Oceania
Abode's new wireless doorbell is full of value, with a few caveats
Installing the Abode Wireless Video Doorbell is relatively simple, both when it comes to physically installing the device, and setting it up in the app. Physically, you'll simply screw in a base-plate, then push the doorbell into the plate to attach it. The doorbell comes with two base-plates, one of which is angled. To set the doorbell up in the Abode app, you'll open the app and follow the on-screen instructions to turn the doorbell on and connect the included chime to your Wi-Fi network. It's straightforward, and I experienced no problems while installing the device.
The 20 most puzzling questions in modern life revealed - so do YOU know the answers?
What is an NFT? (34%) Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are generally digital art pieces or music that can be bought or traded online. These are unique computer files encrypted with an artist's signature. As a result, they cannot be replicated, acting as a digital certificate of ownership and authenticity. In other words, buying an NFT is almost like the more traditional purchasing of fine art - except in a digital form. Artists can sell pieces that may be tricky to advertise otherwise, such as digital stickers.
1MDB suspect and Jho Low associate dies weeks after questioning
A suspect in the 1MDB scandal has died weeks after being deported to Malaysia to face questioning over his role in the $4.5bn fraud. Kee Kok Thiam died in hospital on Monday following a "sudden massive stroke" and was cremated on Wednesday morning, Kee's family said in a statement. "We urge all parties not to entertain any speculations on this unfortunate event and allow the family the space to grief [sic] on his passing," the statement said. News of the 56-year-old businessman's death comes hours after Al Jazeera reported that the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) had confirmed the whereabouts of fugitive Malaysian financier Jho Taek Low โ the alleged mastermind of the 1MDB scandal โ in Macau based on its questioning of Kee. The MACC said that Kee, who was deported from Macau earlier this month, revealed he had met with Low and other 1MDB fugitives in the Chinese territory and that Low had instructed him "not to return to Malaysia as a witness in the 1MDB case".
Generic Temporal Reasoning with Differential Analysis and Explanation
Feng, Yu, Zhou, Ben, Wang, Haoyu, Jin, Helen, Roth, Dan
Temporal reasoning is the task of predicting temporal relations of event pairs. While temporal reasoning models can perform reasonably well on in-domain benchmarks, we have little idea of these systems' generalizability due to existing datasets' limitations. In this work, we introduce a novel task named TODAY that bridges this gap with temporal differential analysis, which as the name suggests, evaluates whether systems can correctly understand the effect of incremental changes. Specifically, TODAY introduces slight contextual changes for given event pairs, and systems are asked to tell how this subtle contextual change would affect relevant temporal relation distributions. To facilitate learning, TODAY also annotates human explanations. We show that existing models, including GPT-3.5, drop to random guessing on TODAY, suggesting that they heavily rely on spurious information rather than proper reasoning for temporal predictions. On the other hand, we show that TODAY's supervision style and explanation annotations can be used in joint learning, encouraging models to use more appropriate signals during training and thus outperform across several benchmarks. TODAY can also be used to train models to solicit incidental supervision from noisy sources such as GPT-3.5, thus moving us more toward the goal of generic temporal reasoning systems.
A Pilot Study on Dialogue-Level Dependency Parsing for Chinese
Jiang, Gongyao, Liu, Shuang, Zhang, Meishan, Zhang, Min
Dialogue-level dependency parsing has received insufficient attention, especially for Chinese. To this end, we draw on ideas from syntactic dependency and rhetorical structure theory (RST), developing a high-quality human-annotated corpus, which contains 850 dialogues and 199,803 dependencies. Considering that such tasks suffer from high annotation costs, we investigate zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Based on an existing syntactic treebank, we adopt a signal-based method to transform seen syntactic dependencies into unseen ones between elementary discourse units (EDUs), where the signals are detected by masked language modeling. Besides, we apply single-view and multi-view data selection to access reliable pseudo-labeled instances. Experimental results show the effectiveness of these baselines. Moreover, we discuss several crucial points about our dataset and approach.
Graph Neural Network-Based Anomaly Detection for River Network Systems
Buchhorn, Katie, Santos-Fernandez, Edgar, Mengersen, Kerrie, Salomone, Robert
Water is the lifeblood of river networks, and its quality plays a crucial role in sustaining both aquatic ecosystems and human societies. Real-time monitoring of water quality is increasingly reliant on in-situ sensor technology. Anomaly detection is crucial for identifying erroneous patterns in sensor data, but can be a challenging task due to the complexity and variability of the data, even under normal conditions. This paper presents a solution to the challenging task of anomaly detection for river network sensor data, which is essential for accurate and continuous monitoring. We use a graph neural network model, the recently proposed Graph Deviation Network (GDN), which employs graph attention-based forecasting to capture the complex spatio-temporal relationships between sensors. We propose an alternate anomaly scoring method, GDN+, based on the learned graph. To evaluate the model's efficacy, we introduce new benchmarking simulation experiments with highly-sophisticated dependency structures and subsequence anomalies of various types. We further examine the strengths and weaknesses of this baseline approach, GDN, in comparison to other benchmarking methods on complex real-world river network data. Findings suggest that GDN+ outperforms the baseline approach in high-dimensional data, while also providing improved interpretability. We also introduce software called gnnad.
Strategies for improving low resource speech to text translation relying on pre-trained ASR models
Kesiraju, Santosh, Sarvas, Marek, Pavlicek, Tomas, Macaire, Cecile, Ciuba, Alejandro
This paper presents techniques and findings for improving the performance of low-resource speech to text translation (ST). We conducted experiments on both simulated and real-low resource setups, on language pairs English - Portuguese, and Tamasheq - French respectively. Using the encoder-decoder framework for ST, our results show that a multilingual automatic speech recognition system acts as a good initialization under low-resource scenarios. Furthermore, using the CTC as an additional objective for translation during training and decoding helps to reorder the internal representations and improves the final translation. Through our experiments, we try to identify various factors (initializations, objectives, and hyper-parameters) that contribute the most for improvements in low-resource setups. With only 300 hours of pre-training data, our model achieved 7.3 BLEU score on Tamasheq - French data, outperforming prior published works from IWSLT 2022 by 1.6 points.
EAMDrift: An interpretable self retrain model for time series
Mateus, Gonรงalo, Soares, Clรกudia, Leitรฃo, Joรฃo, Rodrigues, Antรณnio
The use of machine learning for time series prediction has become increasingly popular across various industries thanks to the availability of time series data and advancements in machine learning algorithms. However, traditional methods for time series forecasting rely on pre-optimized models that are ill-equipped to handle unpredictable patterns in data. In this paper, we present EAMDrift, a novel method that combines forecasts from multiple individual predictors by weighting each prediction according to a performance metric. EAMDrift is designed to automatically adapt to out-of-distribution patterns in data and identify the most appropriate models to use at each moment through interpretable mechanisms, which include an automatic retraining process. Specifically, we encode different concepts with different models, each functioning as an observer of specific behaviors. The activation of the overall model then identifies which subset of the concept observers is identifying concepts in the data. This activation is interpretable and based on learned rules, allowing to study of input variables relations. Our study on real-world datasets shows that EAMDrift outperforms individual baseline models by 20% and achieves comparable accuracy results to non-interpretable ensemble models. These findings demonstrate the efficacy of EAMDrift for time-series prediction and highlight the importance of interpretability in machine learning models.
Evaluating GPT's Programming Capability through CodeWars' Katas
Zhang, Zizhuo, Wen, Lian, Zhang, Shaoyang, Chen, David, Jiang, Yanfei
In the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence (AI), understanding the capabilities and limitations of programming-oriented models is crucial. This paper presents a novel evaluation of the programming proficiency of Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) models, specifically GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, against coding problems of varying difficulty levels drawn from Codewars. The experiments reveal a distinct boundary at the 3kyu level, beyond which these GPT models struggle to provide solutions. These findings led to the proposal of a measure for coding problem complexity that incorporates both problem difficulty and the time required for solution. The research emphasizes the need for validation and creative thinking capabilities in AI models to better emulate human problem-solving techniques. Future work aims to refine this proposed complexity measure, enhance AI models with these suggested capabilities, and develop an objective measure for programming problem difficulty. The results of this research offer invaluable insights for improving AI programming capabilities and advancing the frontier of AI problem-solving abilities.
Shedding a PAC-Bayesian Light on Adaptive Sliced-Wasserstein Distances
Ohana, Ruben, Nadjahi, Kimia, Rakotomamonjy, Alain, Ralaivola, Liva
The Sliced-Wasserstein distance (SW) is a computationally efficient and theoretically grounded alternative to the Wasserstein distance. Yet, the literature on its statistical properties -- or, more accurately, its generalization properties -- with respect to the distribution of slices, beyond the uniform measure, is scarce. To bring new contributions to this line of research, we leverage the PAC-Bayesian theory and a central observation that SW may be interpreted as an average risk, the quantity PAC-Bayesian bounds have been designed to characterize. We provide three types of results: i) PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds that hold on what we refer as adaptive Sliced-Wasserstein distances, i.e. SW defined with respect to arbitrary distributions of slices (among which data-dependent distributions), ii) a principled procedure to learn the distribution of slices that yields maximally discriminative SW, by optimizing our theoretical bounds, and iii) empirical illustrations of our theoretical findings.