Recent video+language datasets cover domains where the interaction is highly structured, such as instructional videos, or where the interaction is scripted, such as TV shows. Both of these properties can lead to spurious cues to be exploited by models rather than learning to ground language. In this paper, we present GrOunded footbAlL commentaries (GOAL), a novel dataset of football (or `soccer') highlights videos with transcribed live commentaries in English. As the course of a game is unpredictable, so are commentaries, which makes them a unique resource to investigate dynamic language grounding. We also provide state-of-the-art baselines for the following tasks: frame reordering, moment retrieval, live commentary retrieval and play-by-play live commentary generation. Results show that SOTA models perform reasonably well in most tasks. We discuss the implications of these results and suggest new tasks for which GOAL can be used. Our codebase is available at: https://gitlab.com/grounded-sport-convai/goal-baselines.

In recent years distributional reinforcement learning has produced many state of the art results. Increasingly sample efficient Distributional algorithms for the discrete action domain have been developed over time that vary primarily in the way they parameterize their approximations of value distributions, and how they quantify the differences between those distributions. In this work we transfer three of the most well-known and successful of those algorithms (QR-DQN, IQN and FQF) to the continuous action domain by extending two powerful actor-critic algorithms (TD3 and SAC) with distributional critics. We investigate whether the relative performance of the methods for the discrete action space translates to the continuous case. To that end we compare them empirically on the pybullet implementations of a set of continuous control tasks. Our results indicate qualitative invariance regarding the number and placement of distributional atoms in the deterministic, continuous action setting.

Data scarcity is one of the main issues with the end-to-end approach for Speech Translation, as compared to the cascaded one. Although most data resources for Speech Translation are originally document-level, they offer a sentence-level view, which can be directly used during training. But this sentence-level view is single and static, potentially limiting the utility of the data. Our proposed data augmentation method SegAugment challenges this idea and aims to increase data availability by providing multiple alternative sentence-level views of a dataset. Our method heavily relies on an Audio Segmentation system to re-segment the speech of each document, after which we obtain the target text with alignment methods. The Audio Segmentation system can be parameterized with different length constraints, thus giving us access to multiple and diverse sentence-level views for each document. Experiments in MuST-C show consistent gains across 8 language pairs, with an average increase of 2.2 BLEU points, and up to 4.7 BLEU for lower-resource scenarios in mTEDx. Additionally, we find that SegAugment is also applicable to purely sentence-level data, as in CoVoST, and that it enables Speech Translation models to completely close the gap between the gold and automatic segmentation at inference time.

The cyber-physical convergence is opening up new business opportunities for industrial operators. The need for deep integration of the cyber and the physical worlds establishes a rich business agenda towards consolidating new system and network engineering approaches. This revolution would not be possible without the rich and heterogeneous sources of data, as well as the ability of their intelligent exploitation, mainly due to the fact that data will serve as a fundamental resource to promote Industry 4.0. One of the most fruitful research and practice areas emerging from this data-rich, cyber-physical, smart factory environment is the data-driven process monitoring field, which applies machine learning methodologies to enable predictive maintenance applications. In this paper, we examine popular time series forecasting techniques as well as supervised machine learning algorithms in the applied context of Industry 4.0, by transforming and preprocessing the historical industrial dataset of a packing machine's operational state recordings (real data coming from the production line of a manufacturing plant from the food and beverage domain). In our methodology, we use only a single signal concerning the machine's operational status to make our predictions, without considering other operational variables or fault and warning signals, hence its characterization as ``agnostic''. In this respect, the results demonstrate that the adopted methods achieve a quite promising performance on three targeted use cases.

Automated Machine Learning-based systems' integration into a wide range of tasks has expanded as a result of their performance and speed. Although there are numerous advantages to employing ML-based systems, if they are not interpretable, they should not be used in critical, high-risk applications where human lives are at risk. To address this issue, researchers and businesses have been focusing on finding ways to improve the interpretability of complex ML systems, and several such methods have been developed. Indeed, there are so many developed techniques that it is difficult for practitioners to choose the best among them for their applications, even when using evaluation metrics. As a result, the demand for a selection tool, a meta-explanation technique based on a high-quality evaluation metric, is apparent. In this paper, we present a local meta-explanation technique which builds on top of the truthfulness metric, which is a faithfulness-based metric. We demonstrate the effectiveness of both the technique and the metric by concretely defining all the concepts and through experimentation.

In this paper, we address the problem of image splicing localization with a multi-stream network architecture that processes the raw RGB image in parallel with other handcrafted forensic signals. Unlike previous methods that either use only the RGB images or stack several signals in a channel-wise manner, we propose an encoder-decoder architecture that consists of multiple encoder streams. Each stream is fed with either the tampered image or handcrafted signals and processes them separately to capture relevant information from each one independently. Finally, the extracted features from the multiple streams are fused in the bottleneck of the architecture and propagated to the decoder network that generates the output localization map. We experiment with two handcrafted algorithms, i.e., DCT and Splicebuster. Our proposed approach is benchmarked on three public forensics datasets, demonstrating competitive performance against several competing methods and achieving state-of-the-art results, e.g., 0.898 AUC on CASIA.

The sheer volume of online user-generated content has rendered content moderation technologies essential in order to protect digital platform audiences from content that may cause anxiety, worry, or concern. Despite the efforts towards developing automated solutions to tackle this problem, creating accurate models remains challenging due to the lack of adequate task-specific training data. The fact that manually annotating such data is a highly demanding procedure that could severely affect the annotators' emotional well-being is directly related to the latter limitation. In this paper, we propose the CM-Refinery framework that leverages large-scale multimedia datasets to automatically extend initial training datasets with hard examples that can refine content moderation models, while significantly reducing the involvement of human annotators. We apply our method on two model adaptation strategies designed with respect to the different challenges observed while collecting data, i.e. lack of (i) task-specific negative data or (ii) both positive and negative data. Additionally, we introduce a diversity criterion applied to the data collection process that further enhances the generalization performance of the refined models. The proposed method is evaluated on the Not Safe for Work (NSFW) and disturbing content detection tasks on benchmark datasets achieving 1.32% and 1.94% accuracy improvements compared to the state of the art, respectively. Finally, it significantly reduces human involvement, as 92.54% of data are automatically annotated in case of disturbing content while no human intervention is required for the NSFW task.

In contrast to the rapid digitalization of several industries, agriculture suffers from low adoption of smart farming tools. While AI-driven digital agriculture tools can offer high-performing predictive functionalities, they lack tangible quantitative evidence on their benefits to the farmers. Field experiments can derive such evidence, but are often costly, time consuming and hence limited in scope and scale of application. To this end, we propose an observational causal inference framework for the empirical evaluation of the impact of digital tools on target farm performance indicators (e.g., yield in this case). This way, we can increase farmers' trust via enhancing the transparency of the digital agriculture market and accelerate the adoption of technologies that aim to secure farmer income resilience and global agricultural sustainability. As a case study, we designed and implemented a recommendation system for the optimal sowing time of cotton based on numerical weather predictions, which was used by a farmers' cooperative during the growing season of 2021. We then leverage agricultural knowledge, collected yield data, and environmental information to develop a causal graph of the farm system. Using the back-door criterion, we identify the impact of sowing recommendations on the yield and subsequently estimate it using linear regression, matching, inverse propensity score weighting and meta-learners. The results reveal that a field sown according to our recommendations exhibited a statistically significant yield increase that ranged from 12% to 17%, depending on the method. The effect estimates were robust, as indicated by the agreement among the estimation methods and four successful refutation tests. We argue that this approach can be implemented for decision support systems of other fields, extending their evaluation beyond a performance assessment of internal functionalities.

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a simple algorithm for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. The performance of TD learning is affected by high variance and it can be naturally enhanced with variance reduction techniques, such as the Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient (SVRG) method. Recently, multiple works have sought to fuse TD learning with SVRG to obtain a policy evaluation method with a geometric rate of convergence. However, the resulting convergence rate is significantly weaker than what is achieved by SVRG in the setting of convex optimization. In this work we utilize a recent interpretation of TD-learning as the splitting of the gradient of an appropriately chosen function, thus simplifying the algorithm and fusing TD with SVRG. We prove a geometric convergence bound with predetermined learning rate of 1/8, that is identical to the convergence bound available for SVRG in the convex setting.

In contrast to the rapid digitalization of several industries, agriculture suffers from low adoption of climate-smart farming tools. Even though AI-driven digital agriculture can offer high-performing predictive functionalities, it lacks tangible quantitative evidence on its benefits to the farmers. Field experiments can derive such evidence, but are often costly and time consuming. To this end, we propose an observational causal inference framework for the empirical evaluation of the impact of digital tools on target farm performance indicators. This way, we can increase farmers' trust by enhancing the transparency of the digital agriculture market, and in turn accelerate the adoption of technologies that aim to increase productivity and secure a sustainable and resilient agriculture against a changing climate. As a case study, we perform an empirical evaluation of a recommendation system for optimal cotton sowing, which was used by a farmers' cooperative during the growing season of 2021. We leverage agricultural knowledge to develop a causal graph of the farm system, we use the back-door criterion to identify the impact of recommendations on the yield and subsequently estimate it using several methods on observational data. The results show that a field sown according to our recommendations enjoyed a significant increase in yield (12% to 17%).