本文研究了“探索性”机器学习分类问题的置信后的事后校准。这些问题的困难源于持续的愿望，即在策划数据集时具有足够的例子来推广哪些类别的界限以及对这些类别的有效性的混乱。我们认为，对于此类问题，必须使用“单一的所有”方法（顶级标签校准），而不是文献中其他地方提倡的“校准 - 满足 - 响应 - 摩托克质”方法。我们介绍并测试了四种旨在处理特定置信度估计的特质的新算法。这些方法中的主要主要是将内核密度比用于置信度校准，包括用于选择带宽的新颖的防弹算法。我们测试了我们的主张，并探讨了生物信息学应用程序（Phanns）1以及经典的MNIST基准2。最后，我们的分析认为，事后校准应始终执行，应仅基于测试数据集，并且应在视觉上进行理智检查。

决策森林（森林），尤其是随机森林和梯度促进树木，与许多监督学习场景中的其他方法相比，已经证明了最先进的准确性。尤其是，森林在表格数据中占主导地位，即当特征空间非结构化时，因此信号是特征指数置换的不变性。然而，在存在于多种多样（例如图像，文本和语音）深网（网络）（特别是卷积深网（Convnets））上的结构化数据中，倾向于优于森林。我们猜想至少部分原因是网络的输入不仅仅是特征幅度，也是其索引。相反，天真的森林实施未能明确考虑特征指数。最近提出的森林方法表明，对于每个节点，森林从某些特定分布中隐式采样一个随机矩阵。这些森林像某些类别的网络一样，通过将特征空间划分为对应于线性函数的凸多物体来学习。我们以这种方法为基础，并表明人们可以以多种感知方式选择分布来纳入特征区域。我们在数据上活在三个不同的流形上的数据上证明了经验性能：圆环，图像和时间序列。此外，我们证明了其在多元模拟环境中的强度，并且在预测癫痫患者的手术结果方面也表现出了优越性，并从非运动脑区域的原始立体定向EEG数据中预测运动方向。在所有模拟和真实数据中，歧管随机森林（MORF）算法的表现优于忽略特征空间结构并挑战Convnets的性能。此外，MORF运行迅速，并保持解释性和理论上的理由。

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but the quality bar for medical and clinical applications is high. Today, attempts to assess models' clinical knowledge typically rely on automated evaluations on limited benchmarks. There is no standard to evaluate model predictions and reasoning across a breadth of tasks. To address this, we present MultiMedQA, a benchmark combining six existing open question answering datasets spanning professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries; and HealthSearchQA, a new free-response dataset of medical questions searched online. We propose a framework for human evaluation of model answers along multiple axes including factuality, precision, possible harm, and bias. In addition, we evaluate PaLM (a 540-billion parameter LLM) and its instruction-tuned variant, Flan-PaLM, on MultiMedQA. Using a combination of prompting strategies, Flan-PaLM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on every MultiMedQA multiple-choice dataset (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, MMLU clinical topics), including 67.6% accuracy on MedQA (US Medical License Exam questions), surpassing prior state-of-the-art by over 17%. However, human evaluation reveals key gaps in Flan-PaLM responses. To resolve this we introduce instruction prompt tuning, a parameter-efficient approach for aligning LLMs to new domains using a few exemplars. The resulting model, Med-PaLM, performs encouragingly, but remains inferior to clinicians. We show that comprehension, recall of knowledge, and medical reasoning improve with model scale and instruction prompt tuning, suggesting the potential utility of LLMs in medicine. Our human evaluations reveal important limitations of today's models, reinforcing the importance of both evaluation frameworks and method development in creating safe, helpful LLM models for clinical applications.

$ $With recent advances in CNNs, exceptional improvements have been made in semantic segmentation of high resolution images in terms of accuracy and latency. However, challenges still remain in detecting objects in crowded scenes, large scale variations, partial occlusion, and distortions, while still maintaining mobility and latency. We introduce a fast and efficient convolutional neural network, ASBU-Net, for semantic segmentation of high resolution images that addresses these problems and uses no novelty layers for ease of quantization and embedded hardware support. ASBU-Net is based on a new feature extraction module, atrous space bender layer (ASBL), which is efficient in terms of computation and memory. The ASB layers form a building block that is used to make ASBNet. Since this network does not use any special layers it can be easily implemented, quantized and deployed on FPGAs and other hardware with limited memory. We present experiments on resource and accuracy trade-offs and show strong performance compared to other popular models.

Autonomous vehicles are being deployed with a spectrum of capability, extending from driver assistance features for the highway in personal vehicles (SAE Level 2+) to fully autonomous fleet ride sharing services operating in complex city environments (SAE Level 4+). This spectrum of autonomy often operates in different physical environments with different degrees of assumed driver in-the-loop oversight and hence have very different system and subsystem requirements. At the heart of SAE Level 2 to 5 systems is localization and mapping, which ranges from road determination for feature geofencing or high-level routing, through lane determination for advanced driver assistance, to where-in-lane positioning for full vehicle control. We assess localization and mapping requirements for different levels of autonomy and supported features. This work provides a framework for system decomposition, including the level of redundancy needed to achieve the target level of safety. We examine several representative autonomous and assistance features and make recommendations on positioning requirements as well map georeferencing and information integrity.

We present Azimuth, an open-source and easy-to-use tool to perform error analysis for text classification. Compared to other stages of the ML development cycle, such as model training and hyper-parameter tuning, the process and tooling for the error analysis stage are less mature. However, this stage is critical for the development of reliable and trustworthy AI systems. To make error analysis more systematic, we propose an approach comprising dataset analysis and model quality assessment, which Azimuth facilitates. We aim to help AI practitioners discover and address areas where the model does not generalize by leveraging and integrating a range of ML techniques, such as saliency maps, similarity, uncertainty, and behavioral analyses, all in one tool. Our code and documentation are available at github.com/servicenow/azimuth.

Science tests competing theories or models by evaluating the similarity of their predictions against observational experience. Thus, how we measure similarity fundamentally determines what we learn. In machine learning and scientific modeling, similarity metrics are used as objective functions. A classic example being mean squared error, which is the optimal measure of similarity when errors are normally distributed and independent and identically distributed (iid). In many cases, however, the error distribution is neither normal nor iid, so it is left to the scientist to determine an appropriate objective. Here, we review how information theory can guide that selection, then demonstrate the approach with a simple hydrologic model.

As Artificial and Robotic Systems are increasingly deployed and relied upon for real-world applications, it is important that they exhibit the ability to continually learn and adapt in dynamically-changing environments, becoming Lifelong Learning Machines. Continual/lifelong learning (LL) involves minimizing catastrophic forgetting of old tasks while maximizing a model's capability to learn new tasks. This paper addresses the challenging lifelong reinforcement learning (L2RL) setting. Pushing the state-of-the-art forward in L2RL and making L2RL useful for practical applications requires more than developing individual L2RL algorithms; it requires making progress at the systems-level, especially research into the non-trivial problem of how to integrate multiple L2RL algorithms into a common framework. In this paper, we introduce the Lifelong Reinforcement Learning Components Framework (L2RLCF), which standardizes L2RL systems and assimilates different continual learning components (each addressing different aspects of the lifelong learning problem) into a unified system. As an instantiation of L2RLCF, we develop a standard API allowing easy integration of novel lifelong learning components. We describe a case study that demonstrates how multiple independently-developed LL components can be integrated into a single realized system. We also introduce an evaluation environment in order to measure the effect of combining various system components. Our evaluation environment employs different LL scenarios (sequences of tasks) consisting of Starcraft-2 minigames and allows for the fair, comprehensive, and quantitative comparison of different combinations of components within a challenging common evaluation environment.

While machine learning models have achieved unprecedented success in real-world applications, they might make biased/unfair decisions for specific demographic groups and hence result in discriminative outcomes. Although research efforts have been devoted to measuring and mitigating bias, they mainly study bias from the result-oriented perspective while neglecting the bias encoded in the decision-making procedure. This results in their inability to capture procedure-oriented bias, which therefore limits the ability to have a fully debiasing method. Fortunately, with the rapid development of explainable machine learning, explanations for predictions are now available to gain insights into the procedure. In this work, we bridge the gap between fairness and explainability by presenting a novel perspective of procedure-oriented fairness based on explanations. We identify the procedure-based bias by measuring the gap of explanation quality between different groups with Ratio-based and Value-based Explanation Fairness. The new metrics further motivate us to design an optimization objective to mitigate the procedure-based bias where we observe that it will also mitigate bias from the prediction. Based on our designed optimization objective, we propose a Comprehensive Fairness Algorithm (CFA), which simultaneously fulfills multiple objectives - improving traditional fairness, satisfying explanation fairness, and maintaining the utility performance. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed CFA and highlight the importance of considering fairness from the explainability perspective. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YuyingZhao/FairExplanations-CFA .

Experience management is an emerging business area where organizations focus on understanding the feedback of customers and employees in order to improve their end-to-end experiences. This results in a unique set of machine learning problems to help understand how people feel, discover issues they care about, and find which actions need to be taken on data that are different in content and distribution from traditional NLP domains. In this paper, we present a case study of building text analysis applications that perform multiple classification tasks efficiently in 12 languages in the nascent business area of experience management. In order to scale up modern ML methods on experience data, we leverage cross lingual and multi-task modeling techniques to consolidate our models into a single deployment to avoid overhead. We also make use of model compression and model distillation to reduce overall inference latency and hardware cost to the level acceptable for business needs while maintaining model prediction quality. Our findings show that multi-task modeling improves task performance for a subset of experience management tasks in both XLM-R and mBert architectures. Among the compressed architectures we explored, we found that MiniLM achieved the best compression/performance tradeoff. Our case study demonstrates a speedup of up to 15.61x with 2.60% average task degradation (or 3.29x speedup with 1.71% degradation) and estimated savings of 44% over using the original full-size model. These results demonstrate a successful scaling up of text classification for the challenging new area of ML for experience management.