Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is a popular optimization tool for the composite and constrained problems in machine learning. However, in many machine learning problems such as black-box attacks and bandit feedback, ADMM could fail because the explicit gradients of these problems are difficult or infeasible to obtain. Zeroth-order (gradient-free) methods can effectively solve these problems due to that the objective function values are only required in the optimization. Recently, though there exist a few zeroth-order ADMM methods, they build on the convexity of objective function. Clearly, these existing zeroth-order methods are limited in many applications. In the paper, thus, we propose a class of fast zeroth-order stochastic ADMM methods (i.e., ZO-SVRG-ADMM and ZO-SAGA-ADMM) for solving nonconvex problems with multiple nonsmooth penalties, based on the coordinate smoothing gradient estimator. Moreover, we prove that both the ZO-SVRG-ADMM and ZO-SAGA-ADMM have convergence rate of $O(1/T)$, where $T$ denotes the number of iterations. In particular, our methods not only reach the best convergence rate $O(1/T)$ for the nonconvex optimization, but also are able to effectively solve many complex machine learning problems with multiple regularized penalties and constraints. Finally, we conduct the experiments of black-box binary classification and structured adversarial attack on black-box deep neural network to validate the efficiency of our algorithms.

Models leak information about their training data. This enables attackers to infer sensitive information about their training sets, notably determine if a data sample was part of the model's training set. The existing works empirically show the possibility of these tracing (membership inference) attacks against complex models with a large number of parameters. However, the attack results are dependent on the specific training data, can be obtained only after the tedious process of training the model and performing the attack, and are missing any measure of the confidence and unused potential power of the attack. A model designer is interested in identifying which model structures leak more information, how adding new parameters to the model increases its privacy risk, and what is the gain of adding new data points to decrease the overall information leakage. The privacy analysis should also enable designing the most powerful inference attack. In this paper, we design a theoretical framework to analyze the maximum power of tracing attacks against high-dimensional models, with the focus on probabilistic graphical models. We provide a tight upper-bound on the power (true positive rate) of these attacks, with respect to their error (false positive rate). The bound, as it should be, is independent of the knowledge and algorithm of any specific attack, as well as the values of particular samples in the training set. It provides a measure of the potential leakage of a model given its structure, as a function of the structure complexity and the size of training set.

Ensemble learning use multiple algorithms to obtain better predictive performance than any single one of its constituent algorithms could. With growing popularity of deep learning, researchers have started to ensemble them for various purposes. Few if any, however, has used the deep learning approach as a means to ensemble algorithms. This paper presents a deep ensemble learning framework which aims to harness deep learning algorithms to integrate multisource data and tap the wisdom of experts. At the voting layer, a sparse autoencoder is trained for feature learning to reduce the correlation of attributes and diversify the base classifiers ultimately. At the stacking layer, a nonlinear feature-weighted method based on deep belief networks is proposed to rank the base classifiers which may violate the conditional independence. Neural network is used as meta classifier. At the optimizing layer, under-sampling and threshold-moving are used to cope with cost-sensitive problem. Optimized predictions are obtained based on ensemble of probabilistic predictions by similarity calculation. The proposed deep ensemble learning framework is used for Alzheimers disease classification. Experiments with the clinical dataset from national Alzheimers coordinating center demonstrate that the classification accuracy of our proposed framework is 4% better than 6 well-known ensemble approaches as well as the standard stacking algorithm. Adequate coverage of more accurate diagnostic services can be provided by utilizing the wisdom of averaged physicians. This paper points out a new way to boost the primary care of Alzheimers disease from the view of machine learning.

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) will form the backbone of future next-generation intelligent transportation systems (ITS) providing travel comfort, road safety, along with a number of value-added services. Such a transformation---which will be fuelled by concomitant advances in technologies for machine learning (ML) and wireless communications---will enable a future vehicular ecosystem that is better featured and more efficient. However, there are lurking security problems related to the use of ML in such a critical setting where an incorrect ML decision may not only be a nuisance but can lead to loss of precious lives. In this paper, we present an in-depth overview of the various challenges associated with the application of ML in vehicular networks. In addition, we formulate the ML pipeline of CAVs and present various potential security issues associated with the adoption of ML methods. In particular, we focus on the perspective of adversarial ML attacks on CAVs and outline a solution to defend against adversarial attacks in multiple settings.

Paraphrasing exemplifies the ability to abstract semantic content from surface forms. Recent work on automatic paraphrasing is dominated by methods leveraging Machine Translation (MT) as an intermediate step. This contrasts with humans, who can paraphrase without being bilingual. This work proposes to learn paraphrasing models from an unlabeled monolingual corpus only. To that end, we propose a residual variant of vector-quantized variational auto-encoder. We compare with MT-based approaches on paraphrase identification, generation, and training augmentation. Monolingual paraphrasing outperforms unsupervised translation in all settings. Comparisons with supervised translation are more mixed: monolingual paraphrasing is interesting for identification and augmentation; supervised translation is superior for generation.

In rank aggregation, preferences from different users are summarized into a total order under the homogeneous data assumption. Thus, model misspecification arises and rank aggregation methods take some noise models into account. However, they all rely on certain noise model assumptions and cannot handle agnostic noises in the real world. In this paper, we propose CoarsenRank, which rectifies the underlying data distribution directly and aligns it to the homogeneous data assumption without involving any noise model. To this end, we define a neighborhood of the data distribution over which Bayesian inference of CoarsenRank is performed, and therefore the resultant posterior enjoys robustness against model misspecification. Further, we derive a tractable closed-form solution for CoarsenRank making it computationally efficient. Experiments on real-world datasets show that CoarsenRank is fast and robust, achieving consistent improvement over baseline methods.

This paper proposes a novel framework for fusing multi-temporal, multispectral satellite images and OpenStreetMap (OSM) data for the classification of local climate zones (LCZs). Feature stacking is the most commonly-used method of data fusion but does not consider the heterogeneity of multimodal optical images and OSM data, which becomes its main drawback. The proposed framework processes two data sources separately and then combines them at the model level through two fusion models (the landuse fusion model and building fusion model), which aim to fuse optical images with landuse and buildings layers of OSM data, respectively. In addition, a new approach to detecting building incompleteness of OSM data is proposed. The proposed framework was trained and tested using data from the 2017 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest, and further validated on one additional test set containing test samples which are manually labeled in Munich and New York. Experimental results have indicated that compared to the feature stacking-based baseline framework the proposed framework is effective in fusing optical images with OSM data for the classification of LCZs with high generalization capability on a large scale. The classification accuracy of the proposed framework outperforms the baseline framework by more than 6% and 2%, while testing on the test set of 2017 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest and the additional test set, respectively. In addition, the proposed framework is less sensitive to spectral diversities of optical satellite images and thus achieves more stable classification performance than state-of-the art frameworks.

We consider the Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) problem in Contextual Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs). Here, the reward of the environment, which is not available to the agent, depends on a static parameter referred to as the context. Each context defines an MDP (with a different reward signal), and the agent is provided demonstrations by an expert, for different contexts. The goal is to learn a mapping from contexts to rewards, such that planning with respect to the induced reward will perform similarly to the expert, even for unseen contexts. We suggest two learning algorithms for this scenario. (1) For rewards that are a linear function of the context, we provide a method that is guaranteed to return an $\epsilon$-optimal solution after a polynomial number of demonstrations. (2) For general reward functions, we propose black-box descent methods based on evolutionary strategies capable of working with nonlinear estimators (e.g., neural networks). We evaluate our algorithms in autonomous driving and medical treatment simulations and demonstrate their ability to learn and generalize to unseen contexts.

A'selfie robot' that is set to replace instant cameras and photo booths at parties has made its debut at at a UK wedding. The robot, designed by Birmingham-based firm, allowed wedding goers at a local reception to send photos it to themselves by email or text. Armed with AI software that can detect faces, the robot can'roam freely' around a room and stops to ask people if they would like their photo taken. It also has an infrared sensor that prevents it smashing into people and obstacles. Eva Photography Robot has been developed by a computer programmer in Birmingham to take selfies of partygoers and made its first debut at a wedding.

A startup in China will be the first company in the world to begin mass-producing self-driving delivery vehicles for some of the country's biggest commerce giants. According to a report from Bloomberg, the company Neolix has begun production on 1,000 level four autonomous vehicles that it plans to roll out in China throughout the next year. The tiny vans, which are essentially four-wheeled robots outfitted with trunks for storage, are capable of navigating their environment without any human pilot and have already garnered interest from two of China's biggest retailers: Huawei and JD.com. Neolix's robotic courier will cost around $30,000 each and could usher in a new era for e-commerce in China where companies like Alibaba have exploded in scope. In 2019 alone, Alibaba has generated about $152 billion.