Spanish is one of the most spoken languages in the globe, but not necessarily Spanish is written and spoken in the same way in different countries. Understanding local language variations can help to improve model performances on regional tasks, both understanding local structures and also improving the message's content. For instance, think about a machine learning engineer who automatizes some language classification task on a particular region or a social scientist trying to understand a regional event with echoes on social media; both can take advantage of dialect-based language models to understand what is happening with more contextual information hence more precision. This manuscript presents and describes a set of regionalized resources for the Spanish language built on four-year Twitter public messages geotagged in 26 Spanish-speaking countries. We introduce word embeddings based on FastText, language models based on BERT, and per-region sample corpora. We also provide a broad comparison among regions covering lexical and semantical similarities; as well as examples of using regional resources on message classification tasks.

So there's this app called Lensa, which was launched as a photo editing app back in 2018, by Prisma Labs. But it only went viral recently for its new AI-generated "magic avatars" feature. Users, provided they upload 10-20 selfies, can pay a small sum to receive digital portraits of themselves morphed into a range of kooky styles from "anime" to "fairy princess". It's one of those trends that launched to meteoritic popularity really fast – it's now the most downloaded photo and video app on the iOS store. Sending pictures of yourself off into the ether to get sent back more pictures of yourself seems a bit weird to me, but I am over 30.

There have been a three points in my life where I have felt something like "this is something huge...it changes everything". The first was during an interaction with a Commodore Pet computer, loading a mine sweeper-type of game. Having a device that allowed users to change what it did and "executed" with simple commands was stunning. It felt like a writable and create-able world, at the hands of each individual. The second moment was in early 2000 as digital networks gave individuals the ability to effortlessly share their thoughts, reflections, and creations with the world through web 2.0/social media - anyone creating and anyone sharing.

The ability to learn from human demonstration endows robots with the ability to automate various tasks. However, directly learning from human demonstration is challenging since the structure of the human hand can be very different from the desired robot gripper. In this work, we show that manipulation skills can be transferred from a human to a robot through the use of micro-evolutionary reinforcement learning, where a five-finger human dexterous hand robot gradually evolves into a commercial robot, while repeated interacting in a physics simulator to continuously update the policy that is first learned from human demonstration. To deal with the high dimensions of robot parameters, we propose an algorithm for multi-dimensional evolution path searching that allows joint optimization of both the robot evolution path and the policy. Through experiments on human object manipulation datasets, we show that our framework can efficiently transfer the expert human agent policy trained from human demonstrations in diverse modalities to target commercial robots.

Bayesian networks (BNs) are attractive, because they are graphical and interpretable machine learning models. However, exact inference on BNs is time-consuming, especially for complex problems. To improve the efficiency, we propose a fast BN exact inference solution named Fast-BNI on multi-core CPUs. Fast-BNI enhances the efficiency of exact inference through hybrid parallelism that tightly integrates coarse- and fine-grained parallelism. We also propose techniques to further simplify the bottleneck operations of BN exact inference. Fast-BNI source code is freely available at https://github.com/jjiantong/FastBN.

We investigate whether three types of post hoc model explanations--feature attribution, concept activation, and training point ranking--are effective for detecting a model's reliance on spurious signals in the training data. Specifically, we consider the scenario where the spurious signal to be detected is unknown, at test-time, to the user of the explanation method. We design an empirical methodology that uses semi-synthetic datasets along with pre-specified spurious artifacts to obtain models that verifiably rely on these spurious training signals. We then provide a suite of metrics that assess an explanation method's reliability for spurious signal detection under various conditions. We find that the post hoc explanation methods tested are ineffective when the spurious artifact is unknown at test-time especially for non-visible artifacts like a background blur. Further, we find that feature attribution methods are susceptible to erroneously indicating dependence on spurious signals even when the model being explained does not rely on spurious artifacts. This finding casts doubt on the utility of these approaches, in the hands of a practitioner, for detecting a model's reliance on spurious signals.

Unsupervised source-free domain adaptation methods aim to train a model to be used in the target domain utilizing the pretrained source-domain model and unlabeled target-domain data, where the source data may not be accessible due to intellectual property or privacy issues. These methods frequently utilize self-training with pseudo-labeling thresholded by prediction confidence. In a source-free scenario, only supervision comes from target data, and thresholding limits the contribution of the self-training. In this study, we utilize self-training with a mean-teacher approach. The student network is trained with all predictions of the teacher network. Instead of thresholding the predictions, the gradients calculated from the pseudo-labels are weighted based on the reliability of the teacher's predictions. We propose a novel method that uses proxy-based metric learning to estimate reliability. We train a metric network on the encoder features of the teacher network. Since the teacher is updated with the moving average, the encoder feature space is slowly changing. Therefore, the metric network can be updated in training time, which enables end-to-end training. We also propose a metric-based online ClassMix method to augment the input of the student network where the patches to be mixed are decided based on the metric reliability. We evaluated our method in synthetic-to-real and cross-city scenarios. The benchmarks show that our method significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Language-conditioned policies allow robots to interpret and execute human instructions. Learning such policies requires a substantial investment with regards to time and compute resources. Still, the resulting controllers are highly device-specific and cannot easily be transferred to a robot with different morphology, capability, appearance or dynamics. In this paper, we propose a sample-efficient approach for training language-conditioned manipulation policies that allows for rapid transfer across different types of robots. By introducing a novel method, namely Hierarchical Modularity, and adopting supervised attention across multiple sub-modules, we bridge the divide between modular and end-to-end learning and enable the reuse of functional building blocks. In both simulated and real world robot manipulation experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods and can transfer policies across 4 different robots in a sample-efficient manner. Finally, we show that the functionality of learned sub-modules is maintained beyond the training process and can be used to introspect the robot decision-making process. Code is available at https://github.com/ir-lab/ModAttn.

In the contemporary media landscape, with the vast and diverse supply of news, it is increasingly challenging to study such an enormous amount of items without a standardized framework. Although attempts have been made to organize and compare news items on the basis of news values, news genres receive little attention, especially the genres in a news consumer's perception. Yet, perceived news genres serve as an essential component in exploring how news has developed, as well as a precondition for understanding media effects. We approach this concept by conceptualizing and operationalizing a non-discrete framework for mapping news items in terms of genre cues. As a starting point, we propose a preliminary set of dimensions consisting of "factuality" and "formality". To automatically analyze a large amount of news items, we deliver two computational models for predicting news sentences in terms of the said two dimensions. Such predictions could then be used for locating news items within our framework. This proposed approach that positions news items upon a multidimensional grid helps in deepening our insight into the evolving nature of news genres.

Gender/ing guides how we view ourselves, the world around us, and each other--including non-humans. Critical voices have raised the alarm about stereotyped gendering in the design of socially embodied artificial agents like voice assistants, conversational agents, and robots. Yet, little is known about how this plays out in research and to what extent. As a first step, we critically reviewed the case of Pepper, a gender-ambiguous humanoid robot. We conducted a systematic review (n=75) involving meta-synthesis and content analysis, examining how participants and researchers gendered Pepper through stated and unstated signifiers and pronoun usage. We found that ascriptions of Pepper's gender were inconsistent, limited, and at times discordant, with little evidence of conscious gendering and some indication of researcher influence on participant gendering. We offer six challenges driving the state of affairs and a practical framework coupled with a critical checklist for centering gender in research on artificial agents.