NLP in the era of generative AI, cognitive sciences, and societal transformation
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A smart application in sensing is mainly powered by a two-stage process comprising sensing (collect data) and computing (process data). Whil… (see more)e the sensing stage is typically performed locally through a dedicated Internet of Things infrastructure, the computing stage may require a powerful infrastructure in the cloud. However, when connectivity is poor and low latency becomes a requirement — as in emergency response and disaster relief operations — edge computing and ad hoc cloud paradigms come in support to keep the computing stage locally. Being local network connectivity and data processing limited, it is vital to properly optimize how the computing workload will be consumed by the local ad hoc cloud. For this purpose, we present and evaluate the swarm-powered Optimized 3D Mapping Pipeline (OptiMaP) for emergency response 3D mapping missions, which is implemented as a collaborative embedded Robot Operating System (ROS) application integrating an ad hoc telecommunication middleware.We simulate — with Software-In-The-Loop — realistic 3D mapping missions comprising up to 5 drones and 363 images covering 0.293km2. We show how the completion times of mapping missions carried out in a typical centralized manner can be dramatically reduced by two versions of the OptiMaP framework powered, respectively, by a variable neighborhood search heuristic and a greedy method.
2022-05-01
International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (published)
Finding the right amount of deliberation, between insufficient and excessive, is a hard decision making problem that depends on the value we… (see more) place on our time. Average-reward, putatively encoded by tonic dopamine, serves in existing reinforcement learning theory as the opportunity cost of time, including deliberation time. Importantly, this cost can itself vary with the environmental context and is not trivial to estimate. Here, we propose how the opportunity cost of deliberation can be estimated adaptively on multiple timescales to account for non-stationary contextual factors. We use it in a simple decision-making heuristic based on average-reward reinforcement learning (AR-RL) that we call Performance-Gated Deliberation (PGD). We propose PGD as a strategy used by animals wherein deliberation cost is implemented directly as urgency, a previously characterized neural signal effectively controlling the speed of the decision-making process. We show PGD outperforms AR-RL solutions in explaining behaviour and urgency of non-human primates in a context-varying random walk prediction task and is consistent with relative performance and urgency in a context-varying random dot motion task. We make readily testable predictions for both neural activity and behaviour.
The random utility maximization model is by far the most adopted framework to estimate consumer choice behavior. However, behavioral economi… (see more)cs has provided strong empirical evidence of irrational choice behaviors, such as halo effects, that are incompatible with this framework. Models belonging to the random utility maximization family may therefore not accurately capture such irrational behavior. Hence, more general choice models, overcoming such limitations, have been proposed. However, the flexibility of such models comes at the price of increased risk of overfitting. As such, estimating such models remains a challenge. In this work, we propose an estimation method for the recently proposed generalized stochastic preference choice model, which subsumes the family of random utility maximization models and is capable of capturing halo effects. In particular, we propose a column-generation method to gradually refine the discrete choice model based on partially ranked preference sequences. Extensive computational experiments indicate that our model, explicitly accounting for irrational preferences, can significantly boost the predictive accuracy on both synthetic and real-world data instances. Summary of Contribution: In this work, we propose an estimation method for the recently proposed generalized stochastic preference choice model, which subsumes the family of random utility maximization models and is capable of capturing halo effects. Specifically, we show how to use partially ranked preferences to efficiently model rational and irrational customer types from transaction data. Our estimation procedure is based on column generation, where relevant customer types are efficiently extracted by expanding a treelike data structure containing the customer behaviors. Furthermore, we propose a new dominance rule among customer types whose effect is to prioritize low orders of interactions among products. An extensive set of experiments assesses the predictive accuracy of the proposed approach by comparing it against rank-based methods with only rational preferences and with more general benchmarks from the literature. Our results show that accounting for irrational preferences can boost predictive accuracy by 12.5% on average when tested on a real-world data set from a large chain of grocery and drug stores.
Prompt tuning has recently emerged as an effective method for adapting pre-trained language models to a number of language understanding and… (see more) generation tasks. In this paper, we investigate prompt tuning for semantic parsing—the task of mapping natural language utterances onto formal meaning representations. On the low-resource splits of Overnight and TOPv2, we find that a prompt tuned T5-xl significantly outperforms its fine-tuned counterpart, as well as strong GPT-3 and BART baselines. We also conduct ablation studies across different model scales and target representations, finding that, with increasing model scale, prompt tuned T5 models improve at generating target representations that are far from the pre-training distribution.
2022-05-01
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) (published)