Trajectory prediction is an important task to support safe and intelligent behaviours in autonomous systems. Many advanced approaches have been proposed over the years with improved spatial and temporal feature extraction. However, human behaviour is naturally multimodal and uncertain: given the past trajectory and surrounding environment information, an agent can have multiple plausible trajectories in the future. To tackle this problem, an essential task named multimodal trajectory prediction (MTP) has recently been studied, which aims to generate a diverse, acceptable and explainable distribution of future predictions for each agent. In this paper, we present the first survey for MTP with our unique taxonomies and comprehensive analysis of frameworks, datasets and evaluation metrics. In addition, we discuss multiple future directions that can help researchers develop novel multimodal trajectory prediction systems.

Due to the extensive growth of information available online, recommender systems play a more significant role in serving people's interests. Traditional recommender systems mostly use an accuracy-focused approach to produce recommendations. Today's research suggests that this single-dimension approach can lead the system to be biased against a series of items with certain attributes. Biased recommendations across groups of items can endanger the interests of item providers along with causing user dissatisfaction with the system. This study aims to manage a new type of intersectional bias regarding the geographical origin and popularity of items in the output of state-of-the-art collaborative filtering recommender algorithms. We introduce an algorithm called MFAIR, a multi-facet post-processing bias mitigation algorithm to alleviate these biases. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets of movies and books, enriched with the items' continents of production, show that the proposed algorithm strikes a reasonable balance between accuracy and both types of the mentioned biases. According to the results, our proposed approach outperforms a well-known competitor with no or only a slight loss of efficiency.

Prediction has recently been considered as a promising approach to meet low-latency and high-reliability requirements in long-distance haptic communications. However, most of the existing methods did not take features of tasks and the relationship between prediction and communication into account. In this paper, we propose a task-oriented prediction and communication co-design framework, where the reliability of the system depends on prediction errors and packet losses in communications. The goal is to minimize the required radio resources subject to the low-latency and high-reliability requirements of various tasks. Specifically, we consider the just noticeable difference (JND) as a performance metric for the haptic communication system. We collect experiment data from a real-world teleoperation testbed and use time-series generative adversarial networks (TimeGAN) to generate a large amount of synthetic data. This allows us to obtain the relationship between the JND threshold, prediction horizon, and the overall reliability including communication reliability and prediction reliability. We take 5G New Radio as an example to demonstrate the proposed framework and optimize bandwidth allocation and data rates of devices. Our numerical and experimental results show that the proposed framework can reduce wireless resource consumption up to 77.80% compared with a task-agnostic benchmark.

Automation is a term thrown around with abandon these days. Indeed, everything seems to include an element of it, and those that don't are seen as slightly archaic and of a quaintly bygone era. Put simply, automation – a process driven by machine learning and AI technologies – streamlines processes, enabling them to be carried out much faster and with far greater accuracy. For an industry like insurance, where the bulk of the donkey work has, for centuries, involved trawling manually through data to decipher results, automation is seen as the silver bullet to the industry's inefficiencies. In the world of technology, everything moves with lightning speed, and the sheer volume of automation technology adoptions since 2020 within the insurance industry has been staggering.

Castle Romeo was the code name given to one of the tests in the Operation Castle series of American ... [ ] thermonuclear tests beginning in March 1954 at Bikini Atoll. The ultimate objective was to test designs for an aircraft deliverable thermonuclear weapon. Microsoft announced it was placing new limits on its Bing chatbot following a week of users reporting some extremely disturbing conversations with the new AI tool. The chatbot expressed a desire to steal nuclear access codes and told one reporter it loved him. "Starting today, the chat experience will be capped at 50 chat turns per day and 5 chat turns per session. A turn is a conversation exchange which contains both a user question and a reply from Bing," the company said in a blog post on Friday.

Determining the most informative features for predicting the overall survival of patients diagnosed with high-grade gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine neoplasms is crucial to improve individual treatment plans for patients, as well as the biological understanding of the disease. Recently developed ensemble feature selectors like the Repeated Elastic Net Technique for Feature Selection (RENT) and the User-Guided Bayesian Framework for Feature Selection (UBayFS) allow the user to identify such features in datasets with low sample sizes. While RENT is purely data-driven, UBayFS is capable of integrating expert knowledge a priori in the feature selection process. In this work we compare both feature selectors on a dataset comprising of 63 patients and 134 features from multiple sources, including basic patient characteristics, baseline blood values, tumor histology, imaging, and treatment information. Our experiments involve data-driven and expert-driven setups, as well as combinations of both. We use findings from clinical literature as a source of expert knowledge. Our results demonstrate that both feature selectors allow accurate predictions, and that expert knowledge has a stabilizing effect on the feature set, while the impact on predictive performance is limited. The features WHO Performance Status, Albumin, Platelets, Ki-67, Tumor Morphology, Total MTV, Total TLG, and SUVmax are the most stable and predictive features in our study.

We initiate the study of how to perturb the reward in a zero-sum Markov game with two players to induce a desirable Nash equilibrium, namely arbitrating. Such a problem admits a bi-level optimization formulation. The lower level requires solving the Nash equilibrium under a given reward function, which makes the overall problem challenging to optimize in an end-to-end way. We propose a backpropagation scheme that differentiates through the Nash equilibrium, which provides the gradient feedback for the upper level. In particular, our method only requires a black-box solver for the (regularized) Nash equilibrium (NE). We develop the convergence analysis for the proposed framework with proper black-box NE solvers and demonstrate the empirical successes in two multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) environments.

Zero-shot information extraction (IE) aims to build IE systems from the unannotated text. It is challenging due to involving little human intervention. Challenging but worthwhile, zero-shot IE reduces the time and effort that data labeling takes. Recent efforts on large language models (LLMs, e.g., GPT-3, ChatGPT) show promising performance on zero-shot settings, thus inspiring us to explore prompt-based methods. In this work, we ask whether strong IE models can be constructed by directly prompting LLMs. Specifically, we transform the zero-shot IE task into a multi-turn question-answering problem with a two-stage framework (ChatIE). With the power of ChatGPT, we extensively evaluate our framework on three IE tasks: entity-relation triple extract, named entity recognition, and event extraction. Empirical results on six datasets across two languages show that ChatIE achieves impressive performance and even surpasses some full-shot models on several datasets (e.g., NYT11-HRL). We believe that our work could shed light on building IE models with limited resources.

The task of causal representation learning aims to uncover latent higher-level causal representations that affect lower-level observations. Identifying true latent causal representations from observed data, while allowing instantaneous causal relations among latent variables, remains a challenge, however. To this end, we start from the analysis of three intrinsic properties in identifying latent space from observations: transitivity, permutation indeterminacy, and scaling indeterminacy. We find that transitivity acts as a key role in impeding the identifiability of latent causal representations. To address the unidentifiable issue due to transitivity, we introduce a novel identifiability condition where the underlying latent causal model satisfies a linear-Gaussian model, in which the causal coefficients and the distribution of Gaussian noise are modulated by an additional observed variable. Under some mild assumptions, we can show that the latent causal representations can be identified up to trivial permutation and scaling. Furthermore, based on this theoretical result, we propose a novel method, termed Structural caUsAl Variational autoEncoder, which directly learns latent causal representations and causal relationships among them, together with the mapping from the latent causal variables to the observed ones. We show that the proposed method learns the true parameters asymptotically. Experimental results on synthetic and real data demonstrate the identifiability and consistency results and the efficacy of the proposed method in learning latent causal representations.

Despite the strong performance of current NLP models, they can be brittle against adversarial attacks. To enable effective learning against adversarial inputs, we introduce the use of rationale models that can explicitly learn to ignore attack tokens. We find that the rationale models can successfully ignore over 90% of attack tokens. This approach leads to consistent sizable improvements ($\sim$10%) over baseline models in robustness on three datasets for both BERT and RoBERTa, and also reliably outperforms data augmentation with adversarial examples alone. In many cases, we find that our method is able to close the gap between model performance on a clean test set and an attacked test set and hence reduce the effect of adversarial attacks.