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0626822954674a06ccd9c234e3f0d572-Supplemental-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

All models can be trained entirely on CPUs on consumer grade Laptop machines within minutes orhours. Execution times per epoch for the single-cell data with 529 features are as follows: Base=0.9, Centering the first frame: For golfing and waving, the root point of the first frame is movedtotheorigin(0,0,0). To map putative transcription factor (TF) and target gene relationships, we use as a reference a regulatory network generated using the gene expression and chromatin accessibility features 15 available inthehuman immune cells dataset. Ourruleforsuccessfully mapping aTFtoatargetgene through achromatin peak isthatall TF, chromatin peak, and target gene, have to be simultaneously in the list of features selected in therank_genes_groupsfunction for cell type of interest, and there haveto be TF motifs linked to that transcription factor in the chromatin peak.


SPAR: Personalized Content-Based Recommendation via Long Engagement Attention

Zhang, Chiyu, Sun, Yifei, Chen, Jun, Lei, Jie, Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad, Wang, Sinong, Jin, Rong, Park, Sem, Yao, Ning, Long, Bo

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Leveraging users' long engagement histories is essential for personalized content recommendations. The success of pretrained language models (PLMs) in NLP has led to their use in encoding user histories and candidate items, framing content recommendations as textual semantic matching tasks. However, existing works still struggle with processing very long user historical text and insufficient user-item interaction. In this paper, we introduce a content-based recommendation framework, SPAR, which effectively tackles the challenges of holistic user interest extraction from the long user engagement history. It achieves so by leveraging PLM, poly-attention layers and attention sparsity mechanisms to encode user's history in a session-based manner. The user and item side features are sufficiently fused for engagement prediction while maintaining standalone representations for both sides, which is efficient for practical model deployment. Moreover, we enhance user profiling by exploiting large language model (LLM) to extract global interests from user engagement history. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods.


Out of the Ordinary: Spectrally Adapting Regression for Covariate Shift

Eyre, Benjamin, Creager, Elliot, Madras, David, Papyan, Vardan, Zemel, Richard

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Designing deep neural network classifiers that perform robustly on distributions differing from the available training data is an active area of machine learning research. However, out-of-distribution generalization for regression--the analogous problem for modeling continuous targets--remains relatively unexplored. To tackle this problem, we return to first principles and analyze how the closed-form solution for Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression is sensitive to covariate shift. We characterize the out-of-distribution risk of the OLS model in terms of the eigenspectrum decomposition of the source and target data. We then use this insight to propose a method for adapting the weights of the last layer of a pre-trained neural regression model to perform better on input data originating from a different distribution. We demonstrate how this lightweight spectral adaptation procedure can improve out-of-distribution performance for synthetic and real-world datasets.


PUG: Photorealistic and Semantically Controllable Synthetic Data for Representation Learning

Bordes, Florian, Shekhar, Shashank, Ibrahim, Mark, Bouchacourt, Diane, Vincent, Pascal, Morcos, Ari S.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Synthetic image datasets offer unmatched advantages for designing and evaluating deep neural networks: they make it possible to (i) render as many data samples as needed, (ii) precisely control each scene and yield granular ground truth labels (and captions), (iii) precisely control distribution shifts between training and testing to isolate variables of interest for sound experimentation. Despite such promise, the use of synthetic image data is still limited -- and often played down -- mainly due to their lack of realism. Most works therefore rely on datasets of real images, which have often been scraped from public images on the internet, and may have issues with regards to privacy, bias, and copyright, while offering little control over how objects precisely appear. In this work, we present a path to democratize the use of photorealistic synthetic data: we develop a new generation of interactive environments for representation learning research, that offer both controllability and realism. We use the Unreal Engine, a powerful game engine well known in the entertainment industry, to produce PUG (Photorealistic Unreal Graphics) environments and datasets for representation learning. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential of PUG to enable more rigorous evaluations of vision models.


Salient Phrase Aware Dense Retrieval: Can a Dense Retriever Imitate a Sparse One?

Chen, Xilun, Lakhotia, Kushal, Oğuz, Barlas, Gupta, Anchit, Lewis, Patrick, Peshterliev, Stan, Mehdad, Yashar, Gupta, Sonal, Yih, Wen-tau

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite their recent popularity and well-known advantages, dense retrievers still lag behind sparse methods such as BM25 in their ability to reliably match salient phrases and rare entities in the query and to generalize to out-of-domain data. It has been argued that this is an inherent limitation of dense models. We rebut this claim by introducing the Salient Phrase Aware Retriever (SPAR), a dense retriever with the lexical matching capacity of a sparse model. We show that a dense Lexical Model {\Lambda} can be trained to imitate a sparse one, and SPAR is built by augmenting a standard dense retriever with {\Lambda}. Empirically, SPAR shows superior performance on a range of tasks including five question answering datasets, MS MARCO passage retrieval, as well as the EntityQuestions and BEIR benchmarks for out-of-domain evaluation, exceeding the performance of state-of-the-art dense and sparse retrievers. The code and models of SPAR are available at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/dpr-scale/tree/main/spar


Spar: A Planner that Satisfies Operational and Geometric Goals in Uncertain Environments

AI Magazine

In this article, we present Spar (simultaneous planner for assembly robots), an implemented system that reasons about high-level operational goals, geometric goals, and uncertainty-reduction goals to create task plans for an assembly robot. These plans contain manipulations to achieve the assembly goals and sensory operations to cope with uncertainties in the robot's environment. High-level goals (which we refer to as operational goals) are satisfied by adding operations to the plan using a nonlinear, constraint-posting method. Geometric goals are satisfied by placing constraints on the execution of these operations. If the geometric configuration of the world prevents this, Spar adds new operations to the plan along with the necessary set of constraints on the execution of these operations.


Advertima raises $17 million for AI that tracks in-store shopping behaviors

#artificialintelligence

Advertima, a startup leveraging AI to customize in-store experiences, today closed a €15 million ($17.3 million) funding round. CEO Iman Nahvi says the company will put the new funds plus €10 million ($11.5 million) of its own capital toward refining its tracking platform. Before the pandemic, AI appeared poised to transform -- and indeed was already transforming -- brick-and-mortar retail. Predictive analytics services like Celect ensure shelves remain stocked during the year's busiest shopping days. Meanwhile, startups like Trigo, Grabango, and Standard Cognition compete with Amazon Go for contactless AI-powered checkout experiences.


A Drone-Flinging Cannon Proves UAVs Can Mangle Planes

WIRED

The man flying the drone didn't know he was violating a temporary restriction on flights around New York City (the president was in town for the 2017 United Nations General Assembly). He didn't know he had just two minutes to land before he violated the prohibition on nighttime flights. And he didn't know his DJI Phantom 4--300 feet up, 2.5 miles away from him, and well beyond his line of sight--was flying dangerously close to an Army Black Hawk helicopter. The drone smashed to pieces. The helicopter, luckily, only suffered a dented rotor and a few scratches, according to the National Transportation Safety Board report.


Spar: A Planner That Satisfies Operational and Geometric Goals in Uncertain Environments

AI Magazine

A prerequisite for intelligent behavior is the ability to reason about actions and their effects. This ability is the essence of the classical AI planning problem in which plans are constructed by reasoning about how available actions can be applied to achieve various goals. For this reasoning process to occur, the planner must be aware of its available actions, the situations in which they are applicable, and the changes affected in the world by their execution. Classical AI planners typically use a highlevel, symbolic representation of actions (for example, well-formed formulas from predicate calculus). Although this type of representational scheme is attractive from a computational standpoint, it cannot adequately represent the intricacies of a domain that includes complex actions, such as robotic assembly (consider, for example, that any geometric configuration of the robotic manipulator is a rather complex function of six joint angles).