Companies claim to "democratise" artificial intelligence (AI) when they donate AI open source software (OSS) to non-profit foundations or release AI models, among others, but what does this term mean and why do they do it? As the impact of AI on society and the economy grows, understanding the commercial incentives behind AI democratisation efforts is crucial for ensuring these efforts serve broader interests beyond commercial agendas. Towards this end, this study employs a mixed-methods approach to investigate commercial incentives for 43 AI OSS donations to the Linux Foundation. It makes contributions to both research and practice. It contributes a taxonomy of both individual and organisational social, economic, and technological incentives for AI democratisation. In particular, it highlights the role of democratising the governance and control rights of an OSS project (i.e., from one company to open governance) as a structural enabler for downstream goals, such as attracting external contributors, reducing development costs, and influencing industry standards, among others. Furthermore, OSS donations are often championed by individual developers within companies, highlighting the importance of the bottom-up incentives for AI democratisation. The taxonomy provides a framework and toolkit for discerning incentives for other AI democratisation efforts, such as the release of AI models. The paper concludes with a discussion of future research directions.

Predicting the response of nonlinear dynamical systems subject to random, broadband excitation is important across a range of scientific disciplines, such as structural dynamics and neuroscience. Building data-driven models requires experimental measurements of the system input and output, but it can be difficult to determine whether inaccuracies in the model stem from modelling errors or noise. This paper presents a novel method to identify the causal component of the input-output data from measurements of a system in the presence of output noise, as a function of frequency, without needing a high fidelity model. An output prediction, calculated using an available model, is optimally combined with noisy measurements of the output to predict the input to the system. The parameters of the algorithm balance the two output signals and are utilised to calculate a nonlinear coherence metric as a measure of causality. This method is applicable to a broad class of nonlinear dynamical systems. There are currently no solutions to this problem in the absence of a complete benchmark model.

Most recommender systems adopt collaborative filtering (CF) and provide recommendations based on past collective interactions. Therefore, the performance of CF algorithms degrades when few or no interactions are available, a scenario referred to as cold-start. To address this issue, previous work relies on models leveraging both collaborative data and side information on the users or items. Similar to multimodal learning, these models aim at combining collaborative and content representations in a shared embedding space. In this work we propose a novel technique for multimodal recommendation, relying on a multimodal Single-Branch embedding network for Recommendation (SiBraR). Leveraging weight-sharing, SiBraR encodes interaction data as well as multimodal side information using the same single-branch embedding network on different modalities. This makes SiBraR effective in scenarios of missing modality, including cold start. Our extensive experiments on large-scale recommendation datasets from three different recommendation domains (music, movie, and e-commerce) and providing multimodal content information (audio, text, image, labels, and interactions) show that SiBraR significantly outperforms CF as well as state-of-the-art content-based RSs in cold-start scenarios, and is competitive in warm scenarios. We show that SiBraR's recommendations are accurate in missing modality scenarios, and that the model is able to map different modalities to the same region of the shared embedding space, hence reducing the modality gap.

Detecting and measuring confounding effects from data is a key challenge in causal inference. Existing methods frequently assume causal sufficiency, disregarding the presence of unobserved confounding variables. Causal sufficiency is both unrealistic and empirically untestable. Additionally, existing methods make strong parametric assumptions about the underlying causal generative process to guarantee the identifiability of confounding variables. Relaxing the causal sufficiency and parametric assumptions and leveraging recent advancements in causal discovery and confounding analysis with non-i.i.d. data, we propose a comprehensive approach for detecting and measuring confounding. We consider various definitions of confounding and introduce tailored methodologies to achieve three objectives: (i) detecting and measuring confounding among a set of variables, (ii) separating observed and unobserved confounding effects, and (iii) understanding the relative strengths of confounding bias between different sets of variables. We present useful properties of a confounding measure and present measures that satisfy those properties. Empirical results support the theoretical analysis.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a machine learning approach able to preserve the privacy of user's data. Applying FL, clients train machine learning models on a local dataset and a central server aggregates the learned parameters coming from the clients, training a global machine learning model without sharing user's data. However, the state-of-the-art shows several approaches to promote attacks on FL systems. For instance, inverting or leaking gradient attacks can find, with high precision, the local dataset used during the training phase of the FL. This paper presents an approach, called Deep Leakage from Gradients with Feedback Blending (DLG-FB), which is able to improve the inverting gradient attack, considering the spatial correlation that typically exists in batches of images. The performed evaluation shows an improvement of 19.18% and 48,82% in terms of attack success rate and the number of iterations per attacked image, respectively.

Recent advancements in machine learning (ML) are transforming the field of structural biology. For example, AlphaFold, a groundbreaking neural network for protein structure prediction, has been widely adopted by researchers. The availability of easy-to-use interfaces and interpretable outcomes from the neural network architecture, such as the confidence scores used to color the predicted structures, have made AlphaFold accessible even to non-ML experts. In this paper, we present various methods for representing protein 3D structures from low- to high-resolution, and show how interpretable ML methods can support tasks such as predicting protein structures, protein function, and protein-protein interactions. This survey also emphasizes the significance of interpreting and visualizing ML-based inference for structure-based protein representations that enhance interpretability and knowledge discovery. Developing such interpretable approaches promises to further accelerate fields including drug development and protein design.

With robots increasingly collaborating with humans in everyday tasks, it is important to take steps toward robotic systems capable of understanding the environment. This work focuses on scene understanding to detect pick and place tasks given initial and final images from the scene. To this end, a dataset is collected for object detection and pick and place task detection. A YOLOv5 network is subsequently trained to detect the objects in the initial and final scenes. Given the detected objects and their bounding boxes, two methods are proposed to detect the pick and place tasks which transform the initial scene into the final scene. A geometric method is proposed which tracks objects' movements in the two scenes and works based on the intersection of the bounding boxes which moved within scenes. Contrarily, the CNN-based method utilizes a Convolutional Neural Network to classify objects with intersected bounding boxes into 5 classes, showing the spatial relationship between the involved objects. The performed pick and place tasks are then derived from analyzing the experiments with both scenes. Results show that the CNN-based method, using a VGG16 backbone, outscores the geometric method by roughly 12 percentage points in certain scenarios, with an overall success rate of 84.3%.

Quantum computing with qudits, an extension of qubits to multiple levels, is a research field less mature than qubit-based quantum computing. However, qudits can offer some advantages over qubits, by representing information with fewer separated components. In this article, we present QuForge, a Python-based library designed to simulate quantum circuits with qudits. This library provides the necessary quantum gates for implementing quantum algorithms, tailored to any chosen qudit dimension. Built on top of differentiable frameworks, QuForge supports execution on accelerating devices such as GPUs and TPUs, significantly speeding up simulations. It also supports sparse operations, leading to a reduction in memory consumption compared to other libraries. Additionally, by constructing quantum circuits as differentiable graphs, QuForge facilitates the implementation of quantum machine learning algorithms, enhancing the capabilities and flexibility of quantum computing research.

One of the growing trends in machine learning is the use of data generation techniques, since the performance of machine learning models is dependent on the quantity of the training dataset. However, in many medical applications, collecting large datasets is challenging due to resource constraints, which leads to overfitting and poor generalization. This paper introduces a novel method, Artificial Data Point Generation in Clustered Latent Space (AGCL), designed to enhance classification performance on small medical datasets through synthetic data generation. The AGCL framework involves feature extraction, K-means clustering, cluster evaluation based on a class separation metric, and the generation of synthetic data points from clusters with distinct class representations. This method was applied to Parkinson's disease screening, utilizing facial expression data, and evaluated across multiple machine learning classifiers. Experimental results demonstrate that AGCL significantly improves classification accuracy compared to baseline, GN and kNNMTD. AGCL achieved the highest overall test accuracy of 83.33% and cross-validation accuracy of 90.90% in majority voting over different emotions, confirming its effectiveness in augmenting small datasets.

In recent years, the Transformer architecture (Vaswani et al., 2017) has played a pivotal role in the field of machine learning, becoming indispensable for a variety of models in the community. In addition to the original breakthroughs in natural language processing, such as the GPT series (Brown et al., 2020; Radford et al., 2018, 2019), it has been observed that in numerous applications, higher accuracy can be achieved by replacing existing models with Transformers. Specifically, models such as the Vision Transformer (Dosovitskiy et al., 2021) in image processing and the Diffusion Transformer (Peebles & Xie, 2023) in generative tasks have demonstrated exceptional performances in a wide variety of tasks. These examples demonstrate how effective and versatile Transformers are for a diverse range of purposes. Although the high performance of Transformers has led to their widespread use in practice, there are ongoing attempts to theoretically analyze what exactly contributes to their superior performance.