Quality-Diversity algorithms refer to a class of evolutionary algorithms designed to find a collection of diverse and high-performing solutions to a given problem. In robotics, such algorithms can be used for generating a collection of controllers covering most of the possible behaviours of a robot. To do so, these algorithms associate a behavioural descriptor to each of these behaviours. Each behavioural descriptor is used for estimating the novelty of one behaviour compared to the others. In most existing algorithms, the behavioural descriptor needs to be hand-coded, thus requiring prior knowledge about the task to solve. In this paper, we introduce: Autonomous Robots Realising their Abilities, an algorithm that uses a dimensionality reduction technique to automatically learn behavioural descriptors based on raw sensory data. The performance of this algorithm is assessed on three robotic tasks in simulation. The experimental results show that it performs similarly to traditional hand-coded approaches without the requirement to provide any hand-coded behavioural descriptor. In the collection of diverse and high-performing solutions, it also manages to find behaviours that are novel with respect to more features than its hand-coded baselines. Finally, we introduce a variant of the algorithm which is robust to the dimensionality of the behavioural descriptor space.

Models that top leaderboards often perform unsatisfactorily when deployed in real world applications; this has necessitated rigorous and expensive pre-deployment model testing. A hitherto unexplored facet of model performance is: Are our leaderboards doing equitable evaluation? In this paper, we introduce a task-agnostic method to probe leaderboards by weighting samples based on their `difficulty' level. We find that leaderboards can be adversarially attacked and top performing models may not always be the best models. We subsequently propose alternate evaluation metrics. Our experiments on 10 models show changes in model ranking and an overall reduction in previously reported performance -- thus rectifying the overestimation of AI systems' capabilities. Inspired by behavioral testing principles, we further develop a prototype of a visual analytics tool that enables leaderboard revamping through customization, based on an end user's focus area. This helps users analyze models' strengths and weaknesses, and guides them in the selection of a model best suited for their application scenario. In a user study, members of various commercial product development teams, covering 5 focus areas, find that our prototype reduces pre-deployment development and testing effort by 41% on average.

Vertical Federated Learning (vFL) allows multiple parties that own different attributes (e.g. features and labels) of the same data entity (e.g. a person) to jointly train a model. To prepare the training data, vFL needs to identify the common data entities shared by all parties. It is usually achieved by Private Set Intersection (PSI) which identifies the intersection of training samples from all parties by using personal identifiable information (e.g. email) as sample IDs to align data instances. As a result, PSI would make sample IDs of the intersection visible to all parties, and therefore each party can know that the data entities shown in the intersection also appear in the other parties, i.e. intersection membership. However, in many real-world privacy-sensitive organizations, e.g. banks and hospitals, revealing membership of their data entities is prohibited. In this paper, we propose a vFL framework based on Private Set Union (PSU) that allows each party to keep sensitive membership information to itself. Instead of identifying the intersection of all training samples, our PSU protocol generates the union of samples as training instances. In addition, we propose strategies to generate synthetic features and labels to handle samples that belong to the union but not the intersection. Through extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, we show our framework can protect the privacy of the intersection membership while maintaining the model utility.

Due to the growing awareness of driving safety and the development of sophisticated technologies, advanced driving assistance system (ADAS) has been equipped in more and more vehicles with higher accuracy and lower price. The latest progress in this field has called for a review to sum up the conventional knowledge of ADAS, the state-of-the-art researches, and novel applications in real-world. With the help of this kind of review, newcomers in this field can get basic knowledge easier and other researchers may be inspired with potential future development possibility. This paper makes a general introduction about ADAS by analyzing its hardware support and computation algorithms. Different types of perception sensors are introduced from their interior feature classifications, installation positions, supporting ADAS functions, and pros and cons. The comparisons between different sensors are concluded and illustrated from their inherent characters and specific usages serving for each ADAS function. The current algorithms for ADAS functions are also collected and briefly presented in this paper from both traditional methods and novel ideas. Additionally, discussions about the definition of ADAS from different institutes are reviewed in this paper, and future approaches about ADAS in China are introduced in particular.

Several methods exist that Yet, we argue that the current literature on model surrogates fit this description and share this goal. However, to explain a prediction lacks the clarity needed for a practitioner despite their shared overall procedure, they set out to make an informed choice on which method to use, different objectives, extract different information given explanation needs. Existing approaches usually lack from the black-box, and consequently produce transparency with regards to the explanation needs they propose diverse explanations, that are -in general-incomparable. to solve, on their specifications and ultimately on their In this work we review the similarities formal objectives. This situation (1) fuels a disseminated research and differences amongst multiple methods, with with propositions that are difficult to compare and (2) a particular focus on what information they extract prevents a sound development of the explainability practice.

In this paper, we propose a density estimation algorithm called \textit{Gradient Boosting Histogram Transform} (GBHT), where we adopt the \textit{Negative Log Likelihood} as the loss function to make the boosting procedure available for the unsupervised tasks. From a learning theory viewpoint, we first prove fast convergence rates for GBHT with the smoothness assumption that the underlying density function lies in the space $C^{0,\alpha}$. Then when the target density function lies in spaces $C^{1,\alpha}$, we present an upper bound for GBHT which is smaller than the lower bound of its corresponding base learner, in the sense of convergence rates. To the best of our knowledge, we make the first attempt to theoretically explain why boosting can enhance the performance of its base learners for density estimation problems. In experiments, we not only conduct performance comparisons with the widely used KDE, but also apply GBHT to anomaly detection to showcase a further application of GBHT.

This paper is concerned with the problem of uncertainty estimation in regression problems. Uncertainty estimation is an increasingly important task in modern machine learning applications--Models should not only make high-accuracy predictions, but also have a sense of how much the true label may deviate from the prediction. This capability is crucial for deploying machine learning in the real world, in particular in risk-sensitive domains such as medical AI [15, 29], self-driving cars [47], and so on. A common approach for uncertainty estimation in regression is to learn a quantile function or a prediction interval of the true label conditioned on the input, which provides useful distributional information about the label. Such learned quantiles are typically evaluated by their coverage, i.e., probability that it covers the true label on a new test example. For example, a learned 90% upper quantile function should be an actual upper bound of the true label at least 90% of the time. Algorithms for learning quantiles date back to the classical quantile regression [35], which estimates the quantile function by solving an empirical risk minimization problem with a suitable loss function that depends on the desired quantile level α.

Recent advances in Transformer models allow for unprecedented sequence lengths, due to linear space and time complexity. In the meantime, relative positional encoding (RPE) was proposed as beneficial for classical Transformers and consists in exploiting lags instead of absolute positions for inference. Still, RPE is not available for the recent linear-variants of the Transformer, because it requires the explicit computation of the attention matrix, which is precisely what is avoided by such methods. In this paper, we bridge this gap and present Stochastic Positional Encoding as a way to generate PE that can be used as a replacement to the classical additive (sinusoidal) PE and provably behaves like RPE. The main theoretical contribution is to make a connection between positional encoding and cross-covariance structures of correlated Gaussian processes. We illustrate the performance of our approach on the Long-Range Arena benchmark and on music generation.

This work studies the behavior of neural networks trained with the logistic loss via gradient descent on binary classification data where the underlying data distribution is general, and the (optimal) Bayes risk is not necessarily zero. In this setting, it is shown that gradient descent with early stopping achieves population risk arbitrarily close to optimal in terms of not just logistic and misclassification losses, but also in terms of calibration, meaning the sigmoid mapping of its outputs approximates the true underlying conditional distribution arbitrarily finely. Moreover, the necessary iteration, sample, and architectural complexities of this analysis all scale naturally with a certain complexity measure of the true conditional model. Lastly, while it is not shown that early stopping is necessary, it is shown that any univariate classifier satisfying a local interpolation property is necessarily inconsistent.

Over the past decades, many individual nonconvex methods have been proposed to achieve better sparse recovery performance in various scenarios. However, how to construct a valid nonconvex regularization function remains open in practice. In this paper, we fill in this gap by presenting a unified framework for constructing the nonconvex regularization based on the probability density function. Meanwhile, a new nonconvex sparse recovery method constructed via the Weibull distribution is studied. Sparse recovery has attracted tremendous research interest in various areas including statistical learning [1] and compressive sensing [2]. The author is with the Department of Statistics, Zhejiang University City College, 310015, Hangzhou, China (e-mail: zhiyongzhou@zucc.edu.cn).