3,929 research outputs found
What counts as good evidence
Making better use of evidence is essential if public services are to deliver more for less. Central to this challenge is the need for a clearer understanding about standards of evidence that can be applied to the research informing social policy. This paper reviews the extent to which it is possible to reach a workable consensus on ways of identifying and labelling evidence. It does this by exploring the efforts made to date and the debates that have ensued. Throughout, the focus is on evidence that is underpinned by research, rather than other sources of evidence such as expert opinion or stakeholder views.Publisher PD
Morphing and Sampling Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion
3D point cloud completion, the task of inferring the complete geometric shape
from a partial point cloud, has been attracting attention in the community. For
acquiring high-fidelity dense point clouds and avoiding uneven distribution,
blurred details, or structural loss of existing methods' results, we propose a
novel approach to complete the partial point cloud in two stages. Specifically,
in the first stage, the approach predicts a complete but coarse-grained point
cloud with a collection of parametric surface elements. Then, in the second
stage, it merges the coarse-grained prediction with the input point cloud by a
novel sampling algorithm. Our method utilizes a joint loss function to guide
the distribution of the points. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness
of our method and demonstrate that it outperforms the existing methods in both
the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) and the Chamfer Distance (CD).Comment: 8pages, 7 figures, AAAI202
Teacher Evaluator Training & Certification: Lessons Learned From the Measures of Effective Teaching Project
Makes recommendations for the design and implementation of programs to train and certify principals in conducting teacher evaluations, including content, format, and length of training, scoring practice, and criteria for certification tests
Reinforcement Learning for Sparse-Reward Object-Interaction Tasks in First-person Simulated 3D Environments
First-person object-interaction tasks in high-fidelity, 3D, simulated
environments such as the AI2Thor virtual home-environment pose significant
sample-efficiency challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) agents learning
from sparse task rewards. To alleviate these challenges, prior work has
provided extensive supervision via a combination of reward-shaping,
ground-truth object-information, and expert demonstrations. In this work, we
show that one can learn object-interaction tasks from scratch without
supervision by learning an attentive object-model as an auxiliary task during
task learning with an object-centric relational RL agent. Our key insight is
that learning an object-model that incorporates object-attention into forward
prediction provides a dense learning signal for unsupervised representation
learning of both objects and their relationships. This, in turn, enables faster
policy learning for an object-centric relational RL agent. We demonstrate our
agent by introducing a set of challenging object-interaction tasks in the
AI2Thor environment where learning with our attentive object-model is key to
strong performance. Specifically, we compare our agent and relational RL agents
with alternative auxiliary tasks to a relational RL agent equipped with
ground-truth object-information, and show that learning with our object-model
best closes the performance gap in terms of both learning speed and maximum
success rate. Additionally, we find that incorporating object-attention into an
object-model's forward predictions is key to learning representations which
capture object-category and object-state
Vision-and-Language Navigation: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions
A long-term goal of AI research is to build intelligent agents that can
communicate with humans in natural language, perceive the environment, and
perform real-world tasks. Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a fundamental
and interdisciplinary research topic towards this goal, and receives increasing
attention from natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, and
machine learning communities. In this paper, we review contemporary studies in
the emerging field of VLN, covering tasks, evaluation metrics, methods, etc.
Through structured analysis of current progress and challenges, we highlight
the limitations of current VLN and opportunities for future work. This paper
serves as a thorough reference for the VLN research community.Comment: 19 pages. Accepted to ACL 202
Explainability for Machine Learning Models: From Data Adaptability to User Perception
This thesis explores the generation of local explanations for already
deployed machine learning models, aiming to identify optimal conditions for
producing meaningful explanations considering both data and user requirements.
The primary goal is to develop methods for generating explanations for any
model while ensuring that these explanations remain faithful to the underlying
model and comprehensible to the users.
The thesis is divided into two parts. The first enhances a widely used
rule-based explanation method. It then introduces a novel approach for
evaluating the suitability of linear explanations to approximate a model.
Additionally, it conducts a comparative experiment between two families of
counterfactual explanation methods to analyze the advantages of one over the
other. The second part focuses on user experiments to assess the impact of
three explanation methods and two distinct representations. These experiments
measure how users perceive their interaction with the model in terms of
understanding and trust, depending on the explanations and representations.
This research contributes to a better explanation generation, with potential
implications for enhancing the transparency, trustworthiness, and usability of
deployed AI systems.Comment: PhD Thesi
Learning Prior Feature and Attention Enhanced Image Inpainting
Many recent inpainting works have achieved impressive results by leveraging
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to model various prior information for image
restoration. Unfortunately, the performance of these methods is largely limited
by the representation ability of vanilla Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)
backbones.On the other hand, Vision Transformers (ViT) with self-supervised
pre-training have shown great potential for many visual recognition and object
detection tasks. A natural question is whether the inpainting task can be
greatly benefited from the ViT backbone? However, it is nontrivial to directly
replace the new backbones in inpainting networks, as the inpainting is an
inverse problem fundamentally different from the recognition tasks. To this
end, this paper incorporates the pre-training based Masked AutoEncoder (MAE)
into the inpainting model, which enjoys richer informative priors to enhance
the inpainting process. Moreover, we propose to use attention priors from MAE
to make the inpainting model learn more long-distance dependencies between
masked and unmasked regions. Sufficient ablations have been discussed about the
inpainting and the self-supervised pre-training models in this paper. Besides,
experiments on both Places2 and FFHQ demonstrate the effectiveness of our
proposed model. Codes and pre-trained models are released in
https://github.com/ewrfcas/MAE-FAR.Comment: ECCV 202
Stakeholder network as a determinant to the degree of synchronization between a firm’s values and its stakeholder management strategies. A comparison between public and private companies using mission statements and corporate charitable donations.
Stakeholder theory and stakeholder management theories have gained popularity among practitioners and scholars in recent decades for both its normative and positive power. Intuitively, it is easy to assume that firms who manage for stakeholders utilize various stakeholder management strategies to realize their corporate values. Thus, this study intends to examine the degree of synchronization, or the lack thereof, between a firm’s publicly endorsed values and the values embedded in its CSR stakeholder management activity, specifically, charitable donations. More importantly, due to the different sizes and nature of the stakeholder networks faced by private and public firms, we expect the levels of synchronization to differ between the two, with the distinction that such values stray further from each other for public firms. We found that public and private firms differ in the levels of synchronization between their endorsed values and their charitable recipient organizations’ values on many semantic and psychological domains (17 categories). Interesting, contrary to our initial hypothesis, the level of discrepancy is greater among private firms than that of public firms on most domains (16 categories), which entices further research into determinants of firms’ behavior affected by institutionalized rituals
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