Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being deployed in ways that touch people's lives, including in areas of healthcare, financial transactions, and delivery of justice. Advances in AI can have profound impacts across varied societal domains, and in recent years, this realisation has sparked ample debate about the values that should guide its development and use. States and international organisations have reacted to these societal concerns in various ways. Some have formed ad-hoc committees tasked to deliberate and provide recommendations on the subject. Examples include the United States National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC) that dispenses advice to the president and various federal officials; the expert group on AI at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); the High-Level Expert Group on AI formed by the European Commission; and the Select Committee on AI appointed by the UK Parliament's House of Lords.[1]

Machine learning (ML) methods such as artificial neural networks are rapidly becoming ubiquitous in modern science, technology and industry. Despite their accuracy and sophistication, neural networks can be easily fooled by carefully designed malicious inputs known as adversarial attacks. While such vulnerabilities remain a serious challenge for classical neural networks, the extent of their existence is not fully understood in the quantum ML setting. In this work, we benchmark the robustness of quantum ML networks, such as quantum variational classifiers (QVC), at scale by performing rigorous training for both simple and complex image datasets and through a variety of high-end adversarial attacks. Our results show that QVCs offer a notably enhanced robustness against classical adversarial attacks by learning features which are not detected by the classical neural networks, indicating a possible quantum advantage for ML tasks. Contrarily, and remarkably, the converse is not true, with attacks on quantum networks also capable of deceiving classical neural networks. By combining quantum and classical network outcomes, we propose a novel adversarial attack detection technology. Traditionally quantum advantage in ML systems has been sought through increased accuracy or algorithmic speed-up, but our work has revealed the potential for a new kind of quantum advantage through superior robustness of ML models, whose practical realisation will address serious security concerns and reliability issues of ML algorithms employed in a myriad of applications including autonomous vehicles, cybersecurity, and surveillance robotic systems.

This paper studies how to train machine-learning models that directly approximate the optimal solutions of constrained optimization problems. This is an empirical risk minimization under constraints, which is challenging as training must balance optimality and feasibility conditions. Supervised learning methods often approach this challenge by training the model on a large collection of pre-solved instances. This paper takes a different route and proposes the idea of Primal-Dual Learning (PDL), a self-supervised training method that does not require a set of pre-solved instances or an optimization solver for training and inference. Instead, PDL mimics the trajectory of an Augmented Lagrangian Method (ALM) and jointly trains primal and dual neural networks. Being a primal-dual method, PDL uses instance-specific penalties of the constraint terms in the loss function used to train the primal network. Experiments show that, on a set of nonlinear optimization benchmarks, PDL typically exhibits negligible constraint violations and minor optimality gaps, and is remarkably close to the ALM optimization. PDL also demonstrated improved or similar performance in terms of the optimality gaps, constraint violations, and training times compared to existing approaches.

Over the past decades, breakthroughs such as Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Agent-based modeling (ABM) have made simulations of economic models feasible. Recently, there has been increasing interest in applying ABM to study the impact of residential preferences on neighborhood segregation in the Schelling Segregation Model. In this paper, RL is combined with ABM to simulate a modified Schelling Segregation model, which incorporates moving expenses as an input parameter. In particular, deep Q network (DQN) is adopted as RL agents' learning algorithm to simulate the behaviors of households and their preferences. This paper studies the impact of moving expenses on the overall segregation pattern and its role in social integration. A more comprehensive simulation of the segregation model is built for policymakers to forecast the potential consequences of their policies.

Contact matrices are an important ingredient in age-structured epidemic models to inform the simulated spread of the disease between sub-groups of the population. These matrices are generally derived using resource-intensive diary-based surveys and few exist in the Global South or tailored to vulnerable populations. In particular, no contact matrices exist for refugee settlements - locations under-served by epidemic models in general. In this paper we present a novel, mixed-method approach, for deriving contact matrices in populations which combines a lightweight, rapidly deployable, survey with an agent-based model of the population informed by census and behavioural data. We use this method to derive the first set of contact matrices for the Cox's Bazar refugee settlement in Bangladesh. The matrices from the refugee settlement show strong banding effects due to different age cut-offs in attendance at certain venues, such as distribution centres and religious sites, as well as the important contribution of the demographic profile of the settlement which was encoded in the model. These can have significant implications to the modelled disease dynamics. To validate our approach, we also apply our method to the population of the UK and compare our derived matrices against well-known contact matrices previously collected using traditional approaches. Overall, our findings demonstrate that our mixed-method approach can address some of the challenges of both the traditional and previously proposed agent-based approaches to deriving contact matrices, and has the potential to be rolled-out in other resource-constrained environments. This work therefore contributes to a broader aim of developing new methods and mechanisms of data collection for modelling disease spread in refugee and IDP settlements and better serving these vulnerable communities.

Creating challenging tabular inference data is essential for learning complex reasoning. Prior work has mostly relied on two data generation strategies. The first is human annotation, which yields linguistically diverse data but is difficult to scale. The second category for creation is synthetic generation, which is scalable and cost effective but lacks inventiveness. In this research, we present a framework for semi-automatically recasting existing tabular data to make use of the benefits of both approaches. We utilize our framework to build tabular NLI instances from five datasets that were initially intended for tasks like table2text creation, tabular Q/A, and semantic parsing. We demonstrate that recasted data could be used as evaluation benchmarks as well as augmentation data to enhance performance on tabular NLI tasks. Furthermore, we investigate the effectiveness of models trained on recasted data in the zero-shot scenario, and analyse trends in performance across different recasted datasets types.

Compared with model-based control and optimization methods, reinforcement learning (RL) provides a data-driven, learning-based framework to formulate and solve sequential decision-making problems. The RL framework has become promising due to largely improved data availability and computing power in the aviation industry. Many aviation-based applications can be formulated or treated as sequential decision-making problems. Some of them are offline planning problems, while others need to be solved online and are safety-critical. In this survey paper, we first describe standard RL formulations and solutions. Then we survey the landscape of existing RL-based applications in aviation. Finally, we summarize the paper, identify the technical gaps, and suggest future directions of RL research in aviation.

How do author perceptions match up to the outcomes of the peer-review process and perceptions of others? In a top-tier computer science conference (NeurIPS 2021) with more than 23,000 submitting authors and 9,000 submitted papers, we survey the authors on three questions: (i) their predicted probability of acceptance for each of their papers, (ii) their perceived ranking of their own papers based on scientific contribution, and (iii) the change in their perception about their own papers after seeing the reviews. The salient results are: (1) Authors have roughly a three-fold overestimate of the acceptance probability of their papers: The median prediction is 70% for an approximately 25% acceptance rate. (2) Female authors exhibit a marginally higher (statistically significant) miscalibration than male authors; predictions of authors invited to serve as meta-reviewers or reviewers are similarly calibrated, but better than authors who were not invited to review. (3) Authors' relative ranking of scientific contribution of two submissions they made generally agree (93%) with their predicted acceptance probabilities, but there is a notable 7% responses where authors think their better paper will face a worse outcome. (4) The author-provided rankings disagreed with the peer-review decisions about a third of the time; when co-authors ranked their jointly authored papers, co-authors disagreed at a similar rate -- about a third of the time. (5) At least 30% of respondents of both accepted and rejected papers said that their perception of their own paper improved after the review process. The stakeholders in peer review should take these findings into account in setting their expectations from peer review.

Despite their recent success, machine learning (ML) models such as graph neural networks (GNNs), suffer from drawbacks such as the need for large training datasets and poor performance for unseen cases. In this work, we use transfer learning (TL) approaches to circumvent the need for retraining with large datasets. We apply TL to an existing ML framework, trained to predict multiple crack propagation and stress evolution in brittle materials under Mode-I loading. The new framework, ACCelerated Universal fRAcTure Emulator (ACCURATE), is generalized to a variety of crack problems by using a sequence of TL update steps including (i) arbitrary crack lengths, (ii) arbitrary crack orientations, (iii) square domains, (iv) horizontal domains, and (v) shear loadings. We show that using small training datasets of 20 simulations for each TL update step, ACCURATE achieved high prediction accuracy in Mode-I and Mode-II stress intensity factors, and crack paths for these problems. %case studies (i) - (iv). We demonstrate ACCURATE's ability to predict crack growth and stress evolution with high accuracy for unseen cases involving the combination of new boundary dimensions with arbitrary crack lengths and crack orientations in both tensile and shear loading. We also demonstrate significantly accelerated simulation times of up to 2 orders of magnitude faster (200x) compared to an XFEM-based fracture model. The ACCURATE framework provides a universal computational fracture mechanics model that can be easily modified or extended in future work.

Scoring systems, as a type of predictive model, have significant advantages in interpretability and transparency and facilitate quick decision-making. As such, scoring systems have been extensively used in a wide variety of industries such as healthcare and criminal justice. However, the fairness issues in these models have long been criticized, and the use of big data and machine learning algorithms in the construction of scoring systems heightens this concern. In this paper, we propose a general framework to create fairness-aware, data-driven scoring systems. First, we develop a social welfare function that incorporates both efficiency and group fairness. Then, we transform the social welfare maximization problem into the risk minimization task in machine learning, and derive a fairness-aware scoring system with the help of mixed integer programming. Lastly, several theoretical bounds are derived for providing parameter selection suggestions. Our proposed framework provides a suitable solution to address group fairness concerns in the development of scoring systems. It enables policymakers to set and customize their desired fairness requirements as well as other application-specific constraints. We test the proposed algorithm with several empirical data sets. Experimental evidence supports the effectiveness of the proposed scoring system in achieving the optimal welfare of stakeholders and in balancing the needs for interpretability, fairness, and efficiency.