Oceania
A simple but strong baseline for online continual learning: Repeated Augmented Rehearsal
Zhang, Yaqian, Pfahringer, Bernhard, Frank, Eibe, Bifet, Albert, Lim, Nick Jin Sean, Jia, Yunzhe
Online continual learning (OCL) aims to train neural networks incrementally from a non-stationary data stream with a single pass through data. Rehearsal-based methods attempt to approximate the observed input distributions over time with a small memory and revisit them later to avoid forgetting. Despite their strong empirical performance, rehearsal methods still suffer from a poor approximation of past data's loss landscape with memory samples. This paper revisits the rehearsal dynamics in online settings. We provide theoretical insights on the inherent memory overfitting risk from the viewpoint of biased and dynamic empirical risk minimization, and examine the merits and limits of repeated rehearsal. Inspired by our analysis, a simple and intuitive baseline, repeated augmented rehearsal (RAR), is designed to address the underfitting-overfitting dilemma of online rehearsal. Surprisingly, across four rather different OCL benchmarks, this simple baseline outperforms vanilla rehearsal by 9%-17% and also significantly improves the state-of-the-art rehearsal-based methods MIR, ASER, and SCR. We also demonstrate that RAR successfully achieves an accurate approximation of the loss landscape of past data and high-loss ridge aversion in its learning trajectory. Extensive ablation studies are conducted to study the interplay between repeated and augmented rehearsal, and reinforcement learning (RL) is applied to dynamically adjust the hyperparameters of RAR to balance the stability-plasticity trade-off online.
Transformers on Multilingual Clause-Level Morphology
Acikgoz, Emre Can, Chubakov, Tilek, Kural, Müge, Şahin, Gözde Gül, Yuret, Deniz
This paper describes our winning systems in MRL: The 1st Shared Task on Multilingual Clause-level Morphology (EMNLP 2022 Workshop) designed by KUIS AI NLP team. We present our work for all three parts of the shared task: inflection, reinflection, and analysis. We mainly explore transformers with two approaches: (i) training models from scratch in combination with data augmentation, and (ii) transfer learning with prefix-tuning at multilingual morphological tasks. Data augmentation significantly improves performance for most languages in the inflection and reinflection tasks. On the other hand, Prefix-tuning on a pre-trained mGPT model helps us to adapt analysis tasks in low-data and multilingual settings. While transformer architectures with data augmentation achieved the most promising results for inflection and reinflection tasks, prefix-tuning on mGPT received the highest results for the analysis task. Our systems received 1st place in all three tasks in MRL 2022.
Send in the drones: how to transform Australia's fight against bushfires and floods
In the wake of storms of the near future, swarms of drones could replace helicopters and planes, providing emergency crews with more rapid and accurate data on the coming threats of lightning-sparked bushfires or flash floods heading for homes. Authorities now rely on satellites, which require clear weather during daytime and may only provide resolution down to 10 metres. Alternatively, pilots of aircraft may burn as much as $3,400 worth of fuel an hour and often can't fly for safety reasons. Enter firms such as Sydney-based Carbonix, a developer that started out designing America's Cup racing yachts before changing tack to make drones capable of flying eight hours or longer with resolution fine enough to read words on a piece of paper. Dario Valenza, chief technology officer and founder of Carbonix, says thermal cameras on the drones could quickly verify fires started by lightning in remote regions, helping to direct fire crews to the scene "with only a few per cent of the fuel" used by conventional aircraft that might have their operations curtailed by weather.
Australia bets on facial recognition for problem gamblers
MELBOURNE – As guests arrive at eastern Australia's Warilla Hotel, a small camera equipped with facial recognition software scans their faces as part of a plan to tackle problem gambling. The tech -- which uses artificial intelligence 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. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites. If this does not resolve the issue or you are unable to add the domains to your allowlist, please see this support page.
Artificial Intelligence Goes Vegan - Forbes India
Artificial intelligence can be used to generate pro-vegan copy. Artificial intelligence can be used to generate pro-vegan copy. Image: Shutterstock What if, in the future, robots were the ones starting petitions to defend the rights of animals? It may sound like science fiction, yet artificial intelligence that can specifically generate vegan content has been developed in New Zealand. Will future advertising campaigns promoting meat-free alternatives or soy milk be written by artificial intelligence? The question is especially relevant because a New Zealand start-up has developed the very first AI tool capable of automatically generating content in support of veganism.
Online Anomalous Subtrajectory Detection on Road Networks with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Zhang, Qianru, Wang, Zheng, Long, Cheng, Huang, Chao, Yiu, Siu-Ming, Liu, Yiding, Cong, Gao, Shi, Jieming
Detecting anomalous trajectories has become an important task in many location-based applications. While many approaches have been proposed for this task, they suffer from various issues including (1) incapability of detecting anomalous subtrajectories, which are finer-grained anomalies in trajectory data, and/or (2) non-data driven, and/or (3) requirement of sufficient supervision labels which are costly to collect. In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement learning based solution called RL4OASD, which avoids all aforementioned issues of existing approaches. RL4OASD involves two networks, one responsible for learning features of road networks and trajectories and the other responsible for detecting anomalous subtrajectories based on the learned features, and the two networks can be trained iteratively without labeled data. Extensive experiments are conducted on two real datasets, and the results show that our solution can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods (with 20-30% improvement) and is efficient for online detection (it takes less than 0.1ms to process each newly generated data point).
Differentially Private Vertical Federated Learning
Ranbaduge, Thilina, Ding, Ming
A successful machine learning (ML) algorithm often relies on a large amount of high-quality data to train well-performed models. Supervised learning approaches, such as deep learning techniques, generate high-quality ML functions for real-life applications, however with large costs and human efforts to label training data. Recent advancements in federated learning (FL) allow multiple data owners or organisations to collaboratively train a machine learning model without sharing raw data. In this light, vertical FL allows organisations to build a global model when the participating organisations have vertically partitioned data. Further, in the vertical FL setting the participating organisation generally requires fewer resources compared to sharing data directly, enabling lightweight and scalable distributed training solutions. However, privacy protection in vertical FL is challenging due to the communication of intermediate outputs and the gradients of model update. This invites adversary entities to infer other organisations underlying data. Thus, in this paper, we aim to explore how to protect the privacy of individual organisation data in a differential privacy (DP) setting. We run experiments with different real-world datasets and DP budgets. Our experimental results show that a trade-off point needs to be found to achieve a balance between the vertical FL performance and privacy protection in terms of the amount of perturbation noise.
Seamful XAI: Operationalizing Seamful Design in Explainable AI
Ehsan, Upol, Liao, Q. Vera, Passi, Samir, Riedl, Mark O., Daume, Hal III
Mistakes in AI systems are inevitable, arising from both technical limitations and sociotechnical gaps. While black-boxing AI systems can make the user experience seamless, hiding the seams risks disempowering users to mitigate fallouts from AI mistakes. While Explainable AI (XAI) has predominantly tackled algorithmic opaqueness, we propose that seamful design can foster Humancentered XAI by strategically revealing sociotechnical and infrastructural mismatches. We introduce the notion of Seamful XAI by (1) conceptually transferring "seams" to the AI context and (2) developing a design process that helps stakeholders design with seams, thereby augmenting explainability and user agency. We explore this process with 43 AI practitioners and users, using a scenario-based co-design activity informed by real-world use cases. We share empirical insights, implications, and critical reflections on how this process can help practitioners anticipate and craft seams in AI, how seamfulness can improve explainability, empower end-users, and facilitate Responsible AI.
Hibikino-Musashi@Home 2022 Team Description Paper
Shiba, Tomoya, Ono, Tomohiro, Tokuno, Shoshi, Uchino, Issei, Okamoto, Masaya, Kanaoka, Daiju, Takahashi, Kazutaka, Tsukamoto, Kenta, Tsutsumi, Yoshiaki, Nakamura, Yugo, Fukuda, Yukiya, Hoji, Yusuke, Amano, Hayato, Kubota, Yuma, Koresawa, Mayu, Sakai, Yoshifumi, Takemoto, Ryogo, Tamai, Katsunori, Nakahara, Kazuo, Hayashi, Hiroyuki, Fujimatsu, Satsuki, Mizutani, Akinobu, Mizoguchi, Yusuke, Yoshimitsu, Yuhei, Suzuka, Mayo, Matsumoto, Ikuya, Yano, Yuga, Tanaka, Yuichiro, Morie, Takashi, Tamukoh, Hakaru
Our team, Hibikino-Musashi@Home (HMA), was founded in 2010. It is based in Japan in the Kitakyushu Science and Research Park. Since 2010, we have annually participated in the RoboCup@Home Japan Open competition in the open platform league (OPL).We participated as an open platform league team in the 2017 Nagoya RoboCup competition and as a domestic standard platform league (DSPL) team in the 2017 Nagoya, 2018 Montreal, 2019 Sydney, and 2021 Worldwide RoboCup competitions.We also participated in theWorld Robot Challenge (WRC) 2018 in the service-robotics category of the partner-robot challenge (real space) and won first place. Currently, we have 27 members from nine different laboratories within the Kyushu Institute of Technology and the university of Kitakyushu. In this paper, we introduce the activities that have been performed by our team and the technologies that we use.
Empirical Risk Minimization with Relative Entropy Regularization: Optimality and Sensitivity Analysis
Perlaza, Samir M., Bisson, Gaetan, Esnaola, Iñaki, Jean-Marie, Alain, Rini, Stefano
The optimality and sensitivity of the empirical risk minimization problem with relative entropy regularization (ERM-RER) are investigated for the case in which the reference is a sigma-finite measure instead of a probability measure. This generalization allows for a larger degree of flexibility in the incorporation of prior knowledge over the set of models. In this setting, the interplay of the regularization parameter, the reference measure, the risk function, and the empirical risk induced by the solution of the ERM-RER problem is characterized. This characterization yields necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a regularization parameter that achieves an arbitrarily small empirical risk with arbitrarily high probability. The sensitivity of the expected empirical risk to deviations from the solution of the ERM-RER problem is studied. The sensitivity is then used to provide upper and lower bounds on the expected empirical risk. Moreover, it is shown that the expectation of the sensitivity is upper bounded, up to a constant factor, by the square root of the lautum information between the models and the datasets.