The choice of learning rate (LR) functions and policies has evolved from a simple fixed LR to the decaying LR and the cyclic LR, aiming to improve the accuracy and reduce the training time of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). This paper presents a systematic approach to selecting and composing an LR policy for effective DNN training to meet desired target accuracy and reduce training time within the pre-defined training iterations. It makes three original contributions. First, we develop an LR tuning mechanism for auto-verification of a given LR policy with respect to the desired accuracy goal under the pre-defined training time constraint. Second, we develop an LR policy recommendation system (LRBench) to select and compose good LR policies from the same and/or different LR functions through dynamic tuning, and avoid bad choices, for a given learning task, DNN model and dataset. Third, we extend LRBench by supporting different DNN optimizers and show the significant mutual impact of different LR policies and different optimizers. Evaluated using popular benchmark datasets and different DNN models (LeNet, CNN3, ResNet), we show that our approach can effectively deliver high DNN test accuracy, outperform the existing recommended default LR policies, and reduce the DNN training time by 1.6$\sim$6.7$\times$ to meet a targeted model accuracy.

Healthcare data are inherently multimodal, including electronic health records (EHR), medical images, and multi-omics data. Combining these multimodal data sources contributes to a better understanding of human health and provides optimal personalized healthcare. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, particularly machine learning (ML), enable the fusion of these different data modalities to provide multimodal insights. To this end, in this scoping review, we focus on synthesizing and analyzing the literature that uses AI techniques to fuse multimodal medical data for different clinical applications. More specifically, we focus on studies that only fused EHR with medical imaging data to develop various AI methods for clinical applications. We present a comprehensive analysis of the various fusion strategies, the diseases and clinical outcomes for which multimodal fusion was used, the ML algorithms used to perform multimodal fusion for each clinical application, and the available multimodal medical datasets. We followed the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. We searched Embase, PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar to retrieve relevant studies. We extracted data from 34 studies that fulfilled the inclusion criteria. In our analysis, a typical workflow was observed: feeding raw data, fusing different data modalities by applying conventional machine learning (ML) or deep learning (DL) algorithms, and finally, evaluating the multimodal fusion through clinical outcome predictions. Specifically, early fusion was the most used technique in most applications for multimodal learning (22 out of 34 studies). We found that multimodality fusion models outperformed traditional single-modality models for the same task. Disease diagnosis and prediction were the most common clinical outcomes (reported in 20 and 10 studies, respectively) from a clinical outcome perspective.

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) aims to transfer classification capability from seen to unseen classes. Recent methods have proved that generalization and specialization are two essential abilities to achieve good performance in ZSL. However, focusing on only one of the abilities may result in models that are either too general with degraded classification ability or too specialized to generalize to unseen classes. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end network, termed as BGSNet, which equips and balances generalization and specialization abilities at the instance and dataset level. Specifically, BGSNet consists of two branches: the Generalization Network (GNet), which applies episodic meta-learning to learn generalized knowledge, and the Balanced Specialization Network (BSNet), which adopts multiple attentive extractors to extract discriminative features and achieve instance-level balance. A novel self-adjusted diversity loss is designed to optimize BSNet with redundancy reduced and diversity boosted. We further propose a differentiable dataset-level balance and update the weights in a linear annealing schedule to simulate network pruning and thus obtain the optimal structure for BSNet with dataset-level balance achieved. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate our model's effectiveness. Sufficient component ablations prove the necessity of integrating and balancing generalization and specialization abilities.

Deep neural networks often suffer from poor generalization caused by complex and non-convex loss landscapes. One of the popular solutions is Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), which smooths the loss landscape via minimizing the maximized change of training loss when adding a perturbation to the weight. However, we find the indiscriminate perturbation of SAM on all parameters is suboptimal, which also results in excessive computation, i.e., double the overhead of common optimizers like Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective training scheme coined as Sparse SAM (SSAM), which achieves sparse perturbation by a binary mask. To obtain the sparse mask, we provide two solutions which are based onFisher information and dynamic sparse training, respectively. In addition, we theoretically prove that SSAM can converge at the same rate as SAM, i.e., $O(\log T/\sqrt{T})$. Sparse SAM not only has the potential for training acceleration but also smooths the loss landscape effectively. Extensive experimental results on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ImageNet-1K confirm the superior efficiency of our method to SAM, and the performance is preserved or even better with a perturbation of merely 50% sparsity. Code is availiable at https://github.com/Mi-Peng/Sparse-Sharpness-Aware-Minimization.

Multi-fidelity modeling and learning are important in physical simulation-related applications. It can leverage both low-fidelity and high-fidelity examples for training so as to reduce the cost of data generation while still achieving good performance. While existing approaches only model finite, discrete fidelities, in practice, the fidelity choice is often continuous and infinite, which can correspond to a continuous mesh spacing or finite element length. In this paper, we propose Infinite Fidelity Coregionalization (IFC). Given the data, our method can extract and exploit rich information within continuous, infinite fidelities to bolster the prediction accuracy. Our model can interpolate and/or extrapolate the predictions to novel fidelities, which can be even higher than the fidelities of training data. Specifically, we introduce a low-dimensional latent output as a continuous function of the fidelity and input, and multiple it with a basis matrix to predict high-dimensional solution outputs. We model the latent output as a neural Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) to capture the complex relationships within and integrate information throughout the continuous fidelities. We then use Gaussian processes or another ODE to estimate the fidelity-varying bases. For efficient inference, we reorganize the bases as a tensor, and use a tensor-Gaussian variational posterior to develop a scalable inference algorithm for massive outputs. We show the advantage of our method in several benchmark tasks in computational physics.

Recent advances in federated learning have demonstrated its promising capability to learn on decentralized datasets. However, a considerable amount of work has raised concerns due to the potential risks of adversaries participating in the framework to poison the global model for an adversarial purpose. This paper investigates the feasibility of model poisoning for backdoor attacks through rare word embeddings of NLP models. In text classification, less than 1% of adversary clients suffices to manipulate the model output without any drop in the performance on clean sentences. For a less complex dataset, a mere 0.1% of adversary clients is enough to poison the global model effectively. We also propose a technique specialized in the federated learning scheme called Gradient Ensemble, which enhances the backdoor performance in all our experimental settings.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a potentially transformational technology that will have broad social, economic, national security, and geopolitical implications for the United States and the world.1 AI is not one particular technology but a general-purpose technology combining software and hardware in systems that enable technologies (machine learning, knowledge representation, and other forms of computerized approximation of human intelligence). This general-purpose nature means that AI could have wide-ranging economic impacts across manufacturing, transportation, health, education, and many other sectors. In 2018, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that AI could add around 16 percent, or $13 trillion, to global output by 2030.2 Since then COVID-19 has further accelerated the use of AI. While the United States is the world leader in AI, China is catching up fast (and may lead in some areas) and other governments are expanding their own AI capacity. Rather than a zero-sum game, many such efforts can be additive, benefiting global welfare. The U.S. can encourage and support AI efforts that seek to develop and compete on fair terms. Other national policies--China's above all--seek to erect barriers to free and open development of AI, appropriating the benefits for their national champions and applying AI as a geopolitical lever. Such policies could distort the development and benefits of AI for humanity, make the world less secure for the U.S. and allies, and markets less receptive to U.S. products and services. To foster AI policies that support development of beneficial, trustworthy, and robust artificial intelligence will require international engagement by the United States and cooperation among like-minded democracies that are leaders in artificial intelligence.

In the UK, a quarter of people who take their own lives were in contact with a health professional the previous week, and most have spoken to someone within the last month. Yet assessing patient suicide risk remains extremely difficult. There were 5,219 recorded deaths by suicide in England in 2021. While the suicide rate in England and Wales has declined by around 31% since 1981, the majority of this decrease happened before 2000. Suicide is three times more common in men than in women, and this gap has increased over time. A study conducted in October 2022, led by the Black Dog Institute in the University of New South Wales, found artificial intelligence (AI) models outperformed clinical risk assessments.

Crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic continuously threaten our world and emotionally affect billions of people worldwide in distinct ways. Understanding the triggers leading to people's emotions is of crucial importance. Social media posts can be a good source of such analysis, yet these texts tend to be charged with multiple emotions, with triggers scattering across multiple sentences. This paper takes a novel angle, namely, emotion detection and trigger summarization, aiming to both detect perceived emotions in text, and summarize events and their appraisals that trigger each emotion. To support this goal, we introduce CovidET (Emotions and their Triggers during Covid-19), a dataset of ~1,900 English Reddit posts related to COVID-19, which contains manual annotations of perceived emotions and abstractive summaries of their triggers described in the post. We develop strong baselines to jointly detect emotions and summarize emotion triggers. Our analyses show that CovidET presents new challenges in emotion-specific summarization, as well as multi-emotion detection in long social media posts.

Strategic Decision-Making is always challenging because it is inherently uncertain, ambiguous, risky, and complex. It is the art of possibility. We develop a systematic taxonomy of decision-making frames that consists of 6 bases, 18 categorical, and 54 frames. We aim to lay out the computational foundation that is possible to capture a comprehensive landscape view of a strategic problem. Compared with traditional models, it covers irrational, non-rational and rational frames c dealing with certainty, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, chaos, and ignorance.