反事实可以以人类的可解释方式解释神经网络的分类决策。我们提出了一种简单但有效的方法来产生这种反事实。更具体地说，我们执行合适的差异坐标转换，然后在这些坐标中执行梯度上升，以查找反事实，这些反事实是由置信度良好的指定目标类别分类的。我们提出了两种方法来利用生成模型来构建完全或大约差异的合适坐标系。我们使用Riemannian差异几何形状分析了生成过程，并使用各种定性和定量测量方法验证了生成的反事实质量。

我们分析了旋转模糊性在应​​用于球形图像的卷积神经网络（CNN）中的作用。我们比较了被称为S2CNN的组等效网络的性能和经过越来越多的数据增强量的标准非等级CNN。所选的体系结构可以视为相应设计范式的基线参考。我们的模型对投影到球体的MNIST或FashionMnist数据集进行了训练和评估。对于固有旋转不变的图像分类的任务，我们发现，通过大大增加数据增强量和网络的大小，标准CNN可以至少达到与Equivariant网络相同的性能。相比之下，对于固有的等效性语义分割任务，非等级网络的表现始终超过具有较少参数的模棱两可的网络。我们还分析和比较了不同网络的推理潜伏期和培训时间，从而实现了对等效架构和数据扩展之间的详细权衡考虑，以解决实际问题。实验中使用的均衡球网络可在https://github.com/janegerken/sem_seg_s2cnn上获得。

We consider a sequential decision making task where we are not allowed to evaluate parameters that violate an a priori unknown (safety) constraint. A common approach is to place a Gaussian process prior on the unknown constraint and allow evaluations only in regions that are safe with high probability. Most current methods rely on a discretization of the domain and cannot be directly extended to the continuous case. Moreover, the way in which they exploit regularity assumptions about the constraint introduces an additional critical hyperparameter. In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic safe exploration criterion that directly exploits the GP posterior to identify the most informative safe parameters to evaluate. Our approach is naturally applicable to continuous domains and does not require additional hyperparameters. We theoretically analyze the method and show that we do not violate the safety constraint with high probability and that we explore by learning about the constraint up to arbitrary precision. Empirical evaluations demonstrate improved data-efficiency and scalability.

语言模型既展示了定量的改进，又展示了新的定性功能，随着规模的增加。尽管它们具有潜在的变革性影响，但这些新能力的特征却很差。为了为未来的研究提供信息，为破坏性的新模型能力做准备，并改善社会有害的效果，至关重要的是，我们必须了解目前和近乎未来的能力和语言模型的局限性。为了应对这一挑战，我们介绍了超越模仿游戏基准（Big Bench）。 Big Bench目前由204个任务组成，由132家机构的442位作者贡献。任务主题是多样的，从语言学，儿童发展，数学，常识性推理，生物学，物理学，社会偏见，软件开发等等。 Big-Bench专注于被认为超出当前语言模型的功能的任务。我们评估了OpenAI的GPT型号，Google内部密集变压器体系结构和大型基础上的开关稀疏变压器的行为，跨越了数百万到数十亿个参数。此外，一个人类专家评估者团队执行了所有任务，以提供强大的基准。研究结果包括：模型性能和校准都随规模改善，但绝对的术语（以及与评估者的性能相比）；在模型类中的性能非常相似，尽管带有稀疏性。逐渐和预测的任务通常涉及大量知识或记忆成分，而在临界规模上表现出“突破性”行为的任务通常涉及多个步骤或组成部分或脆性指标；社交偏见通常会随着含糊不清的环境而随着规模而增加，但这可以通过提示来改善。

放射线学使用定量医学成像特征来预测临床结果。目前，在新的临床应用中，必须通过启发式试验和纠正过程手动完成各种可用选项的最佳放射组方法。在这项研究中，我们提出了一个框架，以自动优化每个应用程序的放射线工作流程的构建。为此，我们将放射线学作为模块化工作流程，并为每个组件包含大量的常见算法。为了优化每个应用程序的工作流程，我们使用随机搜索和结合使用自动化机器学习。我们在十二个不同的临床应用中评估我们的方法，从而在曲线下导致以下区域：1）脂肪肉瘤（0.83）； 2）脱粘型纤维瘤病（0.82）; 3）原发性肝肿瘤（0.80）; 4）胃肠道肿瘤（0.77）； 5）结直肠肝转移（0.61）; 6）黑色素瘤转移（0.45）; 7）肝细胞癌（0.75）; 8）肠系膜纤维化（0.80）; 9）前列腺癌（0.72）； 10）神经胶质瘤（0.71）; 11）阿尔茨海默氏病（0.87）;和12）头颈癌（0.84）。我们表明，我们的框架具有比较人类专家的竞争性能，优于放射线基线，并且表现相似或优于贝叶斯优化和更高级的合奏方法。最后，我们的方法完全自动优化了放射线工作流的构建，从而简化了在新应用程序中对放射线生物标志物的搜索。为了促进可重复性和未来的研究，我们公开发布了六个数据集，框架的软件实施以及重现这项研究的代码。

Modeling lies at the core of both the financial and the insurance industry for a wide variety of tasks. The rise and development of machine learning and deep learning models have created many opportunities to improve our modeling toolbox. Breakthroughs in these fields often come with the requirement of large amounts of data. Such large datasets are often not publicly available in finance and insurance, mainly due to privacy and ethics concerns. This lack of data is currently one of the main hurdles in developing better models. One possible option to alleviating this issue is generative modeling. Generative models are capable of simulating fake but realistic-looking data, also referred to as synthetic data, that can be shared more freely. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is such a model that increases our capacity to fit very high-dimensional distributions of data. While research on GANs is an active topic in fields like computer vision, they have found limited adoption within the human sciences, like economics and insurance. Reason for this is that in these fields, most questions are inherently about identification of causal effects, while to this day neural networks, which are at the center of the GAN framework, focus mostly on high-dimensional correlations. In this paper we study the causal preservation capabilities of GANs and whether the produced synthetic data can reliably be used to answer causal questions. This is done by performing causal analyses on the synthetic data, produced by a GAN, with increasingly more lenient assumptions. We consider the cross-sectional case, the time series case and the case with a complete structural model. It is shown that in the simple cross-sectional scenario where correlation equals causation the GAN preserves causality, but that challenges arise for more advanced analyses.

Deep learning models are known to put the privacy of their training data at risk, which poses challenges for their safe and ethical release to the public. Differentially private stochastic gradient descent is the de facto standard for training neural networks without leaking sensitive information about the training data. However, applying it to models for graph-structured data poses a novel challenge: unlike with i.i.d. data, sensitive information about a node in a graph cannot only leak through its gradients, but also through the gradients of all nodes within a larger neighborhood. In practice, this limits privacy-preserving deep learning on graphs to very shallow graph neural networks. We propose to solve this issue by training graph neural networks on disjoint subgraphs of a given training graph. We develop three random-walk-based methods for generating such disjoint subgraphs and perform a careful analysis of the data-generating distributions to provide strong privacy guarantees. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline on three large graphs, and matches or outperforms it on four smaller ones.

Data-driven models such as neural networks are being applied more and more to safety-critical applications, such as the modeling and control of cyber-physical systems. Despite the flexibility of the approach, there are still concerns about the safety of these models in this context, as well as the need for large amounts of potentially expensive data. In particular, when long-term predictions are needed or frequent measurements are not available, the open-loop stability of the model becomes important. However, it is difficult to make such guarantees for complex black-box models such as neural networks, and prior work has shown that model stability is indeed an issue. In this work, we consider an aluminum extraction process where measurements of the internal state of the reactor are time-consuming and expensive. We model the process using neural networks and investigate the role of including skip connections in the network architecture as well as using l1 regularization to induce sparse connection weights. We demonstrate that these measures can greatly improve both the accuracy and the stability of the models for datasets of varying sizes.

Machine learning models are typically evaluated by computing similarity with reference annotations and trained by maximizing similarity with such. Especially in the bio-medical domain, annotations are subjective and suffer from low inter- and intra-rater reliability. Since annotations only reflect the annotation entity's interpretation of the real world, this can lead to sub-optimal predictions even though the model achieves high similarity scores. Here, the theoretical concept of Peak Ground Truth (PGT) is introduced. PGT marks the point beyond which an increase in similarity with the reference annotation stops translating to better Real World Model Performance (RWMP). Additionally, a quantitative technique to approximate PGT by computing inter- and intra-rater reliability is proposed. Finally, three categories of PGT-aware strategies to evaluate and improve model performance are reviewed.

Logic Mill is a scalable and openly accessible software system that identifies semantically similar documents within either one domain-specific corpus or multi-domain corpora. It uses advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to generate numerical representations of documents. Currently it leverages a large pre-trained language model to generate these document representations. The system focuses on scientific publications and patent documents and contains more than 200 million documents. It is easily accessible via a simple Application Programming Interface (API) or via a web interface. Moreover, it is continuously being updated and can be extended to text corpora from other domains. We see this system as a general-purpose tool for future research applications in the social sciences and other domains.