This report summarizes the 3rd International Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP 2022), held as a part of the 5th Workshop on Formal Methods for ML-Enabled Autonomous Systems (FoMLAS), which was collocated with the 34th International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV). VNN-COMP is held annually to facilitate the fair and objective comparison of state-of-the-art neural network verification tools, encourage the standardization of tool interfaces, and bring together the neural network verification community. To this end, standardized formats for networks (ONNX) and specification (VNN-LIB) were defined, tools were evaluated on equal-cost hardware (using an automatic evaluation pipeline based on AWS instances), and tool parameters were chosen by the participants before the final test sets were made public. In the 2022 iteration, 11 teams participated on a diverse set of 12 scored benchmarks. This report summarizes the rules, benchmarks, participating tools, results, and lessons learned from this iteration of this competition.

A robot that can carry out a natural-language instruction has been a dream since before the Jetsons cartoon series imagined a life of leisure mediated by a fleet of attentive robot helpers. It is a dream that remains stubbornly distant. However, recent advances in vision and language methods have made incredible progress in closely related areas. This is significant because a robot interpreting a naturallanguage navigation instruction on the basis of what it sees is carrying out a vision and language process that is similar to Visual Question Answering. Both tasks can be interpreted as visually grounded sequence-to-sequence translation problems, and many of the same methods are applicable. To enable and encourage the application of vision and language methods to the problem of interpreting visuallygrounded navigation instructions, we present the Matter-port3D Simulator -a large-scale reinforcement learning environment based on real imagery [11]. Using this simulator, which can in future support a range of embodied vision and language tasks, we provide the first benchmark dataset for visually-grounded natural language navigation in real buildings -the Room-to-Room (R2R) dataset 1 .1 https://bringmeaspoon.org Instruction: Head upstairs and walk past the piano through an archway directly in front. Turn right when the hallway ends at pictures and table. Wait by the moose antlers hanging on the wall.

Top-down visual attention mechanisms have been used extensively in image captioning and visual question answering (VQA) to enable deeper image understanding through fine-grained analysis and even multiple steps of reasoning. In this work, we propose a combined bottom-up and topdown attention mechanism that enables attention to be calculated at the level of objects and other salient image regions. This is the natural basis for attention to be considered. Within our approach, the bottom-up mechanism (based on Faster R-CNN) proposes image regions, each with an associated feature vector, while the top-down mechanism determines feature weightings. Applying this approach to image captioning, our results on the MSCOCO test server establish a new state-of-the-art for the task, achieving CIDEr / SPICE / BLEU-4 scores of 117.9, 21.5 and 36.9, respectively. Demonstrating the broad applicability of the method, applying the same approach to VQA we obtain first place in the 2017 VQA Challenge.

There is considerable interest in the task of automatically generating image captions. However, evaluation is challenging. Existing automatic evaluation metrics are primarily sensitive to n-gram overlap, which is neither necessary nor sufficient for the task of simulating human judgment. We hypothesize that semantic propositional content is an important component of human caption evaluation, and propose a new automated caption evaluation metric defined over scene graphs coined SPICE. Extensive evaluations across a range of models and datasets indicate that SPICE captures human judgments over model-generated captions better than other automatic metrics (e.g., system-level correlation of 0.88 with human judgments on the MS COCO dataset, versus 0.43 for CIDEr and 0.53 for METEOR). Furthermore, SPICE can answer questions such as which caption-generator best understands colors? and can caption-generators count?

There are multiple scales of abstraction from which we can describe the same image, depending on whether we are focusing on fine-grained details or a more global attribute of the image. In brain mapping, learning to automatically parse images to build representations of both small-scale features (e.g., the presence of cells or blood vessels) and global properties of an image (e.g., which brain region the image comes from) is a crucial and open challenge. However, most existing datasets and benchmarks for neuroanatomy consider only a single downstream task at a time. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new dataset, annotations, and multiple downstream tasks that provide diverse ways to readout information about brain structure and architecture from the same image. Our multi-task neuroimaging benchmark (MTNeuro) is built on volumetric, micrometer-resolution X-ray microtomography images spanning a large thalamocortical section of mouse brain, encompassing multiple cortical and subcortical regions. We generated a number of different prediction challenges and evaluated several supervised and self-supervised models for brain-region prediction and pixel-level semantic segmentation of microstructures. Our experiments not only highlight the rich heterogeneity of this dataset, but also provide insights into how self-supervised approaches can be used to learn representations that capture multiple attributes of a single image and perform well on a variety of downstream tasks. Datasets, code, and pre-trained baseline models are provided at: https://mtneuro.github.io/ .

Scientists and philosophers have debated whether humans can trust advanced artificial intelligence (AI) agents to respect humanity's best interests. Yet what about the reverse? Will advanced AI agents trust humans? Gauging an AI agent's trust in humans is challenging because--absent costs for dishonesty--such agents might respond falsely about their trust in humans. Here we present a method for incentivizing machine decisions without altering an AI agent's underlying algorithms or goal orientation. In two separate experiments, we then employ this method in hundreds of trust games between an AI agent (a Large Language Model (LLM) from OpenAI) and a human experimenter (author TJ). In our first experiment, we find that the AI agent decides to trust humans at higher rates when facing actual incentives than when making hypothetical decisions. Our second experiment replicates and extends these findings by automating game play and by homogenizing question wording. We again observe higher rates of trust when the AI agent faces real incentives. Across both experiments, the AI agent's trust decisions appear unrelated to the magnitude of stakes. Furthermore, to address the possibility that the AI agent's trust decisions reflect a preference for uncertainty, the experiments include two conditions that present the AI agent with a non-social decision task that provides the opportunity to choose a certain or uncertain option; in those conditions, the AI agent consistently chooses the certain option. Our experiments suggest that one of the most advanced AI language models to date alters its social behavior in response to incentives and displays behavior consistent with trust toward a human interlocutor when incentivized.

3D shapes have complementary abstractions from low-level geometry to part-based hierarchies to languages, which convey different levels of information. This paper presents a unified framework to translate between pairs of shape abstractions: $\textit{Text}$ $\Longleftrightarrow$ $\textit{Point Cloud}$ $\Longleftrightarrow$ $\textit{Program}$. We propose $\textbf{Neural Shape Compiler}$ to model the abstraction transformation as a conditional generation process. It converts 3D shapes of three abstract types into unified discrete shape code, transforms each shape code into code of other abstract types through the proposed $\textit{ShapeCode Transformer}$, and decodes them to output the target shape abstraction. Point Cloud code is obtained in a class-agnostic way by the proposed $\textit{Point}$VQVAE. On Text2Shape, ShapeGlot, ABO, Genre, and Program Synthetic datasets, Neural Shape Compiler shows strengths in $\textit{Text}$ $\Longrightarrow$ $\textit{Point Cloud}$, $\textit{Point Cloud}$ $\Longrightarrow$ $\textit{Text}$, $\textit{Point Cloud}$ $\Longrightarrow$ $\textit{Program}$, and Point Cloud Completion tasks. Additionally, Neural Shape Compiler benefits from jointly training on all heterogeneous data and tasks.

The xView2 competition and xBD dataset spurred significant advancements in overhead building damage detection, but the competition's pixel level scoring can lead to reduced solution performance in areas with tight clusters of buildings or uninformative context. We seek to advance automatic building damage assessment for disaster relief by proposing an auxiliary challenge to the original xView2 competition. This new challenge involves a new dataset and metrics indicating solution performance when damage is more local and limited than in xBD. Our challenge measures a network's ability to identify individual buildings and their damage level without excessive reliance on the buildings' surroundings. Methods that succeed on this challenge will provide more fine-grained, precise damage information than original xView2 solutions. The best-performing xView2 networks' performances dropped noticeably in our new limited/local damage detection task. The common causes of failure observed are that (1) building objects and their classifications are not separated well, and (2) when they are, the classification is strongly biased by surrounding buildings and other damage context. Thus, we release our augmented version of the dataset with additional object-level scoring metrics https://gitlab.kitware.com/dennis.melamed/xfbd to test independence and separability of building objects, alongside the pixel-level performance metrics of the original competition. We also experiment with new baseline models which improve independence and separability of building damage predictions. Our results indicate that building damage detection is not a fully-solved problem, and we invite others to use and build on our dataset augmentations and metrics.

We present Mu$^{2}$SLAM, a multilingual sequence-to-sequence model pre-trained jointly on unlabeled speech, unlabeled text and supervised data spanning Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Automatic Speech Translation (AST) and Machine Translation (MT), in over 100 languages. By leveraging a quantized representation of speech as a target, Mu$^{2}$SLAM trains the speech-text models with a sequence-to-sequence masked denoising objective similar to T5 on the decoder and a masked language modeling (MLM) objective on the encoder, for both unlabeled speech and text, while utilizing the supervised tasks to improve cross-lingual and cross-modal representation alignment within the model. On CoVoST AST, Mu$^{2}$SLAM establishes a new state-of-the-art for models trained on public datasets, improving on xx-en translation over the previous best by 1.9 BLEU points and on en-xx translation by 1.1 BLEU points. On Voxpopuli ASR, our model matches the performance of an mSLAM model fine-tuned with an RNN-T decoder, despite using a relatively weaker sequence-to-sequence architecture. On text understanding tasks, our model improves by more than 6\% over mSLAM on XNLI, getting closer to the performance of mT5 models of comparable capacity on XNLI and TydiQA, paving the way towards a single model for all speech and text understanding tasks.

Often clickbait articles have a title that is phrased as a question or vague teaser that entices the user to click on the link and read the article to find the explanation. We developed a system that will automatically find the answer or explanation of the clickbait hook from the website text so that the user does not need to read through the text themselves. We fine-tune an extractive question and answering model (RoBERTa) and an abstractive one (T5), using data scraped from the 'StopClickbait' Facebook pages and Reddit's 'SavedYouAClick' subforum. We find that both extractive and abstractive models improve significantly after finetuning. We find that the extractive model performs slightly better according to ROUGE scores, while the abstractive one has a slight edge in terms of BERTscores.