BRMs thus naturally induce strategic creators' collective behaviors

The past decade has witnessed the flourishing of a new profession as media content creators, who rely on revenue streams from online content recommendation platforms. The reward mechanism employed by these platforms creates a competitive environment among creators which affects their production choices and, consequently, content distribution and system welfare. It is thus crucial to design the platform's reward mechanism in order to steer the creators' competition towards a desirable welfare outcome in the long run. This work makes two major contributions in this regard: first, we uncover a fundamental limit about a class of widely adopted mechanisms, coined \emph{Merit-based Monotone Mechanisms}, by showing that they inevitably lead to a constant fraction loss of the optimal welfare. To circumvent this limitation, we introduce \emph{Backward Rewarding Mechanisms} (BRMs) and show that the competition game resultant from BRMs possesses a potential game structure. BRMs thus naturally induce strategic creators' collective behaviors towards optimizing the potential function, which can be designed to match any given welfare metric. In addition, the class of BRM can be parameterized so that it allows the platform to directly optimize welfare within the feasible mechanism space even when the welfare metric is not explicitly defined.

BRMs thus naturally induce strategic creators' collective behaviors

The past decade has witnessed the flourishing of a new profession as media content creators, who rely on revenue streams from online content recommendation platforms. The reward mechanism employed by these platforms creates a competitive environment among creators which affects their production choices and, consequently, content distribution and system welfare. It is thus crucial to design the platform's reward mechanism in order to steer the creators' competition towards a desirable welfare outcome in the long run. This work makes two major contributions in this regard: first, we uncover a fundamental limit about a class of widely adopted mechanisms, coined \emph{Merit-based Monotone Mechanisms}, by showing that they inevitably lead to a constant fraction loss of the optimal welfare. To circumvent this limitation, we introduce \emph{Backward Rewarding Mechanisms} (BRMs) and show that the competition game resultant from BRMs possesses a potential game structure. BRMs thus naturally induce strategic creators' collective behaviors towards optimizing the potential function, which can be designed to match any given welfare metric.

We consider the problem of planning collision-free trajectories on distance fields. Our key observation is that querying a distance field at one configuration reveals a region of safe space whose radius is given by the distance value, obviating the need for additional collision checking within the safe region. We refer to such regions as safe bubbles, and show that safe bubbles can be obtained from any Lipschitz-continuous safety constraint. Inspired by sampling-based planning algorithms, we present three algorithms for constructing a safe bubble cover of free space, named bubble roadmap (BRM), rapidly exploring bubble graph (RBG), and expansive bubble graph (EBG). The bubble sampling algorithms are combined with a hierarchical planning method that first computes a discrete path of bubbles, followed by a continuous path within the bubbles computed via convex optimization. Experimental results show that the bubble-based methods yield up to 5- 10 times cost reduction relative to conventional baselines while simultaneously reducing computational efforts by orders of magnitude.

Off-policy Evaluation (OPE) methods are a crucial tool for evaluating policies in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where exploration is often infeasible, unethical, or expensive. However, the extent to which such methods can be trusted under adversarial threats to data quality is largely unexplored. In this work, we make the first attempt at investigating the sensitivity of OPE methods to marginal adversarial perturbations to the data. We design a generic data poisoning attack framework leveraging influence functions from robust statistics to carefully construct perturbations that maximize error in the policy value estimates. We carry out extensive experimentation with multiple healthcare and control datasets. Our results demonstrate that many existing OPE methods are highly prone to generating value estimates with large errors when subject to data poisoning attacks, even for small adversarial perturbations. These findings question the reliability of policy values derived using OPE methods and motivate the need for developing OPE methods that are statistically robust to train-time data poisoning attacks.

The research on neural network (NN) based image compression has shown superior performance compared to classical compression frameworks. Unlike the hand-engineered transforms in the classical frameworks, NN-based models learn the non-linear transforms providing more compact bit representations, and achieve faster coding speed on parallel devices over their classical counterparts. Those properties evoked the attention of both scientific and industrial communities, resulting in the standardization activity JPEG-AI. The verification model for the standardization process of JPEG-AI is already in development and has surpassed the advanced VVC intra codec. To generate reconstructed images with the desired bits per pixel and assess the BD-rate performance of both the JPEG-AI verification model and VVC intra, bit rate matching is employed. However, the current state of the JPEG-AI verification model experiences significant slowdowns during bit rate matching, resulting in suboptimal performance due to an unsuitable model. The proposed methodology offers a gradual algorithmic optimization for matching bit rates, resulting in a fourfold acceleration and over 1% improvement in BD-rate at the base operation point. At the high operation point, the acceleration increases up to sixfold.

One of the classic tools for decision automation is a business rules management system, or BRMS. While these systems are powerful and effective when used correctly, many companies fail to apply best practices when using them. Here's one of our favorite horror stories about a well-intentioned BRMS implementation gone awry. Some years ago, we got a call from a company asking for our help with their business rules project. They said that they had hit a milestone in their rules analysis--it was 80% complete, or so they thought.

For all the talk about artificial intelligence (AI) in financial circles at present – it seems everything is "AI-powered" – it turns out there's a lot less genuine AI in place than we might have imagined. The March 2020 Unlocking AI Playbook: FI Edition, a PYMNTS and Brighterion collaboration, explains that while the use of AI solutions by banks and financial institutions (FIs) skyrocketed 70 percent in a single year (2018-2019), less than 10 percent of all banks say they use AI today. "AI's real-world usage may appear limited compared to the fanfare surrounding it today, but our research aims to accurately depict its adoption, so we precisely define AI," the report states. "Systems fitting our definition must have current business applications and be able to work with and learn from dynamic data sets in real time, and these capabilities must be able to associate with specific entities within a system." Fear of implementation cost and complexity are major deterrents to adoption, with 82 percent of banks turning to existing technology, such as a business rule management system (BRMS), to mimic the data insights promised by true AI.

In this paper, we introduce the increasing belief criterion in association rule mining. The criterion uses a recursive application of Bayes' theorem to compute a rule's belief. Extracted rules are required to have their belief increase with their last observation. We extend the taxonomy of association rule mining algorithms with a new branch for Bayesian rule mining~(BRM), which uses increasing belief as the rule selection criterion. In contrast, the well-established frequent association rule mining~(FRM) branch relies on the minimum-support concept to extract rules. We derive properties of the increasing belief criterion, such as the increasing belief boundary, no-prior-worries, and conjunctive premises. Subsequently, we implement a BRM algorithm using the increasing belief criterion, and illustrate its functionality in three experiments: (1)~a proof-of-concept to illustrate BRM properties, (2)~an analysis relating socioeconomic information and chemical exposure data, and (3)~mining behaviour routines in patients undergoing neurological rehabilitation. We illustrate how BRM is capable of extracting rare rules and does not suffer from support dilution. Furthermore, we show that BRM focuses on the individual event generating processes, while FRM focuses on their commonalities. We consider BRM's increasing belief as an alternative criterion to thresholds on rule support, as often applied in FRM, to determine rule usefulness.