Forecasting future world events is a challenging but valuable task. Forecasts of climate, geopolitical conflict, pandemics and economic indicators help shape policy and decision making. In these domains, the judgment of expert humans contributes to the best forecasts. Given advances in language modeling, can these forecasts be automated? To this end, we introduce Autocast, a dataset containing thousands of forecasting questions and an accompanying news corpus. Questions are taken from forecasting tournaments, ensuring high quality, real-world importance, and diversity. The news corpus is organized by date, allowing us to precisely simulate the conditions under which humans made past forecasts (avoiding leakage from the future).

Program translation is an important tool to migrate legacy code in one language into an ecosystem built in a different language. In this work, we are the first to employ deep neural networks toward tackling this problem. We observe that program translation is a modular procedure, in which a sub-tree of the source tree is translated into the corresponding target sub-tree at each step. To capture this intuition, we design a tree-to-tree neural network to translate a source tree into a target one. Meanwhile, we develop an attention mechanism for the tree-to-tree model, so that when the decoder expands one non-terminal in the target tree, the attention mechanism locates the corresponding sub-tree in the source tree to guide the expansion of the decoder. We evaluate the program translation capability of our tree-to-tree model against several state-of-the-art approaches. Compared against other neural translation models, we observe that our approach is consistently better than the baselines with a margin of up to 15 points. Further, our approach can improve the previous state-of-the-art program translation approaches by a margin of 20 points on the translation of real-world projects.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

In recent years, deep neural networks have demonstrated increasingly strong abilities to recognize objects and activities in videos. However, as video understanding becomes widely used in real-world applications, a key consideration is developing human-centric systems that understand not only the content of the video but also how it would affect the wellbeing and emotional state of viewers. To facilitate research in this setting, we introduce two large-scale datasets with over 60,000 videos manually annotated for emotional response and subjective wellbeing. The Video Cognitive Empathy (VCE) dataset contains annotations for distributions of fine-grained emotional responses, allowing models to gain a detailed understanding of affective states. The Video to Valence (V2V) dataset contains annotations of relative pleasantness between videos, which enables predicting a continuous spectrum of wellbeing. In experiments, we show how video models that are primarily trained to recognize actions and find contours of objects can be repurposed to understand human preferences and the emotional content of videos. Although there is room for improvement, predicting wellbeing and emotional response is on the horizon for state-of-the-art models. We hope our datasets can help foster further advances at the intersection of commonsense video understanding and human preference learning.

Self-supervision provides effective representations for downstream tasks without requiring labels. However, existing approaches lag behind fully supervised training and are often not thought beneficial beyond obviating or reducing the need for annotations. We find that self-supervision can benefit robustness in a variety of ways, including robustness to adversarial examples, label corruption, and common input corruptions. Additionally, self-supervision greatly benefits out-of-distribution detection on difficult, near-distribution outliers, so much so that it exceeds the performance of fully supervised methods. These results demonstrate the promise of self-supervision for improving robustness and uncertainty estimation and establish these tasks as new axes of evaluation for future self-supervised learning research.

Automatic translation from natural language descriptions into programs is a longstanding challenging problem. In this work, we consider a simple yet important sub-problem: translation from textual descriptions to If-Then programs. We devise a novel neural network architecture for this task which we train end-toend. Specifically, we introduce Latent Attention, which computes multiplicative weights for the words in the description in a two-stage process with the goal of better leveraging the natural language structures that indicate the relevant parts for predicting program elements. Our architecture reduces the error rate by 28.57% compared to prior art [3]. We also propose a one-shot learning scenario of If-Then program synthesis and simulate it with our existing dataset. We demonstrate a variation on the training procedure for this scenario that outperforms the original procedure, significantly closing the gap to the model trained with all data.

Program translation is an important tool to migrate legacy code in one language into an ecosystem built in a different language. In this work, we are the first to employ deep neural networks toward tackling this problem. We observe that program translation is a modular procedure, in which a sub-tree of the source tree is translated into the corresponding target sub-tree at each step. To capture this intuition, we design a tree-to-tree neural network to translate a source tree into a target one. Meanwhile, we develop an attention mechanism for the tree-to-tree model, so that when the decoder expands one non-terminal in the target tree, the attention mechanism locates the corresponding sub-tree in the source tree to guide the expansion of the decoder. We evaluate the program translation capability of our tree-to-tree model against several state-of-the-art approaches. Compared against other neural translation models, we observe that our approach is consistently better than the baselines with a margin of up to 15 points. Further, our approach can improve the previous state-of-the-art program translation approaches by a margin of 20 points on the translation of real-world projects.

The task of program synthesis, or automatically generating programs that are consistent with a provided specification, remains a challenging task in artificial intelligence. As in other fields of AI, deep learning-based end-to-end approaches have made great advances in program synthesis. However, compared to other fields such as computer vision, program synthesis provides greater opportunities to explicitly exploit structured information such as execution traces. While execution traces can provide highly detailed guidance for a program synthesis method, they are more difficult to obtain than more basic forms of specification such as input/output pairs. Therefore, we use the insight that we can split the process into two parts: infer traces from input/output examples, then infer programs from traces. Our application of this idea leads to state-of-the-art results in program synthesis in the Karel domain, improving accuracy to 81.3% from the 77.12% of prior work.