Well-designed prompts can guide text-to-image models to generate amazing images. However, the performant prompts are often model-specific and misaligned with user input. Instead of laborious human engineering, we propose prompt adaptation, a general framework that automatically adapts original user input to model-preferred prompts. Specifically, we first perform supervised fine-tuning with a pretrained language model on a small collection of manually engineered prompts. Then we use reinforcement learning to explore better prompts. We define a reward function that encourages the policy to generate more aesthetically pleasing images while preserving the original user intentions. Experimental results on Stable Diffusion show that our method outperforms manual prompt engineering in terms of both automatic metrics and human preference ratings. Moreover, reinforcement learning further boosts performance, especially on out-of-domain prompts. The pretrained checkpoints are available at https://aka.ms/promptist. The demo can be found at https://aka.ms/promptist-demo.

Open-retrieval conversational machine reading comprehension (OCMRC) simulates real-life conversational interaction scenes. Machines are required to make a decision of "Yes/No/Inquire" or generate a follow-up question when the decision is "Inquire" based on retrieved rule texts, user scenario, user question, and dialogue history. Recent studies explored the methods to reduce the information gap between decision-making and question generation and thus improve the performance of generation. However, the information gap still exists because these pipeline structures are still limited in decision-making, span extraction, and question rephrasing three stages. Decision-making and generation are reasoning separately, and the entailment reasoning utilized in decision-making is hard to share through all stages. To tackle the above problem, we proposed a novel one-stage end-to-end framework, called Entailment Fused-T5 (EFT), to bridge the information gap between decision-making and generation in a global understanding manner. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the OR-ShARC benchmark.

对话机阅读理解（CMRC）旨在帮助计算机理解自然语言文本，然后进行多转交谈以回答与文本有关的问题。现有方法通常需要三个步骤：（1）基于需要推理的决策； （2）如果上述决定的要求，请跨越提取； （3）基于提取的跨度重新绘制问题。但是，对于几乎所有这些方法，跨度提取和问题的改写步骤无法完全利用决策制定步骤中的细粒度构成推理信息，因为它们的相对独立性将进一步扩大决策制定和问题措辞之间的信息差距。因此，为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一个基于共享参数机制的对话机读取理解理解的新颖端到端框架，称为Intailment推理T5（ET5）。尽管我们提出的框架轻量级，但实验结果表明，拟议的ET5以55.2的BLEU-4分数在Sharc排行榜上取得了新的最新结果。我们的模型和代码可在https://github.com/yottaxx/et5上公开获取。

无监督的问题回答是一项有吸引力的任务，因为它在标签数据上的独立性。以前的作品通常使用启发式规则以及预先培训的模型来构建数据和训练QA模型。但是，这些作品中的大多数都将命名为实体（NE）视为唯一的答案类型，它忽略了现实世界中答案的高度多样性。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一种新颖的无监督方法，通过多样化的答案，名为Diverseqa。具体而言，所提出的方法由三个模块组成：数据构建，数据增强和降解过滤器。首先，数据构建模块将提取的命名实体扩展到一个较长的句子成分，作为构建具有不同答案的质量检查数据集的新答案跨度。其次，数据增强模块通过嵌入级别的对抗训练采用答案型依赖性数据增强过程。第三，denoising滤波器模块旨在减轻构造数据中的噪声。广泛的实验表明，所提出的方法在五个基准数据集上优于先前的无监督模型，包括squeadv1.1，newsqa，triviaqa，bioasq和Duorc。此外，提出的方法在少量学习设置中显示出强劲的性能。

基础模型由于在广泛的下游应用中的有效性而受到了很多关注。尽管在体系结构方面存在很大的融合，但大多数审慎的模型通常仍用于特定任务或模式。在这项工作中，我们建议将语言模型用作各种基础模型的通用接口。一系列预处理的编码者感知到了多种方式（例如视觉和语言），并与扮演通用任务层角色的语言模型对接。我们提出了一个半伴侣的语言建模目标，以共同确定界面和模块化编码器。我们从因果关系和非因果建模中涵盖了优势和能力，从而结合了两个世界的最佳状态。具体而言，所提出的方法不仅从因果语言建模中继承了内在学习和开放式生成的能力，而且由于双向编码器而有利于填补。更重要的是，我们的方法无缝地解锁了上述功能的组合，例如，通过填充编码器启用了文本学习或指导。各种仅语言和视觉语言基准的实验结果表明，我们的模型表现优于或与鉴定，零弹性概括和几乎没有的学习的专业模型竞争。

Tensor robust principal component analysis (RPCA), which seeks to separate a low-rank tensor from its sparse corruptions, has been crucial in data science and machine learning where tensor structures are becoming more prevalent. While powerful, existing tensor RPCA algorithms can be difficult to use in practice, as their performance can be sensitive to the choice of additional hyperparameters, which are not straightforward to tune. In this paper, we describe a fast and simple self-supervised model for tensor RPCA using deep unfolding by only learning four hyperparameters. Despite its simplicity, our model expunges the need for ground truth labels while maintaining competitive or even greater performance compared to supervised deep unfolding. Furthermore, our model is capable of operating in extreme data-starved scenarios. We demonstrate these claims on a mix of synthetic data and real-world tasks, comparing performance against previously studied supervised deep unfolding methods and Bayesian optimization baselines.

Length extrapolation is a desirable property that permits training a transformer language model on short sequences and retaining similar perplexities when the model is tested on substantially longer sequences. A relative positional embedding mechanism applied on the transformer self-attention matrix, ALiBi, demonstrates the length extrapolation property with the widest usage to date. In this paper, we show that ALiBi surprisingly does not utilize tokens further than the training sequence length, which can be explained by its implicit windowed attention effect that aligns the receptive field during training and testing stages. Inspired by ALiBi and the receptive filed alignment hypothesis, we propose another transformer positional embedding design named~\textbf{Sandwich} that uses longer than training sequence length information, and it is a greatly simplified formulation of the earliest proposed Sinusoidal positional embedding. Finally, we show that both ALiBi and Sandwich enable efficient inference thanks to their implicit windowed attention effect.

Privacy policies provide individuals with information about their rights and how their personal information is handled. Natural language understanding (NLU) technologies can support individuals and practitioners to understand better privacy practices described in lengthy and complex documents. However, existing efforts that use NLU technologies are limited by processing the language in a way exclusive to a single task focusing on certain privacy practices. To this end, we introduce the Privacy Policy Language Understanding Evaluation (PLUE) benchmark, a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the privacy policy language understanding across various tasks. We also collect a large corpus of privacy policies to enable privacy policy domain-specific language model pre-training. We demonstrate that domain-specific pre-training offers performance improvements across all tasks. We release the benchmark to encourage future research in this domain.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Image-text retrieval (ITR) is a challenging task in the field of multimodal information processing due to the semantic gap between different modalities. In recent years, researchers have made great progress in exploring the accurate alignment between image and text. However, existing works mainly focus on the fine-grained alignment between image regions and sentence fragments, which ignores the guiding significance of context background information. Actually, integrating the local fine-grained information and global context background information can provide more semantic clues for retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Graph Alignment Network (HGAN) for image-text retrieval. First, to capture the comprehensive multimodal features, we construct the feature graphs for the image and text modality respectively. Then, a multi-granularity shared space is established with a designed Multi-granularity Feature Aggregation and Rearrangement (MFAR) module, which enhances the semantic corresponding relations between the local and global information, and obtains more accurate feature representations for the image and text modalities. Finally, the ultimate image and text features are further refined through three-level similarity functions to achieve the hierarchical alignment. To justify the proposed model, we perform extensive experiments on MS-COCO and Flickr30K datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed HGAN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both datasets, which demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of our model.