The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC)¹ created in 1971, is the agency responsible for licensing and regulating New York City's medallion (yellow) taxis, and various other taxis. The yellow taxis are the most iconic taxis of NYC, which are widely recognized outside the USA too. Yellow medallion taxis are traditionally hailed by signaling to a driver who is on duty and seeking a passenger (street hail), but now they may also be hailed using e-hail apps. NYC has five boroughs Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. The yellow taxis are the only vehicles permitted to respond to a street hail from a passenger in all five boroughs of NYC. Here, I will try out few models to predict the demand for only yellow taxis and only in Manhattan.

Among other Machine learning (ML) techniques, deep neural networks have become crucial components for various applications, including image classification, audio recognition, and natural language processing (NLP). In most circumstances, these approaches have attained predicted accuracy that is on par with human performance. As a result, techniques for evaluating and comprehending what the model has learned have become an essential component of a thorough validation method. In reality, it's critical to ensure that the measured accuracy results from using an appropriate problem representation rather than exploiting data artifacts. Facebook AI has released a new version of Captum, a powerful, user-friendly model interpretability library for PyTorch.

Pre-trained language models (LMs) have recently gained attention for their potential as an alternative to (or proxy for) explicit knowledge bases (KBs). In this position paper, we examine this hypothesis, identify strengths and limitations of both LMs and KBs, and discuss the complementary nature of the two paradigms. In particular, we offer qualitative arguments that latent LMs are not suitable as a substitute for explicit KBs, but could play a major role for augmenting and curating KBs.

The use of contrastive loss for representation learning has become prominent in computer vision, and it is now getting attention in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Here, we explore the idea of using a batch-softmax contrastive loss when fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained transformer models to learn better task-specific sentence embeddings for pairwise sentence scoring tasks. We introduce and study a number of variations in the calculation of the loss as well as in the overall training procedure; in particular, we find that data shuffling can be quite important. Our experimental results show sizable improvements on a number of datasets and pairwise sentence scoring tasks including classification, ranking, and regression. Finally, we offer detailed analysis and discussion, which should be useful for researchers aiming to explore the utility of contrastive loss in NLP. Recent years have seen a revolution in Natural Language Processing (NLP) thanks to the advances in machine learning. While a lot of attention has been paid to the architectures, especially for deep learning, there has been less focus on studying loss functions. At the same time, loss functions based on similar or on the same ideas were reinvented multiple times under different names. This can cause difficulties when solving new problems or when designing new experiments based on previous results. To a greater extent, this applies to "universal" loss functions, which can be applied in different machine learning areas and tasks such as Computer Vision (CV), Recommendation Systems, and NLP.

Automatic text generation has garnered growing attention in recent years as an essential step towards computer creativity. Generative Pretraining Transformer 2 (GPT2) is one of the state of the art approaches that have excellent successes. In this paper, we took the first step to investigate the power of GPT2 in traditional Vietnamese poetry generation. In the earlier time, our experiment with base GPT2 was quite good at generating the poem in the proper template. Though it can learn the patterns, including rhyme and tone rules, from the training data, like almost all other text generation approaches, the poems generated still has a topic drift and semantic inconsistency. To improve the cohesion within the poems, we proposed a new model SP-GPT2 (semantic poem GPT2) which was built on the top GPT2 model and an additional loss to constrain context throughout the entire poem. For better evaluation, we examined the methods by both automatic quantitative evaluation and human evaluation. Both automatic and human evaluation demonstrated that our approach can generate poems that have better cohesion without losing the quality due to additional loss. At the same time, we are the pioneers of this topic. We released the first computational scoring module for poems generated in the template containing the style rule dictionary. Additionally, we are the first to publish a Luc-Bat dataset, including 87609 Luc Bat poems, which is equivalent to about 2.6 million sentences, combined with about 83579 poems in other styles was also published for further exploration. The code is available at https://github.com/fsoft-ailab/Poem-Generator

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents that exist in high-dimensional state spaces, such as those composed of images, have interconnected learning burdens. Agents must learn an action-selection policy that completes their given task, which requires them to learn a representation of the state space that discerns between useful and useless information. The reward function is the only supervised feedback that RL agents receive, which causes a representation learning bottleneck that can manifest in poor sample efficiency. We present $k$-Step Latent (KSL), a new representation learning method that enforces temporal consistency of representations via a self-supervised auxiliary task wherein agents learn to recurrently predict action-conditioned representations of the state space. The state encoder learned by KSL produces low-dimensional representations that make optimization of the RL task more sample efficient. Altogether, KSL produces state-of-the-art results in both data efficiency and asymptotic performance in the popular PlaNet benchmark suite. Our analyses show that KSL produces encoders that generalize better to new tasks unseen during training, and its representations are more strongly tied to reward, are more invariant to perturbations in the state space, and move more smoothly through the temporal axis of the RL problem than other methods such as DrQ, RAD, CURL, and SAC-AE.

The recent advancement in deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has brought insight into the automation of X-ray security screening for aviation security and beyond. Here, we explore the viability of two recent end-to-end object detection CNN architectures, Cascade R-CNN and FreeAnchor, for prohibited item detection by balancing processing time and the impact of image data compression from an operational viewpoint. Overall, we achieve maximal detection performance using a FreeAnchor architecture with a ResNet50 backbone, obtaining mean Average Precision (mAP) of 87.7 and 85.8 for using the OPIXray and SIXray benchmark datasets, showing superior performance over prior work on both. With fewer parameters and less training time, FreeAnchor achieves the highest detection inference speed of ~13 fps (3.9 ms per image). Furthermore, we evaluate the impact of lossy image compression upon detector performance. The CNN models display substantial resilience to the lossy compression, resulting in only a 1.1% decrease in mAP at the JPEG compression level of 50. Additionally, a thorough evaluation of data augmentation techniques is provided, including adaptions of MixUp and CutMix strategy as well as other standard transformations, further improving the detection accuracy.

Matrix multiplication is the bedrock in Deep Learning inference application. When it comes to hardware acceleration on edge computing devices, matrix multiplication often takes up a great majority of the time. To achieve better performance in edge computing, we introduce a low-power Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) accelerator based on a pipelined matrix multiplication scheme and a nonuniform quantization methodology. The implementation is running on Field-programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices and tested its performance on handwritten digit classification and Q-learning tasks. Results show that our method can achieve better performance with fewer power consumption.

We propose heavy ball neural ordinary differential equations (HBNODEs), leveraging the continuous limit of the classical momentum accelerated gradient descent, to improve neural ODEs (NODEs) training and inference. HBNODEs have two properties that imply practical advantages over NODEs: (i) The adjoint state of an HBNODE also satisfies an HBNODE, accelerating both forward and backward ODE solvers, thus significantly reducing the number of function evaluations (NFEs) and improving the utility of the trained models. (ii) The spectrum of HBNODEs is well structured, enabling effective learning of long-term dependencies from complex sequential data. We verify the advantages of HBNODEs over NODEs on benchmark tasks, including image classification, learning complex dynamics, and sequential modeling. Our method requires remarkably fewer forward and backward NFEs, is more accurate, and learns long-term dependencies more effectively than the other ODE-based neural network models. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/hedixia/HeavyBallNODE}.

The prospect of collusive agreements being stabilized via the use of pricing algorithms is widely discussed by antitrust experts and economists. However, the literature is often lacking the perspective of computer scientists, and seems to regularly overestimate the applicability of recent progress in machine learning to the complex coordination problem firms face in forming cartels. Similarly, modelling results supporting the possibility of collusion by learning algorithms often use simple market simulations which allows them to use simple algorithms that do not produce many of the problems machine learning practitioners have to deal with in real-world problems, which could prove to be particularly detrimental to learning collusive agreements. After critically reviewing the literature on algorithmic collusion, and connecting it to results from computer science, we find that while it is likely too early to adapt antitrust law to be able to deal with self-learning algorithms colluding in real markets, other forms of algorithmic collusion, such as hub-and-spoke arrangements facilitated by centralized pricing algorithms might already warrant legislative action.