Oceania
Artificial intelligence understanding fishy behaviour
Artificial intelligence has for the first time predicted the reproductive behaviour of Yellowtail Kingfish by tracking their movements as part of new research revealed on #WorldOceanDay. The new study published in Movement Ecology used machine learning algorithms to identify and distinguish between behaviours including courtship, feeding, escape, chafing, and swimming to showcase how technology can offer greater understanding of marine life. The results revealed spawning behaviour of Yellowtail Kingfish within the Neptune Islands Group Marine Park and Thorny Passage Marine Park in South Australia. Researchers tagged captive Kingfish and filmed their behaviour in tanks to identify the acceleration signatures and applied artificial intelligence to identify behaviour in free-ranging fish. Flinders University PhD student, Thomas Clarke, in the College of Science & Engineering, says it's the first study to use machine learning to identify spawning behaviours in wild Kingfish and demonstrates how artificial intelligence can be used to better understand reproductive patterns.
SASICM A Multi-Task Benchmark For Subtext Recognition
Yan, Hua, Xiao, Weikang, Han, Feng, Zhao, Jian, Shen, Furao
Subtext is a kind of deep semantics which can be acquired after one or more rounds of expression transformation. As a popular way of expressing one's intentions, it is well worth studying. In this paper, we try to make computers understand whether there is a subtext by means of machine learning. We build a Chinese dataset whose source data comes from the popular social media (e.g. Weibo, Netease Music, Zhihu, and Bilibili). In addition, we also build a baseline model called SASICM to deal with subtext recognition. The F1 score of SASICMg, whose pretrained model is GloVe, is as high as 64.37%, which is 3.97% higher than that of BERT based model, 12.7% higher than that of traditional methods on average, including support vector machine, logistic regression classifier, maximum entropy classifier, naive bayes classifier and decision tree and 2.39% higher than that of the state-of-the-art, including MARIN and BTM. The F1 score of SASICMBERT, whose pretrained model is BERT, is 65.12%, which is 0.75% higher than that of SASICMg. The accuracy rates of SASICMg and SASICMBERT are 71.16% and 70.76%, respectively, which can compete with those of other methods which are mentioned before.
Common Sense Beyond English: Evaluating and Improving Multilingual Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning
Lin, Bill Yuchen, Lee, Seyeon, Qiao, Xiaoyang, Ren, Xiang
Commonsense reasoning research has so far been limited to English. We aim to evaluate and improve popular multilingual language models (ML-LMs) to help advance commonsense reasoning (CSR) beyond English. We collect the Mickey Corpus, consisting of 561k sentences in 11 different languages, which can be used for analyzing and improving ML-LMs. We propose Mickey Probe, a language-agnostic probing task for fairly evaluating the common sense of popular ML-LMs across different languages. In addition, we also create two new datasets, X-CSQA and X-CODAH, by translating their English versions to 15 other languages, so that we can evaluate popular ML-LMs for cross-lingual commonsense reasoning. To improve the performance beyond English, we propose a simple yet effective method -- multilingual contrastive pre-training (MCP). It significantly enhances sentence representations, yielding a large performance gain on both benchmarks.
BoB: BERT Over BERT for Training Persona-based Dialogue Models from Limited Personalized Data
Song, Haoyu, Wang, Yan, Zhang, Kaiyan, Zhang, Wei-Nan, Liu, Ting
Maintaining consistent personas is essential for dialogue agents. Although tremendous advancements have been brought, the limited-scale of annotated persona-dense data are still barriers towards training robust and consistent persona-based dialogue models. In this work, we show how the challenges can be addressed by disentangling persona-based dialogue generation into two sub-tasks with a novel BERT-over-BERT (BoB) model. Specifically, the model consists of a BERT-based encoder and two BERT-based decoders, where one decoder is for response generation, and another is for consistency understanding. In particular, to learn the ability of consistency understanding from large-scale non-dialogue inference data, we train the second decoder in an unlikelihood manner. Under different limited data settings, both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms strong baselines in response quality and persona consistency.
Human rights and AI: interesting insights from Australia's commission
The conundrum is one that many governments face: how do you make the most of technological advances in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI) while protecting people's rights? This applies to government as both a user of the tech and a regulator with a mandate to protect the public. Australia's Human Rights Commission recently undertook an exercise to consider this very question. Its final report, Human Rights and Technology, was published recently and includes some 38 recommendations – from establishing an AI Safety Commissioner to introducing legislation so that a person is notified when a company uses AI in a decision that affects them. We have rounded up some of the report's recommendations for governments about how to ensure greater use of AI-informed decision-making does not result in human rights disaster.
Learngene: From Open-World to Your Learning Task
Wang, Qiufeng, Geng, Xin, Lin, Shuxia, Xia, Shiyu, Qi, Lei, Xu, Ning
Although deep learning has made significant progress on fixed large-scale datasets, it typically encounters challenges regarding improperly detecting new/unseen classes in the open-world classification, over-parametrized, and overfitting small samples. In contrast, biological systems can overcome the above difficulties very well. Individuals inherit an innate gene from collective creatures that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years, and can learn new skills through a few examples. Inspired by this, we propose a practical collective-individual paradigm where open-world tasks are trained in sequence using an evolution (expandable) network. To be specific, we innovatively introduce learngene that inherits the meta-knowledge from the collective model and reconstructs a new lightweight individual model for the target task, to realize the collective-individual paradigm. Particularly, we present a novel criterion that can discover the learngene in the collective model, according to the gradient information. Finally, the individual model is trained only with a few samples in the absence of the source data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in an extensive empirical study and theoretical analysis.
A Game-Theoretic Approach to Multi-Agent Trust Region Optimization
Wen, Ying, Chen, Hui, Yang, Yaodong, Tian, Zheng, Li, Minne, Chen, Xu, Wang, Jun
Trust region methods are widely applied in single-agent reinforcement learning problems due to their monotonic performance-improvement guarantee at every iteration. Nonetheless, when applied in multi-agent settings, the guarantee of trust region methods no longer holds because an agent's payoff is also affected by other agents' adaptive behaviors. To tackle this problem, we conduct a game-theoretical analysis in the policy space, and propose a multi-agent trust region learning method (MATRL), which enables trust region optimization for multi-agent learning. Specifically, MATRL finds a stable improvement direction that is guided by the solution concept of Nash equilibrium at the meta-game level. We derive the monotonic improvement guarantee in multi-agent settings and empirically show the local convergence of MATRL to stable fixed points in the two-player rotational differential game. To test our method, we evaluate MATRL in both discrete and continuous multiplayer general-sum games including checker and switch grid worlds, multi-agent MuJoCo, and Atari games. Results suggest that MATRL significantly outperforms strong multi-agent reinforcement learning baselines.
Lightweight Cross-Lingual Sentence Representation Learning
Mao, Zhuoyuan, Gupta, Prakhar, Chu, Chenhui, Jaggi, Martin, Kurohashi, Sadao
Large-scale models for learning fixed-dimensional cross-lingual sentence representations like LASER (Artetxe and Schwenk, 2019b) lead to significant improvement in performance on downstream tasks. However, further increases and modifications based on such large-scale models are usually impractical due to memory limitations. In this work, we introduce a lightweight dual-transformer architecture with just 2 layers for generating memory-efficient cross-lingual sentence representations. We explore different training tasks and observe that current cross-lingual training tasks leave a lot to be desired for this shallow architecture. To ameliorate this, we propose a novel cross-lingual language model, which combines the existing single-word masked language model with the newly proposed cross-lingual token-level reconstruction task. We further augment the training task by the introduction of two computationally-lite sentence-level contrastive learning tasks to enhance the alignment of cross-lingual sentence representation space, which compensates for the learning bottleneck of the lightweight transformer for generative tasks. Our comparisons with competing models on cross-lingual sentence retrieval and multilingual document classification confirm the effectiveness of the newly proposed training tasks for a shallow model.
Machine Learning May Aid in Diagnosing Type 2 Diabetes
Investigators from Monash University in Australia determined the prevalence of undiagnosed T2D to be 5.26% when utilizing machine learning to analyze modifiable markers not included in current screening guidelines. This equates to up to 29 million people worldwide with undiagnosed T2D by the year 2030. The research team compiled 16,429 medical files and stratified them based on the confirmation of undiagnosed T2D. They identified patients who lacked a current diagnosis and had a positive glycemic response to 1 of 3 tests. Three machine learning algorithms analyzed this group against 114 potential nutritional markers with 13 behavioral and 12 socio-economic variables. Investigators found significant anthropometric markers that included upper leg length, age at heaviest weight, waist circumference, and arm circumference.
What Can Knowledge Bring to Machine Learning? -- A Survey of Low-shot Learning for Structured Data
Hu, Yang, Chapman, Adriane, Wen, Guihua, Hall, Dame Wendy
Supervised machine learning has several drawbacks that make it difficult to use in many situations. Drawbacks include: heavy reliance on massive training data, limited generalizability and poor expressiveness of high-level semantics. Low-shot Learning attempts to address these drawbacks. Low-shot learning allows the model to obtain good predictive power with very little or no training data, where structured knowledge plays a key role as a high-level semantic representation of human. This article will review the fundamental factors of low-shot learning technologies, with a focus on the operation of structured knowledge under different low-shot conditions. We also introduce other techniques relevant to low-shot learning. Finally, we point out the limitations of low-shot learning, the prospects and gaps of industrial applications, and future research directions.