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A Survey and Datasheet Repository of Publicly Available US Criminal Justice Datasets

Neural Information Processing Systems

Predictive tools are becoming widely used in police, courts, and prison systems worldwide. Criminal justice is thus an increasingly important application domain for machine learning and algorithmic fairness. A few benchmark datasets have received significant attention--e.g., COMPAS [1]--but often without proper consideration of the domain context [2]. We conduct a survey of publicly available criminal justice datasets, highlight their potential uses, discuss context, and identify limitations and gaps in the current landscape. We provide datasheets [3] for 15 datasets, and make them available via a public repository. We compare the surveyed datasets across several dimensions, including size, population coverage, and potential use, highlighting possible concerns. We hope this work provides a useful starting point for researchers looking for appropriate datasets related to criminal justice, and wish to further grow the repository in a broader community effort.


Active Sequential Posterior Estimation for Sample-Efficient Simulation-Based Inference

Neural Information Processing Systems

Computer simulations have long presented the exciting possibility of scientific insight into complex real-world processes. Despite the power of modern computing, however, it remains challenging to systematically perform inference under simulation models. This has led to the rise of simulation-based inference (SBI), a class of machine learning-enabled techniques for approaching inverse problems with stochastic simulators. Many such methods, however, require large numbers of simulation samples and face difficulty scaling to high-dimensional settings, often making inference prohibitive under resource-intensive simulators. To mitigate these drawbacks, we introduce active sequential neural posterior estimation (ASNPE). ASNPE brings an active learning scheme into the inference loop to estimate the utility of simulation parameter candidates to the underlying probabilistic model. The proposed acquisition scheme is easily integrated into existing posterior estimation pipelines, allowing for improved sample efficiency with low computational overhead. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the travel demand calibration setting, a high-dimensional inverse problem commonly requiring computationally expensive traffic simulators. Our method outperforms well-tuned benchmarks and state-of-the-art posterior estimation methods on a largescale real-world traffic network, as well as demonstrates a performance advantage over non-active counterparts on a suite of SBI benchmark environments.



MoMu-Diffusion: On Learning Long-Term Motion-Music Synchronization and Correspondence

Neural Information Processing Systems

Motion-to-music and music-to-motion have been studied separately, each attracting substantial research interest within their respective domains. The interaction between human motion and music is a reflection of advanced human intelligence, and establishing a unified relationship between them is particularly important. However, to date, there has been no work that considers them jointly to explore the modality alignment within. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel framework, termed MoMu-Diffusion, for long-term and synchronous motion-music generation. Firstly, to mitigate the huge computational costs raised by long sequences, we propose a novel Bidirectional Contrastive Rhythmic Variational Auto-Encoder (BiCoR-VAE) that extracts the modality-aligned latent representations for both motion and music inputs. Subsequently, leveraging the aligned latent spaces, we introduce a multi-modal Transformer-based diffusion model and a cross-guidance sampling strategy to enable various generation tasks, including cross-modal, multimodal, and variable-length generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoMu-Diffusion surpasses recent state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively, and can synthesize realistic, diverse, long-term, and beat-matched music or motion sequences. The generated samples and codes are available at https://momu-diffusion.github.io/.




Towards Diverse Device Heterogeneous Federated Learning via Task Arithmetic Knowledge Integration

Neural Information Processing Systems

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for collaborative machine learning, while preserving user data privacy. Despite its potential, standard FL algorithms lack support for diverse heterogeneous device prototypes, which vary significantly in model and dataset sizes--from small IoT devices to large workstations. This limitation is only partially addressed by existing knowledge distillation (KD) techniques, which often fail to transfer knowledge effectively across a broad spectrum of device prototypes with varied capabilities. This failure primarily stems from two issues: the dilution of informative logits from more capable devices by those from less capable ones, and the use of a single integrated logits as the distillation target across all devices, which neglects their individual learning capacities and and the unique contributions of each device. To address these challenges, we introduce TAKFL, a novel KD-based framework that treats the knowledge transfer from each device prototype's ensemble as a separate task, independently distilling each to preserve its unique contributions and avoid dilution. TAKFL also incorporates a KD-based self-regularization technique to mitigate the issues related to the noisy and unsupervised ensemble distillation process. To integrate the separately distilled knowledge, we introduce an adaptive task arithmetic knowledge integration process, allowing each student model to customize the knowledge integration for optimal performance.



Instacart combines AI and people power to check more items off your grocery list

ZDNet

Choosing what you want to eat and prepare for all your daily meals can be challenging enough. What's worse is identifying the ingredients you need and finding those items out of stock. This becomes even more irritating when ordering online and learning the item is sold out. Instacart's latest tech looks to eradicate this issue. Also: Samsung's smart fridges can soon add items to your Instacart order On Thursday, Instacart unveiled its new Store View and Second Store Check advancements.