Causal representation learning seeks to uncover latent, high-level causal representations from low-level observed data. It is particularly good at predictions under unseen distribution shifts, because these shifts can generally be interpreted as consequences of interventions. Hence leveraging {seen} distribution shifts becomes a natural strategy to help identifying causal representations, which in turn benefits predictions where distributions are previously {unseen}. Determining the types (or conditions) of such distribution shifts that do contribute to the identifiability of causal representations is critical. This work establishes a {sufficient} and {necessary} condition characterizing the types of distribution shifts for identifiability in the context of latent additive noise models. Furthermore, we present partial identifiability results when only a portion of distribution shifts meets the condition. In addition, we extend our findings to latent post-nonlinear causal models. We translate our findings into a practical algorithm, allowing for the acquisition of reliable latent causal representations. Our algorithm, guided by our underlying theory, has demonstrated outstanding performance across a diverse range of synthetic and real-world datasets. The empirical observations align closely with the theoretical findings, affirming the robustness and effectiveness of our approach.

Uncertainty is critical to reliable decision-making with machine learning. Conformal prediction (CP) handles uncertainty by predicting a set on a test input, hoping the set to cover the true label with at least $(1-\alpha)$ confidence. This coverage can be guaranteed on test data even if the marginal distributions $P_X$ differ between calibration and test datasets. However, as it is common in practice, when the conditional distribution $P_{Y|X}$ is different on calibration and test data, the coverage is not guaranteed and it is essential to measure and minimize the coverage loss under distributional shift at \textit{all} possible confidence levels. To address these issues, we upper bound the coverage difference at all levels using the cumulative density functions of calibration and test conformal scores and Wasserstein distance. Inspired by the invariance of physics across data distributions, we propose a physics-informed structural causal model (PI-SCM) to reduce the upper bound. We validated that PI-SCM can improve coverage robustness along confidence level and test domain on a traffic speed prediction task and an epidemic spread task with multiple real-world datasets.

Mobile Internet user credit assessment is an important way for communication operators to establish decisions and formulate measures, and it is also a guarantee for operators to obtain expected benefits. However, credit evaluation methods have long been monopolized by financial industries such as banks and credit. As supporters and providers of platform network technology and network resources, communication operators are also builders and maintainers of communication networks. Internet data improves the user's credit evaluation strategy. This paper uses the massive data provided by communication operators to carry out research on the operator's user credit evaluation model based on the fusion LightGBM algorithm. First, for the massive data related to user evaluation provided by operators, key features are extracted by data preprocessing and feature engineering methods, and a multi-dimensional feature set with statistical significance is constructed; then, linear regression, decision tree, LightGBM, and other machine learning algorithms build multiple basic models to find the best basic model; finally, integrates Averaging, Voting, Blending, Stacking and other integrated algorithms to refine multiple fusion models, and finally establish the most suitable fusion model for operator user evaluation.

Demand-side flexibility is gaining importance as a crucial element in the energy transition process. Accounting for about 25% of final energy consumption globally, the residential sector is an important (potential) source of energy flexibility. However, unlocking this flexibility requires developing a control framework that (1) easily scales across different houses, (2) is easy to maintain, and (3) is simple to understand for end-users. A potential control framework for such a task is data-driven control, specifically model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Such RL-based controllers learn a good control policy by interacting with their environment, learning purely based on data and with minimal human intervention. Yet, they lack explainability, which hampers user acceptance. Moreover, limited hardware capabilities of residential assets forms a hurdle (e.g., using deep neural networks). To overcome both those challenges, we propose a novel method to obtain explainable RL policies by using differentiable decision trees. Using a policy distillation approach, we train these differentiable decision trees to mimic standard RL-based controllers, leading to a decision tree-based control policy that is data-driven and easy to explain. As a proof-of-concept, we examine the performance and explainability of our proposed approach in a battery-based home energy management system to reduce energy costs. For this use case, we show that our proposed approach can outperform baseline rule-based policies by about 20-25%, while providing simple, explainable control policies. We further compare these explainable policies with standard RL policies and examine the performance trade-offs associated with this increased explainability.

Zero-shot fault diagnosis (ZSFD) is capable of identifying unseen faults via predicting fault attributes labeled by human experts. We first recognize the demand of ZSFD to deal with continuous changes in industrial processes, i.e., the model's ability to adapt to new fault categories and attributes while avoiding forgetting the diagnosis ability learned previously. To overcome the issue that the existing ZSFD paradigm cannot learn from evolving streams of training data in industrial scenarios, the incremental ZSFD (IZSFD) paradigm is proposed for the first time, which incorporates category increment and attribute increment for both traditional ZSFD and generalized ZSFD paradigms. To achieve IZSFD, we present a broad-deep mixed anti-forgetting framework (BDMAFF) that aims to learn from new fault categories and attributes. To tackle the issue of forgetting, BDMAFF effectively accumulates previously acquired knowledge from two perspectives: features and attribute prototypes. The feature memory is established through a deep generative model that employs anti-forgetting training strategies, ensuring the generation quality of historical categories is supervised and maintained. The diagnosis model SEEs the UNSEEN faults with the help of generated samples from the generative model. The attribute prototype memory is established through a diagnosis model inspired by the broad learning system. Unlike traditional incremental learning algorithms, BDMAFF introduces a memory-driven iterative update strategy for the diagnosis model, which allows the model to learn new faults and attributes without requiring the storage of all historical training samples. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by a real hydraulic system and the Tennessee-Eastman benchmark process.

The growing interest in developing smart diagnostic systems to help medical experts process extensive data for treating incurable diseases has been notable. In particular, the challenge of identifying thyroid cancer (TC) has seen progress with the use of machine learning (ML) and big data analysis, incorporating transformers to evaluate TC prognosis and determine the risk of malignancy in individuals. This review article presents a summary of various studies on AIbased approaches, especially those employing transformers, for diagnosing TC. It introduces a new categorization system for these methods based on artifcial intelligence (AI) algorithms, the goals of the framework, and the computing environments used. Additionally, it scrutinizes and contrasts the available TC datasets by their features. The paper highlights the importance of AI instruments in aiding the diagnosis and treatment of TC through supervised, unsupervised, or mixed approaches, with a special focus on the ongoing importance of transformers in medical diagnostics and disease management. It further discusses the progress made and the continuing obstacles in this area. Lastly, it explores future directions and focuses within this research feld.

Explaining outliers occurrence and mechanism of their occurrence can be extremely important in a variety of domains. Malfunctions, frauds, threats, in addition to being correctly identified, oftentimes need a valid explanation in order to effectively perform actionable counteracts. The ever more widespread use of sophisticated Machine Learning approach to identify anomalies make such explanations more challenging. We present the Decision Tree Outlier Regressor (DTOR), a technique for producing rule-based explanations for individual data points by estimating anomaly scores generated by an anomaly detection model. This is accomplished by first applying a Decision Tree Regressor, which computes the estimation score, and then extracting the relative path associated with the data point score. Our results demonstrate the robustness of DTOR even in datasets with a large number of features. Additionally, in contrast to other rule-based approaches, the generated rules are consistently satisfied by the points to be explained. Furthermore, our evaluation metrics indicate comparable performance to Anchors in outlier explanation tasks, with reduced execution time.

Utilizing potent representations of the large vision-language models (VLMs) to accomplish various downstream tasks has attracted increasing attention. Within this research field, soft prompt learning has become a representative approach for efficiently adapting VLMs such as CLIP, to tasks like image classification. However, most existing prompt learning methods learn text tokens that are unexplainable, which cannot satisfy the stringent interpretability requirements of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in high-stakes scenarios like healthcare. To address this issue, we propose a novel explainable prompt learning framework that leverages medical knowledge by aligning the semantics of images, learnable prompts, and clinical concept-driven prompts at multiple granularities. Moreover, our framework addresses the lack of valuable concept annotations by eliciting knowledge from large language models and offers both visual and textual explanations for the prompts. Extensive experiments and explainability analyses conducted on various datasets, with and without concept labels, demonstrate that our method simultaneously achieves superior diagnostic performance, flexibility, and interpretability, shedding light on the effectiveness of foundation models in facilitating XAI. The code will be made publically available.

Neural networks, with powerful nonlinear mapping and classification capabilities, are widely applied in mechanical fault diagnosis to ensure safety. However, being typical black-box models, their application is limited in high-reliability-required scenarios. To understand the classification logic and explain what typical fault signals look like, the prototype matching network (PMN) is proposed by combining the human-inherent prototype-matching with autoencoder (AE). The PMN matches AE-extracted feature with each prototype and selects the most similar prototype as the prediction result. It has three interpreting paths on classification logic, fault prototypes, and matching contributions. Conventional diagnosis and domain generalization experiments demonstrate its competitive diagnostic performance and distinguished advantages in representation learning. Besides, the learned typical fault signals (i.e., sample-level prototypes) showcase the ability for denoising and extracting subtle key features that experts find challenging to capture. This ability broadens human understanding and provides a promising solution from interpretability research to AI-for-Science.

Diagnosing rare diseases presents a common challenge in clinical practice, necessitating the expertise of specialists for accurate identification. The advent of machine learning offers a promising solution, while the development of such technologies is hindered by the scarcity of data on rare conditions and the demand for models that are both interpretable and trustworthy in a clinical context. Interpretable AI, with its capacity for human-readable outputs, can facilitate validation by clinicians and contribute to medical education. In the current work, we focus on choroid neoplasias, the most prevalent form of eye cancer in adults, albeit rare with 5.1 per million. We built the so-far largest dataset consisting of 750 patients, incorporating three distinct imaging modalities collected from 2004 to 2022. Our work introduces a concept-based interpretable model that distinguishes between three types of choroidal tumors, integrating insights from domain experts via radiological reports. Remarkably, this model not only achieves an F1 score of 0.91, rivaling that of black-box models, but also boosts the diagnostic accuracy of junior doctors by 42%. This study highlights the significant potential of interpretable machine learning in improving the diagnosis of rare diseases, laying a groundwork for future breakthroughs in medical AI that could tackle a wider array of complex health scenarios.