计算NASH平衡策略是多方面强化学习中的一个核心问题，在理论和实践中都受到广泛关注。但是，到目前为止，可证明的保证金仅限于完全竞争性或合作的场景，或者在大多数实际应用中实现难以满足的强大假设。在这项工作中，我们通过调查Infinite-Horizo​​n \ Emph {对抗性团队Markov Games}，这是一场自然而充分动机的游戏，其中一组相同兴奋的玩家 - 在没有任何明确的情况下，这是一个自然而有动机的游戏，这是一场自然而有动机的游戏，而偏离了先前的结果。协调或交流 - 正在与对抗者竞争。这种设置允许对零和马尔可夫潜在游戏进行统一处理，并作为模拟更现实的战略互动的一步，这些互动具有竞争性和合作利益。我们的主要贡献是第一种计算固定$ \ epsilon $ - Approximate Nash Equilibria在对抗性团队马尔可夫游戏中具有计算复杂性的算法，在游戏的所有自然参数中都是多项式的，以及$ 1/\ epsilon $。拟议的算法特别自然和实用，它基于为团队中的每个球员执行独立的政策梯度步骤，并与对手侧面的最佳反应同时；反过来，通过解决精心构造的线性程序来获得对手的政策。我们的分析利用非标准技术来建立具有非convex约束的非线性程序的KKT最佳条件，从而导致对诱导的Lagrange乘数的自然解释。在此过程中，我们大大扩展了冯·斯坦格尔（Von Stengel）和科勒（GEB`97）引起的对抗（正常形式）团队游戏中最佳政策的重要特征。

最近的多人游戏的理论和应用方面的最新进步，从电子运动到多种子体生成的对抗网络，我们专注于团队零和游戏中的最大优化。在这类游戏中，玩家分为两支队伍，在同一支队内等等，对手团队的相反标志。与TextBook二手零和游戏不同，在我们的类中找到纳什均衡可以被证明是CLS-Hard，即，它不太可能具有用于计算NASH均衡的多项式时间算法。此外，在该广义框架中，使用梯度下降上升（GDA），其乐观变体和额外梯度，我们建立了即使是渐近的最后一次迭代或时间平均收敛到纳什均衡。具体来说，我们展示了一个诱导效用是\ emph {non}的团队游戏系列\ \ emph {non}有吸引力的\ {per-se}混合的纳什均衡，作为底层优化景观的严格鞍点。利用控制理论的技术，我们通过设计局部收敛的修改GDA来补充这些负面结果，以纳入均衡。最后，我们讨论了我们的框架与AI架构的联系，其中与多助理生成对冲网络这样的团队竞争结构。

In recent years distributional reinforcement learning has produced many state of the art results. Increasingly sample efficient Distributional algorithms for the discrete action domain have been developed over time that vary primarily in the way they parameterize their approximations of value distributions, and how they quantify the differences between those distributions. In this work we transfer three of the most well-known and successful of those algorithms (QR-DQN, IQN and FQF) to the continuous action domain by extending two powerful actor-critic algorithms (TD3 and SAC) with distributional critics. We investigate whether the relative performance of the methods for the discrete action space translates to the continuous case. To that end we compare them empirically on the pybullet implementations of a set of continuous control tasks. Our results indicate qualitative invariance regarding the number and placement of distributional atoms in the deterministic, continuous action setting.

Data scarcity is one of the main issues with the end-to-end approach for Speech Translation, as compared to the cascaded one. Although most data resources for Speech Translation are originally document-level, they offer a sentence-level view, which can be directly used during training. But this sentence-level view is single and static, potentially limiting the utility of the data. Our proposed data augmentation method SegAugment challenges this idea and aims to increase data availability by providing multiple alternative sentence-level views of a dataset. Our method heavily relies on an Audio Segmentation system to re-segment the speech of each document, after which we obtain the target text with alignment methods. The Audio Segmentation system can be parameterized with different length constraints, thus giving us access to multiple and diverse sentence-level views for each document. Experiments in MuST-C show consistent gains across 8 language pairs, with an average increase of 2.2 BLEU points, and up to 4.7 BLEU for lower-resource scenarios in mTEDx. Additionally, we find that SegAugment is also applicable to purely sentence-level data, as in CoVoST, and that it enables Speech Translation models to completely close the gap between the gold and automatic segmentation at inference time.

The cyber-physical convergence is opening up new business opportunities for industrial operators. The need for deep integration of the cyber and the physical worlds establishes a rich business agenda towards consolidating new system and network engineering approaches. This revolution would not be possible without the rich and heterogeneous sources of data, as well as the ability of their intelligent exploitation, mainly due to the fact that data will serve as a fundamental resource to promote Industry 4.0. One of the most fruitful research and practice areas emerging from this data-rich, cyber-physical, smart factory environment is the data-driven process monitoring field, which applies machine learning methodologies to enable predictive maintenance applications. In this paper, we examine popular time series forecasting techniques as well as supervised machine learning algorithms in the applied context of Industry 4.0, by transforming and preprocessing the historical industrial dataset of a packing machine's operational state recordings (real data coming from the production line of a manufacturing plant from the food and beverage domain). In our methodology, we use only a single signal concerning the machine's operational status to make our predictions, without considering other operational variables or fault and warning signals, hence its characterization as ``agnostic''. In this respect, the results demonstrate that the adopted methods achieve a quite promising performance on three targeted use cases.

Automated Machine Learning-based systems' integration into a wide range of tasks has expanded as a result of their performance and speed. Although there are numerous advantages to employing ML-based systems, if they are not interpretable, they should not be used in critical, high-risk applications where human lives are at risk. To address this issue, researchers and businesses have been focusing on finding ways to improve the interpretability of complex ML systems, and several such methods have been developed. Indeed, there are so many developed techniques that it is difficult for practitioners to choose the best among them for their applications, even when using evaluation metrics. As a result, the demand for a selection tool, a meta-explanation technique based on a high-quality evaluation metric, is apparent. In this paper, we present a local meta-explanation technique which builds on top of the truthfulness metric, which is a faithfulness-based metric. We demonstrate the effectiveness of both the technique and the metric by concretely defining all the concepts and through experimentation.

In this paper, we address the problem of image splicing localization with a multi-stream network architecture that processes the raw RGB image in parallel with other handcrafted forensic signals. Unlike previous methods that either use only the RGB images or stack several signals in a channel-wise manner, we propose an encoder-decoder architecture that consists of multiple encoder streams. Each stream is fed with either the tampered image or handcrafted signals and processes them separately to capture relevant information from each one independently. Finally, the extracted features from the multiple streams are fused in the bottleneck of the architecture and propagated to the decoder network that generates the output localization map. We experiment with two handcrafted algorithms, i.e., DCT and Splicebuster. Our proposed approach is benchmarked on three public forensics datasets, demonstrating competitive performance against several competing methods and achieving state-of-the-art results, e.g., 0.898 AUC on CASIA.

The sheer volume of online user-generated content has rendered content moderation technologies essential in order to protect digital platform audiences from content that may cause anxiety, worry, or concern. Despite the efforts towards developing automated solutions to tackle this problem, creating accurate models remains challenging due to the lack of adequate task-specific training data. The fact that manually annotating such data is a highly demanding procedure that could severely affect the annotators' emotional well-being is directly related to the latter limitation. In this paper, we propose the CM-Refinery framework that leverages large-scale multimedia datasets to automatically extend initial training datasets with hard examples that can refine content moderation models, while significantly reducing the involvement of human annotators. We apply our method on two model adaptation strategies designed with respect to the different challenges observed while collecting data, i.e. lack of (i) task-specific negative data or (ii) both positive and negative data. Additionally, we introduce a diversity criterion applied to the data collection process that further enhances the generalization performance of the refined models. The proposed method is evaluated on the Not Safe for Work (NSFW) and disturbing content detection tasks on benchmark datasets achieving 1.32% and 1.94% accuracy improvements compared to the state of the art, respectively. Finally, it significantly reduces human involvement, as 92.54% of data are automatically annotated in case of disturbing content while no human intervention is required for the NSFW task.

In contrast to the rapid digitalization of several industries, agriculture suffers from low adoption of smart farming tools. While AI-driven digital agriculture tools can offer high-performing predictive functionalities, they lack tangible quantitative evidence on their benefits to the farmers. Field experiments can derive such evidence, but are often costly, time consuming and hence limited in scope and scale of application. To this end, we propose an observational causal inference framework for the empirical evaluation of the impact of digital tools on target farm performance indicators (e.g., yield in this case). This way, we can increase farmers' trust via enhancing the transparency of the digital agriculture market and accelerate the adoption of technologies that aim to secure farmer income resilience and global agricultural sustainability. As a case study, we designed and implemented a recommendation system for the optimal sowing time of cotton based on numerical weather predictions, which was used by a farmers' cooperative during the growing season of 2021. We then leverage agricultural knowledge, collected yield data, and environmental information to develop a causal graph of the farm system. Using the back-door criterion, we identify the impact of sowing recommendations on the yield and subsequently estimate it using linear regression, matching, inverse propensity score weighting and meta-learners. The results reveal that a field sown according to our recommendations exhibited a statistically significant yield increase that ranged from 12% to 17%, depending on the method. The effect estimates were robust, as indicated by the agreement among the estimation methods and four successful refutation tests. We argue that this approach can be implemented for decision support systems of other fields, extending their evaluation beyond a performance assessment of internal functionalities.

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a simple algorithm for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. The performance of TD learning is affected by high variance and it can be naturally enhanced with variance reduction techniques, such as the Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient (SVRG) method. Recently, multiple works have sought to fuse TD learning with SVRG to obtain a policy evaluation method with a geometric rate of convergence. However, the resulting convergence rate is significantly weaker than what is achieved by SVRG in the setting of convex optimization. In this work we utilize a recent interpretation of TD-learning as the splitting of the gradient of an appropriately chosen function, thus simplifying the algorithm and fusing TD with SVRG. We prove a geometric convergence bound with predetermined learning rate of 1/8, that is identical to the convergence bound available for SVRG in the convex setting.