In this work, a machine learning approach is developed for predicting the outcomes of football matches. The novelty of this research lies in the utilisation of the Kelly Index to first classify matches into categories where each one denotes the different levels of predictive difficulty. Classification models using a wide suite of algorithms were developed for each category of matches in order to determine the efficacy of the approach. In conjunction to this, a set of previously unexplored features were engineering including Elo-based variables. The dataset originated from the Premier League match data covering the 2019-2021 seasons. The findings indicate that the process of decomposing the predictive problem into sub-tasks was effective and produced competitive results with prior works, while the ensemble-based methods were the most effective. The paper also devised an investment strategy in order to evaluate its effectiveness by benchmarking against bookmaker odds. An approach was developed that minimises risk by combining the Kelly Index with the predefined confidence thresholds of the predictive models. The experiments found that the proposed strategy can return a profit when following a conservative approach that focuses primarily on easy-to-predict matches where the predictive models display a high confidence level.

I recently caught up with Ian Hogarth and Nathan Benaich, who each year produce The State of AI Report, a must-read snapshot of how commercial applications of A.I. are evolving. Benaich is the founder of Air Street Capital, a solo venture capital fund that is one of the savviest early-stage investors in A.I.-based startups I know. Hogarth is the former co-founder of concert discovery app Songkick and has since go on to become a prominent angel investor as well one of the founders behind the founder-lead European venture capital platform Plural. There's always a lot to digest in their report. But one of the key takeaways from this year's State of AI is that concerns established tech giants and their affiliated A.I. research labs would monopolize the development of A.I. have been proven, if not exactly wrong, then at least premature. While it is true that Alphabet (which has both Google Brain and Deepmind in its stable), Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI (which is closely partnered now with Microsoft) are building large "foundational models" for natural language processing and image and video generation, they are hardly the only players in the game.

India to take over Chair of Global Partnership on AI for 2022-23. India will take over the chair of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence for 2022-23 at a meeting of the body in Tokyo on November 21, the Ministry of Electronics and IT said on Sunday. In the election to the Council Chair, India had received more than a two-thirds majority of first-preference votes while Canada and the United States of America ranked in the next two best places in the tally – so they were elected to the two additional government seats on the Steering Committee, the ministry said in a statement. Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar will represent India at the handover ceremony in Tokyo. "Close on the heels of assuming the presidency of G20, a league of world's largest economies, India will take over the chair of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), an international initiative to support responsible and human-centric development and use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)," the statement said.

Machine Learning algorithms have had a profound impact on the field of computer science over the past few decades. These algorithms performance is greatly influenced by the representations that are derived from the data in the learning process. The representations learned in a successful learning process should be concise, discrete, meaningful, and able to be applied across a variety of tasks. A recent effort has been directed toward developing Deep Learning models, which have proven to be particularly effective at capturing high-dimensional, non-linear, and multi-modal characteristics. In this work, we discuss the principles and developments that have been made in the process of learning representations, and converting them into desirable applications. In addition, for each framework or model, the key issues and open challenges, as well as the advantages, are examined.

Clustering is a fundamental problem in network analysis that finds closely connected groups of nodes and separates them from other nodes in the graph, while link prediction is to predict whether two nodes in a network are likely to have a link. The definition of both naturally determines that clustering must play a positive role in obtaining accurate link prediction tasks. Yet researchers have long ignored or used inappropriate ways to undermine this positive relationship. In this article, We construct a simple but efficient clustering-driven link prediction framework(ClusterLP), with the goal of directly exploiting the cluster structures to obtain connections between nodes as accurately as possible in both undirected graphs and directed graphs. Specifically, we propose that it is easier to establish links between nodes with similar representation vectors and cluster tendencies in undirected graphs, while nodes in a directed graphs can more easily point to nodes similar to their representation vectors and have greater influence in their own cluster. We customized the implementation of ClusterLP for undirected and directed graphs, respectively, and the experimental results using multiple real-world networks on the link prediction task showed that our models is highly competitive with existing baseline models. The code implementation of ClusterLP and baselines we use are available at https://github.com/ZINUX1998/ClusterLP.

Multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) is a critical step in information extraction, which aims to detect entity spans and classify them to corresponding entity types given a sentence-image pair. Existing methods either (1) obtain named entities with coarse-grained visual clues from attention mechanisms, or (2) first detect fine-grained visual regions with toolkits and then recognize named entities. However, they suffer from improper alignment between entity types and visual regions or error propagation in the two-stage manner, which finally imports irrelevant visual information into texts. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end framework named MNER-QG that can simultaneously perform MRC-based multimodal named entity recognition and query grounding. Specifically, with the assistance of queries, MNER-QG can provide prior knowledge of entity types and visual regions, and further enhance representations of both texts and images. To conduct the query grounding task, we provide manual annotations and weak supervisions that are obtained via training a highly flexible visual grounding model with transfer learning. We conduct extensive experiments on two public MNER datasets, Twitter2015 and Twitter2017. Experimental results show that MNER-QG outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on the MNER task, and also improves the query grounding performance.

This paper introduces the joint submission of the Beijing Jiaotong University and WeChat AI to the WMT'22 chat translation task for English-German. Based on the Transformer, we apply several effective variants. In our experiments, we utilize the pre-training-then-fine-tuning paradigm. In the first pre-training stage, we employ data filtering and synthetic data generation (i.e., back-translation, forward-translation, and knowledge distillation). In the second fine-tuning stage, we investigate speaker-aware in-domain data generation, speaker adaptation, prompt-based context modeling, target denoising fine-tuning, and boosted self-COMET-based model ensemble. Our systems achieve 0.810 and 0.946 COMET scores. The COMET scores of English-German and German-English are the highest among all submissions.

This paper introduces WeChat's participation in WMT 2022 shared biomedical translation task on Chinese to English. Our systems are based on the Transformer, and use several different Transformer structures to improve the quality of translation. In our experiments, we employ data filtering, data generation, several variants of Transformer, fine-tuning and model ensemble. Our Chinese$\to$English system, named Summer, achieves the highest BLEU score among all submissions.

As a promising solution for model compression, knowledge distillation (KD) has been applied in recommender systems (RS) to reduce inference latency. Traditional solutions first train a full teacher model from the training data, and then transfer its knowledge (\ie \textit{soft labels}) to supervise the learning of a compact student model. However, we find such a standard distillation paradigm would incur serious bias issue -- popular items are more heavily recommended after the distillation. This effect prevents the student model from making accurate and fair recommendations, decreasing the effectiveness of RS. In this work, we identify the origin of the bias in KD -- it roots in the biased soft labels from the teacher, and is further propagated and intensified during the distillation. To rectify this, we propose a new KD method with a stratified distillation strategy. It first partitions items into multiple groups according to their popularity, and then extracts the ranking knowledge within each group to supervise the learning of the student. Our method is simple and teacher-agnostic -- it works on distillation stage without affecting the training of the teacher model. We conduct extensive theoretical and empirical studies to validate the effectiveness of our proposal. We release our code at: https://github.com/chengang95/UnKD.

A robotic feeding system must be able to acquire a variety of foods. Prior bite acquisition works consider single-arm spoon scooping or fork skewering, which do not generalize to foods with complex geometries and deformabilities. For example, when acquiring a group of peas, skewering could smoosh the peas while scooping without a barrier could result in chasing the peas on the plate. In order to acquire foods with such diverse properties, we propose stabilizing food items during scooping using a second arm, for example, by pushing peas against the spoon with a flat surface to prevent dispersion. The added stabilizing arm can lead to new challenges. Critically, this arm should stabilize the food scene without interfering with the acquisition motion, which is especially difficult for easily breakable high-risk food items like tofu. These high-risk foods can break between the pusher and spoon during scooping, which can lead to food waste falling out of the spoon. We propose a general bimanual scooping primitive and an adaptive stabilization strategy that enables successful acquisition of a diverse set of food geometries and physical properties. Our approach, CARBS: Coordinated Acquisition with Reactive Bimanual Scooping, learns to stabilize without impeding task progress by identifying high-risk foods and robustly scooping them using closed-loop visual feedback. We find that CARBS is able to generalize across food shape, size, and deformability and is additionally able to manipulate multiple food items simultaneously. CARBS achieves 87.0% success on scooping rigid foods, which is 25.8% more successful than a single-arm baseline, and reduces food breakage by 16.2% compared to an analytical baseline. Videos can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/bimanualscoop-corl22/home .