Weakly supervised learning aims to empower machine learning when the perfect supervision is unavailable, which has drawn great attention from researchers. Among various types of weak supervision, one of the most challenging cases is to learn from multiple unlabeled (U) datasets with only a little knowledge of the class priors, or U$^m$ learning for short. In this paper, we study the problem of building an AUC (area under ROC curve) optimization model from multiple unlabeled datasets, which maximizes the pairwise ranking ability of the classifier. We propose U$^m$-AUC, an AUC optimization approach that converts the U$^m$ data into a multi-label AUC optimization problem, and can be trained efficiently. We show that the proposed U$^m$-AUC is effective theoretically and empirically.

A change point detection (CPD) framework assisted by a predictive machine learning model called "Predict and Compare" is introduced and characterised in relation to other state-of-the-art online CPD routines which it outperforms in terms of false positive rate and out-of-control average run length. The method's focus is on improving standard methods from sequential analysis such as the CUSUM rule in terms of these quality measures. This is achieved by replacing typically used trend estimation functionals such as the running mean with more sophisticated predictive models (Predict step), and comparing their prognosis with actual data (Compare step). The two models used in the Predict step are the ARIMA model and the LSTM recursive neural network. However, the framework is formulated in general terms, so as to allow the use of other prediction or comparison methods than those tested here. The power of the method is demonstrated in a tribological case study in which change points separating the run-in, steady-state, and divergent wear phases are detected in the regime of very few false positives.

The structure learning problem consists of fitting data generated by a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) to correctly reconstruct its arcs. In this context, differentiable approaches constrain or regularize the optimization problem using a continuous relaxation of the acyclicity property. The computational cost of evaluating graph acyclicity is cubic on the number of nodes and significantly affects scalability. In this paper we introduce COSMO, a constraint-free continuous optimization scheme for acyclic structure learning. At the core of our method, we define a differentiable approximation of an orientation matrix parameterized by a single priority vector. Differently from previous work, our parameterization fits a smooth orientation matrix and the resulting acyclic adjacency matrix without evaluating acyclicity at any step. Despite the absence of explicit constraints, we prove that COSMO always converges to an acyclic solution. In addition to being asymptotically faster, our empirical analysis highlights how COSMO performance on graph reconstruction compares favorably with competing structure learning methods.

In real-world classification settings, such as loan application evaluation or content moderation on online platforms, individuals respond to classifier predictions by strategically updating their features to increase their likelihood of receiving a particular (positive) decision (at a certain cost). Yet, when different demographic groups have different feature distributions or pay different update costs, prior work has shown that individuals from minority groups often pay a higher cost to update their features. Fair classification aims to address such classifier performance disparities by constraining the classifiers to satisfy statistical fairness properties. However, we show that standard fairness constraints do not guarantee that the constrained classifier reduces the disparity in strategic manipulation cost. To address such biases in strategic settings and provide equal opportunities for strategic manipulation, we propose a constrained optimization framework that constructs classifiers that lower the strategic manipulation cost for minority groups. We develop our framework by studying theoretical connections between group-specific strategic cost disparity and standard selection rate fairness metrics (e.g., statistical rate and true positive rate). Empirically, we show the efficacy of this approach over multiple real-world datasets.

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically struggle in the absence of a dense, well-shaped reward function. Intrinsically motivated exploration methods address this limitation by rewarding agents for visiting novel states or transitions, but these methods offer limited benefits in large environments where most discovered novelty is irrelevant for downstream tasks. We describe a method that uses background knowledge from text corpora to shape exploration. This method, called ELLM (Exploring with LLMs) rewards an agent for achieving goals suggested by a language model prompted with a description of the agent's current state. By leveraging large-scale language model pretraining, ELLM guides agents toward human-meaningful and plausibly useful behaviors without requiring a human in the loop. We evaluate ELLM in the Crafter game environment and the Housekeep robotic simulator, showing that ELLM-trained agents have better coverage of common-sense behaviors during pretraining and usually match or improve performance on a range of downstream tasks. Code available at https://github.com/yuqingd/ellm.

A transhumeral prosthesis restores missing anatomical segments below the shoulder, including the hand. Active prostheses utilize real-valued, continuous sensor data to recognize patient target poses, or goals, and proactively move the artificial limb. Previous studies have examined how well the data collected in stationary poses, without considering the time steps, can help discriminate the goals. In this case study paper, we focus on using time series data from surface electromyography electrodes and kinematic sensors to sequentially recognize patients' goals. Our approach involves transforming the data into discrete events and training an existing process mining-based goal recognition system. Results from data collected in a virtual reality setting with ten subjects demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed goal recognition approach, which achieves significantly better precision and recall than the state-of-the-art machine learning techniques and is less confident when wrong, which is beneficial when approximating smoother movements of prostheses.

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UW-ASNs) are predominantly used for underwater environments and find applications in many areas. However, a lack of security considerations, the unstable and challenging nature of the underwater environment, and the resource-constrained nature of the sensor nodes used for UW-ASNs (which makes them incapable of adopting security primitives) make the UW-ASN prone to vulnerabilities. This paper proposes an Adaptive decentralised Intrusion Detection and Prevention System called AIDPS for UW-ASNs. The proposed AIDPS can improve the security of the UW-ASNs so that they can efficiently detect underwater-related attacks (e.g., blackhole, grayhole and flooding attacks). To determine the most effective configuration of the proposed construction, we conduct a number of experiments using several state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms (e.g., Adaptive Random Forest (ARF), light gradient-boosting machine, and K-nearest neighbours) and concept drift detection algorithms (e.g., ADWIN, kdqTree, and Page-Hinkley). Our experimental results show that incremental ARF using ADWIN provides optimal performance when implemented with One-class support vector machine (SVM) anomaly-based detectors. Furthermore, our extensive evaluation results also show that the proposed scheme outperforms state-of-the-art bench-marking methods while providing a wider range of desirable features such as scalability and complexity.

Quantum computing is a growing field where the information is processed by two-levels quantum states known as qubits. Current physical realizations of qubits require a careful calibration, composed by different experiments, due to noise and decoherence phenomena. Among the different characterization experiments, a crucial step is to develop a model to classify the measured state by discriminating the ground state from the excited state. In this proceedings we benchmark multiple classification techniques applied to real quantum devices.

This paper presents a novel evaluation approach to text-based speaker diarization (SD), tackling the limitations of traditional metrics that do not account for any contextual information in text. Two new metrics are proposed, Text-based Diarization Error Rate and Diarization F1, which perform utterance- and word-level evaluations by aligning tokens in reference and hypothesis transcripts. Our metrics encompass more types of errors compared to existing ones, allowing us to make a more comprehensive analysis in SD. To align tokens, a multiple sequence alignment algorithm is introduced that supports multiple sequences in the reference while handling high-dimensional alignment to the hypothesis using dynamic programming. Our work is packaged into two tools, align4d providing an API for our alignment algorithm and TranscribeView for visualizing and evaluating SD errors, which can greatly aid in the creation of high-quality data, fostering the advancement of dialogue systems.

A service robot can provide a smoother interaction experience if it has the ability to proactively detect whether a nearby user intends to interact, in order to adapt its behavior e.g. by explicitly showing that it is available to provide a service. In this work, we propose a learning-based approach to predict the probability that a human user will interact with a robot before the interaction actually begins; the approach is self-supervised because after each encounter with a human, the robot can automatically label it depending on whether it resulted in an interaction or not. We explore different classification approaches, using different sets of features considering the pose and the motion of the user. We validate and deploy the approach in three scenarios. The first collects $3442$ natural sequences (both interacting and non-interacting) representing employees in an office break area: a real-world, challenging setting, where we consider a coffee machine in place of a service robot. The other two scenarios represent researchers interacting with service robots ($200$ and $72$ sequences, respectively). Results show that, even in challenging real-world settings, our approach can learn without external supervision, and can achieve accurate classification (i.e. AUROC greater than $0.9$) of the user's intention to interact with an advance of more than $3$s before the interaction actually occurs.