State abstraction and function approximation are vital components used by reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to efficiently solve complex control problems when exact computations are intractable due to large state and action spaces. Over the past few decades, state abstraction in RL has evolved from the use of pre-determined and problemspecific features [18, 74, 9, 69, 64, 42, 58] to the use of adaptive basis functions learnt by solving an isolated regression problem [53, 47, 39, 56], and more recently to the use of neural network-based Deep-RL algorithms that embed state abstraction in successive layers of a neural network [5, 7]. Feature abstraction results in information loss, and the resulting state features might not satisfy the controlled Markov property, even if this property is satisfied by the corresponding state [70]. One approach to counteract the loss of the Markov property is to generate the features using the history of state-action pairs, and empirical evidence suggests that using such history-based features are beneficial in practice [52]. However, a theoretical characterisation of history-based Deep-RL algorithms for fully observed Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is largely absent form the literature.

Australian surf lifesavers are increasingly using drones to spot sharks at the beach before they get too close to swimmers. But just how reliable are they? Discerning whether that dark splodge in the water is a shark or just, say, seaweed isn't always straightforward and, in reasonable conditions, drone pilots generally make the right call only 60% of the time. While this has implications for public safety, it can also lead to unnecessary beach closures and public alarm. Engineers are trying to boost the accuracy of these shark-spotting drones with artificial intelligence (AI).

GitHub Copilot is a cloud-based artificial intelligence tool developed by GitHub and OpenAI to assist users of Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains integrated development environments (IDEs) by autocompleting code.[1] Currently available by subscription to individual developers, the tool was first announced by GitHub on 29 June 2021, and works best for users coding in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go.[2] On 29 June 2021, GitHub announced GitHub Copilot for technical preview in the Visual Studio Code development environment.[1][3] On 26 October 2021, GitHub Copilot was released as a plugin on the JetBrains marketplace.[4] On 27 October 2021, GitHub released the GitHub Copilot Neovim plugin as a public repository.[5] On 29 March 2022, GitHub officially announced Copilot's availability for the Visual Studio 2022 IDE.[6]

As guests arrive at eastern Australia's Warilla Hotel, a small camera equipped with facial recognition software scans their faces as part of a scheme to tackle problem gambling. The tech – which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify addicts who have asked to be barred from betting sites – is set to be rolled out across gambling venues in the state of New South Wales next year. Supporters say it will help curb problem gambling in a country where the addiction affects about 1 percent of the population and annual losses run to billions of dollars. But the technology is "invasive, dangerous and undermines our most basic and fundamental rights", said Samantha Floreani, programme lead at the non-profit group Digital Rights Watch. "We should be exceptionally wary of introducing it into more areas of our lives and it should not be seen as a simple quick-fix solution to complex social issues," she said.

Deep neural networks are usually initialized with random weights, with adequately selected initial variance to ensure stable signal propagation during training. However, selecting the appropriate variance becomes challenging especially as the number of layers grows. In this work, we replace random weight initialization with a fully deterministic initialization scheme, viz., ZerO, which initializes the weights of networks with only zeros and ones (up to a normalization factor), based on identity and Hadamard transforms. Through both theoretical and empirical studies, we demonstrate that ZerO is able to train networks without damaging their expressivity. Applying ZerO on ResNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on various datasets, including ImageNet, which suggests random weights may be unnecessary for network initialization. In addition, ZerO has many benefits, such as training ultra deep networks (without batch-normalization), exhibiting low-rank learning trajectories that result in low-rank and sparse solutions, and improving training reproducibility.

The explosive growth of dynamic and heterogeneous data traffic brings great challenges for 5G and beyond mobile networks. To enhance the network capacity and reliability, we propose a learning-based dynamic time-frequency division duplexing (D-TFDD) scheme that adaptively allocates the uplink and downlink time-frequency resources of base stations (BSs) to meet the asymmetric and heterogeneous traffic demands while alleviating the inter-cell interference. We formulate the problem as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP) that maximizes the long-term expected sum rate under the users' packet dropping ratio constraints. In order to jointly optimize the global resources in a decentralized manner, we propose a federated reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm named federated Wolpertinger deep deterministic policy gradient (FWDDPG) algorithm. The BSs decide their local time-frequency configurations through RL algorithms and achieve global training via exchanging local RL models with their neighbors under a decentralized federated learning framework. Specifically, to deal with the large-scale discrete action space of each BS, we adopt a DDPG-based algorithm to generate actions in a continuous space, and then utilize Wolpertinger policy to reduce the mapping errors from continuous action space back to discrete action space. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithm to benchmark algorithms with respect to system sum rate.

In this paper, we take a first step towards answering the question of how to design fair machine learning algorithms that are robust to adversarial attacks. Using a minimax framework, we aim to design an adversarially robust fair regression model that achieves optimal performance in the presence of an attacker who is able to add a carefully designed adversarial data point to the dataset or perform a rank-one attack on the dataset. By solving the proposed nonsmooth nonconvex-nonconcave minimax problem, the optimal adversary as well as the robust fairness-aware regression model are obtained. For both synthetic data and real-world datasets, numerical results illustrate that the proposed adversarially robust fair models have better performance on poisoned datasets than other fair machine learning models in both prediction accuracy and group-based fairness measure.

Recent works that revealed the vulnerability of dialogue state tracking (DST) models to distributional shifts have made holistic comparisons on robustness and qualitative analyses increasingly important for understanding their relative performance. We present our findings from standardized and comprehensive DST diagnoses, which have previously been sparse and uncoordinated, using our toolkit, CheckDST, a collection of robustness tests and failure mode analytics. We discover that different classes of DST models have clear strengths and weaknesses, where generation models are more promising for handling language variety while span-based classification models are more robust to unseen entities. Prompted by this discovery, we also compare checkpoints from the same model and find that the standard practice of selecting checkpoints using validation loss/accuracy is prone to overfitting and each model class has distinct patterns of failure. Lastly, we demonstrate how our diagnoses motivate a pre-finetuning procedure with non-dialogue data that offers comprehensive improvements to generation models by alleviating the impact of distributional shifts through transfer learning.

Under climate change, the increasing frequency, intensity, and spatial extent of drought events lead to higher socio-economic costs. However, the relationships between the hydro-meteorological indicators and drought impacts are not identified well yet because of the complexity and data scarcity. In this paper, we proposed a framework based on the extreme gradient model (XGBoost) for Texas to predict multi-category drought impacts and connected a typical drought indicator, Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), to the text-based impacts from the Drought Impact Reporter (DIR). The preliminary results of this study showed an outstanding performance of the well-trained models to assess drought impacts on agriculture, fire, society & public health, plants & wildlife, as well as relief, response & restrictions in Texas. It also provided a possibility to appraise drought impacts using hydro-meteorological indicators with the proposed framework in the United States, which could help drought risk management by giving additional information and improving the updating frequency of drought impacts. Our interpretation results using the Shapley additive explanation (SHAP) interpretability technique revealed that the rules guiding the predictions of XGBoost comply with domain expertise knowledge around the role that SPI indicators play around drought impacts.

In Neural Machine Translation (NMT), each token prediction is conditioned on the source sentence and the target prefix (what has been previously translated at a decoding step). However, previous work on interpretability in NMT has mainly focused solely on source sentence tokens' attributions. Therefore, we lack a full understanding of the influences of every input token (source sentence and target prefix) in the model predictions. In this work, we propose an interpretability method that tracks input tokens' attributions for both contexts. Our method, which can be extended to any encoder-decoder Transformer-based model, allows us to better comprehend the inner workings of current NMT models. We apply the proposed method to both bilingual and multilingual Transformers and present insights into their behaviour.