Consistency is the theoretical property of a meta learning algorithm that ensures that, under certain assumptions, it can adapt to any task at test time. An open question is whether and how theoretical consistency translates into practice, in comparison to inconsistent algorithms. In this paper, we empirically investigate this question on a set of representative meta-RL algorithms. We find that theoretically consistent algorithms can indeed usually adapt to out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks, while inconsistent ones cannot, although they can still fail in practice for reasons like poor exploration. We further find that theoretically inconsistent algorithms can be made consistent by continuing to update all agent components on the OOD tasks, and adapt as well or better than originally consistent ones. We conclude that theoretical consistency is indeed a desirable property, and inconsistent meta-RL algorithms can easily be made consistent to enjoy the same benefits.

In many sequential decision-making problems (e.g., robotics control, game playing, sequential prediction), human or expert data is available containing useful information about the task. However, imitation learning (IL) from a small amount of expert data can be challenging in high-dimensional environments with complex dynamics. Behavioral cloning is a simple method that is widely used due to its simplicity of implementation and stable convergence but doesn't utilize any information involving the environment's dynamics. Many existing methods that exploit dynamics information are difficult to train in practice due to an adversarial optimization process over reward and policy approximators or biased, high variance gradient estimators. We introduce a method for dynamics-aware IL which avoids adversarial training by learning a single Q-function, implicitly representing both reward and policy. On standard benchmarks, the implicitly learned rewards show a high positive correlation with the ground-truth rewards, illustrating our method can also be used for inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). Our method, Inverse soft-Q learning (IQ-Learn) obtains state-of-the-art results in offline and online imitation learning settings, significantly outperforming existing methods both in the number of required environment interactions and scalability in high-dimensional spaces, often by more than 3x.

Tactics analyze the current proof state (goal and assumptions) and apply non-trivial proof transformations. Formalized proofs take advantage of different levels of automation which are in increasing order of generality: specialized rules, theory-based strategies and general purpose strategies. Thanks to progress in proof automation, developers can delegate more and more complicated proof obligations to general purpose strategies. Those are implemented by automated theorem provers (ATPs) such as E prover [32]. Communication between an ITP and ATPs is made possible by a "hammer" system [4,14]. It acts as an interface by performing premise selection, translation and proof reconstruction. Yet, ATPs are not flawless and more precise user-guidance, achieved by applying a particular sequence of specialized rules, is almost always necessary to develop a mathematical theory.

Changing the Ashes schedule to include a second pink-ball Test would give England an advantage, says former Australia bowler Mitchell Johnson.

Clearview AI is back in hot water, this time from the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). The controversial facial recognition giant has caught the attention of global privacy regulators and campaigners for its practice of scraping personal photos from the web for its system without explicit consent. Clearview AI is expected to have scraped over 10 billion photos. "Common law has never recognised a right to privacy for your face," Clearview AI lawyer Tor Ekeland once argued. The UK's ICO launched a joint probe with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) into Cleaview AI's practices. Earlier this month, Australia's Information Commissioner Angelene Falk determined that "the act of uploading an image to a social media site does not unambiguously indicate agreement to collection of that image by an unknown third party for commercial purposes."

The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has provisionally fined the facial recognition company Clearview AI £17 million ($22.6 million) for breaching UK data protection laws. It said that Clearview allegedly failed to inform citizens that it was collecting billions of their photos, among other transgressions. It has also (again, provisionally) ordered it to stop further processing of residents' personal data. The regulator said that Clearview apparently failed to process people's data "in a way that they likely expect or that is fair." It also alleged that the company failed to have a lawful reason to collect the data, didn't meet GDPR standards for biometric data, failed to have a process that prevents data from being retained indefinitely and failed to inform UK residents what was happening to their data.

Face recognition systems have to deal with large variabilities (such as different poses, illuminations, and expressions) that might lead to incorrect matching decisions. These variabilities can be measured in terms of face image quality which is defined over the utility of a sample for recognition. Previous works on face recognition either do not employ this valuable information or make use of non-inherently fit quality estimates. In this work, we propose a simple and effective face recognition solution (QMag-Face) that combines a quality-aware comparison score with a recognition model based on a magnitude-aware angular margin loss. The proposed approach includes model-specific face image qualities in the comparison process to enhance the recognition performance under unconstrained circumstances. Exploiting the linearity between the qualities and their comparison scores induced by the utilized loss, our quality-aware comparison function is simple and highly generalizable. The experiments conducted on several face recognition databases and benchmarks demonstrate that the introduced quality-awareness leads to consistent improvements in the recognition performance. Moreover, the proposed QMagFace approach performs especially well under challenging circumstances, such as cross-pose, cross-age, or cross-quality. Consequently, it leads to state-of-the-art performances on several face recognition benchmarks, such as 98.50% on AgeDB, 83.95% on XQLFQ, and 98.74% on CFP-FP. The code for QMagFace is publicly available

For example, the economic or social effects of a new drug trial, a new policy or even the effects of a new feature in an advertisement or software are all areas of interest to researchers.

While neural language models often perform surprisingly well on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, their strengths and limitations remain poorly understood. Controlled synthetic tasks are thus an increasingly important resource for diagnosing model behavior. In this work we focus on story understanding, a core competency for NLU systems. However, the main synthetic resource for story understanding, the bAbI benchmark, lacks such a systematic mechanism for controllable task generation. We develop Dyna-bAbI, a dynamic framework providing fine-grained control over task generation in bAbI. We demonstrate our ideas by constructing three new tasks requiring compositional generalization, an important evaluation setting absent from the original benchmark. We tested both special-purpose models developed for bAbI as well as state-of-the-art pre-trained methods, and found that while both approaches solve the original tasks (>99% accuracy), neither approach succeeded in the compositional generalization setting, indicating the limitations of the original training data. We explored ways to augment the original data, and found that though diversifying training data was far more useful than simply increasing dataset size, it was still insufficient for driving robust compositional generalization (with <70% accuracy for complex compositions). Our results underscore the importance of highly controllable task generators for creating robust NLU systems through a virtuous cycle of model and data development.

The purpose of the paper is to provide innovative emerging technology framework for community to combat epidemic situations. The paper proposes a unique outbreak response system framework based on artificial intelligence and edge computing for citizen centric services to help track and trace people eluding safety policies like mask detection and social distancing measure in public or workplace setup. The framework further provides implementation guideline in industrial setup as well for governance and contact tracing tasks. The adoption will thus lead in smart city planning and development focusing on citizen health systems contributing to improved quality of life. The conceptual framework presented is validated through quantitative data analysis via secondary data collection from researcher's public websites, GitHub repositories and renowned journals and further benchmarking were conducted for experimental results in Microsoft Azure cloud environment. The study includes selective AI-models for benchmark analysis and were assessed on performance and accuracy in edge computing environment for large scale societal setup. Overall YOLO model Outperforms in object detection task and is faster enough for mask detection and HRNetV2 outperform semantic segmentation problem applied to solve social distancing task in AI-Edge inferencing environmental setup. The paper proposes new Edge-AI algorithm for building technology-oriented solutions for detecting mask in human movement and social distance. The paper enriches the technological advancement in artificial intelligence and edge-computing applied to problems in society and healthcare systems. The framework further equips government agency, system providers to design and constructs technology-oriented models in community setup to Increase the quality of life using emerging technologies into smart urban environments.