Autonomous driving is complex, requiring sophisticated 3D scene understanding, localization, mapping, and control. Rather than explicitly modelling and fusing each of these components, we instead consider an end-to-end approach via reinforcement learning (RL). However, collecting exploration driving data in the real world is impractical and dangerous. While training in simulation and deploying visual sim-to-real techniques has worked well for robot manipulation, deploying beyond controlled workspace viewpoints remains a challenge. In this paper, we address this challenge by presenting Sim2Seg, a re-imagining of RCAN that crosses the visual reality gap for off-road autonomous driving, without using any real-world data. This is done by learning to translate randomized simulation images into simulated segmentation and depth maps, subsequently enabling real-world images to also be translated. This allows us to train an end-to-end RL policy in simulation, and directly deploy in the real-world. Our approach, which can be trained in 48 hours on 1 GPU, can perform equally as well as a classical perception and control stack that took thousands of engineering hours over several months to build. We hope this work motivates future end-to-end autonomous driving research.

We introduce a new open information extraction (OIE) benchmark for pre-trained language models (LM). Recent studies have demonstrated that pre-trained LMs, such as BERT and GPT, may store linguistic and relational knowledge. In particular, LMs are able to answer ``fill-in-the-blank'' questions when given a pre-defined relation category. Instead of focusing on pre-defined relations, we create an OIE benchmark aiming to fully examine the open relational information present in the pre-trained LMs. We accomplish this by turning pre-trained LMs into zero-shot OIE systems. Surprisingly, pre-trained LMs are able to obtain competitive performance on both standard OIE datasets (CaRB and Re-OIE2016) and two new large-scale factual OIE datasets (TAC KBP-OIE and Wikidata-OIE) that we establish via distant supervision. For instance, the zero-shot pre-trained LMs outperform the F1 score of the state-of-the-art supervised OIE methods on our factual OIE datasets without needing to use any training sets. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/cgraywang/IELM

Academic writing should be concise as concise sentences better keep the readers' attention and convey meaning clearly. Writing concisely is challenging, for writers often struggle to revise their drafts. We introduce and formulate revising for concision as a natural language processing task at the sentence level. Revising for concision requires algorithms to use only necessary words to rewrite a sentence while preserving its meaning. The revised sentence should be evaluated according to its word choice, sentence structure, and organization. The revised sentence also needs to fulfil semantic retention and syntactic soundness. To aide these efforts, we curate and make available a benchmark parallel dataset that can depict revising for concision. The dataset contains 536 pairs of sentences before and after revising, and all pairs are collected from college writing centres. We also present and evaluate the approaches to this problem, which may assist researchers in this area.

Evaluating safety performance in a resource-efficient way is crucial for the development of autonomous systems. Simulation of parameterized scenarios is a popular testing strategy but parameter sweeps can be prohibitively expensive. To address this, we propose HiddenGems: a sample-efficient method for discovering the boundary between compliant and non-compliant behavior via active learning. Given a parameterized scenario, one or more compliance metrics, and a simulation oracle, HiddenGems maps the compliant and non-compliant domains of the scenario. The methodology enables critical test case identification, comparative analysis of different versions of the system under test, as well as verification of design objectives. We evaluate HiddenGems on a scenario with a jaywalker crossing in front of an autonomous vehicle and obtain compliance boundary estimates for collision, lane keep, and acceleration metrics individually and in combination, with 6 times fewer simulations than a parameter sweep. We also show how HiddenGems can be used to detect and rectify a failure mode for an unprotected turn with 86% fewer simulations.

Label distribution learning (LDL) differs from multi-label learning which aims at representing the polysemy of instances by transforming single-label values into descriptive degrees. Unfortunately, the feature space of the label distribution dataset is affected by human factors and the inductive bias of the feature extractor causing uncertainty in the feature space. Especially, for datasets with small-scale feature spaces (the feature space dimension $\approx$ the label space), the existing LDL algorithms do not perform well. To address this issue, we seek to model the uncertainty augmentation of the feature space to alleviate the problem in LDL tasks. Specifically, we start with augmenting each feature value in the feature vector of a sample into a vector (sampling on a Gaussian distribution function). Which, the variance parameter of the Gaussian distribution function is learned by using a sub-network, and the mean parameter is filled by this feature value. Then, each feature vector is augmented to a matrix which is fed into a mixer with local attention (\textit{TabMixer}) to extract the latent feature. Finally, the latent feature is squeezed to yield an accurate label distribution via a squeezed network. Extensive experiments verify that our proposed algorithm can be competitive compared to other LDL algorithms on several benchmarks.

Crowd anomaly detection is one of the most popular topics in computer vision in the context of smart cities. A plethora of deep learning methods have been proposed that generally outperform other machine learning solutions. Our review primarily discusses algorithms that were published in mainstream conferences and journals between 2020 and 2022. We present datasets that are typically used for benchmarking, produce a taxonomy of the developed algorithms, and discuss and compare their performances. Our main findings are that the heterogeneities of pre-trained convolutional models have a negligible impact on crowd video anomaly detection performance. We conclude our discussion with fruitful directions for future research.

Interpretation of electrocardiography (ECG) signals is required for diagnosing cardiac arrhythmia. Recently, machine learning techniques have been applied for automated computer-aided diagnosis. Machine learning tasks can be divided into regression and classification. Regression can be used for noise and artifacts removal as well as resolve issues of missing data from low sampling frequency. Classification task concerns the prediction of output diagnostic classes according to expert-labeled input classes. In this work, we propose a deep neural network model capable of solving regression and classification tasks. Moreover, we combined the two approaches, using unlabeled and labeled data, to train the model. We tested the model on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database. Our method showed high effectiveness in detecting cardiac arrhythmia based on modified Lead II ECG records, as well as achieved high quality of ECG signal approximation. For the former, our method attained overall accuracy of 87:33% and balanced accuracy of 80:54%, on par with reference approaches. For the latter, application of self-supervised learning allowed for training without the need for expert labels. The regression model yielded satisfactory performance with fairly accurate prediction of QRS complexes. Transferring knowledge from regression to the classification task, our method attained higher overall accuracy of 87:78%.

In this work, we study the problem of privately maximizing a submodular function in the streaming setting. Extensive work has been done on privately maximizing submodular functions in the general case when the function depends upon the private data of individuals. However, when the size of the data stream drawn from the domain of the objective function is large or arrives very fast, one must privately optimize the objective within the constraints of the streaming setting. We establish fundamental differentially private baselines for this problem and then derive better trade-offs between privacy and utility for the special case of decomposable submodular functions. A submodular function is decomposable when it can be written as a sum of submodular functions; this structure arises naturally when each summand function models the utility of an individual and the goal is to study the total utility of the whole population as in the well-known Combinatorial Public Projects Problem. Finally, we complement our theoretical analysis with experimental corroboration.

Recent work in incremental learning has introduced diverse approaches to tackle catastrophic forgetting from data augmentation to optimized training regimes. However, most of them focus on very few training steps. We propose a method for robust incremental learning over dozens of fine-tuning steps using data from a variety of languages. We show that a combination of data-augmentation and an optimized training regime allows us to continue improving the model even for as many as fifty training steps. Crucially, our augmentation strategy does not require retaining access to previous training data and is suitable in scenarios with privacy constraints.

Planning an optimal route in a complex environment requires efficient reasoning about the surrounding scene. While human drivers prioritize important objects and ignore details not relevant to the decision, learning-based planners typically extract features from dense, high-dimensional grid representations containing all vehicle and road context information. In this paper, we propose PlanT, a novel approach for planning in the context of self-driving that uses a standard transformer architecture. PlanT is based on imitation learning with a compact object-level input representation. On the Longest6 benchmark for CARLA, PlanT outperforms all prior methods (matching the driving score of the expert) while being 5.3x faster than equivalent pixel-based planning baselines during inference. Combining PlanT with an off-the-shelf perception module provides a sensor-based driving system that is more than 10 points better in terms of driving score than the existing state of the art. Furthermore, we propose an evaluation protocol to quantify the ability of planners to identify relevant objects, providing insights regarding their decision-making. Our results indicate that PlanT can focus on the most relevant object in the scene, even when this object is geometrically distant.