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Minnesota DHS whistleblower details 'smear campaign' after reporting fraud concerns to state

FOX News

Minnesota DHS whistleblower Faye Bernstein said she faced a "smear campaign" for reporting fraud concerns since 2019. She was called "racist" and banned from state property.


Concentration Inequalities for Exchangeable Tensors and Matrix-valued Data

Cheng, Chen, Barber, Rina Foygel

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study concentration inequalities for structured weighted sums of random data, including (i) tensor inner products and (ii) sequential matrix sums. We are interested in tail bounds and concentration inequalities for those structured weighted sums under exchangeability, extending beyond the classical framework of independent terms. We develop Hoeffding and Bernstein bounds provided with structure-dependent exchangeability. Along the way, we recover known results in weighted sum of exchangeable random variables and i.i.d. sums of random matrices to the optimal constants. Notably, we develop a sharper concentration bound for combinatorial sum of matrix arrays than the results previously derived from Chatterjee's method of exchangeable pairs. For applications, the richer structures provide us with novel analytical tools for estimating the average effect of multi-factor response models and studying fixed-design sketching methods in federated averaging. We apply our results to these problems, and find that our theoretical predictions are corroborated by numerical evidence.


System Identification and Adaptive Input Estimation on the Jaiabot Micro Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

Faros, Ioannis, Tanner, Herbert G.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper reports an attempt to model the system dynamics and estimate both the unknown internal control input and the state of a recently developed marine autonomous vehicle, the Jaiabot. Although the Jaiabot has shown promise in many applications, process and sensor noise necessitates state estimation and noise filtering. In this work, we present the first surge and heading linear dynamical model for Jaiabots derived from real data collected during field testing. An adaptive input estimation algorithm is implemented to accurately estimate the control input and hence the state. For validation, this approach is compared to the classical Kalman filter, highlighting its advantages in handling unknown control inputs.



A Near-Optimal Primal-Dual Method for Off-Policy Learning in CMDP

Neural Information Processing Systems

As an important framework for safe Reinforcement Learning, the Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) has been extensively studied in the recent literature. However, despite the rich results under various on-policy learning settings, there still lacks some essential understanding of the offline CMDP problems, in terms of both the algorithm design and the information theoretic sample complexity lower bound. In this paper, we focus on solving the CMDP problems where only offline data are available.