半弱监督和监督的学习最近在对象检测文献中引起了很大的关注，因为它们可以减轻成功训练深度学习模型所需的注释成本。半监督学习的最先进方法依赖于使用多阶段过程训练的学生老师模型，并大量数据增强。为弱监督的设置开发了自定义网络，因此很难适应不同的检测器。在本文中，引入了一种弱半监督的训练方法，以减少这些训练挑战，但通过仅利用一小部分全标记的图像，并在弱标记图像中提供信息来实现最先进的性能。特别是，我们基于通用抽样的学习策略以在线方式产生伪基真实（GT）边界框注释，消除了对多阶段培训的需求和学生教师网络配置。这些伪GT框是根据通过得分传播过程累积的对象建议的分类得分从弱标记的图像中采样的。 PASCAL VOC数据集的经验结果表明，使用VOC 2007作为完全标记的拟议方法可提高性能5.0％，而VOC 2012作为弱标记数据。同样，有了5-10％的完全注释的图像，我们观察到MAP中的10％以上的改善，表明对图像级注释的适度投资可以大大改善检测性能。

Numerous works use word embedding-based metrics to quantify societal biases and stereotypes in texts. Recent studies have found that word embeddings can capture semantic similarity but may be affected by word frequency. In this work we study the effect of frequency when measuring female vs. male gender bias with word embedding-based bias quantification methods. We find that Skip-gram with negative sampling and GloVe tend to detect male bias in high frequency words, while GloVe tends to return female bias in low frequency words. We show these behaviors still exist when words are randomly shuffled. This proves that the frequency-based effect observed in unshuffled corpora stems from properties of the metric rather than from word associations. The effect is spurious and problematic since bias metrics should depend exclusively on word co-occurrences and not individual word frequencies. Finally, we compare these results with the ones obtained with an alternative metric based on Pointwise Mutual Information. We find that this metric does not show a clear dependence on frequency, even though it is slightly skewed towards male bias across all frequencies.

Uncertainty quantification is crucial to inverse problems, as it could provide decision-makers with valuable information about the inversion results. For example, seismic inversion is a notoriously ill-posed inverse problem due to the band-limited and noisy nature of seismic data. It is therefore of paramount importance to quantify the uncertainties associated to the inversion process to ease the subsequent interpretation and decision making processes. Within this framework of reference, sampling from a target posterior provides a fundamental approach to quantifying the uncertainty in seismic inversion. However, selecting appropriate prior information in a probabilistic inversion is crucial, yet non-trivial, as it influences the ability of a sampling-based inference in providing geological realism in the posterior samples. To overcome such limitations, we present a regularized variational inference framework that performs posterior inference by implicitly regularizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence loss with a CNN-based denoiser by means of the Plug-and-Play methods. We call this new algorithm Plug-and-Play Stein Variational Gradient Descent (PnP-SVGD) and demonstrate its ability in producing high-resolution, trustworthy samples representative of the subsurface structures, which we argue could be used for post-inference tasks such as reservoir modelling and history matching. To validate the proposed method, numerical tests are performed on both synthetic and field post-stack seismic data.

Social insects such as ants communicate via pheromones which allows them to coordinate their activity and solve complex tasks as a swarm, e.g. foraging for food. This behaviour was shaped through evolutionary processes. In computational models, self-coordination in swarms has been implemented using probabilistic or action rules to shape the decision of each agent and the collective behaviour. However, manual tuned decision rules may limit the behaviour of the swarm. In this work we investigate the emergence of self-coordination and communication in evolved swarms without defining any rule. We evolve a swarm of agents representing an ant colony. We use a genetic algorithm to optimize a spiking neural network (SNN) which serves as an artificial brain to control the behaviour of each agent. The goal of the colony is to find optimal ways to forage for food in the shortest amount of time. In the evolutionary phase, the ants are able to learn to collaborate by depositing pheromone near food piles and near the nest to guide its cohorts. The pheromone usage is not encoded into the network; instead, this behaviour is established through the optimization procedure. We observe that pheromone-based communication enables the ants to perform better in comparison to colonies where communication did not emerge. We assess the foraging performance by comparing the SNN based model to a rule based system. Our results show that the SNN based model can complete the foraging task more efficiently in a shorter time. Our approach illustrates that even in the absence of pre-defined rules, self coordination via pheromone emerges as a result of the network optimization. This work serves as a proof of concept for the possibility of creating complex applications utilizing SNNs as underlying architectures for multi-agent interactions where communication and self-coordination is desired.

Reinforcement learning is a machine learning approach based on behavioral psychology. It is focused on learning agents that can acquire knowledge and learn to carry out new tasks by interacting with the environment. However, a problem occurs when reinforcement learning is used in critical contexts where the users of the system need to have more information and reliability for the actions executed by an agent. In this regard, explainable reinforcement learning seeks to provide to an agent in training with methods in order to explain its behavior in such a way that users with no experience in machine learning could understand the agent's behavior. One of these is the memory-based explainable reinforcement learning method that is used to compute probabilities of success for each state-action pair using an episodic memory. In this work, we propose to make use of the memory-based explainable reinforcement learning method in a hierarchical environment composed of sub-tasks that need to be first addressed to solve a more complex task. The end goal is to verify if it is possible to provide to the agent the ability to explain its actions in the global task as well as in the sub-tasks. The results obtained showed that it is possible to use the memory-based method in hierarchical environments with high-level tasks and compute the probabilities of success to be used as a basis for explaining the agent's behavior.

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) related technology has expanded knowledge in the area, bringing to light new problems and challenges that require solutions. Furthermore, because the technology allows processes usually carried out by people to be automated, it is in great demand in industrial sectors. The automation of these vehicles has been addressed in the literature, applying different machine learning strategies. Reinforcement learning (RL) is an automation framework that is frequently used to train autonomous agents. RL is a machine learning paradigm wherein an agent interacts with an environment to solve a given task. However, learning autonomously can be time consuming, computationally expensive, and may not be practical in highly-complex scenarios. Interactive reinforcement learning allows an external trainer to provide advice to an agent while it is learning a task. In this study, we set out to teach an RL agent to control a drone using reward-shaping and policy-shaping techniques simultaneously. Two simulated scenarios were proposed for the training; one without obstacles and one with obstacles. We also studied the influence of each technique. The results show that an agent trained simultaneously with both techniques obtains a lower reward than an agent trained using only a policy-based approach. Nevertheless, the agent achieves lower execution times and less dispersion during training.

The widespread use of information and communication technology (ICT) over the course of the last decades has been a primary catalyst behind the digitalization of power systems. Meanwhile, as the utilization rate of the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to rise along with recent advancements in ICT, the need for secure and computationally efficient monitoring of critical infrastructures like the electrical grid and the agents that participate in it is growing. A cyber-physical system, such as the electrical grid, may experience anomalies for a number of different reasons. These may include physical defects, mistakes in measurement and communication, cyberattacks, and other similar occurrences. The goal of this study is to emphasize what the most common incidents are with power systems and to give an overview and classification of the most common ways to find problems, starting with the consumer/prosumer end working up to the primary power producers. In addition, this article aimed to discuss the methods and techniques, such as artificial intelligence (AI) that are used to identify anomalies in the power systems and markets.

Knowledge graphs, modeling multi-relational data, improve numerous applications such as question answering or graph logical reasoning. Many graph neural networks for such data emerged recently, often outperforming shallow architectures. However, the design of such multi-relational graph neural networks is ad-hoc, driven mainly by intuition and empirical insights. Up to now, their expressivity, their relation to each other, and their (practical) learning performance is poorly understood. Here, we initiate the study of deriving a more principled understanding of multi-relational graph neural networks. Namely, we investigate the limitations in the expressive power of the well-known Relational GCN and Compositional GCN architectures and shed some light on their practical learning performance. By aligning both architectures with a suitable version of the Weisfeiler-Leman test, we establish under which conditions both models have the same expressive power in distinguishing non-isomorphic (multi-relational) graphs or vertices with different structural roles. Further, by leveraging recent progress in designing expressive graph neural networks, we introduce the $k$-RN architecture that provably overcomes the expressiveness limitations of the above two architectures. Empirically, we confirm our theoretical findings in a vertex classification setting over small and large multi-relational graphs.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become a dominant paradigm for visual representation learning with self-attention operators. Although these operators provide flexibility to the model with their adjustable attention kernels, they suffer from inherent limitations: (1) the attention kernel is not discriminative enough, resulting in high redundancy of the ViT layers, and (2) the complexity in computation and memory is quadratic in the sequence length. In this paper, we propose a novel attention operator, called lightweight structure-aware attention (LiSA), which has a better representation power with log-linear complexity. Our operator learns structural patterns by using a set of relative position embeddings (RPEs). To achieve log-linear complexity, the RPEs are approximated with fast Fourier transforms. Our experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that ViTs based on the proposed operator outperform self-attention and other existing operators, achieving state-of-the-art results on ImageNet, and competitive results on other visual understanding benchmarks such as COCO and Something-Something-V2. The source code of our approach will be released online.

Counterfactual Explanations are becoming a de-facto standard in post-hoc interpretable machine learning. For a given classifier and an instance classified in an undesired class, its counterfactual explanation corresponds to small perturbations of that instance that allows changing the classification outcome. This work aims to leverage Counterfactual Explanations to detect the important decision boundaries of a pre-trained black-box model. This information is used to build a supervised discretization of the features in the dataset with a tunable granularity. Using the discretized dataset, a smaller, therefore more interpretable Decision Tree can be trained, which, in addition, enhances the stability and robustness of the baseline Decision Tree. Numerical results on real-world datasets show the effectiveness of the approach in terms of accuracy and sparsity compared to the baseline Decision Tree.