Gaussian Process regression is a kernel method successfully adopted in many real-life applications. Recently, there is a growing interest on extending this method to non-Euclidean input spaces, like the one considered in this paper, consisting of probability measures. Although a Positive Definite kernel can be defined by using a suitable distance -- the Wasserstein distance -- the common procedure for learning the Gaussian Process model can fail due to numerical issues, arising earlier and more frequently than in the case of an Euclidean input space and, as demonstrated in this paper, that cannot be avoided by adding artificial noise (nugget effect) as usually done. This paper uncovers the main reason of these issues, that is a non-stationarity relationship between the Wasserstein-based squared exponential kernel and its Euclidean-based counterpart. As a relevant result, the Gaussian Process model is learned by assuming the input space as Euclidean and then an algebraic transformation, based on the uncovered relation, is used to transform it into a non-stationary and Wasserstein-based Gaussian Process model over probability measures. This algebraic transformation is simpler than log-exp maps used in the case of data belonging to Riemannian manifolds and recently extended to consider the pseudo-Riemannian structure of an input space equipped with the Wasserstein distance.

本文的主要目标是概述一个理论框架，以在不确定性下表征人类的决策策略，特别是在黑匣子优化任务和信息收集之间的交易（勘探）和奖励之间的交易（剥削） 。人类根据这两个目标做出的决定可以在帕累托合理性方面进行建模。如果决策集包含帕累托有效的策略，则理性决策者应始终通过其占主导地位的替代方案选择主导战略。距离帕累托前沿的距离决定了选择是帕累托的理性。要收集有关人类策略的数据，我们使用了显示游戏领域的游戏应用程序，以前的决定和观察以及获得的分数。本文中的关键要素是人类学习者的行为模式作为离散概率分布的表现。这将人类行为的表征映射到其元素是由直方图之间的距离构成的概率分布的空间的问题，即Wassersein距离（WST）。分布分析对人类搜索策略的新见解及其与帕累托合理性的偏差。由于不确定性是定义帕累托前沿的两个目标之一，因此已经进行了三种不同的不确定性量化措施，以确定哪个更好地解释普通的行为模式。除了对单个模式的分析，WST还支持计算重心和WST K-MERIAL聚类的全局分析。决策树已经进行了进一步的分析，以涉及非帕氏人的行为，其特征在于恼怒的利用，以奖励寻求过程的演变的动态。

可以将多任务学习（MTL）范例追溯到Caruana（1997）的早期纸张中，其中表示可以使用来自多个任务的数据，其目的是在独立地学习每个任务的旨在获得更好的性能。 MTL与相互矛盾的目标的解决方案需要在它们中进行折衷，这通常超出了直线组合可以实现的。理论上原则和计算有效的策略正在寻找不受他人主导的解决方案，因为它在帕累托分析中解决了它。多任务学习环境中产生的多目标优化问题具有特定的功能，需要adhoc方法。对这些特征的分析和新的计算方法的提议代表了这项工作的重点。多目标进化算法（MOEAS）可以容易地包括优势的概念，因此可以分析。 MOEAS的主要缺点是关于功能评估的低样本效率。此缺点的关键原因是大多数进化方法不使用模型来近似于目标函数。贝叶斯优化采用基于代理模型的完全不同的方法，例如高斯过程。在本文中，输入空间中的解决方案表示为封装功能评估中包含的知识的概率分布。在这种概率分布的空间中，赋予由Wassersein距离给出的度量，可以设计一种新的算法MOEA / WST，其中模型不直接在目标函数上，而是在输入空间中的对象的中间信息空间中被映射成直方图。计算结果表明，MoEA / WST提供的样品效率和帕累托集的质量明显优于标准MoEa。

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.

Humans have internal models of robots (like their physical capabilities), the world (like what will happen next), and their tasks (like a preferred goal). However, human internal models are not always perfect: for example, it is easy to underestimate a robot's inertia. Nevertheless, these models change and improve over time as humans gather more experience. Interestingly, robot actions influence what this experience is, and therefore influence how people's internal models change. In this work we take a step towards enabling robots to understand the influence they have, leverage it to better assist people, and help human models more quickly align with reality. Our key idea is to model the human's learning as a nonlinear dynamical system which evolves the human's internal model given new observations. We formulate a novel optimization problem to infer the human's learning dynamics from demonstrations that naturally exhibit human learning. We then formalize how robots can influence human learning by embedding the human's learning dynamics model into the robot planning problem. Although our formulations provide concrete problem statements, they are intractable to solve in full generality. We contribute an approximation that sacrifices the complexity of the human internal models we can represent, but enables robots to learn the nonlinear dynamics of these internal models. We evaluate our inference and planning methods in a suite of simulated environments and an in-person user study, where a 7DOF robotic arm teaches participants to be better teleoperators. While influencing human learning remains an open problem, our results demonstrate that this influence is possible and can be helpful in real human-robot interaction.

Explainability is a vibrant research topic in the artificial intelligence community, with growing interest across methods and domains. Much has been written about the topic, yet explainability still lacks shared terminology and a framework capable of providing structural soundness to explanations. In our work, we address these issues by proposing a novel definition of explanation that is a synthesis of what can be found in the literature. We recognize that explanations are not atomic but the product of evidence stemming from the model and its input-output and the human interpretation of this evidence. Furthermore, we fit explanations into the properties of faithfulness (i.e., the explanation being a true description of the model's decision-making) and plausibility (i.e., how much the explanation looks convincing to the user). Using our proposed theoretical framework simplifies how these properties are ope rationalized and provide new insight into common explanation methods that we analyze as case studies.

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.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on graph-structured data across numerous domains. Their underlying ability to represent nodes as summaries of their vicinities has proven effective for homophilous graphs in particular, in which same-type nodes tend to connect. On heterophilous graphs, in which different-type nodes are likely connected, GNNs perform less consistently, as neighborhood information might be less representative or even misleading. On the other hand, GNN performance is not inferior on all heterophilous graphs, and there is a lack of understanding of what other graph properties affect GNN performance. In this work, we highlight the limitations of the widely used homophily ratio and the recent Cross-Class Neighborhood Similarity (CCNS) metric in estimating GNN performance. To overcome these limitations, we introduce 2-hop Neighbor Class Similarity (2NCS), a new quantitative graph structural property that correlates with GNN performance more strongly and consistently than alternative metrics. 2NCS considers two-hop neighborhoods as a theoretically derived consequence of the two-step label propagation process governing GCN's training-inference process. Experiments on one synthetic and eight real-world graph datasets confirm consistent improvements over existing metrics in estimating the accuracy of GCN- and GAT-based architectures on the node classification task.

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has become increasingly successful in its application to science and the process of scientific discovery in general. However, while RL algorithms learn to solve increasingly complex problems, interpreting the solutions they provide becomes ever more challenging. In this work, we gain insights into an RL agent's learned behavior through a post-hoc analysis based on sequence mining and clustering. Specifically, frequent and compact subroutines, used by the agent to solve a given task, are distilled as gadgets and then grouped by various metrics. This process of gadget discovery develops in three stages: First, we use an RL agent to generate data, then, we employ a mining algorithm to extract gadgets and finally, the obtained gadgets are grouped by a density-based clustering algorithm. We demonstrate our method by applying it to two quantum-inspired RL environments. First, we consider simulated quantum optics experiments for the design of high-dimensional multipartite entangled states where the algorithm finds gadgets that correspond to modern interferometer setups. Second, we consider a circuit-based quantum computing environment where the algorithm discovers various gadgets for quantum information processing, such as quantum teleportation. This approach for analyzing the policy of a learned agent is agent and environment agnostic and can yield interesting insights into any agent's policy.

This paper presents a methodology for integrating machine learning techniques into metaheuristics for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Namely, we propose a general machine learning framework for neighbor generation in metaheuristic search. We first define an efficient neighborhood structure constructed by applying a transformation to a selected subset of variables from the current solution. Then, the key of the proposed methodology is to generate promising neighbors by selecting a proper subset of variables that contains a descent of the objective in the solution space. To learn a good variable selection strategy, we formulate the problem as a classification task that exploits structural information from the characteristics of the problem and from high-quality solutions. We validate our methodology on two metaheuristic applications: a Tabu Search scheme for solving a Wireless Network Optimization problem and a Large Neighborhood Search heuristic for solving Mixed-Integer Programs. The experimental results show that our approach is able to achieve a satisfactory trade-off between the exploration of a larger solution space and the exploitation of high-quality solution regions on both applications.