ABSTRACT Large language models, with their strong reasoning ability and rich knowledge, have brought revolution to many tasks of AI, but their impact on sign language generation remains limited due to its complexity and unique rules. In this paper, we propose TEAch Me Sign (TEAM-Sign), treating sign language as another natural language. By fine-tuning an LLM, we enable it to learn the correspondence between text and sign language, and facilitate generation. Considering the differences between sign and spoken language, we employ a stepwise prompting strategy to extract the inherent sign language knowledge within the LLM, thereby supporting the learning and generation process. Experimental results on How2Sign and Phoenix14T datasets demonstrate that our approach effectively leverages both the sign language knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLM to align the different distribution and grammatical rules between sign and spoken language.

In the domain of algorithmic decision-making, non-Markovian dynamics manifest as a significant impediment, especially for paradigms such as Reinforcement Learning (RL), thereby exerting far-reaching consequences on the advancement and effectiveness of the associated systems. Nevertheless, the existing benchmarks are deficient in comprehensively assessing the capacity of decision algorithms to handle non-Markovian dynamics. To address this deficiency, we have devised a generalized methodology grounded in category theory. Notably, we established the category of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) and the category of non-Markovian Decision Processes (NMDP), and proved the equivalence relationship between them. This theoretical foundation provides a novel perspective for understanding and addressing non-Markovian dynamics. We further introduced non-Markovianity into decision-making problem settings via the History Aggregator for State (HAS). With HAS, we can precisely control the state dependency structure of decision-making problems in the time series. Our analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in representing a broad range of non-Markovian dynamics. This approach facilitates a more rigorous and flexible evaluation of decision algorithms by testing them in problem settings where non-Markovian dynamics are explicitly constructed.

We investigate the problem of compound estimation of normal means while accounting for the presence of side information. Leveraging the empirical Bayes framework, we develop a nonparametric integrative Tweedie (NIT) approach that incorporates structural knowledge encoded in multivariate auxiliary data to enhance the precision of compound estimation. Our approach employs convex optimization tools to estimate the gradient of the log-density directly, enabling the incorporation of structural constraints. We conduct theoretical analyses of the asymptotic risk of NIT and establish the rate at which NIT converges to the oracle estimator. As the dimension of the auxiliary data increases, we accurately quantify the improvements in estimation risk and the associated deterioration in convergence rate. The numerical performance of NIT is illustrated through the analysis of both simulated and real data, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods.

Systematic compositionality is an essential mechanism in human language, allowing the recombination of known parts to create novel expressions. However, existing neural models have been shown to lack this basic ability in learning symbolic structures. Motivated by the failure of a Transformer model on the SCAN compositionality challenge (Lake and Baroni, 2018), which requires parsing a command into actions, we propose two auxiliary sequence prediction tasks that track the progress of function and argument semantics, as additional training supervision. These automatically-generated sequences are more representative of the underlying compositional symbolic structures of the input data. During inference, the model jointly predicts the next action and the next tokens in the auxiliary sequences at each step. Experiments on the SCAN dataset show that our method encourages the Transformer to understand compositional structures of the command, improving its accuracy on multiple challenging splits from <= 10% to 100%. With only 418 (5%) training instances, our approach still achieves 97.8% accuracy on the MCD1 split. Therefore, we argue that compositionality can be induced in Transformers given minimal but proper guidance. We also show that a better result is achieved using less contextualized vectors as the attention's query, providing insights into architecture choices in achieving systematic compositionality. Finally, we show positive generalization results on the groundedSCAN task (Ruis et al., 2020). Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/jiangycTarheel/compositional-auxseq