在培训机器学习模型期间，它们可能会存储或“了解”有关培训数据的更多信息，而不是预测或分类任务所需的信息。属性推理攻击旨在从给定模型的培训数据中提取统计属性，而无需访问培训数据本身，从而利用了这一点。这些属性可能包括图片的质量，以识别相机模型，以揭示产品的目标受众的年龄分布或在计算机网络中使用恶意软件攻击的随附的主机类型。当攻击者可以访问所有模型参数时，即在白色盒子方案中，此攻击尤其准确。通过捍卫此类攻击，模型所有者可以确保其培训数据，相关的属性以及其知识产权保持私密，即使他们故意共享自己的模型，例如协作培训或模型泄漏。在本文中，我们介绍了属性，这是针对白盒属性推理攻击的有效防御机制，独立于培训数据类型，模型任务或属性数量。属性通过系统地更改目标模型的训练的权重和偏见来减轻属性推理攻击，从而使对手无法提取所选属性。我们在三个不同的数据集（包括表格数据和图像数据）以及两种类型的人工神经网络（包括人造神经网络）上进行了经验评估属性。我们的研究结果表明，以良好的隐私性权衡取舍，可以保护机器学习模型免受财产推理攻击的侵害，既有效又可靠。此外，我们的方法表明该机制也有效地取消了多个特性。

The application of deep learning algorithms to financial data is difficult due to heavy non-stationarities which can lead to over-fitted models that underperform under regime changes. Using the Numerai tournament data set as a motivating example, we propose a machine learning pipeline for trading market-neutral stock portfolios based on tabular data which is robust under changes in market conditions. We evaluate various machine-learning models, including Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs) and Neural Networks with and without simple feature engineering, as the building blocks for the pipeline. We find that GBDT models with dropout display high performance, robustness and generalisability with relatively low complexity and reduced computational cost. We then show that online learning techniques can be used in post-prediction processing to enhance the results. In particular, dynamic feature neutralisation, an efficient procedure that requires no retraining of models and can be applied post-prediction to any machine learning model, improves robustness by reducing drawdown in volatile market conditions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the creation of model ensembles through dynamic model selection based on recent model performance leads to improved performance over baseline by improving the Sharpe and Calmar ratios. We also evaluate the robustness of our pipeline across different data splits and random seeds with good reproducibility of results.

Understanding the relationship between structure and sentiment is essential in highlighting future operations with online social networks. More specifically, within popular conversation on Twitter. This paper provides a development on the relationship between the two variables: structure, defined as the composition of a directed network, and sentiment, a quantified value of the positive/negative connotations of a conversation. We highlight thread sentiment to be inversely proportional to the strength and connectivity of a network. The second portion of this paper highlights differences in query types, specifically how the aforementioned behavior differs within four key query types. This paper focuses on topical, event-based, geographic, and individual queries as orientations which have differing behavior. Using cross-query analysis, we see that the relationship between structure and sentiment, though still inversely proportional, differs greatly across query types. We find this relationship to be the most clear within the individual queries and the least prevalent within the event-based queries. This paper provides a sociological progression in our understanding of opinion and networks, while providing a methodological advancement for future studies on similar subjects.

We present temporally layered architecture (TLA), a biologically inspired system for temporally adaptive distributed control. TLA layers a fast and a slow controller together to achieve temporal abstraction that allows each layer to focus on a different time-scale. Our design is biologically inspired and draws on the architecture of the human brain which executes actions at different timescales depending on the environment's demands. Such distributed control design is widespread across biological systems because it increases survivability and accuracy in certain and uncertain environments. We demonstrate that TLA can provide many advantages over existing approaches, including persistent exploration, adaptive control, explainable temporal behavior, compute efficiency and distributed control. We present two different algorithms for training TLA: (a) Closed-loop control, where the fast controller is trained over a pre-trained slow controller, allowing better exploration for the fast controller and closed-loop control where the fast controller decides whether to "act-or-not" at each timestep; and (b) Partially open loop control, where the slow controller is trained over a pre-trained fast controller, allowing for open loop-control where the slow controller picks a temporally extended action or defers the next n-actions to the fast controller. We evaluated our method on a suite of continuous control tasks and demonstrate the advantages of TLA over several strong baselines.

The stock market prediction has been a traditional yet complex problem researched within diverse research areas and application domains due to its non-linear, highly volatile and complex nature. Existing surveys on stock market prediction often focus on traditional machine learning methods instead of deep learning methods. Deep learning has dominated many domains, gained much success and popularity in recent years in stock market prediction. This motivates us to provide a structured and comprehensive overview of the research on stock market prediction focusing on deep learning techniques. We present four elaborated subtasks of stock market prediction and propose a novel taxonomy to summarize the state-of-the-art models based on deep neural networks from 2011 to 2022. In addition, we also provide detailed statistics on the datasets and evaluation metrics commonly used in the stock market. Finally, we highlight some open issues and point out several future directions by sharing some new perspectives on stock market prediction.

Data deprivation, or the lack of easily available and actionable information on the well-being of individuals, is a significant challenge for the developing world and an impediment to the design and operationalization of policies intended to alleviate poverty. In this paper we explore the suitability of data derived from OpenStreetMap to proxy for the location of two crucial public services: schools and health clinics. Thanks to the efforts of thousands of digital humanitarians, online mapping repositories such as OpenStreetMap contain millions of records on buildings and other structures, delineating both their location and often their use. Unfortunately much of this data is locked in complex, unstructured text rendering it seemingly unsuitable for classifying schools or clinics. We apply a scalable, unsupervised learning method to unlabeled OpenStreetMap building data to extract the location of schools and health clinics in ten countries in Africa. We find the topic modeling approach greatly improves performance versus reliance on structured keys alone. We validate our results by comparing schools and clinics identified by our OSM method versus those identified by the WHO, and describe OSM coverage gaps more broadly.

We present a new algorithm for automatically bounding the Taylor remainder series. In the special case of a scalar function $f: \mathbb{R} \mapsto \mathbb{R}$, our algorithm takes as input a reference point $x_0$, trust region $[a, b]$, and integer $k \ge 0$, and returns an interval $I$ such that $f(x) - \sum_{i=0}^k \frac {f^{(i)}(x_0)} {i!} (x - x_0)^i \in I (x - x_0)^{k+1}$ for all $x \in [a, b]$. As in automatic differentiation, the function $f$ is provided to the algorithm in symbolic form, and must be composed of known elementary functions. At a high level, our algorithm has two steps. First, for a variety of commonly-used elementary functions (e.g., $\exp$, $\log$), we derive sharp polynomial upper and lower bounds on the Taylor remainder series. We then recursively combine the bounds for the elementary functions using an interval arithmetic variant of Taylor-mode automatic differentiation. Our algorithm can make efficient use of machine learning hardware accelerators, and we provide an open source implementation in JAX. We then turn our attention to applications. Most notably, we use our new machinery to create the first universal majorization-minimization optimization algorithms: algorithms that iteratively minimize an arbitrary loss using a majorizer that is derived automatically, rather than by hand. Applied to machine learning, this leads to architecture-specific optimizers for training deep networks that converge from any starting point, without hyperparameter tuning. Our experiments show that for some optimization problems, these hyperparameter-free optimizers outperform tuned versions of gradient descent, Adam, and AdaGrad. We also show that our automatically-derived bounds can be used for verified global optimization and numerical integration, and to prove sharper versions of Jensen's inequality.

A typical product or place often has hundreds of reviews, and summarization of these texts is an important and challenging problem. Recent progress on abstractive summarization in domains such as news has been driven by supervised systems trained on hundreds of thousands of news articles paired with human-written summaries. However for opinion texts, such large scale datasets are rarely available. Unsupervised methods, self-training, and few-shot learning approaches bridge that gap. In this work, we present a novel self-training approach, OpineSum, for abstractive opinion summarization. The summaries in this approach are built using a novel application of textual entailment and capture the consensus of opinions across the various reviews for an item. This method can be used to obtain silver-standard summaries on a large scale and train both unsupervised and few-shot abstractive summarization systems. OpineSum achieves state-of-the-art performance in both settings.

The applicability of computational models to the biological world is an active topic of debate. We argue that a useful path forward results from abandoning hard boundaries between categories and adopting an observer-dependent, pragmatic view. Such a view dissolves the contingent dichotomies driven by human cognitive biases (e.g., tendency to oversimplify) and prior technological limitations in favor of a more continuous, gradualist view necessitated by the study of evolution, developmental biology, and intelligent machines. Efforts to re-shape living systems for biomedical or bioengineering purposes require prediction and control of their function at multiple scales. This is challenging for many reasons, one of which is that living systems perform multiple functions in the same place at the same time. We refer to this as "polycomputing" - the ability of the same substrate to simultaneously compute different things. This ability is an important way in which living things are a kind of computer, but not the familiar, linear, deterministic kind; rather, living things are computers in the broad sense of computational materials as reported in the rapidly-growing physical computing literature. We argue that an observer-centered framework for the computations performed by evolved and designed systems will improve the understanding of meso-scale events, as it has already done at quantum and relativistic scales. Here, we review examples of biological and technological polycomputing, and develop the idea that overloading of different functions on the same hardware is an important design principle that helps understand and build both evolved and designed systems. Learning to hack existing polycomputing substrates, as well as evolve and design new ones, will have massive impacts on regenerative medicine, robotics, and computer engineering.

Abstractive summarization has enjoyed renewed interest in recent years, thanks to pre-trained language models and the availability of large-scale datasets. Despite promising results, current models still suffer from generating factually inconsistent summaries, reducing their utility for real-world application. Several recent efforts attempt to address this by devising models that automatically detect factual inconsistencies in machine generated summaries. However, they focus exclusively on English, a language with abundant resources. In this work, we leverage factual consistency evaluation models to improve multilingual summarization. We explore two intuitive approaches to mitigate hallucinations based on the signal provided by a multilingual NLI model, namely data filtering and controlled generation. Experimental results in the 45 languages from the XLSum dataset show gains over strong baselines in both automatic and human evaluation.