This paper presents a white-box intention-aware decision-making for the handling of interactions between a pedestrian and an automated vehicle (AV) in an unsignalized street crossing scenario. Moreover, a design framework has been developed, which enables automated parameterization of the decision-making. This decision-making is designed in such a manner that it can understand pedestrians in urban traffic and can react accordingly to their intentions. That way, a human-like response to the actions of the pedestrian is ensured, leading to a higher acceptance of AVs. The core notion of this paper is that the intention prediction of the pedestrian to cross the street and decision-making are divided into two subsystems. On the one hand, the intention detection is a data-driven, black-box model. Thus, it can model the complex behavior of the pedestrians. On the other hand, the decision-making is a white-box model to ensure traceability and to enable a rapid verification and validation of AVs. This white-box decision-making provides human-like behavior and a guaranteed prevention of deadlocks. An additional benefit is that the proposed decision-making requires low computational resources only enabling real world usage. The automated parameterization uses a particle swarm optimization and compares two different models of the pedestrian: The social force model and the Markov decision process model. Consequently, a rapid design of the decision-making is possible and different pedestrian behaviors can be taken into account. The results reinforce the applicability of the proposed intention-aware decision-making.

Michael Scott, the protagonist from the US version of The Office, is using an AI recruiter to hire a receptionist. The text-based system asks applicants five questions that delve into how they responded to past work situations, including dealing with difficult colleagues and juggling competing work demands. Potential employees type their answers into a chat-style program that resembles a responsive help desk. The real – and unnerving – power of AI then kicks in, sending a score and traits profile to the employer, and a personality report to the applicant. This demonstration, by the Melbourne-based startup Sapia.ai,

It is the whiz-kid of the artificial intelligence (AI) world that others are trying to emulate. In the four months since its November 30 launch, ChatGPT has shown the ability to perform a wide range of tasks, from cracking the bar and medical licensing exams in the United States to writing emails and songs, building apps, and more. The fact that it is freely available for public use has opened up a plethora of opportunities previously thought beyond the realm of possibility of AI -- even though the app's makers have faced criticism for opacity around the programming they have used to train it. Developed by OpenAI, a company backed by Microsoft, ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in the world two months after its launch, with more than 100 million users by January. That early success has prompted Microsoft to integrate its Bing search engine and Edge browser with the technology running ChatGPT in the hope of improving the experience of users.

As black-box models increasingly power high-stakes applications, a variety of data-driven explanation methods have been introduced. Meanwhile, machine learning models are constantly challenged by distributional shifts. A question naturally arises: Are data-driven explanations robust against out-of-distribution data? Our empirical results show that even though predict correctly, the model might still yield unreliable explanations under distributional shifts. How to develop robust explanations against out-of-distribution data? To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end model-agnostic learning framework Distributionally Robust Explanations (DRE). The key idea is, inspired by self-supervised learning, to fully utilizes the inter-distribution information to provide supervisory signals for the learning of explanations without human annotation. Can robust explanations benefit the model's generalization capability? We conduct extensive experiments on a wide range of tasks and data types, including classification and regression on image and scientific tabular data. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the model's performance in terms of explanation and prediction robustness against distributional shifts.

This paper explores a novel application of textual semantic similarity to user-preference representation for rating prediction. The approach represents a user's preferences as a graph of textual snippets from review text, where the edges are defined by semantic similarity. This textual, memory-based approach to rating prediction enables review-based explanations for recommendations. The method is evaluated quantitatively, highlighting that leveraging text in this way outperforms both strong memory-based and model-based collaborative filtering baselines.

To represent the biological variability of clinical neuroimaging populations, it is vital to be able to combine data across scanners and studies. However, different MRI scanners produce images with different characteristics, resulting in a domain shift known as the `harmonisation problem'. Additionally, neuroimaging data is inherently personal in nature, leading to data privacy concerns when sharing the data. To overcome these barriers, we propose an Unsupervised Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) method, SFHarmony. Through modelling the imaging features as a Gaussian Mixture Model and minimising an adapted Bhattacharyya distance between the source and target features, we can create a model that performs well for the target data whilst having a shared feature representation across the data domains, without needing access to the source data for adaptation or target labels. We demonstrate the performance of our method on simulated and real domain shifts, showing that the approach is applicable to classification, segmentation and regression tasks, requiring no changes to the algorithm. Our method outperforms existing SFDA approaches across a range of realistic data scenarios, demonstrating the potential utility of our approach for MRI harmonisation and general SFDA problems. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/nkdinsdale/SFHarmony}.

Sponge examples are test-time inputs carefully optimized to increase energy consumption and latency of neural networks when deployed on hardware accelerators. In this work, we are the first to demonstrate that sponge examples can also be injected at training time, via an attack that we call sponge poisoning. This attack allows one to increase the energy consumption and latency of machine-learning models indiscriminately on each test-time input. We present a novel formalization for sponge poisoning, overcoming the limitations related to the optimization of test-time sponge examples, and show that this attack is possible even if the attacker only controls a few model updates; for instance, if model training is outsourced to an untrusted third-party or distributed via federated learning. Our extensive experimental analysis shows that sponge poisoning can almost completely vanish the effect of hardware accelerators. We also analyze the activations of poisoned models, identifying which components are more vulnerable to this attack. Finally, we examine the feasibility of countermeasures against sponge poisoning to decrease energy consumption, showing that sanitization methods may be overly expensive for most of the users.

As Smart Meters are collecting and transmitting household energy consumption data to Retail Energy Providers (REP), the main challenge is to ensure the effective use of fine-grained consumer data while ensuring data privacy. In this manuscript, we tackle this challenge for energy load consumption forecasting in regards to REPs which is essential to energy demand management, load switching and infrastructure development. Specifically, we note that existing energy load forecasting is centralized, which are not scalable and most importantly, vulnerable to data privacy threats. Besides, REPs are individual market participants and liable to ensure the privacy of their own customers. To address this issue, we propose a novel horizontal privacy-preserving federated learning framework for REPs energy load forecasting, namely FedREP. We consider a federated learning system consisting of a control centre and multiple retailers by enabling multiple REPs to build a common, robust machine learning model without sharing data, thus addressing critical issues such as data privacy, data security and scalability. For forecasting, we use a state-of-the-art Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network due to its ability to learn long term sequences of observations and promises of higher accuracy with time-series data while solving the vanishing gradient problem. Finally, we conduct extensive data-driven experiments using a real energy consumption dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed federated learning framework can achieve sufficient performance in terms of MSE ranging between 0.3 to 0.4 and is relatively similar to that of a centralized approach while preserving privacy and improving scalability.

Robotic grasping of 3D deformable objects is critical for real-world applications such as food handling and robotic surgery. Unlike rigid and articulated objects, 3D deformable objects have infinite degrees of freedom. Fully defining their state requires 3D deformation and stress fields, which are exceptionally difficult to analytically compute or experimentally measure. Thus, evaluating grasp candidates for grasp planning typically requires accurate, but slow 3D finite element method (FEM) simulation. Sampling-based grasp planning is often impractical, as it requires evaluation of a large number of grasp candidates. Gradient-based grasp planning can be more efficient, but requires a differentiable model to synthesize optimal grasps from initial candidates. Differentiable FEM simulators may fill this role, but are typically no faster than standard FEM. In this work, we propose learning a predictive graph neural network (GNN), DefGraspNets, to act as our differentiable model. We train DefGraspNets to predict 3D stress and deformation fields based on FEM-based grasp simulations. DefGraspNets not only runs up to 1500 times faster than the FEM simulator, but also enables fast gradient-based grasp optimization over 3D stress and deformation metrics. We design DefGraspNets to align with real-world grasp planning practices and demonstrate generalization across multiple test sets, including real-world experiments.

With growing security and privacy concerns in the Smart Grid domain, intrusion detection on critical energy infrastructure has become a high priority in recent years. To remedy the challenges of privacy preservation and decentralized power zones with strategic data owners, Federated Learning (FL) has contemporarily surfaced as a viable privacy-preserving alternative which enables collaborative training of attack detection models without requiring the sharing of raw data. To address some of the technical challenges associated with conventional synchronous FL, this paper proposes FeDiSa, a novel Semi-asynchronous Federated learning framework for power system faults and cyberattack Discrimination which takes into account communication latency and stragglers. Specifically, we propose a collaborative training of deep auto-encoder by Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition sub-systems which upload their local model updates to a control centre, which then perform a semi-asynchronous model aggregation for a new global model parameters based on a buffer system and a preset cut-off time. Experiments on the proposed framework using publicly available industrial control systems datasets reveal superior attack detection accuracy whilst preserving data confidentiality and minimizing the adverse effects of communication latency and stragglers. Furthermore, we see a 35% improvement in training time, thus validating the robustness of our proposed method.