As of 2022, greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions reporting and auditing are not yet compulsory for all companies and methodologies of measurement and estimation are not unified. We propose a machine learning-based model to estimate scope 1 and scope 2 GHG emissions of companies not reporting them yet. Our model, specifically designed to be transparent and completely adapted to this use case, is able to estimate emissions for a large universe of companies. It shows good out-of-sample global performances as well as good out-of-sample granular performances when evaluating it by sectors, by countries or by revenues buckets. We also compare our results to those of other providers and find our estimates to be more accurate. Thanks to the proposed explainability tools using Shapley values, our model is fully interpretable, the user being able to understand which factors split explain the GHG emissions for each particular company.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great potential in the field of graph representation learning. Standard GNNs define a local message-passing mechanism which propagates information over the whole graph domain by stacking multiple layers. This paradigm suffers from two major limitations, over-squashing and poor long-range dependencies, that can be solved using global attention but significantly increases the computational cost to quadratic complexity. In this work, we propose an alternative approach to overcome these structural limitations by leveraging the ViT/MLP-Mixer architectures introduced in computer vision. We introduce a new class of GNNs, called Graph MLP-Mixer, that holds three key properties. First, they capture long-range dependency and mitigate the issue of over-squashing as demonstrated on the Long Range Graph Benchmark (LRGB) and the TreeNeighbourMatch datasets. Second, they offer better speed and memory efficiency with a complexity linear to the number of nodes and edges, surpassing the related Graph Transformer and expressive GNN models. Third, they show high expressivity in terms of graph isomorphism as they can distinguish at least 3-WL non-isomorphic graphs. We test our architecture on 4 simulated datasets and 7 real-world benchmarks, and show highly competitive results on all of them.

Over the past decade, neural networks have been successful at making predictions from biological sequences, especially in the context of regulatory genomics. As in other fields of deep learning, tools have been devised to extract features such as sequence motifs that can explain the predictions made by a trained network. Here we intend to go beyond explainable machine learning and introduce SEISM, a selective inference procedure to test the association between these extracted features and the predicted phenotype. In particular, we discuss how training a one-layer convolutional network is formally equivalent to selecting motifs maximizing some association score. We adapt existing sampling-based selective inference procedures by quantizing this selection over an infinite set to a large but finite grid. Finally, we show that sampling under a specific choice of parameters is sufficient to characterize the composite null hypothesis typically used for selective inference-a result that goes well beyond our particular framework. We illustrate the behavior of our method in terms of calibration, power and speed and discuss its power/speed trade-off with a simpler data-split strategy. SEISM paves the way to an easier analysis of neural networks used in regulatory genomics, and to more powerful methods for genome wide association studies (GWAS).

Information on the grass growth over a year is essential for some models simulating the use of this resource to feed animals on pasture or at barn with hay or grass silage. Unfortunately, this information is rarely available. The challenge is to reconstruct grass growth from two sources of information: usual daily climate data (rainfall, radiation, etc.) and cumulative growth over the year. We have to be able to capture the effect of seasonal climatic events which are known to distort the growth curve within the year. In this paper, we formulate this challenge as a problem of disaggregating the cumulative growth into a time series. To address this problem, our method applies time series forecasting using climate information and grass growth from previous time steps. Several alternatives of the method are proposed and compared experimentally using a database generated from a grassland process-based model. The results show that our method can accurately reconstruct the time series, independently of the use of the cumulative growth information.

Robots are traditionally bounded by a fixed embodiment during their operational lifetime, which limits their ability to adapt to their surroundings. Co-optimizing control and morphology of a robot, however, is often inefficient due to the complex interplay between the controller and morphology. In this paper, we propose a learning-based control method that can inherently take morphology into consideration such that once the control policy is trained in the simulator, it can be easily deployed to robots with different embodiments in the real world. In particular, we present the Embodiment-aware Transformer (EAT), an architecture that casts this control problem as conditional sequence modeling. EAT outputs the optimal actions by leveraging a causally masked Transformer. By conditioning an autoregressive model on the desired robot embodiment, past states, and actions, our EAT model can generate future actions that best fit the current robot embodiment. Experimental results show that EAT can outperform all other alternatives in embodiment-varying tasks, and succeed in an example of real-world evolution tasks: stepping down a stair through updating the morphology alone. We hope that EAT will inspire a new push toward real-world evolution across many domains, where algorithms like EAT can blaze a trail by bridging the field of evolutionary robotics and big data sequence modeling.

Dependency hell is a well-known pain point in the development of large software projects and machine learning (ML) code bases are not immune from it. In fact, ML applications suffer from an additional form, namely, "data source dependency hell". This term refers to the central role played by data and its unique quirks that often lead to unexpected failures of ML models which cannot be explained by code changes. In this paper, we present an automated dependency mapping framework that allows MLOps engineers to monitor the whole dependency map of their models in a fast paced engineering environment and thus mitigate ahead of time the consequences of any data source changes (e.g., re-train model, ignore data, set default data etc.). Our system is based on a unified and generic approach, employing techniques from static analysis, from which data sources can be identified reliably for any type of dependency on a wide range of source languages and artefacts. The dependency mapping framework is exposed as a REST web API where the only input is the path to the Git repository hosting the code base. Currently used by MLOps engineers at Microsoft, we expect such dependency map APIs to be adopted more widely by MLOps engineers in the future.

Recent developments of advanced driver-assistance systems necessitate an increasing number of tests to validate new technologies. These tests cannot be carried out on track in a reasonable amount of time and automotive groups rely on simulators to perform most tests. The reliability of these simulators for constantly refined tasks is becoming an issue and, to increase the number of tests, the industry is now developing surrogate models, that should mimic the behavior of the simulator while being much faster to run on specific tasks. In this paper we aim to construct a surrogate model to mimic and replace the simulator. We first test several classical methods such as random forests, ridge regression or convolutional neural networks. Then we build three hybrid models that use all these methods and combine them to obtain an efficient hybrid surrogate model.

We propose EM-PASTE: an Expectation Maximization(EM) guided Cut-Paste compositional dataset augmentation approach for weakly-supervised instance segmentation using only image-level supervision. The proposed method consists of three main components. The first component generates high-quality foreground object masks. To this end, an EM-like approach is proposed that iteratively refines an initial set of object mask proposals generated by a generic region proposal method. Next, in the second component, high-quality context-aware background images are generated using a text-to-image compositional synthesis method like DALL-E. Finally, the third component creates a large-scale pseudo-labeled instance segmentation training dataset by compositing the foreground object masks onto the original and generated background images. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art weakly-supervised instance segmentation results on both the PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO datasets by using only image-level, weak label information. In particular, it outperforms the best baseline by +7.4 and +2.8 mAP0.50 on PASCAL and COCO, respectively. Further, the method provides a new solution to the long-tail weakly-supervised instance segmentation problem (when many classes may only have few training samples), by selectively augmenting under-represented classes.

Classifying forecasting methods as being either of a "machine learning" or "statistical" nature has become commonplace in parts of the forecasting literature and community, as exemplified by the M4 competition and the conclusion drawn by the organizers. We argue that this distinction does not stem from fundamental differences in the methods assigned to either class. Instead, this distinction is probably of a tribal nature, which limits the insights into the appropriateness and effectiveness of different forecasting methods. We provide alternative characteristics of forecasting methods which, in our view, allow to draw meaningful conclusions. Further, we discuss areas of forecasting which could benefit most from cross-pollination between the ML and the statistics communities.

A tractogram is a virtual representation of the brain white matter. It is composed of millions of virtual fibers, encoded as 3D polylines, which approximate the white matter axonal pathways. To date, tractograms are the most accurate white matter representation and thus are used for tasks like presurgical planning and investigations of neuroplasticity, brain disorders, or brain networks. However, it is a well-known issue that a large portion of tractogram fibers is not anatomically plausible and can be considered artifacts of the tracking procedure. With Verifyber, we tackle the problem of filtering out such non-plausible fibers using a novel fully-supervised learning approach. Differently from other approaches based on signal reconstruction and/or brain topology regularization, we guide our method with the existing anatomical knowledge of the white matter. Using tractograms annotated according to anatomical principles, we train our model, Verifyber, to classify fibers as either anatomically plausible or non-plausible. The proposed Verifyber model is an original Geometric Deep Learning method that can deal with variable size fibers, while being invariant to fiber orientation. Our model considers each fiber as a graph of points, and by learning features of the edges between consecutive points via the proposed sequence Edge Convolution, it can capture the underlying anatomical properties. The output filtering results highly accurate and robust across an extensive set of experiments, and fast; with a 12GB GPU, filtering a tractogram of 1M fibers requires less than a minute. Verifyber implementation and trained models are available at https://github.com/FBK-NILab/verifyber.