在人类循环机器学习应用程序的背景下，如决策支持系统，可解释性方法应在不使用户等待的情况下提供可操作的见解。在本文中，我们提出了加速的模型 - 不可知论解释（ACME），一种可解释的方法，即在全球和本地层面迅速提供特征重要性分数。可以将acme应用于每个回归或分类模型的后验。 ACME计算功能排名不仅提供了一个什么，但它还提供了一个用于评估功能值的变化如何影响模型预测的原因 - 如果分析工具。我们评估了综合性和现实世界数据集的建议方法，同时也与福芙添加剂解释（Shap）相比，我们制作了灵感的方法，目前是最先进的模型无关的解释性方法。我们在生产解释的质量方面取得了可比的结果，同时急剧减少计算时间并为全局和局部解释提供一致的可视化。为了促进该领域的研究，为重复性，我们还提供了一种存储库，其中代码用于实验。

对抗性鲁棒性是深度学习和计算机视觉研究中最具挑战性问题之一。所有最先进的技术都需要耗时的过程，该过程创建巧妙的扰动图像。由于其成本，提出了许多解决方案以避免对抗性培训。然而，所有这些尝试都证明是无效的，因为攻击者设法利用像素之间的杂散相关来触发模型隐含地学习的脆性特征。本文首先介绍了一种名为图像图提取器（IGE）的新图像滤波方案，该方案通过图形结构提取图像的基本节点及其连接。通过利用IgE表示，我们构建了一种新的防御方法，过滤为防御，不允许攻击者纠缠像素以产生恶意模式。此外，我们显示使用过滤图像的数据增强有效地提高了模型对数据损坏的鲁棒性。我们在CiFar-10，CiFar-100和Imagenet上验证了我们的技术。

Artificial neural networks can learn complex, salient data features to achieve a given task. On the opposite end of the spectrum, mathematically grounded methods such as topological data analysis allow users to design analysis pipelines fully aware of data constraints and symmetries. We introduce a class of persistence-based neural network layers. Persistence-based layers allow the users to easily inject knowledge about symmetries (equivariance) respected by the data, are equipped with learnable weights, and can be composed with state-of-the-art neural architectures.

Deep Reinforcement Learning is emerging as a promising approach for the continuous control task of robotic arm movement. However, the challenges of learning robust and versatile control capabilities are still far from being resolved for real-world applications, mainly because of two common issues of this learning paradigm: the exploration strategy and the slow learning speed, sometimes known as "the curse of dimensionality". This work aims at exploring and assessing the advantages of the application of Quantum Computing to one of the state-of-art Reinforcement Learning techniques for continuous control - namely Soft Actor-Critic. Specifically, the performance of a Variational Quantum Soft Actor-Critic on the movement of a virtual robotic arm has been investigated by means of digital simulations of quantum circuits. A quantum advantage over the classical algorithm has been found in terms of a significant decrease in the amount of required parameters for satisfactory model training, paving the way for further promising developments.

Algorithms and technologies are essential tools that pervade all aspects of our daily lives. In the last decades, health care research benefited from new computer-based recruiting methods, the use of federated architectures for data storage, the introduction of innovative analyses of datasets, and so on. Nevertheless, health care datasets can still be affected by data bias. Due to data bias, they provide a distorted view of reality, leading to wrong analysis results and, consequently, decisions. For example, in a clinical trial that studied the risk of cardiovascular diseases, predictions were wrong due to the lack of data on ethnic minorities. It is, therefore, of paramount importance for researchers to acknowledge data bias that may be present in the datasets they use, eventually adopt techniques to mitigate them and control if and how analyses results are impacted. This paper proposes a method to address bias in datasets that: (i) defines the types of data bias that may be present in the dataset, (ii) characterizes and quantifies data bias with adequate metrics, (iii) provides guidelines to identify, measure, and mitigate data bias for different data sources. The method we propose is applicable both for prospective and retrospective clinical trials. We evaluate our proposal both through theoretical considerations and through interviews with researchers in the health care environment.

Explanations are crucial parts of deep neural network (DNN) classifiers. In high stakes applications, faithful and robust explanations are important to understand and gain trust in DNN classifiers. However, recent work has shown that state-of-the-art attribution methods in text classifiers are susceptible to imperceptible adversarial perturbations that alter explanations significantly while maintaining the correct prediction outcome. If undetected, this can critically mislead the users of DNNs. Thus, it is crucial to understand the influence of such adversarial perturbations on the networks' explanations and their perceptibility. In this work, we establish a novel definition of attribution robustness (AR) in text classification, based on Lipschitz continuity. Crucially, it reflects both attribution change induced by adversarial input alterations and perceptibility of such alterations. Moreover, we introduce a wide set of text similarity measures to effectively capture locality between two text samples and imperceptibility of adversarial perturbations in text. We then propose our novel TransformerExplanationAttack (TEA), a strong adversary that provides a tight estimation for attribution robustness in text classification. TEA uses state-of-the-art language models to extract word substitutions that result in fluent, contextual adversarial samples. Finally, with experiments on several text classification architectures, we show that TEA consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art AR estimators, yielding perturbations that alter explanations to a greater extent while being more fluent and less perceptible.

The current trend of applying transfer learning from CNNs trained on large datasets can be an overkill when the target application is a custom and delimited problem with enough data to train a network from scratch. On the other hand, the training of custom and lighter CNNs requires expertise, in the from-scratch case, and or high-end resources, as in the case of hardware-aware neural architecture search (HW NAS), limiting access to the technology by non-habitual NN developers. For this reason, we present Colab NAS, an affordable HW NAS technique for producing lightweight task-specific CNNs. Its novel derivative-free search strategy, inspired by Occam's razor, allows it to obtain state-of-the-art results on the Visual Wake Word dataset in just 4.5 GPU hours using free online GPU services such as Google Colaboratory and Kaggle Kernel.

We propose a novel approach for deep learning-based Multi-View Stereo (MVS). For each pixel in the reference image, our method leverages a deep architecture to search for the corresponding point in the source image directly along the corresponding epipolar line. We denote our method DELS-MVS: Deep Epipolar Line Search Multi-View Stereo. Previous works in deep MVS select a range of interest within the depth space, discretize it, and sample the epipolar line according to the resulting depth values: this can result in an uneven scanning of the epipolar line, hence of the image space. Instead, our method works directly on the epipolar line: this guarantees an even scanning of the image space and avoids both the need to select a depth range of interest, which is often not known a priori and can vary dramatically from scene to scene, and the need for a suitable discretization of the depth space. In fact, our search is iterative, which avoids the building of a cost volume, costly both to store and to process. Finally, our method performs a robust geometry-aware fusion of the estimated depth maps, leveraging a confidence predicted alongside each depth. We test DELS-MVS on the ETH3D, Tanks and Temples and DTU benchmarks and achieve competitive results with respect to state-of-the-art approaches.

The central question in representation learning is what constitutes a good or meaningful representation. In this work we argue that if we consider data with inherent cluster structures, where clusters can be characterized through different means and covariances, those data structures should be represented in the embedding as well. While Autoencoders (AE) are widely used in practice for unsupervised representation learning, they do not fulfil the above condition on the embedding as they obtain a single representation of the data. To overcome this we propose a meta-algorithm that can be used to extend an arbitrary AE architecture to a tensorized version (TAE) that allows for learning cluster-specific embeddings while simultaneously learning the cluster assignment. For the linear setting we prove that TAE can recover the principle components of the different clusters in contrast to principle component of the entire data recovered by a standard AE. We validated this on planted models and for general, non-linear and convolutional AEs we empirically illustrate that tensorizing the AE is beneficial in clustering and de-noising tasks.

We define the bicategory of Graph Convolutional Neural Networks $\mathbf{GCNN}_n$ for an arbitrary graph with $n$ nodes. We show it can be factored through the already existing categorical constructions for deep learning called $\mathbf{Para}$ and $\mathbf{Lens}$ with the base category set to the CoKleisli category of the product comonad. We prove that there exists an injective-on-objects, faithful 2-functor $\mathbf{GCNN}_n \to \mathbf{Para}(\mathsf{CoKl}(\mathbb{R}^{n \times n} \times -))$. We show that this construction allows us to treat the adjacency matrix of a GCNN as a global parameter instead of a a local, layer-wise one. This gives us a high-level categorical characterisation of a particular kind of inductive bias GCNNs possess. Lastly, we hypothesize about possible generalisations of GCNNs to general message-passing graph neural networks, connections to equivariant learning, and the (lack of) functoriality of activation functions.