A key impediment to the use of AI is the lacking of transparency, especially in safety/security critical applications. The black-box nature of AI systems prevents humans from direct explanations on how the AI makes predictions, which stimulated Explainable AI (XAI) -- a research field that aims at improving the trust and transparency of AI systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel XAI technique, BayLIME, which is a Bayesian modification of the widely used XAI approach LIME. BayLIME exploits prior knowledge to improve the consistency in repeated explanations of a single prediction and also the robustness to kernel settings. Both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments are conducted to support our conclusions.

We introduce the Graph Mixture Density Network, a new family of machine learning models that can fit multimodal output distributions conditioned on arbitrary input graphs. By combining ideas from mixture models and graph representation learning, we address a broad class of challenging regression problems that rely on structured data. Our main contribution is the design and evaluation of our method on large stochastic epidemic simulations conditioned on random graphs. We show that there is a significant improvement in the likelihood of an epidemic outcome when taking into account both multimodality and structure. In addition, we investigate how to \textit{implicitly} retain structural information in node representations by computing the distance between distributions of adjacent nodes, and the technique is tested on two structure reconstruction tasks with very good accuracy. Graph Mixture Density Networks open appealing research opportunities in the study of structure-dependent phenomena that exhibit non-trivial conditional output distributions.

A new machine learning approach offers important insights into catalysis, a fundamental process that makes it possible to reduce the emission of toxic exhaust gases or produce essential materials like fabric. In a report published in Nature Communications, Hongliang Xin, associate professor of chemical engineering at Virginia Tech, and his team of researchers developed a Bayesian learning model of chemisorption, or Bayeschem for short, aiming to use artificial intelligence to unlock the nature of chemical bonding at catalyst surfaces. "It all comes down to how catalysts bind with molecules," said Xin. "The interaction has to be strong enough to break some chemical bonds at reasonably low temperatures, but not too strong that catalysts would be poisoned by reaction intermediates. This rule is known as the Sabatier principle in catalysis." Understanding how catalysts interact with different intermediates and determining how to control their bond strengths so that they are within that'goldilocks zone' is the key to designing efficient catalytic processes, Xin said. The research provides a tool for that purpose.

Hands-on Machine Learning With Python: An online, 12-hour workshop focused on machine learning algorithms and their application. Targeted at: Engineering (all streams) as well as science students, who are looking forward to get started with machine learning. Instructor profile: A certified data scientist, with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. Note: We will be limiting the participants to 50. About Us: Founded in 2018, Machine Learning India (MLI), is a thriving community of 350,000 passionate technologists across India and the globe.

We consider the problem of learning the underlying graph of a sparse Ising model with $p$ nodes from $n$ i.i.d. samples. The most recent and best performing approaches combine an empirical loss (the logistic regression loss or the interaction screening loss) with a regularizer (an L1 penalty or an L1 constraint). This results in a convex problem that can be solved separately for each node of the graph. In this work, we leverage the cardinality constraint L0 norm, which is known to properly induce sparsity, and further combine it with an L2 norm to better model the non-zero coefficients. We show that our proposed estimators achieve an improved sample complexity, both (a) theoretically -- by reaching new state-of-the-art upper bounds for recovery guarantees -- and (b) empirically -- by showing sharper phase transitions between poor and full recovery for graph topologies studied in the literature -- when compared to their L1-based counterparts.

Learning task-agnostic dynamics models in high-dimensional observation spaces can be challenging for model-based RL agents. We propose a novel way to learn latent world models by learning to predict sequences of future actions conditioned on task completion. These task-conditioned models adaptively focus modeling capacity on task-relevant dynamics, while simultaneously serving as an effective heuristic for planning with sparse rewards. We evaluate our method on challenging visual goal completion tasks and show a substantial increase in performance compared to prior model-free approaches. Deep reinforcement learning has proven to be a powerful and effective framework for solving a diversity of challenging decision-making problems (Silver et al., 2017a; Berner et al., 2019). However these algorithms are typically trained to maximize a single reward function, ignoring information that is not directly relevant to the associated task at hand. This way of learning is in stark contrast to how humans learn (Tenenbaum, 2018). Without being prompted by a specific task, humans can still explore their environment, practice achieving imaginary goals, and in so doing learn about the dynamics of the environment. When subsequently presented with a novel task, humans can utilize this learned knowledge to bootstrap learning -- a property we would like our artificial agents to have. In this work, we investigate one way to bridge this gap by learning world models (Ha & Schmidhuber, 2018) that enable the realization of previously unseen tasks. By modeling the task-agnostic dynamics of an environment, an agent can make predictions about how its own actions may affect the environment state without the need for additional samples from the environment. Prior work has shown that by using powerful function approximators to model environment dynamics, training an agent entirely within its own world models can result in large gains in sample efficiency (Ha & Schmidhuber, 2018).

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have been long considered an ideal, yet unscalable solution for improving the robustness and the predictive uncertainty of deep neural networks. While they could capture more accurately the posterior distribution of the network parameters, most BNN approaches are either limited to small networks or rely on constraining assumptions such as parameter independence. These drawbacks have enabled prominence of simple, but computationally heavy approaches such as Deep Ensembles, whose training and testing costs increase linearly with the number of networks. In this work we aim for efficient deep BNNs amenable to complex computer vision architectures, e.g. ResNet50 DeepLabV3+, and tasks, e.g. semantic segmentation, with fewer assumptions on the parameters. We achieve this by leveraging variational autoencoders (VAEs) to learn the interaction and the latent distribution of the parameters at each network layer. Our approach, Latent-Posterior BNN (LP-BNN), is compatible with the recent BatchEnsemble method, leading to highly efficient ({in terms of computation and} memory during both training and testing) ensembles. LP-BNN s attain competitive results across multiple metrics in several challenging benchmarks for image classification, semantic segmentation and out-of-distribution detection.

In the recent past, psychological stress has been increasingly observed in humans, and early detection is crucial to prevent health risks. Stress detection using on-device deep learning algorithms has been on the rise owing to advancements in pervasive computing. However, an important challenge that needs to be addressed is handling unlabeled data in real-time via suitable ground truthing techniques (like Active Learning), which should help establish affective states (labels) while also selecting only the most informative data points to query from an oracle. In this paper, we propose a framework with capabilities to represent model uncertainties through approximations in Bayesian Neural Networks using Monte-Carlo (MC) Dropout. This is combined with suitable acquisition functions for active learning. Empirical results on a popular stress and affect detection dataset experimented on a Raspberry Pi 2 indicate that our proposed framework achieves a considerable efficiency boost during inference, with a substantially low number of acquired pool points during active learning across various acquisition functions. Variation Ratios achieves an accuracy of 90.38% which is comparable to the maximum test accuracy achieved while training on about 40% lesser data.

As machine learning (ML) has been applied to facilitate decision-making in various areas, such as hiring, loan grading etc., there have been and continue to be increasing concerns [3, 31] that ML models will inevitably "learn undesired bias" from the training data and make unfair predictions. From algorithms erroneously detecting suspects of crimes base on the color of their skin [7] and deciding who goes to jail [26], to algorithms used to predict test scores that provide unfairly higher scores to socioeconomically privileged students, allowing them to enter universities at a higher rate [27], the lack of understanding and control of undesired bias in ML models has tangible consequences. To deal with this challenge of biased models, many researchers have devoted their efforts, e.g., [15, 17, 35, 8, 2] to define, detect and mitigate bias in ML over the past decade. These approaches mainly measure and reduce undesired bias with respect to a sensitive attribute, such as age or race, in the training dataset. Although many of them provide various effective approaches, they all focus on centralized ML, where the training dataset is stored in a single place, executing the learning procedure, and hence assume full access to the entire dataset.

Probabilistic Machine Learning comes hand in hand with Stock Trading: Probabilistic Machine Learning uses past instances to predict probabilities of certain events happening in future instances. This can be directly applied to stock trading, to predict future stock prices. This program will use Gaussian Naive Bayes to classify data into increasing stock price, or decreasing stock price. Because of the volatility of the stocks, I will not be using the closing price of the stock to predict it, but rather be using the ratio between the past and current closing prices. Gaussian Naive Bayes is an algorithm that classifies data by extrapolating data using Gaussian Distribution (identical to Normal Distribution) as well as Bayes theorem.