一再证明机器学习可以提供不同的结果，其中人群的亚组（例如，由年龄，性别或其他敏感属性定义）是系统地处于不利因果的。先前的文献集中在通过统计程序检测此类差异，以确定敏感属性何时提出了先验的敏感属性。但是，这限制了数据集具有高维度的现实世界设置，最重要的是，敏感属性可能未知。作为一种补救措施，我们提出了一个名为“自动差异位置”（ALD）的数据驱动框架，旨在在机器学习中找到差异。 ALD满足机器学习实践的几种要求：ALD（1）适用于任意机器学习分类器； （2）操作不同的差异定义（例如，统计奇偶校验或均衡赔率）； （3）处理分类和连续预测因子； （4）适合处理高维设置； （5）甚至确定了由于相交性而引起的差异，其中差异是由复杂和多路相互作用引起的（例如，年龄高于60岁和女性）。 ALD会产生可解释的公平报告作为输出。我们证明了基于合成和现实世界数据集的ALD的有效性。结果，ALD帮助算法公平性的从业者和研究人员检测机器学习算法的差异，因此可以减轻不同的甚至不公平的结果。此外，ALD支持从业者进行算法审核并保护个人免受歧视。

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

Network-based analyses of dynamical systems have become increasingly popular in climate science. Here we address network construction from a statistical perspective and highlight the often ignored fact that the calculated correlation values are only empirical estimates. To measure spurious behaviour as deviation from a ground truth network, we simulate time-dependent isotropic random fields on the sphere and apply common network construction techniques. We find several ways in which the uncertainty stemming from the estimation procedure has major impact on network characteristics. When the data has locally coherent correlation structure, spurious link bundle teleconnections and spurious high-degree clusters have to be expected. Anisotropic estimation variance can also induce severe biases into empirical networks. We validate our findings with ERA5 reanalysis data. Moreover we explain why commonly applied resampling procedures are inappropriate for significance evaluation and propose a statistically more meaningful ensemble construction framework. By communicating which difficulties arise in estimation from scarce data and by presenting which design decisions increase robustness, we hope to contribute to more reliable climate network construction in the future.

With the advent of Neural Style Transfer (NST), stylizing an image has become quite popular. A convenient way for extending stylization techniques to videos is by applying them on a per-frame basis. However, such per-frame application usually lacks temporal-consistency expressed by undesirable flickering artifacts. Most of the existing approaches for enforcing temporal-consistency suffers from one or more of the following drawbacks. They (1) are only suitable for a limited range of stylization techniques, (2) can only be applied in an offline fashion requiring the complete video as input, (3) cannot provide consistency for the task of stylization, or (4) do not provide interactive consistency-control. Note that existing consistent video-filtering approaches aim to completely remove flickering artifacts and thus do not respect any specific consistency-control aspect. For stylization tasks, however, consistency-control is an essential requirement where a certain amount of flickering can add to the artistic look and feel. Moreover, making this control interactive is paramount from a usability perspective. To achieve the above requirements, we propose an approach that can stylize video streams while providing interactive consistency-control. Apart from stylization, our approach also supports various other image processing filters. For achieving interactive performance, we develop a lite optical-flow network that operates at 80 Frames per second (FPS) on desktop systems with sufficient accuracy. We show that the final consistent video-output using our flow network is comparable to that being obtained using state-of-the-art optical-flow network. Further, we employ an adaptive combination of local and global consistent features and enable interactive selection between the two. By objective and subjective evaluation, we show that our method is superior to state-of-the-art approaches.

Cybercriminals are moving towards zero-day attacks affecting resource-constrained devices such as single-board computers (SBC). Assuming that perfect security is unrealistic, Moving Target Defense (MTD) is a promising approach to mitigate attacks by dynamically altering target attack surfaces. Still, selecting suitable MTD techniques for zero-day attacks is an open challenge. Reinforcement Learning (RL) could be an effective approach to optimize the MTD selection through trial and error, but the literature fails when i) evaluating the performance of RL and MTD solutions in real-world scenarios, ii) studying whether behavioral fingerprinting is suitable for representing SBC's states, and iii) calculating the consumption of resources in SBC. To improve these limitations, the work at hand proposes an online RL-based framework to learn the correct MTD mechanisms mitigating heterogeneous zero-day attacks in SBC. The framework considers behavioral fingerprinting to represent SBCs' states and RL to learn MTD techniques that mitigate each malicious state. It has been deployed on a real IoT crowdsensing scenario with a Raspberry Pi acting as a spectrum sensor. More in detail, the Raspberry Pi has been infected with different samples of command and control malware, rootkits, and ransomware to later select between four existing MTD techniques. A set of experiments demonstrated the suitability of the framework to learn proper MTD techniques mitigating all attacks (except a harmfulness rootkit) while consuming <1 MB of storage and utilizing <55% CPU and <80% RAM.

Mixtures of von Mises-Fisher distributions can be used to cluster data on the unit hypersphere. This is particularly adapted for high-dimensional directional data such as texts. We propose in this article to estimate a von Mises mixture using a l 1 penalized likelihood. This leads to sparse prototypes that improve clustering interpretability. We introduce an expectation-maximisation (EM) algorithm for this estimation and explore the trade-off between the sparsity term and the likelihood one with a path following algorithm. The model's behaviour is studied on simulated data and, we show the advantages of the approach on real data benchmark. We also introduce a new data set on financial reports and exhibit the benefits of our method for exploratory analysis.

The future of population-based breast cancer screening is likely personalized strategies based on clinically relevant risk models. Mammography-based risk models should remain robust to domain shifts caused by different populations and mammographic devices. Modern risk models do not ensure adaptation across vendor-domains and are often conflated to unintentionally rely on both precursors of cancer and systemic/global mammographic information associated with short- and long-term risk, respectively, which might limit performance. We developed a robust, cross-vendor model for long-term risk assessment. An augmentation-based domain adaption technique, based on flavorization of mammographic views, ensured generalization to an unseen vendor-domain. We trained on samples without diagnosed/potential malignant findings to learn systemic/global breast tissue features, called mammographic texture, indicative of future breast cancer. However, training so may cause erratic convergence. By excluding noise-inducing samples and designing a case-control dataset, a robust ensemble texture model was trained. This model was validated in two independent datasets. In 66,607 Danish women with flavorized Siemens views, the AUC was 0.71 and 0.65 for prediction of interval cancers within two years (ICs) and from two years after screening (LTCs), respectively. In a combination with established risk factors, the model's AUC increased to 0.68 for LTCs. In 25,706 Dutch women with Hologic-processed views, the AUCs were not different from the AUCs in Danish women with flavorized views. The results suggested that the model robustly estimated long-term risk while adapting to an unseen processed vendor-domain. The model identified 8.1% of Danish women accounting for 20.9% of ICs and 14.2% of LTCs.

This short paper discusses continually updated causal abstractions as a potential direction of future research. The key idea is to revise the existing level of causal abstraction to a different level of detail that is both consistent with the history of observed data and more effective in solving a given task.

Many researchers have voiced their support towards Pearl's counterfactual theory of causation as a stepping stone for AI/ML research's ultimate goal of intelligent systems. As in any other growing subfield, patience seems to be a virtue since significant progress on integrating notions from both fields takes time, yet, major challenges such as the lack of ground truth benchmarks or a unified perspective on classical problems such as computer vision seem to hinder the momentum of the research movement. This present work exemplifies how the Pearl Causal Hierarchy (PCH) can be understood on image data by providing insights on several intricacies but also challenges that naturally arise when applying key concepts from Pearlian causality to the study of image data.

In recent years, nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) has been extensively used for solving automotive motion control and planning tasks. In order to formulate the NMPC problem, different coordinate systems can be used with different advantages. We propose and compare formulations for the NMPC related optimization problem, involving a Cartesian and a Frenet coordinate frame (CCF/ FCF) in a single nonlinear program (NLP). We specify costs and collision avoidance constraints in the more advantageous coordinate frame, derive appropriate formulations and compare different obstacle constraints. With this approach, we exploit the simpler formulation of opponent vehicle constraints in the CCF, as well as road aligned costs and constraints related to the FCF. Comparisons to other approaches in a simulation framework highlight the advantages of the proposed approaches.