these models overlook key features such as the correlation between emotions and task completion in ToDs. In this paper, we propose a framework that turns a chit-chat ERC model into a task-oriented one, addressing three critical aspects: data, features and objective. First, we devise two ways of augmenting rare emotions to improve ERC performance. Second, we use dialogue states as auxiliary features to incorporate key information from the goal of the user. Lastly, we leverage a multi-aspect emotion definition in ToDs to devise a multi-task learning objective and a novel emotion-distance weighted loss function. Our framework yields significant improvements for a range of chit-chat ERC models on EmoWOZ, a large-scale dataset for user emotion in ToDs. We further investigate the generalisability of the best resulting model to predict user satisfaction in different ToD datasets. A comparison with supervised baselines shows a strong zero-shot capability, highlighting the potential usage of our framework in wider scenarios.

The rapid growth of deep learning (DL) has spurred interest in enhancing log-based anomaly detection. This approach aims to extract meaning from log events (log message templates) and develop advanced DL models for anomaly detection. However, these DL methods face challenges like heavy reliance on training data, labels, and computational resources due to model complexity. In contrast, traditional machine learning and data mining techniques are less data-dependent and more efficient but less effective than DL. To make log-based anomaly detection more practical, the goal is to enhance traditional techniques to match DL's effectiveness. Previous research in a different domain (linking questions on Stack Overflow) suggests that optimized traditional techniques can rival state-of-the-art DL methods. Drawing inspiration from this concept, we conducted an empirical study. We optimized the unsupervised PCA (Principal Component Analysis), a traditional technique, by incorporating lightweight semantic-based log representation. This addresses the issue of unseen log events in training data, enhancing log representation. Our study compared seven log-based anomaly detection methods, including four DL-based, two traditional, and the optimized PCA technique, using public and industrial datasets. Results indicate that the optimized unsupervised PCA technique achieves similar effectiveness to advanced supervised/semi-supervised DL methods while being more stable with limited training data and resource-efficient. This demonstrates the adaptability and strength of traditional techniques through small yet impactful adaptations.

Existing K-nearest neighbor (KNN) retrieval-based methods usually conduct industrial anomaly detection in two stages: obtain feature representations with a pre-trained CNN model and perform distance measures for defect detection. However, the features are not fully exploited as they ignore domain bias and the difference of local density in feature space, which limits the detection performance. In this paper, we propose Reducing Biases (REB) in representation by considering the domain bias of the pre-trained model and building a self-supervised learning task for better domain adaption with a defect generation strategy (DefectMaker) imitating the natural defects. Additionally, we propose a local density KNN (LDKNN) to reduce the local density bias and obtain effective anomaly detection. We achieve a promising result of 99.5\% AUROC on the widely used MVTec AD benchmark. We also achieve 88.0\% AUROC on the challenging MVTec LOCO AD dataset and bring an improvement of 4.7\% AUROC to the state-of-the-art result. All results are obtained with smaller backbone networks such as Vgg11 and Resnet18, which indicates the effectiveness and efficiency of REB for practical industrial applications.

This paper describes our multiclass classification system developed as part of the LTEDI@RANLP-2023 shared task. We used a BERT-based language model to detect homophobic and transphobic content in social media comments across five language conditions: English, Spanish, Hindi, Malayalam, and Tamil. We retrained a transformer-based crosslanguage pretrained language model, XLMRoBERTa, with spatially and temporally relevant social media language data. We also retrained a subset of models with simulated script-mixed social media language data with varied performance. We developed the best performing seven-label classification system for Malayalam based on weighted macro averaged F1 score (ranked first out of six) with variable performance for other language and class-label conditions. We found the inclusion of this spatio-temporal data improved the classification performance for all language and task conditions when compared with the baseline. The results suggests that transformer-based language classification systems are sensitive to register-specific and language-specific retraining.

Automatic differentiation variational inference (ADVI) offers fast and easy-to-use posterior approximation in multiple modern probabilistic programming languages. However, its stochastic optimizer lacks clear convergence criteria and requires tuning parameters. Moreover, ADVI inherits the poor posterior uncertainty estimates of mean-field variational Bayes (MFVB). We introduce "deterministic ADVI" (DADVI) to address these issues. DADVI replaces the intractable MFVB objective with a fixed Monte Carlo approximation, a technique known in the stochastic optimization literature as the "sample average approximation" (SAA). By optimizing an approximate but deterministic objective, DADVI can use off-the-shelf second-order optimization, and, unlike standard mean-field ADVI, is amenable to more accurate posterior covariances via linear response (LR). In contrast to existing worst-case theory, we show that, on certain classes of common statistical problems, DADVI and the SAA can perform well with relatively few samples even in very high dimensions, though we also show that such favorable results cannot extend to variational approximations that are too expressive relative to mean-field ADVI. We show on a variety of real-world problems that DADVI reliably finds good solutions with default settings (unlike ADVI) and, together with LR covariances, is typically faster and more accurate than standard ADVI.

Predictive algorithms inform consequential decisions in settings where the outcome is selectively observed given some choices made by human decision makers. There often exists unobserved confounders that affected the decision maker's choice and the outcome. We propose a unified methodology for the robust design and evaluation of predictive algorithms in selectively observed data under such unobserved confounding. Our approach imposes general assumptions on how much the outcome may vary on average between unselected and selected units conditional on observed covariates and identified nuisance parameters, formalizing popular empirical strategies for imputing missing data such as proxy outcomes and instrumental variables. We develop debiased machine learning estimators for the bounds on a large class of predictive performance estimands, such as the conditional likelihood of the outcome, a predictive algorithm's mean square error, true/false positive rate, and many others, under these assumptions. In an administrative dataset from a large Australian financial institution, we illustrate how varying assumptions on unobserved confounding leads to meaningful changes in default risk predictions and evaluations of credit scores across sensitive groups.

Deep code generation is a topic of deep learning for software engineering (DL4SE), which adopts neural models to generate code for the intended functions. Since end-to-end neural methods lack domain knowledge and software hierarchy awareness, they tend to perform poorly w.r.t project-level tasks. To systematically explore the potential improvements of code generation, we let it participate in the whole top-down development from \emph{expressibles} to \emph{executables}, which is possible in limited scopes. In the process, it benefits from massive samples, features, and knowledge. As the foundation, we suggest building a taxonomy on code data, namely code taxonomy, leveraging the categorization of code information. Moreover, we introduce a three-layer semantic pyramid (SP) to associate text data and code data. It identifies the information of different abstraction levels, and thus introduces the domain knowledge on development and reveals the hierarchy of software. Furthermore, we propose a semantic pyramid framework (SPF) as the approach, focusing on software of high modularity and low complexity. SPF divides the code generation process into stages and reserves spots for potential interactions. In addition, we conceived preliminary applications in software development to confirm the neuro-symbolic framework.