Artificial intelligence nowadays plays an increasingly prominent role in our life since decisions that were once made by humans are now delegated to automated systems. A machine learning algorithm trained based on biased data, however, tends to make unfair predictions. Developing classification algorithms that are fair with respect to protected attributes of the data thus becomes an important problem. Motivated by concerns surrounding the fairness effects of sharing and few-shot machine learning tools, such as the Model Agnostic Meta-Learning framework, we propose a novel fair fast-adapted few-shot meta-learning approach that efficiently mitigates biases during meta-train by ensuring controlling the decision boundary covariance that between the protected variable and the signed distance from the feature vectors to the decision boundary. Through extensive experiments on two real-world image benchmarks over three state-of-the-art meta-learning algorithms, we empirically demonstrate that our proposed approach efficiently mitigates biases on model output and generalizes both accuracy and fairness to unseen tasks with a limited amount of training samples.

Victoria's Premier Daniel Andrews said the numbers were "cause for great optimism". His state, which has accounted for 75% of Australia's 26,900 cases and 90% of its 849 deaths, has been under lockdown since early July.

In this work we study the stability of algebraic neural networks (AlgNNs) with commutative algebras which unify CNNs and GNNs under the umbrella of algebraic signal processing. An AlgNN is a stacked layered structure where each layer is conformed by an algebra $\mathcal{A}$, a vector space $\mathcal{M}$ and a homomorphism $\rho:\mathcal{A}\rightarrow\text{End}(\mathcal{M})$, where $\text{End}(\mathcal{M})$ is the set of endomorphims of $\mathcal{M}$. Signals in each layer are modeled as elements of $\mathcal{M}$ and are processed by elements of $\text{End}(\mathcal{M})$ defined according to the structure of $\mathcal{A}$ via $\rho$. This framework provides a general scenario that covers several types of neural network architectures where formal convolution operators are being used. We obtain stability conditions regarding to perturbations which are defined as distortions of $\rho$, reaching general results whose particular cases are consistent with recent findings in the literature for CNNs and GNNs. We consider conditions on the domain of the homomorphisms in the algebra that lead to stable operators. Interestingly, we found that these conditions are related to the uniform boundedness of the Fr\'echet derivative of a function $p:\text{End}(\mathcal{M})\rightarrow\text{End}(\mathcal{M})$ that maps the images of the generators of $\mathcal{A}$ on $\text{End}(\mathcal{M})$ into a power series representation that defines the filtering of elements in $\mathcal{M}$. Additionally, our results show that stability is universal to convolutional architectures whose algebraic signal model uses the same algebra.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for video moment retrieval (VMR) that achieves state of the arts (SOTA) performance on R@1 metrics and surpassing the SOTA on the high IoU metric (R@1, IoU=0.7). First, we propose to use a multi-head self-attention mechanism, and further a cross-attention scheme to capture video/query interaction and long-range query dependencies from video context. The attention-based methods can develop frame-to-query interaction and query-to-frame interaction at arbitrary positions and the multi-head setting ensures the sufficient understanding of complicated dependencies. Our model has a simple architecture, which enables faster training and inference while maintaining . Second, We also propose to use multiple task training objective consists of moment segmentation task, start/end distribution prediction and start/end location regression task. We have verified that start/end prediction are noisy due to annotator disagreement and joint training with moment segmentation task can provide richer information since frames inside the target clip are also utilized as positive training examples. Third, we propose to use an early fusion approach, which achieves better performance at the cost of inference time. However, the inference time will not be a problem for our model since our model has a simple architecture which enables efficient training and inference.

Comparing metric measure spaces (i.e. a metric space endowed with a probability distribution) is at the heart of many machine learning problems. This includes for instance predicting properties of molecules in quantum chemistry or generating graphs with varying connectivity. The most popular distance between such metric measure spaces is the Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distance, which is the solution of a quadratic assignment problem. This distance has been successfully applied to supervised learning and generative modeling, for applications as diverse as quantum chemistry or natural language processing. The GW distance is however limited to the comparison of metric measure spaces endowed with a \emph{probability} distribution. This strong limitation is problematic for many applications in ML where there is no a priori natural normalization on the total mass of the data. Furthermore, imposing an exact conservation of mass across spaces is not robust to outliers and often leads to irregular matching. To alleviate these issues, we introduce two Unbalanced Gromov-Wasserstein formulations: a distance and a more computationally tractable upper-bounding relaxation. They both allow the comparison of metric spaces equipped with arbitrary positive measures up to isometries.

Pairwise learning corresponds to the supervised learning setting where the goal is to make predictions for pairs of objects. Prominent applications include predicting drug-target or protein-protein interactions, or customer-product preferences. Several kernel functions have been proposed for incorporating prior knowledge about the relationship between the objects, when training kernel based learning methods. However, the number of training pairs n is often very large, making O(n^2) cost of constructing the pairwise kernel matrix infeasible. If each training pair x= (d,t) consists of drug d and target t, let m and q denote the number of unique drugs and targets appearing in the training pairs. In many real-world applications m,q << n, which can be used to develop computational shortcuts. Recently, a O(nm+nq) time algorithm we refer to as the generalized vec trick was introduced for training kernel methods with the Kronecker kernel. In this work, we show that a large class of pairwise kernels can be expressed as a sum of product matrices, which generalizes the result to the most commonly used pairwise kernels. This includes symmetric and anti-symmetric, metric-learning, Cartesian, ranking, as well as linear, polynomial and Gaussian kernels. In the experiments, we demonstrate how the introduced approach allows scaling pairwise kernels to much larger data sets than previously feasible, and compare the kernels on a number of biological interaction prediction tasks.

RDF2vec is an embedding technique for representing knowledge graph entities in a continuous vector space. In this paper, we investigate the effect of materializing implicit A-box axioms induced by subproperties, as well as symmetric and transitive properties. While it might be a reasonable assumption that such a materialization before computing embeddings might lead to better embeddings, we conduct a set of experiments on DBpedia which demonstrate that the materialization actually has a negative effect on the performance of RDF2vec. In our analysis, we argue that despite the huge body of work devoted on completing missing information in knowledge graphs, such missing implicit information is actually a signal, not a defect, and we show examples illustrating that assumption.

Max-margin methods for binary classification such as the support vector machine (SVM) have been extended to the structured prediction setting under the name of max-margin Markov networks ($M^3N$), or more generally structural SVMs. Unfortunately, these methods are statistically inconsistent when the relationship between inputs and labels is far from deterministic. We overcome such limitations by defining the learning problem in terms of a "max-min" margin formulation, naming the resulting method max-min margin Markov networks ($M^4N$). We prove consistency and finite sample generalization bounds for $M^4N$ and provide an explicit algorithm to compute the estimator. The algorithm achieves a generalization error of $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ for a total cost of $O(n)$ projection-oracle calls (which have at most the same cost as the max-oracle from $M^3N$). Experiments on multi-class classification, ordinal regression, sequence prediction and ranking demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Developing algorithms that are able to generalize to a novel task given only a few labeled examples represents a fundamental challenge in closing the gap between machine- and human-level performance. The core of human cognition lies in the structured, reusable concepts that help us to rapidly adapt to new tasks and provide reasoning behind our decisions. However, existing meta-learning methods learn complex representations across prior labeled tasks without imposing any structure on the learned representations. Here we propose COMET, a meta-learning method that improves generalization ability by learning to learn along human-interpretable concept dimensions. Instead of learning a joint unstructured metric space, COMET learns mappings of high-level concepts into semi-structured metric spaces, and effectively combines the outputs of independent concept learners. We evaluate our model on few-shot tasks from diverse domains, including a benchmark image classification dataset and a novel single-cell dataset from a biological domain developed in our work. COMET significantly outperforms strong meta-learning baselines, achieving $9$-$12\%$ average improvement on the most challenging $1$-shot learning tasks, while unlike existing methods also providing interpretations behind the model's predictions.

In this work, we propose KeRNS: an algorithm for episodic reinforcement learning in non-stationary Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) whose state-action set is endowed with a metric. Using a non-parametric model of the MDP built with time-dependent kernels, we prove a regret bound that scales with the covering dimension of the state-action space and the total variation of the MDP with time, which quantifies its level of non-stationarity. Our method generalizes previous approaches based on sliding windows and exponential discounting used to handle changing environments. We further propose a practical implementation of KeRNS, we analyze its regret and validate it experimentally.