Named Entity Understanding (NEU) plays an essential role in interactions between users and voice assistants, since successfully identifying entities and correctly linking them to their standard forms is crucial to understanding the user's intent. NEU is a challenging task in voice assistants due to the ambiguous nature of natural language and because noise introduced by speech transcription and user errors occur frequently in spoken natural language queries. In this paper, we propose an architecture with novel features that jointly solves the recognition of named entities (a.k.a. Named Entity Recognition, or NER) and the resolution to their canonical forms (a.k.a. Entity Linking, or EL). We show that by combining NER and EL information in a joint reranking module, our proposed framework improves accuracy in both tasks. This improved performance and the features that enable it, also lead to better accuracy in downstream tasks, such as domain classification and semantic parsing.

Building natural language interfaces for databases has been a long-standing challenge for several decades. The major advantage of these so-called text-to-SQL systems is that end-users can query complex databases without the need to know SQL or the underlying database schema. Due to significant advancements in machine learning, the recent focus of research has been on neural networks to tackle this challenge on complex datasets like Spider. Several recent text-to-SQL systems achieve promising results on this dataset. However, none of them extracts and incorporates values from the user questions for generating SQL statements. Thus, the practical use of these systems in a real-world scenario has not been sufficiently demonstrated yet. In this paper we propose ValueNet light and ValueNet -- the first end-to-end text-to-SQL system incorporating values on the challenging Spider dataset. The main idea of our approach is to use not only metadata information about the underlying database but also information on the base data as input for our neural network architecture. In particular, we propose a novel architecture sketch to extract values from a user question and come up with possible value candidates which are not explicitly mentioned in the question. We then use a neural model based on an encoder-decoder architecture to synthesize the SQL query. Finally, we evaluate our model on the Spider challenge using the Execution Accuracy metric, a more difficult metric than used by most participants of the challenge. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that ValueNet light and ValueNet reach state-of-the-art results of 64% and 60% accuracy, respectively, for translating from text to SQL, even when applying this more difficult metric than used by previous work.

With advances in reinforcement learning (RL), agents are now being developed in high-stakes application domains such as healthcare and transportation. Explaining the behavior of these agents is challenging, as the environments in which they act have large state spaces, and their decision-making can be affected by delayed rewards, making it difficult to analyze their behavior. To address this problem, several approaches have been developed. Some approaches attempt to convey the $\textit{global}$ behavior of the agent, describing the actions it takes in different states. Other approaches devised $\textit{local}$ explanations which provide information regarding the agent's decision-making in a particular state. In this paper, we combine global and local explanation methods, and evaluate their joint and separate contributions, providing (to the best of our knowledge) the first user study of combined local and global explanations for RL agents. Specifically, we augment strategy summaries that extract important trajectories of states from simulations of the agent with saliency maps which show what information the agent attends to. Our results show that the choice of what states to include in the summary (global information) strongly affects people's understanding of agents: participants shown summaries that included important states significantly outperformed participants who were presented with agent behavior in a randomly set of chosen world-states. We find mixed results with respect to augmenting demonstrations with saliency maps (local information), as the addition of saliency maps did not significantly improve performance in most cases. However, we do find some evidence that saliency maps can help users better understand what information the agent relies on in its decision making, suggesting avenues for future work that can further improve explanations of RL agents.

We describe several datasets and first experiments with creating conjectures by neural methods. The datasets are based on the Mizar Mathematical Library processed in several forms and the problems extracted from it by the MPTP system and proved by the E prover using the ENIGMA guidance. The conjecturing experiments use the Transformer architecture and in particular its GPT-2 implementation.

Framed in positive terms, this report examines how technical AI research might be steered in a manner that is more attentive to humanity's long-term prospects for survival as a species. In negative terms, we ask what existential risks humanity might face from AI development in the next century, and by what principles contemporary technical research might be directed to address those risks. A key property of hypothetical AI technologies is introduced, called \emph{prepotence}, which is useful for delineating a variety of potential existential risks from artificial intelligence, even as AI paradigms might shift. A set of \auxref{dirtot} contemporary research \directions are then examined for their potential benefit to existential safety. Each research direction is explained with a scenario-driven motivation, and examples of existing work from which to build. The research directions present their own risks and benefits to society that could occur at various scales of impact, and in particular are not guaranteed to benefit existential safety if major developments in them are deployed without adequate forethought and oversight. As such, each direction is accompanied by a consideration of potentially negative side effects.

Most machine learning models, especially artificial neural networks, require numerical, not categorical data. We briefly describe the advantages and disadvantages of common encoding schemes. For example, one-hot encoding is commonly used for attributes with a few unrelated categories and word embeddings for attributes with many related categories (e.g., words). Neither is suitable for encoding attributes with many unrelated categories, such as diagnosis codes in healthcare applications. Application of one-hot encoding for diagnosis codes, for example, can result in extremely high dimensionality with low sample size problems or artificially induce machine learning artifacts, not to mention the explosion of computing resources needed. Quasi-orthonormal encoding (QOE) fills the gap. We briefly show how QOE compares to one-hot encoding. We provide example code of how to implement QOE using popular ML libraries such as Tensorflow and PyTorch and a demonstration of QOE to MNIST handwriting samples.

How to augment limited stock price data is an open problem in stock trend prediction. Most innovative data augmentation schemes adopted in image processing community cannot be used directly in time-series data. Although the traditional financial data simulation method can generate time-series data, there are some defects when considering the real-world market. For example, Monte Carlo simulation is one of the primary traditional tools applied extensively in financial engineering research, economics, and a wide array of other fields during the past four decades [1]. However, Monte Carlo simulation is ultimately a statistical model, which means it requires several assumptions. Those assumptions may be unrealistic and depends on the individual circumstances. There are three primary disadvantages as follows: 1. Monte Carlo simulations need distribution assumptions to built around a specific type of statistical distribution. If we use the right distribution assumption, the results are valid. However, if we use the wrong one then the results will be meaningless [2].

Effective peer assessment requires students to be attentive to the deficiencies in the work they rate. Thus, their reviews should identify problems. But what ways are there to check that they do? We attempt to automate the process of deciding whether a review comment detects a problem. We use over 18,000 review comments that were labeled by the reviewees as either detecting or not detecting a problem with the work. We deploy several traditional machine-learning models, as well as neural-network models using GloVe and BERT embeddings. We find that the best performer is the Hierarchical Attention Network classifier, followed by the Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) Attention and Capsule model with scores of 93.1% and 90.5% respectively. The best non-neural network model was the support vector machine with a score of 89.71%. This is followed by the Stochastic Gradient Descent model and the Logistic Regression model with 89.70% and 88.98%.

Structural damage detection has become an interdisciplinary area of interest for various engineering fields, while the available damage detection methods are being in the process of adapting machine learning concepts. Most machine learning based methods heavily depend on extracted ``hand-crafted" features that are manually selected in advance by domain experts and then, fixed. Recently, deep learning has demonstrated remarkable performance on traditional challenging tasks, such as image classification, object detection, etc., due to the powerful feature learning capabilities. This breakthrough has inspired researchers to explore deep learning techniques for structural damage detection problems. However, existing methods have considered either spatial relation (e.g., using convolutional neural network (CNN)) or temporal relation (e.g., using long short term memory network (LSTM)) only. In this work, we propose a novel Hierarchical CNN and Gated recurrent unit (GRU) framework to model both spatial and temporal relations, termed as HCG, for structural damage detection. Specifically, CNN is utilized to model the spatial relations and the short-term temporal dependencies among sensors, while the output features of CNN are fed into the GRU to learn the long-term temporal dependencies jointly. Extensive experiments on IASC-ASCE structural health monitoring benchmark and scale model of three-span continuous rigid frame bridge structure datasets have shown that our proposed HCG outperforms other existing methods for structural damage detection significantly.

It has been advocated that medical imaging systems and reconstruction algorithms should be assessed and optimized by use of objective measures of image quality that quantify the performance of an observer at specific diagnostic tasks. One important source of variability that can significantly limit observer performance is variation in the objects to-be-imaged. This source of variability can be described by stochastic object models (SOMs). A SOM is a generative model that can be employed to establish an ensemble of to-be-imaged objects with prescribed statistical properties. In order to accurately model variations in anatomical structures and object textures, it is desirable to establish SOMs from experimental imaging measurements acquired by use of a well-characterized imaging system. Deep generative neural networks, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) hold great potential for this task. However, conventional GANs are typically trained by use of reconstructed images that are influenced by the effects of measurement noise and the reconstruction process. To circumvent this, an AmbientGAN has been proposed that augments a GAN with a measurement operator. However, the original AmbientGAN could not immediately benefit from modern training procedures, such as progressive growing, which limited its ability to be applied to realistically sized medical image data. To circumvent this, in this work, a new Progressive Growing AmbientGAN (ProAmGAN) strategy is developed for establishing SOMs from medical imaging measurements. Stylized numerical studies corresponding to common medical imaging modalities are conducted to demonstrate and validate the proposed method for establishing SOMs.