It has been rightfully emphasized that the use of AI for clinical decision making could amplify health disparities. A machine learning model may pick up undesirable correlations, for example, between a patient's racial identity and clinical outcome. Such correlations are often present in (historical) data used for model development. There has been an increase in studies reporting biases in disease detection models across patient subgroups. Besides the scarcity of data from underserved populations, very little is known about how these biases are encoded and how one may reduce or even remove disparate performance. There is some speculation whether algorithms may recognize patient characteristics such as biological sex or racial identity, and then directly or indirectly use this information when making predictions. But it remains unclear how we can establish whether such information is actually used. This article aims to shed some light on these issues by exploring new methodology allowing intuitive inspections of the inner working of machine learning models for image-based detection of disease. We also evaluate an effective yet debatable technique for addressing disparities leveraging the automatic prediction of patient characteristics, resulting in models with comparable true and false positive rates across subgroups. Our findings may stimulate the discussion about safe and ethical use of AI.
There has been increasing interest in smart factories powered by robotics systems to tackle repetitive, laborious tasks. One impactful yet challenging task in robotics-powered smart factory applications is robotic grasping: using robotic arms to grasp objects autonomously in different settings. Robotic grasping requires a variety of computer vision tasks such as object detection, segmentation, grasp prediction, pick planning, etc. While significant progress has been made in leveraging of machine learning for robotic grasping, particularly with deep learning, a big challenge remains in the need for large-scale, high-quality RGBD datasets that cover a wide diversity of scenarios and permutations. To tackle this big, diverse data problem, we are inspired by the recent rise in the concept of metaverse, which has greatly closed the gap between virtual worlds and the physical world. Metaverses allow us to create digital twins of real-world manufacturing scenarios and to virtually create different scenarios from which large volumes of data can be generated for training models. In this paper, we present MetaGraspNet: a large-scale benchmark dataset for vision-driven robotic grasping via physics-based metaverse synthesis. The proposed dataset contains 100,000 images and 25 different object types and is split into 5 difficulties to evaluate object detection and segmentation model performance in different grasping scenarios. We also propose a new layout-weighted performance metric alongside the dataset for evaluating object detection and segmentation performance in a manner that is more appropriate for robotic grasp applications compared to existing general-purpose performance metrics. Our benchmark dataset is available open-source on Kaggle, with the first phase consisting of detailed object detection, segmentation, layout annotations, and a layout-weighted performance metric script.
While recent years have witnessed a rapid growth of research papers on recommender system (RS), most of the papers focus on inventing machine learning models to better fit user behavior data. However, user behavior data is observational rather than experimental. This makes various biases widely exist in the data, including but not limited to selection bias, position bias, exposure bias, and popularity bias. Blindly fitting the data without considering the inherent biases will result in many serious issues, e.g., the discrepancy between offline evaluation and online metrics, hurting user satisfaction and trust on the recommendation service, etc. To transform the large volume of research models into practical improvements, it is highly urgent to explore the impacts of the biases and perform debiasing when necessary. When reviewing the papers that consider biases in RS, we find that, to our surprise, the studies are rather fragmented and lack a systematic organization. The terminology ``bias'' is widely used in the literature, but its definition is usually vague and even inconsistent across papers. This motivates us to provide a systematic survey of existing work on RS biases. In this paper, we first summarize seven types of biases in recommendation, along with their definitions and characteristics. We then provide a taxonomy to position and organize the existing work on recommendation debiasing. Finally, we identify some open challenges and envision some future directions, with the hope of inspiring more research work on this important yet less investigated topic. The summary of debiasing methods reviewed in this survey can be found at \url{//github.com/jiawei-chen/RecDebiasing}.
Socio-economic characteristics are influencing the temporal and spatial variability of water demand - the biggest source of uncertainties within water distribution system modeling. Improving our knowledge on these influences can be utilized to decrease demand uncertainties. This paper aims to link smart water meter data to socio-economic user characteristics by applying a novel clustering algorithm that uses dynamic time warping on daily demand patterns. The approach is tested on simulated and measured single family home datasets. We show that the novel algorithm performs better compared to commonly used clustering methods, both, in finding the right number of clusters as well as assigning patterns correctly. Additionally, the methodology can be used to identify outliers within clusters of demand patterns. Furthermore, this study investigates which socio-economic characteristics (e.g. employment status, number of residents) are prevalent within single clusters and, consequently, can be linked to the shape of the cluster's barycenters. In future, the proposed methods in combination with stochastic demand models can be used to fill data-gaps in hydraulic models.
We explore the locomotion of soft robots in granular medium (GM) resulting from the elastic deformation of slender rods. A low-cost, rapidly fabricable robot inspired by the physiological structure of bacteria is presented. It consists of a rigid head, with a motor and batteries embedded, and multiple elastic rods (our model for flagella) to investigate locomotion in GM. The elastic flagella are rotated at one end by the motor, and they deform due to the drag from GM, propelling the robot. The external drag is determined by the flagellar shape, while the latter changes due to the competition between external loading and elastic forces. In this coupled fluid-structure interaction problem, we observe that increasing the number of flagella can decrease or increase the propulsive speed of the robot, depending on the physical parameters of the system. This nonlinearity in the functional relation between propulsion and the parameters of this simple robot motivates us to fundamentally analyze its mechanics using theory, numerical simulation, and experiments. We present a simple Euler-Bernoulli beam theory-based analytical framework that is capable of qualitatively capturing both cases. Theoretical prediction quantitatively matches experiments when the flagellar deformation is small. To account for the geometrically nonlinear deformation often encountered in soft robots and microbes, we implement a simulation framework that incorporates discrete differential geometry-based simulations of elastic rods, a resistive force theory-based model for drag, and a modified Stokes law for the hydrodynamics of the robot head. Comparison with experimental data indicates that the simulations can quantitatively predict robotic motion. Overall, the theoretical and numerical tools presented in this paper can shed light on the design and control of this class of articulated robots in granular or fluid media.
The rapid recent progress in machine learning (ML) has raised a number of scientific questions that challenge the longstanding dogma of the field. One of the most important riddles is the good empirical generalization of overparameterized models. Overparameterized models are excessively complex with respect to the size of the training dataset, which results in them perfectly fitting (i.e., interpolating) the training data, which is usually noisy. Such interpolation of noisy data is traditionally associated with detrimental overfitting, and yet a wide range of interpolating models -- from simple linear models to deep neural networks -- have recently been observed to generalize extremely well on fresh test data. Indeed, the recently discovered double descent phenomenon has revealed that highly overparameterized models often improve over the best underparameterized model in test performance. Understanding learning in this overparameterized regime requires new theory and foundational empirical studies, even for the simplest case of the linear model. The underpinnings of this understanding have been laid in very recent analyses of overparameterized linear regression and related statistical learning tasks, which resulted in precise analytic characterizations of double descent. This paper provides a succinct overview of this emerging theory of overparameterized ML (henceforth abbreviated as TOPML) that explains these recent findings through a statistical signal processing perspective. We emphasize the unique aspects that define the TOPML research area as a subfield of modern ML theory and outline interesting open questions that remain.
Fact-checking has become increasingly important due to the speed with which both information and misinformation can spread in the modern media ecosystem. Therefore, researchers have been exploring how fact-checking can be automated, using techniques based on natural language processing, machine learning, knowledge representation, and databases to automatically predict the veracity of claims. In this paper, we survey automated fact-checking stemming from natural language processing, and discuss its connections to related tasks and disciplines. In this process, we present an overview of existing datasets and models, aiming to unify the various definitions given and identify common concepts. Finally, we highlight challenges for future research.
This book develops an effective theory approach to understanding deep neural networks of practical relevance. Beginning from a first-principles component-level picture of networks, we explain how to determine an accurate description of the output of trained networks by solving layer-to-layer iteration equations and nonlinear learning dynamics. A main result is that the predictions of networks are described by nearly-Gaussian distributions, with the depth-to-width aspect ratio of the network controlling the deviations from the infinite-width Gaussian description. We explain how these effectively-deep networks learn nontrivial representations from training and more broadly analyze the mechanism of representation learning for nonlinear models. From a nearly-kernel-methods perspective, we find that the dependence of such models' predictions on the underlying learning algorithm can be expressed in a simple and universal way. To obtain these results, we develop the notion of representation group flow (RG flow) to characterize the propagation of signals through the network. By tuning networks to criticality, we give a practical solution to the exploding and vanishing gradient problem. We further explain how RG flow leads to near-universal behavior and lets us categorize networks built from different activation functions into universality classes. Altogether, we show that the depth-to-width ratio governs the effective model complexity of the ensemble of trained networks. By using information-theoretic techniques, we estimate the optimal aspect ratio at which we expect the network to be practically most useful and show how residual connections can be used to push this scale to arbitrary depths. With these tools, we can learn in detail about the inductive bias of architectures, hyperparameters, and optimizers.
Deep Learning has implemented a wide range of applications and has become increasingly popular in recent years. The goal of multimodal deep learning is to create models that can process and link information using various modalities. Despite the extensive development made for unimodal learning, it still cannot cover all the aspects of human learning. Multimodal learning helps to understand and analyze better when various senses are engaged in the processing of information. This paper focuses on multiple types of modalities, i.e., image, video, text, audio, body gestures, facial expressions, and physiological signals. Detailed analysis of past and current baseline approaches and an in-depth study of recent advancements in multimodal deep learning applications has been provided. A fine-grained taxonomy of various multimodal deep learning applications is proposed, elaborating on different applications in more depth. Architectures and datasets used in these applications are also discussed, along with their evaluation metrics. Last, main issues are highlighted separately for each domain along with their possible future research directions.
Deep neural networks (DNN) have achieved unprecedented success in numerous machine learning tasks in various domains. However, the existence of adversarial examples has raised concerns about applying deep learning to safety-critical applications. As a result, we have witnessed increasing interests in studying attack and defense mechanisms for DNN models on different data types, such as images, graphs and text. Thus, it is necessary to provide a systematic and comprehensive overview of the main threats of attacks and the success of corresponding countermeasures. In this survey, we review the state of the art algorithms for generating adversarial examples and the countermeasures against adversarial examples, for the three popular data types, i.e., images, graphs and text.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.