Procedural video representation learning is an active research area where the objective is to learn an agent which can anticipate and forecast the future given the present video input, typically in conjunction with textual annotations. Prior works often rely on large-scale pretraining of visual encoders and prediction models with language supervision. However, the necessity and effectiveness of extending compute intensive pretraining to learn video clip sequences with noisy text supervision have not yet been fully validated by previous works. In this work, we show that a strong off-the-shelf frozen pretrained visual encoder, along with a well designed prediction model, can achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance in forecasting and procedural planning without the need for pretraining the prediction model, nor requiring additional supervision from language or ASR. Instead of learning representations from pixel space, our method utilizes the latent embedding space of publicly available vision encoders. By conditioning on frozen clip-level embeddings from observed steps to predict the actions of unseen steps, our prediction model is able to learn robust representations for forecasting through iterative denoising —leveraging the recent advances in diffusion transformers (Peebles & Xie, 2023). Empirical studies over a total of five procedural learning tasks across four datasets (NIV, CrossTask, COIN and Ego4D-v2) show that our model advances the strong baselines in long-horizon action anticipation (+2.6% in Verb ED@20, +3.1% in Noun ED@20), and significantly improves the SoTA in step forecasting (+5.0%), task classification (+3.8%), and procedure planning tasks (up to +2.28% in success rate, +3.39% in mAcc, and +0.90% in mIoU).

Frozen models trained to mimic static datasets can never improve their performance.Models that can employ internet-retrieval for up-to-date information and obtain feedback from humans during deployment provide the promise of both adapting to new information, and improving their performance.In this work we study how to improve internet-driven conversational skills in such a learning framework.We collect deployment data, which we make publicly available, of human interactions, and collect various types of human feedback -including binary quality measurements, free-form text feedback, and fine-grained reasons for failure.We then study various algorithms for improving from such feedback, including standard supervised learning, rejection sampling, modelguiding and reward-based learning, in order to make recommendations on which type of feedback and algorithms work best.We find the recently introduced DIRECTOR model (Arora et al., 2022) shows significant improvements over other existing approaches.

The largest store of continually updating knowledge on our planet can be accessed via internet search.In this work we study giving access to this information to conversational agents.Large language models, even though they store an impressive amount of knowledge within their weights, are known to hallucinate facts when generating dialogue (Shuster et al., 2021); moreover, those facts are frozen in time at the point of model training.In contrast, we propose an approach that learns to generate an internet search query based on the context, and then conditions on the search results to finally generate a response, a method that can employ up-to-the-minute relevant information.We train and evaluate such models on a newly collected dataset of human-human conversations whereby one of the speakers is given access to internet search during knowledge-driven discussions in order to ground their responses.We find that search-query based access of the internet in conversation provides superior performance compared to existing approaches that either use no augmentation or FAISS-based retrieval (Lewis et al., 2020b).

We give a quantum algorithm for finding a marked element on the grid when there are multiple marked elements. Our algorithm uses quadratically fewer steps than a random walk on the grid, ignoring logarithmic factors. This is the first known quantum walk that finds a marked element in a number of steps less than the square-root of the extended hitting time. We also give a new tighter upper bound on the extended hitting time of a marked subset, expressed in terms of the hitting times of its members.