This short paper discusses continually updated causal abstractions as a potential direction of future research. The key idea is to revise the existing level of causal abstraction to a different level of detail that is both consistent with the history of observed data and more effective in solving a given task.

决策树集合中汇总分类估计的一种常见方法是使用投票或平均每个类别的概率。后者考虑了不确定性估计值的可靠性（可以说，“不确定性的不确定性”）。更普遍的是，如何最好地结合来自多个来源的概率估计值，这是未知的。在本文中，我们研究了许多替代预测方法。我们的方法受到概率，信念功能和可靠分类的理论的启发，以及我们称证据积累的原则。我们对各种数据集的实验是基于随机决策树，该决策树保证了要组合的预测中的高度多样性。出乎意料的是，我们发现将平均值超过概率实际上很难击败。但是，证据积累在除小叶子以外的所有叶子上都表现出更好的结果。

线性程序（LPS）一直是机器学习的基础之一，并在学习系统的可区分优化器中获得了最新进步。尽管有用于高维LP的求解器，但理解高维解决方案带来了正交和未解决的问题。我们介绍了一种方法，我们考虑了LPS的神经编码，这些神经编码证明了为神经学习系统设计的可解释人工智能（XAI）的归因方法的应用。我们提出的几个编码功能都考虑到了方面，例如决策空间的可行性，附加到每个输入的成本或与特殊点的距离。我们研究了几种XAI方法对所述神经LP编码的数学后果。我们从经验上表明，归因方法的显着性和石灰揭示了无法区分的结果，直到扰动水平，一方面，我们提出了定向性的属性，这是显着性和石灰之间的主要判别标准，另一方面是基于扰动的特征置换方法。 。定向性指示归因方法是否给出了该功能增加的特征归因。我们进一步注意到集成梯度的经典计算机视觉设置之外的基线选择问题。

Machine learning models are typically evaluated by computing similarity with reference annotations and trained by maximizing similarity with such. Especially in the bio-medical domain, annotations are subjective and suffer from low inter- and intra-rater reliability. Since annotations only reflect the annotation entity's interpretation of the real world, this can lead to sub-optimal predictions even though the model achieves high similarity scores. Here, the theoretical concept of Peak Ground Truth (PGT) is introduced. PGT marks the point beyond which an increase in similarity with the reference annotation stops translating to better Real World Model Performance (RWMP). Additionally, a quantitative technique to approximate PGT by computing inter- and intra-rater reliability is proposed. Finally, three categories of PGT-aware strategies to evaluate and improve model performance are reviewed.

Mixtures of von Mises-Fisher distributions can be used to cluster data on the unit hypersphere. This is particularly adapted for high-dimensional directional data such as texts. We propose in this article to estimate a von Mises mixture using a l 1 penalized likelihood. This leads to sparse prototypes that improve clustering interpretability. We introduce an expectation-maximisation (EM) algorithm for this estimation and explore the trade-off between the sparsity term and the likelihood one with a path following algorithm. The model's behaviour is studied on simulated data and, we show the advantages of the approach on real data benchmark. We also introduce a new data set on financial reports and exhibit the benefits of our method for exploratory analysis.

Passive monitoring of acoustic or radio sources has important applications in modern convenience, public safety, and surveillance. A key task in passive monitoring is multiobject tracking (MOT). This paper presents a Bayesian method for multisensor MOT for challenging tracking problems where the object states are high-dimensional, and the measurements follow a nonlinear model. Our method is developed in the framework of factor graphs and the sum-product algorithm (SPA). The multimodal probability density functions (pdfs) provided by the SPA are effectively represented by a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). To perform the operations of the SPA in high-dimensional spaces, we make use of Particle flow (PFL). Here, particles are migrated towards regions of high likelihood based on the solution of a partial differential equation. This makes it possible to obtain good object detection and tracking performance even in challenging multisensor MOT scenarios with single sensor measurements that have a lower dimension than the object positions. We perform a numerical evaluation in a passive acoustic monitoring scenario where multiple sources are tracked in 3-D from 1-D time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) measurements provided by pairs of hydrophones. Our numerical results demonstrate favorable detection and estimation accuracy compared to state-of-the-art reference techniques.

Location-aware networks will introduce new services and applications for modern convenience, surveillance, and public safety. In this paper, we consider the problem of cooperative localization in a wireless network where the position of certain anchor nodes can be controlled. We introduce an active planning method that aims at moving the anchors such that the information gain of future measurements is maximized. In the control layer of the proposed method, control inputs are calculated by minimizing the traces of approximate inverse Bayesian Fisher information matrixes (FIMs). The estimation layer computes estimates of the agent states and provides Gaussian representations of marginal posteriors of agent positions to the control layer for approximate Bayesian FIM computations. Based on a cost function that accumulates Bayesian FIM contributions over a sliding window of discrete future timesteps, a receding horizon (RH) control is performed. Approximations that make it possible to solve the resulting tree-search problem efficiently are also discussed. A numerical case study demonstrates the intelligent behavior of a single controlled anchor in a 3-D scenario and the resulting significantly improved localization accuracy.

This paper presents an introduction to the state-of-the-art in anomaly and change-point detection. On the one hand, the main concepts needed to understand the vast scientific literature on those subjects are introduced. On the other, a selection of important surveys and books, as well as two selected active research topics in the field, are presented.

Our aim is to build autonomous agents that can solve tasks in environments like Minecraft. To do so, we used an imitation learning-based approach. We formulate our control problem as a search problem over a dataset of experts' demonstrations, where the agent copies actions from a similar demonstration trajectory of image-action pairs. We perform a proximity search over the BASALT MineRL-dataset in the latent representation of a Video PreTraining model. The agent copies the actions from the expert trajectory as long as the distance between the state representations of the agent and the selected expert trajectory from the dataset do not diverge. Then the proximity search is repeated. Our approach can effectively recover meaningful demonstration trajectories and show human-like behavior of an agent in the Minecraft environment.

Text classifiers have promising applications in high-stake tasks such as resume screening and content moderation. These classifiers must be fair and avoid discriminatory decisions by being invariant to perturbations of sensitive attributes such as gender or ethnicity. However, there is a gap between human intuition about these perturbations and the formal similarity specifications capturing them. While existing research has started to address this gap, current methods are based on hardcoded word replacements, resulting in specifications with limited expressivity or ones that fail to fully align with human intuition (e.g., in cases of asymmetric counterfactuals). This work proposes novel methods for bridging this gap by discovering expressive and intuitive individual fairness specifications. We show how to leverage unsupervised style transfer and GPT-3's zero-shot capabilities to automatically generate expressive candidate pairs of semantically similar sentences that differ along sensitive attributes. We then validate the generated pairs via an extensive crowdsourcing study, which confirms that a lot of these pairs align with human intuition about fairness in the context of toxicity classification. Finally, we show how limited amounts of human feedback can be leveraged to learn a similarity specification that can be used to train downstream fairness-aware models.