根据研究人员在歧视和校准性能方面采用的标准评估实践，这项工作旨在了解阶级不平衡对胸部X射线分类器的性能的影响。首先，我们进行了一项文献研究，分析了普通科学实践并确认：（1）即使在处理高度不平衡的数据集时，社区也倾向于使用由大多数阶级主导的指标; （2）包括包括胸部X射线分类器的校准研究仍然罕见，尽管其在医疗保健的背景下的重要性。其次，我们对两个主要胸部X射线数据集进行了系统实验，探讨了不同类别比率下的几种性能指标的行为，并显示了广泛采用的指标可以隐藏少数阶级中的性能。最后，我们提出了通过两个替代度量，精密召回曲线和平衡的Brier得分，这更好地反映了系统在这种情况下的性能。我们的研究结果表明，胸部X射线分类器研究界采用的当前评估实践可能无法反映真实临床情景中计算机辅助诊断系统的性能，并建议改善这种情况的替代方案。

在现实生活中，机器学习模型经常面临培训和测试域之间存在数据分布的变化的情景。当目标是对不同于在培训中看到的分布的预测，我们会产生域泛化问题。解决此问题的方法使用来自多个源域的数据来学习模型，然后将此模型应用于未经调整的目标域。我们的假设是，当用多个域训练时，每个迷你批处理中的冲突梯度包含特定于与其他域的各个域特定的信息，包括测试域。如果保持不受影响，这种分歧可能会降低泛化性能。在这项工作中，我们在域移情中出现的突出梯度，并根据梯度手术制定新的渐变协议策略，以减轻其效果。我们在具有三个多域数据集中的图像分类任务中验证了我们的方法，显示了提高域移位情景中深入学习模型的泛化能力的拟议协议策略的价值。

Numerous works use word embedding-based metrics to quantify societal biases and stereotypes in texts. Recent studies have found that word embeddings can capture semantic similarity but may be affected by word frequency. In this work we study the effect of frequency when measuring female vs. male gender bias with word embedding-based bias quantification methods. We find that Skip-gram with negative sampling and GloVe tend to detect male bias in high frequency words, while GloVe tends to return female bias in low frequency words. We show these behaviors still exist when words are randomly shuffled. This proves that the frequency-based effect observed in unshuffled corpora stems from properties of the metric rather than from word associations. The effect is spurious and problematic since bias metrics should depend exclusively on word co-occurrences and not individual word frequencies. Finally, we compare these results with the ones obtained with an alternative metric based on Pointwise Mutual Information. We find that this metric does not show a clear dependence on frequency, even though it is slightly skewed towards male bias across all frequencies.

This report summarizes the work carried out by the authors during the Twelfth Montreal Industrial Problem Solving Workshop, held at Universit\'e de Montr\'eal in August 2022. The team tackled a problem submitted by CBC/Radio-Canada on the theme of Automatic Text Simplification (ATS).

Feature acquisition algorithms address the problem of acquiring informative features while balancing the costs of acquisition to improve the learning performances of ML models. Previous approaches have focused on calculating the expected utility values of features to determine the acquisition sequences. Other approaches formulated the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and applied reinforcement learning based algorithms. In comparison to previous approaches, we focus on 1) formulating the feature acquisition problem as a MDP and applying Monte Carlo Tree Search, 2) calculating the intermediary rewards for each acquisition step based on model improvements and acquisition costs and 3) simultaneously optimizing model improvement and acquisition costs with multi-objective Monte Carlo Tree Search. With Proximal Policy Optimization and Deep Q-Network algorithms as benchmark, we show the effectiveness of our proposed approach with experimental study.

360-degree panoramic videos have gained considerable attention in recent years due to the rapid development of head-mounted displays (HMDs) and panoramic cameras. One major problem in streaming panoramic videos is that panoramic videos are much larger in size compared to traditional ones. Moreover, the user devices are often in a wireless environment, with limited battery, computation power, and bandwidth. To reduce resource consumption, researchers have proposed ways to predict the users' viewports so that only part of the entire video needs to be transmitted from the server. However, the robustness of such prediction approaches has been overlooked in the literature: it is usually assumed that only a few models, pre-trained on past users' experiences, are applied for prediction to all users. We observe that those pre-trained models can perform poorly for some users because they might have drastically different behaviors from the majority, and the pre-trained models cannot capture the features in unseen videos. In this work, we propose a novel meta learning based viewport prediction paradigm to alleviate the worst prediction performance and ensure the robustness of viewport prediction. This paradigm uses two machine learning models, where the first model predicts the viewing direction, and the second model predicts the minimum video prefetch size that can include the actual viewport. We first train two meta models so that they are sensitive to new training data, and then quickly adapt them to users while they are watching the videos. Evaluation results reveal that the meta models can adapt quickly to each user, and can significantly increase the prediction accuracy, especially for the worst-performing predictions.

This paper presents a corpus annotated for the task of direct-speech extraction in Croatian. The paper focuses on the annotation of the quotation, co-reference resolution, and sentiment annotation in SETimes news corpus in Croatian and on the analysis of its language-specific differences compared to English. From this, a list of the phenomena that require special attention when performing these annotations is derived. The generated corpus with quotation features annotations can be used for multiple tasks in the field of Natural Language Processing.

With the ever-growing popularity of the field of NLP, the demand for datasets in low resourced-languages follows suit. Following a previously established framework, in this paper, we present the UNER dataset, a multilingual and hierarchical parallel corpus annotated for named-entities. We describe in detail the developed procedure necessary to create this type of dataset in any language available on Wikipedia with DBpedia information. The three-step procedure extracts entities from Wikipedia articles, links them to DBpedia, and maps the DBpedia sets of classes to the UNER labels. This is followed by a post-processing procedure that significantly increases the number of identified entities in the final results. The paper concludes with a statistical and qualitative analysis of the resulting dataset.

This article presents the application of the Universal Named Entity framework to generate automatically annotated corpora. By using a workflow that extracts Wikipedia data and meta-data and DBpedia information, we generated an English dataset which is described and evaluated. Furthermore, we conducted a set of experiments to improve the annotations in terms of precision, recall, and F1-measure. The final dataset is available and the established workflow can be applied to any language with existing Wikipedia and DBpedia. As part of future research, we intend to continue improving the annotation process and extend it to other languages.

As machine learning (ML) systems get adopted in more critical areas, it has become increasingly crucial to address the bias that could occur in these systems. Several fairness pre-processing algorithms are available to alleviate implicit biases during model training. These algorithms employ different concepts of fairness, often leading to conflicting strategies with consequential trade-offs between fairness and accuracy. In this work, we evaluate three popular fairness pre-processing algorithms and investigate the potential for combining all algorithms into a more robust pre-processing ensemble. We report on lessons learned that can help practitioners better select fairness algorithms for their models.