Explainable AI (XAI) refers to techniques that provide human-understandable insights into the workings of AI models. Recently, the focus of XAI is being extended towards Large Language Models (LLMs) which are often criticized for their lack of transparency. This extension calls for a significant transformation in XAI methodologies because of two reasons. First, many existing XAI methods cannot be directly applied to LLMs due to their complexity and advanced capabilities. Second, as LLMs are increasingly deployed across diverse industry applications, the role of XAI shifts from merely opening the "black box" to actively enhancing the productivity and applicability of LLMs in real-world settings. Meanwhile, unlike traditional machine learning models that are passive recipients of XAI insights, the distinct abilities of LLMs can reciprocally enhance XAI. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce Usable XAI in the context of LLMs by analyzing (1) how XAI can benefit LLMs and AI systems, and (2) how LLMs can contribute to the advancement of XAI. We introduce 10 strategies, introducing the key techniques for each and discussing their associated challenges. We also provide case studies to demonstrate how to obtain and leverage explanations.

We present a method for learning Bayesian networks from data sets containing thousands of variables without the need for structure constraints. Our approach is made of two parts. The first is a novel algorithm that effectively explores the space of possible parent sets of a node. It guides the exploration towards the most promising parent sets on the basis of an approximated score function that is computed in constant time. The second part is an improvement of an existing ordering-based algorithm for structure optimization. The new algorithm provably achieves a higher score compared to its original formulation. Our novel approach consistently outperforms the state of the art on very large data sets.

We present a method for learning treewidth-bounded Bayesian networks from data sets containing thousands of variables. Bounding the treewidth of a Bayesian network greatly reduces the complexity of inferences. Yet, being a global property of the graph, it considerably increases the difficulty of the learning process. Our novel algorithm accomplishes this task, scaling both to large domains and to large treewidths. Our novel approach consistently outperforms the state of the art on experiments with up to thousands of variables.

Asynchronous parallel optimization received substantial successes and extensive attention recently. One of core theoretical questions is how much speedup (or benefit) the asynchronous parallelization can bring to us. This paper provides a comprehensive and generic analysis to study the speedup property for a broad range of asynchronous parallel stochastic algorithms from the zeroth order to the first order methods. Our result recovers or improves existing analysis on special cases, provides more insights for understanding the asynchronous parallel behaviors, and suggests a novel asynchronous parallel zeroth order method for the first time. Our experiments provide novel applications of the proposed asynchronous parallel zeroth order method on hyper parameter tuning and model blending problems.

We investigate an experiential learning paradigm for acquiring an internal model of intuitive physics. Our model is evaluated on a real-world robotic manipulation task that requires displacing objects to target locations by poking. The robot gathered over 400 hours of experience by executing more than 100K pokes on different objects. We propose a novel approach based on deep neural networks for modeling the dynamics of robot's interactions directly from images, by jointly estimating forward and inverse models of dynamics. The inverse model objective provides supervision to construct informative visual features, which the forward model can then predict and in turn regularize the feature space for the inverse model. The interplay between these two objectives creates useful, accurate models that can then be used for multi-step decision making. This formulation has the additional benefit that it is possible to learn forward models in an abstract feature space and thus alleviate the need of predicting pixels. Our experiments show that this joint modeling approach outperforms alternative methods.

We derive a sharp condition which ensures that the support of the vector to recover is stable to small additive noise in the observations, as long as the loss constraint size is tuned proportionally to the noise level. A distinctive feature of our theory is that it also explains what happens when the support is unstable. While the support is not stable anymore, we identify an "extended support" and show that this extended support is stable to small additive noise. To exemplify the usefulness of our theory, we give a detailed numerical analysis of the support stability/instability of compressed sensing recovery with these different losses. This highlights different parameter regimes, ranging from total support stability to progressively increasing support instability.

We propose to prune a random forest (RF) for resource-constrained prediction. We first construct a RF and then prune it to optimize expected feature cost & accuracy. We pose pruning RFs as a novel 0-1 integer program with linear constraints that encourages feature re-use. We establish total unimodularity of the constraint set to prove that the corresponding LP relaxation solves the original integer program. We then exploit connections to combinatorial optimization and develop an efficient primal-dual algorithm, scalable to large datasets. In contrast to our bottom-up approach, which benefits from good RF initialization, conventional methods are top-down acquiring features based on their utility value and is generally intractable, requiring heuristics. Empirically, our pruning algorithm outperforms existing state-of-the-art resource-constrained algorithms.

We consider convex-concave saddle-point problems where the objective functions may be split in many components, and extend recent stochastic variance reduction methods (such as SVRG or SAGA) to provide the first large-scale linearly convergent algorithms for this class of problems which are common in machine learning. While the algorithmic extension is straightforward, it comes with challenges and opportunities: (a) the convex minimization analysis does not apply and we use the notion of monotone operators to prove convergence, showing in particular that the same algorithm applies to a larger class of problems, such as variational inequalities, (b) there are two notions of splits, in terms of functions, or in terms of partial derivatives, (c) the split does need to be done with convex-concave terms, (d) non-uniform sampling is key to an efficient algorithm, both in theory and practice, and (e) these incremental algorithms can be easily accelerated using a simple extension of the "catalyst" framework, leading to an algorithm which is always superior to accelerated batch algorithms.

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a cornerstone of ubiquitous computing, with promising applications in diverse fields such as health monitoring and ambient assisted living. Despite significant advancements, sensor-based HAR methods often operate under the assumption that training and testing data have identical distributions. However, in many real-world scenarios, particularly in sensor-based HAR, this assumption is invalidated by out-of-distribution ($\displaystyle o.o.d.$) challenges, including differences from heterogeneous sensors, change over time, and individual behavioural variability. This paper centres on the latter, exploring the cross-user HAR problem where behavioural variability across individuals results in differing data distributions. To address this challenge, we introduce the Deep Temporal State Domain Adaptation (DTSDA) model, an innovative approach tailored for time series domain adaptation in cross-user HAR. Contrary to the common assumption of sample independence in existing domain adaptation approaches, DTSDA recognizes and harnesses the inherent temporal relations in the data. Therefore, we introduce 'Temporal State', a concept that defined the different sub-activities within an activity, consistent across different users. We ensure these sub-activities follow a logical time sequence through 'Temporal Consistency' property and propose the 'Pseudo Temporal State Labeling' method to identify the user-invariant temporal relations. Moreover, the design principle of DTSDA integrates adversarial learning for better domain adaptation. Comprehensive evaluations on three HAR datasets demonstrate DTSDA's superior performance in cross-user HAR applications by briding individual behavioral variability using temporal relations across sub-activities.

This survey explores the adaptation of visual transformer models in Autonomous Driving, a transition inspired by their success in Natural Language Processing. Surpassing traditional Recurrent Neural Networks in tasks like sequential image processing and outperforming Convolutional Neural Networks in global context capture, as evidenced in complex scene recognition, Transformers are gaining traction in computer vision. These capabilities are crucial in Autonomous Driving for real-time, dynamic visual scene processing. Our survey provides a comprehensive overview of Vision Transformer applications in Autonomous Driving, focusing on foundational concepts such as self-attention, multi-head attention, and encoder-decoder architecture. We cover applications in object detection, segmentation, pedestrian detection, lane detection, and more, comparing their architectural merits and limitations. The survey concludes with future research directions, highlighting the growing role of Vision Transformers in Autonomous Driving.