将来，强大的AI系统可能会在高风险的设置中部署，在这种情况下，单个故障可能是灾难性的。在高风险设置中改善AI安全性的一种技术是对手训练，该培训使用对手来生成示例进行训练，以实现更好的最差表现。在这项工作中，我们将语言生成任务用作测试台，以通过对抗性培训来实现高可靠性。我们创建了一系列的对抗训练技术 - 包括一种有助于人类对手的工具 - 以在分类器中找到和消除故障，该分类器过滤了发电机建议的文本完成。在简单的“避免受伤”任务中，我们确定我们可以设置非常保守的分类器阈值，而不会显着影响过滤后的输出的质量。使用我们选择的阈值，使用基线分类器进行过滤，将不安全完成的速度从分布数据的数据降低到约2.4％至0.003％，这是我们测量能力的极限。我们发现，对抗性训练可显着提高对我们训练的对抗攻击的鲁棒性，而不会影响分布性能。我们希望在高风险的可靠性环境中看到进一步的工作，包括更强大的工具来增强人类对手，以及更好的方法来衡量高水平的可靠性，直到我们可以自信地排除强大模型的灾难性部署时间失败的可能性。

The Elo algorithm, due to its simplicity, is widely used for rating in sports competitions as well as in other applications where the rating/ranking is a useful tool for predicting future results. However, despite its widespread use, a detailed understanding of the convergence properties of the Elo algorithm is still lacking. Aiming to fill this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive (stochastic) analysis of the Elo algorithm, considering round-robin (one-on-one) competitions. Specifically, analytical expressions are derived characterizing the behavior/evolution of the skills and of important performance metrics. Then, taking into account the relationship between the behavior of the algorithm and the step-size value, which is a hyperparameter that can be controlled, some design guidelines as well as discussions about the performance of the algorithm are provided. To illustrate the applicability of the theoretical findings, experimental results are shown, corroborating the very good match between analytical predictions and those obtained from the algorithm using real-world data (from the Italian SuperLega, Volleyball League).

Algorithms that involve both forecasting and optimization are at the core of solutions to many difficult real-world problems, such as in supply chains (inventory optimization), traffic, and in the transition towards carbon-free energy generation in battery/load/production scheduling in sustainable energy systems. Typically, in these scenarios we want to solve an optimization problem that depends on unknown future values, which therefore need to be forecast. As both forecasting and optimization are difficult problems in their own right, relatively few research has been done in this area. This paper presents the findings of the ``IEEE-CIS Technical Challenge on Predict+Optimize for Renewable Energy Scheduling," held in 2021. We present a comparison and evaluation of the seven highest-ranked solutions in the competition, to provide researchers with a benchmark problem and to establish the state of the art for this benchmark, with the aim to foster and facilitate research in this area. The competition used data from the Monash Microgrid, as well as weather data and energy market data. It then focused on two main challenges: forecasting renewable energy production and demand, and obtaining an optimal schedule for the activities (lectures) and on-site batteries that lead to the lowest cost of energy. The most accurate forecasts were obtained by gradient-boosted tree and random forest models, and optimization was mostly performed using mixed integer linear and quadratic programming. The winning method predicted different scenarios and optimized over all scenarios jointly using a sample average approximation method.

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.

Topic modeling is widely used for analytically evaluating large collections of textual data. One of the most popular topic techniques is Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which is flexible and adaptive, but not optimal for e.g. short texts from various domains. We explore how the state-of-the-art BERTopic algorithm performs on short multi-domain text and find that it generalizes better than LDA in terms of topic coherence and diversity. We further analyze the performance of the HDBSCAN clustering algorithm utilized by BERTopic and find that it classifies a majority of the documents as outliers. This crucial, yet overseen problem excludes too many documents from further analysis. When we replace HDBSCAN with k-Means, we achieve similar performance, but without outliers.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

Standard imitation learning can fail when the expert demonstrators have different sensory inputs than the imitating agent. This is because partial observability gives rise to hidden confounders in the causal graph. We break down the space of confounded imitation learning problems and identify three settings with different data requirements in which the correct imitation policy can be identified. We then introduce an algorithm for deconfounded imitation learning, which trains an inference model jointly with a latent-conditional policy. At test time, the agent alternates between updating its belief over the latent and acting under the belief. We show in theory and practice that this algorithm converges to the correct interventional policy, solves the confounding issue, and can under certain assumptions achieve an asymptotically optimal imitation performance.

DeepMind的游戏理论与多代理团队研究多学科学习的几个方面，从计算近似值到游戏理论中的基本概念，再到在富裕的空间环境中模拟社会困境，并在困难的团队协调任务中培训3-D类人动物。我们小组的一个签名目的是使用DeepMind在DeepMind中提供的资源和专业知识，以深入强化学习来探索复杂环境中的多代理系统，并使用这些基准来提高我们的理解。在这里，我们总结了我们团队的最新工作，并提出了一种分类法，我们认为这重点介绍了多代理研究中许多重要的开放挑战。

在本文中，我们介绍Bayesldm，这是一个用于贝叶斯纵向数据建模的系统，该系统由高级建模语言组成，具有针对复杂的多变量时间序列数据建模的特定功能，并与编译器相结合，可以生成优化的概率程序代码，以在指定模型中执行指定的推理。 Bayesldm支持贝叶斯网络模型的建模，其特定关注动态贝叶斯网络（DBN）的高效，声明性规范。 Bayesldm编译器将模型规范与可用数据和输出代码相结合，用于执行贝叶斯推断，以同时处理丢失的数据，同时处理未知模型参数。这些功能有可能通过抽象产生计算有效的概率推断代码的过程来显着加速域中的迭代建模工作流，这些迭代建模工作流程涉及复杂纵向数据的分析。我们描述了Bayesldm系统组件，评估表示和推理优化的效率，并提供了该系统在分析异质和部分观察到的移动健康数据的应用示例。

机器人模拟一直是机器人领域研发的组成部分。模拟消除了通过启用机器人的应用测试来快速，负担得起的，而无需遭受机械或电子误差而进行机器人应用测试，从而消除了对传感器，电动机和实际机器人物理结构的可能性。通过虚拟现实（VR）模拟，通过提供更好的环境可视化提示，为与模拟机器人互动提供了更具吸引力的替代方法，从而提供了更严肃的体验。这种沉浸至关重要，尤其是在讨论社交机器人时，人类机器人相互作用（HRI）领域的子区域。在日常生活中，机器人的广泛使用取决于HRI。将来，机器人将能够与人们有效互动，以在人类文明中执行各种任务。在个人工作空间开始扩散时，为机器人开发简单且易于理解的接口至关重要。因此，在这项研究中，我们实施了一个使用现成的工具和包装的VR机器人框架，以增强社交HRI的研究和应用开发。由于整个VR接口是一个开源项目，因此可以在身临其境的环境中进行测试，而无需物理机器人。