Healthcare sector indices consolidate the economic health of pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and healthcare service firms. The short-term movements in these indices are closely intertwined with capital allocation decisions affecting research and development investment, drug availability, and long-term health outcomes. This research investigates whether historical open-high-low-close (OHLC) index data contain sufficient information for predicting the directional movement of the opening index on the subsequent trading day. The problem is formulated as a supervised classification task involving a one-step-ahead rolling window. A diverse feature set is constructed, comprising original prices, volatility-based technical indicators, and a novel class of nowcasting features derived from mutual OHLC ratios. The framework is evaluated on data from healthcare indices in the U.S. and Indian markets over a five-year period spanning multiple economic phases, including the COVID-19 pandemic. The results demonstrate robust predictive performance, with accuracy exceeding 0.8 and Matthews correlation coefficients above 0.6. Notably, the proposed nowcasting features have emerged as a key determinant of the market movement. We have employed the Shapley-based explainability paradigm to further elucidate the contribution of the features: outcomes reveal the dominant role of the nowcasting features, followed by a more moderate contribution of original prices. This research offers a societal utility: the proposed features and model for short-term forecasting of healthcare indices can reduce information asymmetry and support a more stable and equitable health economy.

Availability attacks are one of the strongest forms of training-phase attacks in machine learning, making the model unusable. While prior work in distributed ML has demonstrated such effect via gradient attacks and, more recently, data poisoning, we ask: can similar damage be inflicted solely by flipping training labels, without altering features? In this work, we introduce a novel formalization of label flipping attacks and derive an attacker-optimized loss function that better illustrates label flipping capabilities. To compare the damaging effect of label flipping with that of gradient attacks, we use a setting that allows us to compare their \emph{writing power} on the ML model. Our contribution is threefold, (1) we provide the first evidence for an availability attack through label flipping alone, (2) we shed light on an interesting interplay between what the attacker gains from more \emph{write access} versus what they gain from more \emph{flipping budget} and (3) we compare the power of targeted label flipping attack to that of an untargeted label flipping attack.

With fairness concerns gaining significant attention in Machine Learning (ML), several bias mitigation techniques have been proposed, often compared against each other to find the best method. These benchmarking efforts tend to use a common setup for evaluation under the assumption that providing a uniform environment ensures a fair comparison. However, bias mitigation techniques are sensitive to hyperparameter choices, random seeds, feature selection, etc., meaning that comparison on just one setting can unfairly favour certain algorithms. In this work, we show significant variance in fairness achieved by several algorithms and the influence of the learning pipeline on fairness scores. We highlight that most bias mitigation techniques can achieve comparable performance, given the freedom to perform hyperparameter optimization, suggesting that the choice of the evaluation parameters-rather than the mitigation technique itself-can sometimes create the perceived superiority of one method over another. We hope our work encourages future research on how various choices in the lifecycle of developing an algorithm impact fairness, and trends that guide the selection of appropriate algorithms.

In this study, we aim to identify the most effective machine learning model for accurately classifying Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) types from Reddit posts and a Kaggle data set. We apply multi-label classification using the Binary Relevance method. We use Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) approach to highlight the transparency and understandability of the process and result. To achieve this, we experiment with glass-box learning models, i.e. models designed for simplicity, transparency, and interpretability. We selected k-Nearest Neighbour, Multinomial Naive Bayes, and Logistic Regression for the glass-box models. We show that Multinomial Naive Bayes and k-Nearest Neighbour perform better if classes with Observer (S) traits are excluded, whereas Logistic Regression obtains its best results when all classes have > 550 entries.

The bio-inspired event cameras or dynamic vision sensors are capable of asynchronously capturing per-pixel brightness changes (called event-streams) in high temporal resolution and high dynamic range. However, the non-structural spatial-temporal event-streams make it challenging for providing intuitive visualization with rich semantic information for human vision. It calls for events-to-video (E2V) solutions which take event-streams as input and generate high quality video frames for intuitive visualization. However, current solutions are predominantly data-driven without considering the prior knowledge of the underlying statistics relating event-streams and video frames. It highly relies on the non-linearity and generalization capability of the deep neural networks, thus, is struggling on reconstructing detailed textures when the scenes are complex. In this work, we propose \textbf{E2HQV}, a novel E2V paradigm designed to produce high-quality video frames from events. This approach leverages a model-aided deep learning framework, underpinned by a theory-inspired E2V model, which is meticulously derived from the fundamental imaging principles of event cameras. To deal with the issue of state-reset in the recurrent components of E2HQV, we also design a temporal shift embedding module to further improve the quality of the video frames. Comprehensive evaluations on the real world event camera datasets validate our approach, with E2HQV, notably outperforming state-of-the-art approaches, e.g., surpassing the second best by over 40\% for some evaluation metrics.

Identifying the underlying dynamics of physical systems can be challenging when only provided with observational data. In this work, we consider systems that can be modelled as first-order ordinary differential equations. By assuming a certain pseudo-Hamiltonian formulation, we are able to learn the analytic terms of internal dynamics even if the model is trained on data where the system is affected by unknown damping and external disturbances. In cases where it is difficult to find analytic terms for the disturbances, a hybrid model that uses a neural network to learn these can still accurately identify the dynamics of the system as if under ideal conditions. This makes the models applicable in some situations where other system identification models fail. Furthermore, we propose to use a fourth-order symmetric integration scheme in the loss function and avoid actual integration in the training, and demonstrate on varied examples how this leads to increased performance on noisy data.

Zero-shot object detection aims to localize and recognize objects of unseen classes. Most of existing works face two problems: the low recall of RPN in unseen classes and the confusion of unseen classes with background. In this paper, we present the first method that combines DETR and meta-learning to perform zero-shot object detection, named Meta-ZSDETR, where model training is formalized as an individual episode based meta-learning task. Different from Faster R-CNN based methods that firstly generate class-agnostic proposals, and then classify them with visual-semantic alignment module, Meta-ZSDETR directly predict class-specific boxes with class-specific queries and further filter them with the predicted accuracy from classification head. The model is optimized with meta-contrastive learning, which contains a regression head to generate the coordinates of class-specific boxes, a classification head to predict the accuracy of generated boxes, and a contrastive head that utilizes the proposed contrastive-reconstruction loss to further separate different classes in visual space. We conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets MS COCO and PASCAL VOC. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the existing ZSD methods by a large margin.

We study stochastic zeroth order gradient and Hessian estimators for real-valued functions in $\mathbb{R}^n$. We show that, via taking finite difference along random orthogonal directions, the variance of the stochastic finite difference estimators can be significantly reduced. In particular, we design estimators for smooth functions such that, if one uses $ \Theta \left( k \right) $ random directions sampled from the Stiefel's manifold $ \text{St} (n,k) $ and finite-difference granularity $\delta$, the variance of the gradient estimator is bounded by $ \mathcal{O} \left( \left( \frac{n}{k} - 1 \right) + \left( \frac{n^2}{k} - n \right) \delta^2 + \frac{ n^2 \delta^4 }{ k } \right) $, and the variance of the Hessian estimator is bounded by $\mathcal{O} \left( \left( \frac{n^2}{k^2} - 1 \right) + \left( \frac{n^4}{k^2} - n^2 \right) \delta^2 + \frac{n^4 \delta^4 }{k^2} \right) $. When $k = n$, the variances become negligibly small. In addition, we provide improved bias bounds for the estimators. The bias of both gradient and Hessian estimators for smooth function $f$ is of order $\mathcal{O} \left( \delta^2 \Gamma \right)$, where $\delta$ is the finite-difference granularity, and $ \Gamma $ depends on high order derivatives of $f$. Our results are evidenced by empirical observations.

The Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Path Finding (MO-MAPF) problem is the problem of finding the Pareto-optimal frontier of collision-free paths for a team of agents while minimizing multiple cost metrics. Examples of such cost metrics include arrival times, travel distances, and energy consumption.In this paper, we focus on the Multi-Objective Conflict-Based Search (MO-CBS) algorithm, a state-of-the-art MO-MAPF algorithm. We show that the standard splitting strategy used by MO-CBS can lead to duplicate search nodes and hence can duplicate the search effort that MO-CBS needs to make. To address this issue, we propose two new splitting strategies for MO-CBS, namely cost splitting and disjoint cost splitting. Our theoretical results show that, when combined with either of these two new splitting strategies, MO-CBS maintains its completeness and optimality guarantees. Our experimental results show that disjoint cost splitting, our best splitting strategy, speeds up MO-CBS by up to two orders of magnitude and substantially improves its success rates in various settings.

Abstract: Traffic prediction plays an important role in the realization of traffic control and scheduling tasks in intelligent transportation systems. With the diversification of data sources, re asonably using rich traffic data to model the complex spatial-temporal dependence and nonlinear characteristics in traffic flow are the key challenge for intelligent transportation system. In addition, clearly evaluating the importance of spatialtemporal features extracted from different data becomes a challenge. A Double Layer - Spatial Temporal Feature Extraction and Evaluation (DL-STFEE) model is proposed. The lower layer of DL-STFEE is spatialtemporal feature extraction layer. The spatial and temporal features in traffic data are extracted by multi-graph graph convolution and attention mechanism, and different combinations of spatial and temporal features are generated. The upper layer of DL-STFEE is the spatial-temporal feature evaluation layer. Through the attention score matrix generated by the high-dimensional self-attention mechanism, the spatial-temporal features combinations are fused and evaluated, so as to get the impact of different combinations on prediction effect. Three sets of experiments are performed on actual traffic datasets to show that DL-STFEE can effectively capture the spatial-temporal features and evaluate the importance of different spatial-temporal feature combinations. With the continuous acceleration of urbanization, the population and vehicle ownership are also increasing, resulting in traffic congestion and other problems. In order to improve the efficiency, sustainability and security of transportation network, intelligent transportation system (ITS) [1] is proposed and becomes an advancing research field. Traffic prediction is an important step in the development of intelligent transportation [2]. It 2 aims to predict future traffic conditions by integrating historical observation data and measurement information of road sensor networks.