音频文本检索需要自然语言查询以在数据库中检索相关的音频文件。相反，文本审计检索将音频文件作为查询来检索相关的自然语言描述。大多数带有一个音频字幕数据集的文献训练检索系统，但是评估多个数据集培训的好处是没有充满反感的。此外，检索系统必须学习描述从几秒钟到几秒钟的可变长度的音频内容之间的详细句子之间的对齐。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个新的Web音频文本对以及一个新的检索框架。首先，我们提供了大约五千个Web音频纹理对的新集合，我们称为WavText5k。当用来训练我们的检索系统时，WavText5K比其他音频字幕更多地提高了性能。其次，我们的框架学会了使用文本编码器，两个音频编码器和对比度学习目标来连接语言和音频内容。组合两个音频编码器有助于处理可变长度音频。这两个贡献超过了AudioCaps和Clote的Text-Audio检索的最新表现，相对2％和16％，而音频检索则达到6％和23％。

The photograph and our understanding of photography is ever changing and has transitioned from a world of unprocessed rolls of C-41 sitting in a fridge 50 years ago to sharing photos on the 1.5" screen of a point and shoot camera 10 years back. And today the photograph is again something different. The way we take photos is fundamentally different. We can view, share, and interact with photos on the device they were taken on. We can edit, tag, or "filter" photos directly on the camera at the same time the photo is being taken. Photos can be automatically pushed to various online sharing services, and the distinction between photos and videos has lessened. Beyond this, and more importantly, there are now lots of them. To Facebook alone more than 250 billion photos have been uploaded and on average it receives over 350 million new photos every day [6], while YouTube reports that 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute [22]. A back of the envelope estimation reports 10% of all photos in the world were taken in the last 12 months, and that was calculated already more than three years ago [8].Today, a large number of the digital media objects that are shared have been uploaded to services like Flickr or Instagram, which along with their metadata and their social ecosystem form a vibrant environment for finding solutions to many research questions at scale. Photos and videos provide a wealth of information about the universe, covering entertainment, travel, personal records, and various other aspects of life in general as it was when they were taken. Considered collectively, they represent knowledge that goes * This work was done while Benjamin Elizalde was at ICSI.† This work was done while Karl Ni was at LLNL. ‡ This work was done while Damian Borth was at ICSI. § This work was done while Li-Jia Li was at Yahoo Labs.

The recent increase in public and academic interest in preserving biodiversity has led to the growth of the field of conservation technology. This field involves designing and constructing tools that utilize technology to aid in the conservation of wildlife. In this article, we will use case studies to demonstrate the importance of designing conservation tools with human-wildlife interaction in mind and provide a framework for creating successful tools. These case studies include a range of complexities, from simple cat collars to machine learning and game theory methodologies. Our goal is to introduce and inform current and future researchers in the field of conservation technology and provide references for educating the next generation of conservation technologists. Conservation technology not only has the potential to benefit biodiversity but also has broader impacts on fields such as sustainability and environmental protection. By using innovative technologies to address conservation challenges, we can find more effective and efficient solutions to protect and preserve our planet's resources.

We address the problem of extracting key steps from unlabeled procedural videos, motivated by the potential of Augmented Reality (AR) headsets to revolutionize job training and performance. We decompose the problem into two steps: representation learning and key steps extraction. We employ self-supervised representation learning via a training strategy that adapts off-the-shelf video features using a temporal module. Training implements self-supervised learning losses involving multiple cues such as appearance, motion and pose trajectories extracted from videos to learn generalizable representations. Our method extracts key steps via a tunable algorithm that clusters the representations extracted from procedural videos. We quantitatively evaluate our approach with key step localization and also demonstrate the effectiveness of the extracted representations on related downstream tasks like phase classification. Qualitative results demonstrate that the extracted key steps are meaningful to succinctly represent the procedural tasks.

We introduce Argoverse 2 (AV2) - a collection of three datasets for perception and forecasting research in the self-driving domain. The annotated Sensor Dataset contains 1,000 sequences of multimodal data, encompassing high-resolution imagery from seven ring cameras, and two stereo cameras in addition to lidar point clouds, and 6-DOF map-aligned pose. Sequences contain 3D cuboid annotations for 26 object categories, all of which are sufficiently-sampled to support training and evaluation of 3D perception models. The Lidar Dataset contains 20,000 sequences of unlabeled lidar point clouds and map-aligned pose. This dataset is the largest ever collection of lidar sensor data and supports self-supervised learning and the emerging task of point cloud forecasting. Finally, the Motion Forecasting Dataset contains 250,000 scenarios mined for interesting and challenging interactions between the autonomous vehicle and other actors in each local scene. Models are tasked with the prediction of future motion for "scored actors" in each scenario and are provided with track histories that capture object location, heading, velocity, and category. In all three datasets, each scenario contains its own HD Map with 3D lane and crosswalk geometry - sourced from data captured in six distinct cities. We believe these datasets will support new and existing machine learning research problems in ways that existing datasets do not. All datasets are released under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

In training neural networks, batch normalization has many benefits, not all of them entirely understood. But it also has some drawbacks. Foremost is arguably memory consumption, as computing the batch statistics requires all instances within the batch to be processed simultaneously, whereas without batch normalization it would be possible to process them one by one while accumulating the weight gradients. Another drawback is that that distribution parameters (mean and standard deviation) are unlike all other model parameters in that they are not trained using gradient descent but require special treatment, complicating implementation. In this paper, I show a simple and straightforward way to address these issues. The idea, in short, is to add terms to the loss that, for each activation, cause the minimization of the negative log likelihood of a Gaussian distribution that is used to normalize the activation. Among other benefits, this will hopefully contribute to the democratization of AI research by means of lowering the hardware requirements for training larger models.

In this paper, we introduce neural texture learning for 6D object pose estimation from synthetic data and a few unlabelled real images. Our major contribution is a novel learning scheme which removes the drawbacks of previous works, namely the strong dependency on co-modalities or additional refinement. These have been previously necessary to provide training signals for convergence. We formulate such a scheme as two sub-optimisation problems on texture learning and pose learning. We separately learn to predict realistic texture of objects from real image collections and learn pose estimation from pixel-perfect synthetic data. Combining these two capabilities allows then to synthesise photorealistic novel views to supervise the pose estimator with accurate geometry. To alleviate pose noise and segmentation imperfection present during the texture learning phase, we propose a surfel-based adversarial training loss together with texture regularisation from synthetic data. We demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the recent state-of-the-art methods without ground-truth pose annotations and demonstrates substantial generalisation improvements towards unseen scenes. Remarkably, our scheme improves the adopted pose estimators substantially even when initialised with much inferior performance.

Prevailing methods for assessing and comparing generative AIs incentivize responses that serve a hypothetical representative individual. Evaluating models in these terms presumes homogeneous preferences across the population and engenders selection of agglomerative AIs, which fail to represent the diverse range of interests across individuals. We propose an alternative evaluation method that instead prioritizes inclusive AIs, which provably retain the requisite knowledge not only for subsequent response customization to particular segments of the population but also for utility-maximizing decisions.

We designed and constructed an A-sized base autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), augmented with a stack of modular and extendable hardware and software, including autonomy, navigation, control and high fidelity simulation capabilities (A-size stands for the standard sonobuoy form factor, with a maximum diameter of 124 mm). Subsequently, we extended this base vehicle with a novel tuna-inspired morphing fin payload module (referred to as the Morpheus AUV), to achieve good directional stability and exceptional maneuverability; properties that are highly desirable for rigid hull AUVs, but are presently difficult to achieve because they impose contradictory requirements. The morphing fin payload allows the base AUV to dynamically change its stability-maneuverability qualities by using morphing fins, which can be deployed, deflected and retracted, as needed. The base vehicle and Morpheus AUV were both extensively field tested in-water in the Charles river, Massachusetts, USA; by conducting hundreds of hours of operations over a period of two years. The maneuvering capability of the Morpheus AUV was evaluated with and without the use of morphing fins to quantify the performance improvement. The Morpheus AUV was able to showcase an exceptional turning rate of around 25-35 deg/s. A maximum turn rate improvement of around 35% - 50% was gained through the use of morphing fins.

Imitation learning (IL) is a simple and powerful way to use high-quality human driving data, which can be collected at scale, to identify driving preferences and produce human-like behavior. However, policies based on imitation learning alone often fail to sufficiently account for safety and reliability concerns. In this paper, we show how imitation learning combined with reinforcement learning using simple rewards can substantially improve the safety and reliability of driving policies over those learned from imitation alone. In particular, we use a combination of imitation and reinforcement learning to train a policy on over 100k miles of urban driving data, and measure its effectiveness in test scenarios grouped by different levels of collision risk. To our knowledge, this is the first application of a combined imitation and reinforcement learning approach in autonomous driving that utilizes large amounts of real-world human driving data.