Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most important branches of AI. Due to its capacity for self-adaption and decision-making in dynamic environments, reinforcement learning has been widely applied in multiple areas, such as healthcare, data markets, autonomous driving, and robotics. However, some of these applications and systems have been shown to be vulnerable to security or privacy attacks, resulting in unreliable or unstable services. A large number of studies have focused on these security and privacy problems in reinforcement learning. However, few surveys have provided a systematic review and comparison of existing problems and state-of-the-art solutions to keep up with the pace of emerging threats. Accordingly, we herein present such a comprehensive review to explain and summarize the challenges associated with security and privacy in reinforcement learning from a new perspective, namely that of the Markov Decision Process (MDP). In this survey, we first introduce the key concepts related to this area. Next, we cover the security and privacy issues linked to the state, action, environment, and reward function of the MDP process, respectively. We further highlight the special characteristics of security and privacy methodologies related to reinforcement learning. Finally, we discuss the possible future research directions within this area.

In the new era of personalization, learning the heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) becomes an inevitable trend with numerous applications. Yet, most existing HTE estimation methods focus on independently and identically distributed observations and cannot handle the non-stationarity and temporal dependency in the common panel data setting. The treatment evaluators developed for panel data, on the other hand, typically ignore the individualized information. To fill the gap, in this paper, we initialize the study of HTE estimation in panel data. Under different assumptions for HTE identifiability, we propose the corresponding heterogeneous one-side and two-side synthetic learner, namely H1SL and H2SL, by leveraging the state-of-the-art HTE estimator for non-panel data and generalizing the synthetic control method that allows flexible data generating process. We establish the convergence rates of the proposed estimators. The superior performance of the proposed methods over existing ones is demonstrated by extensive numerical studies.

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.

The security of artificial intelligence (AI) is an important research area towards safe, reliable, and trustworthy AI systems. To accelerate the research on AI security, the Artificial Intelligence Security Competition (AISC) was organized by the Zhongguancun Laboratory, China Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University, and RealAI as part of the Zhongguancun International Frontier Technology Innovation Competition (https://www.zgc-aisc.com/en). The competition consists of three tracks, including Deepfake Security Competition, Autonomous Driving Security Competition, and Face Recognition Security Competition. This report will introduce the competition rules of these three tracks and the solutions of top-ranking teams in each track.

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.

We introduce CAMRL, the first curriculum-based asymmetric multi-task learning (AMTL) algorithm for dealing with multiple reinforcement learning (RL) tasks altogether. To mitigate the negative influence of customizing the one-off training order in curriculum-based AMTL, CAMRL switches its training mode between parallel single-task RL and asymmetric multi-task RL (MTRL), according to an indicator regarding the training time, the overall performance, and the performance gap among tasks. To leverage the multi-sourced prior knowledge flexibly and to reduce negative transfer in AMTL, we customize a composite loss with multiple differentiable ranking functions and optimize the loss through alternating optimization and the Frank-Wolfe algorithm. The uncertainty-based automatic adjustment of hyper-parameters is also applied to eliminate the need of laborious hyper-parameter analysis during optimization. By optimizing the composite loss, CAMRL predicts the next training task and continuously revisits the transfer matrix and network weights. We have conducted experiments on a wide range of benchmarks in multi-task RL, covering Gym-minigrid, Meta-world, Atari video games, vision-based PyBullet tasks, and RLBench, to show the improvements of CAMRL over the corresponding single-task RL algorithm and state-of-the-art MTRL algorithms. The code is available at: https://github.com/huanghanchi/CAMRL

Transformer-based language models have become the standard approach to solving natural language processing tasks. However, industry adoption usually requires the maximum throughput to comply with certain latency constraints that prevents Transformer models from being used in production. To address this gap, model compression techniques such as quantization and pruning may be used to improve inference efficiency. However, these compression techniques require specialized software to apply and deploy at scale. In this work, we propose a new pipeline for creating and running Fast Transformer models on CPUs, utilizing hardware-aware pruning, knowledge distillation, quantization, and our own Transformer inference runtime engine with optimized kernels for sparse and quantized operators. We demonstrate the efficiency of our pipeline by creating a Fast DistilBERT model showing minimal accuracy loss on the question-answering SQuADv1.1 benchmark, and throughput results under typical production constraints and environments. Our results outperform existing state-of-the-art Neural Magic's DeepSparse runtime performance by up to 50% and up to 4.1x performance speedup over ONNX Runtime. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-transformers.

自我训练在半监督学习中表现出巨大的潜力。它的核心思想是使用在标记数据上学习的模型来生成未标记样本的伪标签，然后自我教学。为了获得有效的监督，主动尝试通常会采用动量老师进行伪标签的预测，但要观察确认偏见问题，在这种情况下，错误的预测可能会提供错误的监督信号并在培训过程中积累。这种缺点的主要原因是，现行的自我训练框架充当以前的知识指导当前状态，因为老师仅与过去的学生更新。为了减轻这个问题，我们提出了一种新颖的自我训练策略，该策略使模型可以从未来学习。具体而言，在每个培训步骤中，我们都会首先优化学生（即，在不将其应用于模型权重的情况下缓存梯度），然后用虚拟未来的学生更新老师，最后要求老师为伪标记生产伪标签目前的学生作为指导。这样，我们设法提高了伪标签的质量，从而提高了性能。我们还通过深入（FST-D）和广泛（FST-W）窥视未来，开发了我们未来自我训练（FST）框架的两个变体。将无监督的域自适应语义分割和半监督语义分割的任务作为实例，我们在广泛的环境下实验表明了我们方法的有效性和优越性。代码将公开可用。

变压器模型最近已成为自然语言处理中的基础模型之一，作为副产品，最近对扩展这些模型具有重大的兴趣和投资。但是，这些大型变压器语言模型的培训和推理成本令人难以置信，因此需要更多的研究来识别更有效的变体。在这项工作中，我们通过用统计语言建模中的文献启发的变压器体系结构提出了一个简单而有效的修改，该架构是通过通过文本序列的离散潜在表示构建的n-grams来增强模型的。我们评估了我们的模型，关于C4数据集的语言建模的N-Strammer以及Superglue数据集的文本分类，并发现它的表现优于诸如变压器和底漆等几个强基线。我们为JAX中的可重复性目的开放源模型。

符号回归（SR）是一种回归分析，可以自动找到最适合数据的数学表达式。当前，SR基本上仍然依赖各种搜索策略，因此需要针对每个表达式进行特定于样本的模型，这显着限制了模型的概括和效率。受到人类可以根据其曲线推断数学表达的事实的启发，我们提出了符号表达变压器（set），这是从SR的计算机视觉的角度来看，这是一个样本 - 无义模型。具体而言，收集的数据表示为图像，并采用图像标题模型将图像转换为符号表达式。释放了图像域中训练和测试集之间没有重叠的大规模数据集。我们的结果证明了集合的有效性，并提出了基于图像的模型解决挑战性SR问题的有希望的方向。