Accurate attribution for multiple platforms is critical for evaluating performancebased advertising. However, existing attribution methods rely heavily on the heuristic methods, e.g., Last-Click Mechanism (LCM) which always allocates the attribution to the platform with the latest report, lacking theoretical guarantees for attribution accuracy. In this work, we propose a novel theoretical model for the advertising attribution problem, in which we aim to design the optimal dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) mechanisms and evaluate their performance. We first show that LCM is not DSIC and performs poorly in terms of accuracy and fairness. To address this limitation, we introduce the Peer-Validated Mechanism (PVM), a DSIC mechanism in which a platform's attribution depends solely on the reports of other platforms. We then examine the accuracy of PVM across both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings, and provide provable accuracy bounds for each case. Notably, we show that PVM is the optimal DSIC mechanism in the homogeneous setting. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to show that PVM consistently outperforms LCM in terms of attribution accuracy and fairness.

Although quantum systems are generally described by quantum state vectors, we show that in certain cases their measurement processes can be reformulated as probabilistic equations expressed in terms of probabilistic state vectors. These probabilistic representations can, in turn, be approximated by the neural network dynamics of the Tensor Brain (TB) model. The Tensor Brain is a recently proposed framework for modeling perception and memory in the brain, providing a biologically inspired mechanism for efficiently integrating generated symbolic representations into reasoning processes.

In visuomotor policy learning, the control policy for the robotic agent is derived directly from visual inputs. The typical approach, where a policy and vision encoder are trained jointly from scratch, generalizes poorly to novel visual scene changes. Using pre-trained vision models (PVMs) to inform a policy network improves robustness in model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL). Recent developments in Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) suggest that MBRL is more sample-efficient than MFRL. However, counterintuitively, existing work has found PVMs to be ineffective in MBRL. Here, we investigate PVM's effectiveness in MBRL, specifically on generalization under visual domain shifts. We show that, in scenarios with severe shifts, PVMs perform much better than a baseline model trained from scratch. We further investigate the effects of varying levels of fine-tuning of PVMs. Our results show that partial fine-tuning can maintain the highest average task performance under the most extreme distribution shifts. Our results demonstrate that PVMs are highly successful in promoting robustness in visual policy learning, providing compelling evidence for their wider adoption in model-based robotic learning applications.

Pre-trained vision models (PVMs) are fundamental to modern robotics, yet their optimal configuration remains unclear. Through systematic evaluation, we find that while DINO and iBOT outperform MAE across visuomotor control and perception tasks, they struggle when trained on non-(single-)object-centric (NOC) data--a limitation strongly correlated with their diminished ability to learn object-centric representations. This investigation indicates that the ability to form object-centric representations from the non-object-centric robotics dataset is the key to success for PVMs. Motivated by this discovery, we designed SlotMIM, a method that induces object-centric representations by introducing a semantic bottleneck to reduce the number of prototypes to encourage the emergence of objectness as well as cross-view consistency regularization for encouraging multiview invariance. Our experiments encompass pre-training on object-centric, scene-centric, web-crawled, and ego-centric data. Across all settings, our approach learns transferrable representations and achieves significant improvements over prior work in image recognition, scene understanding, and robot learning evaluations. When scaled up with million-scale datasets, our method also demonstrates superior data efficiency and scalability. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/SlotMIM.

Large-scale pre-trained vision models (PVMs) have As a promising solution, parameter-efficient fine-tuning shown great potential for adaptability across various (PEFT), which was originally proposed in NLP, overcomes downstream vision tasks. However, with stateof-the-art the above challenges by updating a minimal number of parameters PVMs growing to billions or even trillions while potentially achieving comparable or superior of parameters, the standard full fine-tuning performance to full fine-tuning [Hu and et al., 2021; Yu and paradigm is becoming unsustainable due to high et al., 2022]. These approaches hinge on recent advances computational and storage demands. In response, showing that large pre-trained models trained with rich data researchers are exploring parameter-efficient finetuning have strong generalisability and most parameters in the PVMs (PEFT), which seeks to exceed the performance could be shared for the new tasks [Kornblith and et al., 2019; of full fine-tuning with minimal parameter Yu and et al., 2022]. PEFT methods could reduce learnable parameters, modifications. This survey provides a comprehensive which not only facilitates more effective adaptation overview and future directions for visual PEFT, to novel tasks but also safeguards the pre-existing knowledge offering a systematic review of the latest advancements.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) represent deeds of ownership, based on blockchain technologies and smart contracts, of unique crypto assets on digital art forms (e.g., artworks or collectibles). In the spotlight after skyrocketing in 2021, NFTs have attracted the attention of crypto enthusiasts and investors intent on placing promising investments in this profitable market. However, the NFT financial performance prediction has not been widely explored to date. In this work, we address the above problem based on the hypothesis that NFT images and their textual descriptions are essential proxies to predict the NFT selling prices. To this purpose, we propose MERLIN, a novel multimodal deep learning framework designed to train Transformer-based language and visual models, along with graph neural network models, on collections of NFTs' images and texts. A key aspect in MERLIN is its independence on financial features, as it exploits only the primary data a user interested in NFT trading would like to deal with, i.e., NFT images and textual descriptions. By learning dense representations of such data, a price-category classification task is performed by MERLIN models, which can also be tuned according to user preferences in the inference phase to mimic different risk-return investment profiles. Experimental evaluation on a publicly available dataset has shown that MERLIN models achieve significant performances according to several financial assessment criteria, fostering profitable investments, and also beating baseline machine-learning classifiers based on financial features.

In recent years, quantum machine learning (QML) has been actively used for various tasks, e.g., classification, reinforcement learning, and adversarial learning. However, these QML studies are unable to carry out complex tasks due to scalability issues on input and output which is currently the biggest hurdle in QML. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to overcome the problem of scalability. Motivated by this challenge, we focus on projection-valued measurements (PVM) which utilize the nature of probability amplitude in quantum statistical mechanics. By leveraging PVM, the output dimension is expanded from $q$, which is the number of qubits, to $2^q$. We propose a novel QML framework that utilizes PVM for multi-class classification. Our framework is proven to outperform the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methodologies with various datasets, assuming no more than 6 qubits are used. Furthermore, our PVM-based QML shows about $42.2\%$ better performance than the SOTA framework.

In this episode I have a conversation with Filip Piękniewski, researcher working on computer vision and AI at Koh Young Research America. His adventure with AI started in the 90s and since then a long list of experiences at the intersection of computer science and physics, led him to the conclusion that deep learning might not be sufficient nor appropriate to solve the problem of intelligence, specifically artificial intelligence. I read some of his publications and got familiar with some of his ideas. Honestly, I have been attracted by the fact that Filip does not buy the hype around AI and deep learning in particular. He doesn't seem to share the vision of folks like Elon Musk who claimed that we are going to see an exponential improvement in self driving cars among other things (he actually said that before a Tesla drove over a pedestrian). I have a somewhat complex love and hate relationship with deep learning.

I've elaborated in my previous post on why I think predictive capability is crucial for an intelligent agent and how we get fooled by getting 90% of motor commands right from a purely reactive system. This also relates to a way of thinking of the problem in terms of either statistics or dynamics. The current mainstream (statistical majority) is focused on statistics and that statistically works. However much like with guiding behavior, statistical majority may omit important outliers - important information is often hidden in the tail of the distribution. I've mentioned the Predictive Vision Model which is our (me and a few colleagues that think alike) way to introduce predictive paradigm into machine learning.

We introduce a new nearest-prototype classifier, the prototype vector machine (PVM). It arises from a combinatorial optimization problem which we cast as a variant of the set cover problem. We propose two algorithms for approximating its solution. The PVM selects a relatively small number of representative points which can then be used for classification. It contains 1-NN as a special case. The method is compatible with any dissimilarity measure, making it amenable to situations in which the data are not embedded in an underlying feature space or in which using a non-Euclidean metric is desirable. Indeed, we demonstrate on the much studied ZIP code data how the PVM can reap the benefits of a problem-specific metric. In this example, the PVM outperforms the highly successful 1-NN with tangent distance, and does so retaining fewer than half of the data points. This example highlights the strengths of the PVM in yielding a low-error, highly interpretable model. Additionally, we apply the PVM to a protein classification problem in which a kernel-based distance is used.