本文提供了有关在机器学习（ML）模型中实现公平性的偏置缓解方法的全面调查。我们总共收集了234个有关ML分类器偏置缓解的出版物。这些方法可以根据其干预程序（即预处理，进行内部处理，后处理）及其应用的技术来区分。我们研究了文献中如何评估现有的缓解方法。特别是，我们考虑数据集，指标和基准测试。根据收集的见解（例如，最受欢迎的公平度量是什么？用于评估偏置缓解方法的数据集？）。我们希望在开发和评估新的缓解方法时支持从业者做出明智的选择。

软件偏见是软件工程师越来越重要的操作问题。我们提出了17种代表性缓解方法的大规模，全面的经验评估，该方法通过1​​2个机器学习（ML）绩效指标，4项公平度量指标和24种类型的公平性 - 性能权衡评估，应用于8种广泛采用的公平性折衷评估基准软件决策/预测任务。与以前在此重要的操作软件特征上的工作相比，经验覆盖范围是全面的，涵盖了最多的偏见缓解方法，评估指标和公平性的绩效权衡措施。我们发现（1）偏置缓解方法大大降低了所有ML性能指标（包括先前工作中未考虑的指标）所报告的值，在很大一部分的情况下（根据不同的ML性能指标为42％〜75％） ; （2）在所有情况和指标中，偏置缓解方法仅在约50％的情况下获得公平性改善（根据用于评估偏见/公平性的指标，介于29％〜59％之间）； （3）缓解偏见的方法的表现不佳，甚至导致37％的情况下的公平性和ML性能下降； （4）缓解偏差方法的有效性取决于任务，模型，公平性和ML性能指标，并且没有证明对所有研究的情况有效的“银弹”缓解方法。在仅29％的方案中，我们发现优于其他方法的最佳缓解方法。我们已公开提供本研究中使用的脚本和数据，以便将来复制和扩展我们的工作。

茶叶菊花检测在开花阶段是选择性菊花收获机器人发展的关键部件之一。然而，在非结构化领域环境下检测开花的菊花是一种挑战，鉴于照明，闭塞和对象量表的变化。在这方面，我们提出了一种基于Yolo的茶叶菊花检测（TC-YOLO）的高度融合和轻量级的深度学习架构。首先，在骨干组件和颈部部件中，该方法使用跨级部分密度的网络（CSPDenSenet）作为主网络，并嵌入自定义特征融合模块以引导梯度流。在最终的头部部件中，该方法将递归特征金字塔（RFP）多尺度融合回流结构和腔间空间金字塔（ASPP）模块结合在一起，具有腔卷积以实现检测任务。得到的模型在300个现场图像上进行了测试，显示在NVIDIA TESLA P100 GPU环境下，如果推断速度为每个图像的47.23 FPS（416 * 416），则TC-Yolo可以实现92.49％的平均精度（AP）在我们自己的茶叶菊花。此外，该方法（13.6M）可以部署在单个移动GPU上，并且可以进一步开发为未来选择性菊花收获机器人的感知系统。

Research on automated essay scoring has become increasing important because it serves as a method for evaluating students' written-responses at scale. Scalable methods for scoring written responses are needed as students migrate to online learning environments resulting in the need to evaluate large numbers of written-response assessments. The purpose of this study is to describe and evaluate three active learning methods than can be used to minimize the number of essays that must be scored by human raters while still providing the data needed to train a modern automated essay scoring system. The three active learning methods are the uncertainty-based, the topological-based, and the hybrid method. These three methods were used to select essays included as part of the Automated Student Assessment Prize competition that were then classified using a scoring model that was training with the bidirectional encoder representations from transformer language model. All three active learning methods produced strong results, with the topological-based method producing the most efficient classification. Growth rate accuracy was also evaluated. The active learning methods produced different levels of efficiency under different sample size allocations but, overall, all three methods were highly efficient and produced classifications that were similar to one another.

This paper presents a novel framework for planning in unknown and occluded urban spaces. We specifically focus on turns and intersections where occlusions significantly impact navigability. Our approach uses an inpainting model to fill in a sparse, occluded, semantic lidar point cloud and plans dynamically feasible paths for a vehicle to traverse through the open and inpainted spaces. We demonstrate our approach using a car's lidar data with real-time occlusions, and show that by inpainting occluded areas, we can plan longer paths, with more turn options compared to without inpainting; in addition, our approach more closely follows paths derived from a planner with no occlusions (called the ground truth) compared to other state of the art approaches.

Feature acquisition algorithms address the problem of acquiring informative features while balancing the costs of acquisition to improve the learning performances of ML models. Previous approaches have focused on calculating the expected utility values of features to determine the acquisition sequences. Other approaches formulated the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and applied reinforcement learning based algorithms. In comparison to previous approaches, we focus on 1) formulating the feature acquisition problem as a MDP and applying Monte Carlo Tree Search, 2) calculating the intermediary rewards for each acquisition step based on model improvements and acquisition costs and 3) simultaneously optimizing model improvement and acquisition costs with multi-objective Monte Carlo Tree Search. With Proximal Policy Optimization and Deep Q-Network algorithms as benchmark, we show the effectiveness of our proposed approach with experimental study.

The celebrated proverb that "speech is silver, silence is golden" has a long multinational history and multiple specific meanings. In written texts punctuation can in fact be considered one of its manifestations. Indeed, the virtue of effectively speaking and writing involves - often decisively - the capacity to apply the properly placed breaks. In the present study, based on a large corpus of world-famous and representative literary texts in seven major Western languages, it is shown that the distribution of intervals between consecutive punctuation marks in almost all texts can universally be characterised by only two parameters of the discrete Weibull distribution which can be given an intuitive interpretation in terms of the so-called hazard function. The values of these two parameters tend to be language-specific, however, and even appear to navigate translations. The properties of the computed hazard functions indicate that among the studied languages, English turns out to be the least constrained by the necessity to place a consecutive punctuation mark to partition a sequence of words. This may suggest that when compared to other studied languages, English is more flexible, in the sense of allowing longer uninterrupted sequences of words. Spanish reveals similar tendency to only a bit lesser extent.

This report summarizes the 3rd International Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP 2022), held as a part of the 5th Workshop on Formal Methods for ML-Enabled Autonomous Systems (FoMLAS), which was collocated with the 34th International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV). VNN-COMP is held annually to facilitate the fair and objective comparison of state-of-the-art neural network verification tools, encourage the standardization of tool interfaces, and bring together the neural network verification community. To this end, standardized formats for networks (ONNX) and specification (VNN-LIB) were defined, tools were evaluated on equal-cost hardware (using an automatic evaluation pipeline based on AWS instances), and tool parameters were chosen by the participants before the final test sets were made public. In the 2022 iteration, 11 teams participated on a diverse set of 12 scored benchmarks. This report summarizes the rules, benchmarks, participating tools, results, and lessons learned from this iteration of this competition.

Automatic machine translation (MT) metrics are widely used to distinguish the translation qualities of machine translation systems across relatively large test sets (system-level evaluation). However, it is unclear if automatic metrics are reliable at distinguishing good translations from bad translations at the sentence level (segment-level evaluation). In this paper, we investigate how useful MT metrics are at detecting the success of a machine translation component when placed in a larger platform with a downstream task. We evaluate the segment-level performance of the most widely used MT metrics (chrF, COMET, BERTScore, etc.) on three downstream cross-lingual tasks (dialogue state tracking, question answering, and semantic parsing). For each task, we only have access to a monolingual task-specific model. We calculate the correlation between the metric's ability to predict a good/bad translation with the success/failure on the final task for the Translate-Test setup. Our experiments demonstrate that all metrics exhibit negligible correlation with the extrinsic evaluation of the downstream outcomes. We also find that the scores provided by neural metrics are not interpretable mostly because of undefined ranges. Our analysis suggests that future MT metrics be designed to produce error labels rather than scores to facilitate extrinsic evaluation.

Reliable and automated 3D plant shoot segmentation is a core prerequisite for the extraction of plant phenotypic traits at the organ level. Combining deep learning and point clouds can provide effective ways to address the challenge. However, fully supervised deep learning methods require datasets to be point-wise annotated, which is extremely expensive and time-consuming. In our work, we proposed a novel weakly supervised framework, Eff-3DPSeg, for 3D plant shoot segmentation. First, high-resolution point clouds of soybean were reconstructed using a low-cost photogrammetry system, and the Meshlab-based Plant Annotator was developed for plant point cloud annotation. Second, a weakly-supervised deep learning method was proposed for plant organ segmentation. The method contained: (1) Pretraining a self-supervised network using Viewpoint Bottleneck loss to learn meaningful intrinsic structure representation from the raw point clouds; (2) Fine-tuning the pre-trained model with about only 0.5% points being annotated to implement plant organ segmentation. After, three phenotypic traits (stem diameter, leaf width, and leaf length) were extracted. To test the generality of the proposed method, the public dataset Pheno4D was included in this study. Experimental results showed that the weakly-supervised network obtained similar segmentation performance compared with the fully-supervised setting. Our method achieved 95.1%, 96.6%, 95.8% and 92.2% in the Precision, Recall, F1-score, and mIoU for stem leaf segmentation and 53%, 62.8% and 70.3% in the AP, AP@25, and AP@50 for leaf instance segmentation. This study provides an effective way for characterizing 3D plant architecture, which will become useful for plant breeders to enhance selection processes.