AI is everywhere: inside smartphones, on wearable devices, at hospitals and airports, and even in cars. The technology is shaking up economies, pushing companies to adapt and forcing governments to take a closer look at its implications. As AI becomes more ubiquitous, it is also polarizing public opinion, with fears over man's ability to control the technology, its long-term impact on labour markets and concerns over data collection and privacy. The late physicist and author Stephen Hawking warned that AI could be the "worst event in the history of our civilization." Similarly alarmist, Elon Musk, founder of electric car manufacturer Tesla described AI as more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

In imitation learning, behavior learning is generally done using the features extracted from the demonstration data. Recent deep learning algorithms enable the development of machine learning methods that can get high dimensional data as an input. In this work, we use imitation learning to teach the robot to dribble the ball to the goal. We use B-Human robot software to collect demonstration data and a deep convolutional network to represent the policies. We use top and bottom camera images of the robot as input and speed commands as outputs. The CNN policy learns the mapping between the series of images and speed commands. In 3D realistic robotics simulator experiments, we show that the robot is able to learn to search the ball and dribble the ball, but it struggles to align to the goal. The best-proposed policy model learns to score 4 goals out of 20 test episodes.

Recent results at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have pointed to enhanced physics capabilities through the improvement of the real-time event processing techniques. Machine learning methods are ubiquitous and have proven to be very powerful in LHC physics, and particle physics as a whole. However, exploration of the use of such techniques in low-latency, low-power FPGA hardware has only just begun. FPGA-based trigger and data acquisition (DAQ) systems have extremely low, sub-microsecond latency requirements that are unique to particle physics. We present a case study for neural network inference in FPGAs focusing on a classifier for jet substructure which would enable, among many other physics scenarios, searches for new dark sector particles and novel measurements of the Higgs boson. While we focus on a specific example, the lessons are far-reaching. We develop a package based on High-Level Synthesis (HLS) called hls4ml to build machine learning models in FPGAs. The use of HLS increases accessibility across a broad user community and allows for a drastic decrease in firmware development time. We map out FPGA resource usage and latency versus neural network hyperparameters to identify the problems in particle physics that would benefit from performing neural network inference with FPGAs. For our example jet substructure model, we fit well within the available resources of modern FPGAs with a latency on the scale of 100 ns.

With the proliferation of social media, fashion inspired from celebrities, reputed designers as well as fashion influencers has shortened the cycle of fashion design and manufacturing. However, with the explosion of fashion related content and large number of user generated fashion photos, it is an arduous task for fashion designers to wade through social media photos and create a digest of trending fashion. This necessitates deep parsing of fashion photos on social media to localize and classify multiple fashion items from a given fashion photo. While object detection competitions such as MSCOCO have thousands of samples for each of the object categories, it is quite difficult to get large labeled datasets for fast fashion items. Moreover, state-of-the-art object detectors do not have any functionality to ingest large amount of unlabeled data available on social media in order to fine tune object detectors with labeled datasets. In this work, we show application of a generic object detector, that can be pretrained in an unsupervised manner, on 24 categories from recently released Open Images V4 dataset. We first train the base architecture of the object detector using unsupervisd learning on 60K unlabeled photos from 24 categories gathered from social media, and then subsequently fine tune it on 8.2K labeled photos from Open Images V4 dataset. On 300 X 300 image inputs, we achieve 72.7% mAP on a test dataset of 2.4K photos while performing 11% to 17% better as compared to the state-of-the-art object detectors. We show that this improvement is due to our choice of architecture that lets us do unsupervised learning and that performs significantly better in identifying small objects.

We consider the problem of improving fairness when one lacks access to a dataset labeled with protected groups, making it difficult to take advantage of strategies that can improve fairness but require protected group labels, either at training or runtime. To address this, we investigate improving fairness metrics for proxy groups, and test whether doing so results in improved fairness for the true sensitive groups. Results on benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrate that such a proxy fairness strategy can work well in practice. However, we caution that the effectiveness likely depends on the choice of fairness metric, as well as how aligned the proxy groups are with the true protected groups in terms of the constrained model parameters.

Generative models are known to be difficult to assess. Recent works, especially on generative adversarial networks (GANs), produce good visual samples of varied categories of images. However, the validation of their quality is still difficult to define and there is no existing agreement on the best evaluation process. This paper aims at making a step toward an objective evaluation process for generative models. It presents a new method to assess a trained generative model by evaluating its capacity to teach a classification task to a discriminative model. Our approach evaluates generators on a testing set by using, as a proxy, a neural network classifier trained on generated samples. Neural networks classifier are known to be difficult to train on an unbalanced or biased dataset. We use this weakness as a proxy to evaluate generated data and hence generative models. Our assumption is that to train a successful neural network classifier, the training data should contain meaningful and varied information, that fit and capture the whole distribution of the testing dataset. By comparing results with different generated datasets we can classify generative models. The motivation of this approach is also to evaluate if generative models can help discriminative neural networks to learn, i.e., measure if training on generated data is able to make a model successful at testing on real settings. Our experiments compare different generators from the VAE and GAN framework on MNIST and fashion MNIST datasets. The results of our different experiments show that none of the generative models are able to replace completely true data to train a discriminative model. It also shows that the initial GAN and WGAN are the best choices to generate comparable datasets on MNIST and fashion MNIST but suffer from instability. VAE and CVAE are a bit less well-performing but are much more stable.

Since the machine learning techniques are improving rapidly, it has been shown that the image recognition techniques in deep neural networks can be used to detect jet substructure. And it turns out that deep neural networks can match or outperform traditional approach of expert features. However, there are disadvantages such as sparseness of jet images. Based on the natural tree-like structure of jet sequential clustering, the recursive neural networks (RecNNs), which embed jet clustering history recursively as in natural language processing, have a better behavior when confronted with these problems. We thus try to explore the performance of RecNNs in quark/gluon discrimination. The results show that RecNNs work better than the baseline boosted decision tree (BDT) by a few percent in gluon rejection rate. However, extra implementation of particle flow identification only increases the performance slightly. We also experimented on some relevant aspects which might influence the performance of the networks. It shows that even taking only particle flow identification as input feature without any extra information on momentum or angular position is already giving a fairly good result, which indicates that the most of the information for quark/gluon discrimination is already included in the tree-structure itself. As a bonus, a rough up/down quark jets discrimination is also explored.

Accurately predicting when and where ambulance call-outs occur can reduce response times and ensure the patient receives urgent care sooner. Here we present a novel method for ambulance demand prediction using Gaussian process regression (GPR) in time and geographic space. The method exhibits superior accuracy to MEDIC, a method which has been used in industry. The use of GPR has additional benefits such as the quantification of uncertainty with each prediction, the choice of kernel functions to encode prior knowledge and the ability to capture spatial correlation. Measures to increase the utility of GPR in the current context, with large training sets and a Poisson-distributed output, are outlined.

Deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarial attacks. In computer vision, well-crafted perturbations to images can cause neural networks to make mistakes such as identifying a panda as a gibbon or confusing a cat with a computer. Previous adversarial examples have been designed to degrade performance of models or cause machine learning models to produce specific outputs chosen ahead of time by the attacker. We introduce adversarial attacks that instead reprogram the target model to perform a task chosen by the attacker---without the attacker needing to specify or compute the desired output for each test-time input. This attack is accomplished by optimizing for a single adversarial perturbation, of unrestricted magnitude, that can be added to all test-time inputs to a machine learning model in order to cause the model to perform a task chosen by the adversary when processing these inputs---even if the model was not trained to do this task. These perturbations can be thus considered a program for the new task. We demonstrate adversarial reprogramming on six ImageNet classification models, repurposing these models to perform a counting task, as well as two classification tasks: classification of MNIST and CIFAR-10 examples presented within the input to the ImageNet model.

Many applications in machine learning require optimizing a function whose true gradient is unknown, but where surrogate gradient information (directions that may be correlated with, but not necessarily identical to, the true gradient) is available instead. This arises when an approximate gradient is easier to compute than the full gradient (e.g. in meta-learning or unrolled optimization), or when a true gradient is intractable and is replaced with a surrogate (e.g. in certain reinforcement learning applications, or when using synthetic gradients). We propose Guided Evolutionary Strategies, a method for optimally using surrogate gradient directions along with random search. We define a search distribution for evolutionary strategies that is elongated along a guiding subspace spanned by the surrogate gradients. This allows us to estimate a descent direction which can then be passed to a first-order optimizer. We analytically and numerically characterize the tradeoffs that result from tuning how strongly the search distribution is stretched along the guiding subspace, and we use this to derive a setting of the hyperparameters that works well across problems. Finally, we apply our method to example problems including truncated unrolled optimization and a synthetic gradient problem, demonstrating improvement over both standard evolutionary strategies and first-order methods that directly follow the surrogate gradient.