The congruence between affective experiences and physiological changes has been a debated topic for centuries. Recent technological advances in measurement and data analysis provide hope to solve this epic challenge. Open science and open data practices, together with data analysis challenges open to the academic community, are also promising tools for solving this problem. In this entry to the Emotion Physiology and Experience Collaboration (EPiC) challenge, we propose a data analysis solution that combines theoretical assumptions with data-driven methodologies. We used feature engineering and ensemble selection. Each predictor was trained on subsets of the training data that would maximize the information available for training. Late fusion was used with an averaging step. We chose to average considering a ``wisdom of crowds'' strategy. This strategy yielded an overall RMSE of 1.19 in the test set. Future work should carefully explore if our assumptions are correct and the potential of weighted fusion.

Machine Learning has attained high success rates in practically Similarly, zip codes can be correlated with race. Hence, every field, including healthcare, finance, and education, the bias gets embedded in the non-sensitive attributes that based on the accuracy and efficiency of the model's are used in the model training. Based on this hypothesis, a outcome (Dastile, Çelik, and Potsane 2020; Bakator and few initial efforts have been made to mitigate bias in the Radosav 2018). However, these models are biased and exhibit absence of protected attributes (Grari, Lamprier, and Detyniecki a propensity to favor one demographic group over another 2022; Lahoti et al. 2020; Yan, Kao, and Ferrara in various applications, including credit and loan approval, 2020; Zhao et al. 2022). The most recent approach (Zhao criminal justice, and resume-based candidate shortlisting et al. 2022) identifies related features that are correlated with (Mehrabi et al. 2021; Gianfrancesco et al. 2018; Yapo the sensitive attributes and would further minimize the correlation and Weiss 2018). The idea of fairness has received a lot of between the related features and the model's prediction attention recently to combat the discrimination from the outcome to learn a fair classifier with respect to the sensitive of ML models (Dwork et al. 2012; Beutel et al. 2017; attribute. However, identification of related features require Hardt, Price, and Srebro 2016).

The recent success of learning-based algorithms can be greatly attributed to the immense amount of annotated data used for training. Yet, many datasets lack annotations due to the high costs associated with labeling, resulting in degraded performances of deep learning methods. Self-supervised learning is frequently adopted to mitigate the reliance on massive labeled datasets since it exploits unlabeled data to learn relevant feature representations. In this work, we propose SS-StyleGAN, a self-supervised approach for image annotation and classification suitable for extremely small annotated datasets. This novel framework adds self-supervision to the StyleGAN architecture by integrating an encoder that learns the embedding to the StyleGAN latent space, which is well-known for its disentangled properties. The learned latent space enables the smart selection of representatives from the data to be labeled for improved classification performance. We show that the proposed method attains strong classification results using small labeled datasets of sizes 50 and even 10. We demonstrate the superiority of our approach for the tasks of COVID-19 and liver tumor pathology identification.

Federated learning (FL) enables a loose set of participating clients to collaboratively learn a global model via coordination by a central server and with no need for data sharing. Existing FL approaches that rely on complex algorithms with massive models, such as deep neural networks (DNNs), suffer from computation and communication bottlenecks. In this paper, we first propose FedHDC, a federated learning framework based on hyperdimensional computing (HDC). FedHDC allows for fast and light-weight local training on clients, provides robust learning, and has smaller model communication overhead compared to learning with DNNs. However, current HDC algorithms get poor accuracy when classifying larger & more complex images, such as CIFAR10. To address this issue, we design FHDnn, which complements FedHDC with a self-supervised contrastive learning feature extractor. We avoid the transmission of the DNN and instead train only the HDC learner in a federated manner, which accelerates learning, reduces transmission cost, and utilizes the robustness of HDC to tackle network errors. We present a formal analysis of the algorithm and derive its convergence rate both theoretically, and show experimentally that FHDnn converges 3$\times$ faster vs. DNNs. The strategies we propose to improve the communication efficiency enable our design to reduce communication costs by 66$\times$ vs. DNNs, local client compute and energy consumption by ~1.5 - 6$\times$, while being highly robust to network errors. Finally, our proposed strategies for improving the communication efficiency have up to 32$\times$ lower communication costs with good accuracy.

Fast and accurate predictions for complex physical dynamics are a significant challenge across various applications. Real-time prediction on resource-constrained hardware is even more crucial in real-world problems. The deep operator network (DeepONet) has recently been proposed as a framework for learning nonlinear mappings between function spaces. However, the DeepONet requires many parameters and has a high computational cost when learning operators, particularly those with complex (discontinuous or non-smooth) target functions. This study proposes HyperDeepONet, which uses the expressive power of the hypernetwork to enable the learning of a complex operator with a smaller set of parameters. The DeepONet and its variant models can be thought of as a method of injecting the input function information into the target function. From this perspective, these models can be viewed as a particular case of HyperDeepONet. We analyze the complexity of DeepONet and conclude that HyperDeepONet needs relatively lower complexity to obtain the desired accuracy for operator learning. HyperDeepONet successfully learned various operators with fewer computational resources compared to other benchmarks. Operator learning for mapping between infinite-dimensional function spaces is a challenging problem. It has been used in many applications, such as climate prediction (Kurth et al., 2022) and fluid dynamics (Guo et al., 2016). The computational efficiency of learning the mapping is still important in real-world problems. The target function of the operator can be discontinuous or sharp for complicated dynamic systems. In this case, balancing model complexity and cost for computational time is a core problem for the real-time prediction on resource-constrained hardware (Choudhary et al., 2020; Murshed et al., 2021). Many machine learning methods and deep learning-based architectures have been successfully developed to learn a nonlinear mapping from an infinite-dimensional Banach space to another.

The objective of Active Learning is to strategically label a subset of the dataset to maximize performance within a predetermined labeling budget. In this study, we harness features acquired through self-supervised learning. We introduce a straightforward yet potent metric, Cluster Distance Difference, to identify diverse data. Subsequently, we introduce a novel framework, Balancing Active Learning (BAL), which constructs adaptive sub-pools to balance diverse and uncertain data. Our approach outperforms all established active learning methods on widely recognized benchmarks by 1.20%. Moreover, we assess the efficacy of our proposed framework under extended settings, encompassing both larger and smaller labeling budgets. Experimental results demonstrate that, when labeling 80% of the samples, the performance of the current SOTA method declines by 0.74%, whereas our proposed BAL achieves performance comparable to the full dataset. Codes are available at https://github.com/JulietLJY/BAL.

Gaussian processes (GPs) stand as crucial tools in machine learning and signal processing, with their effectiveness hinging on kernel design and hyper-parameter optimization. This paper presents a novel GP linear multiple kernel (LMK) and a generic sparsity-aware distributed learning framework to optimize the hyper-parameters. The newly proposed grid spectral mixture (GSM) kernel is tailored for multi-dimensional data, effectively reducing the number of hyper-parameters while maintaining good approximation capabilities. We further demonstrate that the associated hyper-parameter optimization of this kernel yields sparse solutions. To exploit the inherent sparsity property of the solutions, we introduce the Sparse LInear Multiple Kernel Learning (SLIM-KL) framework. The framework incorporates a quantized alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) scheme for collaborative learning among multiple agents, where the local optimization problem is solved using a distributed successive convex approximation (DSCA) algorithm. SLIM-KL effectively manages large-scale hyper-parameter optimization for the proposed kernel, simultaneously ensuring data privacy and minimizing communication costs. Theoretical analysis establishes convergence guarantees for the learning framework, while experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate the superior prediction performance and efficiency of our proposed methods.

Accurate fovea localization is essential for analyzing retinal diseases to prevent irreversible vision loss. While current deep learning-based methods outperform traditional ones, they still face challenges such as the lack of local anatomical landmarks around the fovea, the inability to robustly handle diseased retinal images, and the variations in image conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based architecture called DualStreamFoveaNet (DSFN) for multi-cue fusion. This architecture explicitly incorporates long-range connections and global features using retina and vessel distributions for robust fovea localization. We introduce a spatial attention mechanism in the dual-stream encoder to extract and fuse self-learned anatomical information, focusing more on features distributed along blood vessels and significantly reducing computational costs by decreasing token numbers. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public datasets and one large-scale private dataset. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the DSFN is more robust on both normal and diseased retina images and has better generalization capacity in cross-dataset experiments.

In contemporary scientific research, understanding the distinction between correlation and causation is crucial. While correlation is a widely used analytical standard, it does not inherently imply causation. This paper addresses the potential for misinterpretation in relying solely on correlation, especially in the context of nonlinear dynamics. Despite the rapid development of various correlation research methodologies, including machine learning, the exploration into mining causal correlations between variables remains ongoing. Empirical Dynamic Modeling (EDM) emerges as a data-driven framework for modeling dynamic systems, distinguishing itself by eschewing traditional formulaic methods in data analysis. Instead, it reconstructs dynamic system behavior directly from time series data. The fundamental premise of EDM is that dynamic systems can be conceptualized as processes where a set of states, governed by specific rules, evolve over time in a high-dimensional space. By reconstructing these evolving states, dynamic systems can be effectively modeled. Using EDM, this paper explores the detection of causal relationships between variables within dynamic systems through their time series data. It posits that if variable X causes variable Y, then the information about X is inherent in Y and can be extracted from Y's data. This study begins by examining the dialectical relationship between correlation and causation, emphasizing that correlation does not equate to causation, and the absence of correlation does not necessarily indicate a lack of causation.

Recent research demonstrates that GNNs are vulnerable to the model stealing attack, a nefarious endeavor geared towards duplicating the target model via query permissions. However, they mainly focus on node classification tasks, neglecting the potential threats entailed within the domain of graph classification tasks. Furthermore, their practicality is questionable due to unreasonable assumptions, specifically concerning the large data requirements and extensive model knowledge. To this end, we advocate following strict settings with limited real data and hard-label awareness to generate synthetic data, thereby facilitating the stealing of the target model. Specifically, following important data generation principles, we introduce three model stealing attacks to adapt to different actual scenarios: MSA-AU is inspired by active learning and emphasizes the uncertainty to enhance query value of generated samples; MSA-AD introduces diversity based on Mixup augmentation strategy to alleviate the query inefficiency issue caused by over-similar samples generated by MSA-AU; MSA-AUD combines the above two strategies to seamlessly integrate the authenticity, uncertainty, and diversity of the generated samples. Finally, extensive experiments consistently demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods in terms of concealment, query efficiency, and stealing performance.