Recently, there has been increasing interest in synthesizing data to improve downstream text-to-SQL tasks. In this paper, we first examined the existing synthesized datasets and discovered that state-of-the-art text-to-SQL algorithms did not further improve on popular benchmarks when trained with augmented synthetic data. We observed two shortcomings: illogical synthetic SQL queries from independent column sampling and arbitrary table joins. To address these issues, we propose a novel synthesis framework that incorporates key relationships from schema, imposes strong typing, and conducts schema-distance-weighted column sampling. We also adopt an intermediate representation (IR) for the SQL-to-text task to further improve the quality of the generated natural language questions. When existing powerful semantic parsers are pre-finetuned on our high-quality synthesized data, our experiments show that these models have significant accuracy boosts on popular benchmarks, including new state-of-the-art performance on Spider.

Distribution shifts-where the training distribution differs from the test distribution-can substantially degrade the accuracy of machine learning (ML) systems deployed in the wild. Despite their ubiquity in the real-world deployments, these distribution shifts are under-represented in the datasets widely used in the ML community today. To address this gap, we present Wilds, a curated benchmark of 10 datasets reflecting a diverse range of distribution shifts that naturally arise in real-world applications, such as shifts across hospitals for tumor identification; across camera traps for wildlife monitoring; and across time and location in satellite imaging and poverty mapping. On each dataset, we show that standard training yields substantially lower out-of-distribution than in-distribution performance. This gap remains even with models trained by existing methods for tackling distribution shifts, underscoring the need for new methods for training models that are more robust to the types of distribution shifts that arise in practice. To facilitate method development, we provide an open-source package that automates dataset loading, contains default model architectures and hyperparameters, and standardizes evaluations. Code and leaderboards are available at https://wilds.stanford.edu.

大多数机器学习算法的基本假设是培训和测试数据是从相同的底层分布中汲取的。然而，在几乎所有实际应用中违反了这种假设：由于不断变化的时间相关，非典型最终用户或其他因素，机器学习系统经常测试。在这项工作中，我们考虑域泛化的问题设置，其中训练数据被构造成域，并且可能有多个测试时间偏移，对应于新域或域分布。大多数事先方法旨在学习在所有域上执行良好的单一强大模型或不变的功能空间。相比之下，我们的目标是使用未标记的测试点学习适应域转移到域移的模型。我们的主要贡献是介绍自适应风险最小化（ARM）的框架，其中模型被直接优化，以便通过学习来转移以适应培训域来改编。与稳健性，不变性和适应性的先前方法相比，ARM方法提供了在表现域移位的多个图像分类问题上的性能增益为1-4％的测试精度。

设计有效的基于模型的增强学习算法很困难，因为必须对模型生成数据的偏置权衡数据生成的易用性。在本文中，我们研究了模型使用在理论上和经验上的政策优化中的作用。我们首先制定和分析一种基于模型的加强学习算法，并在每个步骤中保证单调改善。在实践中，该分析过于悲观，并表明实际的脱助策略数据总是优选模拟策略数据，但我们表明可以将模型概括的经验估计纳入这样的分析以证明模型使用证明模型使用。通过这种分析的动机，我们证明，使用从真实数据分支的短模型生成的卷展栏的简单过程具有更复杂的基于模型的算法而没有通常的缺陷的效益。特别是，这种方法超越了基于模型的方法的样本效率，匹配了最佳无模型算法的渐近性能，并缩放到导致其他基于模型的方法完全失败的视野。

Linear partial differential equations (PDEs) are an important, widely applied class of mechanistic models, describing physical processes such as heat transfer, electromagnetism, and wave propagation. In practice, specialized numerical methods based on discretization are used to solve PDEs. They generally use an estimate of the unknown model parameters and, if available, physical measurements for initialization. Such solvers are often embedded into larger scientific models or analyses with a downstream application such that error quantification plays a key role. However, by entirely ignoring parameter and measurement uncertainty, classical PDE solvers may fail to produce consistent estimates of their inherent approximation error. In this work, we approach this problem in a principled fashion by interpreting solving linear PDEs as physics-informed Gaussian process (GP) regression. Our framework is based on a key generalization of a widely-applied theorem for conditioning GPs on a finite number of direct observations to observations made via an arbitrary bounded linear operator. Crucially, this probabilistic viewpoint allows to (1) quantify the inherent discretization error; (2) propagate uncertainty about the model parameters to the solution; and (3) condition on noisy measurements. Demonstrating the strength of this formulation, we prove that it strictly generalizes methods of weighted residuals, a central class of PDE solvers including collocation, finite volume, pseudospectral, and (generalized) Galerkin methods such as finite element and spectral methods. This class can thus be directly equipped with a structured error estimate and the capability to incorporate uncertain model parameters and observations. In summary, our results enable the seamless integration of mechanistic models as modular building blocks into probabilistic models.

For improving short-length codes, we demonstrate that classic decoders can also be used with real-valued, neural encoders, i.e., deep-learning based codeword sequence generators. Here, the classical decoder can be a valuable tool to gain insights into these neural codes and shed light on weaknesses. Specifically, the turbo-autoencoder is a recently developed channel coding scheme where both encoder and decoder are replaced by neural networks. We first show that the limited receptive field of convolutional neural network (CNN)-based codes enables the application of the BCJR algorithm to optimally decode them with feasible computational complexity. These maximum a posteriori (MAP) component decoders then are used to form classical (iterative) turbo decoders for parallel or serially concatenated CNN encoders, offering a close-to-maximum likelihood (ML) decoding of the learned codes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a classical decoding algorithm is applied to a non-trivial, real-valued neural code. Furthermore, as the BCJR algorithm is fully differentiable, it is possible to train, or fine-tune, the neural encoder in an end-to-end fashion.

In this paper a global reactive motion planning framework for robotic manipulators in complex dynamic environments is presented. In particular, the circular field predictions (CFP) planner from Becker et al. (2021) is extended to ensure obstacle avoidance of the whole structure of a robotic manipulator. Towards this end, a motion planning framework is developed that leverages global information about promising avoidance directions from arbitrary configuration space motion planners, resulting in improved global trajectories while reactively avoiding dynamic obstacles and decreasing the required computational power. The resulting motion planning framework is tested in multiple simulations with complex and dynamic obstacles and demonstrates great potential compared to existing motion planning approaches.

Whole slide images (WSI) are microscopy images of stained tissue slides routinely prepared for diagnosis and treatment selection in medical practice. WSI are very large (gigapixel size) and complex (made of up to millions of cells). The current state-of-the-art (SoTA) approach to classify WSI subdivides them into tiles, encodes them by pre-trained networks and applies Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) to train for specific downstream tasks. However, annotated datasets are often small, typically a few hundred to a few thousand WSI, which may cause overfitting and underperforming models. Conversely, the number of unannotated WSI is ever increasing, with datasets of tens of thousands (soon to be millions) of images available. While it has been previously proposed to use these unannotated data to identify suitable tile representations by self-supervised learning (SSL), downstream classification tasks still require full supervision because parts of the MIL architecture is not trained during tile level SSL pre-training. Here, we propose a strategy of slide level SSL to leverage the large number of WSI without annotations to infer powerful slide representations. Applying our method to The Cancer-Genome Atlas, one of the most widely used data resources in cancer research (16 TB image data), we are able to downsize the dataset to 23 MB without any loss in predictive power: we show that a linear classifier trained on top of these embeddings maintains or improves previous SoTA performances on various benchmark WSI classification tasks. Finally, we observe that training a classifier on these representations with tiny datasets (e.g. 50 slides) improved performances over SoTA by an average of +6.3 AUC points over all downstream tasks.

We present G-MSM (Graph-based Multi-Shape Matching), a novel unsupervised learning approach for non-rigid shape correspondence. Rather than treating a collection of input poses as an unordered set of samples, we explicitly model the underlying shape data manifold. To this end, we propose an adaptive multi-shape matching architecture that constructs an affinity graph on a given set of training shapes in a self-supervised manner. The key idea is to combine putative, pairwise correspondences by propagating maps along shortest paths in the underlying shape graph. During training, we enforce cycle-consistency between such optimal paths and the pairwise matches which enables our model to learn topology-aware shape priors. We explore different classes of shape graphs and recover specific settings, like template-based matching (star graph) or learnable ranking/sorting (TSP graph), as special cases in our framework. Finally, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on several recent shape correspondence benchmarks, including real-world 3D scan meshes with topological noise and challenging inter-class pairs.

In this work we present a fast occupancy map building approach based on the VDB datastructure. Existing log-odds based occupancy mapping systems are often not able to keep up with the high point densities and framerates of modern sensors. Therefore, we suggest a highly optimized approach based on a modern datastructure coming from a computer graphic background. A multithreaded insertion scheme allows occupancy map building at unprecedented speed. Multiple optimizations allow for a customizable tradeoff between runtime and map quality. We first demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach quantitatively on a set of ablation studies and typical benchmark sets, before we practically demonstrate the system using a legged robot and a UAV.