What is cloud technology or data science and what's all the hype about? More importantly, what can it do for you, your team, and your business? If you want to learn about cloud technology so you can excel in your role, help build the future of your business and thrive in the cloud era, then the Business Transformation with Google Cloud course is for you. Through this interactive training, you'll learn about core cloud business drivers--specifically Google's cloud--and gain the knowledge/skills to determine if business transformation is right for you and your team, and build short and long-term projects using the "superpowers" of cloud accordingly. You'll also find several templates, guides, and resource links through the supplementary student workbook to help you build a custom briefing document to share with your leadership, technical teams or partners.

This post contains a list of the AI-related seminars that are scheduled to take place between 7 November 2022 and 31 December 2022. All events detailed here are free and open for anyone to attend virtually. Does chocolate really cure cancer? Advances and Challenges in Conformal Prediction Speaker: Ryan Tibshirani Organised by: Harvard ML Theory Join the mailing list to find out how to access the seminars. Title to be confirmed Speaker: Tim G. J. Rudner (New York University) Organised by: New York University Please contact the organisers here if you are interested in attending the virtual seminar.

Upskilling has gained prominence in recent times with working professionals increasingly realising the importance of expanding their abilities and closing the current skill gaps. According to the World Economic Forum, almost half of the existing workforce has to upskill/reskill by 2025 to stay relevant in the changing business realities. There are different methods and ways for upskilling to ensure continuous learning that helps employees expand their skill set to confidently take on new roles and responsibilities across functional domains and operational areas. A learning organisation always defines and deploys the best learning solutions for building capability to stay relevant. The world of workplaces has undergone a massive transformation in the last couple of years.

With recent advances in the fabrication and control of hardware for quantum information processing, the possibilities of merging quantum computing (QC) with machine learning (ML) have received a huge amount of attention within the growing research community. Hereby, reinforcement learning (RL) is the third paradigm besides supervised and unsupervised learning. In this survey article, we provide an overview over so-called quantum reinforcement learning (QRL) algorithms. We understand these as quantum-assisted approaches, that solve a particular task (be they classical or quantum in nature) by employing quantum resources (either in simulation and/or in experiment). In order to keep this contribution as self-contained as possible, we provide the necessary backgrounds before venturing into the QRL literature. We start out with a brief recap of the essentials of the RL paradigm in the fully classical setting in Sec. 2. Further, in Sec. 3 we provide a quick introduction to QC and variational quantum circuits (VQCs). Readers familiar with either of the topics may safely skip these sections. In Sec. 4 we turn our attention to the emerging field of QRL, starting out with a quick overview of the literature.

In continual learning (CL), the goal is to design models that can learn a sequence of tasks without catastrophic forgetting. While there is a rich set of techniques for CL, relatively little understanding exists on how representations built by previous tasks benefit new tasks that are added to the network. To address this, we study the problem of continual representation learning (CRL) where we learn an evolving representation as new tasks arrive. Focusing on zero-forgetting methods where tasks are embedded in subnetworks (e.g., PackNet), we first provide experiments demonstrating CRL can significantly boost sample efficiency when learning new tasks. To explain this, we establish theoretical guarantees for CRL by providing sample complexity and generalization error bounds for new tasks by formalizing the statistical benefits of previously-learned representations. Our analysis and experiments also highlight the importance of the order in which we learn the tasks. Specifically, we show that CL benefits if the initial tasks have large sample size and high "representation diversity". Diversity ensures that adding new tasks incurs small representation mismatch and can be learned with few samples while training only few additional nonzero weights. Finally, we ask whether one can ensure each task subnetwork to be efficient during inference time while retaining the benefits of representation learning. To this end, we propose an inference-efficient variation of PackNet called Efficient Sparse PackNet (ESPN) which employs joint channel & weight pruning. ESPN embeds tasks in channel-sparse subnets requiring up to 80% less FLOPs to compute while approximately retaining accuracy and is very competitive with a variety of baselines. In summary, this work takes a step towards data and compute-efficient CL with a representation learning perspective. GitHub page: https://github.com/ucr-optml/CtRL

This work introduces the novel task of Source-free Multi-target Domain Adaptation and proposes adaptation framework comprising of \textbf{Co}nsistency with \textbf{N}uclear-Norm Maximization and \textbf{Mix}Up knowledge distillation (\textit{CoNMix}) as a solution to this problem. The main motive of this work is to solve for Single and Multi target Domain Adaptation (SMTDA) for the source-free paradigm, which enforces a constraint where the labeled source data is not available during target adaptation due to various privacy-related restrictions on data sharing. The source-free approach leverages target pseudo labels, which can be noisy, to improve the target adaptation. We introduce consistency between label preserving augmentations and utilize pseudo label refinement methods to reduce noisy pseudo labels. Further, we propose novel MixUp Knowledge Distillation (MKD) for better generalization on multiple target domains using various source-free STDA models. We also show that the Vision Transformer (VT) backbone gives better feature representation with improved domain transferability and class discriminability. Our proposed framework achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in various paradigms of source-free STDA and MTDA settings on popular domain adaptation datasets like Office-Home, Office-Caltech, and DomainNet. Project Page: https://sites.google.com/view/conmix-vcl

Natural Language Generation (NLG) has improved exponentially in recent years thanks to the development of sequence-to-sequence deep learning technologies such as Transformer-based language models. This advancement has led to more fluent and coherent NLG, leading to improved development in downstream tasks such as abstractive summarization, dialogue generation and data-to-text generation. However, it is also apparent that deep learning based generation is prone to hallucinate unintended text, which degrades the system performance and fails to meet user expectations in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, many studies have been presented in measuring and mitigating hallucinated texts, but these have never been reviewed in a comprehensive manner before. In this survey, we thus provide a broad overview of the research progress and challenges in the hallucination problem in NLG. The survey is organized into two parts: (1) a general overview of metrics, mitigation methods, and future directions; and (2) an overview of task-specific research progress on hallucinations in the following downstream tasks, namely abstractive summarization, dialogue generation, generative question answering, data-to-text generation, machine translation, and visual-language generation. This survey serves to facilitate collaborative efforts among researchers in tackling the challenge of hallucinated texts in NLG.

Recent lay language generation systems have used Transformer models trained on a parallel corpus to increase health information accessibility. However, the applicability of these models is constrained by the limited size and topical breadth of available corpora. We introduce CELLS, the largest (63k pairs) and broadest-ranging (12 journals) parallel corpus for lay language generation. The abstract and the corresponding lay language summary are written by domain experts, assuring the quality of our dataset. Furthermore, qualitative evaluation of expert-authored plain language summaries has revealed background explanation as a key strategy to increase accessibility. Such explanation is challenging for neural models to generate because it goes beyond simplification by adding content absent from the source. We derive two specialized paired corpora from CELLS to address key challenges in lay language generation: generating background explanations and simplifying the original abstract. We adopt retrieval-augmented models as an intuitive fit for the task of background explanation generation, and show improvements in summary quality and simplicity while maintaining factual correctness. Taken together, this work presents the first comprehensive study of background explanation for lay language generation, paving the path for disseminating scientific knowledge to a broader audience. CELLS is publicly available at: https://github.com/LinguisticAnomalies/pls_retrieval.

The proposed architecture relies on the Teacher-Student mutual learning framework. To filter out noisy pseudo-labels, we use confidence thresholding for bounding boxes and mask scoring for masks. The approach has been tested with CenterMask, a single-stage anchor-free detector. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first works tackling the problem of semi-supervised instance segmentation and the first one devoted to an anchor-free detector. The advent of deep learning transformed computer vision pipelines both in academia and industry. However, progress is often hindered, since deep learning models are expensive to train for several reasons. Leaving the hardware and computational expenses aside, the vast share of costs often comes from providing the right amount of samples to learn from. For a number of supervised problems in computer vision, it is relatively easy to obtain data. However, labelling them is often the real source of expenses. Semi-supervised learning methods are tailored to deal with the situation in which there are enough data samples, but access to the labels is severely limited.

We introduce CAMRL, the first curriculum-based asymmetric multi-task learning (AMTL) algorithm for dealing with multiple reinforcement learning (RL) tasks altogether. To mitigate the negative influence of customizing the one-off training order in curriculum-based AMTL, CAMRL switches its training mode between parallel single-task RL and asymmetric multi-task RL (MTRL), according to an indicator regarding the training time, the overall performance, and the performance gap among tasks. To leverage the multi-sourced prior knowledge flexibly and to reduce negative transfer in AMTL, we customize a composite loss with multiple differentiable ranking functions and optimize the loss through alternating optimization and the Frank-Wolfe algorithm. The uncertainty-based automatic adjustment of hyper-parameters is also applied to eliminate the need of laborious hyper-parameter analysis during optimization. By optimizing the composite loss, CAMRL predicts the next training task and continuously revisits the transfer matrix and network weights. We have conducted experiments on a wide range of benchmarks in multi-task RL, covering Gym-minigrid, Meta-world, Atari video games, vision-based PyBullet tasks, and RLBench, to show the improvements of CAMRL over the corresponding single-task RL algorithm and state-of-the-art MTRL algorithms. The code is available at: https://github.com/huanghanchi/CAMRL