Geoscape Australia, a government-owned geospatial data company, has announced it has partnered with an Israeli artificial intelligence start-up to use machine vision and deep learning technology to enhance its 3D digital maps of Australia. The CEO of Geoscape Australia said that the partnership will advance what is known about every address across the country. Applying the Israeli AI start-up's patented AI technology to the highest quality aerial imagery will significantly evolve the current digital model of Australia. The company says more accurate digital models of Australia's urban environment will enable the data-driven foundation of Digital Twin applications that better reflect the real world. The up-to-date data will also improve the assessment of risk for insurers, allow architects to visualise new developments in the context of their surroundings, help noise modellers better understand what will be impacted by noise, and power modelling of energy use patterns in commercial and residential buildings.

Intrinsic evaluations of OIE systems are carried out either manually -- with human evaluators judging the correctness of extractions -- or automatically, on standardized benchmarks. The latter, while much more cost-effective, is less reliable, primarily because of the incompleteness of the existing OIE benchmarks: the ground truth extractions do not include all acceptable variants of the same fact, leading to unreliable assessment of models' performance. Moreover, the existing OIE benchmarks are available for English only. In this work, we introduce BenchIE: a benchmark and evaluation framework for comprehensive evaluation of OIE systems for English, Chinese and German. In contrast to existing OIE benchmarks, BenchIE takes into account informational equivalence of extractions: our gold standard consists of fact synsets, clusters in which we exhaustively list all surface forms of the same fact. We benchmark several state-of-the-art OIE systems using BenchIE and demonstrate that these systems are significantly less effective than indicated by existing OIE benchmarks. We make BenchIE (data and evaluation code) publicly available.

Commonsense is defined as the knowledge that is shared by everyone. However, certain types of commonsense knowledge are correlated with culture and geographic locations and they are only shared locally. For example, the scenarios of wedding ceremonies vary across regions due to different customs influenced by historical and religious factors. Such regional characteristics, however, are generally omitted in prior work. In this paper, we construct a Geo-Diverse Visual Commonsense Reasoning dataset (GD-VCR) to test vision-and-language models' ability to understand cultural and geo-location-specific commonsense. In particular, we study two state-of-the-art Vision-and-Language models, VisualBERT and ViLBERT trained on VCR, a standard multimodal commonsense benchmark with images primarily from Western regions. We then evaluate how well the trained models can generalize to answering the questions in GD-VCR. We find that the performance of both models for non-Western regions including East Asia, South Asia, and Africa is significantly lower than that for Western region. We analyze the reasons behind the performance disparity and find that the performance gap is larger on QA pairs that: 1) are concerned with culture-related scenarios, e.g., weddings, religious activities, and festivals; 2) require high-level geo-diverse commonsense reasoning rather than low-order perception and recognition. Dataset and code are released at https://github.com/WadeYin9712/GD-VCR.

Recent language models can generate interesting and grammatically correct text in story generation but often lack plot development and long-term coherence. This paper experiments with a latent vector planning approach based on a TD-VAE (Temporal Difference Variational Autoencoder), using the model for conditioning and reranking for text generation. The results demonstrate strong performance in automatic cloze and swapping evaluations. The human judgments show stories generated with TD-VAE reranking improve on a GPT-2 medium baseline and show comparable performance to a hierarchical LSTM reranking model. Conditioning on the latent vectors proves disappointing and deteriorates performance in human evaluation because it reduces the diversity of generation, and the models don't learn to progress the narrative. This highlights an important difference between technical task performance (e.g. cloze) and generating interesting stories.

Relevance in summarization is typically defined based on textual information alone, without incorporating insights about a particular decision. As a result, to support risk analysis of pancreatic cancer, summaries of medical notes may include irrelevant information such as a knee injury. We propose a novel problem, decision-focused summarization, where the goal is to summarize relevant information for a decision. We leverage a predictive model that makes the decision based on the full text to provide valuable insights on how a decision can be inferred from text. To build a summary, we then select representative sentences that lead to similar model decisions as using the full text while accounting for textual non-redundancy. To evaluate our method (DecSum), we build a testbed where the task is to summarize the first ten reviews of a restaurant in support of predicting its future rating on Yelp. DecSum substantially outperforms text-only summarization methods and model-based explanation methods in decision faithfulness and representativeness. We further demonstrate that DecSum is the only method that enables humans to outperform random chance in predicting which restaurant will be better rated in the future.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming integrated into military Command and Control (C2) systems as a strategic priority for many defence forces. The successful implementation of AI is promising to herald a significant leap in C2 agility through automation. However, realistic expectations need to be set on what AI can achieve in the foreseeable future. This paper will argue that AI could lead to a fragility trap, whereby the delegation of C2 functions to an AI could increase the fragility of C2, resulting in catastrophic strategic failures. This calls for a new framework for AI in C2 to avoid this trap. We will argue that antifragility along with agility should form the core design principles for AI-enabled C2 systems. This duality is termed Agile, Antifragile, AI-Enabled Command and Control (A3IC2). An A3IC2 system continuously improves its capacity to perform in the face of shocks and surprises through overcompensation from feedback during the C2 decision-making cycle. An A3IC2 system will not only be able to survive within a complex operational environment, it will also thrive, benefiting from the inevitable shocks and volatility of war.

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques play a key role towards long-term autonomy of mobile robots due to the ability to correct localization errors and produce consistent maps of an environment over time. Contrarily to urban or man-made environments, where the presence of unique objects and structures offer unique cues for localization, the appearance of unstructured natural environments is often ambiguous and self-similar, hindering the performances of loop closure detection. In this paper, we present an approach to improve the robustness of place recognition in the context of a submap-based stereo SLAM based on Gaussian Process Gradient Maps (GPGMaps). GPGMaps embed a continuous representation of the gradients of the local terrain elevation by means of Gaussian Process regression and Structured Kernel Interpolation, given solely noisy elevation measurements. We leverage the image-like structure of GPGMaps to detect loop closures using traditional visual features and Bag of Words. GPGMap matching is performed as an SE(2) alignment to establish loop closure constraints within a pose graph. We evaluate the proposed pipeline on a variety of datasets recorded on Mt. Etna, Sicily and in the Morocco desert, respectively Moon- and Mars-like environments, and we compare the localization performances with state-of-the-art approaches for visual SLAM and visual loop closure detection.

In recent years, online ride-hailing platforms have become an indispensable part of urban transportation. After a passenger is matched up with a driver by the platform, both the passenger and the driver have the freedom to simply accept or cancel a ride with one click. Hence, accurately predicting whether a passenger-driver pair is a good match turns out to be crucial for ride-hailing platforms to devise instant order assignments. However, since the users of ride-hailing platforms consist of two parties, decision-making needs to simultaneously account for the dynamics from both the driver and the passenger sides. This makes it more challenging than traditional online advertising tasks. Moreover, the amount of available data is severely imbalanced across different cities, creating difficulties for training an accurate model for smaller cities with scarce data. Though a sophisticated neural network architecture can help improve the prediction accuracy under data scarcity, the overly complex design will impede the model's capacity of delivering timely predictions in a production environment. In the paper, to accurately predict the MSR of passenger-driver, we propose the Multi-View model (MV) which comprehensively learns the interactions among the dynamic features of the passenger, driver, trip order, as well as context. Regarding the data imbalance problem, we further design the Knowledge Distillation framework (KD) to supplement the model's predictive power for smaller cities using the knowledge from cities with denser data and also generate a simple model to support efficient deployment. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets from several different cities, which demonstrates the superiority of our solution.

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to train a model from the labeled source domain to make predictions on the unlabeled target domain when the data distribution of the two domains is different. As a result, it needs to reduce the data distribution difference between the two domains to improve the model's generalization ability. Existing methods tend to align the two domains directly at the domain-level, or perform class-level domain alignment based on deep feature. The former ignores the relationship between the various classes in the two domains, which may cause serious negative transfer, the latter alleviates it by introducing pseudo-labels of the target domain, but it does not consider the importance of performing class-level alignment on shallow feature representations. In this paper, we develop this work on the method of class-level alignment. The proposed method reduces the difference between two domains dramaticlly by aligning multi-level features. In the case that the two domains share the label space, the class-level alignment is implemented by introducing Multi-Level Feature Contrastive Networks (MLFCNet). In practice, since the categories of samples in target domain are unavailable, we iteratively use clustering algorithm to obtain the pseudo-labels, and then minimize Multi-Level Contrastive Discrepancy (MLCD) loss to achieve more accurate class-level alignment. Experiments on three real-world benchmarks ImageCLEF-DA, Office-31 and Office-Home demonstrate that MLFCNet compares favorably against the existing state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods.

Nodes in networks may have one or more functions that determine their role in the system. As opposed to local proximity, which captures the local context of nodes, the role identity captures the functional "role" that nodes play in a network, such as being the center of a group, or the bridge between two groups. This means that nodes far apart in a network can have similar structural role identities. Several recent works have explored methods for embedding the roles of nodes in networks. However, these methods all rely on either approximating or indirect modeling of structural equivalence. In this paper, we present a novel and flexible framework using stress majorization, to transform the high-dimensional role identities in networks directly (without approximation or indirect modeling) to a low-dimensional embedding space. Our method is also flexible, in that it does not rely on specific structural similarity definitions. We evaluated our method on the tasks of node classification, clustering, and visualization, using three real-world and five synthetic networks. Our experiments show that our framework achieves superior results than existing methods in learning node role representations.