Recent work has made significant progress in improving spatial resolution for pixelwise labeling with Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) framework by employing Dilated/Atrous convolution, utilizing multi-scale features and refining boundaries. In this paper, we explore the impact of global contextual information in semantic segmentation by introducing the Context Encoding Module, which captures the semantic context of scenes and selectively highlights class-dependent featuremaps. The proposed Context Encoding Module significantly improves semantic segmentation results with only marginal extra computation cost over FCN. Our approach has achieved new state-of-theart results 51.7% mIoU on PASCAL-Context, 85.9% mIoU on PASCAL VOC 2012. Our single model achieves a final score of 0.5567 on ADE20K test set, which surpasses the winning entry of COCO-Place Challenge 2017. In addition, we also explore how the Context Encoding Module can improve the feature representation of relatively shallow networks for the image classification on CIFAR-10 dataset. Our 14 layer network has achieved an error rate of 3.45%, which is comparable with state-of-the-art approaches with over 10× more layers. The source code for the complete system are publicly available 1 .

We consider the problem of continually releasing an estimate of the population mean of a stream of samples that is user-level differentially private (DP). At each time instant, a user contributes a sample, and the users can arrive in arbitrary order. Until now these requirements of continual release and user-level privacy were considered in isolation. But, in practice, both these requirements come together as the users often contribute data repeatedly and multiple queries are made. We provide an algorithm that outputs a mean estimate at every time instant $t$ such that the overall release is user-level $\varepsilon$-DP and has the following error guarantee: Denoting by $M_t$ the maximum number of samples contributed by a user, as long as $\tilde{\Omega}(1/\varepsilon)$ users have $M_t/2$ samples each, the error at time $t$ is $\tilde{O}(1/\sqrt{t}+\sqrt{M}_t/t\varepsilon)$. This is a universal error guarantee which is valid for all arrival patterns of the users. Furthermore, it (almost) matches the existing lower bounds for the single-release setting at all time instants when users have contributed equal number of samples.

In this work, we devise robust and efficient learning protocols for orchestrating a Federated Learning (FL) process for the Federated Tumor Segmentation Challenge (FeTS 2022). Enabling FL for FeTS setup is challenging mainly due to data heterogeneity among collaborators and communication cost of training. To tackle these challenges, we propose Robust Learning Protocol (RoLePRO) which is a combination of server-side adaptive optimisation (e.g., server-side Adam) and judicious parameter (weights) aggregation schemes (e.g., adaptive weighted aggregation). RoLePRO takes a two-phase approach, where the first phase consists of vanilla Federated Averaging, while the second phase consists of a judicious aggregation scheme that uses a sophisticated reweighting, all in the presence of an adaptive optimisation algorithm at the server. We draw insights from extensive experimentation to tune learning rates for the two phases.

Soft actuators have attracted a great deal of interest in the context of rehabilitative and assistive robots for increasing safety and lowering costs as compared to rigid-body robotic systems. During actuation, soft actuators experience high levels of deformation, which can lead to microscale fractures in their elastomeric structure, which fatigues the system over time and eventually leads to macroscale damages and eventually failure. This paper reports finite element modeling (FEM) of pneu-nets at high angles, along with repetitive experimentation at high deformation rates, in order to study the effect and behavior of fatigue in soft robotic actuators, which would result in deviation from the ideal behavior. Comparing the FEM model and experimental data, we show that FEM can model the performance of the actuator before fatigue to a bending angle of 167 degrees with ~96% accuracy. We also show that the FEM model performance will drop to 80% due to fatigue after repetitive high-angle bending. The results of this paper objectively highlight the emergence of fatigue over cyclic activation of the system and the resulting deviation from the computational FEM model. Such behavior can be considered in future controllers to adapt the system with time-variable and non-autonomous response dynamics of soft robots.

As Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are increasingly deployed in safety critical and privacy sensitive applications such as autonomous driving and biometric authentication, it is critical to understand the fault-tolerance nature of DNNs. Prior work primarily focuses on metrics such as Failures In Time (FIT) rate and the Silent Data Corruption (SDC) rate, which quantify how often a device fails. Instead, this paper focuses on quantifying the DNN accuracy given that a transient error has occurred, which tells us how well a network behaves when a transient error occurs. We call this metric Resiliency Accuracy (RA). We show that existing RA formulation is fundamentally inaccurate, because it incorrectly assumes that software variables (model weights/activations) have equal faulty probability under hardware transient faults. We present an algorithm that captures the faulty probabilities of DNN variables under transient faults and, thus, provides correct RA estimations validated by hardware. To accelerate RA estimation, we reformulate RA calculation as a Monte Carlo integration problem, and solve it using importance sampling driven by DNN specific heuristics. Using our lightweight RA estimation method, we show that transient faults lead to far greater accuracy degradation than what todays DNN resiliency tools estimate. We show how our RA estimation tool can help design more resilient DNNs by integrating it with a Network Architecture Search framework.

We present RecD (Recommendation Deduplication), a suite of end-to-end infrastructure optimizations across the Deep Learning Recommendation Model (DLRM) training pipeline. RecD addresses immense storage, preprocessing, and training overheads caused by feature duplication inherent in industry-scale DLRM training datasets. Feature duplication arises because DLRM datasets are generated from interactions. While each user session can generate multiple training samples, many features' values do not change across these samples. We demonstrate how RecD exploits this property, end-to-end, across a deployed training pipeline. RecD optimizes data generation pipelines to decrease dataset storage and preprocessing resource demands and to maximize duplication within a training batch. RecD introduces a new tensor format, InverseKeyedJaggedTensors (IKJTs), to deduplicate feature values in each batch. We show how DLRM model architectures can leverage IKJTs to drastically increase training throughput. RecD improves the training and preprocessing throughput and storage efficiency by up to 2.49x, 1.79x, and 3.71x, respectively, in an industry-scale DLRM training system.

本文研究了与可解释的AI（XAI）实践有关的两个不同但相关的问题。机器学习（ML）在金融服务中越来越重要，例如预批准，信用承销，投资以及各种前端和后端活动。机器学习可以自动检测培训数据中的非线性和相互作用，从而促进更快，更准确的信用决策。但是，机器学习模型是不透明的，难以解释，这是建立可靠技术所需的关键要素。该研究比较了各种机器学习模型，包括单个分类器（逻辑回归，决策树，LDA，QDA），异质集合（Adaboost，随机森林）和顺序神经网络。结果表明，整体分类器和神经网络的表现优于表现。此外，使用基于美国P2P贷款平台Lending Club提供的开放式访问数据集评估了两种先进的事后不可解释能力 - 石灰和外形来评估基于ML的信用评分模型。对于这项研究，我们还使用机器学习算法来开发新的投资模型，并探索可以最大化盈利能力同时最大程度地降低风险的投资组合策略。

执法和城市安全受到监视系统中的暴力事件的严重影响。尽管现代（智能）相机广泛可用且负担得起，但在大多数情况下，这种技术解决方案无能为力。此外，监测CCTV记录的人员经常显示出迟来的反应，从而导致对人和财产的灾难。因此，对迅速行动的暴力自动检测至关重要。拟议的解决方案使用了一种新颖的端到端深度学习视频视觉变压器（Vivit），可以在视频序列中熟练地辨别战斗，敌对运动和暴力事件。该研究提出了利用数据增强策略来克服较弱的电感偏见的缺点，同时在较小的培训数据集中训练视觉变压器。评估的结果随后可以发送给当地有关当局，可以分析捕获的视频。与最先进的（SOTA）相比，所提出的方法在某些具有挑战性的基准数据集上实现了吉祥的性能。

由于隐私立法赋予用户有权被遗忘的权利，因此使模型忘记其某些培训数据已经成为必不可少的。我们探讨了删除任何客户在联邦学习（FL）中的贡献的问题。在FL回合中，每个客户都进行本地培训，以学习一个模型，以最大程度地减少其私人数据的经验损失。我们建议通过逆转学习过程，即训练模型\ emph {最大化}局部经验损失来对客户（将要删除）进行学习。 In particular, we formulate the unlearning problem as a constrained maximization problem by restricting to an $\ell_2$-norm ball around a suitably chosen reference model to help retain some knowledge learnt from the other clients' data.这使客户可以使用投影的梯度下降来执行学习。该方法确实不需要全局访问用于培训的数据，也不需要由聚合器（服务器）或任何客户端存​​储的参数更新历史记录。 MNIST数据集的实验表明，所提出的未学习方法是有效的。

我们介绍了精致的，这是一种有效的端到端实体链接模型，该模型使用精细的实体类型和实体描述来执行链接。该模型执行提及的检测，细粒实体键入以及单个向前传球中文档中所有提及的实体歧义，使其比现有方法快60倍以上。精制还超过了标准实体链接数据集的最先进性能，平均比3.7 F1。该模型能够将其推广到大规模的知识库，例如Wikidata（其实体是Wikipedia的15倍）和零拍的实体链接。速度，准确性和规模的结合使精制成为从网络规模数据集中提取实体的有效且具有成本效益的系统，该数据集已成功部署该模型。我们的代码和预培训模型可在https://github.com/alexa/refined上找到