通过选择最具信息丰富的样本，已证明主动学习可用于最小化标记成本。但是，现有的主动学习方法在诸如不平衡或稀有类别的现实方案中不适用于未标记集中的分发数据和冗余。在这项工作中，我们提出了类似的（基于子模块信息措施的主动学习），使用最近提出的子模块信息措施（SIM）作为采集函数的统一主动学习框架。我们认为类似的不仅在标准的主动学习中工作，而且还可以轻松扩展到上面考虑的现实设置，并充当活动学习的一站式解决方案，可以扩展到大型真实世界数据集。凭经验，我们表明，在罕见的课程的情况下，在罕见的阶级和〜5％ - 10％的情况下，在罕见的几个图像分类任务的情况下，相似显着优异的活动学习算法像CiFar-10，Mnist和Imagenet。类似于Distil Toolkit的一部分：“https://github.com/decile-team/distil”。

随着深入学习更加标签的目标，越来越多的论文已经研究了深度模型的主动学习（AL）。然而，普遍存在的实验设置中存在许多问题，主要源于缺乏统一的实施和基准。当前文献中的问题包括有时对不同AL算法的性能的矛盾观察，意外排除重要的概括方法，如数据增强和SGD进行优化，缺乏对al的标签效率等评价方面的研究，并且很少或没有在Al优于随机采样（RS）的情况下的清晰度。在这项工作中，我们通过我们的新开源AL Toolkit Distil在图像分类的背景下统一重新实现了最先进的AL算法，我们仔细研究了这些问题作为有效评估的方面。在积极的方面，我们表明AL技术为2美元至4倍以上$ 4 \倍。与使用数据增强相比，与卢比相比，高效。令人惊讶的是，当包括数据增强时，在使用徽章，最先进的方法，在简单的不确定性采样中不再存在一致的增益。然后，我们仔细分析现有方法如何具有不同数量的冗余和每个类的示例。最后，我们为AL从业者提供了几次见解，以考虑在将来的工作中考虑，例如Al批量大小的效果，初始化的效果，在每一轮中再培训模型的重要性以及其他见解。

Feature selection helps reduce data acquisition costs in ML, but the standard approach is to train models with static feature subsets. Here, we consider the dynamic feature selection (DFS) problem where a model sequentially queries features based on the presently available information. DFS is often addressed with reinforcement learning (RL), but we explore a simpler approach of greedily selecting features based on their conditional mutual information. This method is theoretically appealing but requires oracle access to the data distribution, so we develop a learning approach based on amortized optimization. The proposed method is shown to recover the greedy policy when trained to optimality and outperforms numerous existing feature selection methods in our experiments, thus validating it as a simple but powerful approach for this problem.

We demonstrate how efficient autonomous drone swarms can be in detecting and tracking occluded targets in densely forested areas, such as lost people during search and rescue missions. Exploration and optimization of local viewing conditions, such as occlusion density and target view obliqueness, provide much faster and much more reliable results than previous, blind sampling strategies that are based on pre-defined waypoints. An adapted real-time particle swarm optimization and a new objective function are presented that are able to deal with dynamic and highly random through-foliage conditions. Synthetic aperture sensing is our fundamental sampling principle, and drone swarms are employed to approximate the optical signals of extremely wide and adaptable airborne lenses.

Sequential testing, always-valid $p$-values, and confidence sequences promise flexible statistical inference and on-the-fly decision making. However, unlike fixed-$n$ inference based on asymptotic normality, existing sequential tests either make parametric assumptions and end up under-covering/over-rejecting when these fail or use non-parametric but conservative concentration inequalities and end up over-covering/under-rejecting. To circumvent these issues, we sidestep exact at-least-$\alpha$ coverage and focus on asymptotically exact coverage and asymptotic optimality. That is, we seek sequential tests whose probability of ever rejecting a true hypothesis asymptotically approaches $\alpha$ and whose expected time to reject a false hypothesis approaches a lower bound on all tests with asymptotic coverage at least $\alpha$, both under an appropriate asymptotic regime. We permit observations to be both non-parametric and dependent and focus on testing whether the observations form a martingale difference sequence. We propose the universal sequential probability ratio test (uSPRT), a slight modification to the normal-mixture sequential probability ratio test, where we add a burn-in period and adjust thresholds accordingly. We show that even in this very general setting, the uSPRT is asymptotically optimal under mild generic conditions. We apply the results to stabilized estimating equations to test means, treatment effects, etc. Our results also provide corresponding guarantees for the implied confidence sequences. Numerical simulations verify our guarantees and the benefits of the uSPRT over alternatives.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but the quality bar for medical and clinical applications is high. Today, attempts to assess models' clinical knowledge typically rely on automated evaluations on limited benchmarks. There is no standard to evaluate model predictions and reasoning across a breadth of tasks. To address this, we present MultiMedQA, a benchmark combining six existing open question answering datasets spanning professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries; and HealthSearchQA, a new free-response dataset of medical questions searched online. We propose a framework for human evaluation of model answers along multiple axes including factuality, precision, possible harm, and bias. In addition, we evaluate PaLM (a 540-billion parameter LLM) and its instruction-tuned variant, Flan-PaLM, on MultiMedQA. Using a combination of prompting strategies, Flan-PaLM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on every MultiMedQA multiple-choice dataset (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, MMLU clinical topics), including 67.6% accuracy on MedQA (US Medical License Exam questions), surpassing prior state-of-the-art by over 17%. However, human evaluation reveals key gaps in Flan-PaLM responses. To resolve this we introduce instruction prompt tuning, a parameter-efficient approach for aligning LLMs to new domains using a few exemplars. The resulting model, Med-PaLM, performs encouragingly, but remains inferior to clinicians. We show that comprehension, recall of knowledge, and medical reasoning improve with model scale and instruction prompt tuning, suggesting the potential utility of LLMs in medicine. Our human evaluations reveal important limitations of today's models, reinforcing the importance of both evaluation frameworks and method development in creating safe, helpful LLM models for clinical applications.

Transformers have been essential to pretraining success in NLP. Other architectures have been used, but require attention layers to match benchmark accuracy. This work explores pretraining without attention. We test recently developed routing layers based on state-space models (SSM) and model architectures based on multiplicative gating. Used together these modeling choices have a large impact on pretraining accuracy. Empirically the proposed Bidirectional Gated SSM (BiGS) replicates BERT pretraining results without attention and can be extended to long-form pretraining of 4096 tokens without approximation.

In this paper, we present strong baselines for the task of Feedback Comment Generation for Writing Learning. Given a sentence and an error span, the task is to generate a feedback comment explaining the error. Sentences and feedback comments are both in English. We experiment with LLMs and also create multiple pseudo datasets for the task, investigating how it affects the performance of our system. We present our results for the task along with extensive analysis of the generated comments with the aim of aiding future studies in feedback comment generation for English language learners.

In order for automated mobile vehicles to navigate in the real world with minimal collision risks, it is necessary for their planning algorithms to consider uncertainties from measurements and environmental disturbances. In this paper, we consider analytical solutions for a conservative approximation of the mutual probability of collision between two robotic vehicles in the presence of such uncertainties. Therein, we present two methods, which we call unitary scaling and principal axes rotation, for decoupling the bivariate integral required for efficient approximation of the probability of collision between two vehicles including orientation effects. We compare the conservatism of these methods analytically and numerically. By closing a control loop through a model predictive guidance scheme, we observe through Monte-Carlo simulations that directly implementing collision avoidance constraints from the conservative approximations remains infeasible for real-time planning. We then propose and implement a convexification approach based on the tightened collision constraints that significantly improves the computational efficiency and robustness of the predictive guidance scheme.

Static subword tokenization algorithms have been an essential component of recent works on language modeling. However, their static nature results in important flaws that degrade the models' downstream performance and robustness. In this work, we propose MANTa, a Module for Adaptive Neural TokenizAtion. MANTa is a differentiable tokenizer trained end-to-end with the language model. The resulting system offers a trade-off between the expressiveness of byte-level models and the speed of models trained using subword tokenization. In addition, our tokenizer is highly explainable since it produces an explicit segmentation of sequences into blocks. We evaluate our pre-trained model on several English datasets from different domains as well as on synthetic noise. We find that MANTa improves robustness to character perturbations and out-of-domain data. We then show that MANTa performs comparably to other models on the general-domain GLUE benchmark. Finally, we show that it is considerably faster than strictly byte-level models.