Identifying whether a word carries the same meaning or different meaning in two contexts is an important research area in natural language processing which plays a significant role in many applications such as question answering, document summarisation, information retrieval and information extraction. Most of the previous work in this area rely on language-specific resources making it difficult to generalise across languages. Considering this limitation, our approach to SemEval-2021 Task 2 is based only on pretrained transformer models and does not use any language-specific processing and resources. Despite that, our best model achieves 0.90 accuracy for English-English subtask which is very compatible compared to the best result of the subtask; 0.93 accuracy. Our approach also achieves satisfactory results in other monolingual and cross-lingual language pairs as well.

This paper addresses the problem of multi-step time series forecasting for non-stationary signals that can present sudden changes. Current state-of-the-art deep learning forecasting methods, often trained with variants of the MSE, lack the ability to provide sharp predictions in deterministic and probabilistic contexts. To handle these challenges, we propose to incorporate shape and temporal criteria in the training objective of deep models. We define shape and temporal similarities and dissimilarities, based on a smooth relaxation of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and Temporal Distortion Index (TDI), that enable to build differentiable loss functions and positive semi-definite (PSD) kernels. With these tools, we introduce DILATE (DIstortion Loss including shApe and TimE), a new objective for deterministic forecasting, that explicitly incorporates two terms supporting precise shape and temporal change detection. For probabilistic forecasting, we introduce STRIPE++ (Shape and Time diverRsIty in Probabilistic forEcasting), a framework for providing a set of sharp and diverse forecasts, where the structured shape and time diversity is enforced with a determinantal point process (DPP) diversity loss. Extensive experiments and ablations studies on synthetic and real-world datasets confirm the benefits of leveraging shape and time features in time series forecasting.

This paper presents Contrastive Reconstruction, ConRec - a self-supervised learning algorithm that obtains image representations by jointly optimizing a contrastive and a self-reconstruction loss. We showcase that state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods (e.g. SimCLR) have shortcomings to capture fine-grained visual features in their representations. ConRec extends the SimCLR framework by adding (1) a self-reconstruction task and (2) an attention mechanism within the contrastive learning task. This is accomplished by applying a simple encoder-decoder architecture with two heads. We show that both extensions contribute towards an improved vector representation for images with fine-grained visual features. Combining those concepts, ConRec outperforms SimCLR and SimCLR with Attention-Pooling on fine-grained classification datasets.

This paper describes an AI agent that plays the popular first-person-shooter (FPS) video game'Counter-Strike; Global Offensive' (CSGO) from pixel input. The agent, a deep neural network, matches the performance of the medium difficulty built-in AI on the deathmatch game mode, whilst adopting a humanlike play style. Unlike much prior work in games, no API is available for CSGO, so algorithms must train and run in real-time. This limits the quantity of on-policy data that can be generated, precluding many reinforcement learning algorithms. Our solution uses behavioural cloning -- training on a large noisy dataset scraped from human play on online servers (4 million frames, comparable in size to ImageNet), and a smaller dataset of high-quality expert demonstrations. This scale is an order of magnitude larger than prior work on imitation learning in FPS games.

This paper proposes an automatic Chinese text categorization method for solving the emergency event report classification problem. Since bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) has achieved great success in natural language processing domain, it is employed to derive emergency text features in this study. To overcome the data imbalance problem in the distribution of emergency event categories, a novel loss function is proposed to improve the performance of the BERT-based model. Meanwhile, to avoid the impact of the extreme learning rate, the Adabound optimization algorithm that achieves a gradual smooth transition from Adam to SGD is employed to learn parameters of the model. To verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method, a Chinese emergency text dataset collected from the Internet is employed. Compared with benchmarking methods, the proposed method has achieved the best performance in terms of accuracy, weighted-precision, weighted-recall, and weighted-F1 values. Therefore, it is promising to employ the proposed method for real applications in smart emergency management systems.

Before deploying machine learning models it is critical to assess their robustness. In the context of deep neural networks for image understanding, changing the object location, rotation and size may affect the predictions in non-trivial ways. In this work we perform a fine-grained analysis of robustness with respect to these factors of variation using SI-Score, a synthetic dataset. In particular, we investigate ResNets, Vision Transformers and CLIP, and identify interesting qualitative differences between these.

This paper presents our submission to SemEval-2021 Task 5: Toxic Spans Detection. The purpose of this task is to detect the spans that make a text toxic, which is a complex labour for several reasons. Firstly, because of the intrinsic subjectivity of toxicity, and secondly, due to toxicity not always coming from single words like insults or offends, but sometimes from whole expressions formed by words that may not be toxic individually. Following this idea of focusing on both single words and multi-word expressions, we study the impact of using a multi-depth DistilBERT model, which uses embeddings from different layers to estimate the final per-token toxicity. Our quantitative results show that using information from multiple depths boosts the performance of the model. Finally, we also analyze our best model qualitatively.

The conference starts on Monday, April 12th and is virtual. "The sessions at NVIDIA'S GTC event are always illuminating. Kinetic Vision's two presentations will show how new AI-driven digital twin models are changing the foundations of retail operations and product development," said Jeremy Jarrett, Executive Vice President of Kinetic Vision. The first session is a deep dive into physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). This innovative technology is able to provide real-time simulation results within the design environment, and could even create'intelligent CAD' to guide the user towards the most functional design.

You are in your bed, with a book and a cup of coffee in hand. It's raining, and you are savouring the sound of rain droplets buffeting your window panes while your favourite songs play in the background. And most likely, the song you are listening to is recommended by your music app. Music apps -- that leverages the latest AI, ML technologies -- have become an essential part of our daily routines. The app has over 50 million songs and collects a lot of information about music tastes, search habits, playlists, geographical location, and most-used devices.

This article is about most probably the next generation of neural networks for all computer vision applications: The transformer architecture. You've certainly already heard about this architecture in the field of natural language processing, or NLP, mainly with GPT3 that made a lot of noise in 2020. Transformers can be used as a general-purpose backbone for many different applications and not only NLP. In a couple of minutes, you will know how the transformer architecture can be applied to computer vision with a new paper called the Swin Transformer by Ze Lio et al. from Microsoft Research [1]. This article may be less flashy than usual as it doesn't really show the actual results of a precise application.