Benchmark performance of deep learning classifiers alone is not a reliable predictor for the performance of a deployed model. In particular, if the image classifier has picked up spurious features in the training data, its predictions can fail in unexpected ways. In this paper, we develop a framework that allows us to systematically identify spurious features in large datasets like ImageNet. It is based on our neural PCA components and their visualization. Previous work on spurious features of image classifiers often operates in toy settings or requires costly pixel-wise annotations. In contrast, we validate our results by checking that presence of the harmful spurious feature of a class is sufficient to trigger the prediction of that class. We introduce a novel dataset "Spurious ImageNet" and check how much existing classifiers rely on spurious features.

在值得信赖的机器学习中，这是一个重要的问题，可以识别与分配任务无关的输入的分布（OOD）输入。近年来，已经提出了许多分布式检测方法。本文的目的是识别共同的目标以及确定不同OOD检测方法的隐式评分函数。我们专注于在培训期间使用替代OOD数据的方法，以学习在测试时概括为新的未见外部分布的OOD检测分数。我们表明，内部和（不同）外部分布之间的二元歧视等同于OOD检测问题的几种不同的公式。当与标准分类器以共同的方式接受培训时，该二进制判别器达到了类似于离群暴露的OOD检测性能。此外，我们表明，异常暴露所使用的置信损失具有隐式评分函数，在训练和测试外部分配相同的情况下，以非平凡的方式与理论上最佳评分功能有所不同，这又是类似于训练基于能量的OOD检测器或添加背景类时使用的一种。在实践中，当以完全相同的方式培训时，所有这些方法的性能类似。

图像空间中的视觉反事实解释（VCE）是了解图像分类器的决策的重要工具，因为它们显示了图像的更改，分类器的决策将会改变。他们在图像空间中的产生具有挑战性，由于对抗性例子的问题，需要强大的模型。在图像空间中生成VCE的现有技术遭受背景虚假变化的影响。我们对VCE的新型扰动模型以及通过我们的新型自动 - 弗兰克 - 摩 - 摩托方案的有效优化产生了稀疏的VCE，从而导致了针对目标类别的细微变化。此外，我们表明，由于Imagenet数据集中的虚假特征，VCE可用于检测Imagenet分类器的不希望的行为。

Neural compression offers a domain-agnostic approach to creating codecs for lossy or lossless compression via deep generative models. For sequence compression, however, most deep sequence models have costs that scale with the sequence length rather than the sequence complexity. In this work, we instead treat data sequences as observations from an underlying continuous-time process and learn how to efficiently discretize while retaining information about the full sequence. As a consequence of decoupling sequential information from its temporal discretization, our approach allows for greater compression rates and smaller computational complexity. Moreover, the continuous-time approach naturally allows us to decode at different time intervals. We empirically verify our approach on multiple domains involving compression of video and motion capture sequences, showing that our approaches can automatically achieve reductions in bit rates by learning how to discretize.

This paper extends quantile factor analysis to a probabilistic variant that incorporates regularization and computationally efficient variational approximations. By means of synthetic and real data experiments it is established that the proposed estimator can achieve, in many cases, better accuracy than a recently proposed loss-based estimator. We contribute to the literature on measuring uncertainty by extracting new indexes of low, medium and high economic policy uncertainty, using the probabilistic quantile factor methodology. Medium and high indexes have clear contractionary effects, while the low index is benign for the economy, showing that not all manifestations of uncertainty are the same.

We introduce organism networks, which function like a single neural network but are composed of several neural particle networks; while each particle network fulfils the role of a single weight application within the organism network, it is also trained to self-replicate its own weights. As organism networks feature vastly more parameters than simpler architectures, we perform our initial experiments on an arithmetic task as well as on simplified MNIST-dataset classification as a collective. We observe that individual particle networks tend to specialise in either of the tasks and that the ones fully specialised in the secondary task may be dropped from the network without hindering the computational accuracy of the primary task. This leads to the discovery of a novel pruning-strategy for sparse neural networks

Overfitting is a problem in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) that causes poor generalization of models on unseen data. To remediate this problem, many new and diverse data augmentation methods (DA) have been proposed to supplement or generate more training data, and thereby increase its quality. In this work, we propose a new data augmentation algorithm: VoronoiPatches (VP). We primarily utilize non-linear recombination of information within an image, fragmenting and occluding small information patches. Unlike other DA methods, VP uses small convex polygon-shaped patches in a random layout to transport information around within an image. Sudden transitions created between patches and the original image can, optionally, be smoothed. In our experiments, VP outperformed current DA methods regarding model variance and overfitting tendencies. We demonstrate data augmentation utilizing non-linear re-combination of information within images, and non-orthogonal shapes and structures improves CNN model robustness on unseen data.

An optimal delivery of arguments is key to persuasion in any debate, both for humans and for AI systems. This requires the use of clear and fluent claims relevant to the given debate. Prior work has studied the automatic assessment of argument quality extensively. Yet, no approach actually improves the quality so far. Our work is the first step towards filling this gap. We propose the task of claim optimization: to rewrite argumentative claims to optimize their delivery. As an initial approach, we first generate a candidate set of optimized claims using a sequence-to-sequence model, such as BART, while taking into account contextual information. Our key idea is then to rerank generated candidates with respect to different quality metrics to find the best optimization. In automatic and human evaluation, we outperform different reranking baselines on an English corpus, improving 60% of all claims (worsening 16% only). Follow-up analyses reveal that, beyond copy editing, our approach often specifies claims with details, whereas it adds less evidence than humans do. Moreover, its capabilities generalize well to other domains, such as instructional texts.

We consider distributed learning in the presence of slow and unresponsive worker nodes, referred to as stragglers. In order to mitigate the effect of stragglers, gradient coding redundantly assigns partial computations to the worker such that the overall result can be recovered from only the non-straggling workers. Gradient codes are designed to tolerate a fixed number of stragglers. Since the number of stragglers in practice is random and unknown a priori, tolerating a fixed number of stragglers can yield a sub-optimal computation load and can result in higher latency. We propose a gradient coding scheme that can tolerate a flexible number of stragglers by carefully concatenating gradient codes for different straggler tolerance. By proper task scheduling and small additional signaling, our scheme adapts the computation load of the workers to the actual number of stragglers. We analyze the latency of our proposed scheme and show that it has a significantly lower latency than gradient codes.

With the rise of AI and automation, moral decisions are being put into the hands of algorithms that were formerly the preserve of humans. In autonomous driving, a variety of such decisions with ethical implications are made by algorithms for behavior and trajectory planning. Therefore, we present an ethical trajectory planning algorithm with a framework that aims at a fair distribution of risk among road users. Our implementation incorporates a combination of five essential ethical principles: minimization of the overall risk, priority for the worst-off, equal treatment of people, responsibility, and maximum acceptable risk. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first ethical algorithm for trajectory planning of autonomous vehicles in line with the 20 recommendations from the EU Commission expert group and with general applicability to various traffic situations. We showcase the ethical behavior of our algorithm in selected scenarios and provide an empirical analysis of the ethical principles in 2000 scenarios. The code used in this research is available as open-source software.