The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission measured light from stars in ~85% of the sky throughout its two-year primary mission, resulting in millions of TESS 30-minute cadence light curves to analyze in the search for transiting exoplanets. To search this vast dataset, we aim to provide an approach that is both computationally efficient, produces highly performant predictions, and minimizes the required human search effort. We present a convolutional neural network that we train to identify short period variables. To make a prediction for a given light curve, our network requires no prior target parameters identified using other methods. Our network performs inference on a TESS 30-minute cadence light curve in ~5ms on a single GPU, enabling large scale archival searches. We present a collection of 14156 short-period variables identified by our network. The majority of our identified variables fall into two prominent populations, one of short-period main sequence binaries and another of Delta Scuti stars. Our neural network model and related code is additionally provided as open-source code for public use and extension.

Fair predictive algorithms hinge on both equality and trust, yet inherent uncertainty in real-world data challenges our ability to make consistent, fair, and calibrated decisions. While fairly managing predictive error has been extensively explored, some recent work has begun to address the challenge of fairly accounting for irreducible prediction uncertainty. However, a clear taxonomy and well-specified objectives for integrating uncertainty into fairness remains undefined. We address this gap by introducing FairlyUncertain, an axiomatic benchmark for evaluating uncertainty estimates in fairness. Our benchmark posits that fair predictive uncertainty estimates should be consistent across learning pipelines and calibrated to observed randomness. Through extensive experiments on ten popular fairness datasets, our evaluation reveals: (1) A theoretically justified and simple method for estimating uncertainty in binary settings is more consistent and calibrated than prior work; (2) Abstaining from binary predictions, even with improved uncertainty estimates, reduces error but does not alleviate outcome imbalances between demographic groups; (3) Incorporating consistent and calibrated uncertainty estimates in regression tasks improves fairness without any explicit fairness interventions. Additionally, our benchmark package is designed to be extensible and open-source, to grow with the field. By providing a standardized framework for assessing the interplay between uncertainty and fairness, FairlyUncertain paves the way for more equitable and trustworthy machine learning practices.

Detecting credit card fraud (CCF) holds significant importance due to its role in safeguarding consumers from unauthorized transactions that have the potential to result in financial detriment and negative impacts on their credit rating. It aids financial institutions in upholding the reliability of their payment mechanisms and circumventing the expensive procedure of compensating for deceitful transactions. The utilization of Artificial Intelligence methodologies demonstrated remarkable efficacy in the identification of credit card fraud instances. Within this study, we present a unique attention-based ensemble model. This model is enhanced by adding an attention layer for integration of first layer classifiers' predictions and a selection layer for choosing the best integrated value. The attention layer is implemented with two aggregation operators: dependent ordered weighted averaging (DOWA) and induced ordered weighted averaging (IOWA). The performance of the IOWA operator is very close to the learning algorithm in neural networks which is based on the gradient descent optimization method, and performing the DOWA operator is based on weakening the classifiers that make outlier predictions compared to other learners. Both operators have a sufficient level of complexity for the recognition of complex patterns. Accuracy and diversity are the two criteria we use for selecting the classifiers whose predictions are to be integrated by the two aggregation operators. Using a bootstrap forest, we identify the 13 most significant features of the dataset that contribute the most to CCF detection and use them to feed the proposed model. Exhibiting its efficacy, the ensemble model attains an accuracy of 99.95% with an area under the curve (AUC) of 1.

Many bias mitigation methods have been developed for addressing fairness issues in machine learning. We found that using linear mixup alone, a data augmentation technique, for bias mitigation, can still retain biases present in dataset labels. Research presented in this paper aims to address this issue by proposing a novel pre-processing strategy in which both an existing mixup method and our new bias mitigation algorithm can be utilized to improve the generation of labels of augmented samples, which are proximity aware. Specifically, we proposed ProxiMix which keeps both pairwise and proximity relationships for fairer data augmentation. We conducted thorough experiments with three datasets, three ML models, and different hyperparameters settings. Our experimental results showed the effectiveness of ProxiMix from both fairness of predictions and fairness of recourse perspectives.

We present a cost-effective approach for developing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for low-resource languages like Ika. We fine-tune the pretrained wav2vec 2.0 Massively Multilingual Speech Models on a high-quality speech dataset compiled from New Testament Bible translations in Ika. Our results show that fine-tuning multilingual pretrained models achieves a Word Error Rate (WER) of 0.5377 and Character Error Rate (CER) of 0.2651 with just over 1 hour of training data. The larger 1 billion parameter model outperforms the smaller 300 million parameter model due to its greater complexity and ability to store richer speech representations. However, we observe overfitting to the small training dataset, reducing generalizability. Our findings demonstrate the potential of leveraging multilingual pretrained models for low-resource languages. Future work should focus on expanding the dataset and exploring techniques to mitigate overfitting.

Power system operators must ensure that dispatch decisions remain feasible in case of grid outages or contingencies to prevent cascading failures and ensure reliable operation. However, checking the feasibility of all $N - k$ contingencies -- every possible simultaneous failure of $k$ grid components -- is computationally intractable for even small $k$, requiring system operators to resort to heuristic screening methods. Because of the increase in uncertainty and changes in system behaviors, heuristic lists might not include all relevant contingencies, generating false negatives in which unsafe scenarios are misclassified as safe. In this work, we propose to use input-convex neural networks (ICNNs) for contingency screening. We show that ICNN reliability can be determined by solving a convex optimization problem, and by scaling model weights using this problem as a differentiable optimization layer during training, we can learn an ICNN classifier that is both data-driven and has provably guaranteed reliability. Namely, our method can ensure a zero false negative rate. We empirically validate this methodology in a case study on the IEEE 39-bus test network, observing that it yields substantial (10-20x) speedups while having excellent classification accuracy.

In this study, we consider the problem of predicting task success for open-vocabulary manipulation by a manipulator, based on instruction sentences and egocentric images before and after manipulation. Conventional approaches, including multimodal large language models (MLLMs), often fail to appropriately understand detailed characteristics of objects and/or subtle changes in the position of objects. We propose Contrastive $\lambda$-Repformer, which predicts task success for table-top manipulation tasks by aligning images with instruction sentences. Our method integrates the following three key types of features into a multi-level aligned representation: features that preserve local image information; features aligned with natural language; and features structured through natural language. This allows the model to focus on important changes by looking at the differences in the representation between two images. We evaluate Contrastive $\lambda$-Repformer on a dataset based on a large-scale standard dataset, the RT-1 dataset, and on a physical robot platform. The results show that our approach outperformed existing approaches including MLLMs. Our best model achieved an improvement of 8.66 points in accuracy compared to the representative MLLM-based model.

The Random Forest (RF) algorithm can be applied to a broad spectrum of problems, including time series prediction. However, neither the classical IID (Independent and Identically distributed) bootstrap nor block bootstrapping strategies (as implemented in rangerts) completely account for the nature of the Data Generating Process (DGP) while resampling the observations. We propose the combination of RF with a residual bootstrapping technique where we replace the IID bootstrap with the AR-Sieve Bootstrap (ARSB), which assumes the DGP to be an autoregressive process. To assess the new model's predictive performance, we conduct a simulation study using synthetic data generated from different types of DGPs. It turns out that ARSB provides more variation amongst the trees in the forest. Moreover, RF with ARSB shows greater accuracy compared to RF with other bootstrap strategies. However, these improvements are achieved at some efficiency costs.

Current efforts to detect nuclear detonations and correctly categorize explosion sources with ground- and space-collected discriminants presents challenges that remain unaddressed by the Event Categorization Matrix (ECM) model. Smaller events (lower yield explosions) often include only sparse observations among few modalities and can therefore lack a complete set of discriminants. The covariance structures can also vary significantly between such observations of event (source-type) categories. Both obstacles are problematic for ``classic'' ECM. Our work addresses this gap and presents a Bayesian update to the previous ECM model, termed B-ECM, which can be trained on partial observations and does not rely on a pooled covariance structure. We further augment ECM with Bayesian Decision Theory so that false negative or false positive rates of an event categorization can be reduced in an intuitive manner. To demonstrate improved categorization rates with B-ECM, we compare an array of B-ECM and classic ECM models with multiple performance metrics that leverage Monte Carlo experiments. We use both synthetic and real data. Our B-ECM models show consistent gains in overall accuracy and a lower false negative rates relative to the classic ECM model. We propose future avenues to improve B-ECM that expand its decision-making and predictive capability.

In this work, we present AfriHuBERT, an extension of mHuBERT-147, a state-of-the-art (SOTA) and compact self-supervised learning (SSL) model, originally pretrained on 147 languages. While mHuBERT-147 was pretrained on 16 African languages, we expand this to cover 39 African languages through continued pretraining on 6,500+ hours of speech data aggregated from diverse sources, including 23 newly added languages. We evaluate AfriHuBERT on two key speech tasks: Language Identification (LID) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) using FLEURS dataset. Our results show a +4% F1 score improvement on average for LID and a -1.2% average Word Error Rate (WER) reduction for ASR. Further analysis shows that ASR models trained on AfriHuBERT exhibit improved cross-corpus generalization. Additionally, the analysis indicates that the FLEURS have data quality limitations that may affect their suitability for evaluating low-resource African languages, suggesting the need for better evaluation benchmarks for these languages.