As we make tremendous advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence technosciences, there is a renewed understanding in the AI community that we must ensure that humans being are at the center of our deliberations so that we don't end in technology-induced dystopias. As strongly argued by Green in his book Smart Enough City, the incorporation of technology in city environs does not automatically translate into prosperity, wellbeing, urban livability, or social justice. There is a great need to deliberate on the future of the cities worth living and designing. There are philosophical and ethical questions involved along with various challenges that relate to the security, safety, and interpretability of AI algorithms that will form the technological bedrock of future cities. Several research institutes on human centered AI have been established at top international universities. Globally there are calls for technology to be made more humane and human-compatible. For example, Stuart Russell has a book called Human Compatible AI. The Center for Humane Technology advocates for regulators and technology companies to avoid business models and product features that contribute to social problems such as extremism, polarization, misinformation, and Internet addiction. In this paper, we analyze and explore key challenges including security, robustness, interpretability, and ethical challenges to a successful deployment of AI or ML in human-centric applications, with a particular emphasis on the convergence of these challenges. We provide a detailed review of existing literature on these key challenges and analyze how one of these challenges may lead to others or help in solving other challenges. The paper also advises on the current limitations, pitfalls, and future directions of research in these domains, and how it can fill the current gaps and lead to better solutions.

When formulated as an unsupervised learning problem, anomaly detection often requires a model to learn the distribution of normal data. Previous works apply Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to anomaly detection tasks and show good performances from these models. Motivated by the observation that GAN ensembles often outperform single GANs in generation tasks, we propose to construct GAN ensembles for anomaly detection. In the proposed method, a group of generators and a group of discriminators are trained together, so every generator gets feedback from multiple discriminators, and vice versa. Compared to a single GAN, a GAN ensemble can better model the distribution of normal data and thus better detect anomalies. Our theoretical analysis of GANs and GAN ensembles explains the role of a GAN discriminator in anomaly detection. In the empirical study, we evaluate ensembles constructed from four types of base models, and the results show that these ensembles clearly outperform single models in a series of tasks of anomaly detection.

In the absence of external rewards, agents can still learn useful behaviors by identifying and mastering a set of diverse skills within their environment. Existing skill learning methods use mutual information objectives to incentivize each skill to be diverse and distinguishable from the rest. However, if care is not taken to constrain the ways in which the skills are diverse, trivially diverse skill sets can arise. To ensure useful skill diversity, we propose a novel skill learning objective, Relative Variational Intrinsic Control (RVIC), which incentivizes learning skills that are distinguishable in how they change the agent's relationship to its environment. The resulting set of skills tiles the space of affordances available to the agent. We qualitatively analyze skill behaviors on multiple environments and show how RVIC skills are more useful than skills discovered by existing methods when used in hierarchical reinforcement learning.

Few-shot meta-learning methods consider the problem of learning new tasks from a small, fixed number of examples, by meta-learning across static data from a set of previous tasks. However, in many real world settings, it is more natural to view the problem as one of minimizing the total amount of supervision --- both the number of examples needed to learn a new task and the amount of data needed for meta-learning. Such a formulation can be studied in a sequential learning setting, where tasks are presented in sequence. When studying meta-learning in this online setting, a critical question arises: can meta-learning improve over the sample complexity and regret of standard empirical risk minimization methods, when considering both meta-training and adaptation together? The answer is particularly non-obvious for meta-learning algorithms with complex bi-level optimizations that may demand large amounts of meta-training data. To answer this question, we extend previous meta-learning algorithms to handle the variable-shot settings that naturally arise in sequential learning: from many-shot learning at the start, to zero-shot learning towards the end. On sequential learning problems, we find that meta-learning solves the full task set with fewer overall labels and achieves greater cumulative performance, compared to standard supervised methods. These results suggest that meta-learning is an important ingredient for building learning systems that continuously learn and improve over a sequence of problems.

Automatic text summarization has enjoyed great progress over the last years. Now is the time to re-assess its focus and objectives. Does the current focus fully adhere to users' desires or should we expand or change our focus? We investigate this question empirically by conducting a survey amongst heavy users of pre-made summaries. We find that the current focus of the field does not fully align with participants' wishes. In response, we identify three groups of implications. First, we argue that it is important to adopt a broader perspective on automatic summarization. Based on our findings, we illustrate how we can expand our view when it comes to the types of input material that is to be summarized, the purpose of the summaries and their potential formats. Second, we define requirements for datasets that can facilitate these research directions. Third, usefulness is an important aspect of summarization that should be included in our evaluation methodology; we propose a methodology to evaluate the usefulness of a summary. With this work we unlock important research directions for future work on automatic summarization and we hope to initiate the development of methods in these directions.

The pre-training models such as BERT have achieved great results in various natural language processing problems. However, a large number of parameters need significant amounts of memory and the consumption of inference time, which makes it difficult to deploy them on edge devices. In this work, we propose a knowledge distillation method LRC-BERT based on contrastive learning to fit the output of the intermediate layer from the angular distance aspect, which is not considered by the existing distillation methods. Furthermore, we introduce a gradient perturbation-based training architecture in the training phase to increase the robustness of LRC-BERT, which is the first attempt in knowledge distillation. Additionally, in order to better capture the distribution characteristics of the intermediate layer, we design a two-stage training method for the total distillation loss. Finally, by verifying 8 datasets on the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark, the performance of the proposed LRC-BERT exceeds the existing state-of-the-art methods, which proves the effectiveness of our method.

Most explanation methods in deep learning map importance estimates for a model's prediction back to the original input space. These "visual" explanations are often insufficient, as the model's actual concept remains elusive. Moreover, without insights into the model's semantic concept, it is difficult -- if not impossible -- to intervene on the model's behavior via its explanations, called Explanatory Interactive Learning. Consequently, we propose to intervene on a Neuro-Symbolic scene representation, which allows one to revise the model on the semantic level, e.g. "never focus on the color to make your decision". We compiled a novel confounded visual scene data set, the CLEVR-Hans data set, capturing complex compositions of different objects. The results of our experiments on CLEVR-Hans demonstrate that our semantic explanations, i.e. compositional explanations at a per-object level, can identify confounders that are not identifiable using "visual" explanations only. More importantly, feedback on this semantic level makes it possible to revise the model from focusing on these confounding factors.

Understanding generalization in deep learning is arguably one of the most important questions in deep learning. Deep learning has been successfully adopted to a large number of problems ranging from pattern recognition to complex decision making, but many recent researchers have raised many concerns about deep learning, among which the most important is generalization. Despite numerous attempts, conventional statistical learning approaches have yet been able to provide a satisfactory explanation on why deep learning works. A recent line of works aims to address the problem by trying to predict the generalization performance through complexity measures. In this competition, we invite the community to propose complexity measures that can accurately predict generalization of models. A robust and general complexity measure would potentially lead to a better understanding of deep learning's underlying mechanism and behavior of deep models on unseen data, or shed light on better generalization bounds. All these outcomes will be important for making deep learning more robust and reliable.

We study scalable alternatives to robust gradient descent (RGD) techniques that can be used when the losses and/or gradients can be heavy-tailed, though this will be unknown to the learner. The core technique is simple: instead of trying to robustly aggregate gradients at each step, which is costly and leads to sub-optimal dimension dependence in risk bounds, we instead focus computational effort on robustly choosing (or newly constructing) a strong candidate based on a collection of cheap stochastic sub-processes which can be run in parallel. The exact selection process depends on the convexity of the underlying objective, but in all cases, our selection technique amounts to a robust form of boosting the confidence of weak learners. In addition to formal guarantees, we also provide empirical analysis of robustness to perturbations to experimental conditions, under both sub-Gaussian and heavy-tailed data, along with applications to a variety of benchmark datasets. The overall take-away is an extensible procedure that is simple to implement, trivial to parallelize, which keeps the formal merits of RGD methods but scales much better to large learning problems.

Few-shot relation classification seeks to classify incoming query instances after meeting only few support instances. This ability is gained by training with large amount of in-domain annotated data. In this paper, we tackle an even harder problem by further limiting the amount of data available at training time. We propose a few-shot learning framework for relation classification, which is particularly powerful when the training data is very small. In this framework, models not only strive to classify query instances, but also seek underlying knowledge about the support instances to obtain better instance representations. The framework also includes a method for aggregating cross-domain knowledge into models by open-source task enrichment. Additionally, we construct a brand new dataset: the TinyRel-CM dataset, a few-shot relation classification dataset in health domain with purposely small training data and challenging relation classes. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework brings performance gains for most underlying classification models, outperforms the state-of-the-art results given small training data, and achieves competitive results with sufficiently large training data.