An Immediate Update Strategy of Multi-State Constraint Kalman Filter

The lightweight Multi-state Constraint Kalman Filter (MSCKF) has been well-known for its high efficiency, in which the delayed update has been usually adopted since its proposal. This work investigates the immediate update strategy of MSCKF based on timely reconstructed 3D feature points and measurement constraints. The differences between the delayed update and the immediate update are theoretically analyzed in detail. It is found that the immediate update helps construct more observation constraints and employ more filtering updates than the delayed update, which improves the linearization point of the measurement model and therefore enhances the estimation accuracy. Numerical simulations and experiments show that the immediate update strategy significantly enhances MSCKF even with a small amount of feature observations.

Conformal Online Auction Design

This paper proposes the conformal online auction design (COAD), a novel mechanism for maximizing revenue in online auctions by quantifying the uncertainty in bidders' values without relying on assumptions about value distributions. COAD incorporates both the bidder and item features and leverages historical data to provide an incentive-compatible mechanism for online auctions. Unlike traditional methods for online auctions, COAD employs a distribution-free, prediction interval-based approach using conformal prediction techniques. This novel approach ensures that the expected revenue from our mechanism can achieve at least a constant fraction of the revenue generated by the optimal mechanism. Additionally, COAD admits the use of a broad array of modern machine-learning methods, including random forests, kernel methods, and deep neural nets, for predicting bidders' values. It ensures revenue performance under any finite sample of historical data. Moreover, COAD introduces bidder-specific reserve prices based on the lower confidence bounds of bidders' valuations, which is different from the uniform reserve prices commonly used in the literature. We validate our theoretical predictions through extensive simulations and a real-data application. All code for using COAD and reproducing results is made available on GitHub.

CM-TTS: Enhancing Real Time Text-to-Speech Synthesis Efficiency through Weighted Samplers and Consistency Models

Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems find broad applications in voice assistants, e-learning, and audiobook creation. The pursuit of modern models, like Diffusion Models (DMs), holds promise for achieving high-fidelity, real-time speech synthesis. Yet, the efficiency of multi-step sampling in Diffusion Models presents challenges. Efforts have been made to integrate GANs with DMs, speeding up inference by approximating denoising distributions, but this introduces issues with model convergence due to adversarial training. To overcome this, we introduce CM-TTS, a novel architecture grounded in consistency models (CMs). Drawing inspiration from continuous-time diffusion models, CM-TTS achieves top-quality speech synthesis in fewer steps without adversarial training or pre-trained model dependencies. We further design weighted samplers to incorporate different sampling positions into model training with dynamic probabilities, ensuring unbiased learning throughout the entire training process. We present a real-time mel-spectrogram generation consistency model, validated through comprehensive evaluations. Experimental results underscore CM-TTS's superiority over existing single-step speech synthesis systems, representing a significant advancement in the field.

Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Continual Few-Shot Relation Extractors

Continual Few-shot Relation Extraction (CFRE) is a practical problem that requires the model to continuously learn novel relations while avoiding forgetting old ones with few labeled training data. The primary challenges are catastrophic forgetting and overfitting. This paper harnesses prompt learning to explore the implicit capabilities of pre-trained language models to address the above two challenges, thereby making language models better continual few-shot relation extractors. Specifically, we propose a Contrastive Prompt Learning framework, which designs prompt representation to acquire more generalized knowledge that can be easily adapted to old and new categories, and margin-based contrastive learning to focus more on hard samples, therefore alleviating catastrophic forgetting and overfitting issues. To further remedy overfitting in low-resource scenarios, we introduce an effective memory augmentation strategy that employs well-crafted prompts to guide ChatGPT in generating diverse samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin and significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting and overfitting in low-resource scenarios.

Robust multi-item auction design using statistical learning: Overcoming uncertainty in bidders' types distributions

This paper presents a novel mechanism design for multi-item auction settings with uncertain bidders' type distributions. Our proposed approach utilizes nonparametric density estimation to accurately estimate bidders' types from historical bids, and is built upon the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism, ensuring satisfaction of Bayesian incentive compatibility (BIC) and $\delta$-individual rationality (IR). To further enhance the efficiency of our mechanism, we introduce two novel strategies for query reduction: a filtering method that screens potential winners' value regions within the confidence intervals generated by our estimated distribution, and a classification strategy that designates the lower bound of an interval as the estimated type when the length is below a threshold value. Simulation experiments conducted on both small-scale and large-scale data demonstrate that our mechanism consistently outperforms existing methods in terms of revenue maximization and query reduction, particularly in large-scale scenarios. This makes our proposed mechanism a highly desirable and effective option for sellers in the realm of multi-item auctions.

Exploring Task Difficulty for Few-Shot Relation Extraction

Few-shot relation extraction (FSRE) focuses on recognizing novel relations by learning with merely a handful of annotated instances. Meta-learning has been widely adopted for such a task, which trains on randomly generated few-shot tasks to learn generic data representations. Despite impressive results achieved, existing models still perform suboptimally when handling hard FSRE tasks, where the relations are fine-grained and similar to each other. We argue this is largely because existing models do not distinguish hard tasks from easy ones in the learning process. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach based on contrastive learning that learns better representations by exploiting relation label information. We further design a method that allows the model to adaptively learn how to focus on hard tasks. Experiments on two standard datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Integrating Subgraph-aware Relation and DirectionReasoning for Question Answering

Question Answering (QA) models over Knowledge Bases (KBs) are capable of providing more precise answers by utilizing relation information among entities. Although effective, most of these models solely rely on fixed relation representations to obtain answers for different question-related KB subgraphs. Hence, the rich structured information of these subgraphs may be overlooked by the relation representation vectors. Meanwhile, the direction information of reasoning, which has been proven effective for the answer prediction on graphs, has not been fully explored in existing work. To address these challenges, we propose a novel neural model, Relation-updated Direction-guided Answer Selector (RDAS), which converts relations in each subgraph to additional nodes to learn structure information. Additionally, we utilize direction information to enhance the reasoning ability. Experimental results show that our model yields substantial improvements on two widely used datasets.