Text-to-SQL, which involves translating natural language into Structured Query Language (SQL), is crucial for enabling broad access to structured databases without expert knowledge. However, designing models for such tasks is challenging due to numerous factors, including the presence of 'noise,' such as ambiguous questions and syntactical errors. This study provides an in-depth analysis of the distribution and types of noise in the widely used BIRD-Bench benchmark and the impact of noise on models. While BIRD-Bench was created to model dirty and noisy database values, it was not created to contain noise and errors in the questions and gold queries. We found that noise in questions and gold queries are prevalent in the dataset, with varying amounts across domains, and with an uneven distribution between noise types. The presence of incorrect gold SQL queries, which then generate incorrect gold answers, has a significant impact on the benchmark's reliability. Surprisingly, when evaluating models on corrected SQL queries, zero-shot baselines surpassed the performance of state-of-the-art prompting methods. We conclude that informative noise labels and reliable benchmarks are crucial to developing new Text-to-SQL methods that can handle varying types of noise. All datasets, annotations, and code are available at https://github.com/niklaswretblad/the-effects-of-noise-in-text-to-SQL.

We present RAPID (Real-time Automated Photometric IDentification), a novel time-series classification tool capable of automatically identifying transients from within a day of the initial alert, to the full lifetime of a light curve. Using a deep recurrent neural network with Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs), we present the first method specifically designed to provide early classifications of astronomical time-series data, typing 12 different transient classes. Our classifier can process light curves with any phase coverage, and it does not rely on deriving computationally expensive features from the data, making RAPID well-suited for processing the millions of alerts that ongoing and upcoming wide-field surveys such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will produce. The classification accuracy improves over the lifetime of the transient as more photometric data becomes available, and across the 12 transient classes, we obtain an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.95 and 0.98 at early and late epochs, respectively. We demonstrate RAPID's ability to effectively provide early classifications of transients from the ZTF data stream. We have made RAPID available as an open-source software package (https://astrorapid.readthedocs.io) for machine learning-based alert-brokers to use for the autonomous and quick classification of several thousand light curves within a few seconds.

Building models, or maps, of robot environments is a highly active research area; however, most existing techniques construct unstructured maps and assume static environments. In this paper, we present an algorithm for learning object models of non-stationary objects found in office-type environments. Our algorithm exploits the fact that many objects found in office environments look alike (e.g., chairs, recycling bins). It does so through a two-level hierarchical representation, which links individual objects with generic shape templates of object classes. We derive an approximate EM algorithm for learning shape parameters at both levels of the hierarchy, using local occupancy grid maps for representing shape. Additionally, we develop a Bayesian model selection algorithm that enables the robot to estimate the total number of objects and object templates in the environment. Experimental results using a real robot equipped with a laser range finder indicate that our approach performs well at learning object-based maps of simple office environments. The approach outperforms a previously developed non-hierarchical algorithm that models objects but lacks class templates.