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

While reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable successes in several domains, its real-world application is limited due to many methods failing to generalise to unfamiliar conditions. In this work, we consider the problem of generalising to new transition dynamics, corresponding to cases in which the environment's response to the agent's actions differs. For example, the gravitational force exerted on a robot depends on its mass and changes the robot's mobility. Consequently, in such cases, it is necessary to condition an agent's actions on extrinsic state information and pertinent contextual information reflecting how the environment responds. While the need for context-sensitive policies has been established, the manner in which context is incorporated architecturally has received less attention. Thus, in this work, we present an investigation into how context information should be incorporated into behaviour learning to improve generalisation. To this end, we introduce a neural network architecture, the Decision Adapter, which generates the weights of an adapter module and conditions the behaviour of an agent on the context information. We show that the Decision Adapter is a useful generalisation of a previously proposed architecture and empirically demonstrate that it results in superior generalisation performance compared to previous approaches in several environments. Beyond this, the Decision Adapter is more robust to irrelevant distractor variables than several alternative methods.

People living with Motor Neuron Disease (plwMND) frequently encounter speech and motor impairments that necessitate a reliance on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems. This paper tackles the main challenge that traditional symbol-based AAC systems offer a limited vocabulary, while text entry solutions tend to exhibit low communication rates. To help plwMND articulate their needs about the system efficiently and effectively, we iteratively design and develop a novel multimodal text generation system called ImageTalk through a tailored proxy-user-based and an end-user-based design phase. The system demonstrates pronounced keystroke savings of 95.6%, coupled with consistent performance and high user satisfaction. We distill three design guidelines for AI-assisted text generation systems design and outline four user requirement levels tailored for AAC purposes, guiding future research in this field.

Duplicate removal is a critical step to accomplish a reasonable amount of predictions in prevalent proposal-based object detection frameworks.

Sim-to-real transfer remains a major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for robotics, as policies trained in simulation often fail to generalize to the real world due to discrepancies in environment dynamics. While standard approaches typically train policies agnostic to these variations, we investigate whether sim-to-real transfer can be improved by conditioning the policy on an estimate of the dynamics parameters -- referred to as context. To this end, we integrate a context estimation module into a DR-based RL framework and systematically compare SOTA supervision strategies. We evaluate the resulting context-aware policies in both a canonical control benchmark and a real-world pushing task using a Franka Emika Panda robot. Results show that context-aware policies outperform the context-agnostic baseline across all settings, although the best supervision strategy depends on the task. Introduction Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved significant success in developing robot controllers capable of solving complex tasks [1]. To address these limitations, physics simulation engines are widely used as a safer and more efficient alternative for policy training. Once a policy has been trained in simulation, it is transferred to the physical robot--a process known as sim-to-real transfer [2, 1, 3]. Although promising, this paradigm is hindered by the reality or sim-to-real gap, which refers to the discrepancy between the simulated and real-world environments [4, 5].

Automatic relationship extraction (RE) from biomedical literature is critical for managing the vast amount of scientific knowledge produced each year. In recent years, utilizing pre-trained language models (PLMs) has become the prevalent approach in RE. Several studies report improved performance when incorporating additional context information while fine-tuning PLMs for RE. However, variations in the PLMs applied, the databases used for augmentation, hyper-parameter optimization, and evaluation methods complicate direct comparisons between studies and raise questions about the generalizability of these findings. Our study addresses this research gap by evaluating PLMs enhanced with contextual information on five datasets spanning four relation scenarios within a consistent evaluation framework. We evaluate three baseline PLMs and first conduct extensive hyperparameter optimization. After selecting the top-performing model, we enhance it with additional data, including textual entity descriptions, relational information from knowledge graphs, and molecular structure encodings. Our findings illustrate the importance of i) the choice of the underlying language model and ii) a comprehensive hyperparameter optimization for achieving strong extraction performance. Although inclusion of context information yield only minor overall improvements, an ablation study reveals substantial benefits for smaller PLMs when such external data was included during fine-tuning.

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

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has achieved remarkable success with deep learning, driving advancements in conversational artificial intelligence, media transcription, and assistive technologies. However, ASR systems still struggle in complex environments such as TV series, where multiple speakers, overlapping speech, domain-specific terminology, and long-range contextual dependencies pose significant challenges to transcription accuracy. Existing approaches fail to explicitly leverage the rich temporal and contextual information available in the video. To address this limitation, we propose a Video-Guided Post-ASR Correction (VPC) framework that uses a Video-Large Multimodal Model (VLMM) to capture video context and refine ASR outputs. Evaluations on a TV-series benchmark show that our method consistently improves transcription accuracy in complex multimedia environments.

On the other hand, as the teacher has learned rich and powerful representations, the existing approaches enforce the student to fully mimic the behavior of the teacher.

--It is difficult for individuals and organizations to protect personal information without a fundamental understanding of relative privacy risks. By analyzing over 5,000 empirical identity theft and fraud cases, this research identifies which types of personal data are exposed, how frequently exposures occur, and what the consequences of those exposures are. We construct an Identity Ecosystem graph--a foundational, graph-based model in which nodes represent personally identifiable information (PII) attributes and edges represent empirical disclosure relationships between them (e.g., the probability that one PII attribute is exposed due to the exposure of another). Leveraging this graph structure, we develop a privacy risk prediction framework that uses graph theory and graph neural networks to estimate the likelihood of further disclosures when certain PII attributes are compromised. The results show that our approach effectively answers the core question: Can the disclosure of a given identity attribute possibly lead to the disclosure of another attribute? Different individuals and organizations have different sets of personally identifiable information (PII), and therefore have different perspectives on which PII attributes are more vulnerable, more valuable, and in greater need of protection. An individual's PII includes personal data in four different categories--What you Know (e.g., name, address, phone number, mother's maiden name), What you Have (e.g., driver's license, Social Security Card, employee ID, passport), What you Are (e.g., fingerprint, voice, facial image), and What you Do (e.g., patterns of life such as websites visited, GPS locations visited, phone logs) [1]. Protecting PII data can be costly and time-consuming. Research has uncovered various strategies to reduce risks of unintended data disclosure [2], including statistical disclosure limitation (SDL) techniques commonly used by national statistical agencies before releasing public-use data sets.