智能仪表测量值虽然对于准确的需求预测至关重要，但仍面临一些缺点，包括消费者的隐私，数据泄露问题，仅举几例。最近的文献探索了联合学习（FL）作为一种有前途的隐私机器学习替代方案，该替代方案可以协作学习模型，而无需将私人原始数据暴露于短期负载预测中。尽管有着美德，但标准FL仍然容易受到棘手的网络威胁，称为拜占庭式攻击，这是由错误和/或恶意客户进行的。因此，为了提高联邦联邦短期负载预测对拜占庭威胁的鲁棒性，我们开发了一个最先进的基于私人安全的FL框架，以确保单个智能电表的数据的隐私，同时保护FL的安全性模型和架构。我们提出的框架利用了通过符号随机梯度下降（SignsGD）算法的梯度量化的想法，在本地模型培训后，客户仅将梯度的“符号”传输到控制中心。当我们通过涉及一组拜占庭攻击模型的基准神经网络的实验突出显示时，我们提出的方法会非常有效地减轻此类威胁，从而优于常规的FED-SGD模型。

随着智能设备的扩散和通信中的旋转，配电系统逐渐从被动，手动操作和不灵活的，到大规模互连的网络物理智能电网，以解决未来的能源挑战。然而，由于部署的大规模复杂性和资源限制，若干尖端技术的集成引入了几种安全和隐私漏洞。最近的研究趋势表明，虚假数据注入（FDI）攻击正成为整个智能电网范式内最恶毒的网络威胁之一。因此，本文介绍了对积极分配系统内的直接投资袭击事件的最近进展的全面调查，并提出了分类法，以对智能电网目标进行外商直接投资威胁。相关研究与攻击方法和对电力分配网络的影响形成鲜明对比和总结。最后，我们确定了一些研究差距并推荐了一些未来的研究方向，以指导和激励前瞻性研究人员。

The ability to distinguish between different movie scenes is critical for understanding the storyline of a movie. However, accurately detecting movie scenes is often challenging as it requires the ability to reason over very long movie segments. This is in contrast to most existing video recognition models, which are typically designed for short-range video analysis. This work proposes a State-Space Transformer model that can efficiently capture dependencies in long movie videos for accurate movie scene detection. Our model, dubbed TranS4mer, is built using a novel S4A building block, which combines the strengths of structured state-space sequence (S4) and self-attention (A) layers. Given a sequence of frames divided into movie shots (uninterrupted periods where the camera position does not change), the S4A block first applies self-attention to capture short-range intra-shot dependencies. Afterward, the state-space operation in the S4A block is used to aggregate long-range inter-shot cues. The final TranS4mer model, which can be trained end-to-end, is obtained by stacking the S4A blocks one after the other multiple times. Our proposed TranS4mer outperforms all prior methods in three movie scene detection datasets, including MovieNet, BBC, and OVSD, while also being $2\times$ faster and requiring $3\times$ less GPU memory than standard Transformer models. We will release our code and models.

Learning policies from fixed offline datasets is a key challenge to scale up reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms towards practical applications. This is often because off-policy RL algorithms suffer from distributional shift, due to mismatch between dataset and the target policy, leading to high variance and over-estimation of value functions. In this work, we propose variance regularization for offline RL algorithms, using stationary distribution corrections. We show that by using Fenchel duality, we can avoid double sampling issues for computing the gradient of the variance regularizer. The proposed algorithm for offline variance regularization (OVAR) can be used to augment any existing offline policy optimization algorithms. We show that the regularizer leads to a lower bound to the offline policy optimization objective, which can help avoid over-estimation errors, and explains the benefits of our approach across a range of continuous control domains when compared to existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

Several self-supervised representation learning methods have been proposed for reinforcement learning (RL) with rich observations. For real-world applications of RL, recovering underlying latent states is crucial, particularly when sensory inputs contain irrelevant and exogenous information. In this work, we study how information bottlenecks can be used to construct latent states efficiently in the presence of task-irrelevant information. We propose architectures that utilize variational and discrete information bottlenecks, coined as RepDIB, to learn structured factorized representations. Exploiting the expressiveness bought by factorized representations, we introduce a simple, yet effective, bottleneck that can be integrated with any existing self-supervised objective for RL. We demonstrate this across several online and offline RL benchmarks, along with a real robot arm task, where we find that compressed representations with RepDIB can lead to strong performance improvements, as the learned bottlenecks help predict only the relevant state while ignoring irrelevant information.

Artificial intelligence(AI) systems based on deep neural networks (DNNs) and machine learning (ML) algorithms are increasingly used to solve critical problems in bioinformatics, biomedical informatics, and precision medicine. However, complex DNN or ML models that are unavoidably opaque and perceived as black-box methods, may not be able to explain why and how they make certain decisions. Such black-box models are difficult to comprehend not only for targeted users and decision-makers but also for AI developers. Besides, in sensitive areas like healthcare, explainability and accountability are not only desirable properties of AI but also legal requirements -- especially when AI may have significant impacts on human lives. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is an emerging field that aims to mitigate the opaqueness of black-box models and make it possible to interpret how AI systems make their decisions with transparency. An interpretable ML model can explain how it makes predictions and which factors affect the model's outcomes. The majority of state-of-the-art interpretable ML methods have been developed in a domain-agnostic way and originate from computer vision, automated reasoning, or even statistics. Many of these methods cannot be directly applied to bioinformatics problems, without prior customization, extension, and domain adoption. In this paper, we discuss the importance of explainability with a focus on bioinformatics. We analyse and comprehensively overview of model-specific and model-agnostic interpretable ML methods and tools. Via several case studies covering bioimaging, cancer genomics, and biomedical text mining, we show how bioinformatics research could benefit from XAI methods and how they could help improve decision fairness.

Curriculum learning and self-paced learning are the training strategies that gradually feed the samples from easy to more complex. They have captivated increasing attention due to their excellent performance in robotic vision. Most recent works focus on designing curricula based on difficulty levels in input samples or smoothing the feature maps. However, smoothing labels to control the learning utility in a curriculum manner is still unexplored. In this work, we design a paced curriculum by label smoothing (P-CBLS) using paced learning with uniform label smoothing (ULS) for classification tasks and fuse uniform and spatially varying label smoothing (SVLS) for semantic segmentation tasks in a curriculum manner. In ULS and SVLS, a bigger smoothing factor value enforces a heavy smoothing penalty in the true label and limits learning less information. Therefore, we design the curriculum by label smoothing (CBLS). We set a bigger smoothing value at the beginning of training and gradually decreased it to zero to control the model learning utility from lower to higher. We also designed a confidence-aware pacing function and combined it with our CBLS to investigate the benefits of various curricula. The proposed techniques are validated on four robotic surgery datasets of multi-class, multi-label classification, captioning, and segmentation tasks. We also investigate the robustness of our method by corrupting validation data into different severity levels. Our extensive analysis shows that the proposed method improves prediction accuracy and robustness.

Task agnostic generative pretraining (GPT) has recently proved promising for zero- and few-shot learning, gradually diverting attention from the expensive supervised learning paradigm. Although the community is accumulating knowledge as to capabilities of English-language autoregressive models such as GPT-3 adopting this generative approach, scholarship about these models remains acutely Anglocentric. Consequently, the community currently has serious gaps in its understanding of this class of models, their potential, and their societal impacts in diverse settings, linguistic traditions, and cultures. To alleviate this issue for Arabic, a collection of diverse languages and language varieties with more than $400$ million population, we introduce JASMINE, a suite of powerful Arabic autoregressive Transformer language models ranging in size between 300 million-13 billion parameters. We pretrain our new models with large amounts of diverse data (400GB of text) from different Arabic varieties and domains. We evaluate JASMINE extensively in both intrinsic and extrinsic settings, using a comprehensive benchmark for zero- and few-shot learning across a wide range of NLP tasks. We also carefully develop and release a novel benchmark for both automated and human evaluation of Arabic autoregressive models focused at investigating potential social biases, harms, and toxicity in these models. We aim to responsibly release our models with interested researchers, along with code for experimenting with them

Climate change has increased the intensity, frequency, and duration of extreme weather events and natural disasters across the world. While the increased data on natural disasters improves the scope of machine learning (ML) in this field, progress is relatively slow. One bottleneck is the lack of benchmark datasets that would allow ML researchers to quantify their progress against a standard metric. The objective of this short paper is to explore the state of benchmark datasets for ML tasks related to natural disasters, categorizing them according to the disaster management cycle. We compile a list of existing benchmark datasets introduced in the past five years. We propose a web platform - NADBenchmarks - where researchers can search for benchmark datasets for natural disasters, and we develop a preliminary version of such a platform using our compiled list. This paper is intended to aid researchers in finding benchmark datasets to train their ML models on, and provide general directions for topics where they can contribute new benchmark datasets.

The neural implementation of operant conditioning with few trials is unclear. We propose a Hippocampus-Inspired Cognitive Architecture (HICA) as a neural mechanism for operant conditioning. HICA explains a learning mechanism in which agents can learn a new behavior policy in a few trials, as mammals do in operant conditioning experiments. HICA is composed of two different types of modules. One is a universal learning module type that represents a cortical column in the neocortex gray matter. The working principle is modeled as Modulated Heterarchical Prediction Memory (mHPM). In mHPM, each module learns to predict a succeeding input vector given the sequence of the input vectors from lower layers and the context vectors from higher layers. The prediction is fed into the lower layers as a context signal (top-down feedback signaling), and into the higher layers as an input signal (bottom-up feedforward signaling). Rewards modulate the learning rate in those modules to memorize meaningful sequences effectively. In mHPM, each module updates in a local and distributed way compared to conventional end-to-end learning with backpropagation of the single objective loss. This local structure enables the heterarchical network of modules. The second type is an innate, special-purpose module representing various organs of the brain's subcortical system. Modules modeling organs such as the amygdala, hippocampus, and reward center are pre-programmed to enable instinctive behaviors. The hippocampus plays the role of the simulator. It is an autoregressive prediction model of the top-most level signal with a loop structure of memory, while cortical columns are lower layers that provide detailed information to the simulation. The simulation becomes the basis for learning with few trials and the deliberate planning required for operant conditioning.