We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy that achieves the optimal balance between success probability and invocation cost. However, the service providers are self-interested and may misrepresent their private cost information if it benefits them. For such settings, we design a novel procurement auction that provides the consumer with the highest possible revenue, while giving sufficient incentives to providers to tell the truth about their costs. This auction creates a contingent plan for gradual service procurement that suggests recruiting a new provider only when the success probability of the already hired providers drops below a time-dependent threshold. To make this auction incentive compatible, we propose a novel weighted threshold payment scheme which pays the minimum among all truthful mechanisms. Using the weighted payment scheme, we also design a low-complexity near-optimal auction that reduces the computational complexity of the optimal mechanism by 99% with only marginal performance loss (less than 1%). We demonstrate the effectiveness and strength of our proposed auctions through both game theoretical and numerical analysis. The experiment results confirm that the proposed auctions exhibit 59% improvement in performance over the current state-of-the-art, by increasing success probability up to 79% and reducing invocation cost by up to 11%.

Computational Humour (CH) has attracted the interest of Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics communities. Creating datasets for automatic measurement of humour quotient is difficult due to multiple possible interpretations of the content. In this work, we create a multi-modal humour-annotated dataset ($\sim$40 hours) using stand-up comedy clips. We devise a novel scoring mechanism to annotate the training data with a humour quotient score using the audience's laughter. The normalized duration (laughter duration divided by the clip duration) of laughter in each clip is used to compute this humour coefficient score on a five-point scale (0-4). This method of scoring is validated by comparing with manually annotated scores, wherein a quadratic weighted kappa of 0.6 is obtained. We use this dataset to train a model that provides a "funniness" score, on a five-point scale, given the audio and its corresponding text. We compare various neural language models for the task of humour-rating and achieve an accuracy of $0.813$ in terms of Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK). Our "Open Mic" dataset is released for further research along with the code.

Model efficiency is a critical aspect of developing and deploying machine learning models. Inference time and latency directly affect the user experience, and some applications have hard requirements. In addition to inference costs, model training also have direct financial and environmental impacts. Although there are numerous well-established metrics (cost indicators) for measuring model efficiency, researchers and practitioners often assume that these metrics are correlated with each other and report only few of them. In this paper, we thoroughly discuss common cost indicators, their advantages and disadvantages, and how they can contradict each other. We demonstrate how incomplete reporting of cost indicators can lead to partial conclusions and a blurred or incomplete picture of the practical considerations of different models. We further present suggestions to improve reporting of efficiency metrics.

Equivariance has emerged as a desirable property of representations of objects subject to identity-preserving transformations that constitute a group, such as translations and rotations. However, the expressivity of a representation constrained by group equivariance is still not fully understood. We address this gap by providing a generalization of Cover's Function Counting Theorem that quantifies the number of linearly separable and group-invariant binary dichotomies that can be assigned to equivariant representations of objects. We find that the fraction of separable dichotomies is determined by the dimension of the space that is fixed by the group action. We show how this relation extends to operations such as convolutions, element-wise nonlinearities, and global and local pooling. While other operations do not change the fraction of separable dichotomies, local pooling decreases the fraction, despite being a highly nonlinear operation. Finally, we test our theory on intermediate representations of randomly initialized and fully trained convolutional neural networks and find perfect agreement.

Unlike the courts in western countries, public records of Indian judiciary are completely unstructured and noisy. No large scale publicly available annotated datasets of Indian legal documents exist till date. This limits the scope for legal analytics research. In this work, we propose a new dataset consisting of over 10,000 judgements delivered by the supreme court of India and their corresponding hand written summaries. The proposed dataset is pre-processed by normalising common legal abbreviations, handling spelling variations in named entities, handling bad punctuations and accurate sentence tokenization. Each sentence is tagged with their rhetorical roles. We also annotate each judgement with several attributes like date, names of the plaintiffs, defendants and the people representing them, judges who delivered the judgement, acts/statutes that are cited and the most common citations used to refer the judgement. Further, we propose an automatic labelling technique for identifying sentences which have summary worthy information. We demonstrate that this auto labeled data can be used effectively to train a weakly supervised sentence extractor with high accuracy. Some possible applications of this dataset besides legal document summarization can be in retrieval, citation analysis and prediction of decisions by a particular judge.

Companies, governments and institutions in the Global North -- and even in Westernized spaces in the Global South -- often communicate and think about AI through singular lenses that convey over-the-top optimisms or pessimisms about the future. AI is going to save humanity, as promised by many AI corporations.¹ Alternatively, AI is going to destroy us, with big tech corporations and personalities regularly selling us this fear and the idea that their technological innovation will save us from AI or at least prepare us from AI taking over our lives. In the process of conveying these lenses, minoritized communities are further otherized from technoscientific processes; seen as either incapable of having any answers to everyday living problems that may require technological solutions, or seen as passive consumers of technology and capital exploitation. In this essay, I present an alternative discourse of AI creation: one driven by communities, collaboration, and mutual support.

For something so effortless and automatic, vision is a tough job for the brain. It's remarkable that we can transform electromagnetic radiation--light--into a meaningful world of objects and scenes. After all, light focused into an eye is merely a stream of photons with different wave properties, projecting continuously on our retinas, a layer of cells on the backside of our eyes. Before it's transduced by our eyes, light has no brightness or color, which are properties of animal perception. Our retinas transform this energy into electrical impulses that propagate within our nervous system. Somehow this comes out as a world: skies, children, art, auroras, and occasionally ghosts and UFOs.

Multi-view triangulation is the gold standard for 3D reconstruction from 2D correspondences given known calibration and sufficient views. However in practice, expensive multi-view setups -- involving tens sometimes hundreds of cameras -- are required in order to obtain the high fidelity 3D reconstructions necessary for many modern applications. In this paper we present a novel approach that leverages recent advances in 2D-3D lifting using neural shape priors while also enforcing multi-view equivariance. We show how our method can achieve comparable fidelity to expensive calibrated multi-view rigs using a limited (2-3) number of uncalibrated camera views.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been widely applied. But as the CNNs grow, the number of arithmetic operations and memory footprint also increase. Furthermore, typical non-linear activation functions do not allow associativity of the operations encoded by consecutive layers, preventing the simplification of intermediate steps by combining them. We present a new activation function that allows associativity between sequential layers of CNNs. Even though our activation function is non-linear, it can be represented by a sequence of linear operations in the conformal model for Euclidean geometry. In this domain, operations like, but not limited to, convolution, average pooling, and dropout remain linear. We take advantage of associativity to combine all the "conformal layers" and make the cost of inference constant regardless of the depth of the network.

Many functions have approximately-known upper and/or lower bounds, potentially aiding the modeling of such functions. In this paper, we introduce Gaussian process models for functions where such bounds are (approximately) known. More specifically, we propose the first use of such bounds to improve Gaussian process (GP) posterior sampling and Bayesian optimization (BO). That is, we transform a GP model satisfying the given bounds, and then sample and weight functions from its posterior. To further exploit these bounds in BO settings, we present bounded entropy search (BES) to select the point gaining the most information about the underlying function, estimated by the GP samples, while satisfying the output constraints. We characterize the sample variance bounds and show that the decision made by BES is explainable. Our proposed approach is conceptually straightforward and can be used as a plug in extension to existing methods for GP posterior sampling and Bayesian optimization.