Counterfactual explanations are viewed as an effective way to explain machine learning predictions. This interest is reflected by a relatively young literature with already dozens of algorithms aiming to generate such explanations. These algorithms are focused on finding how features can be modified to change the output classification. However, this rather general objective can be achieved in different ways, which brings about the need for a methodology to test and benchmark these algorithms. The contributions of this work are manifold: First, a large benchmarking study of 10 algorithmic approaches on 22 tabular datasets is performed, using 9 relevant evaluation metrics. Second, the introduction of a novel, first of its kind, framework to test counterfactual generation algorithms. Third, a set of objective metrics to evaluate and compare counterfactual results. And finally, insight from the benchmarking results that indicate which approaches obtain the best performance on what type of dataset. This benchmarking study and framework can help practitioners in determining which technique and building blocks most suit their context, and can help researchers in the design and evaluation of current and future counterfactual generation algorithms. Our findings show that, overall, there's no single best algorithm to generate counterfactual explanations as the performance highly depends on properties related to the dataset, model, score and factual point specificities.

Generating future frames given a few context (or past) frames is a challenging task. It requires modeling the temporal coherence of videos and multi-modality in terms of diversity in the potential future states. Current variational approaches for video generation tend to marginalize over multi-modal future outcomes. Instead, we propose to explicitly model the multi-modality in the future outcomes and leverage it to sample diverse futures. Our approach, Diverse Video Generator, uses a Gaussian Process (GP) to learn priors on future states given the past and maintains a probability distribution over possible futures given a particular sample. In addition, we leverage the changes in this distribution over time to control the sampling of diverse future states by estimating the end of ongoing sequences. That is, we use the variance of GP over the output function space to trigger a change in an action sequence. We achieve state-of-the-art results on diverse future frame generation in terms of reconstruction quality and diversity of the generated sequences.

Deep neural networks have demonstrated their capability to learn control policies for a variety of tasks. However, these neural network-based policies have been shown to be susceptible to exploitation by adversarial agents. Therefore, there is a need to develop techniques to learn control policies that are robust against adversaries. We introduce Adversarially Robust Control (ARC), which trains the protagonist policy and the adversarial policy end-to-end on the same loss. The aim of the protagonist is to maximise this loss, whilst the adversary is attempting to minimise it. We demonstrate the proposed ARC training in a highway driving scenario, where the protagonist controls the follower vehicle whilst the adversary controls the lead vehicle. By training the protagonist against an ensemble of adversaries, it learns a significantly more robust control policy, which generalises to a variety of adversarial strategies. The approach is shown to reduce the amount of collisions against new adversaries by up to 90.25%, compared to the original policy. Moreover, by utilising an auxiliary distillation loss, we show that the fine-tuned control policy shows no drop in performance across its original training distribution.

Annotating user interfaces (UIs) that involves localization and classification of meaningful UI elements on a screen is a critical step for many mobile applications such as screen readers and voice control of devices. Annotating object icons, such as menu, search, and arrow backward, is especially challenging due to the lack of explicit labels on screens, their similarity to pictures, and their diverse shapes. Existing studies either use view hierarchy or pixel based methods to tackle the task. Pixel based approaches are more popular as view hierarchy features on mobile platforms are often incomplete or inaccurate, however it leaves out instructional information in the view hierarchy such as resource-ids or content descriptions. We propose a novel deep learning based multi-modal approach that combines the benefits of both pixel and view hierarchy features as well as leverages the state-of-the-art object detection techniques. In order to demonstrate the utility provided, we create a high quality UI dataset by manually annotating the most commonly used 29 icons in Rico, a large scale mobile design dataset consisting of 72k UI screenshots. The experimental results indicate the effectiveness of our multi-modal approach. Our model not only outperforms a widely used object classification baseline but also pixel based object detection models. Our study sheds light on how to combine view hierarchy with pixel features for annotating UI elements.

The combination of Winograd's algorithm and systolic array architecture has demonstrated the capability of improving DSP efficiency in accelerating convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on FPGA platforms. However, handling arbitrary convolution kernel sizes in FPGA-based Winograd processing elements and supporting efficient data access remain underexplored. In this work, we are the first to propose an optimized Winograd processing element (WinoPE), which can naturally support multiple convolution kernel sizes with the same amount of computing resources and maintains high runtime DSP efficiency. Using the proposed WinoPE, we construct a highly efficient systolic array accelerator, termed WinoCNN. We also propose a dedicated memory subsystem to optimize the data access. Based on the accelerator architecture, we build accurate resource and performance modeling to explore optimal accelerator configurations under different resource constraints. We implement our proposed accelerator on multiple FPGAs, which outperforms the state-of-the-art designs in terms of both throughput and DSP efficiency. Our implementation achieves DSP efficiency up to 1.33 GOPS/DSP and throughput up to 3.1 TOPS with the Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA. These are 29.1\% and 20.0\% better than the best solutions reported previously, respectively.

Deep neural networks often suffer from poor performance or even training failure due to the ill-conditioned problem, the vanishing/exploding gradient problem, and the saddle point problem. In this paper, a novel method by acting the gradient activation function (GAF) on the gradient is proposed to handle these challenges. Intuitively, the GAF enlarges the tiny gradients and restricts the large gradient. Theoretically, this paper gives conditions that the GAF needs to meet, and on this basis, proves that the GAF alleviates the problems mentioned above. In addition, this paper proves that the convergence rate of SGD with the GAF is faster than that without the GAF under some assumptions. Furthermore, experiments on CIFAR, ImageNet, and PASCAL visual object classes confirm the GAF's effectiveness. The experimental results also demonstrate that the proposed method is able to be adopted in various deep neural networks to improve their performance. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/LongJin-lab/Activated-Gradients-for-Deep-Neural-Networks.

Hugging Face is the technology startup, with an active open-source community, that drove the worldwide adoption of transformer-based models thanks to its eponymous Transformers library. Earlier this year, Hugging Face and AWS collaborated to enable you to train and deploy over 10,000 pre-trained models on Amazon SageMaker. For more information on training Hugging Face models at scale on SageMaker, refer to AWS and Hugging Face collaborate to simplify and accelerate adoption of Natural Language Processing models and the sample notebooks. In this post, we discuss different methods to create a SageMaker endpoint for a Hugging Face model. If you're unfamiliar with transformer-based models and their place in the natural language processing (NLP) landscape, here is an overview.

Faraz Malik Awan is working as a Research Engineer at Data Intelligence and Communication Engineering (DICE) Lab, Telecom SudParis. This job is in collaboration with his Ph.D. from Institut Polytechnique de Paris. He is conducting research on recommendation/prediction systems for Smart Cities, exploiting Machine/Deep Learning approaches. He did his BS in Computer Science from COMSATS University Islamabad. After completing his BS degree, he started working for a German corporation, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) as a Software Engineer.

GitHub is helping developers to speed up and clean up their code with a new AI-powered tool that it calls Copilot. GitHub Copilot uses an AI system from OpenAI known as OpenAI Codex. The system claims to have a broad knowledge of how people use code and claims to be "significantly more capable than GPT-3" in generating code. By drawing context from the code that a developer is working on, the system is able to suggest entire lines or functions. Even veteran coders can benefit from GitHub Copilot by using the system to explore new APIs and discover alternative ways to solve problems without having to scour the web for answers.

Abstract: Deep neural networks have achieved great success, most notably in learning to classify images. Yet, the phenomenon of learning images is not well understood, and generalization of deep networks is considered a mystery. Recent studies have explained the generalization of deep networks within the framework of interpolation. In this talk, we will see that the task of classifying images requires extrapolation capability, and interpolation by itself is not adequate to understand deep networks. We study image classification datasets in the pixel space, the internal representations of images learned throughout the layers of trained networks, and also in the low-dimensional feature space that one can derive using wavelets/shearlets.