We study the relationship between adversarial robustness and differential privacy in high-dimensional algorithmic statistics. We give the first black-box reduction from privacy to robustness which can produce private estimators with optimal tradeoffs among sample complexity, accuracy, and privacy for a wide range of fundamental high-dimensional parameter estimation problems, including mean and covariance estimation. We show that this reduction can be implemented in polynomial time in some important special cases. In particular, using nearly-optimal polynomial-time robust estimators for the mean and covariance of high-dimensional Gaussians which are based on the Sum-of-Squares method, we design the first polynomial-time private estimators for these problems with nearly-optimal samples-accuracy-privacy tradeoffs. Our algorithms are also robust to a constant fraction of adversarially-corrupted samples.

Fingerprints are key tools in climate change detection and attribution (D&A) that are used to determine whether changes in observations are different from internal climate variability (detection), and whether observed changes can be assigned to specific external drivers (attribution). We propose a direct D&A approach based on supervised learning to extract fingerprints that lead to robust predictions under relevant interventions on exogenous variables, i.e., climate drivers other than the target. We employ anchor regression, a distributionally-robust statistical learning method inspired by causal inference that extrapolates well to perturbed data under the interventions considered. The residuals from the prediction achieve either uncorrelatedness or mean independence with the exogenous variables, thus guaranteeing robustness. We define D&A as a unified hypothesis testing framework that relies on the same statistical model but uses different targets and test statistics. In the experiments, we first show that the CO2 forcing can be robustly predicted from temperature spatial patterns under strong interventions on the solar forcing. Second, we illustrate attribution to the greenhouse gases and aerosols while protecting against interventions on the aerosols and CO2 forcing, respectively. Our study shows that incorporating robustness constraints against relevant interventions may significantly benefit detection and attribution of climate change.

Audio sound recognition and classification is used for many tasks and applications including human voice recognition, music recognition and audio tagging. In this paper we apply Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) in combination with a range of machine learning models to identify (Australian) birds from publicly available audio files of their birdsong. We present approaches used for data processing and augmentation and compare the results of various state of the art machine learning models. We achieve an overall accuracy of 91% for the top-5 birds from the 30 selected as the case study. Applying the models to more challenging and diverse audio files comprising 152 bird species, we achieve an accuracy of 58%.

Simulating quantum channels is a fundamental primitive in quantum computing, since quantum channels define general (trace-preserving) quantum operations. An arbitrary quantum channel cannot be exactly simulated using a finite-dimensional programmable quantum processor, making it important to develop optimal approximate simulation techniques. In this paper, we study the challenging setting in which the channel to be simulated varies adversarially with time. We propose the use of matrix exponentiated gradient descent (MEGD), an online convex optimization method, and analytically show that it achieves a sublinear regret in time. Through experiments, we validate the main results for time-varying dephasing channels using a programmable generalized teleportation processor.

Script event prediction aims to predict the subsequent event given the context. This requires the capability to infer the correlations between events. Recent works have attempted to improve event correlation reasoning by using pretrained language models and incorporating external knowledge~(e.g., discourse relations). Though promising results have been achieved, some challenges still remain. First, the pretrained language models adopted by current works ignore event-level knowledge, resulting in an inability to capture the correlations between events well. Second, modeling correlations between events with discourse relations is limited because it can only capture explicit correlations between events with discourse markers, and cannot capture many implicit correlations. To this end, we propose a novel generative approach for this task, in which a pretrained language model is fine-tuned with an event-centric pretraining objective and predicts the next event within a generative paradigm. Specifically, we first introduce a novel event-level blank infilling strategy as the learning objective to inject event-level knowledge into the pretrained language model, and then design a likelihood-based contrastive loss for fine-tuning the generative model. Instead of using an additional prediction layer, we perform prediction by using sequence likelihoods generated by the generative model. Our approach models correlations between events in a soft way without any external knowledge. The likelihood-based prediction eliminates the need to use additional networks to make predictions and is somewhat interpretable since it scores each word in the event. Experimental results on the multi-choice narrative cloze~(MCNC) task demonstrate that our approach achieves better results than other state-of-the-art baselines. Our code will be available at https://github.com/zhufq00/mcnc.

Real-time detection of anomalies in streaming data is receiving increasing attention as it allows us to raise alerts, predict faults, and detect intrusions or threats across industries. Yet, little attention has been given to compare the effectiveness and efficiency of anomaly detectors for streaming data (i.e., of online algorithms). In this paper, we present a qualitative, synthetic overview of major online detectors from different algorithmic families (i.e., distance, density, tree or projection-based) and highlight their main ideas for constructing, updating and testing detection models. Then, we provide a thorough analysis of the results of a quantitative experimental evaluation of online detection algorithms along with their offline counterparts. The behavior of the detectors is correlated with the characteristics of different datasets (i.e., meta-features), thereby providing a meta-level analysis of their performance. Our study addresses several missing insights from the literature such as (a) how reliable are detectors against a random classifier and what dataset characteristics make them perform randomly; (b) to what extent online detectors approximate the performance of offline counterparts; (c) which sketch strategy and update primitives of detectors are best to detect anomalies visible only within a feature subspace of a dataset; (d) what are the tradeoffs between the effectiveness and the efficiency of detectors belonging to different algorithmic families; (e) which specific characteristics of datasets yield an online algorithm to outperform all others.

Recent studies have found that pain in infancy has a significant impact on infant development, including psychological problems, possible brain injury, and pain sensitivity in adulthood. However, due to the lack of specialists and the fact that infants are unable to express verbally their experience of pain, it is difficult to assess infant pain. Most existing infant pain assessment systems directly apply adult methods to infants ignoring the differences between infant expressions and adult expressions. Meanwhile, as the study of facial action coding system continues to advance, the use of action units (AUs) opens up new possibilities for expression recognition and pain assessment. In this paper, a novel AuE-IPA method is proposed for assessing infant pain by leveraging different engagement levels of AUs. First, different engagement levels of AUs in infant pain are revealed, by analyzing the class activation map of an end-to-end pain assessment model. The intensities of top-engaged AUs are then used in a regression model for achieving automatic infant pain assessment. The model proposed is trained and experimented on YouTube Immunization dataset, YouTube Blood Test dataset, and iCOPEVid dataset. The experimental results show that our AuE-IPA method is more applicable to infants and possesses stronger generalization ability than end-to-end assessment model and the classic PSPI metric.

At first glance, this is a natural summary, inheriting both the statistical amenability of the sample mean (Shalev-Shwartz and Ben-David, 2014) and the wide arsenal of optimization algorithms designed specifically for finite sum objectives (Le Roux et al., 2012; Defazio et al., 2014; Johnson and Zhang, 2013; Reddi et al., 2016). However, as modern learning systems are deployed in critical domain applications such as energy planning (Guigues and Sagastizábal, 2013), materials engineering (Yeh, 2006), and financial regulation (He et al., 2022), safe and reliable performance in "worst-case" scenarios is paramount. This imperative can be modeled by alternate risk measures (statistical functionals of the loss distribution), particularly those that encapsulate the behavior of the distribution's upper tail.

Process mining is a family of techniques that support the analysis of operational processes, in terms of key performance indicators, using event data Van Der Aalst (2012). Process mining can be used in number of ways, such as in identifying insights into current processes or in identifying actions or places within workflows where interventions should be made to improve performance. Although processing mining is typically used in the context of commercial business environments, there is crossover to other areas where processes play an important role, such as in water quality management processes administered by local government authorities or citizen science projects that use the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) Higgins, Williams, Leibovici, Simonis, Davis, Muldoon, van Genuchten, O'Hare and Wiemann (2016). In the case of water quality management, traditional event log data from information technology systems is often lacking in that many tasks, such as the manual sampling of water and the microbial culturing by biologists and laboratory technicians to identify faecal coliforms, are not performed using computers and are not logged. Nevertheless, it is likely that techniques developed to aid explainability and in the evaluation of machine learning algorithms in such cases will prove using in traditional process mining systems where similar problems must be addressed. This paper focuses on mining suitable features to perform inference for the level of bacteria, and specifically Enterococci and Escherichia coli (E.

Assessing the physical condition in rehabilitation scenarios is a challenging problem, since it involves Human Activity Recognition (HAR) and kinematic analysis methods. In addition, the difficulties increase in unconstrained rehabilitation scenarios, which are much closer to the real use cases. In particular, our aim is to design an upper-limb assessment pipeline for stroke patients using smartwatches. We focus on the HAR task, as it is the first part of the assessing pipeline. Our main target is to automatically detect and recognize four key movements inspired by the Fugl-Meyer assessment scale, which are performed in both constrained and unconstrained scenarios. In addition to the application protocol and dataset, we propose two detection and classification baseline methods. We believe that the proposed framework, dataset and baseline results will serve to foster this research field.