In many practical applications, such as fraud detection, credit risk modeling or medical decision making, classification models for assigning instances to a predefined set of classes are required to be both precise as well as interpretable. Linear modeling methods such as logistic regression are often adopted, since they offer an acceptable balance between precision and interpretability. Linear methods, however, are not well equipped to handle categorical predictors with high-cardinality or to exploit non-linear relations in the data. As a solution, data preprocessing methods such as weight-of-evidence are typically used for transforming the predictors. The binning procedure that underlies the weight-of-evidence approach, however, has been little researched and typically relies on ad-hoc or expert driven procedures. The objective in this paper, therefore, is to propose a formalized, data-driven and powerful method. To this end, we explore the discretization of continuous variables through the binning of spline functions, which allows for capturing non-linear effects in the predictor variables and yields highly interpretable predictors taking only a small number of discrete values. Moreover, we extend upon the weight-of-evidence approach and propose to estimate the proportions using shrinkage estimators. Together, this offers an improved ability to exploit both non-linear and categorical predictors for achieving increased classification precision, while maintaining interpretability of the resulting model and decreasing the risk of overfitting. We present the results of a series of experiments in a fraud detection setting, which illustrate the effectiveness of the presented approach. We facilitate reproduction of the presented results and adoption of the proposed approaches by providing both the dataset and the code for implementing the experiments and the presented approach.

Existing weighting methods for treatment effect estimation are often built upon the idea of propensity scores or covariate balance. They usually impose strong assumptions on treatment assignment or outcome model to obtain unbiased estimation, such as linearity or specific functional forms, which easily leads to the major drawback of model mis-specification. In this paper, we aim to alleviate these issues by developing a distribution learning-based weighting method. We first learn the true underlying distribution of covariates conditioned on treatment assignment, then leverage the ratio of covariates' density in the treatment group to that of the control group as the weight for estimating treatment effects. Specifically, we propose to approximate the distribution of covariates in both treatment and control groups through invertible transformations via change of variables. To demonstrate the superiority, robustness, and generalizability of our method, we conduct extensive experiments using synthetic and real data. From the experiment results, we find that our method for estimating average treatment effect on treated (ATT) with observational data outperforms several cutting-edge weighting-only benchmarking methods, and it maintains its advantage under a doubly-robust estimation framework that combines weighting with some advanced outcome modeling methods.

Astounding results from transformer models on natural language tasks have intrigued the vision community to study their application to computer vision problems. This has led to exciting progress on a number of tasks while requiring minimal inductive biases in the model design. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the transformer models in the computer vision discipline and assumes little to no prior background in the field. We start with an introduction to fundamental concepts behind the success of transformer models i.e., self-supervision and self-attention. Transformer architectures leverage self-attention mechanisms to encode long-range dependencies in the input domain which makes them highly expressive. Since they assume minimal prior knowledge about the structure of the problem, self-supervision using pretext tasks is applied to pre-train transformer models on large-scale (unlabelled) datasets. The learned representations are then fine-tuned on the downstream tasks, typically leading to excellent performance due to the generalization and expressivity of encoded features. We cover extensive applications of transformers in vision including popular recognition tasks (e.g., image classification, object detection, action recognition, and segmentation), generative modeling, multi-modal tasks (e.g., visual-question answering and visual reasoning), video processing (e.g., activity recognition, video forecasting), low-level vision (e.g., image super-resolution and colorization) and 3D analysis (e.g., point cloud classification and segmentation). We compare the respective advantages and limitations of popular techniques both in terms of architectural design and their experimental value. Finally, we provide an analysis on open research directions and possible future works.

We investigate large-scale latent variable models (LVMs) for neural story generation -- an under-explored application for open-domain long text -- with objectives in two threads: generation effectiveness and controllability. LVMs, especially the variational autoencoder (VAE), have achieved both effective and controllable generation through exploiting flexible distributional latent representations. Recently, Transformers and its variants have achieved remarkable effectiveness without explicit latent representation learning, thus lack satisfying controllability in generation. In this paper, we advocate to revive latent variable modeling, essentially the power of representation learning, in the era of Transformers to enhance controllability without hurting state-of-the-art generation effectiveness. Specifically, we integrate latent representation vectors with a Transformer-based pre-trained architecture to build conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE). Model components such as encoder, decoder and the variational posterior are all built on top of pre-trained language models -- GPT2 specifically in this paper. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art conditional generation ability of our model, as well as its excellent representation learning capability and controllability.

The Multi-armed bandit offer the advantage to learn and exploit the already learnt knowledge at the same time. This capability allows this approach to be applied in different domains, going from clinical trials where the goal is investigating the effects of different experimental treatments while minimizing patient losses, to adaptive routing where the goal is to minimize the delays in a network. This article provides a review of the recent results on applying bandit to real-life scenario and summarize the state of the art for each of these fields. Different techniques has been proposed to solve this problem setting, like epsilon-greedy, Upper confident bound (UCB) and Thompson Sampling (TS). We are showing here how this algorithms were adapted to solve the different problems of exploration exploitation.

In Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), encoding information in a suboptimal or erroneous way can impact the quality of representations based on later elements in the sequence and subsequently lead to wrong predictions and a worse model performance. In humans, challenging cases like garden path sentences (an instance of this being the infamous "The horse raced past the barn fell") can lead their language understanding astray. However, they are still able to correct their representation accordingly and recover when new information is encountered. Inspired by this, I propose an augmentation to standard RNNs in form of a gradient-based correction mechanism: This way I hope to enable such models to dynamically adapt their inner representation of a sentence, adding a way to correct deviations as soon as they occur. This could therefore lead to more robust models using more flexible representations, even during inference time. I conduct different experiments in the context of language modeling, where the impact of using such a mechanism is examined in detail. To this end, I look at modifications based on different kinds of time-dependent error signals and how they influence the model performance. Furthermore, this work contains a study of the model's confidence in its predictions during training and for challenging test samples and the effect of the manipulation thereof. Lastly, I also study the difference in behavior of these novel models compared to a standard LSTM baseline and investigate error cases in detail to identify points of future research. I show that while the proposed approach comes with promising theoretical guarantees and an appealing intuition, it is only able to produce minor improvements over the baseline due to challenges in its practical application and the efficacy of the tested model variants.

In recent years, ride-hailing services have been increasingly prevalent as they provide huge convenience for passengers. As a fundamental problem, the timely prediction of passenger demands in different regions is vital for effective traffic flow control and route planning. As both spatial and temporal patterns are indispensable passenger demand prediction, relevant research has evolved from pure time series to graph-structured data for modeling historical passenger demand data, where a snapshot graph is constructed for each time slot by connecting region nodes via different relational edges (e.g., origin-destination relationship, geographical distance, etc.). Consequently, the spatiotemporal passenger demand records naturally carry dynamic patterns in the constructed graphs, where the edges also encode important information about the directions and volume (i.e., weights) of passenger demands between two connected regions. However, existing graph-based solutions fail to simultaneously consider those three crucial aspects of dynamic, directed, and weighted (DDW) graphs, leading to limited expressiveness when learning graph representations for passenger demand prediction. Therefore, we propose a novel spatiotemporal graph attention network, namely Gallat (Graph prediction with all attention) as a solution. In Gallat, by comprehensively incorporating those three intrinsic properties of DDW graphs, we build three attention layers to fully capture the spatiotemporal dependencies among different regions across all historical time slots. Moreover, the model employs a subtask to conduct pretraining so that it can obtain accurate results more quickly. We evaluate the proposed model on real-world datasets, and our experimental results demonstrate that Gallat outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

Various neural-based methods have been proposed so far for joint mention detection and coreference resolution. However, existing works on coreference resolution are mainly dependent on filtered mention representation, while other spans are largely neglected. In this paper, we aim at increasing the utilization rate of data and investigating whether those eliminated spans are totally useless, or to what extent they can improve the performance of coreference resolution. To achieve this, we propose a mention representation refining strategy where spans highly related to mentions are well leveraged using a pointer network for representation enhancing. Notably, we utilize an additional loss term in this work to encourage the diversity between entity clusters. Experimental results on the document-level CoNLL-2012 Shared Task English dataset show that eliminated spans are indeed much effective and our approach can achieve competitive results when compared with previous state-of-the-art in coreference resolution.

Research and development of electroencephalogram (EEG) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have advanced rapidly, partly due to deeper understanding of the brain and wide adoption of sophisticated machine learning approaches for decoding the EEG signals. However, recent studies have shown that machine learning algorithms are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. This article proposes to use narrow period pulse for poisoning attack of EEG-based BCIs, which is implementable in practice and has never been considered before. One can create dangerous backdoors in the machine learning model by injecting poisoning samples into the training set. Test samples with the backdoor key will then be classified into the target class specified by the attacker. What most distinguishes our approach from previous ones is that the backdoor key does not need to be synchronized with the EEG trials, making it very easy to implement. The effectiveness and robustness of the backdoor attack approach is demonstrated, highlighting a critical security concern for EEG-based BCIs and calling for urgent attention to address it.

A riddle is a mystifying, puzzling question about everyday concepts. For example, the riddle "I have five fingers but I am not alive. What am I?" asks about the concept of a glove. Solving riddles is a challenging cognitive process for humans, in that it requires complex commonsense reasoning abilities and an understanding of figurative language. However, there are currently no commonsense reasoning datasets that test these abilities. We propose RiddleSense, a novel multiple-choice question answering challenge for benchmarking higher-order commonsense reasoning models, which is the first large dataset for riddle-style commonsense question answering, where the distractors are crowdsourced from human annotators. We systematically evaluate a wide range of reasoning models over it and point out that there is a large gap between the best-supervised model and human performance -- pointing to interesting future research for higher-order commonsense reasoning and computational creativity.