To tackle interpretability in deep learning, we present a novel framework to jointly learn a predictive model and its associated interpretation model. The interpreter provides both local and global interpretability about the predictive model in terms of human-understandable high level attribute functions, with minimal loss of accuracy. This is achieved by a dedicated architecture and well chosen regularization penalties. We seek for a small-size dictionary of high level attribute functions that take as inputs the outputs of selected hidden layers and whose outputs feed a linear classifier. We impose strong conciseness on the activation of attributes with an entropy-based criterion while enforcing fidelity to both inputs and outputs of the predictive model. A detailed pipeline to visualize the learnt features is also developed. Moreover, besides generating interpretable models by design, our approach can be specialized to provide post-hoc interpretations for a pre-trained neural network. We validate our approach against several state-of-the-art methods on multiple datasets and show its efficacy on both kinds of tasks.

Adverts for Nike, Superdry and Lacoste have been banned for making misleading claims about their green credentials. The UK's advertising watchdog challenged the brands over the use of the word sustainable in paid-for Google ads which were not backed up by evidence of their sustainability. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) identified three adverts from the retailers promising customers sustainable materials, sustainable style and sustainable clothing. The UK's advertising code states that the basis of claims about environmental sustainability must be clear and supported by a high level of substantiation. In each case, it asked the companies for evidence to back up the claims about the sustainability of the products.

Gruesome pictures have revealed the shocking impact microplastics could be having on your appearance -- and making you look decrepit and older. Microplastics are now in almost everything we touch, from food and clothing to water, kitchenware and household items - and every American is now thought to have microplastics in their bodies. Now, a UK recycling company has tried to capture the impact these toxins could be having on the skin. In a release, they used AI to estimate how long-term exposure to microplastics at low, medium and high levels could impact a man and a woman's appearance. Mark Hall, a plastic waste expert at the business behind the report, said: 'It's clear to see there are many worrying signs of how this pollution might affect us.

This is an interesting approach and seems novel in the context of options, although it looks to have some similarities to potential based reward shaping, e.g. (Devlin and Kudenko, 2012). The main advantages claimed for HAAR are (loosely) those of improved performance under sparse rewards and the learning of skills appropriate for transfer. These claims could be made more explicit, and that might help to justify the experimental section. The authors define advantage as: A_h(s_t h,a_t h) E[r_t h \gamma_h V_h(s_{t k} h) - V_h(s_{t} h)] The meaning of this is a little ambiguous and I would prefer this to be clarified.

This paper introduces a new coreset construction mechanism for fair clustering in which the points can be of multiple disjoint types. As in classic fair clustering, the goal of this work is to construct a clustering in which the types represented in each cluster are balanced. Unlike previous work, the focus here is on constructing the clustering efficiently via coresets. This work provides a coreset construction algorithm for fair k-median (previously unknown) and improves the previously known coreset construction algorithm for fair k-means. In addition to theoretical contributions with respect to coreset size and construction time, the authors also provide a small empirical study.

To tackle interpretability in deep learning, we present a novel framework to jointly learn a predictive model and its associated interpretation model. The interpreter provides both local and global interpretability about the predictive model in terms of human-understandable high level attribute functions, with minimal loss of accuracy. This is achieved by a dedicated architecture and well chosen regularization penalties. We seek for a small-size dictionary of high level attribute functions that take as inputs the outputs of selected hidden layers and whose outputs feed a linear classifier. We impose strong conciseness on the activation of attributes with an entropy-based criterion while enforcing fidelity to both inputs and outputs of the predictive model.

Author profiling is the task of inferring characteristics about individuals by analyzing content they share. Supervised machine learning still dominates automatic systems that perform this task, despite the popularity of prompting large language models to address natural language understanding tasks. One reason is that the classification instances consist of large amounts of posts, potentially a whole user profile, which may exceed the input length of Transformers. Even if a model can use a large context window, the entirety of posts makes the application of API-accessed black box systems costly and slow, next to issues which come with such "needle-in-the-haystack" tasks. To mitigate this limitation, we propose a new method for author profiling which aims at distinguishing relevant from irrelevant content first, followed by the actual user profiling only with relevant data. To circumvent the need for relevance-annotated data, we optimize this relevance filter via reinforcement learning with a reward function that utilizes the zero-shot capabilities of large language models. We evaluate our method for Big Five personality trait prediction on two Twitter corpora. On publicly available real-world data with a skewed label distribution, our method shows similar efficacy to using all posts in a user profile, but with a substantially shorter context. An evaluation on a version of these data balanced with artificial posts shows that the filtering to relevant posts leads to a significantly improved accuracy of the predictions.

This paper proposes a comprehensive hierarchical control framework for autonomous decision-making arising in robotics and autonomous systems. In a typical hierarchical control architecture, high-level decision making is often characterised by discrete state and decision/control sets. However, a rational decision is usually affected by not only the discrete states of the autonomous system, but also the underlying continuous dynamics even the evolution of its operational environment. This paper proposes a holistic and comprehensive design process and framework for this type of challenging problems, from new modelling and design problem formulation to control design and stability analysis. It addresses the intricate interplay between traditional continuous systems dynamics utilized at the low levels for control design and discrete Markov decision processes (MDP) for facilitating high-level decision making. We model the decision making system in complex environments as a hybrid system consisting of a controlled MDP and autonomous (i.e. uncontrolled) continuous dynamics. Consequently, the new formulation is called as hybrid Markov decision process (HMDP). The design problem is formulated with a focus on ensuring both safety and optimality while taking into account the influence of both the discrete and continuous state variables of different levels. With the help of the model predictive control (MPC) concept, a decision maker design scheme is proposed for the proposed hybrid decision making model. By carefully designing key ingredients involved in this scheme, it is shown that the recursive feasibility and stability of the proposed autonomous decision making scheme are guaranteed. The proposed framework is applied to develop an autonomous lane changing system for intelligent vehicles.