个性化Pagerank（PPR）是无监督学习图表（例如节点排名，标签和图形嵌入）的基本工具。但是，尽管数据隐私是最近的最重要问题之一，但现有的PPR算法并非旨在保护用户隐私。 PPR对输入图边缘高度敏感：仅一个边缘的差异可能会导致PPR矢量发生很大变化，并可能泄漏私人用户数据。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种输出近似PPR的算法，并证明对输入边缘的敏感性有界限。此外，我们证明，当输入图具有较大的程度时，我们的算法与非私有算法相似。我们敏感性的PPR直接暗示了用于几种图形学习工具的私有算法，例如差异私有（DP）PPR排名，DP节点分类和DP节点嵌入。为了补充我们的理论分析，我们还经验验证了算法的实际性能。

在使用提供明确定义的隐私保证的用户数据时，至关重要。在这项工作中，我们旨在与第三方私下操纵和分享整个稀疏数据集。实际上，差异隐私已成为隐私的黄金标准，但是，当涉及到稀疏数据集时，作为我们的主要结果之一，我们证明\ emph {any}与最初的私人机制有差异化的私人机制数据集注定要拥有非常薄弱的隐私保证。因此，我们需要选择其他隐私概念，例如$ k $ - 匿名性更好地在这种情况下保存实用程序。在这项工作中，我们介绍了$ k $ - 匿名的变体，我们称之为平滑$ k $ - 匿名和设计简单算法，可有效地提供平滑的$ k $ - 匿名性。我们进一步执行经验评估以支持我们的理论保证，并表明我们的算法改善了匿名数据下游机器学习任务的性能。

我们在$ d $ dimensional Euclidean Space中研究私人$ k $ -Median和$ k $ -means聚集问题。通过利用树的嵌入，我们提供了一种有效且易于实现的算法，该算法在非私人方法的经验上具有竞争力。我们证明我们的方法计算一个最多$ o（d^{3/2} \ log n）\ cdot opt + o（k d^2 \ log^2 n / \ epsilon^2）$的解决方案，其中$ \ Epsilon $是隐私担保。 （使用标准尺寸缩小技术可以用$ o（\ log k）$替换尺寸项，$ d $。）尽管最坏的案例保证比最先进的私人聚类方法的状态更糟糕，但算法是我们建议是实用的，以接近线性的方式运行，$ \ tilde {o}（nkd）$，时间和比例为数千万分。我们还表明，我们的方法适合在大规模分布式计算环境中并行化。特别是我们表明，我们的私人算法可以在sublinear内存制度中的对数MPC弹奏数中实现。最后，我们通过经验评估来补充理论分析，证明了该算法与其他隐私聚类基线相比的效率和准确性。

Computational units in artificial neural networks follow a simplified model of biological neurons. In the biological model, the output signal of a neuron runs down the axon, splits following the many branches at its end, and passes identically to all the downward neurons of the network. Each of the downward neurons will use their copy of this signal as one of many inputs dendrites, integrate them all and fire an output, if above some threshold. In the artificial neural network, this translates to the fact that the nonlinear filtering of the signal is performed in the upward neuron, meaning that in practice the same activation is shared between all the downward neurons that use that signal as their input. Dendrites thus play a passive role. We propose a slightly more complex model for the biological neuron, where dendrites play an active role: the activation in the output of the upward neuron becomes optional, and instead the signals going through each dendrite undergo independent nonlinear filterings, before the linear combination. We implement this new model into a ReLU computational unit and discuss its biological plausibility. We compare this new computational unit with the standard one and describe it from a geometrical point of view. We provide a Keras implementation of this unit into fully connected and convolutional layers and estimate their FLOPs and weights change. We then use these layers in ResNet architectures on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Imagenette, and Imagewoof, obtaining performance improvements over standard ResNets up to 1.73%. Finally, we prove a universal representation theorem for continuous functions on compact sets and show that this new unit has more representational power than its standard counterpart.

Fruit is a key crop in worldwide agriculture feeding millions of people. The standard supply chain of fruit products involves quality checks to guarantee freshness, taste, and, most of all, safety. An important factor that determines fruit quality is its stage of ripening. This is usually manually classified by experts in the field, which makes it a labor-intensive and error-prone process. Thus, there is an arising need for automation in the process of fruit ripeness classification. Many automatic methods have been proposed that employ a variety of feature descriptors for the food item to be graded. Machine learning and deep learning techniques dominate the top-performing methods. Furthermore, deep learning can operate on raw data and thus relieve the users from having to compute complex engineered features, which are often crop-specific. In this survey, we review the latest methods proposed in the literature to automatize fruit ripeness classification, highlighting the most common feature descriptors they operate on.

Artificial neural networks can learn complex, salient data features to achieve a given task. On the opposite end of the spectrum, mathematically grounded methods such as topological data analysis allow users to design analysis pipelines fully aware of data constraints and symmetries. We introduce a class of persistence-based neural network layers. Persistence-based layers allow the users to easily inject knowledge about symmetries (equivariance) respected by the data, are equipped with learnable weights, and can be composed with state-of-the-art neural architectures.

In this work we introduce reinforcement learning techniques for solving lexicographic multi-objective problems. These are problems that involve multiple reward signals, and where the goal is to learn a policy that maximises the first reward signal, and subject to this constraint also maximises the second reward signal, and so on. We present a family of both action-value and policy gradient algorithms that can be used to solve such problems, and prove that they converge to policies that are lexicographically optimal. We evaluate the scalability and performance of these algorithms empirically, demonstrating their practical applicability. As a more specific application, we show how our algorithms can be used to impose safety constraints on the behaviour of an agent, and compare their performance in this context with that of other constrained reinforcement learning algorithms.

In contextual linear bandits, the reward function is assumed to be a linear combination of an unknown reward vector and a given embedding of context-arm pairs. In practice, the embedding is often learned at the same time as the reward vector, thus leading to an online representation learning problem. Existing approaches to representation learning in contextual bandits are either very generic (e.g., model-selection techniques or algorithms for learning with arbitrary function classes) or specialized to particular structures (e.g., nested features or representations with certain spectral properties). As a result, the understanding of the cost of representation learning in contextual linear bandit is still limited. In this paper, we take a systematic approach to the problem and provide a comprehensive study through an instance-dependent perspective. We show that representation learning is fundamentally more complex than linear bandits (i.e., learning with a given representation). In particular, learning with a given set of representations is never simpler than learning with the worst realizable representation in the set, while we show cases where it can be arbitrarily harder. We complement this result with an extensive discussion of how it relates to existing literature and we illustrate positive instances where representation learning is as complex as learning with a fixed representation and where sub-logarithmic regret is achievable.

Relation extraction (RE) is a sub-discipline of information extraction (IE) which focuses on the prediction of a relational predicate from a natural-language input unit (such as a sentence, a clause, or even a short paragraph consisting of multiple sentences and/or clauses). Together with named-entity recognition (NER) and disambiguation (NED), RE forms the basis for many advanced IE tasks such as knowledge-base (KB) population and verification. In this work, we explore how recent approaches for open information extraction (OpenIE) may help to improve the task of RE by encoding structured information about the sentences' principal units, such as subjects, objects, verbal phrases, and adverbials, into various forms of vectorized (and hence unstructured) representations of the sentences. Our main conjecture is that the decomposition of long and possibly convoluted sentences into multiple smaller clauses via OpenIE even helps to fine-tune context-sensitive language models such as BERT (and its plethora of variants) for RE. Our experiments over two annotated corpora, KnowledgeNet and FewRel, demonstrate the improved accuracy of our enriched models compared to existing RE approaches. Our best results reach 92% and 71% of F1 score for KnowledgeNet and FewRel, respectively, proving the effectiveness of our approach on competitive benchmarks.

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.