Deep Learning (DL) has advanced various fields by extracting complex patterns from large datasets. However, the computational demands of DL models pose environmental and resource challenges. Deep shift neural networks (DSNNs) offer a solution by leveraging shift operations to reduce computational complexity at inference. Following the insights from standard DNNs, we are interested in leveraging the full potential of DSNNs by means of AutoML techniques. We study the impact of hyperparameter optimization (HPO) to maximize DSNN performance while minimizing resource consumption. Since this combines multi-objective (MO) optimization with accuracy and energy consumption as potentially complementary objectives, we propose to combine state-of-the-art multi-fidelity (MF) HPO with multi-objective optimization. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, resulting in models with over 80\% in accuracy and low computational cost. Overall, our method accelerates efficient model development while enabling sustainable AI applications.

Before autonomous systems can be deployed in safety-critical applications, we must be able to understand and verify the safety of these systems. For cases where the risk or cost of real-world testing is prohibitive, we propose a simulation-based framework for a) predicting ways in which an autonomous system is likely to fail and b) automatically adjusting the system's design and control policy to preemptively mitigate those failures. Existing tools for failure prediction struggle to search over high-dimensional environmental parameters, cannot efficiently handle end-to-end testing for systems with vision in the loop, and provide little guidance on how to mitigate failures once they are discovered. We approach this problem through the lens of approximate Bayesian inference and use differentiable simulation and rendering for efficient failure case prediction and repair. For cases where a differentiable simulator is not available, we provide a gradient-free version of our algorithm, and we include a theoretical and empirical evaluation of the trade-offs between gradient-based and gradient-free methods. We apply our approach on a range of robotics and control problems, including optimizing search patterns for robot swarms, UAV formation control, and robust network control. Compared to optimization-based falsification methods, our method predicts a more diverse, representative set of failure modes, and we find that our use of differentiable simulation yields solutions that have up to 10x lower cost and requires up to 2x fewer iterations to converge relative to gradient-free techniques. In hardware experiments, we find that repairing control policies using our method leads to a 5x robustness improvement. Accompanying code and video can be found at https://mit-realm.github.io/radium/

Quantified policy targets are a fundamental element of climate policy, typically characterised by domain-specific and technical language. Current methods for curating comprehensive views of global climate policy targets entail significant manual effort. At present there are few scalable methods for extracting climate targets from national laws or policies, which limits policymakers' and researchers' ability to (1) assess private and public sector alignment with global goals and (2) inform policy decisions. In this paper we present an approach for extracting mentions of climate targets from national laws and policies. We create an expert-annotated dataset identifying three categories of target ('Net Zero', 'Reduction' and 'Other' (e.g. renewable energy targets)) and train a classifier to reliably identify them in text. We investigate bias and equity impacts related to our model and identify specific years and country names as problematic features. Finally, we investigate the characteristics of the dataset produced by running this classifier on the Climate Policy Radar (CPR) dataset of global national climate laws and policies and UNFCCC submissions, highlighting the potential of automated and scalable data collection for existing climate policy databases and supporting further research. Our work represents a significant upgrade in the accessibility of these key climate policy elements for policymakers and researchers. We publish our model at https://huggingface.co/ClimatePolicyRadar/national-climate-targets and related dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ClimatePolicyRadar/national-climate-targets.

Site-specific weather forecasts are essential to accurate prediction of power demand and are consequently of great interest to energy operators. However, weather forecasts from current numerical weather prediction (NWP) models lack the fine-scale detail to capture all important characteristics of localised real-world sites. Instead they provide weather information representing a rectangular gridbox (usually kilometres in size). Even after post-processing and bias correction, area-averaged information is usually not optimal for specific sites. Prior work on site optimised forecasts has focused on linear methods, weighted consensus averaging, time-series methods, and others. Recent developments in machine learning (ML) have prompted increasing interest in applying ML as a novel approach towards this problem. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of optimising forecasts at sites by adopting the popular machine learning model gradient boosting decision tree, supported by the Python version of the XGBoost package. Regression trees have been trained with historical NWP and site observations as training data, aimed at predicting temperature and dew point at multiple site locations across Australia. We developed a working ML framework, named 'Multi-SiteBoost' and initial testing results show a significant improvement compared with gridded values from bias-corrected NWP models. The improvement from XGBoost is found to be comparable with non-ML methods reported in literature. With the insights provided by SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), this study also tests various approaches to understand the ML predictions and increase the reliability of the forecasts generated by ML.

Gaussian process (GP) regression is a non-parametric, Bayesian framework to approximate complex models. Standard GP regression can lead to an unbounded model in which some points can take infeasible values. We introduce a new GP method that enforces the physical constraints in a probabilistic manner. This GP model is trained by the quantum-inspired Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (QHMC). QHMC is an efficient way to sample from a broad class of distributions. Unlike the standard Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm in which a particle has a fixed mass, QHMC allows a particle to have a random mass matrix with a probability distribution. Introducing the QHMC method to the inequality and monotonicity constrained GP regression in the probabilistic sense, our approach improves the accuracy and reduces the variance in the resulting GP model. According to our experiments on several datasets, the proposed approach serves as an efficient method as it accelerates the sampling process while maintaining the accuracy, and it is applicable to high dimensional problems.

In recent years there has been increased interest in understanding the interplay between deep generative models (DGMs) and the manifold hypothesis. Research in this area focuses on understanding the reasons why commonly-used DGMs succeed or fail at learning distributions supported on unknown low-dimensional manifolds, as well as developing new models explicitly designed to account for manifold-supported data. This manifold lens provides both clarity as to why some DGMs (e.g. diffusion models and some generative adversarial networks) empirically surpass others (e.g. likelihood-based models such as variational autoencoders, normalizing flows, or energy-based models) at sample generation, and guidance for devising more performant DGMs. We carry out the first survey of DGMs viewed through this lens, making two novel contributions along the way. First, we formally establish that numerical instability of high-dimensional likelihoods is unavoidable when modelling low-dimensional data. We then show that DGMs on learned representations of autoencoders can be interpreted as approximately minimizing Wasserstein distance: this result, which applies to latent diffusion models, helps justify their outstanding empirical results. The manifold lens provides a rich perspective from which to understand DGMs, which we aim to make more accessible and widespread.

The notion of inference on function spaces is essential to the physical sciences and engineering, where the governing equations are frequently partial differential equations (PDEs) describing the evolution of functions in space and time. In particular, it is often desirable to infer the values of a function everywhere in a physical domain given a sparse number of observation points. There are numerous types of problems in which functional regression plays an important role, such as inverse problems, time series forecasting, data imputation/assimilation. Functional regression problems can be particularly challenging for real world datasets because the underlying stochastic process is often unknown. Much of the work on functional regression and inference has relied on Gaussian processes (GPs) (Rasmussen and Williams, 2006), a specific type of stochastic process in which any finite collection of points has a multivariate Gaussian distribution. Some of the earliest applications focused on analyzing geological data, such as the locations of valuable ore deposits, to identify where new deposits might be found (Chiles and Delfiner, 2012). GP regression (GPR) provides several advantages for functional inference including robustness and mathematical tractability for various problems. This has led to the use of GPR in an assortment of scientific and engineering fields, where precision and reliability in predictions and inferences can significantly impact outcomes (Deringer et al., 2021; Aigrain and Foreman-Mackey, 2023). Despite widespread adoption, the assumption of a GP prior for functional inference problems can be rather limiting, particularly in scenarios where the data exhibit heavy-tailed or multimodal distributions, e.g.

Artificial intelligence have contributed to advancements across various industries. However, the rapid growth of artificial intelligence technologies also raises concerns about their environmental impact, due to associated carbon footprints to train computational models. Fetal brain segmentation in medical imaging is challenging due to the small size of the fetal brain and the limited image quality of fast 2D sequences. Deep neural networks are a promising method to overcome this challenge. In this context, the construction of larger models requires extensive data and computing power, leading to high energy consumption. Our study aims to explore model architectures and compression techniques that promote energy efficiency by optimizing the trade-off between accuracy and energy consumption through various strategies such as lightweight network design, architecture search, and optimized distributed training tools. We have identified several effective strategies including optimization of data loading, modern optimizers, distributed training strategy implementation, and reduced floating point operations precision usage with light model architectures while tuning parameters according to available computer resources. Our findings demonstrate that these methods lead to satisfactory model performance with low energy consumption during deep neural network training for medical image segmentation.

Anomaly detection in wind turbines typically involves using normal behaviour models to detect faults early. However, training autoencoder models for each turbine is time-consuming and resource intensive. Thus, transfer learning becomes essential for wind turbines with limited data or applications with limited computational resources. This study examines how cross-turbine transfer learning can be applied to autoencoder-based anomaly detection. Here, autoencoders are combined with constant thresholds for the reconstruction error to determine if input data contains an anomaly. The models are initially trained on one year's worth of data from one or more source wind turbines. They are then fine-tuned using smaller amounts of data from another turbine. Three methods for fine-tuning are investigated: adjusting the entire autoencoder, only the decoder, or only the threshold of the model. The performance of the transfer learning models is compared to baseline models that were trained on one year's worth of data from the target wind turbine. The results of the tests conducted in this study indicate that models trained on data of multiple wind turbines do not improve the anomaly detection capability compared to models trained on data of one source wind turbine. In addition, modifying the model's threshold can lead to comparable or even superior performance compared to the baseline, whereas fine-tuning the decoder or autoencoder further enhances the models' performance.

Objective. This study conduct an extensive Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) reproducibility analysis on open electroencephalography datasets, aiming to assess existing solutions and establish open and reproducible benchmarks for effective comparison within the field. The need for such benchmark lies in the rapid industrial progress that has given rise to undisclosed proprietary solutions. Furthermore, the scientific literature is dense, often featuring challenging-to-reproduce evaluations, making comparisons between existing approaches arduous. Approach. Within an open framework, 30 machine learning pipelines (separated into raw signal: 11, Riemannian: 13, deep learning: 6) are meticulously re-implemented and evaluated across 36 publicly available datasets, including motor imagery (14), P300 (15), and SSVEP (7). The analysis incorporates statistical meta-analysis techniques for results assessment, encompassing execution time and environmental impact considerations. Main results. The study yields principled and robust results applicable to various BCI paradigms, emphasizing motor imagery, P300, and SSVEP. Notably, Riemannian approaches utilizing spatial covariance matrices exhibit superior performance, underscoring the necessity for significant data volumes to achieve competitive outcomes with deep learning techniques. The comprehensive results are openly accessible, paving the way for future research to further enhance reproducibility in the BCI domain. Significance. The significance of this study lies in its contribution to establishing a rigorous and transparent benchmark for BCI research, offering insights into optimal methodologies and highlighting the importance of reproducibility in driving advancements within the field.