Due to its robust and precise distance measurements, LiDAR plays an important role in scene understanding for autonomous driving. Training deep neural networks (DNNs) on LiDAR data requires large-scale point-wise annotations, which are time-consuming and expensive to obtain. Instead, simulation-to-real domain adaptation (SRDA) trains a DNN using unlimited synthetic data with automatically generated labels and transfers the learned model to real scenarios. Existing SRDA methods for LiDAR point cloud segmentation mainly employ a multi-stage pipeline and focus on feature-level alignment. They require prior knowledge of real-world statistics and ignore the pixel-level dropout noise gap and the spatial feature gap between different domains. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end framework, named ePointDA, to address the above issues. Specifically, ePointDA consists of three components: self-supervised dropout noise rendering, statistics-invariant and spatially-adaptive feature alignment, and transferable segmentation learning. The joint optimization enables ePointDA to bridge the domain shift at the pixel-level by explicitly rendering dropout noise for synthetic LiDAR and at the feature-level by spatially aligning the features between different domains, without requiring the real-world statistics. Extensive experiments adapting from synthetic GTA-LiDAR to real KITTI and SemanticKITTI demonstrate the superiority of ePointDA for LiDAR point cloud segmentation.

Peer-to-peer ridesharing (P2P-RS) enables people to arrange one-time rides with their own private cars, without the involvement of professional drivers. It is a prominent collective intelligence application producing significant benefits both for individuals (reduced costs) and for the entire community (reduced pollution and traffic), as we showed in a recent publication where we proposed an online approximate solution algorithm for large-scale P2P-RS. In this paper we tackle the fundamental question of assessing the benefit of predicting ridesharing requests in the context of P2P-RS optimisation. Results on a public real-world show that, by employing a perfect predictor, the total reward can be improved by 5.27% with a forecast horizon of 1 minute. On the other hand, a vanilla long short-term memory neural network cannot improve upon a baseline predictor that simply replicates the previous day's requests, whilst achieving an almost-double accuracy.

We explore the application of transformer-based language models to automated theorem proving. This work is motivated by the possibility that a major limitation of automated theorem provers compared to humans -- the generation of original mathematical terms -- might be addressable via generation from language models. We present an automated prover and proof assistant, GPT-f, for the Metamath formalization language, and analyze its performance. GPT-f found new short proofs that were accepted into the main Metamath library, which is to our knowledge, the first time a deep-learning based system has contributed proofs that were adopted by a formal mathematics community.

The dm_control software package is a collection of Python libraries and task suites for reinforcement learning agents in an articulated-body simulation. A MuJoCo wrapper provides convenient bindings to functions and data structures. The PyMJCF and Composer libraries enable procedural model manipulation and task authoring. The Control Suite is a fixed set of tasks with standardised structure, intended to serve as performance benchmarks. The Locomotion framework provides high-level abstractions and examples of locomotion tasks. A set of configurable manipulation tasks with a robot arm and snap-together bricks is also included. dm_control is publicly available at https://www.github.com/deepmind/dm_control

Deep Learning has become an attractive approach towards various data-based problems of theoretical physics in the past decade. Its protagonists, the deep neural networks (DNNs), are capable of making accurate predictions for data of arbitrarily high complexity. A well-known issue most DNNs share is their lack of interpretability. In order to explain their behavior and extract physical laws they have discovered during training, a suitable interpretation method has, therefore, to be applied post-hoc. Due to its simplicity and ubiquity in quantum physics, we decide to present a rather general interpretation method in the context of two-body scattering: We find a one-to-one correspondence between the $n^\text{th}$-order Born approximation and the $n^\text{th}$-order Taylor approximation of deep multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), that predict S-wave scattering lengths $a_0$ for discretized, attractive potentials of finite range. This defines a perturbation theory for MLPs similarily to Born approximations defining a perturbation theory for $a_0$. In the case of shallow potentials, lower-order approximations, that can be argued to be local interpretations of respective MLPs, reliably reproduce $a_0$. As deep MLPs are highly nested functions, the computation of higher-order partial derivatives, which is substantial for a Taylor approximation, is an effortful endeavour. By introducing quantities we refer to as propagators and vertices and that depend on the MLP's weights and biases, we establish a graph-theoretical approach towards partial derivatives and local interpretability. Similar to Feynman rules in quantum field theories, we find rules that systematically assign diagrams consisting of propagators and vertices to the corresponding order of the MLP perturbation theory.

Recent work on Renyi Differential Privacy has shown the feasibility of applying differential privacy to deep learning tasks. Despite their promise, however, differentially private deep networks often lag far behind their non-private counterparts in accuracy, showing the need for more research in model architectures, optimizers, etc. One of the barriers to this expanded research is the training time -- often orders of magnitude larger than training non-private networks. The reason for this slowdown is a crucial privacy-related step called "per-example gradient clipping" whose naive implementation undoes the benefits of batch training with GPUs. By analyzing the back-propagation equations we derive new methods for per-example gradient clipping that are compatible with auto-differentiation (e.g., in PyTorch and TensorFlow) and provide better GPU utilization. Our implementation in PyTorch showed significant training speed-ups (by factors of 54x - 94x for training various models with batch sizes of 128). These techniques work for a variety of architectural choices including convolutional layers, recurrent networks, attention, residual blocks, etc.

Most existing person re-identification methods compute pairwise similarity by extracting robust visual features and learning the discriminative metric. Owing to visual ambiguities, these content-based methods that determine the pairwise relationship only based on the similarity between them, inevitably produce a suboptimal ranking list. Instead, the pairwise similarity can be estimated more accurately along the geodesic path of the underlying data manifold by exploring the rich contextual information of the sample. In this paper, we propose a lightweight post-processing person re-identification method in which the pairwise measure is determined by the relationship between the sample and the counterpart's context in an unsupervised way. We translate the point-to-point comparison into the bilateral point-to-set comparison. The sample's context is composed of its neighbor samples with two different definition ways: the first order context and the second order context, which are used to compute the pairwise similarity in sequence, resulting in a progressive post-processing model. The experiments on four large-scale person re-identification benchmark datasets indicate that (1) the proposed method can consistently achieve higher accuracies by serving as a post-processing procedure after the content-based person re-identification methods, showing its state-of-the-art results, (2) the proposed lightweight method only needs about 6 milliseconds for optimizing the ranking results of one sample, showing its high-efficiency. Code is available at: https://github.com/123ci/PBCmodel.

Conditional story generation and contextual text continuation have become increasingly popular topics in NLP community. Existing models are often prone to output paragraphs of texts that gradually diverge from the given prompt. Although the generated text may have a reasonable perplexity and diversity, it could easily be identified by human as gibberish. The goal of our project is to improve the coherence and consistency across sentences in a language-generation model. We aim to solve this issue by first training a sentence pair coherence classifier with GPT-2 pretrained model, and then co-train the GPT-2 language model with this new coherence objective using a method analogous to the REINFORCE algorithm. This fine-tuned language model is able to generate lengthy paragraph conditioned on a given topic without diverging too much. The simplicity of this model allows it to be applicable to a variety of underlying language model architecture since it only modifies the final layer of the pre-trained model.

Timely completion of design cycles for multiscale and multiphysics systems ranging from consumer electronics to hypersonic vehicles relies on rapid simulation-based prototyping. The latter typically involves high-dimensional spaces of possibly correlated control variables (CVs) and quantities of interest (QoIs) with non-Gaussian and/or multimodal distributions. We develop a model-agnostic, moment-independent global sensitivity analysis (GSA) that relies on differential mutual information to rank the effects of CVs on QoIs. Large amounts of data, which are necessary to rank CVs with confidence, are cheaply generated by a deep neural network (DNN) surrogate model of the underlying process. The DNN predictions are made explainable by the GSA so that the DNN can be deployed to close design loops. Our information-theoretic framework is compatible with a wide variety of black-box models. Its application to multiscale supercapacitor design demonstrates that the CV rankings facilitated by a domain-aware Graph-Informed Neural Network are better resolved than their counterparts obtained with a physics-based model for a fixed computational budget. Consequently, our information-theoretic GSA provides an "outer loop" for accelerated product design by identifying the most and least sensitive input directions and performing subsequent optimization over appropriately reduced parameter subspaces.

Objective: Medical relations are the core components of medical knowledge graphs that are needed for healthcare artificial intelligence. However, the requirement of expert annotation by conventional algorithm development processes creates a major bottleneck for mining new relations. In this paper, we present Hi-RES, a framework for high-throughput relation extraction algorithm development. We also show that combining knowledge articles with electronic health records (EHRs) significantly increases the classification accuracy. Methods: We use relation triplets obtained from structured databases and semistructured webpages to label sentences from target corpora as positive training samples. Two methods are also provided for creating improved negative samples by combining positive samples with na\"ive negative samples. We propose a common model that summarizes sentence information using large-scale pretrained language models and multi-instance attention, which then joins with the concept embeddings trained from the EHRs for relation prediction. Results: We apply the Hi-RES framework to develop classification algorithms for disorder-disorder relations and disorder-location relations. Millions of sentences are created as training data. Using pretrained language models and EHR-based embeddings individually provides considerable accuracy increases over those of previous models. Joining them together further tremendously increases the accuracy to 0.947 and 0.998 for the two sets of relations, respectively, which are 10-17 percentage points higher than those of previous models. Conclusion: Hi-RES is an efficient framework for achieving high-throughput and accurate relation extraction algorithm development.