Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation aims to build a model that can well generalise its learnt knowledge from source domains to an unseen target domain. However, current image classification models often perform poorly in the OOD setting due to statistically spurious correlations learning from model training. From causality-based perspective, we formulate the data generation process in OOD image classification using a causal graph. On this graph, we show that prediction P(Y|X) of a label Y given an image X in statistical learning is formed by both causal effect P(Y|do(X)) and spurious effects caused by confounding features (e.g., background). Since the spurious features are domain-variant, the prediction P(Y|X) becomes unstable on unseen domains. In this paper, we propose to mitigate the spurious effect of confounders using front-door adjustment. In our method, the mediator variable is hypothesized as semantic features that are essential to determine a label for an image. Inspired by capability of style transfer in image generation, we interpret the combination of the mediator variable with different generated images in the front-door formula and propose novel algorithms to estimate it. Extensive experimental results on widely used benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our method.

检测条件独立性在几个统计和机器学习任务中起着关键作用，尤其是在因果发现算法中。在这项研究中，我们介绍了LCIT（基于潜在的条件独立性检验） - 一种基于表示学习的有条件独立性测试的新型非参数方法。我们的主要贡献涉及提出一个生成框架，在该框架中测试X和Y之间的独立性，我们首先学会推断目标变量X和Y的潜在表示，该代表不包含有关条件变量Z的信息。潜在变量是然后研究了任何剩余的显着依赖性，可以使用常规的部分相关测试进行。经验评估表明，在不同的评估指标下，LCIT始终超过几个最先进的基线，并且能够很好地适应非线性和高维度的各种合成和真实数据集的集合。

数据增强是提高计算机视觉中机器学习模型的分类精度的最成功的技术之一。但是，将数据增强应用于表格数据是一个具有挑战性的问题，因为很难用标签生成合成样本。在本文中，我们提出了一种有效的分类器，该分类器采用用于表格数据的新型数据增强技术。我们称为CCRAL的方法结合了因果推理，以学习原始培训样本的反事实样本，并积极学习以基于不确定性区域选择有用的反事实样本。通过这样做，我们的方法可以最大化模型对看不见的测试数据的概括。我们通过分析验证我们的方法，并与标准基线进行比较。我们的实验结果强调，就精度和AUC而言，CCRAL的性能要比几个现实世界中的基准数据集的性能要好得多。数据和源代码可在以下网址获得：https：//github.com/nphdang/ccral。

量子神经网络在嘈杂的中间量子时代的广泛应用方面有希望。因此，对自动量子神经架构搜索的需求不断增长。我们通过设计高斯工艺的贝叶斯优化的量子电路指标来应对这一挑战。为了实现这一目标，我们提出了一个新的量子门距离，该距离距离，以每个量子状态的行动为特征，并就其几何特性提供理论观点。我们的方法极大地超过了三个经验量子机学习问题的基准，包括培训量子生成的对抗网络，在MaxCut问题中求解组合优化以及模拟量子傅立叶变换。我们的方法可以扩展以表征各种量子机学习模型的行为。

RTE is a significant problem and is a reasonably active research community. The proposed research works on the approach to this problem are pretty diverse with many different directions. For Vietnamese, the RTE problem is moderately new, but this problem plays a vital role in natural language understanding systems. Currently, methods to solve this problem based on contextual word representation learning models have given outstanding results. However, Vietnamese is a semantically rich language. Therefore, in this paper, we want to present an experiment combining semantic word representation through the SRL task with context representation of BERT relative models for the RTE problem. The experimental results give conclusions about the influence and role of semantic representation on Vietnamese in understanding natural language. The experimental results show that the semantic-aware contextual representation model has about 1% higher performance than the model that does not incorporate semantic representation. In addition, the effects on the data domain in Vietnamese are also higher than those in English. This result also shows the positive influence of SRL on RTE problem in Vietnamese.

Optimal transport (OT) has become a widely used tool in the machine learning field to measure the discrepancy between probability distributions. For instance, OT is a popular loss function that quantifies the discrepancy between an empirical distribution and a parametric model. Recently, an entropic penalty term and the celebrated Sinkhorn algorithm have been commonly used to approximate the original OT in a computationally efficient way. However, since the Sinkhorn algorithm runs a projection associated with the Kullback-Leibler divergence, it is often vulnerable to outliers. To overcome this problem, we propose regularizing OT with the \beta-potential term associated with the so-called $\beta$-divergence, which was developed in robust statistics. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the $\beta$-potential can prevent the mass from being transported to outliers. We experimentally demonstrate that the transport matrix computed with our algorithm helps estimate a probability distribution robustly even in the presence of outliers. In addition, our proposed method can successfully detect outliers from a contaminated dataset

In this work, we propose a new approach that combines data from multiple sensors for reliable obstacle avoidance. The sensors include two depth cameras and a LiDAR arranged so that they can capture the whole 3D area in front of the robot and a 2D slide around it. To fuse the data from these sensors, we first use an external camera as a reference to combine data from two depth cameras. A projection technique is then introduced to convert the 3D point cloud data of the cameras to its 2D correspondence. An obstacle avoidance algorithm is then developed based on the dynamic window approach. A number of experiments have been conducted to evaluate our proposed approach. The results show that the robot can effectively avoid static and dynamic obstacles of different shapes and sizes in different environments.

This study proposes an approach for establishing an optimal multihop ad-hoc network using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to provide emergency communication in disaster areas. The approach includes two stages, one uses particle swarm optimization (PSO) to find optimal positions to deploy UAVs, and the other uses a behavior-based controller to navigate the UAVs to their assigned positions without colliding with obstacles in an unknown environment. Several constraints related to the UAVs' sensing and communication ranges have been imposed to ensure the applicability of the proposed approach in real-world scenarios. A number of simulation experiments with data loaded from real environments have been conducted. The results show that our proposed approach is not only successful in establishing multihop ad-hoc routes but also meets the requirements for real-time deployment of UAVs.

We introduce an approach for the answer-aware question generation problem. Instead of only relying on the capability of strong pre-trained language models, we observe that the information of answers and questions can be found in some relevant sentences in the context. Based on that, we design a model which includes two modules: a selector and a generator. The selector forces the model to more focus on relevant sentences regarding an answer to provide implicit local information. The generator generates questions by implicitly combining local information from the selector and global information from the whole context encoded by the encoder. The model is trained jointly to take advantage of latent interactions between the two modules. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that our model is better than strong pre-trained models for the question generation task. The code is also available (shorturl.at/lV567).

In the era of Internet of Things (IoT), network-wide anomaly detection is a crucial part of monitoring IoT networks due to the inherent security vulnerabilities of most IoT devices. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) has been proposed to separate network traffics into two disjoint subspaces corresponding to normal and malicious behaviors for anomaly detection. However, the privacy concerns and limitations of devices' computing resources compromise the practical effectiveness of PCA. We propose a federated PCA-based Grassmannian optimization framework that coordinates IoT devices to aggregate a joint profile of normal network behaviors for anomaly detection. First, we introduce a privacy-preserving federated PCA framework to simultaneously capture the profile of various IoT devices' traffic. Then, we investigate the alternating direction method of multipliers gradient-based learning on the Grassmann manifold to guarantee fast training and the absence of detecting latency using limited computational resources. Empirical results on the NSL-KDD dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline approaches. Finally, we show that the Grassmann manifold algorithm is highly adapted for IoT anomaly detection, which permits drastically reducing the analysis time of the system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first federated PCA algorithm for anomaly detection meeting the requirements of IoT networks.