The issue of fairness arises when the automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems do not perform equally well for all subgroups of the population. In any fairness measurement studies for ASR, the open questions of how to control the nuisance factors, how to handle unobserved heterogeneity across speakers, and how to trace the source of any word error rate (WER) gap among different subgroups are especially important - if not appropriately accounted for, incorrect conclusions will be drawn. In this paper, we introduce mixed-effects Poisson regression to better measure and interpret any WER difference among subgroups of interest. Particularly, the presented method can effectively address the three problems raised above and is very flexible to use in practical disparity analyses. We demonstrate the validity of proposed model-based approach on both synthetic and real-world speech data.

zoofs is a Python library for performing feature selection using a variety of nature-inspired wrapper algorithms. The algorithms range from swarm-intelligence to physics-based to Evolutionary. It's easy to use , flexible and powerful tool to reduce your feature size. - GitHub - jaswinder9051998/zoofs: zoofs is a Python library for performing feature selection using a variety of nature-inspired wrapper algorithms. The algorithms range from swarm-intelligence to physics-based to Evolutionary. It's easy to use , flexible and powerful tool to reduce your feature size.

Recent advancements in deep learning, computer vision, and embodied AI have given rise to synthetic causal reasoning video datasets. These datasets facilitate the development of AI algorithms that can reason about physical interactions between objects. However, datasets thus far have primarily focused on elementary physical events such as rolling or falling. There is currently a scarcity of datasets that focus on the physical interactions that humans perform daily with objects in the real world. To address this scarcity, we introduce SPACE: A Simulator for Physical Interactions and Causal Learning in 3D Environments. The SPACE simulator allows us to generate the SPACE dataset, a synthetic video dataset in a 3D environment, to systematically evaluate physics-based models on a range of physical causal reasoning tasks. Inspired by daily object interactions, the SPACE dataset comprises videos depicting three types of physical events: containment, stability and contact. These events make up the vast majority of the basic physical interactions between objects. We then further evaluate it with a state-of-the-art physics-based deep model and show that the SPACE dataset improves the learning of intuitive physics with an approach inspired by curriculum learning. Repository: https://github.com/jiafei1224/SPACE

We examine interval estimation of the effect of a treatment T on an outcome Y given the existence of an unobserved confounder U. Using H\"older's inequality, we derive a set of bounds on the confounding bias |E[Y|T=t]-E[Y|do(T=t)]| based on the degree of unmeasured confounding (i.e., the strength of the connection U->T, and the strength of U->Y). These bounds are tight either when U is independent of T or when U is independent of Y given T (when there is no unobserved confounding). We focus on a special case of this bound depending on the total variation distance between the distributions p(U) and p(U|T=t), as well as the maximum (over all possible values of U) deviation of the conditional expected outcome E[Y|U=u,T=t] from the average expected outcome E[Y|T=t]. We discuss possible calibration strategies for this bound to get interval estimates for treatment effects, and experimentally validate the bound using synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets.

Solving multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) problems with sparse rewards is generally challenging. Existing approaches have utilized goal relabeling on collected experiences to alleviate issues raised from sparse rewards. However, these methods are still limited in efficiency and cannot make full use of experiences. In this paper, we propose Model-based Hindsight Experience Replay (MHER), which exploits experiences more efficiently by leveraging environmental dynamics to generate virtual achieved goals. Replacing original goals with virtual goals generated from interaction with a trained dynamics model leads to a novel relabeling method, \emph{model-based relabeling} (MBR). Based on MBR, MHER performs both reinforcement learning and supervised learning for efficient policy improvement. Theoretically, we also prove the supervised part in MHER, i.e., goal-conditioned supervised learning with MBR data, optimizes a lower bound on the multi-goal RL objective. Experimental results in several point-based tasks and simulated robotics environments show that MHER achieves significantly higher sample efficiency than previous state-of-the-art methods.

Despite the recent advances in the power conversion efficiency of organic solar cells, insights into the processing-driven thermo-mechanical stability of bulk heterojunction active layers are helping to advance the field. Lehigh University engineer Ganesh Balasubramanian, like many others, wondered if there were ways to improve the design of solar cells to make them more efficient? Balasubramanian, an associate professor of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics, studies the basic physics of the materials at the heart of solar energy conversion – the organic polymers passing electrons from molecule to molecule so they can be stored and harnessed – as well as the manufacturing processes that produce commercial solar cells. Using the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) – one of the most powerful on the planet – Balasubramanian and his graduate student Joydeep Munshi have been running molecular models of organic solar cell production processes, and designing a framework to determine the optimal engineering choices. "When engineers make solar cells, they mix two organic molecules in a solvent and evaporate the solvent to create a mixture which helps with the exciton conversion and electron transport," Balasubramanian said.

… consider future-facing investments for the even higher performing machines that … computing, artificial intelligence, and scientific machine learning.”.

We study the statistical limits of uniform convergence for offline policy evaluation (OPE) problems (uniform OPE for short) with model-based methods under episodic MDP setting. Uniform OPE $\sup_\Pi|Q^\pi-\hat{Q}^\pi|<\epsilon$ (initiated by Yin et al. 2021) is a stronger measure than the point-wise (fixed policy) OPE and ensures offline policy learning when $\Pi$ contains all policies (we call it global policy class). In this paper, we establish an $\Omega(H^2 S/d_m\epsilon^2)$ lower bound (over model-based family) for the global uniform OPE, where $d_m$ is the minimal state-action distribution induced by the behavior policy. The order $S/d_m\epsilon^2$ reveals global uniform OPE task is intrinsically harder than offline policy learning due to the extra $S$ factor. Next, our main result establishes an episode complexity of $\tilde{O}(H^2/d_m\epsilon^2)$ for \emph{local} uniform convergence that applies to all \emph{near-empirically optimal} policies for the MDPs with \emph{stationary} transition. The result implies the optimal sample complexity for offline learning and separates local uniform OPE from the global case. Paramountly, the model-based method combining with our new analysis technique (singleton absorbing MDP) can be adapted to the new settings: offline task-agnostic and the offline reward-free with optimal complexity $\tilde{O}(H^2\log(K)/d_m\epsilon^2)$ ($K$ is the number of tasks) and $\tilde{O}(H^2S/d_m\epsilon^2)$ respectively, which provides a unified framework for simultaneously solving different offline RL problems.

Bell's theorem is typically understood as the proof that quantum theory is incompatible with local hidden variable models. More generally, we can see the violation of a Bell inequality as witnessing the impossibility of explaining quantum correlations with classical causal models. The violation of a Bell inequality, however, does not exclude classical models where some level of measurement dependence is allowed, that is, the choice made by observers can be correlated with the source generating the systems to be measured. Here we show that the level of measurement dependence can be quantitatively upper bounded if we arrange the Bell test within a network. Furthermore, we also prove that these results can be adapted in order to derive non-linear Bell inequalities for a large class of causal networks and to identify quantumly realizable correlations which violate them.

Symbolic control techniques aim to satisfy complex logic specifications. A critical step in these techniques is the construction of a symbolic (discrete) abstraction, a finite-state system whose behaviour mimics that of a given continuous-state system. The methods used to compute symbolic abstractions, however, require knowledge of an accurate closed-form model. To generalize them to systems with unknown dynamics, we present a new data-driven approach that does not require closed-form dynamics, instead relying only the ability to evaluate successors of each state under given inputs. To provide guarantees for the learned abstraction, we use the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) statistical framework. We first introduce a PAC-style behavioural relationship and an appropriate refinement procedure. We then show how the symbolic abstraction can be constructed to satisfy this new behavioural relationship. Moreover, we provide PAC bounds that dictate the number of data required to guarantee a prescribed level of accuracy and confidence. Finally, we present an illustrative example.