Object recognition algorithms sold by tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, perform worse when asked to identify items from lower-income countries. These are the findings of a new study conducted by Facebook's AI lab, which shows that AI bias can not only reproduce inequalities within countries, but also between them. In the study (which we spotted via Jack Clark's Import AI newsletter), researchers tested five popular off-the-shelf object recognition algorithms -- Microsoft Azure, Clarifai, Google Cloud Vision, Amazon Rekognition, and IBM Watson -- to see how well each program identified household items collected from a global dataset. The dataset included 117 categories (everything from shoes to soap to sofas) and a diverse array of household incomes and geographic locations (from a family in Burundi making $27 a month to a family in Ukraine with a monthly income of $10,090). The researchers found that the object recognition algorithms made around 10 percent more errors when asked to identify items from a household with a $50 monthly income compared to those from a household making more than $3,500.

Deep fakes are "videos that have been constructed to make a person appear to say or do something that they never said or did. Many commentators worry that voters will be influenced by pure fiction: As the 2020 US election looms, we learn of the fight to stay ahead (CNN, April 26, 2019) of the "growing threat" (ABC Eyewitness News, May 7, 2019) because "The 2020 campaigns aren't ready for deepfakes" (Axios/HBO, June 4, 2019). We Can No Longer Believe What We See, the New York Times warned yesterday. Under the right set of circumstances, deepfakes will be very influential. They don't even have to be particularly good to potentially swing the outcome of an election. As with so much in elections, deepfakes are a numbers game. While the presence of tampering in all but the most sophisticated deepfakes can be quickly identified, not everyone who views them will get that message. More fundamentally, not everyone wants to get that message. As can occur with other forms of online ...

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - Yemen's Houthi rebels said on Tuesday they launched at least two drones targeting a southwest Saudi city that's home to an air base. The Houthis' Al-Masirah satellite news channel reported the rebels launched Qasef-2K drones to strike the city of Khamis Mushait. The state-run Saudi Press Agency reported Tuesday, quoting military spokesman Col. Turki al-Maliki, that soldiers "intercepted" two drones launched by the Houthis. The Iranian-allied Houthis increasingly have targeted the kingdom with bomb-carrying drones. Khamis Mushait, some 815 km (510 miles) southwest of the capital, Riyadh, is near the kingdom's border with Yemen.

This paper introduces two straightforward, effective indices to evaluate the input data and the data flowing through layers of a feedforward deep neural network. For classification problems, the separation rate of target labels in the space of dataflow is explained as a key factor indicating the performance of designed layers in improving the generalization of the network. According to the explained concept, a shapeless distance-based evaluation index is proposed. Similarly, for regression problems, the smoothness rate of target outputs in the space of dataflow is explained as a key factor indicating the performance of designed layers in improving the generalization of the network. According to the explained smoothness concept, a shapeless distance-based smoothness index is proposed for regression problems. To consider more strictly concepts of separation and smoothness, their extended versions are introduced, and by interpreting a regression problem as a classification problem, it is shown that the separation and smoothness indices are related together. Through four case studies, the profits of using the introduced indices are shown. In the first case study, for classification and regression problems , the challenging of some known input datasets are compared respectively by the proposed separation and smoothness indices. In the second case study, the quality of dataflow is evaluated through layers of two pre-trained VGG 16 networks in classification of Cifar10 and Cifar100. In the third case study, it is shown that the correct classification rate and the separation index are almost equivalent through layers particularly while the serration index is increased. In the last case study, two multi-layer neural networks, which are designed for the prediction of Boston Housing price, are compared layer by layer by using the proposed smoothness index.

Stable matching, a classical model for two-sided markets, has long been studied with little consideration for how each side's preferences are learned. With the advent of massive online markets powered by data-driven matching platforms, it has become necessary to better understand the interplay between learning and market objectives. We propose a statistical learning model in which one side of the market does not have a priori knowledge about its preferences for the other side and is required to learn these from stochastic rewards. Our model extends the standard multi-armed bandits framework to multiple players, with the added feature that arms have preferences over players. We study both centralized and decentralized approaches to this problem and show surprising exploration-exploitation trade-offs compared to the single player multi-armed bandits setting.

Despite the recent successes in robotic locomotion control, the design of robot relies heavily on human engineering. Automatic robot design has been a long studied subject, but the recent progress has been slowed due to the large combinatorial search space and the difficulty in evaluating the found candidates. To address the two challenges, we formulate automatic robot design as a graph search problem and perform evolution search in graph space. We propose Neural Graph Evolution (NGE), which performs selection on current candidates and evolves new ones iteratively. Different from previous approaches, NGE uses graph neural networks to parameterize the control policies, which reduces evaluation cost on new candidates with the help of skill transfer from previously evaluated designs. In addition, NGE applies Graph Mutation with Uncertainty (GM-UC) by incorporating model uncertainty, which reduces the search space by balancing exploration and exploitation. We show that NGE significantly outperforms previous methods by an order of magnitude. As shown in experiments, NGE is the first algorithm that can automatically discover kinematically preferred robotic graph structures, such as a fish with two symmetrical flat side-fins and a tail, or a cheetah with athletic front and back legs. Instead of using thousands of cores for weeks, NGE efficiently solves searching problem within a day on a single 64 CPU-core Amazon EC2 machine.

Logistic regression is commonly used for modeling dichotomous outcomes. In the classical setting, where the number of observations is much larger than the number of parameters, properties of the maximum likelihood estimator in logistic regression are well understood. Recently, Sur and Candes have studied logistic regression in the high-dimensional regime, where the number of observations and parameters are comparable, and show, among other things, that the maximum likelihood estimator is biased. In the high-dimensional regime the underlying parameter vector is often structured (sparse, block-sparse, finite-alphabet, etc.) and so in this paper we study regularized logistic regression (RLR), where a convex regularizer that encourages the desired structure is added to the negative of the log-likelihood function. An advantage of RLR is that it allows parameter recovery even for instances where the (unconstrained) maximum likelihood estimate does not exist. We provide a precise analysis of the performance of RLR via the solution of a system of six nonlinear equations, through which any performance metric of interest (mean, mean-squared error, probability of support recovery, etc.) can be explicitly computed. Our results generalize those of Sur and Candes and we provide a detailed study for the cases of $\ell_2^2$-RLR and sparse ($\ell_1$-regularized) logistic regression. In both cases, we obtain explicit expressions for various performance metrics and can find the values of the regularizer parameter that optimizes the desired performance. The theory is validated by extensive numerical simulations across a range of parameter values and problem instances.

The standard reinforcement learning (RL) formulation considers the expectation of the (discounted) cumulative reward. This is limiting in applications where we are concerned with not only the expected performance, but also the distribution of the performance. In this paper, we introduce micro-objective reinforcement learning --- an alternative RL formalism that overcomes this issue. In this new formulation, a RL task is specified by a set of micro-objectives, which are constructs that specify the desirability or undesirability of events. In addition, micro-objectives allow prior knowledge in the form of temporal abstraction to be incorporated into the global RL objective. The generality of this formalism, and its relations to single/multi-objective RL, and hierarchical RL are discussed.

Collaborative representation is a popular feature learning approach, which encoding process is assisted by variety types of information. In this paper, we propose a collaborative representation restricted Boltzmann Machine (CRRBM) for modeling binary data and a collaborative representation Gaussian restricted Boltzmann Machine (CRGRBM) for modeling realvalued data by applying a collaborative representation strategy in the encoding procedure. We utilize Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) to generate similar sample subsets of the instance and observed feature set simultaneously from input data. Hence, we can obtain some mini blocks, which come from the intersection of instance and observed feature subsets. Then we integrate Contrastive Divergence and Bregman Divergence methods with mini blocks to optimize our CRRBM and CRGRBM models. In their training process, the complex collaborative relationships between multiple instances and features are fused into the hidden layer encoding. Hence, these encodings have dual characteristics of concealment and cooperation. Here, we develop two deep collaborative encoder frameworks (DCEF) based on the CRRBM and CRGRBM models: one is a DCEF with Gaussian linear visible units (GDCEF) for modeling real-valued data, and the other is a DCEF with binary visible units (BDCEF) for modeling binary data. We explore the collaborative representation capability of the hidden features in every layer of the GDCEF and BDCEF framework, especially in the deepest hidden layer. The experimental results show that the GDCEF and BDCEF frameworks have more outstanding performances than the classic Autoencoder framework for unsupervised clustering task on the MSRA-MM2.0 and UCI datasets, respectively.

Machine learning and deep learning have gained popularity and achieved immense success in Drug discovery in recent decades. Historically, machine learning and deep learning models were trained on either structural data or chemical properties by separated model. In this study, we proposed an architecture training simultaneously both type of data in order to improve the overall performance. Given the molecular structure in the form of SMILES notation and their label, we generated the SMILES-based feature matrix and molecular descriptors. These data was trained on an deep learning model which was also integrated with the Attention mechanism to facilitate training and interpreting. Experiments showed that our model could raise the performance of model. With the maximum MCC 0.56 and AUC 91% by cross-validation on EGFR inhibitors dataset, our architecture was outperforming the referring model. We also successfully integrated Attention mechanism into our model, which helped to interpret the contribution of chemical structures on bioactivity.