遗传算法具有独特的属性，当应用于黑匣子优化时很有用。使用选择，交叉和突变算子，可以获得候选溶液，而无需计算梯度。在这项工作中，我们研究了从遗传算法的选择机理中使用量子增强的算子获得的结果。我们的方法将选择过程描述为最小化的二元二次模型，我们使用该模型编码适合度和人群成员之间的距离，我们利用量子退火系统来为选择机制采样低能解决方案。我们在各种黑盒目标函数（包括ONEMAX函数）以及来自IOH-Profiler库中的函数进行黑盒优化的函数基准对这些量子增强算法基准针对经典算法进行基准测试。与OneMax功能上的经典相比，我们观察到平均世代相传的性能增长，以收敛到量子增强的精英选择运算符。我们还发现，具有非专业选择的量子增强选择算子在IOHProfiler库中具有适应性扰动的功能上的基准优于基准。此外，我们发现，在精英选择的情况下，量子增强的操作员在不同程度的虚拟变量和中立性方面的函数上优于经典基准。

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.

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.

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.

Unsupervised object discovery aims to localize objects in images, while removing the dependence on annotations required by most deep learning-based methods. To address this problem, we propose a fully unsupervised, bottom-up approach, for multiple objects discovery. The proposed approach is a two-stage framework. First, instances of object parts are segmented by using the intra-image similarity between self-supervised local features. The second step merges and filters the object parts to form complete object instances. The latter is performed by two CNN models that capture semantic information on objects from the entire dataset. We demonstrate that the pseudo-labels generated by our method provide a better precision-recall trade-off than existing single and multiple objects discovery methods. In particular, we provide state-of-the-art results for both unsupervised class-agnostic object detection and unsupervised image segmentation.