Recommender systems are ubiquitous in most of our interactions in the current digital world. Whether shopping for clothes, scrolling YouTube for exciting videos, or searching for restaurants in a new city, the recommender systems at the back-end power these services. Most large-scale recommender systems are huge models trained on extensive datasets and are black-boxes to both their developers and end-users. Prior research has shown that providing recommendations along with their reason enhances trust, scrutability, and persuasiveness of the recommender systems. Recent literature in explainability has been inundated with works proposing several algorithms to this end. Most of these works provide item-style explanations, i.e., `We recommend item A because you bought item B.' We propose a novel approach, RecXplainer, to generate more fine-grained explanations based on the user's preference over the attributes of the recommended items. We perform experiments using real-world datasets and demonstrate the efficacy of RecXplainer in capturing users' preferences and using them to explain recommendations. We also propose ten new evaluation metrics and compare RecXplainer to six baseline methods.

可解释的人工智能（XAI）方法缺乏地面真理。代替方法，方法开发人员依靠公理来确定其解释行为的理想特性。对于需要解释性的机器学习的高利益使用，因此依靠公理作为实现或使用不足是不足以实现理想的。结果，对验证XAI方法的性能进行了积极的研究。在依赖XAI的域中，对验证的需求特别放大。一项消融研究，经常用于评估其效用并在某种程度上评估其效用的程序。通过在重要性等级顺序上扰动输入变量，目标是评估模型性能的敏感性。扰动重要变量应与模型能力度量的降低相关，而不是扰动不太重要的特征。尽管意图很明确，但实际实施细节尚未针对表格数据进行严格研究。使用五个数据集，三种XAI方法，四个基线和三个扰动，我们的目的是表明1）不同的扰动和添加简单的护栏如何有助于避免可能有缺陷的结论，2）分类变量的处理是如何在两个帖子中都重要的考虑因素。 - HOC解释性和消融研究，以及3）如何识别XAI方法的有用基准，以及用于消融研究的可行扰动。

可说明的机器学习（ML）近年来由于许多部门的ML基系统的增加而增加了近年来。算法refurrses（ARS）提供“如果输入数据点为x'而不是x的形式的反馈，那么基于ML的系统的输出将是Y'而不是Y.”由于其可行的反馈，对现有的法律框架和忠诚于底层ML模型，ARS由于其可行的反馈而具有吸引力。然而，当前的AR方法是单次拍摄 - 也就是说，它们假设X可以在单个时间段内更改为X'。我们提出了一种新的基于随机控制的方法，它产生序贯ARS，即允许X随机X移动到最终状态X'的ARS。我们的方法是模型不可知论和黑匣子。此外，ARS的计算被摊销，使得一旦训练，它适用于多个DataPoints，而无需重新优化。除了这些主要特征之外，我们的方法还承认可选的Desiderata，例如遵守数据歧管，尊重因果关系和稀疏性 - 通过过去的研究确定的ARS的理想性质。我们使用三个现实世界数据集评估我们的方法，并表现出尊重其他追索者的顺序ARS的成功生成。

Mixup is a popular data augmentation technique for training deep neural networks where additional samples are generated by linearly interpolating pairs of inputs and their labels. This technique is known to improve the generalization performance in many learning paradigms and applications. In this work, we first analyze Mixup and show that it implicitly regularizes infinitely many directional derivatives of all orders. We then propose a new method to improve Mixup based on the novel insight. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct experiments across various domains such as images, tabular data, speech, and graphs. Our results show that the proposed method improves Mixup across various datasets using a variety of architectures, for instance, exhibiting an improvement over Mixup by 0.8% in ImageNet top-1 accuracy.

In multi-agent systems with large number of agents, typically the contribution of each agent to the value of other agents is minimal (e.g., aggregation systems such as Uber, Deliveroo). In this paper, we consider such multi-agent systems where each agent is self-interested and takes a sequence of decisions and represent them as a Stochastic Non-atomic Congestion Game (SNCG). We derive key properties for equilibrium solutions in SNCG model with non-atomic and also nearly non-atomic agents. With those key equilibrium properties, we provide a novel Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) mechanism that minimizes variance across values of agents in the same state. To demonstrate the utility of this new mechanism, we provide detailed results on a real-world taxi dataset and also a generic simulator for aggregation systems. We show that our approach reduces the variance in revenues earned by taxi drivers, while still providing higher joint revenues than leading approaches.

This thesis considers sequential decision problems, where the loss/reward incurred by selecting an action may not be inferred from observed feedback. A major part of this thesis focuses on the unsupervised sequential selection problem, where one can not infer the loss incurred for selecting an action from observed feedback. We also introduce a new setup named Censored Semi Bandits, where the loss incurred for selecting an action can be observed under certain conditions. Finally, we study the channel selection problem in the communication networks, where the reward for an action is only observed when no other player selects that action to play in the round. These problems find applications in many fields like healthcare, crowd-sourcing, security, adaptive resource allocation, among many others. This thesis aims to address the above-described sequential decision problems by exploiting specific structures these problems exhibit. We develop provably optimal algorithms for each of these setups with weak feedback and validate their empirical performance on different problem instances derived from synthetic and real datasets.

This thesis considers sequential decision problems, where the loss/reward incurred by selecting an action may not be inferred from observed feedback. A major part of this thesis focuses on the unsupervised sequential selection problem, where one can not infer the loss incurred for selecting an action from observed feedback. We also introduce a new setup named Censored Semi Bandits, where the loss incurred for selecting an action can be observed under certain conditions. Finally, we study the channel selection problem in the communication networks, where the reward for an action is only observed when no other player selects that action to play in the round. These problems find applications in many fields like healthcare, crowd-sourcing, security, adaptive resource allocation, among many others. This thesis aims to address the above-described sequential decision problems by exploiting specific structures these problems exhibit. We develop provably optimal algorithms for each of these setups with weak feedback and validate their empirical performance on different problem instances derived from synthetic and real datasets.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) has proven to be an essential component of Vision-Language (VL) pretraining. To implement MLM, the researcher must make two design choices: the masking strategy, which determines which tokens to mask, and the masking rate, which determines how many tokens to mask. Previous work has focused primarily on the masking strategy while setting the masking rate at a default of 15\%. In this paper, we show that increasing this masking rate improves downstream performance while simultaneously reducing performance gap among different masking strategies, rendering the uniform masking strategy competitive to other more complex ones. Surprisingly, we also discover that increasing the masking rate leads to gains in Image-Text Matching (ITM) tasks, suggesting that the role of MLM goes beyond language modeling in VL pretraining.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been increasingly used to make decision-making processes faster, more accurate, and more efficient. However, such systems are also at constant risk of being attacked. While the majority of attacks targeting AI-based applications aim to manipulate classifiers or training data and alter the output of an AI model, recently proposed Sponge Attacks against AI models aim to impede the classifier's execution by consuming substantial resources. In this work, we propose \textit{Dual Denial of Decision (DDoD) attacks against collaborative Human-AI teams}. We discuss how such attacks aim to deplete \textit{both computational and human} resources, and significantly impair decision-making capabilities. We describe DDoD on human and computational resources and present potential risk scenarios in a series of exemplary domains.