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.

医学图像分析中使用的深度学习模型很容易由于其黑盒性质而引起的可靠性问题。为了阐明这些黑盒模型，先前的作品主要集中在识别输入特征对诊断的贡献，即功能归因。在这项工作中，我们探讨了反事实解释，以确定模型依赖于诊断的模式。具体而言，我们研究了胸部X射线内变化特征对分类器输出的影响，以了解其决策机制。我们利用一种基于样式的方法（StyleEx）来通过操纵其潜在空间中的特定潜在方向来为胸部X射线射线创建反事实解释。此外，我们建议本本芬大大减少生成解释的计算时间。我们在放射科医生的帮助下临床评估反事实解释的相关性。我们的代码公开可用。

磁共振成像（MRI）是中风成像的中心方式。它被用来接受患者的治疗决定，例如选择患者进行静脉溶栓或血管内治疗。随后在住院期间使用MRI来通过可视化梗塞核心大小和位置来预测结果。此外，它可以用来表征中风病因，例如（心脏） - 栓塞和非胚胎中风之间的区分。基于计算机的自动医疗图像处理越来越多地进入临床常规。缺血性中风病变分割（ISLE）挑战的先前迭代有助于生成鉴定急性和急性缺血性中风病变分割的基准方法。在这里，我们介绍了一个专家注册的多中心MRI数据集，以分割急性到亚急性中风病变。该数据集包括400个多供应商MRI案例，中风病变大小，数量和位置的可变性很高。它分为n = 250的训练数据集和n = 150的测试数据集。所有培训数据将公开可用。测试数据集将仅用于模型验证，并且不会向公众发布。该数据集是Isles 2022挑战的基础，目的是找到算法方法，以实现缺血性中风的稳健和准确分割算法的开发和基准测试。

人类评分是分割质量的抽象表示。为了近似于稀缺专家数据的人类质量评级，我们训练替代质量估计模型。我们根据Brats注释方案评估复杂的多级分割问题，特别是神经胶质瘤分割。培训数据以15位专家神经放射科学家的质量评级为特征，范围从1到6星，用于各种计算机生成和手动3D注释。即使网络在2D图像上运行并使用稀缺的训练数据，我们也可以在与人类内部内可靠性相当的错误范围内近似分段质量。细分质量预测具有广泛的应用。虽然对分割质量的理解对于成功分割质量算法的成功临床翻译至关重要，但它可以在培训新的分割模型中发挥至关重要的作用。由于推断时间分裂，可以直接在损失函数中或在联合学习设置中作为完全自动的数据集策划机制。

事实证明，深度卷积神经网络在语义分割任务中非常有效。引入了最流行的损失功能，以提高体积分数，例如Sorensen骰子系数。根据设计，DSC可以解决类不平衡；但是，它不能识别类中的实例不平衡。结果，大型前景实例可以主导次要实例，并且仍然产生令人满意的Sorensen骰子系数。然而，错过实例将导致检测性能不佳。这代表了诸如疾病进展监测等应用中的一个关键问题。例如，必须在多发性硬化症患者的随访中定位和监视小规模病变。我们提出了一个新型的损失功能家族，绰号斑点损失，主要旨在最大化实例级检测指标，例如F1得分和灵敏度。 BLOB损失是针对语义分割问题而设计的，其中实例是类中连接的组件。我们在五个复杂的3D语义分割任务中广泛评估了基于DSC的斑点损失，这些任务具有明显的实例异质性，从纹理和形态上讲。与软骰子损失相比，我们的MS病变改善了5％，肝肿瘤改善了3％，考虑F1分数的显微镜细分任务平均提高了2％。

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.

Deep learning models are known to put the privacy of their training data at risk, which poses challenges for their safe and ethical release to the public. Differentially private stochastic gradient descent is the de facto standard for training neural networks without leaking sensitive information about the training data. However, applying it to models for graph-structured data poses a novel challenge: unlike with i.i.d. data, sensitive information about a node in a graph cannot only leak through its gradients, but also through the gradients of all nodes within a larger neighborhood. In practice, this limits privacy-preserving deep learning on graphs to very shallow graph neural networks. We propose to solve this issue by training graph neural networks on disjoint subgraphs of a given training graph. We develop three random-walk-based methods for generating such disjoint subgraphs and perform a careful analysis of the data-generating distributions to provide strong privacy guarantees. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline on three large graphs, and matches or outperforms it on four smaller ones.

Data-driven models such as neural networks are being applied more and more to safety-critical applications, such as the modeling and control of cyber-physical systems. Despite the flexibility of the approach, there are still concerns about the safety of these models in this context, as well as the need for large amounts of potentially expensive data. In particular, when long-term predictions are needed or frequent measurements are not available, the open-loop stability of the model becomes important. However, it is difficult to make such guarantees for complex black-box models such as neural networks, and prior work has shown that model stability is indeed an issue. In this work, we consider an aluminum extraction process where measurements of the internal state of the reactor are time-consuming and expensive. We model the process using neural networks and investigate the role of including skip connections in the network architecture as well as using l1 regularization to induce sparse connection weights. We demonstrate that these measures can greatly improve both the accuracy and the stability of the models for datasets of varying sizes.

Explainable AI transforms opaque decision strategies of ML models into explanations that are interpretable by the user, for example, identifying the contribution of each input feature to the prediction at hand. Such explanations, however, entangle the potentially multiple factors that enter into the overall complex decision strategy. We propose to disentangle explanations by finding relevant subspaces in activation space that can be mapped to more abstract human-understandable concepts and enable a joint attribution on concepts and input features. To automatically extract the desired representation, we propose new subspace analysis formulations that extend the principle of PCA and subspace analysis to explanations. These novel analyses, which we call principal relevant component analysis (PRCA) and disentangled relevant subspace analysis (DRSA), optimize relevance of projected activations rather than the more traditional variance or kurtosis. This enables a much stronger focus on subspaces that are truly relevant for the prediction and the explanation, in particular, ignoring activations or concepts to which the prediction model is invariant. Our approach is general enough to work alongside common attribution techniques such as Shapley Value, Integrated Gradients, or LRP. Our proposed methods show to be practically useful and compare favorably to the state of the art as demonstrated on benchmarks and three use cases.

Cybercriminals are moving towards zero-day attacks affecting resource-constrained devices such as single-board computers (SBC). Assuming that perfect security is unrealistic, Moving Target Defense (MTD) is a promising approach to mitigate attacks by dynamically altering target attack surfaces. Still, selecting suitable MTD techniques for zero-day attacks is an open challenge. Reinforcement Learning (RL) could be an effective approach to optimize the MTD selection through trial and error, but the literature fails when i) evaluating the performance of RL and MTD solutions in real-world scenarios, ii) studying whether behavioral fingerprinting is suitable for representing SBC's states, and iii) calculating the consumption of resources in SBC. To improve these limitations, the work at hand proposes an online RL-based framework to learn the correct MTD mechanisms mitigating heterogeneous zero-day attacks in SBC. The framework considers behavioral fingerprinting to represent SBCs' states and RL to learn MTD techniques that mitigate each malicious state. It has been deployed on a real IoT crowdsensing scenario with a Raspberry Pi acting as a spectrum sensor. More in detail, the Raspberry Pi has been infected with different samples of command and control malware, rootkits, and ransomware to later select between four existing MTD techniques. A set of experiments demonstrated the suitability of the framework to learn proper MTD techniques mitigating all attacks (except a harmfulness rootkit) while consuming <1 MB of storage and utilizing <55% CPU and <80% RAM.