Last week, a group of Amazon scientists and engineers gathered to dream big. The event was all about machine learning, a powerful type of artificial intelligence that has already transformed Amazon's business and those of other tech giants. What was different about this AI conclave was its focus on audacious possibilities in the medical field, such as using ML to revolutionize drug discovery, clinical trials, genomics and related areas. Insider obtained documents that reveal the topics, goals and challenges discussed. Together, they show Amazon's ambition to take on Google's DeepMind, a pioneer in AI-powered scientific discovery.

OpenAI, whose text- and image-generating artificial intelligence has become a mainstream hit, is in advanced talks to raise more funding from Microsoft, which previously backed the startup with capital that includes credits to use Microsoft's Azure cloud computing services to develop its technology, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. A new deal could help Microsoft grow Azure usage, one of its top priorities, while keeping OpenAI's business away from rivals including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. The talks follow a previously undisclosed sale of OpenAI stock by existing shareholders last year to investors including Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management, Bedrock Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. In that deal, the price of the shares implied a valuation of nearly $20 billion for the seven-year-old startup, said several people with knowledge of the deal.

Successful coordination in Dec-POMDPs requires agents to adopt robust strategies and interpretable styles of play for their partner. A common failure mode is symmetry breaking, when agents arbitrarily converge on one out of many equivalent but mutually incompatible policies. Commonly these examples include partial observability, e.g. waving your right hand vs. left hand to convey a covert message. In this paper, we present a novel equivariant network architecture for use in Dec-POMDPs that prevents the agent from learning policies which break symmetries, doing so more effectively than prior methods. Our method also acts as a "coordination-improvement operator" for generic, pre-trained policies, and thus may be applied at test-time in conjunction with any self-play algorithm. We provide theoretical guarantees of our work and test on the AI benchmark task of Hanabi, where we demonstrate our methods outperforming other symmetry-aware baselines in zero-shot coordination, as well as able to improve the coordination ability of a variety of pre-trained policies. In particular, we show our method can be used to improve on the state of the art for zero-shot coordination on the Hanabi benchmark.

Recent methods based on pre-trained language models have exhibited superior performance over tabular tasks (e.g., tabular NLI), despite showing inherent problems such as not using the right evidence and inconsistent predictions across inputs while reasoning over the tabular data. In this work, we utilize Pattern-Exploiting Training (PET) (i.e., strategic MLM) on pre-trained language models to strengthen these tabular reasoning models' pre-existing knowledge and reasoning abilities. Our upgraded model exhibits a superior understanding of knowledge facts and tabular reasoning compared to current baselines. Additionally, we demonstrate that such models are more effective for underlying downstream tasks of tabular inference on InfoTabs. Furthermore, we show our model's robustness against adversarial sets generated through various character and word level perturbations.

While neural methods for text-to-speech (TTS) have shown great advances in modeling multiple speakers, even in zero-shot settings, the amount of data needed for those approaches is generally not feasible for the vast majority of the world's over 6,000 spoken languages. In this work, we bring together the tasks of zero-shot voice cloning and multilingual low-resource TTS. Using the language agnostic meta learning (LAML) procedure and modifications to a TTS encoder, we show that it is possible for a system to learn speaking a new language using just 5 minutes of training data while retaining the ability to infer the voice of even unseen speakers in the newly learned language. We show the success of our proposed approach in terms of intelligibility, naturalness and similarity to target speaker using objective metrics as well as human studies and provide our code and trained models open source.

Recently, dataset-generation-based zero-shot learning has shown promising results by training a task-specific model with a dataset synthesized from large pre-trained language models (PLMs). The final task-specific model often achieves compatible or even better performance than PLMs under the zero-shot setting, with orders of magnitude fewer parameters. However, synthetic datasets have their drawbacks. They have long been suffering from low-quality issues (e.g., low informativeness and redundancy). This explains why the massive synthetic data does not lead to better performance -- a scenario we would expect in the human-labeled data. To improve the quality of dataset synthesis, we propose a progressive zero-shot dataset generation framework, ProGen, which leverages the feedback from the task-specific model to guide the generation of new training data via in-context examples. Extensive experiments on five text classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We also show ProGen achieves on-par or superior performance with only 1\% synthetic dataset size compared to baseline methods without in-context feedback.

Large language models (LMs) have rapidly become a mainstay in Natural Language Processing. These models are known to acquire rich linguistic knowledge from training on large amounts of text. In this paper, we investigate if pre-training on text also confers these models with helpful `inductive biases' for non-linguistic reasoning. On a set of 19 diverse non-linguistic tasks involving quantitative computations, recognizing regular expressions and reasoning over strings. We find that pretrained models significantly outperform comparable non-pretrained neural models. This remains true also in experiments with training non-pretrained models with fewer parameters to account for model regularization effects. We further explore the effect of text domain on LMs by pretraining models from text from different domains and provenances. Our experiments surprisingly reveal that the positive effects of pre-training persist even when pretraining on multi-lingual text or computer code, and even for text generated from synthetic languages. Our findings suggest a hitherto unexplored deep connection between pre-training and inductive learning abilities of language models.

Large-scale pretrained language models have made significant advances in solving downstream language understanding tasks. However, they generally suffer from reporting bias, the phenomenon describing the lack of explicit commonsense knowledge in written text, e.g., ''an orange is orange''. To overcome this limitation, we develop a novel approach, Z-LaVI, to endow language models with visual imagination capabilities. Specifically, we leverage two complementary types of ''imaginations'': (i) recalling existing images through retrieval and (ii) synthesizing nonexistent images via text-to-image generation. Jointly exploiting the language inputs and the imagination, a pretrained vision-language model (e.g., CLIP) eventually composes a zero-shot solution to the original language tasks. Notably, fueling language models with imagination can effectively leverage visual knowledge to solve plain language tasks. In consequence, Z-LaVI consistently improves the zero-shot performance of existing language models across a diverse set of language tasks.

Massively Multilingual Language Models (MMLMs) have recently gained popularity due to their surprising effectiveness in cross-lingual transfer. While there has been much work in evaluating these models for their performance on a variety of tasks and languages, little attention has been paid on how well calibrated these models are with respect to the confidence in their predictions. We first investigate the calibration of MMLMs in the zero-shot setting and observe a clear case of miscalibration in low-resource languages or those which are typologically diverse from English. Next, we empirically show that calibration methods like temperature scaling and label smoothing do reasonably well towards improving calibration in the zero-shot scenario. We also find that few-shot examples in the language can further help reduce the calibration errors, often substantially. Overall, our work contributes towards building more reliable multilingual models by highlighting the issue of their miscalibration, understanding what language and model specific factors influence it, and pointing out the strategies to improve the same.

The new generation of state-of-the-art computer vision systems are trained from natural language supervision, ranging from simple object category names to descriptive captions. This form of supervision ensures high generality and usability of the learned visual models, due to the broad concept coverage achieved via large-scale data collection process. Alternatively, we argue that learning with external knowledge is a promising way which leverages a much more structured source of supervision and offers sample efficiency. We propose K-LITE, a simple strategy to leverage external knowledge for building transferable visual systems: In training, it enriches entities in text with WordNet and Wiktionary knowledge, leading to an efficient and scalable approach to learning image representations that uses knowledge about the visual concepts. In evaluation, the text is also augmented with external knowledge and then used to reference learned visual concepts (or describe new ones) to enable zero-shot and few-shot transfer of the pre-trained models. We study the performance of K-LITE on two important computer vision problems, image classification and object detection, benchmarking on 20 and 13 different existing datasets, respectively. The proposed knowledge-augmented models show significant improvement in transfer learning performance over existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/klite.