Current approaches for explaining machine learning models fall into two distinct classes: antecedent event influence and value attribution. The former leverages training instances to describe how much influence a training point exerts on a test point, while the latter attempts to attribute value to the features most pertinent to a given prediction. In this work, we discuss an algorithm, AVA: Aggregate Valuation of Antecedents, that fuses these two explanation classes to form a new approach to feature attribution that not only retrieves local explanations but also captures global patterns learned by a model. Our experimentation convincingly favors weighting and aggregating feature attributions via AVA.

Let's reflect a bit on the so-called AI revolution in marketing. Companies are sitting on an almost endless amount of customer data. Most marketing strategies are already based on data. However, with AI, we can do better. Before getting into AI, you need to ask yourself one thing: Which questions do you want to be answered by AI-related methods and tools?

In this work, we introduce the concept of bandlimiting into the theory of machine learning because all physical processes are bandlimited by nature, including real-world machine learning tasks. After the bandlimiting constraint is taken into account, our theoretical analysis has shown that all practical machine learning tasks are asymptotically solvable in a perfect sense. Furthermore, the key towards this solvability almost solely relies on two factors: i) a sufficiently large amount of training samples beyond a threshold determined by a difficulty measurement of the underlying task; ii) a sufficiently complex model that is properly bandlimited. Moreover, for some special cases, we have derived new error bounds for perfect learning, which can quantify the difficulty of learning. These case-specific bounds are much tighter than the uniform bounds in conventional learning theory. Our results have provided a new perspective to explain the recent successes of large-scale supervised learning using complex models like neural networks.

This paper presents Mixed Formal Learning, a new architecture that learns models based on formal mathematical representations of the domain of interest and exposes latent variables. The second element in the architecture learns a particular skill, typically by using traditional prediction or classification mechanisms. Our key findings include that this architecture: (1) Facilitates transparency by exposing key latent variables based on a learned mathematical model; (2) Enables Low Shot and Zero Shot training of machine learning without sacrificing accuracy or recall.

Vid Robots normally need to be programmed in order to get them to perform a particular task, but they can be coaxed into writing the instructions themselves with the help of machine learning, according to research published in Science. Engineers at Vicarious AI, a robotics startup based in California, USA, have built what they call a "visual cognitive computer" (VCC), a software platform connected to a camera system and a robot gripper. Given a set of visual clues, the VCC writes a short program of instructions to be followed by the robot so it knows how to move its gripper to do simple tasks. "Humans are good at inferring the concepts conveyed in a pair of images and then applying them in a completely different setting," the paper states. "The human-inferred concepts are at a sufficiently high level to be effortlessly applied in situations that look very different, a capacity so natural that it is used by IKEA and LEGO to make language-independent assembly instructions."

In autonomous vehicle (AV) control, allowing mistakes can be quite dangerous and costly in the real world. For this reason we investigate methods of training an AV without allowing the agent to explore and instead having a human explorer collect the data. Supervised learning has been explored for AV control, but it encounters the issue of the covariate shift. That is, training data collected from an optimal demonstration consists only of the states induced by the optimal control policy, but at runtime, the trained agent may encounter a vastly different state distribution with little relevant training data. To mitigate this issue, we have our human explorer make sub-optimal decisions. In order to have our agent not replicate these sub-optimal decisions, supervised learning requires that we either erase these actions, or replace these action with the correct action. Erasing is wasteful and replacing is difficult, since it is not easy to know the correct action without driving. We propose an alternate framework that includes continuous scalar feedback for each action, marking which actions we should replicate, which we should avoid, and how sure we are. Our framework learns continuous control from sub-optimal demonstration and evaluative feedback collected before training. We find that a human demonstrator can explore sub-optimal states in a safe manner, while still getting enough gradation to benefit learning. The collection method for data and feedback we call "Backseat Driver." We call the more general learning framework ReNeg, since it learns a regression from states to actions given negative as well as positive examples. We empirically validate several models in the ReNeg framework, testing on lane-following with limited data. We find that the best solution is a generalization of mean-squared error and outperforms supervised learning on the positive examples alone.

Datasets often contain biases which unfairly disadvantage certain groups, and classifiers trained on such datasets can inherit these biases. In this paper, we provide a mathematical formulation of how this bias can arise. We do so by assuming the existence of underlying, unknown, and unbiased labels which are overwritten by an agent who intends to provide accurate labels but may have biases against certain groups. Despite the fact that we only observe the biased labels, we are able to show that the bias may nevertheless be corrected by re-weighting the data points without changing the labels. We show, with theoretical guarantees, that training on the re-weighted dataset corresponds to training on the unobserved but unbiased labels, thus leading to an unbiased machine learning classifier. Our procedure is fast and robust and can be used with virtually any learning algorithm. We evaluate on a number of standard machine learning fairness datasets and a variety of fairness notions, finding that our method outperforms standard approaches in achieving fair classification.

Partial Label Learning (PLL) aims to learn from the data where each training example is associated with a set of candidate labels, among which only one is correct. The key to deal with such problem is to disambiguate the candidate label sets and obtain the correct assignments between instances and their candidate labels. In this paper, we interpret such assignments as instance-to-label matchings, and reformulate the task of PLL as a matching selection problem. To model such problem, we propose a novel Graph Matching based Partial Label Learning (GM-PLL) framework, where Graph Matching (GM) scheme is incorporated owing to its excellent capability of exploiting the instance and label relationship. Meanwhile, since conventional one-to-one GM algorithm does not satisfy the constraint of PLL problem that multiple instances may correspond to the same label, we extend a traditional one-to-one probabilistic matching algorithm to the many-to-one constraint, and make the proposed framework accommodate to the PLL problem. Moreover, we also propose a relaxed matching prediction model, which can improve the prediction accuracy via GM strategy. Extensive experiments on both artificial and real-world data sets demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve superior or comparable performance against the state-of-the-art methods.

Over the past decades, numerous loss functions have been been proposed for a variety of supervised learning tasks, including regression, classification, ranking, and more generally structured prediction. Understanding the core principles and theoretical properties underpinning these losses is key to choose the right loss for the right problem, as well as to create new losses which combine their strengths. In this paper, we introduce Fenchel-Young losses, a generic way to construct a convex loss function for a regularized prediction function. We provide an in-depth study of their properties in a very broad setting, covering all the aforementioned supervised learning tasks, and revealing new connections between sparsity, generalized entropies, and separation margins. We show that Fenchel-Young losses unify many well-known loss functions and allow to create useful new ones easily. Finally, we derive efficient predictive and training algorithms, making Fenchel-Young losses appealing both in theory and practice.

Community detection was a hot topic on network analysis, where the main aim is to perform unsupervised learning or clustering in networks. Recently, semi-supervised learning has received increasing attention among researchers. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, called weighted inverse Laplacian (WIL), for predicting labels in partially labeled networks. The idea comes from the first hitting time in random walk, and it also has nice explanations both in information propagation and the regularization framework. We propose a partially labeled degree-corrected block model (pDCBM) to describe the generation of partially labeled networks. We show that WIL ensures the misclassification rate is of order $O(\frac{1}{d})$ for the pDCBM with average degree $d=\Omega(\log n),$ and that it can handle situations with greater unbalanced than traditional Laplacian methods. WIL outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in most of our simulations and real datasets, especially in unbalanced networks and heterogeneous networks.