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All Politics is Local: Redistricting via Local Fairness

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we propose to use the concept of local fairness for auditing and ranking redistricting plans. Given a redistricting plan, a deviating group is a population-balanced contiguous region in which a majority of individuals are of the same interest and in the minority of their respective districts; such a set of individuals have a justified complaint with how the redistricting plan was drawn. A redistricting plan with no deviating groups is called locally fair. We show that the problem of auditing a given plan for local fairness is NP-complete. We present an MCMC approach for auditing as well as ranking redistricting plans. We also present a dynamic programming based algorithm for the auditing problem that we use to demonstrate the efficacy of our MCMC approach. Using these tools, we test local fairness on real-world election data, showing that it is indeed possible to find plans that are almost or exactly locally fair. Further, we show that such plans can be generated while sacrificing very little in terms of compactness and existing fairness measures such as competitiveness of the districts or seat shares of the plans.


Efficient Streaming Algorithms for Graphlet Sampling Marco Bressan Cispa Helmholtz Center for Information Security Department of Computer Science Saarland University

Neural Information Processing Systems

Given a graph G and a positive integer k, the Graphlet Sampling problem asks to sample a connected induced k-vertex subgraph of G uniformly at random. Graphlet sampling enhances machine learning applications by transforming graph structures into feature vectors for tasks such as graph classification and subgraph identification, boosting neural network performance, and supporting clustered federated learning by capturing local structures and relationships.


Sharper Convergence Guarantees for Asynchronous SGD for Distributed and Federated Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the asynchronous stochastic gradient descent algorithm for distributed training over n workers which have varying computation and communication frequency over time. In this algorithm, workers compute stochastic gradients in parallel at their own pace and return those to the server without any synchronization.


Air Force F-16 struck by drone during training flight over Arizona in 2023

FOX News

A routine training flight over Arizona in January 2023 took an unusual turn when a U.S. Air Force F-16D was struck by what was initially reported as an unidentified object, but now U.S. defense officials say was a small drone. Fox News confirmed that the incident, which occurred near Gila Bend, Arizona, on Jan. 19, 2023, was a routine training mission and was witnessed by the instructor pilot seated in the rear of the two-seat aircraft. According to a U.S. defense official, the pilot observed a "mostly white and orange object" collide with the left side of the aircraft canopy, the transparent covering over the cockpit. Initially, the object was thought to be a bird, a common hazard for aircraft. But after conducting checks during the flight and a detailed inspection upon landing at Tucson International Airport, the crew found "zero evidence" of a bird strike.


Reconciling Modern Deep Learning with Traditional Optimization Analyses: The Intrinsic Learning Rate

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent works (e.g., (Li and Arora, 2020)) suggest that the use of popular normalization schemes (including Batch Normalization) in today's deep learning can move it far from a traditional optimization viewpoint, e.g., use of exponentially increasing learning rates. The current paper highlights other ways in which behavior of normalized nets departs from traditional viewpoints, and then initiates a formal framework for studying their mathematics via suitable adaptation of the conventional framework namely, modeling SGD-induced training trajectory via a suitable stochastic differential equation (SDE) with a noise term that captures gradient noise. This yields: (a) A new "intrinsic learning rate" parameter that is the product of the normal learning rate ฮท and weight decay factor ฮป. Analysis of the SDE shows how the effective speed of learning varies and equilibrates over time under the control of intrinsic LR.


Feature-fortified Unrestricted Graph Alignment

Neural Information Processing Systems

The necessity to align two graphs, minimizing a structural distance metric, is prevalent in biology, chemistry, recommender systems, and social network analysis. Due to the problem's NP-hardness, prevailing graph alignment methods follow a modular and mediated approach, solving the problem restricted to the domain of intermediary graph representations or products like embeddings, spectra, and graph signals. Restricting the problem to this intermediate space may distort the original problem and are hence predisposed to miss high-quality solutions.


Maximum-Entropy Adversarial Data Augmentation for Improved Generalization and Robustness Long Zhao 1 Ting Liu 2 Xi Peng 3

Neural Information Processing Systems

Adversarial data augmentation has shown promise for training robust deep neural networks against unforeseen data shifts or corruptions. However, it is difficult to define heuristics to generate effective fictitious target distributions containing "hard" adversarial perturbations that are largely different from the source distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective regularization term for adversarial data augmentation. We theoretically derive it from the information bottleneck principle, which results in a maximum-entropy formulation. Intuitively, this regularization term encourages perturbing the underlying source distribution to enlarge predictive uncertainty of the current model, so that the generated "hard" adversarial perturbations can improve the model robustness during training. Experimental results on three standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms the existing state of the art by a statistically significant margin.


Apple design legend Jony Ive joins OpenAI to work on AI hardware

The Japan Times

The legendary designer behind Apple's iPhone, Jony Ive, has joined OpenAI to create devices tailored for using generative artificial intelligence, according to a video posted Wednesday by the ChatGPT maker. Ive and his team will take over design at OpenAI as part of an acquisition of his startup named "IO" valued at 6.5 billion. Sharing no details, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said in the video that a prototype Ive shared with him "is the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen."


a novel constraint optimization method to encode the generic knowledge into a BN without requiring any training data

Neural Information Processing Systems

Our proposed approach can be applied to other AUs as well. In Tab.6, LP-SM also considers apex frames on CK+, and The comparison to LP-SM is consistent. In Tab.8, we apply FMPN-FER and DeepEmotion to our pre-processed We will consider a pre-trained VGGFace model in our further work. R2 2.1 The novelty compared to prior work. Facial expression can be a group of AUs.


A Appendix

Neural Information Processing Systems

A.1 Speech Translation Evaluation One hyperparameter in our speech translation evaluation is the threshold on the alignment scores. Mined speech-text pairs are included in the train set if their alignment scores are greater than or equal to the threshold. Speech translation models are trained on the combination of CoVoST2 train set and mined data at different thresholds. We report the performance of each model on the dev set of Common Voice in Figure 5, and find the optimal value for the threshold. Figure 5: BLEU on dev set achieved by S2T models trained on CoVoST train set + mined data at different thresholds.