深度神经网络的高度非线性性质使它们容易受到对抗例子的影响，并且具有不稳定的梯度，从而阻碍了可解释性。但是，解决这些问题的现有方法，例如对抗性训练，是昂贵的，并且通常会牺牲预测的准确性。在这项工作中，我们考虑曲率，这是编码非线性程度的数学数量。使用此功能，我们展示了低曲率的神经网络（LCNN），这些神经网络（LCNN）的曲率比标准模型大大低，同时表现出相似的预测性能，从而导致稳健性和稳定梯度，并且只有略有增加的训练时间。为了实现这一目标，我们最大程度地减少了与数据依赖性的上限在神经网络的曲率上，该曲率分解了其组成层的曲率和斜率方面的总体曲率。为了有效地最大程度地减少这种结合，我们介绍了两个新型的建筑组件：首先，一种称为中心软pplus的非线性性，是SoftPlus非线性的稳定变体，其次是Lipschitz构成的批处理标准化层。我们的实验表明，与标准的高曲率对应物相比，LCNN具有较低的曲率，更稳定的梯度和增加现成的对抗性鲁棒性，而不会影响预测性能。我们的方法易于使用，可以很容易地将其纳入现有的神经网络模型中。

A critical problem in post hoc explainability is the lack of a common foundational goal among methods. For example, some methods are motivated by function approximation, some by game theoretic notions, and some by obtaining clean visualizations. This fragmentation of goals causes not only an inconsistent conceptual understanding of explanations but also the practical challenge of not knowing which method to use when. In this work, we begin to address these challenges by unifying eight popular post hoc explanation methods (LIME, C-LIME, SHAP, Occlusion, Vanilla Gradients, Gradients x Input, SmoothGrad, and Integrated Gradients). We show that these methods all perform local function approximation of the black-box model, differing only in the neighbourhood and loss function used to perform the approximation. This unification enables us to (1) state a no free lunch theorem for explanation methods which demonstrates that no single method can perform optimally across all neighbourhoods, and (2) provide a guiding principle to choose among methods based on faithfulness to the black-box model. We empirically validate these theoretical results using various real-world datasets, model classes, and prediction tasks. By bringing diverse explanation methods into a common framework, this work (1) advances the conceptual understanding of these methods, revealing their shared local function approximation objective, properties, and relation to one another, and (2) guides the use of these methods in practice, providing a principled approach to choose among methods and paving the way for the creation of new ones.

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have brought a lot of advancements in sequence labeling tasks and sequence data. However, their effectiveness is limited when the observations in the sequence are irregularly sampled, where the observations arrive at irregular time intervals. To address this, continuous time variants of the RNNs were introduced based on neural ordinary differential equations (NODE). They learn a better representation of the data using the continuous transformation of hidden states over time, taking into account the time interval between the observations. However, they are still limited in their capability as they use the discrete transformations and a fixed discrete number of layers (depth) over an input in the sequence to produce the output observation. We intend to address this limitation by proposing RNNs based on differential equations which model continuous transformations over both depth and time to predict an output for a given input in the sequence. Specifically, we propose continuous depth recurrent neural differential equations (CDR-NDE) which generalizes RNN models by continuously evolving the hidden states in both the temporal and depth dimensions. CDR-NDE considers two separate differential equations over each of these dimensions and models the evolution in the temporal and depth directions alternatively. We also propose the CDR-NDE-heat model based on partial differential equations which treats the computation of hidden states as solving a heat equation over time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models by comparing against the state-of-the-art RNN models on real world sequence labeling problems and data.

A popular approach to creating a zero-shot cross-language retrieval model is to substitute a monolingual pretrained language model in the retrieval model with a multilingual pretrained language model such as Multilingual BERT. This multilingual model is fined-tuned to the retrieval task with monolingual data such as English MS MARCO using the same training recipe as the monolingual retrieval model used. However, such transferred models suffer from mismatches in the languages of the input text during training and inference. In this work, we propose transferring monolingual retrieval models using adapters, a parameter-efficient component for a transformer network. By adding adapters pretrained on language tasks for a specific language with task-specific adapters, prior work has shown that the adapter-enhanced models perform better than fine-tuning the entire model when transferring across languages in various NLP tasks. By constructing dense retrieval models with adapters, we show that models trained with monolingual data are more effective than fine-tuning the entire model when transferring to a Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) setting. However, we found that the prior suggestion of replacing the language adapters to match the target language at inference time is suboptimal for dense retrieval models. We provide an in-depth analysis of this discrepancy between other cross-language NLP tasks and CLIR.

Negotiation is one of the crucial abilities in human communication, and there has been a resurgent research interest in negotiation dialogue systems recently, which goal is to empower intelligent agents with such ability that can efficiently help humans resolve conflicts or reach beneficial agreements. Although there have been many explorations in negotiation dialogue systems, a systematic review of this task has to date remained notably absent. To this end, we aim to fill this gap by reviewing contemporary studies in the emerging field of negotiation dialogue systems, covering benchmarks, evaluations, and methodologies. Furthermore, we also discuss potential future directions, including multi-modal, multi-party, and cross-cultural negotiation scenarios. Our goal is to provide the community with a systematic overview of negotiation dialogue systems and to inspire future research.

Entity matching in Customer 360 is the task of determining if multiple records represent the same real world entity. Entities are typically people, organizations, locations, and events represented as attributed nodes in a graph, though they can also be represented as records in relational data. While probabilistic matching engines and artificial neural network models exist for this task, explaining entity matching has received less attention. In this demo, we present our Explainable Entity Matching (xEM) system and discuss the different AI/ML considerations that went into its implementation.

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.

Vascular shunt insertion is a fundamental surgical procedure used to temporarily restore blood flow to tissues. It is often performed in the field after major trauma. We formulate a problem of automated vascular shunt insertion and propose a pipeline to perform Automated Vascular Shunt Insertion (AVSI) using a da Vinci Research Kit. The pipeline uses a learned visual model to estimate the locus of the vessel rim, plans a grasp on the rim, and moves to grasp at that point. The first robot gripper then pulls the rim to stretch open the vessel with a dilation motion. The second robot gripper then proceeds to insert a shunt into the vessel phantom (a model of the blood vessel) with a chamfer tilt followed by a screw motion. Results suggest that AVSI achieves a high success rate even with tight tolerances and varying vessel orientations up to 30{\deg}. Supplementary material, dataset, videos, and visualizations can be found at https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/autolab-avsi.

Real engineering and scientific applications often involve one or more qualitative inputs. Standard Gaussian processes (GPs), however, cannot directly accommodate qualitative inputs. The recently introduced latent variable Gaussian process (LVGP) overcomes this issue by first mapping each qualitative factor to underlying latent variables (LVs), and then uses any standard GP covariance function over these LVs. The LVs are estimated similarly to the other GP hyperparameters through maximum likelihood estimation, and then plugged into the prediction expressions. However, this plug-in approach will not account for uncertainty in estimation of the LVs, which can be significant especially with limited training data. In this work, we develop a fully Bayesian approach for the LVGP model and for visualizing the effects of the qualitative inputs via their LVs. We also develop approximations for scaling up LVGPs and fully Bayesian inference for the LVGP hyperparameters. We conduct numerical studies comparing plug-in inference against fully Bayesian inference over a few engineering models and material design applications. In contrast to previous studies on standard GP modeling that have largely concluded that a fully Bayesian treatment offers limited improvements, our results show that for LVGP modeling it offers significant improvements in prediction accuracy and uncertainty quantification over the plug-in approach.

元加强学习（META-RL）是一种方法，即从解决各种任务中获得的经验被蒸馏成元政策。当仅适应一个小（或仅一个）数量的步骤时，元派利赛能够在新的相关任务上近距离执行。但是，采用这种方法来解决现实世界中的问题的主要挑战是，它们通常与稀疏的奖励功能相关联，这些功能仅表示任务是部分或完全完成的。我们考虑到某些数据可能由亚最佳代理生成的情况，可用于每个任务。然后，我们使用示范（EMRLD）开发了一类名为“增强元RL”的算法，即使在训练过程中获得了次优的指导，也可以利用此信息。我们展示了EMRLD如何共同利用RL和在离线数据上进行监督学习，以生成一个显示单调性能改进的元数据。我们还开发了一个称为EMRLD-WS的温暖开始的变体，该变体对于亚最佳演示数据特别有效。最后，我们表明，在包括移动机器人在内的各种稀疏奖励环境中，我们的EMRLD算法显着优于现有方法。