Strategic classification studies learning in settings where users can modify their features to obtain favorable predictions. Most current works focus on simple classifiers that trigger independent user responses. Here we examine the implications of learning with more elaborate models that break the independence assumption. Motivated by the idea that applications of strategic classification are often social in nature, we focus on graph neural networks, which make use of social relations between users to improve predictions. Using a graph for learning introduces inter-user dependencies in prediction; our key point is that strategic users can exploit these to promote their own goals. As we show through analysis and simulation, this can work either against the system--or for it. Based on this, we propose a differentiable framework for strategically-robust learning of graph-based classifiers. Experiments on several real networked datasets demonstrate the utility of our approach. Machine learning is increasingly being used to inform decisions about humans. But when users of a system stand to gain from certain predictive outcomes, they may be prone to "game" the system by strategically modifying their features (at some cost). The literature on strategic classification (Brückner & Scheffer, 2011; Hardt et al., 2016) studies learning in this setting, with emphasis on how to learn classifiers that are robust to strategic user behavior. The idea that users may respond to a decision rule applies broadly and across many domains, from hiring, admissions, and scholarships to loan approval, insurance, welfare benefits, and medical eligibility (McCrary, 2008; Almond et al., 2010; Camacho & Conover, 2011; Lee & Lemieux, 2010). But despite these advances, most works in strategic classification remain to follow the original problem formulation in assuming independence across users responses. From a technical perspective, this assumption greatly simplifies the learning task, as it allows the classifier to consider each user's response in isolation: user behavior is modeled via a response mapping Intuitively, a user will modify her features if this'moves' her across the decision boundary, as long as this is worthwhile (i.e., gains from prediction exceed modification costs).

Voice communication between air traffic controllers (ATCos) and pilots is critical for ensuring safe and efficient air traffic control (ATC). This task requires high levels of awareness from ATCos and can be tedious and error-prone. Recent attempts have been made to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into ATC in order to reduce the workload of ATCos. However, the development of data-driven AI systems for ATC demands large-scale annotated datasets, which are currently lacking in the field. This paper explores the lessons learned from the ATCO2 project, a project that aimed to develop a unique platform to collect and preprocess large amounts of ATC data from airspace in real time. Audio and surveillance data were collected from publicly accessible radio frequency channels with VHF receivers owned by a community of volunteers and later uploaded to Opensky Network servers, which can be considered an "unlimited source" of data. In addition, this paper reviews previous work from ATCO2 partners, including (i) robust automatic speech recognition, (ii) natural language processing, (iii) English language identification of ATC communications, and (iv) the integration of surveillance data such as ADS-B. We believe that the pipeline developed during the ATCO2 project, along with the open-sourcing of its data, will encourage research in the ATC field. A sample of the ATCO2 corpus is available on the following website: https://www.atco2.org/data, while the full corpus can be purchased through ELDA at http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-S0484. We demonstrated that ATCO2 is an appropriate dataset to develop ASR engines when little or near to no ATC in-domain data is available. For instance, with the CNN-TDNNf kaldi model, we reached the performance of as low as 17.9% and 24.9% WER on public ATC datasets which is 6.6/7.6% better than "out-of-domain" but supervised CNN-TDNNf model.

Neural networks are the state-of-the-art for many approximation tasks in high-dimensional spaces, as supported by an abundance of experimental evidence. However, we still need a solid theoretical understanding of what they can approximate and, more importantly, at what cost and accuracy. One network architecture of practical use, especially for approximation tasks involving images, is convolutional (residual) networks. However, due to the locality of the linear operators involved in these networks, their analysis is more complicated than for generic fully connected neural networks. This paper focuses on sequence approximation tasks, where a matrix or a higher-order tensor represents each observation. We show that when approximating sequences arising from space-time discretisations of PDEs we may use relatively small networks. We constructively derive these results by exploiting connections between discrete convolution and finite difference operators. Throughout, we design our network architecture to, while having guarantees, be similar to those typically adopted in practice for sequence approximation tasks. Our theoretical results are supported by numerical experiments which simulate linear advection, the heat equation, and the Fisher equation. The implementation used is available at the repository associated to the paper.

Short-term forecasts of infectious disease spread are a critical component in risk evaluation and public health decision making. While different models for short-term forecasting have been developed, open questions about their relative performance remain. Here, we compare short-term probabilistic forecasts of popular mechanistic models based on the renewal equation with forecasts of statistical time series models. Our empirical comparison is based on data of the daily incidence of COVID-19 across six large US states over the first pandemic year. We find that, on average, probabilistic forecasts from statistical time series models are overall at least as accurate as forecasts from mechanistic models. Moreover, statistical time series models better capture volatility. Our findings suggest that domain knowledge, which is integrated into mechanistic models by making assumptions about disease dynamics, does not improve short-term forecasts of disease incidence. We note, however, that forecasting is often only one of many objectives and thus mechanistic models remain important, for example, to model the impact of vaccines or the emergence of new variants.

Data sparsity is one of the main challenges posed by code-switching (CS), which is further exacerbated in the case of morphologically rich languages. For the task of machine translation (MT), morphological segmentation has proven successful in alleviating data sparsity in monolingual contexts; however, it has not been investigated for CS settings. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of different segmentation approaches on MT performance, covering morphology-based and frequency-based segmentation techniques. We experiment on MT from code-switched Arabic-English to English. We provide detailed analysis, examining a variety of conditions, such as data size and sentences with different degrees of CS. Empirical results show that morphology-aware segmenters perform the best in segmentation tasks but under-perform in MT. Nevertheless, we find that the choice of the segmentation setup to use for MT is highly dependent on the data size. For extreme low-resource scenarios, a combination of frequency and morphology-based segmentations is shown to perform the best. For more resourced settings, such a combination does not bring significant improvements over the use of frequency-based segmentation.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has made great advancements in recent years with major breakthroughs that have established new benchmarks. However, these advances have mainly benefited a certain group of languages commonly referred to as resource-rich such as English and French. Majority of other languages with weaker resources are then left behind which is the case for most African languages including Wolof. In this work, we present a parallel Wolof/French corpus of 123,000 sentences on which we conducted experiments on machine translation models based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) in different data configurations. We noted performance gains with the models trained on subworded data as well as those trained on the French-English language pair compared to those trained on the French-Wolof pair under the same experimental conditions.

Low-resource speech recognition has been long-suffering from insufficient training data. In this paper, we propose an approach that leverages neighboring languages to improve low-resource scenario performance, founded on the hypothesis that similar linguistic units in neighboring languages exhibit comparable term frequency distributions, which enables us to construct a Huffman tree for performing multilingual hierarchical Softmax decoding. This hierarchical structure enables cross-lingual knowledge sharing among similar tokens, thereby enhancing low-resource training outcomes. Empirical analyses demonstrate that our method is effective in improving the accuracy and efficiency of low-resource speech recognition.

Training deep neural networks (DNNs) under weak supervision has attracted increasing research attention as it can significantly reduce the annotation cost. However, labels from weak supervision can be noisy, and the high capacity of DNNs enables them to easily overfit the label noise, resulting in poor generalization. Recent methods leverage self-training to build noise-resistant models, in which a teacher trained under weak supervision is used to provide highly confident labels for teaching the students. Nevertheless, the teacher derived from such frameworks may have fitted a substantial amount of noise and therefore produce incorrect pseudo-labels with high confidence, leading to severe error propagation. In this work, we propose Meta Self-Refinement (MSR), a noise-resistant learning framework, to effectively combat label noise from weak supervision. Instead of relying on a fixed teacher trained with noisy labels, we encourage the teacher to refine its pseudo-labels. At each training step, MSR performs a meta gradient descent on the current mini-batch to maximize the student performance on a clean validation set. Extensive experimentation on eight NLP benchmarks demonstrates that MSR is robust against label noise in all settings and outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 11.4% in accuracy and 9.26% in F1 score.

Knowledge graph (KG) question generation (QG) aims to generate natural language questions from KGs and target answers. Previous works mostly focus on a simple setting which is to generate questions from a single KG triple. In this work, we focus on a more realistic setting where we aim to generate questions from a KG subgraph and target answers. In addition, most of previous works built on either RNN-based or Transformer based models to encode a linearized KG sugraph, which totally discards the explicit structure information of a KG subgraph. To address this issue, we propose to apply a bidirectional Graph2Seq model to encode the KG subgraph. Furthermore, we enhance our RNN decoder with node-level copying mechanism to allow directly copying node attributes from the KG subgraph to the output question. Both automatic and human evaluation results demonstrate that our model achieves new state-of-the-art scores, outperforming existing methods by a significant margin on two QG benchmarks. Experimental results also show that our QG model can consistently benefit the Question Answering (QA) task as a mean of data augmentation.

In this article I propose an approach for defining replicability for prediction rules. Motivated by a recent NAS report, I start from the perspective that replicability is obtaining consistent results across studies suitable to address the same prediction question, each of which has obtained its own data. I then discuss concept and issues in defining key elements of this statement. I focus specifically on the meaning of "consistent results" in typical utilization contexts, and propose a multi-agent framework for defining replicability, in which agents are neither partners nor adversaries. I recover some of the prevalent practical approaches as special cases. I hope to provide guidance for a more systematic assessment of replicability in machine learning.