隐私敏感数据的培训机器学习模型已成为一种流行的练习，在不断扩大的田野中推动创新。这已经向新攻击打开了门，这可能会产生严重的隐私含义。一个这样的攻击，会员推导攻击（MIA），暴露了特定数据点是否用于训练模型。一种越来越多的文献使用差异的私人（DP）训练算法作为反对这种攻击的辩护。但是，这些作品根据限制假设评估防御，即所有培训集以及非成员的所有成员都是独立的并相同分布的。这种假设没有在文献中的许多真实用例中占据。由此激励，我们评估隶属于样本之间的统计依赖性，并解释为什么DP不提供有意义的保护（在这种更常规的情况下，培训集尺寸$ N $的隐私参数$ \ epsilon $ scales）。我们使用从现实世界数据构建的培训集进行了一系列实证评估，其中包括示出样品之间的不同类型依赖性的培训集。我们的结果表明，培训集依赖关系可能会严重增加MIS的性能，因此假设数据样本在统计上独立，可以显着低估均撒的性能。

Modelling and forecasting real-life human behaviour using online social media is an active endeavour of interest in politics, government, academia, and industry. Since its creation in 2006, Twitter has been proposed as a potential laboratory that could be used to gauge and predict social behaviour. During the last decade, the user base of Twitter has been growing and becoming more representative of the general population. Here we analyse this user base in the context of the 2021 Mexican Legislative Election. To do so, we use a dataset of 15 million election-related tweets in the six months preceding election day. We explore different election models that assign political preference to either the ruling parties or the opposition. We find that models using data with geographical attributes determine the results of the election with better precision and accuracy than conventional polling methods. These results demonstrate that analysis of public online data can outperform conventional polling methods, and that political analysis and general forecasting would likely benefit from incorporating such data in the immediate future. Moreover, the same Twitter dataset with geographical attributes is positively correlated with results from official census data on population and internet usage in Mexico. These findings suggest that we have reached a period in time when online activity, appropriately curated, can provide an accurate representation of offline behaviour.

Feature selection helps reduce data acquisition costs in ML, but the standard approach is to train models with static feature subsets. Here, we consider the dynamic feature selection (DFS) problem where a model sequentially queries features based on the presently available information. DFS is often addressed with reinforcement learning (RL), but we explore a simpler approach of greedily selecting features based on their conditional mutual information. This method is theoretically appealing but requires oracle access to the data distribution, so we develop a learning approach based on amortized optimization. The proposed method is shown to recover the greedy policy when trained to optimality and outperforms numerous existing feature selection methods in our experiments, thus validating it as a simple but powerful approach for this problem.

Remote sensing of the Earth's surface water is critical in a wide range of environmental studies, from evaluating the societal impacts of seasonal droughts and floods to the large-scale implications of climate change. Consequently, a large literature exists on the classification of water from satellite imagery. Yet, previous methods have been limited by 1) the spatial resolution of public satellite imagery, 2) classification schemes that operate at the pixel level, and 3) the need for multiple spectral bands. We advance the state-of-the-art by 1) using commercial imagery with panchromatic and multispectral resolutions of 30 cm and 1.2 m, respectively, 2) developing multiple fully convolutional neural networks (FCN) that can learn the morphological features of water bodies in addition to their spectral properties, and 3) FCN that can classify water even from panchromatic imagery. This study focuses on rivers in the Arctic, using images from the Quickbird, WorldView, and GeoEye satellites. Because no training data are available at such high resolutions, we construct those manually. First, we use the RGB, and NIR bands of the 8-band multispectral sensors. Those trained models all achieve excellent precision and recall over 90% on validation data, aided by on-the-fly preprocessing of the training data specific to satellite imagery. In a novel approach, we then use results from the multispectral model to generate training data for FCN that only require panchromatic imagery, of which considerably more is available. Despite the smaller feature space, these models still achieve a precision and recall of over 85%. We provide our open-source codes and trained model parameters to the remote sensing community, which paves the way to a wide range of environmental hydrology applications at vastly superior accuracies and 2 orders of magnitude higher spatial resolution than previously possible.

Many real-world reinforcement learning tasks require control of complex dynamical systems that involve both costly data acquisition processes and large state spaces. In cases where the transition dynamics can be readily evaluated at specified states (e.g., via a simulator), agents can operate in what is often referred to as planning with a \emph{generative model}. We propose the AE-LSVI algorithm for best-policy identification, a novel variant of the kernelized least-squares value iteration (LSVI) algorithm that combines optimism with pessimism for active exploration (AE). AE-LSVI provably identifies a near-optimal policy \emph{uniformly} over an entire state space and achieves polynomial sample complexity guarantees that are independent of the number of states. When specialized to the recently introduced offline contextual Bayesian optimization setting, our algorithm achieves improved sample complexity bounds. Experimentally, we demonstrate that AE-LSVI outperforms other RL algorithms in a variety of environments when robustness to the initial state is required.

As language models (LMs) scale, they develop many novel behaviors, good and bad, exacerbating the need to evaluate how they behave. Prior work creates evaluations with crowdwork (which is time-consuming and expensive) or existing data sources (which are not always available). Here, we automatically generate evaluations with LMs. We explore approaches with varying amounts of human effort, from instructing LMs to write yes/no questions to making complex Winogender schemas with multiple stages of LM-based generation and filtering. Crowdworkers rate the examples as highly relevant and agree with 90-100% of labels, sometimes more so than corresponding human-written datasets. We generate 154 datasets and discover new cases of inverse scaling where LMs get worse with size. Larger LMs repeat back a dialog user's preferred answer ("sycophancy") and express greater desire to pursue concerning goals like resource acquisition and goal preservation. We also find some of the first examples of inverse scaling in RL from Human Feedback (RLHF), where more RLHF makes LMs worse. For example, RLHF makes LMs express stronger political views (on gun rights and immigration) and a greater desire to avoid shut down. Overall, LM-written evaluations are high-quality and let us quickly discover many novel LM behaviors.

Natural language interaction is a promising direction for democratizing 3D shape design. However, existing methods for text-driven 3D shape editing face challenges in producing decoupled, local edits to 3D shapes. We address this problem by learning disentangled latent representations that ground language in 3D geometry. To this end, we propose a complementary tool set including a novel network architecture, a disentanglement loss, and a new editing procedure. Additionally, to measure edit locality, we define a new metric that we call part-wise edit precision. We show that our method outperforms existing SOTA methods by 20% in terms of edit locality, and up to 6.6% in terms of language reference resolution accuracy. Our work suggests that by solely disentangling language representations, downstream 3D shape editing can become more local to relevant parts, even if the model was never given explicit part-based supervision.

Neural networks have revolutionized the area of artificial intelligence and introduced transformative applications to almost every scientific field and industry. However, this success comes at a great price; the energy requirements for training advanced models are unsustainable. One promising way to address this pressing issue is by developing low-energy neuromorphic hardware that directly supports the algorithm's requirements. The intrinsic non-volatility, non-linearity, and memory of spintronic devices make them appealing candidates for neuromorphic devices. Here we focus on the reservoir computing paradigm, a recurrent network with a simple training algorithm suitable for computation with spintronic devices since they can provide the properties of non-linearity and memory. We review technologies and methods for developing neuromorphic spintronic devices and conclude with critical open issues to address before such devices become widely used.

We present a method for controlling a swarm using its spectral decomposition -- that is, by describing the set of trajectories of a swarm in terms of a spatial distribution throughout the operational domain -- guaranteeing scale invariance with respect to the number of agents both for computation and for the operator tasked with controlling the swarm. We use ergodic control, decentralized across the network, for implementation. In the DARPA OFFSET program field setting, we test this interface design for the operator using the STOMP interface -- the same interface used by Raytheon BBN throughout the duration of the OFFSET program. In these tests, we demonstrate that our approach is scale-invariant -- the user specification does not depend on the number of agents; it is persistent -- the specification remains active until the user specifies a new command; and it is real-time -- the user can interact with and interrupt the swarm at any time. Moreover, we show that the spectral/ergodic specification of swarm behavior degrades gracefully as the number of agents goes down, enabling the operator to maintain the same approach as agents become disabled or are added to the network. We demonstrate the scale-invariance and dynamic response of our system in a field relevant simulator on a variety of tactical scenarios with up to 50 agents. We also demonstrate the dynamic response of our system in the field with a smaller team of agents. Lastly, we make the code for our system available.

Many scientific fields -- including biology, health, education, and the social sciences -- use machine learning (ML) to help them analyze data at an unprecedented scale. However, ML researchers who develop advanced methods rarely provide detailed tutorials showing how to apply these methods. Existing tutorials are often costly to participants, presume extensive programming knowledge, and are not tailored to specific application fields. In an attempt to democratize ML methods, we organized a year-long, free, online tutorial series targeted at teaching advanced natural language processing (NLP) methods to computational social science (CSS) scholars. Two organizers worked with fifteen subject matter experts to develop one-hour presentations with hands-on Python code for a range of ML methods and use cases, from data pre-processing to analyzing temporal variation of language change. Although live participation was more limited than expected, a comparison of pre- and post-tutorial surveys showed an increase in participants' perceived knowledge of almost one point on a 7-point Likert scale. Furthermore, participants asked thoughtful questions during tutorials and engaged readily with tutorial content afterwards, as demonstrated by 10K~total views of posted tutorial recordings. In this report, we summarize our organizational efforts and distill five principles for democratizing ML+X tutorials. We hope future organizers improve upon these principles and continue to lower barriers to developing ML skills for researchers of all fields.