Modern machine learning models deployed often encounter distribution shifts in real-world applications, manifesting as covariate or semantic out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts. These shifts give rise to challenges in OOD generalization and OOD detection. This paper introduces a novel, integrated approach AHA (Adaptive Human-Assisted OOD learning) to simultaneously address both OOD generalization and detection through a human-assisted framework by labeling data in the wild. Our approach strategically labels examples within a novel maximum disambiguation region, where the number of semantic and covariate OOD data roughly equalizes. By labeling within this region, we can maximally disambiguate the two types of OOD data, thereby maximizing the utility of the fixed labeling budget. Our algorithm first utilizes a noisy binary search algorithm that identifies the maximal disambiguation region with high probability. The algorithm then continues with annotating inside the identified labeling region, reaping the full benefit of human feedback. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our framework. We observed that with only a few hundred human annotations, our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods that do not involve human assistance, in both OOD generalization and OOD detection. Code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/HaoyueBaiZJU/aha}.

Analog-on-Top Mixed Signal (AMS) Integrated Circuit (IC) design is a time-consuming process predominantly carried out by hand. Within this flow, usually, some area is reserved by the top-level integrator for the placement of digital blocks. Specific features of the area, such as size and shape, have a relevant impact on the possibility of implementing the digital logic with the required functionality. We present a Machine Learning (ML)-based evaluation methodology for predicting the feasibility of digital implementation using a set of high-level features. This approach aims to avoid time-consuming Place-and-Route trials, enabling rapid feedback between Digital and Analog Back-End designers during top-level placement.

Recent advances in machine learning have led to a surge in adoption of neural networks for various tasks, but lack of interpretability remains an issue for many others in which an understanding of the features influencing the prediction is necessary to ensure fairness, safety, and legal compliance. In this paper we consider one class of such tasks, tabular dataset classification, and propose a novel neuro-symbolic architecture, Neural Reasoning Networks (NRN), that is scalable and generates logically sound textual explanations for its predictions. NRNs are connected layers of logical neurons which implement a form of real valued logic. A training algorithm (R-NRN) learns the weights of the network as usual using gradient descent optimization with backprop, but also learns the network structure itself using a bandit-based optimization. Both are implemented in an extension to PyTorch (https://github.com/IBM/torchlogic) that takes full advantage of GPU scaling and batched training. Evaluation on a diverse set of 22 open-source datasets for tabular classification demonstrates performance (measured by ROC AUC) which improves over multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and is statistically similar to other state-of-the-art approaches such as Random Forest, XGBoost and Gradient Boosted Trees, while offering 43% faster training and a more than 2 orders of magnitude reduction in the number of parameters required, on average. Furthermore, R-NRN explanations are shorter than the compared approaches while producing more accurate feature importance scores.

Many organizations depend on human decision-makers to make subjective decisions, especially in settings where information is scarce. Although workers are often viewed as interchangeable, the specific individual assigned to a task can significantly impact outcomes due to their unique decision-making processes and risk tolerance. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that utilizes machine learning to predict worker behavior and employs integer optimization to strategically assign workers to tasks. Unlike traditional methods that treat machine learning predictions as static inputs for optimization, in our approach, the optimal predictive model used to represent a worker's behavior is determined by how that worker is allocated within the optimization process. We present a decision-aware optimization framework that integrates predictive model selection with worker allocation. Collaborating with an auto-insurance provider and using real-world data, we evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method by applying three different techniques to predict worker behavior. Our findings show the proposed decision-aware framework outperforms traditional methods and offers context-sensitive and data-responsive strategies for workforce management.

Understanding human activity is a crucial aspect of developing intelligent robots, particularly in the domain of human-robot collaboration. Nevertheless, existing systems encounter challenges such as over-segmentation, attributed to errors in the up-sampling process of the decoder. In response, we introduce a promising solution: the Temporal Fusion Graph Convolutional Network. This innovative approach aims to rectify the inadequate boundary estimation of individual actions within an activity stream and mitigate the issue of over-segmentation in the temporal dimension. Moreover, systems leveraging human activity recognition frameworks for decision-making necessitate more than just the identification of actions. They require a confidence value indicative of the certainty regarding the correspondence between observations and training examples. This is crucial to prevent overly confident responses to unforeseen scenarios that were not part of the training data and may have resulted in mismatches due to weak similarity measures within the system. To address this, we propose the incorporation of a Spectral Normalized Residual connection aimed at enhancing efficient estimation of novelty in observations. This innovative approach ensures the preservation of input distance within the feature space by imposing constraints on the maximum gradients of weight updates. By limiting these gradients, we promote a more robust handling of novel situations, thereby mitigating the risks associated with overconfidence. Our methodology involves the use of a Gaussian process to quantify the distance in feature space.

It has recently been discovered that the conclusions of many highly influential econometrics studies can be overturned by removing a very small fraction of their samples (often less than $0.5\%$). These conclusions are typically based on the results of one or more Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions, raising the question: given a dataset, can we certify the robustness of an OLS fit on this dataset to the removal of a given number of samples? Brute-force techniques quickly break down even on small datasets. Existing approaches which go beyond brute force either can only find candidate small subsets to remove (but cannot certify their non-existence) [BGM20, KZC21], are computationally intractable beyond low dimensional settings [MR22], or require very strong assumptions on the data distribution and too many samples to give reasonable bounds in practice [BP21, FH23]. We present an efficient algorithm for certifying the robustness of linear regressions to removals of samples. We implement our algorithm and run it on several landmark econometrics datasets with hundreds of dimensions and tens of thousands of samples, giving the first non-trivial certificates of robustness to sample removal for datasets of dimension $4$ or greater. We prove that under distributional assumptions on a dataset, the bounds produced by our algorithm are tight up to a $1 + o(1)$ multiplicative factor.

Stress has become a fact in people's lives. It has a significant effect on the function of body systems and many key systems of the body including respiratory, cardiovascular, and even reproductive systems are impacted by stress. It can be very helpful to detect stress episodes in early steps of its appearance to avoid damages it can cause to body systems. Using physiological signals can be useful for stress detection as they reflect very important information about the human body. PPG signal due to its advantages is one of the mostly used signal in this field. In this research work, we take advantage of PPG signals to detect stress events. The PPG signals used in this work are collected from one of the newest publicly available datasets named as UBFC-Phys and a model is developed by using CNN-MLP deep learning algorithm. The results obtained from the proposed model indicate that stress can be detected with an accuracy of approximately 82 percent.

The structure of many real-world datasets is intrinsically hierarchical, making the modeling of such hierarchies a critical objective in both unsupervised and supervised machine learning. Recently, novel approaches for hierarchical clustering with deep architectures have been proposed. In this work, we take a critical perspective on this line of research and demonstrate that many approaches exhibit major limitations when applied to realistic datasets, partly due to their high computational complexity. In particular, we show that a lightweight procedure implemented on top of pre-trained non-hierarchical clustering models outperforms models designed specifically for hierarchical clustering. Our proposed approach is computationally efficient and applicable to any pre-trained clustering model that outputs logits, without requiring any fine-tuning. To highlight the generality of our findings, we illustrate how our method can also be applied in a supervised setup, recovering meaningful hierarchies from a pre-trained ImageNet classifier.

While large language models (LLMs) have rapidly improved their performance on a broad number of tasks, they still often fall short on reasoning tasks. As LLMs become more integrated in diverse real-world tasks, advancing their reasoning capabilities is crucial to their effectiveness in nuanced, complex problems. Wang et al. [27]'s self-consistency framework reveals that sampling multiple rationales before taking a majority vote reliably improves model performance across various closed-answer reasoning tasks. Standard methods based on this framework aggregate the final decisions of these rationales but fail to utilize the detailed step-by-step reasoning paths applied by these paths. Our work enhances this approach by incorporating and analyzing both the reasoning paths of these rationales in addition to their final decisions before taking a majority vote. These methods not only improve the reliability of reasoning paths but also cause more robust performance on complex reasoning tasks.

Diffusion and flow-matching models achieve remarkable generative performance but at the cost of many sampling steps, this slows inference and limits applicability to time-critical tasks. The ReFlow procedure can accelerate sampling by straightening generation trajectories. However, ReFlow is an iterative procedure, typically requiring training on simulated data, and results in reduced sample quality. To mitigate sample deterioration, we examine the design space of ReFlow and highlight potential pitfalls in prior heuristic practices. We then propose seven improvements for training dynamics, learning and inference, which are verified with thorough ablation studies on CIFAR10 $32 \times 32$, AFHQv2 $64 \times 64$, and FFHQ $64 \times 64$. Combining all our techniques, we achieve state-of-the-art FID scores (without / with guidance, resp.) for fast generation via neural ODEs: $2.23$ / $1.98$ on CIFAR10, $2.30$ / $1.91$ on AFHQv2, $2.84$ / $2.67$ on FFHQ, and $3.49$ / $1.74$ on ImageNet-64, all with merely $9$ neural function evaluations.