Machine learning (ML) continues to permeate all layers of academia, industry and society. Despite its successes, mental frameworks to capture and represent machine learning workflows in a consistent and coherent manner are lacking. For instance, the de facto process modeling standard, Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), managed by the Object Management Group, is widely accepted and applied. However, it is short of specific support to represent machine learning workflows. Further, the number of heterogeneous tools for deployment of machine learning solutions can easily overwhelm practitioners. Research is needed to align the process from modeling to deploying ML workflows. We analyze requirements for standard based conceptual modeling for machine learning workflows and their serverless deployment. Confronting the shortcomings with respect to consistent and coherent modeling of ML workflows in a technology independent and interoperable manner, we extend BPMN's Meta-Object Facility (MOF) metamodel and the corresponding notation and introduce BPMN4sML (BPMN for serverless machine learning). Our extension BPMN4sML follows the same outline referenced by the Object Management Group (OMG) for BPMN. We further address the heterogeneity in deployment by proposing a conceptual mapping to convert BPMN4sML models to corresponding deployment models using TOSCA. BPMN4sML allows technology-independent and interoperable modeling of machine learning workflows of various granularity and complexity across the entire machine learning lifecycle. It aids in arriving at a shared and standardized language to communicate ML solutions. Moreover, it takes the first steps toward enabling conversion of ML workflow model diagrams to corresponding deployment models for serverless deployment via TOSCA.

With recent improvements in natural language generation (NLG) models for various applications, it has become imperative to have the means to identify and evaluate whether NLG output is only sharing verifiable information about the external world. In this work, we present a new evaluation framework entitled Attributable to Identified Sources (AIS) for assessing the output of natural language generation models, when such output pertains to the external world. We first define AIS and introduce a two-stage annotation pipeline for allowing annotators to appropriately evaluate model output according to AIS guidelines. We empirically validate this approach on generation datasets spanning three tasks (two conversational QA datasets, a summarization dataset, and a table-to-text dataset) via human evaluation studies that suggest that AIS could serve as a common framework for measuring whether model-generated statements are supported by underlying sources. We release guidelines for the human evaluation studies.

Extracting knowledge from unlabeled texts using machine learning algorithms can be complex. Document categorization and information retrieval are two applications that may benefit from unsupervised learning (e.g., text clustering and topic modeling), including exploratory data analysis. However, the unsupervised learning paradigm poses reproducibility issues. The initialization can lead to variability depending on the machine learning algorithm. Furthermore, the distortions can be misleading when regarding cluster geometry. Amongst the causes, the presence of outliers and anomalies can be a determining factor. Despite the relevance of initialization and outlier issues for text clustering and topic modeling, the authors did not find an in-depth analysis of them. This survey provides a systematic literature review (2011-2022) of these subareas and proposes a common terminology since similar procedures have different terms. The authors describe research opportunities, trends, and open issues. The appendices summarize the theoretical background of the text vectorization, the factorization, and the clustering algorithms that are directly or indirectly related to the reviewed works.

In the Machine Learning research community, there is a consensus regarding the relationship between model complexity and the required amount of data and computation power. In real world applications, these computational requirements are not always available, motivating research on regularization methods. In addition, current and past research have shown that simpler classification algorithms can reach state-of-the-art performance on computer vision tasks given a robust method to artificially augment the training dataset. Because of this, data augmentation techniques became a popular research topic in recent years. However, existing data augmentation methods are generally less transferable than other regularization methods. In this paper we identify the main areas of application of data augmentation algorithms, the types of algorithms used, significant research trends, their progression over time and research gaps in data augmentation literature. To do this, the related literature was collected through the Scopus database. Its analysis was done following network science, text mining and exploratory analysis approaches. We expect readers to understand the potential of data augmentation, as well as identify future research directions and open questions within data augmentation research.

Over the weekend, debris from an out-of-control Chinese rocket crashed to Earth over the Indian and Pacific oceans. There had been fears that pieces of the 23-tonne Long March 5B booster could come down over a populated area, but experts had said the probability of this was extremely low. Nevertheless, NASA hit out at China by accusing Beijing of not sharing the'specific trajectory information' needed to calculate where possible debris might fall. Elsewhere at the weekend, a 10ft (3m) piece of space junk – thought to be from one of Elon Musk's spacecrafts – crashed into a farmer's property in Australia at around 15,500mph (25,000km/h). The object, believed to be part of the SpaceX Crew-1 craft, was found in a sheep paddock by a farmer living on a large property in the Snowy Mountains in New South Wales.

Surveillance of health care–associated infection (HAI) is the foundation of infection control and one of the first steps in infection prevention. Traditionally, however, surveillance is performed by infection control professionals (ICPs) who manually review patients' records, searching for defined criteria. Such an approach leaves room for subjective interpretation, resulting in low interrater reliability. Moreover, depending on the surveillance method used -- for instance, a search based on antimicrobial results -- it may have low sensitivity. In Brazil, leaders at Tacchini Hospital and Qualis, a startup that offers infection control advisory and antimicrobial stewardship, have developed a machine-learning–algorithm robot that has been demonstrated to be a reliable tool for identifying patients with HAIs using a semiautomated method.

Foundation models offer an exciting new paradigm for constructing models with out-of-the-box embeddings and a few labeled examples. However, it is not clear how to best apply foundation models without labeled data. A potential approach is to fuse foundation models with weak supervision frameworks, which use weak label sources -- pre-trained models, heuristics, crowd-workers -- to construct pseudolabels. The challenge is building a combination that best exploits the signal available in both foundation models and weak sources. We propose Liger, a combination that uses foundation model embeddings to improve two crucial elements of existing weak supervision techniques. First, we produce finer estimates of weak source quality by partitioning the embedding space and learning per-part source accuracies. Second, we improve source coverage by extending source votes in embedding space. Despite the black-box nature of foundation models, we prove results characterizing how our approach improves performance and show that lift scales with the smoothness of label distributions in embedding space. On six benchmark NLP and video tasks, Liger outperforms vanilla weak supervision by 14.1 points, weakly-supervised kNN and adapters by 11.8 points, and kNN and adapters supervised by traditional hand labels by 7.2 points.

Recently, pioneer research works have proposed a large number of acoustic features (log power spectrogram, linear frequency cepstral coefficients, constant Q cepstral coefficients, etc.) for audio deepfake detection, obtaining good performance, and showing that different subbands have different contributions to audio deepfake detection. However, this lacks an explanation of the specific information in the subband, and these features also lose information such as phase. Inspired by the mechanism of synthetic speech, the fundamental frequency (F0) information is used to improve the quality of synthetic speech, while the F0 of synthetic speech is still too average, which differs significantly from that of real speech. It is expected that F0 can be used as important information to discriminate between bonafide and fake speech, while this information cannot be used directly due to the irregular distribution of F0. Insteadly, the frequency band containing most of F0 is selected as the input feature. Meanwhile, to make full use of the phase and full-band information, we also propose to use real and imaginary spectrogram features as complementary input features and model the disjoint subbands separately. Finally, the results of F0, real and imaginary spectrogram features are fused. Experimental results on the ASVspoof 2019 LA dataset show that our proposed system is very effective for the audio deepfake detection task, achieving an equivalent error rate (EER) of 0.43%, which surpasses almost all systems.

We perform quantum process tomography (QPT) for both discrete- and continuous-variable quantum systems by learning a process representation using Kraus operators. The Kraus form ensures that the reconstructed process is completely positive. To make the process trace-preserving, we use a constrained gradient-descent (GD) approach on the so-called Stiefel manifold during optimization to obtain the Kraus operators. Our ansatz uses a few Kraus operators to avoid direct estimation of large process matrices, e.g., the Choi matrix, for low-rank quantum processes. The GD-QPT matches the performance of both compressed-sensing (CS) and projected least-squares (PLS) QPT in benchmarks with two-qubit random processes, but shines by combining the best features of these two methods. Similar to CS (but unlike PLS), GD-QPT can reconstruct a process from just a small number of random measurements, and similar to PLS (but unlike CS) it also works for larger system sizes, up to at least five qubits. We envisage that the data-driven approach of GD-QPT can become a practical tool that greatly reduces the cost and computational effort for QPT in intermediate-scale quantum systems.

We present an enrichment of the Hateval corpus of hate speech tweets (Basile et. al 2019) aimed to facilitate automated counter-narrative generation. Comparably to previous work (Chung et. al. 2019), manually written counter-narratives are associated to tweets. However, this information alone seems insufficient to obtain satisfactory language models for counter-narrative generation. That is why we have also annotated tweets with argumentative information based on Wagemanns (2016), that we believe can help in building convincing and effective counter-narratives for hate speech against particular groups. We discuss adequacies and difficulties of this annotation process and present several baselines for automatic detection of the annotated elements. Preliminary results show that automatic annotators perform close to human annotators to detect some aspects of argumentation, while others only reach low or moderate level of inter-annotator agreement.