在处理自动化数据驱动的决策中的敏感数据时，一个重要的问题是学习具有高性能的预测因素对类标签进行高性能，同时最小化对从偏置数据引起的性别或种族的任何敏感属性的歧视。存在一些混合树优化标准，即结合分类性能和公平性。虽然无阈值ROC-AUC是测量传统分类模型性能的标准，但目前的公平树分类方法主要针对分类任务以及公平度量的固定阈值优化。在本文中，我们提出了一种复合分裂标准，其将无阈值（即，强）人口统计平价与Roc-Auc称为公允剧的Scaff - 分裂标准AUC - 并且容易延伸到袋装和提升的树框架。我们的方法同时利用多个敏感属性，其中值可以是多语言的或交叉的，并且可以针对不可避免的性能公平折衷来调谐。在我们的实验中，我们展示了Scaff如何在二进制，多语言和多敏感属性方面产生具有性能和公平的模型。

In this paper the implementation of piezoelectrics to a state-of-the-art wafer gripper is investigated. The objective is to propose and validate a solution method, which includes a mechanical design and control system, to achieve at least 5% damping for two eigenmodes of a wafer gripper. This objective serves as a 'proof of concept' to show the possibilities of implementing a state-of-the-art damping method to an industrial application, which in turn can be used to dampen different thin structures. The coupling relation between the piezoelectrics and their host structure were used to design the placement of the piezoelectric patches, together with modal analysis data of the a state-of-the-art wafer gripper. This data had been measured through an experimental setup. Active damping has been succesfully implemented onto the wafer gripper where positive position feedback (PPF) is used as a control algorithm to dampen two eigenmodes.

尽管近期因因果推断领域的进展，迄今为止没有关于从观察数据的收集治疗效应估算的方法。对临床实践的结果是，当缺乏随机试验的结果时，没有指导在真实情景中似乎有效的指导。本文提出了一种务实的方法，以获得从观察性研究的治疗效果的初步但稳健地估算，为前线临床医生提供对其治疗策略的信心程度。我们的研究设计适用于一个公开问题，估算Covid-19密集护理患者的拳击机动的治疗效果。

放射线学使用定量医学成像特征来预测临床结果。目前，在新的临床应用中，必须通过启发式试验和纠正过程手动完成各种可用选项的最佳放射组方法。在这项研究中，我们提出了一个框架，以自动优化每个应用程序的放射线工作流程的构建。为此，我们将放射线学作为模块化工作流程，并为每个组件包含大量的常见算法。为了优化每个应用程序的工作流程，我们使用随机搜索和结合使用自动化机器学习。我们在十二个不同的临床应用中评估我们的方法，从而在曲线下导致以下区域：1）脂肪肉瘤（0.83）； 2）脱粘型纤维瘤病（0.82）; 3）原发性肝肿瘤（0.80）; 4）胃肠道肿瘤（0.77）； 5）结直肠肝转移（0.61）; 6）黑色素瘤转移（0.45）; 7）肝细胞癌（0.75）; 8）肠系膜纤维化（0.80）; 9）前列腺癌（0.72）； 10）神经胶质瘤（0.71）; 11）阿尔茨海默氏病（0.87）;和12）头颈癌（0.84）。我们表明，我们的框架具有比较人类专家的竞争性能，优于放射线基线，并且表现相似或优于贝叶斯优化和更高级的合奏方法。最后，我们的方法完全自动优化了放射线工作流的构建，从而简化了在新应用程序中对放射线生物标志物的搜索。为了促进可重复性和未来的研究，我们公开发布了六个数据集，框架的软件实施以及重现这项研究的代码。

由于自动化车辆的复杂运营领域，开发用于自动化车辆性能的新评估方法对于能够部署自动化驾驶技术至关重要。一种贡献方法是基于场景的评估，其中测试用例来自从驾驶数据获得的实际道路交通场景。鉴于在这些场景中建模的现实的复杂性，定义用于捕获这些方案的结构是一项挑战。一种强化定义，提供了一组特征，被认为是必要的，并且足以有资格认证所构建的方案既完整且相互可分关。在本文中，我们在考虑文献中的现有定义时，我们对情景概念进行了全面而可操作的定义。这是通过提出面向对象的框架来实现的，其中场景和构建块被定义为具有与其他对象的属性，方法和关系的对象的类。面向对象的方法促进了对象的清晰度，模块化，可重用性和封装。我们提供每个条款的定义和理由。此外，该框架用于将术语以公开可用的语言翻译。

Modeling lies at the core of both the financial and the insurance industry for a wide variety of tasks. The rise and development of machine learning and deep learning models have created many opportunities to improve our modeling toolbox. Breakthroughs in these fields often come with the requirement of large amounts of data. Such large datasets are often not publicly available in finance and insurance, mainly due to privacy and ethics concerns. This lack of data is currently one of the main hurdles in developing better models. One possible option to alleviating this issue is generative modeling. Generative models are capable of simulating fake but realistic-looking data, also referred to as synthetic data, that can be shared more freely. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is such a model that increases our capacity to fit very high-dimensional distributions of data. While research on GANs is an active topic in fields like computer vision, they have found limited adoption within the human sciences, like economics and insurance. Reason for this is that in these fields, most questions are inherently about identification of causal effects, while to this day neural networks, which are at the center of the GAN framework, focus mostly on high-dimensional correlations. In this paper we study the causal preservation capabilities of GANs and whether the produced synthetic data can reliably be used to answer causal questions. This is done by performing causal analyses on the synthetic data, produced by a GAN, with increasingly more lenient assumptions. We consider the cross-sectional case, the time series case and the case with a complete structural model. It is shown that in the simple cross-sectional scenario where correlation equals causation the GAN preserves causality, but that challenges arise for more advanced analyses.

The ability to convert reciprocating, i.e., alternating, actuation into rotary motion using linkages is hindered fundamentally by their poor torque transmission capability around kinematic singularity configurations. Here, we harness the elastic potential energy of a linear spring attached to the coupler link of four-bar mechanisms to manipulate force transmission around the kinematic singularities. We developed a theoretical model to explore the parameter space for proper force transmission in slider-crank and rocker-crank four-bar kinematics. Finally, we verified the proposed model and methodology by building and testing a macro-scale prototype of a slider-crank mechanism. We expect this approach to enable the development of small-scale rotary engines and robotic devices with closed kinematic chains dealing with serial kinematic singularities, such as linkages and parallel manipulators.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) aims to produce useful feature representations without access to any human-labeled data annotations. Due to the success of recent SSL methods based on contrastive learning, such as SimCLR, this problem has gained popularity. Most current contrastive learning approaches append a parametrized projection head to the end of some backbone network to optimize the InfoNCE objective and then discard the learned projection head after training. This raises a fundamental question: Why is a learnable projection head required if we are to discard it after training? In this work, we first perform a systematic study on the behavior of SSL training focusing on the role of the projection head layers. By formulating the projection head as a parametric component for the InfoNCE objective rather than a part of the network, we present an alternative optimization scheme for training contrastive learning based SSL frameworks. Our experimental study on multiple image classification datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach over alternatives in the SSL literature.

With the increased use of machine learning systems for decision making, questions about the fairness properties of such systems start to take center stage. Most existing work on algorithmic fairness assume complete observation of features at prediction time, as is the case for popular notions like statistical parity and equal opportunity. However, this is not sufficient for models that can make predictions with partial observation as we could miss patterns of bias and incorrectly certify a model to be fair. To address this, a recently introduced notion of fairness asks whether the model exhibits any discrimination pattern, in which an individual characterized by (partial) feature observations, receives vastly different decisions merely by disclosing one or more sensitive attributes such as gender and race. By explicitly accounting for partial observations, this provides a much more fine-grained notion of fairness. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to search for discrimination patterns in a general class of probabilistic models, namely probabilistic circuits. Previously, such algorithms were limited to naive Bayes classifiers which make strong independence assumptions; by contrast, probabilistic circuits provide a unifying framework for a wide range of tractable probabilistic models and can even be compiled from certain classes of Bayesian networks and probabilistic programs, making our method much more broadly applicable. Furthermore, for an unfair model, it may be useful to quickly find discrimination patterns and distill them for better interpretability. As such, we also propose a sampling-based approach to more efficiently mine discrimination patterns, and introduce new classes of patterns such as minimal, maximal, and Pareto optimal patterns that can effectively summarize exponentially many discrimination patterns

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.