Deep classifiers are known to rely on spurious features $\unicode{x2013}$ patterns which are correlated with the target on the training data but not inherently relevant to the learning problem, such as the image backgrounds when classifying the foregrounds. In this paper we evaluate the amount of information about the core (non-spurious) features that can be decoded from the representations learned by standard empirical risk minimization (ERM) and specialized group robustness training. Following recent work on Deep Feature Reweighting (DFR), we evaluate the feature representations by re-training the last layer of the model on a held-out set where the spurious correlation is broken. On multiple vision and NLP problems, we show that the features learned by simple ERM are highly competitive with the features learned by specialized group robustness methods targeted at reducing the effect of spurious correlations. Moreover, we show that the quality of learned feature representations is greatly affected by the design decisions beyond the training method, such as the model architecture and pre-training strategy. On the other hand, we find that strong regularization is not necessary for learning high quality feature representations. Finally, using insights from our analysis, we significantly improve upon the best results reported in the literature on the popular Waterbirds, CelebA hair color prediction and WILDS-FMOW problems, achieving 97%, 92% and 50% worst-group accuracies, respectively.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is already widely applied to applications such as robotics, but it is only sparsely used in sensor management. In this paper, we apply the popular Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) approach to a multi-agent UAV tracking scenario. While recorded data of real scenarios can accurately reflect the real world, the required amount of data is not always available. Simulation data, however, is typically cheap to generate, but the utilized target behavior is often naive and only vaguely represents the real world. In this paper, we utilize multi-agent RL to jointly generate protagonistic and antagonistic policies and overcome the data generation problem, as the policies are generated on-the-fly and adapt continuously. This way, we are able to clearly outperform baseline methods and robustly generate competitive policies. In addition, we investigate explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) by interpreting feature saliency and generating an easy-to-read decision tree as a simplified policy.

Healthcare digitalization requires effective applications of human sensors, when various parameters of the human body are instantly monitored in everyday life due to the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular, machine learning (ML) sensors for the prompt diagnosis of COVID-19 are an important option for IoT application in healthcare and ambient assisted living (AAL). Determining a COVID-19 infected status with various diagnostic tests and imaging results is costly and time-consuming. This study provides a fast, reliable and cost-effective alternative tool for the diagnosis of COVID-19 based on the routine blood values (RBVs) measured at admission. The dataset of the study consists of a total of 5296 patients with the same number of negative and positive COVID-19 test results and 51 routine blood values. In this study, 13 popular classifier machine learning models and the LogNNet neural network model were exanimated. The most successful classifier model in terms of time and accuracy in the detection of the disease was the histogram-based gradient boosting (HGB) (accuracy: 100%, time: 6.39 sec). The HGB classifier identified the 11 most important features (LDL, cholesterol, HDL-C, MCHC, triglyceride, amylase, UA, LDH, CK-MB, ALP and MCH) to detect the disease with 100% accuracy. In addition, the importance of single, double and triple combinations of these features in the diagnosis of the disease was discussed. We propose to use these 11 features and their binary combinations as important biomarkers for ML sensors in the diagnosis of the disease, supporting edge computing on Arduino and cloud IoT service.

Dr. Andrew Ng is a globally recognized leader in AI. He is Founder and CEO of DeepLearning.AI, Founder and CEO of Landing AI, General Partner at AI Fund, Chairman and Co-Founder of Coursera and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University's Computer Science Department. He has authored or co-authored over 200 research papers in machine learning, robotics and related fields. In 2013, he was named to the Time 100 list of the most influential persons in the world.

The US has taken unprecedented steps to limit the sale of advanced computer chips to China, escalating efforts to contain Beijing's tech and military ambitions. The moves are designed to cut off supplies of critical technology to China that may be used across sectors including advanced computing and weapons manufacture. The crackdown marks the most significant action by Washington against Beijing on technology exports in decades, escalating a trade battle between the world's two most powerful economies. After the export controls, Apple reportedly put on hold plans to use memory chips from China's Yangtze Memory Technologies in its products. The Nikkei newspaper said Apple had planned to use the chips in iPhones sold in China.

Scientific extreme summarization (TLDR) aims to form ultra-short summaries of scientific papers. Previous efforts on curating scientific TLDR datasets failed to scale up due to the heavy human annotation and domain expertise required. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach to automatically extracting TLDR summaries for scientific papers from their citation texts. Based on the proposed approach, we create a new benchmark CiteSum without human annotation, which is around 30 times larger than the previous human-curated dataset SciTLDR. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of CiteSum, examining its data characteristics and establishing strong baselines. We further demonstrate the usefulness of CiteSum by adapting models pre-trained on CiteSum (named CITES) to new tasks and domains with limited supervision. For scientific extreme summarization, CITES outperforms most fully-supervised methods on SciTLDR without any fine-tuning and obtains state-of-the-art results with only 128 examples. For news extreme summarization, CITES achieves significant gains on XSum over its base model (not pre-trained on CiteSum), e.g., +7.2 ROUGE-1 zero-shot performance and state-of-the-art few-shot performance. For news headline generation, CITES performs the best among unsupervised and zero-shot methods on Gigaword. Our dataset and code can be found at https://github.com/morningmoni/CiteSum.

In this paper, we propose a new task of sub-event generation for an unseen process to evaluate the understanding of the coherence of sub-event actions and objects. To solve the problem, we design SubeventWriter, a sub-event sequence generation framework with a coherence controller. Given an unseen process, the framework can iteratively construct the sub-event sequence by generating one sub-event at each iteration. We also design a very effective coherence controller to decode more coherent sub-events. As our extensive experiments and analysis indicate, SubeventWriter can generate more reliable and meaningful sub-event sequences for unseen processes.

With the booming of pre-trained transformers, representation-based models based on Siamese transformer encoders have become mainstream techniques for efficient text matching. However, these models suffer from severe performance degradation due to the lack of interaction between the text pair, compared with interaction-based models. Prior arts attempt to address this through performing extra interaction for Siamese encoded representations, while the interaction during encoding is still ignored. To remedy this, we propose a \textit{Virtual} InteRacTion mechanism (VIRT) to transfer interactive knowledge from interaction-based models into Siamese encoders through attention map distillation. As a train-time-only component, VIRT could completely maintain the high efficiency of the Siamese structure and brings no extra computation cost during inference. To fully utilize the learned interactive knowledge, we further design a VIRT-adapted interaction strategy. Experimental results on multiple text matching datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art representation-based models. What's more, VIRT can be easily integrated into existing representation-based methods to achieve further improvements.

We introduce OpenEarthMap, a benchmark dataset, for global high-resolution land cover mapping. OpenEarthMap consists of 2.2 million segments of 5000 aerial and satellite images covering 97 regions from 44 countries across 6 continents, with manually annotated 8-class land cover labels at a 0.25--0.5m ground sampling distance. Semantic segmentation models trained on the OpenEarthMap generalize worldwide and can be used as off-the-shelf models in a variety of applications. We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art methods for unsupervised domain adaptation and present challenging problem settings suitable for further technical development. We also investigate lightweight models using automated neural architecture search for limited computational resources and fast mapping. The dataset is available at https://open-earth-map.org.

We propose to extend the concept of private information retrieval by allowing for distortion in the retrieval process and relaxing the perfect privacy requirement at the same time. In particular, we study the trade-off between download rate, distortion, and user privacy leakage, and show that in the limit of large file sizes this trade-off can be captured via a novel information-theoretical formulation for datasets with a known distribution. Moreover, for scenarios where the statistics of the dataset is unknown, we propose a new deep learning framework by leveraging a generative adversarial network approach, which allows the user to learn efficient schemes from the data itself. We evaluate the performance of the scheme on a synthetic Gaussian dataset as well as on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and LSUN datasets. For the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and LSUN datasets, the data-driven approach significantly outperforms a nonlearning-based scheme which combines source coding with the download of multiple files.