可解释性已成为某些高风险领域（例如医疗保健，银行和安全性）中人工智能的重要主题。对于常用的表格数据，传统方法仅使用数值和分类数据训练了端到端的机器学习模型，并且不利用人类可理解的知识，例如数据描述。然而，从表格数据中挖掘人类水平的知识并将其用于预测仍然是一个挑战。因此，我们提出了一个基于概念和论证的模型（CAM），其中包括以下两个组成部分：一种新颖的概念挖掘方法，可从特征和基础数据的描述中获得人类可理解的概念及其关系，以及基于定量论证的方法进行知识表示和推理。因此，CAM提供了基于人类水平知识的决策，而推理过程本质上是可解释的。最后，为了可视化有目的的可解释模型，我们提供了一个对话解释，该解释包含CAM内主导的推理路径。开源基准数据集和现实词业务数据集的实验结果表明，CAM是透明且可解释的，CAM内部的知识与人类的理解是一致的； （2）与其他最先进模型相比，我们的可解释方法可以达到竞争结果。

一个自治系统由制造商构建，在患有规范和法律的社会中运营，并与最终用户进行互动。所有这些行动者都是受自治系统行为影响的利益相关者。我们解决这些利益攸关方的道德观点的挑战可以集成在自治系统的行为中。我们提出了一个道德推荐组件，我们称之为JIMINY，它使用规范系统和正式论证的技术，以达到利益攸关方之间的道德协议。 JIMINY代表了使用规范系统的每个利益相关者的道德观点，并有三种解决涉及利益攸关方意见的道德困境。首先，JIMINY认为利益相关者的论据是如何彼此相关的，这可能已经解决了困境。其次，JIMINY结合了利益攸关方的规范性系统，使利益攸关方的合并专业知识可能解决困境。第三，只有当这两种其他方法失败时，JIMINY使用上下文敏感的规则来决定哪个利益相关者优先考虑。在抽象层面，这三种方法的特点是添加参数，参数之间的攻击以及争论之间的攻击。我们展示了JIMINY不仅可以用于道德推理和协作决策，而且还用于提供关于道德行为的解释。

Interview has been regarded as one of the most crucial step for recruitment. To fully prepare for the interview with the recruiters, job seekers usually practice with mock interviews between each other. However, such a mock interview with peers is generally far away from the real interview experience: the mock interviewers are not guaranteed to be professional and are not likely to behave like a real interviewer. Due to the rapid growth of online recruitment in recent years, recruiters tend to have online interviews, which makes it possible to collect real interview data from real interviewers. In this paper, we propose a novel application named EZInterviewer, which aims to learn from the online interview data and provides mock interview services to the job seekers. The task is challenging in two ways: (1) the interview data are now available but still of low-resource; (2) to generate meaningful and relevant interview dialogs requires thorough understanding of both resumes and job descriptions. To address the low-resource challenge, EZInterviewer is trained on a very small set of interview dialogs. The key idea is to reduce the number of parameters that rely on interview dialogs by disentangling the knowledge selector and dialog generator so that most parameters can be trained with ungrounded dialogs as well as the resume data that are not low-resource. Evaluation results on a real-world job interview dialog dataset indicate that we achieve promising results to generate mock interviews. With the help of EZInterviewer, we hope to make mock interview practice become easier for job seekers.

General nonlinear sieve learnings are classes of nonlinear sieves that can approximate nonlinear functions of high dimensional variables much more flexibly than various linear sieves (or series). This paper considers general nonlinear sieve quasi-likelihood ratio (GN-QLR) based inference on expectation functionals of time series data, where the functionals of interest are based on some nonparametric function that satisfy conditional moment restrictions and are learned using multilayer neural networks. While the asymptotic normality of the estimated functionals depends on some unknown Riesz representer of the functional space, we show that the optimally weighted GN-QLR statistic is asymptotically Chi-square distributed, regardless whether the expectation functional is regular (root-$n$ estimable) or not. This holds when the data are weakly dependent beta-mixing condition. We apply our method to the off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, by formulating the Bellman equation into the conditional moment restriction framework, so that we can make inference about the state-specific value functional using the proposed GN-QLR method with time series data. In addition, estimating the averaged partial means and averaged partial derivatives of nonparametric instrumental variables and quantile IV models are also presented as leading examples. Finally, a Monte Carlo study shows the finite sample performance of the procedure

This paper presents a safety-critical locomotion control framework for quadrupedal robots. Our goal is to enable quadrupedal robots to safely navigate in cluttered environments. To tackle this, we introduce exponential Discrete Control Barrier Functions (exponential DCBFs) with duality-based obstacle avoidance constraints into a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) with Whole-Body Control (WBC) framework for quadrupedal locomotion control. This enables us to use polytopes to describe the shapes of the robot and obstacles for collision avoidance while doing locomotion control of quadrupedal robots. Compared to most prior work, especially using CBFs, that utilize spherical and conservative approximation for obstacle avoidance, this work demonstrates a quadrupedal robot autonomously and safely navigating through very tight spaces in the real world. (Our open-source code is available at github.com/HybridRobotics/quadruped_nmpc_dcbf_duality, and the video is available at youtu.be/p1gSQjwXm1Q.)

Video semantic segmentation (VSS) is beneficial for dealing with dynamic scenes due to the continuous property of the real-world environment. On the one hand, some methods alleviate the predicted inconsistent problem between continuous frames. On the other hand, other methods employ the previous frame as the prior information to assist in segmenting the current frame. Although the previous methods achieve superior performances on the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) data, they can not generalize well on other unseen domains. Thus, we explore a new task, the video generalizable semantic segmentation (VGSS) task that considers both continuous frames and domain generalization. In this paper, we propose a class-wise non-salient region generalized (CNSG) framework for the VGSS task. Concretely, we first define the class-wise non-salient feature, which describes features of the class-wise non-salient region that carry more generalizable information. Then, we propose a class-wise non-salient feature reasoning strategy to select and enhance the most generalized channels adaptively. Finally, we propose an inter-frame non-salient centroid alignment loss to alleviate the predicted inconsistent problem in the VGSS task. We also extend our video-based framework to the image-based generalizable semantic segmentation (IGSS) task. Experiments demonstrate that our CNSG framework yields significant improvement in the VGSS and IGSS tasks.

In this paper, we improve the kernel alignment regret bound for online kernel learning in the regime of the Hinge loss function. Previous algorithm achieves a regret of $O((\mathcal{A}_TT\ln{T})^{\frac{1}{4}})$ at a computational complexity (space and per-round time) of $O(\sqrt{\mathcal{A}_TT\ln{T}})$, where $\mathcal{A}_T$ is called \textit{kernel alignment}. We propose an algorithm whose regret bound and computational complexity are better than previous results. Our results depend on the decay rate of eigenvalues of the kernel matrix. If the eigenvalues of the kernel matrix decay exponentially, then our algorithm enjoys a regret of $O(\sqrt{\mathcal{A}_T})$ at a computational complexity of $O(\ln^2{T})$. Otherwise, our algorithm enjoys a regret of $O((\mathcal{A}_TT)^{\frac{1}{4}})$ at a computational complexity of $O(\sqrt{\mathcal{A}_TT})$. We extend our algorithm to batch learning and obtain a $O(\frac{1}{T}\sqrt{\mathbb{E}[\mathcal{A}_T]})$ excess risk bound which improves the previous $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ bound.

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.

Modeling noise transition matrix is a kind of promising method for learning with label noise. Based on the estimated noise transition matrix and the noisy posterior probabilities, the clean posterior probabilities, which are jointly called Label Distribution (LD) in this paper, can be calculated as the supervision. To reliably estimate the noise transition matrix, some methods assume that anchor points are available during training. Nonetheless, if anchor points are invalid, the noise transition matrix might be poorly learned, resulting in poor performance. Consequently, other methods treat reliable data points, extracted from training data, as pseudo anchor points. However, from a statistical point of view, the noise transition matrix can be inferred from data with noisy labels under the clean-label-domination assumption. Therefore, we aim to estimate the noise transition matrix without (pseudo) anchor points. There is evidence showing that samples are more likely to be mislabeled as other similar class labels, which means the mislabeling probability is highly correlated with the inter-class correlation. Inspired by this observation, we propose an instance-specific Label Distribution Regularization (LDR), in which the instance-specific LD is estimated as the supervision, to prevent DCNNs from memorizing noisy labels. Specifically, we estimate the noisy posterior under the supervision of noisy labels, and approximate the batch-level noise transition matrix by estimating the inter-class correlation matrix with neither anchor points nor pseudo anchor points. Experimental results on two synthetic noisy datasets and two real-world noisy datasets demonstrate that our LDR outperforms existing methods.

With the development of gene sequencing technology, an explosive growth of gene data has been witnessed. And the storage of gene data has become an important issue. Traditional gene data compression methods rely on general software like G-zip, which fails to utilize the interrelation of nucleotide sequence. Recently, many researchers begin to investigate deep learning based gene data compression method. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based gene compression method named GeneFormer. Specifically, we first introduce a modified transformer structure to fully explore the nucleotide sequence dependency. Then, we propose fixed-length parallel grouping to accelerate the decoding speed of our autoregressive model. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that our method saves 29.7% bit rate compared with the state-of-the-art method, and the decoding speed is significantly faster than all existing learning-based gene compression methods.