Extractive summarization produces summaries by identifying and concatenating the most important sentences in a document. Since most summarization datasets do not come with gold labels indicating whether document sentences are summary-worthy, different labeling algorithms have been proposed to extrapolate oracle extracts for model training. In this work, we identify two flaws with the widely used greedy labeling approach: it delivers suboptimal and deterministic oracles. To alleviate both issues, we propose a simple yet effective labeling algorithm that creates soft, expectation-based sentence labels. We define a new learning objective for extractive summarization which incorporates learning signals from multiple oracle summaries and prove it is equivalent to estimating the oracle expectation for each document sentence. Without any architectural modifications, the proposed labeling scheme achieves superior performance on a variety of summarization benchmarks across domains and languages, in both supervised and zero-shot settings.

TOR (The Onion Router) network is a widely used open source anonymous communication tool, the abuse of TOR makes it difficult to monitor the proliferation of online crimes such as to access criminal websites. Most existing approches for TOR network de-anonymization heavily rely on manually extracted features resulting in time consuming and poor performance. To tackle the shortcomings, this paper proposes a neural representation learning approach to recognize website fingerprint based on classification algorithm. We constructed a new website fingerprinting attack model based on convolutional neural network (CNN) with dilation and causal convolution, which can improve the perception field of CNN as well as capture the sequential characteristic of input data. Experiments on three mainstream public datasets show that the proposed model is robust and effective for the website fingerprint classification and improves the accuracy by 12.21% compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

We provide the first formal definition of reward hacking, a phenomenon where optimizing an imperfect proxy reward function, $\mathcal{\tilde{R}}$, leads to poor performance according to the true reward function, $\mathcal{R}$. We say that a proxy is unhackable if increasing the expected proxy return can never decrease the expected true return. Intuitively, it might be possible to create an unhackable proxy by leaving some terms out of the reward function (making it "narrower") or overlooking fine-grained distinctions between roughly equivalent outcomes, but we show this is usually not the case. A key insight is that the linearity of reward (in state-action visit counts) makes unhackability a very strong condition. In particular, for the set of all stochastic policies, two reward functions can only be unhackable if one of them is constant. We thus turn our attention to deterministic policies and finite sets of stochastic policies, where non-trivial unhackable pairs always exist, and establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of simplifications, an important special case of unhackability. Our results reveal a tension between using reward functions to specify narrow tasks and aligning AI systems with human values.

Neural metrics have achieved impressive correlation with human judgements in the evaluation of machine translation systems, but before we can safely optimise towards such metrics, we should be aware of (and ideally eliminate) biases toward bad translations that receive high scores. Our experiments show that sample-based Minimum Bayes Risk decoding can be used to explore and quantify such weaknesses. When applying this strategy to COMET for en-de and de-en, we find that COMET models are not sensitive enough to discrepancies in numbers and named entities. We further show that these biases are hard to fully remove by simply training on additional synthetic data and release our code and data for facilitating further experiments.

Recent advances in remote patient monitoring (RPM) systems can recognize various human activities to measure vital signs, including subtle motions from superficial vessels. There is a growing interest in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to this area of healthcare by addressing known limitations and challenges such as predicting and classifying vital signs and physical movements, which are considered crucial tasks. Federated learning is a relatively new AI technique designed to enhance data privacy by decentralizing traditional machine learning modeling. However, traditional federated learning requires identical architectural models to be trained across the local clients and global servers. This limits global model architecture due to the lack of local models heterogeneity. To overcome this, a novel federated learning architecture, FedStack, which supports ensembling heterogeneous architectural client models was proposed in this study. This work offers a protected privacy system for hospitalized in-patients in a decentralized approach and identifies optimum sensor placement. The proposed architecture was applied to a mobile health sensor benchmark dataset from 10 different subjects to classify 12 routine activities. Three AI models, ANN, CNN, and Bi-LSTM were trained on individual subject data. The federated learning architecture was applied to these models to build local and global models capable of state of the art performances. The local CNN model outperformed ANN and Bi-LSTM models on each subject data. Our proposed work has demonstrated better performance for heterogeneous stacking of the local models compared to homogeneous stacking. This work sets the stage to build an enhanced RPM system that incorporates client privacy to assist with clinical observations for patients in an acute mental health facility and ultimately help to prevent unexpected death.

In addition to being familiar with policies, high investment returns also require extensive knowledge of relevant industry knowledge and news. In addition, it is necessary to leverage relevant theories for investment to make decisions, thereby amplifying investment returns. A effective investment return estimate can feedback the future rate of return of investment behavior. In recent years, deep learning are developing rapidly, and investment return prediction based on deep learning has become an emerging research topic. This paper proposes an embedding-based dual branch approach to predict an investment's return. This approach leverages embedding to encode the investment id into a low-dimensional dense vector, thereby mapping high-dimensional data to a low-dimensional manifold, so that highdimensional features can be represented competitively. In addition, the dual branch model realizes the decoupling of features by separately encoding different information in the two branches. In addition, the swish activation function further improves the model performance. Our approach are validated on the Ubiquant Market Prediction dataset. The results demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to Xgboost, Lightgbm and Catboost.

Successful Artificial Intelligence systems often require numerous labeled data to extract information from document images. In this paper, we investigate the problem of improving the performance of Artificial Intelligence systems in understanding document images, especially in cases where training data is limited. We address the problem by proposing a novel finetuning method using reinforcement learning. Our approach treats the Information Extraction model as a policy network and uses policy gradient training to update the model to maximize combined reward functions that complement the traditional cross-entropy losses. Our experiments on four datasets using labels and expert feedback demonstrate that our finetuning mechanism consistently improves the performance of a state-of-the-art information extractor, especially in the small training data regime.

The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a leading strategy that exploits noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) machines to tackle chemical problems outperforming classical approaches. To gain such computational advantages on large-scale problems, a feasible solution is the QUantum DIstributed Optimization (QUDIO) scheme, which partitions the original problem into $K$ subproblems and allocates them to $K$ quantum machines followed by the parallel optimization. Despite the provable acceleration ratio, the efficiency of QUDIO may heavily degrade by the synchronization operation. To conquer this issue, here we propose Shuffle-QUDIO to involve shuffle operations into local Hamiltonians during the quantum distributed optimization. Compared with QUDIO, Shuffle-QUDIO significantly reduces the communication frequency among quantum processors and simultaneously achieves better trainability. Particularly, we prove that Shuffle-QUDIO enables a faster convergence rate over QUDIO. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to verify that Shuffle-QUDIO allows both a wall-clock time speedup and low approximation error in the tasks of estimating the ground state energy of molecule. We empirically demonstrate that our proposal can be seamlessly integrated with other acceleration techniques, such as operator grouping, to further improve the efficacy of VQE.

The task of empathetic response generation aims to understand what feelings a speaker expresses on his/her experiences and then reply to the speaker appropriately. To solve the task, it is essential to model the content-emotion duality of a dialogue, which is composed of the content view (i.e., what personal experiences are described) and the emotion view (i.e., the feelings of the speaker on these experiences). To this end, we design a framework to model the Content-Emotion Duality (CEDual) via disentanglement for empathetic response generation. With disentanglement, we encode the dialogue history from both the content and emotion views, and then generate the empathetic response based on the disentangled representations, thereby both the content and emotion information of the dialogue history can be embedded in the generated response. The experiments on the benchmark dataset EMPATHETICDIALOGUES show that the CEDual model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both automatic and human metrics, and it also generates more empathetic responses than previous methods.

Text generation is of great importance to many natural language processing applications. However, maximization-based decoding methods (e.g., beam search) of neural language models often lead to degenerate solutions--the generated text is unnatural and contains undesirable repetitions. Existing approaches introduce stochasticity via sampling or modify training objectives to decrease the probabilities of certain tokens (e.g., unlikelihood training). However, they often lead to solutions that lack coherence. In this work, we show that an underlying reason for model degeneration is the anisotropic distribution of token representations. We present a contrastive solution: (i) SimCTG, a contrastive training objective to calibrate the model's representation space, and (ii) a decoding method--contrastive search--to encourage diversity while maintaining coherence in the generated text. Extensive experiments and analyses on three benchmarks from two languages demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art text generation methods as evaluated by both human and automatic metrics.