Numerous solutions for yield estimation are either based on data-driven models, or on crop-simulation models (CSMs). Researchers tend to build data-driven models using nationwide crop information databases provided by agencies such as the USDA. On the opposite side of the spectrum, CSMs require fine data that may be hard to generalize from a handful of fields. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive approach for yield forecasting that combines data-driven solutions, crop simulation models, and model surrogates to support multiple user-profiles and needs when dealing with crop management decision-making. To achieve this goal, we have developed a solution to calibrate CSMs at scale, a surrogate model of a CSM assuring faster execution, and a neural network-based approach that performs efficient risk assessment in such settings. Our data-driven modeling approach outperforms previous works with yield correlation predictions close to 91\%. The crop simulation modeling architecture achieved 6% error; the proposed crop simulation model surrogate performs predictions almost 100 times faster than the adopted crop simulator with similar accuracy levels.

Sea surface temperature (SST) is an essential climate variable that can be measured via ground truth, remote sensing, or hybrid model methodologies. Here, we celebrate SST surveillance progress via the application of a few relevant technological advances from the late 20th and early 21st century. We further develop our existing water cycle observation framework, Flux to Flow (F2F), to fuse AMSR-E and MODIS into a higher resolution product with the goal of capturing gradients and filling cloud gaps that are otherwise unavailable. Our neural network architecture is constrained to a deep convolutional residual regressive neural network. We utilize three snapshots of twelve monthly SST measurements in 2010 as measured by the passive microwave radiometer AMSR-E, the visible and infrared monitoring MODIS instrument, and the in situ Argo dataset ISAS. The performance of the platform and success of this approach is evaluated using the root mean squared error (RMSE) metric. We determine that the 1:1 configuration of input and output data and a large observation region is too challenging for the single compute node and dcrrnn structure as is. When constrained to a single 100 x 100 pixel region and a small training dataset, the algorithm improves from the baseline experiment covering a much larger geography. For next discrete steps, we envision the consideration of a large input range with a very small output range. Furthermore, we see the need to integrate land and sea variables before performing computer vision tasks like those within. Finally, we see parallelization as necessary to overcome the compute obstacles we encountered.

The robustness of modern machine learning (ML) models has become an increasing concern within the community. The ability to subvert a model into making errant predictions using seemingly inconsequential changes to input is startling, as is our lack of success in building models robust to this concern. Existing research shows progress, but current mitigations come with a high cost and simultaneously reduce the model's accuracy. However, such trade-offs may not be necessary when other design choices could subvert the risk. In this survey we review the current literature on attacks and their real-world occurrences, or limited evidence thereof, to critically evaluate the real-world risks of adversarial machine learning (AML) for the average entity. This is done with an eye toward how one would then mitigate these attacks in practice, the risks for production deployment, and how those risks could be managed. In doing so we elucidate that many AML threats do not warrant the cost and trade-offs of robustness due to a low likelihood of attack or availability of superior non-ML mitigations. Our analysis also recommends cases where an actor should be concerned about AML to the degree where robust ML models are necessary for a complete deployment.

Quantum Federated Learning (QFL) is an emerging interdisciplinary field that merges the principles of Quantum Computing (QC) and Federated Learning (FL), with the goal of leveraging quantum technologies to enhance privacy, security, and efficiency in the learning process. Currently, there is no comprehensive survey for this interdisciplinary field. This review offers a thorough, holistic examination of QFL. We aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the principles, techniques, and emerging applications of QFL. We discuss the current state of research in this rapidly evolving field, identify challenges and opportunities associated with integrating these technologies, and outline future directions and open research questions. We propose a unique taxonomy of QFL techniques, categorized according to their characteristics and the quantum techniques employed. As the field of QFL continues to progress, we can anticipate further breakthroughs and applications across various industries, driving innovation and addressing challenges related to data privacy, security, and resource optimization. This review serves as a first-of-its-kind comprehensive guide for researchers and practitioners interested in understanding and advancing the field of QFL.

We aimed to investigate the impact of social circumstances on cancer therapy selection using natural language processing to derive insights from social worker documentation. We developed and employed a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) based approach, using a hierarchical multi-step BERT model (BERT-MS) to predict the prescription of targeted cancer therapy to patients based solely on documentation by clinical social workers. Our corpus included free-text clinical social work notes, combined with medication prescription information, for all patients treated for breast cancer. We conducted a feature importance analysis to pinpoint the specific social circumstances that impact cancer therapy selection. Using only social work notes, we consistently predicted the administration of targeted therapies, suggesting systematic differences in treatment selection exist due to non-clinical factors. The UCSF-BERT model, pretrained on clinical text at UCSF, outperformed other publicly available language models with an AUROC of 0.675 and a Macro F1 score of 0.599. The UCSF BERT-MS model, capable of leveraging multiple pieces of notes, surpassed the UCSF-BERT model in both AUROC and Macro-F1. Our feature importance analysis identified several clinically intuitive social determinants of health (SDOH) that potentially contribute to disparities in treatment. Our findings indicate that significant disparities exist among breast cancer patients receiving different types of therapies based on social determinants of health. Social work reports play a crucial role in understanding these disparities in clinical decision-making.

In recent years, discussions of responsible AI practices have seen growing support for "participatory AI" approaches, intended to involve members of the public in the design and development of AI systems. Prior research has identified a lack of standardised methods or approaches for how to use participatory approaches in the AI development process. At present, there is a dearth of evidence on attitudes to and approaches for participation in the sites driving major AI developments: commercial AI labs. Through 12 semi-structured interviews with industry practitioners and subject-matter experts, this paper explores how commercial AI labs understand participatory AI approaches and the obstacles they have faced implementing these practices in the development of AI systems and research. We find that while interviewees view participation as a normative project that helps achieve "societally beneficial" AI systems, practitioners face numerous barriers to embedding participatory approaches in their companies: participation is expensive and resource intensive, it is "atomised" within companies, there is concern about exploitation, there is no incentive to be transparent about its adoption, and it is complicated by a lack of clear context. These barriers result in a piecemeal approach to participation that confers no decision-making power to participants and has little ongoing impact for AI labs. This papers contribution is to provide novel empirical research on the implementation of public participation in commercial AI labs, and shed light on the current challenges of using participatory approaches in this context.

In efforts to keep up with the rapid progress and use of large language models, gender bias research is becoming more prevalent in NLP. Non-English bias research, however, is still in its infancy with most work focusing on English. In our work, we study how grammatical gender bias relating to politeness levels manifests in Japanese and Korean language models. Linguistic studies in these languages have identified a connection between gender bias and politeness levels, however it is not yet known if language models reproduce these biases. We analyze relative prediction probabilities of the male and female grammatical genders using templates and find that informal polite speech is most indicative of the female grammatical gender, while rude and formal speech is most indicative of the male grammatical gender. Further, we find politeness levels to be an attack vector for allocational gender bias in cyberbullying detection models. Cyberbullies can evade detection through simple techniques abusing politeness levels. We introduce an attack dataset to (i) identify representational gender bias across politeness levels, (ii) demonstrate how gender biases can be abused to bypass cyberbullying detection models and (iii) show that allocational biases can be mitigated via training on our proposed dataset. Through our findings we highlight the importance of bias research moving beyond its current English-centrism.

Activity and property prediction models are the central workhorses in drug discovery and materials sciences, but currently they have to be trained or fine-tuned for new tasks. Without training or fine-tuning, scientific language models could be used for such low-data tasks through their announced zero- and few-shot capabilities. However, their predictive quality at activity prediction is lacking. In this work, we envision a novel type of activity prediction model that is able to adapt to new prediction tasks at inference time, via understanding textual information describing the task. To this end, we propose a new architecture with separate modules for chemical and natural language inputs, and a contrastive pre-training objective on data from large biochemical databases. In extensive experiments, we show that our method CLAMP yields improved predictive performance on few-shot learning benchmarks and zero-shot problems in drug discovery. We attribute the advances of our method to the modularized architecture and to our pre-training objective.

Systems based on algorithms and machine learning are increasingly used to guide or outright make decisions which strongly impact human lives; thus it is imperative to take fairness into account when designing such systems. Notions of fairness in computer science can be classified into those that try to capture fairness towards a group (Hardt et al., 2016; Hébert-Johnson et al., 2018; Kearns et al., 2018; Kleinberg et al., 2017) vs. those that try to be fair to each individual Dwork et al. (2012); Kim et al. (2018, 2020). In our work, we focus on the latter notion. The most widely studied notion of individual fairness is due to the seminal work of Dwork et al. (2012): it assumes that a metric space on observable features of individuals captures similarity, and requires that outcomes of a resource allocation mechanism satisfy a certain Lipschitz continuity condition with respect to the given metric. Intuitively, this ensures that individuals who are similar according to the metric will be treated similarly by the mechanism. We consider a setting in which individuals have preferences over the outcomes of the resource allocation mechanism, focusing on the important setting of two-sided markets. Applications of this setting abound: matching students to schools, job fair participants to interviews, doctors to hospitals, patients to treatments, drivers to passengers in ride hailing, or advertisers to ad slots/users in online advertising (Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez, 2003; Bronfman et al., 2015; Mehta et al., 2013; Roth, 1986; Roth et al., 2007), to name a

Deep neural networks have been shown to be vulnerable to small perturbations of their inputs, known as adversarial attacks. In this paper, we investigate the vulnerability of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models to adversarial attacks and propose a new attack algorithm called TransFool. To fool NMT models, TransFool builds on a multi-term optimization problem and a gradient projection step. By integrating the embedding representation of a language model, we generate fluent adversarial examples in the source language that maintain a high level of semantic similarity with the clean samples. Experimental results demonstrate that, for different translation tasks and NMT architectures, our white-box attack can severely degrade the translation quality while the semantic similarity between the original and the adversarial sentences stays high. Moreover, we show that TransFool is transferable to unknown target models. Finally, based on automatic and human evaluations, TransFool leads to improvement in terms of success rate, semantic similarity, and fluency compared to the existing attacks both in white-box and black-box settings. Thus, TransFool permits us to better characterize the vulnerability of NMT models and outlines the necessity to design strong defense mechanisms and more robust NMT systems for real-life applications.