There is no instruction for a decision-making process. However, important decisions are usually made by analyzing tons of data to find the optimal way to solve a problem. That's where we truly rely on logic and deduction. That's why surgeons dig into anamnesis, or businesses gather key persons to see a bigger picture before making a turn. Relying on AI decision-making can significantly reduce the time spent on research and data gathering.

This post contains a list of the AI-related seminars that are scheduled to take place between 10 October 2022 and 30 November 2022. All events detailed here are free and open for anyone to attend virtually. Does the Data Induce Capacity Control in Deep Learning? AI ethics with Michael Cohen – Advanced artificial agents intervene in the provision of reward Speaker: Michael Cohen Organised by: Chalmers University Register here. Con Slobodchikoff – Decoding Animal Languages: Possibilities and Challenges Speaker: Con Slobodchikoff (Northern Arizona University) Organised by: University of Michigan Join here.

Video question answering (VideoQA) is a complex task that requires diverse multi-modal data for training. Manual annotation of question and answers for videos, however, is tedious and prohibits scalability. To tackle this problem, recent methods consider zero-shot settings with no manual annotation of visual question-answer. In particular, a promising approach adapts frozen autoregressive language models pretrained on Web-scale text-only data to multi-modal inputs. In contrast, we here build on frozen bidirectional language models (BiLM) and show that such an approach provides a stronger and cheaper alternative for zero-shot VideoQA. In particular, (i) we combine visual inputs with the frozen BiLM using light trainable modules, (ii) we train such modules using Web-scraped multi-modal data, and finally (iii) we perform zero-shot VideoQA inference through masked language modeling, where the masked text is the answer to a given question. Our proposed approach, FrozenBiLM, outperforms the state of the art in zero-shot VideoQA by a significant margin on a variety of datasets, including LSMDC-FiB, iVQA, MSRVTT-QA, MSVD-QA, ActivityNet-QA, TGIF-FrameQA, How2QA and TVQA. It also demonstrates competitive performance in the few-shot and fully-supervised setting. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/antoyang/FrozenBiLM.

Streaming anomaly detection refers to the problem of detecting anomalous data samples in streams of data. This problem poses challenges that classical and deep anomaly detection methods are not designed to cope with, such as conceptual drift and continuous learning. State-of-the-art flow anomaly detection methods rely on fixed memory using hash functions or nearest neighbors that may not be able to constrain high-frequency values as in a moving average or remove seamless outliers and cannot be trained in an end-to-end deep learning architecture. We present a new incremental anomaly detection method that performs continuous density estimation based on random Fourier features and the mechanism of quantum measurements and density matrices that can be viewed as an exponential moving average density. It can process potentially endless data and its update complexity is constant $O(1)$. A systematic evaluation against 12 state-of-the-art streaming anomaly detection algorithms using 12 streaming datasets is presented.

Modeling multivariate time series as temporal signals over a (possibly dynamic) graph is an effective representational framework that allows for developing models for time series analysis. In fact, discrete sequences of graphs can be processed by autoregressive graph neural networks to recursively learn representations at each discrete point in time and space. Spatiotemporal graphs are often highly sparse, with time series characterized by multiple, concurrent, and long sequences of missing data, e.g., due to the unreliable underlying sensor network. In this context, autoregressive models can be brittle and exhibit unstable learning dynamics. The objective of this paper is, then, to tackle the problem of learning effective models to reconstruct, i.e., impute, missing data points by conditioning the reconstruction only on the available observations. In particular, we propose a novel class of attention-based architectures that, given a set of highly sparse discrete observations, learn a representation for points in time and space by exploiting a spatiotemporal propagation architecture aligned with the imputation task. Representations are trained end-to-end to reconstruct observations w.r.t. the corresponding sensor and its neighboring nodes. Compared to the state of the art, our model handles sparse data without propagating prediction errors or requiring a bidirectional model to encode forward and backward time dependencies. Empirical results on representative benchmarks show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Code-switching is a common phenomenon among multilingual speakers, where alternation between two or more languages occurs within the context of a single conversation. While multilingual humans can seamlessly switch back and forth between languages, multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) models are not robust to such sudden changes in input. This work explores multilingual NMT models' ability to handle code-switched text. First, we propose checks to measure switching capability. Second, we investigate simple and effective data augmentation methods that can enhance an NMT model's ability to support code-switching. Finally, by using a glass-box analysis of attention modules, we demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods in improving robustness.

In neural networks, the property of being equivariant to transformations improves generalization when the corresponding symmetry is present in the data. In particular, scale-equivariant networks are suited to computer vision tasks where the same classes of objects appear at different scales, like in most semantic segmentation tasks. Recently, convolutional layers equivariant to a semigroup of scalings and translations have been proposed. However, the equivariance of subsampling and upsampling has never been explicitly studied even though they are necessary building blocks in some segmentation architectures. The U-Net is a representative example of such architectures, which includes the basic elements used for state-of-the-art semantic segmentation. Therefore, this paper introduces the Scale Equivariant U-Net (SEU-Net), a U-Net that is made approximately equivariant to a semigroup of scales and translations through careful application of subsampling and upsampling layers and the use of aforementioned scale-equivariant layers. Moreover, a scale-dropout is proposed in order to improve generalization to different scales in approximately scale-equivariant architectures. The proposed SEU-Net is trained for semantic segmentation of the Oxford Pet IIIT and the DIC-C2DH-HeLa dataset for cell segmentation. The generalization metric to unseen scales is dramatically improved in comparison to the U-Net, even when the U-Net is trained with scale jittering, and to a scale-equivariant architecture that does not perform upsampling operators inside the equivariant pipeline. The scale-dropout induces better generalization on the scale-equivariant models in the Pet experiment, but not on the cell segmentation experiment.

In this paper, we focus on video-to-text summarization and investigate how to best utilize multimodal information for summarizing long inputs (e.g., an hour-long TV show) into long outputs (e.g., a multi-sentence summary). We extend SummScreen (Chen et al., 2021), a dialogue summarization dataset consisting of transcripts of TV episodes with reference summaries, and create a multimodal variant by collecting corresponding full-length videos. We incorporate multimodal information into a pre-trained textual summarizer efficiently using adapter modules augmented with a hierarchical structure while tuning only 3.8\% of model parameters. Our experiments demonstrate that multimodal information offers superior performance over more memory-heavy and fully fine-tuned textual summarization methods.

Identification of best performing fertilizer practices among a set of contrasting practices with field trials is challenging as crop losses are costly for farmers. To identify best management practices, an ''intuitive strategy'' would be to set multi-year field trials with equal proportion of each practice to test. Our objective was to provide an identification strategy using a bandit algorithm that was better at minimizing farmers' losses occurring during the identification, compared with the ''intuitive strategy''. We used a modification of the Decision Support Systems for Agro-Technological Transfer (DSSAT) crop model to mimic field trial responses, with a case-study in Southern Mali. We compared fertilizer practices using a risk-aware measure, the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), and a novel agronomic metric, the Yield Excess (YE). YE accounts for both grain yield and agronomic nitrogen use efficiency. The bandit-algorithm performed better than the intuitive strategy: it increased, in most cases, farmers' protection against worst outcomes. This study is a methodological step which opens up new horizons for risk-aware ensemble identification of the performance of contrasting crop management practices in real conditions.

Mental health research through data-driven methods has been hindered by a lack of standard typology and scarcity of adequate data. In this study, we leverage the clinical articulation of depression to build a typology for social media texts for detecting the severity of depression. It emulates the standard clinical assessment procedure Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) to encompass subtle indications of depressive disorders from tweets. Along with the typology, we present a new dataset of 40191 tweets labeled by expert annotators. Each tweet is labeled as 'non-depressed' or 'depressed'. Moreover, three severity levels are considered for 'depressed' tweets: (1) mild, (2) moderate, and (3) severe. An associated confidence score is provided with each label to validate the quality of annotation. We examine the quality of the dataset via representing summary statistics while setting strong baseline results using attention-based models like BERT and DistilBERT. Finally, we extensively address the limitations of the study to provide directions for further research.