Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Context-Gloss Augmentation for Improving Arabic Target Sense Verification

Arabic language lacks semantic datasets and sense inventories. The most common semantically-labeled dataset for Arabic is the ArabGlossBERT, a relatively small dataset that consists of 167K context-gloss pairs (about 60K positive and 107K negative pairs), collected from Arabic dictionaries. This paper presents an enrichment to the ArabGlossBERT dataset, by augmenting it using (Arabic-English-Arabic) machine back-translation. Augmentation increased the dataset size to 352K pairs (149K positive and 203K negative pairs). We measure the impact of augmentation using different data configurations to fine-tune BERT on target sense verification (TSV) task. Overall, the accuracy ranges between 78% to 84% for different data configurations. Although our approach performed at par with the baseline, we did observe some improvements for some POS tags in some experiments. Furthermore, our fine-tuned models are trained on a larger dataset covering larger vocabulary and contexts. We provide an in-depth analysis of the accuracy for each part-of-speech (POS).
Disentangled Causal Embedding With Contrastive Learning For Recommender System

Recommender systems usually rely on observed user interaction data to build personalized recommendation models, assuming that the observed data reflect user interest. However, user interacting with an item may also due to conformity, the need to follow popular items. Most previous studies neglect user's conformity and entangle interest with it, which may cause the recommender systems fail to provide satisfying results. Therefore, from the cause-effect view, disentangling these interaction causes is a crucial issue. It also contributes to OOD problems, where training and test data are out-of-distribution. Nevertheless, it is quite challenging as we lack the signal to differentiate interest and conformity. The data sparsity of pure cause and the items' long-tail problem hinder disentangled causal embedding. In this paper, we propose DCCL, a framework that adopts contrastive learning to disentangle these two causes by sample augmentation for interest and conformity respectively. Futhermore, DCCL is model-agnostic, which can be easily deployed in any industrial online system. Extensive experiments are conducted over two real-world datasets and DCCL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on top of various backbone models in various OOD environments. We also demonstrate the performance improvements by online A/B testing on Kuaishou, a billion-user scale short-video recommender system.
KENGIC: KEyword-driven and N-Gram Graph based Image Captioning

This paper presents a Keyword-driven and N-gram Graph based approach for Image Captioning (KENGIC). Most current state-of-the-art image caption generators are trained end-to-end on large scale paired image-caption datasets which are very laborious and expensive to collect. Such models are limited in terms of their explainability and their applicability across different domains. To address these limitations, a simple model based on N-Gram graphs which does not require any end-to-end training on paired image captions is proposed. Starting with a set of image keywords considered as nodes, the generator is designed to form a directed graph by connecting these nodes through overlapping n-grams as found in a given text corpus. The model then infers the caption by maximising the most probable n-gram sequences from the constructed graph. To analyse the use and choice of keywords in context of this approach, this study analysed the generation of image captions based on (a) keywords extracted from gold standard captions and (b) from automatically detected keywords. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrated the effectiveness of KENGIC. The performance achieved is very close to that of current state-of-the-art image caption generators that are trained in the unpaired setting. The analysis of this approach could also shed light on the generation process behind current top performing caption generators trained in the paired setting, and in addition, provide insights on the limitations of the current most widely used evaluation metrics in automatic image captioning.
Provably Efficient Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning with General Function Approximation and Single-Policy Concentrability

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) refers to learning general-purpose skills that aim to reach diverse goals. In particular, offline GCRL only requires purely pre-collected datasets to perform training tasks without additional interactions with the environment. Although offline GCRL has become increasingly prevalent and many previous works have demonstrated its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of efficient offline GCRL algorithms is not well established, especially when the state space is huge and the offline dataset only covers the policy we aim to learn. In this paper, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis of an existing empirically successful offline GCRL algorithm. We prove that under slight modification, this algorithm enjoys an $\widetilde{O}(\text{poly}(1/\epsilon))$ sample complexity (where $\epsilon$ is the desired suboptimality of the learned policy) with general function approximation thanks to the property of (semi-)strong convexity of the objective functions. We only require nearly minimal assumptions on the dataset (single-policy concentrability) and the function class (realizability). Moreover, this algorithm consists of two uninterleaved optimization steps, which we refer to as $V$-learning and policy learning, and is computationally stable since it does not involve minimax optimization. We also empirically validate our theory by showing that the modified algorithm outperforms the previous algorithm in various real-world environments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that is both provably efficient with general function approximation and single-policy concentrability, and empirically successful without requiring solving minimax optimization problems.
Quantifying high-dimensional spatial entanglement with a single-photon-sensitive time-stamping camera

High-dimensional entanglement is a promising resource for quantum technologies. Being able to certify it for any quantum state is essential. However, to date, experimental entanglement certification methods are imperfect and leave some loopholes open. Using a single-photon sensitive time-stamping camera, we quantify high-dimensional spatial entanglement by collecting all output modes and without background subtraction, two critical steps on the route towards assumptions-free entanglement certification. We show position-momentum Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) correlations and quantify the entanglement of formation of our source to be larger than 2.8 along both transverse spatial axes, indicating a dimension higher than 14. Our work overcomes important challenges in photonic entanglement quantification and paves the way towards the development of practical quantum information processing protocols based on high-dimensional entanglement.
GraphGUIDE: interpretable and controllable conditional graph generation with discrete Bernoulli diffusion

Diffusion models achieve state-of-the-art performance in generating realistic objects and have been successfully applied to images, text, and videos. Recent work has shown that diffusion can also be defined on graphs, including graph representations of drug-like molecules. Unfortunately, it remains difficult to perform conditional generation on graphs in a way which is interpretable and controllable. In this work, we propose GraphGUIDE, a novel framework for graph generation using diffusion models, where edges in the graph are flipped or set at each discrete time step. We demonstrate GraphGUIDE on several graph datasets, and show that it enables full control over the conditional generation of arbitrary structural properties without relying on predefined labels. Our framework for graph diffusion can have a large impact on the interpretable conditional generation of graphs, including the generation of drug-like molecules with desired properties in a way which is informed by experimental evidence.
AI and Core Electoral Processes: Mapping the Horizons

Significant enthusiasm around AI uptake has been witnessed across societies globally. The electoral process -- the time, place and manner of elections within democratic nations -- has been among those very rare sectors in which AI has not penetrated much. Electoral management bodies in many countries have recently started exploring and deliberating over the use of AI in the electoral process. In this paper, we consider five representative avenues within the core electoral process which have potential for AI usage, and map the challenges involved in using AI within them. These five avenues are: voter list maintenance, determining polling booth locations, polling booth protection processes, voter authentication and video monitoring of elections. Within each of these avenues, we lay down the context, illustrate current or potential usage of AI, and discuss extant or potential ramifications of AI usage, and potential directions for mitigating risks while considering AI usage. We believe that the scant current usage of AI within electoral processes provides a very rare opportunity, that of being able to deliberate on the risks and mitigation possibilities, prior to real and widespread AI deployment. This paper is an attempt to map the horizons of risks and opportunities in using AI within the electoral processes and to help shape the debate around the topic.
Geometric Perception based Efficient Text Recognition

Every Scene Text Recognition (STR) task consists of text localization \& text recognition as the prominent sub-tasks. However, in real-world applications with fixed camera positions such as equipment monitor reading, image-based data entry, and printed document data extraction, the underlying data tends to be regular scene text. Hence, in these tasks, the use of generic, bulky models comes up with significant disadvantages compared to customized, efficient models in terms of model deployability, data privacy \& model reliability. Therefore, this paper introduces the underlying concepts, theory, implementation, and experiment results to develop models, which are highly specialized for the task itself, to achieve not only the SOTA performance but also to have minimal model weights, shorter inference time, and high model reliability. We introduce a novel deep learning architecture (GeoTRNet), trained to identify digits in a regular scene image, only using the geometrical features present, mimicking human perception over text recognition. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ACRA-FL/GeoTRNet
Participatory Personalization in Classification

Machine learning models are often personalized with information that is protected, sensitive, self-reported, or costly to acquire. These models use information about people but do not facilitate nor inform their consent. Individuals cannot opt out of reporting personal information to a model, nor tell if they benefit from personalization in the first place. We introduce a family of classification models, called participatory systems, that let individuals opt into personalization at prediction time. We present a model-agnostic algorithm to learn participatory systems for personalization with categorical group attributes. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of participatory systems in clinical prediction tasks, benchmarking them with common approaches for personalization and imputation. Our results demonstrate that participatory systems can facilitate and inform consent while improving performance and data use across all groups who report personal data.
Potential Outcome and Decision Theoretic Foundations for Statistical Causality

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Causal Inference, Philip Dawid has described a graphical causal model based on decision diagrams. This article describes how single-world intervention graphs (SWIGs) relate to these diagrams. In this way, a correspondence is established between Dawid's approach and those based on potential outcomes such as Robins' Finest Fully Randomized Causally Interpreted Structured Tree Graphs. In more detail, a reformulation of Dawid's theory is given that is essentially equivalent to his proposal and isomorphic to SWIGs.
Zero-shot Generation of Coherent Storybook from Plain Text Story using Diffusion Models

Recent advancements in large scale text-to-image models have opened new possibilities for guiding the creation of images through human-devised natural language. However, while prior literature has primarily focused on the generation of individual images, it is essential to consider the capability of these models to ensure coherency within a sequence of images to fulfill the demands of real-world applications such as storytelling. To address this, here we present a novel neural pipeline for generating a coherent storybook from the plain text of a story. Specifically, we leverage a combination of a pre-trained Large Language Model and a text-guided Latent Diffusion Model to generate coherent images. While previous story synthesis frameworks typically require a large-scale text-to-image model trained on expensive image-caption pairs to maintain the coherency, we employ simple textual inversion techniques along with detector-based semantic image editing which allows zero-shot generation of the coherent storybook. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art image editing baselines.
Estimation of Gaussian Bi-Clusters with General Block-Diagonal Covariance Matrix and Applications

Bi-clustering is a technique that allows for the simultaneous clustering of observations and features in a dataset. This technique is often used in bioinformatics, text mining, and time series analysis. An important advantage of biclustering algorithm is the ability to uncover multiple ``views'' (i.e., through rows and column groupings) in the data. Several Gaussian mixture model based biclustering approach currently exist in the literature. However, they impose severe restrictions on the structure of the covariance matrix. Here, we propose a Gaussian mixture model-based bi-clustering approach that provides a more flexible block-diagonal covariance structure. We show that the clustering accuracy of the proposed model is comparable to other known techniques but our approach provides a more flexible covariance structure and has substantially lower computational time. We demonstrate the application of the proposed model in bioinformatics and topic modelling.
Investigating the role of model-based learning in exploration and transfer

State of the art reinforcement learning has enabled training agents on tasks of ever increasing complexity. However, the current paradigm tends to favor training agents from scratch on every new task or on collections of tasks with a view towards generalizing to novel task configurations. The former suffers from poor data efficiency while the latter is difficult when test tasks are out-of-distribution. Agents that can effectively transfer their knowledge about the world pose a potential solution to these issues. In this paper, we investigate transfer learning in the context of model-based agents. Specifically, we aim to understand when exactly environment models have an advantage and why. We find that a model-based approach outperforms controlled model-free baselines for transfer learning. Through ablations, we show that both the policy and dynamics model learnt through exploration matter for successful transfer. We demonstrate our results across three domains which vary in their requirements for transfer: in-distribution procedural (Crafter), in-distribution identical (RoboDesk), and out-of-distribution (Meta-World). Our results show that intrinsic exploration combined with environment models present a viable direction towards agents that are self-supervised and able to generalize to novel reward functions.
A Compendium on Distributed Systems

Computer systems have evolved over the years starting from sizable, single-user, slow, and expensive machines to multi-user, fast, cheaper, and small-sized machines. The use of multi-user computer networks has given rise to a new paradigm of computing known as Distributed Systems. A distributed system is regarded as software consisting of a collection of dependent network communication and computational nodes. This paradigm yields high performance while also maintaining high efficiency due to the decentralization of various computer related tasks to several computer nodes that are interconnected. Even if distributed systems have proven to be beneficial over the years it also has some design flaws, security concerns and challenges. In this paper, the main objective is to define these issues, challenges and security concerns while also examining the various solutions developed over the years to resolve them. This paper also briefly covers the components as well as the working of Distributed Systems.
Quantum Electronics for Fundamental Physics

The emerging field of quantum sensors and electronics for fundamental physics is introduced, emphasising the role of thin-film superconducting devices. Although the next generation of ground-based and space-based experiments requires the development of advanced technology across the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum, this article focuses on ultra-low-noise techniques for radio to far-infrared wavelengths, where existing devices fall short of theoretical limits. Passive circuits, detectors and amplifiers are described from classical and quantum perspectives, and the sensitivities of detector-based and amplifier-based instruments discussed. Advances will be achieved through refinements in existing technology, but innovation is essential. The needed developments go beyond engineering and relate to theoretical studies that bring together concepts from quantum information theory, quantum field theory, classical circuit theory, and device physics. This article has been written to introduce graduate-level scientists to quantum sensor physics, rather than as a formal review.
Data-driven control and transfer learning using neural canonical control structures*

An indirect data-driven control and transfer learning approach based on a data-driven feedback linearization with neural canonical control structures is proposed. An artificial neural network auto-encoder structure trained on recorded sensor data is used to approximate state and input transformations for the identification of the sampled-data system in Brunovsky canonical form. The identified transformations, together with a designed trajectory controller, can be transferred to a system with varied parameters, where the neural network weights are adapted using newly collected recordings. The proposed approach is demonstrated using an academic and an industrially motivated example.
FR-LIO: Fast and Robust Lidar-Inertial Odometry by Tightly-Coupled Iterated Kalman Smoother and Robocentric Voxels

This paper presents a fast lidar-inertial odometry (LIO) that is robust to aggressive motion. To achieve robust tracking in aggressive motion scenes, we exploit the continuous scanning property of lidar to adaptively divide the full scan into multiple partial scans (named sub-frames) according to the motion intensity. And to avoid the degradation of sub-frames resulting from insufficient constraints, we propose a robust state estimation method based on a tightly-coupled iterated error state Kalman smoother (ESKS) framework. Furthermore, we propose a robocentric voxel map (RC-Vox) to improve the system's efficiency. The RC-Vox allows efficient maintenance of map points and k nearest neighbor (k-NN) queries by mapping local map points into a fixed-size, two-layer 3D array structure. Extensive experiments are conducted on 27 sequences from 4 public datasets and our own dataset. The results show that our system can achieve stable tracking in aggressive motion scenes (angular velocity up to 21.8 rad/s) that cannot be handled by other state-of-the-art methods, while our system can achieve competitive performance with these methods in general scenes. Furthermore, thanks to the RC-Vox, our system is much faster than the most efficient LIO system currently published.
Fortuna: A Library for Uncertainty Quantification in Deep Learning

We present Fortuna, an open-source library for uncertainty quantification in deep learning. Fortuna supports a range of calibration techniques, such as conformal prediction that can be applied to any trained neural network to generate reliable uncertainty estimates, and scalable Bayesian inference methods that can be applied to Flax-based deep neural networks trained from scratch for improved uncertainty quantification and accuracy. By providing a coherent framework for advanced uncertainty quantification methods, Fortuna simplifies the process of benchmarking and helps practitioners build robust AI systems.
Detecting Data Type Inconsistencies in a Property Graph Database

Some property graph databases do not have a fixed schema, which can result in data type inconsistencies for properties on nodes and relationships, especially when importing data into a running database. Here we present a tool which can rapidly produce a detailed report on every property in the graph. When executed on a large knowledge graph, it allowed us to debug a complex ETL process and enforce 100% data type consistency.
ZipLM: Inference-Aware Structured Pruning of Language Models

The breakthrough performance of large language models (LLMs) comes with major computational footprints and high deployment costs. In this paper, we progress towards resolving this problem by proposing a novel structured compression approach for LLMs, called ZipLM. ZipLM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy-vs-speedup, while matching a set of desired target runtime speedups in any given inference environment. Specifically, given a model, a dataset, an inference environment, as well as a set of speedup targets, ZipLM iteratively identifies and removes components with the worst loss-runtime trade-off. Unlike prior methods that specialize in either the post-training/one-shot or the gradual compression setting, and only for specific families of models such as BERT (encoder) or GPT (decoder), ZipLM produces state-of-the-art compressed models across all these settings. Furthermore, ZipLM achieves superior results for a fraction of the computational cost relative to prior distillation and pruning techniques, making it a cost-effective approach for generating an entire family of smaller, faster, and highly accurate models, guaranteed to meet the desired inference specifications. In particular, ZipLM outperforms all prior BERT-base distillation and pruning techniques, such as CoFi, MiniLM, and TinyBERT. Moreover, it matches the performance of the heavily optimized MobileBERT model, obtained via extensive architecture search, by simply pruning the baseline BERT-large model. When compressing GPT2, ZipLM outperforms DistilGPT2 while being 60% smaller and 30% faster. Our code is available at: https://github.com/IST-DASLab/ZipLM.
Intrinsic Rewards from Self-Organizing Feature Maps for Exploration in Reinforcement Learning

We introduce an exploration bonus for deep reinforcement learning methods calculated using self-organising feature maps. Our method uses adaptive resonance theory (ART) providing online, unsupervised clustering to quantify the novelty of a state. This heuristic is used to add an intrinsic reward to the extrinsic reward signal for then to optimize the agent to maximize the sum of these two rewards. We find that this method was able to play the game Ordeal at a human level after a comparable number of training epochs to ICM arXiv:1705.05464. Agents augmented with RND arXiv:1810.12894 were unable to achieve the same level of performance in our space of hyperparameters.