Typed entailment graphs try to learn the entailment relations between predicates from text and model them as edges between predicate nodes. The construction of entailment graphs usually suffers from severe sparsity and unreliability of distributional similarity. We propose a two-stage method, Entailment Graph with Textual Entailment and Transitivity (EGT2). EGT2 learns local entailment relations by recognizing possible textual entailment between template sentences formed by typed CCG-parsed predicates. Based on the generated local graph, EGT2 then uses three novel soft transitivity constraints to consider the logical transitivity in entailment structures. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that EGT2 can well model the transitivity in entailment graph to alleviate the sparsity issue, and lead to significant improvement over current state-of-the-art methods.

We consider an expected-value ranking and selection problem where all k solutions' simulation outputs depend on a common uncertain input model. Given that the uncertainty of the input model is captured by a probability simplex on a finite support, we define the most probable best (MPB) to be the solution whose probability of being optimal is the largest. To devise an efficient sampling algorithm to find the MPB, we first derive a lower bound to the large deviation rate of the probability of falsely selecting the MPB, then formulate an optimal computing budget allocation (OCBA) problem to find the optimal static sampling ratios for all solution-input model pairs that maximize the lower bound. We devise a series of sequential algorithms that apply interpretable and computationally efficient sampling rules and prove their sampling ratios achieve the optimality conditions for the OCBA problem as the simulation budget increases. The algorithms are benchmarked against a state-of-the-art sequential sampling algorithm designed for contextual ranking and selection problems and demonstrated to have superior empirical performances at finding the MPB.

Image-based anomaly detection systems are of vital importance in various manufacturing applications. The resolution and acquisition rate of such systems is increasing significantly in recent years under the fast development of image sensing technology. This enables the detection of tiny defects in real-time. However, such a high resolution and acquisition rate of image data not only slows down the speed of image processing algorithms but also increases data storage and transmission cost. To tackle this problem, we propose a fast and data-efficient method with theoretical performance guarantee that is suitable for sparse anomaly detection in images with a smooth background (smooth plus sparse signal). The proposed method, named Compressed Smooth Sparse Decomposition (CSSD), is a one-step method that unifies the compressive image acquisition and decomposition-based image processing techniques. To further enhance its performance in a high-dimensional scenario, a Kronecker Compressed Smooth Sparse Decomposition (KronCSSD) method is proposed. Compared to traditional smooth and sparse decomposition algorithms, significant transmission cost reduction and computational speed boost can be achieved with negligible performance loss. Simulation examples and several case studies in various applications illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

An increased awareness concerning risks of algorithmic bias has driven a surge of efforts around bias mitigation strategies. A vast majority of the proposed approaches fall under one of two categories: (1) imposing algorithmic fairness constraints on predictive models, and (2) collecting additional training samples. Most recently and at the intersection of these two categories, methods that propose active learning under fairness constraints have been developed. However, proposed bias mitigation strategies typically overlook the bias presented in the observed labels. In this work, we study fairness considerations of active data collection strategies in the presence of label bias. We first present an overview of different types of label bias in the context of supervised learning systems. We then empirically show that, when overlooking label bias, collecting more data can aggravate bias, and imposing fairness constraints that rely on the observed labels in the data collection process may not address the problem. Our results illustrate the unintended consequences of deploying a model that attempts to mitigate a single type of bias while neglecting others, emphasizing the importance of explicitly differentiating between the types of bias that fairness-aware algorithms aim to address, and highlighting the risks of neglecting label bias during data collection.

With the wide application of face recognition systems, there is rising concern that original face images could be exposed to malicious intents and consequently cause personal privacy breaches. This paper presents DuetFace, a novel privacy-preserving face recognition method that employs collaborative inference in the frequency domain. Starting from a counterintuitive discovery that face recognition can achieve surprisingly good performance with only visually indistinguishable high-frequency channels, this method designs a credible split of frequency channels by their cruciality for visualization and operates the server-side model on non-crucial channels. However, the model degrades in its attention to facial features due to the missing visual information. To compensate, the method introduces a plug-in interactive block to allow attention transfer from the client-side by producing a feature mask. The mask is further refined by deriving and overlaying a facial region of interest (ROI). Extensive experiments on multiple datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in protecting face images from undesired visual inspection, reconstruction, and identification while maintaining high task availability and performance. Results show that the proposed method achieves a comparable recognition accuracy and computation cost to the unprotected ArcFace and outperforms the state-of-the-art privacy-preserving methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/TFace/tree/master/recognition/tasks/duetface.

Transformers, currently the state-of-the-art in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, are prone to generate uncalibrated predictions or extreme probabilities, making the process of taking different decisions based on their output relatively difficult. In this paper we propose to build several inductive Venn--ABERS predictors (IVAP), which are guaranteed to be well calibrated under minimal assumptions, based on a selection of pre-trained transformers. We test their performance over a set of diverse NLU tasks and show that they are capable of producing well-calibrated probabilistic predictions that are uniformly spread over the [0,1] interval -- all while retaining the original model's predictive accuracy.

Few-shot bioacoustic event detection is a task that detects the occurrence time of a novel sound given a few examples. Previous methods employ metric learning to build a latent space with the labeled part of different sound classes, also known as positive events. In this study, we propose a segment-level few-shot learning framework that utilizes both the positive and negative events during model optimization. Training with negative events, which are larger in volume than positive events, can increase the generalization ability of the model. In addition, we use transductive inference on the validation set during training for better adaptation to novel classes. We conduct ablation studies on our proposed method with different setups on input features, training data, and hyper-parameters. Our final system achieves an F-measure of 62.73 on the DCASE 2022 challenge task 5 (DCASE2022-T5) validation set, outperforming the performance of the baseline prototypical network 34.02 by a large margin. Using the proposed method, our submitted system ranks 2nd in DCASE2022-T5. The code of this paper is fully open-sourced at https://github.com/haoheliu/DCASE_2022_Task_5.

Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are complex black boxes. This means that a security analyst will have little to no explanation or clarification on why an IDS model made a particular prediction. A potential solution to this problem is to research and develop Explainable Intrusion Detection Systems (X-IDS) based on current capabilities in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). In this paper, we create a Self Organizing Maps (SOMs) based X-IDS system that is capable of producing explanatory visualizations. We leverage SOM's explainability to create both global and local explanations. An analyst can use global explanations to get a general idea of how a particular IDS model computes predictions. Local explanations are generated for individual datapoints to explain why a certain prediction value was computed. Furthermore, our SOM based X-IDS was evaluated on both explanation generation and traditional accuracy tests using the NSL-KDD and the CIC-IDS-2017 datasets.

Deep learning-based melanoma classification with dermoscopic images has recently shown great potential in automatic early-stage melanoma diagnosis. However, limited by the significant data imbalance and obvious extraneous artifacts, i.e., the hair and ruler markings, discriminative feature extraction from dermoscopic images is very challenging. In this study, we seek to resolve these problems respectively towards better representation learning for lesion features. Specifically, a GAN-based data augmentation (GDA) strategy is adapted to generate synthetic melanoma-positive images, in conjunction with the proposed implicit hair denoising (IHD) strategy. Wherein the hair-related representations are implicitly disentangled via an auxiliary classifier network and reversely sent to the melanoma-feature extraction backbone for better melanoma-specific representation learning. Furthermore, to train the IHD module, the hair noises are additionally labeled on the ISIC2020 dataset, making it the first large-scale dermoscopic dataset with annotation of hair-like artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework as well as the effectiveness of each component. The improved dataset publicly avaliable at https://github.com/kirtsy/DermoscopicDataset.

Bacterial infections are responsible for high mortality worldwide. Antimicrobial resistance underlying the infection, and multifaceted patient's clinical status can hamper the correct choice of antibiotic treatment. Randomized clinical trials provide average treatment effect estimates but are not ideal for risk stratification and optimization of therapeutic choice, i.e., individualized treatment effects (ITE). Here, we leverage large-scale electronic health record data, collected from Southern US academic clinics, to emulate a clinical trial, i.e., 'target trial', and develop a machine learning model of mortality prediction and ITE estimation for patients diagnosed with acute bacterial skin and skin structure infection (ABSSSI) due to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). ABSSSI-MRSA is a challenging condition with reduced treatment options - vancomycin is the preferred choice, but it has non-negligible side effects. First, we use propensity score matching to emulate the trial and create a treatment randomized (vancomycin vs. other antibiotics) dataset. Next, we use this data to train various machine learning methods (including boosted/LASSO logistic regression, support vector machines, and random forest) and choose the best model in terms of area under the receiver characteristic (AUC) through bootstrap validation. Lastly, we use the models to calculate ITE and identify possible averted deaths by therapy change. The out-of-bag tests indicate that SVM and RF are the most accurate, with AUC of 81% and 78%, respectively, but BLR/LASSO is not far behind (76%). By calculating the counterfactuals using the BLR/LASSO, vancomycin increases the risk of death, but it shows a large variation (odds ratio 1.2, 95% range 0.4-3.8) and the contribution to outcome probability is modest. Instead, the RF exhibits stronger changes in ITE, suggesting more complex treatment heterogeneity.