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。

Biometrics is the science of identifying an individual based on their intrinsic anatomical or behavioural characteristics, such as fingerprints, face, iris, gait, and voice. Iris recognition is one of the most successful methods because it exploits the rich texture of the human iris, which is unique even for twins and does not degrade with age. Modern approaches to iris recognition utilize deep learning to segment the valid portion of the iris from the rest of the eye, so it can then be encoded, stored and compared. This paper aims to improve the accuracy of iris semantic segmentation systems by introducing a novel data augmentation technique. Our method can transform an iris image with a certain dilation level into any desired dilation level, thus augmenting the variability and number of training examples from a small dataset. The proposed method is fast and does not require training. The results indicate that our data augmentation method can improve segmentation accuracy up to 15% for images with high pupil dilation, which creates a more reliable iris recognition pipeline, even under extreme dilation.

We introduce M-VADER: a diffusion model (DM) for image generation where the output can be specified using arbitrary combinations of images and text. We show how M-VADER enables the generation of images specified using combinations of image and text, and combinations of multiple images. Previously, a number of successful DM image generation algorithms have been introduced that make it possible to specify the output image using a text prompt. Inspired by the success of those models, and led by the notion that language was already developed to describe the elements of visual contexts that humans find most important, we introduce an embedding model closely related to a vision-language model. Specifically, we introduce the embedding model S-MAGMA: a 13 billion parameter multimodal decoder combining components from an autoregressive vision-language model MAGMA and biases finetuned for semantic search.

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or bad) the decisions made by the learned agent are. Unfortunately, in a broad range of problems the design of a good reward function is not trivial, so in such cases sparse reward signals are instead adopted. The lack of a dense reward function poses new challenges, mostly related to exploration. Imitation Learning has addressed those problems by leveraging demonstrations from experts. In the absence of an expert (and its subsequent demonstrations), an option is to prioritize well-suited exploration experiences collected by the agent in order to bootstrap its learning process with good exploration behaviors. However, this solution highly depends on the ability of the agent to discover such trajectories in the early stages of its learning process. To tackle this issue, we propose to combine imitation learning with intrinsic motivation, two of the most widely adopted techniques to address problems with sparse reward. In this work intrinsic motivation is used to encourage the agent to explore the environment based on its curiosity, whereas imitation learning allows repeating the most promising experiences to accelerate the learning process. This combination is shown to yield an improved performance and better generalization in procedurally-generated environments, outperforming previously reported self-imitation learning methods and achieving equal or better sample efficiency with respect to intrinsic motivation in isolation.

Machine-Learned Likelihoods (MLL) is a method that, by combining modern machine-learning classification techniques with likelihood-based inference tests, allows to estimate the experimental sensitivity of high-dimensional data sets. We extend the MLL method by including the exclusion hypothesis tests and show that the addition of Kernel Density Estimators avoids the need to bin the classifier output in order to extract the resulting one-dimensional signal and background probability density functions. We first test our method on toy models generated with multivariate Gaussian distributions, where the true probability distribution functions are known. We then apply it to a case of interest in the search for new physics at the HL-LHC, in which a $Z^\prime$ boson decays into lepton pairs, comparing the performance of our method for estimating 95\% CL exclusion limits to the results obtained applying a binned likelihood to the machine-learning classifier output.

Federated Learning (FL) is extensively used to train AI/ML models in distributed and privacy-preserving settings. Participant edge devices in FL systems typically contain non-independent and identically distributed~(Non-IID) private data and unevenly distributed computational resources. Preserving user data privacy while optimizing AI/ML models in a heterogeneous federated network requires us to address data heterogeneity and system/resource heterogeneity. Hence, we propose \underline{R}esource-\underline{a}ware \underline{F}ederated \underline{L}earning~(RaFL) to address these challenges. RaFL allocates resource-aware models to edge devices using Neural Architecture Search~(NAS) and allows heterogeneous model architecture deployment by knowledge extraction and fusion. Integrating NAS into FL enables on-demand customized model deployment for resource-diverse edge devices. Furthermore, we propose a multi-model architecture fusion scheme allowing the aggregation of the distributed learning results. Results demonstrate RaFL's superior resource efficiency compared to SoTA.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having a tremendous impact across most areas of science. Applications of AI in healthcare have the potential to improve our ability to detect, diagnose, prognose, and intervene on human disease. For AI models to be used clinically, they need to be made safe, reproducible and robust, and the underlying software framework must be aware of the particularities (e.g. geometry, physiology, physics) of medical data being processed. This work introduces MONAI, a freely available, community-supported, and consortium-led PyTorch-based framework for deep learning in healthcare. MONAI extends PyTorch to support medical data, with a particular focus on imaging, and provide purpose-specific AI model architectures, transformations and utilities that streamline the development and deployment of medical AI models. MONAI follows best practices for software-development, providing an easy-to-use, robust, well-documented, and well-tested software framework. MONAI preserves the simple, additive, and compositional approach of its underlying PyTorch libraries. MONAI is being used by and receiving contributions from research, clinical and industrial teams from around the world, who are pursuing applications spanning nearly every aspect of healthcare.

Specular microscopy assessment of the human corneal endothelium (CE) in Fuchs' dystrophy is challenging due to the presence of dark image regions called guttae. This paper proposes a UNet-based segmentation approach that requires minimal post-processing and achieves reliable CE morphometric assessment and guttae identification across all degrees of Fuchs' dystrophy. We cast the segmentation problem as a regression task of the cell and gutta signed distance maps instead of a pixel-level classification task as typically done with UNets. Compared to the conventional UNet classification approach, the distance-map regression approach converges faster in clinically relevant parameters. It also produces morphometric parameters that agree with the manually-segmented ground-truth data, namely the average cell density difference of -41.9 cells/mm2 (95% confidence interval (CI) [-306.2, 222.5]) and the average difference of mean cell area of 14.8 um2 (95% CI [-41.9, 71.5]). These results suggest a promising alternative for CE assessment.

人类利用先验知识来描述图像，并能够使其解释适应特定的上下文信息，即使在上下文信息和图像不匹配时，也可以在发明合理的解释的范围内。在这项工作中，我们提出了通过整合上下文知识来字幕Wikipedia图像的新颖任务。具体而言，我们制作的模型共同推理了Wikipedia文章，Wikimedia图像及其相关描述以产生上下文化的标题。特别是，可以使用类似的Wikimedia图像来说明不同的文章，并且所产生的标题需要适应特定的上下文，因此使我们能够探索模型的限制以调整标题为不同的上下文信息。该领域中的一个特殊挑战性的任务是处理量不多的单词和命名实体。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一个预训练目标，掩盖了命名实体建模（MNEM），并表明与基线模型相比，此借口任务可以改善。此外，我们验证了Wikipedia中使用MNEM目标预先训练的模型可以很好地推广到新闻字幕数据集。此外，我们根据字幕任务的难度定义了两种不同的测试拆分。我们提供有关每种方式的作用和重要性的见解，并突出我们模型的局限性。接受时，代码，模型和数据拆分可公开可用。