Human Sensing, a field that leverages technology to monitor human activities, psycho-physiological states, and interactions with the environment, enhances our understanding of human behavior and drives the development of advanced services that improve overall quality of life. However, its reliance on detailed and often privacy-sensitive data as the basis for its machine learning (ML) models raises significant legal and ethical concerns. The recently proposed ML approach of Federated Learning (FL) promises to alleviate many of these concerns, as it is able to create accurate ML models without sending raw user data to a central server. While FL has demonstrated its usefulness across a variety of areas, such as text prediction and cyber security, its benefits in Human Sensing are under-explored, given the particular challenges in this domain. This survey conducts a comprehensive analysis of the current state-of-the-art studies on FL in Human Sensing, and proposes a taxonomy and an eight-dimensional assessment for FL approaches. Through the eight-dimensional assessment, we then evaluate whether the surveyed studies consider a specific FL-in-Human-Sensing challenge or not. Finally, based on the overall analysis, we discuss open challenges and highlight five research aspects related to FL in Human Sensing that require urgent research attention. Our work provides a comprehensive corpus of FL studies and aims to assist FL practitioners in developing and evaluating solutions that effectively address the real-world complexities of Human Sensing.

Adding explanations to recommender systems is said to have multiple benefits, such as increasing user trust or system transparency. Previous work from other application areas suggests that specific user characteristics impact the users' perception of the explanation. However, we rarely find this type of evaluation for recommender systems explanations. This paper addresses this gap by surveying 124 papers in which recommender systems explanations were evaluated in user studies. We analyzed their participant descriptions and study results where the impact of user characteristics on the explanation effects was measured. Our findings suggest that the results from the surveyed studies predominantly cover specific users who do not necessarily represent the users of recommender systems in the evaluation domain. This may seriously hamper the generalizability of any insights we may gain from current studies on explanations in recommender systems. We further find inconsistencies in the data reporting, which impacts the reproducibility of the reported results. Hence, we recommend actions to move toward a more inclusive and reproducible evaluation.

The insurance company uses different factors to classify the policyholders. In this study, we apply several machine learning models such as nearest neighbour and logistic regression to the Actuarial Challenge dataset used by Qazvini (2019) to classify liability insurance policies into two groups: 1 - policies with claims and 2 - policies without claims. The applications of Machine Learning (ML) models and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in areas such as medical diagnosis, economics, banking, fraud detection, agriculture, etc, have been known for quite a number of years. ML models have changed these industries remarkably. However, despite their high predictive power and their capability to identify nonlinear transformations and interactions between variables, they are slowly being introduced into the insurance industry and actuarial fields.

This paper introduces the Lagrange Policy for Continuous Actions (LPCA), a reinforcement learning algorithm specifically designed for weakly coupled MDP problems with continuous action spaces. LPCA addresses the challenge of resource constraints dependent on continuous actions by introducing a Lagrange relaxation of the weakly coupled MDP problem within a neural network framework for Q-value computation. This approach effectively decouples the MDP, enabling efficient policy learning in resource-constrained environments. We present two variations of LPCA: LPCA-DE, which utilizes differential evolution for global optimization, and LPCA-Greedy, a method that incrementally and greadily selects actions based on Q-value gradients. Comparative analysis against other state-of-the-art techniques across various settings highlight LPCA's robustness and efficiency in managing resource allocation while maximizing rewards.

As the content on the Internet continues to grow, many new dynamically changing and heterogeneous sources of data constantly emerge. A conventional search engine cannot crawl and index at the same pace as the expansion of the Internet. Moreover, a large portion of the data on the Internet is not accessible to traditional search engines. Distributed Information Retrieval (DIR) is a viable solution to this as it integrates multiple shards (resources) and provides a unified access to them. Resource selection is a key component of DIR systems. There is a rich body of literature on resource selection approaches for DIR. A key limitation of the existing approaches is that they primarily use term-based statistical features and do not generally model resource-query and resource-resource relationships. In this paper, we propose a graph neural network (GNN) based approach to learning-to-rank that is capable of modeling resource-query and resource-resource relationships. Specifically, we utilize a pre-trained language model (PTLM) to obtain semantic information from queries and resources. Then, we explicitly build a heterogeneous graph to preserve structural information of query-resource relationships and employ GNN to extract structural information. In addition, the heterogeneous graph is enriched with resource-resource type of edges to further enhance the ranking accuracy. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our proposed approach is highly effective in resource selection. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 6.4% to 42% on various performance metrics.

Millions of vulnerable consumer IoT devices in home networks are the enabler for cyber crimes putting user privacy and Internet security at risk. Internet service providers (ISPs) are best poised to play key roles in mitigating risks by automatically inferring active IoT devices per household and notifying users of vulnerable ones. Developing a scalable inference method that can perform robustly across thousands of home networks is a non-trivial task. This paper focuses on the challenges of developing and applying data-driven inference models when labeled data of device behaviors is limited and the distribution of data changes (concept drift) across time and space domains. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) We collect and analyze network traffic of 24 types of consumer IoT devices from 12 real homes over six weeks to highlight the challenge of temporal and spatial concept drifts in network behavior of IoT devices; (2) We analyze the performance of two inference strategies, namely "global inference" (a model trained on a combined set of all labeled data from training homes) and "contextualized inference" (several models each trained on the labeled data from a training home) in the presence of concept drifts; and (3) To manage concept drifts, we develop a method that dynamically applies the ``closest'' model (from a set) to network traffic of unseen homes during the testing phase, yielding better performance in 20% of scenarios.

Automated Machine Learning with ensembling (or AutoML with ensembling) seeks to automatically build ensembles of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to achieve qualitative predictions. Ensemble of DNNs are well known to avoid over-fitting but they are memory and time consuming approaches. Therefore, an ideal AutoML would produce in one single run time different ensembles regarding accuracy and inference speed. While previous works on AutoML focus to search for the best model to maximize its generalization ability, we rather propose a new AutoML to build a larger library of accurate and diverse individual models to then construct ensembles. First, our extensive benchmarks show asynchronous Hyperband is an efficient and robust way to build a large number of diverse models to combine them. Then, a new ensemble selection method based on a multi-objective greedy algorithm is proposed to generate accurate ensembles by controlling their computing cost. Finally, we propose a novel algorithm to optimize the inference of the DNNs ensemble in a GPU cluster based on allocation optimization. The produced AutoML with ensemble method shows robust results on two datasets using efficiently GPU clusters during both the training phase and the inference phase. Deep Neural networks (DNNs) are notoriously difficult to tune, train, and ensemble to achieve state-of-the-art results. Automatic machine learning with ensembling or "AutoML+ensembling" tools provide a simple interface to train and evaluate many ensembles of DNNs to achieve high accuracy by reducing overfitting. Nowadays, multiple researchers and practitioners have well understood the benefit of ensembling DNNs. Further, several winners and top performers on challenges routinely use ensembles to improve accuracy. However, ensembles of DNNs suffer from three main limitations to be widely deployed in research and industrial applications.

Ensembles of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved qualitative predictions but they are computing and memory intensive. Therefore, the demand is growing to make them answer a heavy workload of requests with available computational resources. Unlike recent initiatives on inference servers and inference frameworks, which focus on the prediction of single DNNs, we propose a new software layer to serve with flexibility and efficiency ensembles of DNNs. Our inference system is designed with several technical innovations. First, we propose a novel procedure to find a good allocation matrix between devices (CPUs or GPUs) and DNN instances. It runs successively a worst-fit to allocate DNNs into the memory devices and a greedy algorithm to optimize allocation settings and speed up the ensemble. Second, we design the inference system based on multiple processes to run asynchronously: batching, prediction, and the combination rule with an efficient internal communication scheme to avoid overhead. Experiments show the flexibility and efficiency under extreme scenarios: It successes to serve an ensemble of 12 heavy DNNs into 4 GPUs and at the opposite, one single DNN multi-threaded into 16 GPUs. It also outperforms the simple baseline consisting of optimizing the batch size of DNNs by a speedup up to 2.7X on the image classification task.

Abstract-- Deep Reinforcement Learning (or just "RL") is In this paper, we aim to answer them. Then, we aspects: intermittent nature of renewable energy, variations evaluate the computing cost of the building phase and the in demand, low storage abilities, [1] [2] significant room inference phase running on modern computing nodes. Deep This paper first demonstrates experimental evidence that Reinforcement Learning has shown great success in scaling homogeneous ensembles with averaging as a combination up model-free reinforcement learning algorithms to the rule are more performant and stabler than one individual RL challenging Markov Decision Processes [4] [5] and is a agent and other ensemble procedures. Second, we perform promising method to solve issues of electricity control [6]. Finally, due to the simplicity To alleviate this, we analyze and propose an ensemble of of the proposed procedure and the stabilization effects, our deep reinforcement learning agent procedures and discuss its experiments are easily reproducible.

We introduce an implementation of an extension of Answer Set Programming (ASP) with language constructs from dynamic (and temporal) logic that provides an expressive computational framework for modeling dynamic applications. Starting from logical foundations, provided by dynamic and temporal equilibrium logics over finite linear traces, we develop a translation of dynamic formulas into temporal logic programs. This provides us with a normal form result establishing the strong equivalence of formulas in different logics. Our translation relies on the introduction of auxiliary atoms to guarantee polynomial space complexity and to provide an embedding that is doomed to be impossible over the same language. Finally, the reduction of dynamic formulas to temporal logic programs allows us to extend ASP with both approaches in a uniform way and to implement both extensions via temporal ASP solvers such as telingo