A common assumption in causal inference from observational data is that there is no hidden confounding. Yet it is, in general, impossible to verify the presence of hidden confounding factors from a single dataset. Under the assumption of independent causal mechanisms underlying the data generating process, we demonstrate a way to detect unobserved confounders when having multiple observational datasets coming from different environments. We present a theory for testable conditional independencies that are only absent during hidden confounding and examine cases where we violate its assumptions: degenerate & dependent mechanisms, and faithfulness violations. Additionally, we propose a procedure to test these independencies and study its empirical finite-sample behavior using simulation studies and semi-synthetic data based on a real-world dataset. In most cases, our theory correctly predicts the presence of hidden confounding, particularly when the confounding bias is~large.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

目的：机器学习技术已广泛用于12铅心电图（ECG）分析。对于生理时间序列，基于领域知识的深度学习（DL）优势（FE）方法仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。此外，尚不清楚将DL与FE结合起来是否可以提高性能。方法：我们考虑了要解决这些研究差距的三个任务：心律不齐的诊断（多类 - 甲状腺素分类），房颤风险预测（二进制分类）和年龄估计（回归）。我们使用2.3m 12铅ECG录音的总体数据集来培训每个任务的以下模型：i）随机森林将FE作为输入作为经典的机器学习方法培训； ii）端到端DL模型； iii）Fe+DL的合并模型。结果：FE得出的结果与DL产生了可比的结果，同时需要较少的两个分类任务数据，并且对于回归任务而言，DL的表现优于DL。对于所有任务，将FE与DL合并并不能单独提高DL的性能。结论：我们发现，对于传统的12铅ECG诊断任务，DL并未对FE产生有意义的改进，而它显着改善了非传统回归任务。我们还发现，将FE与DL相结合并不能单独改善DL，这表明FE与DL学到的功能是多余的。意义：我们的发现提供了有关哪种机器学习策略和数据制度的重要建议，可以选择基于12 Lead ECG开发新机器学习模型的任务。

本文着重于根据数据包输送比率（PDR）（即，在远程广阔的区域（Lorawan）中通过End Devices（EDS）发送）的数据包数量来改善资源分配算法。设置传输参数会显着影响PDR。我们采用强化学习（RL）提出了一种资源分配算法，该算法使ED可以以分布式方式配置其传输参数。我们将资源分配问题建模为多臂强盗（MAB），然后通过提出一种名为Mix-MAB的两相算法来解决它，该算法由探索和开发（EXP3）和连续消除（SE）组成，该算法由指数重量组成（SE）算法。我们通过仿真结果评估混合MAB性能，并将其与其他现有方法进行比较。数值结果表明，就收敛时间和PDR而言，所提出的解决方案的性能优于现有方案。

Making histopathology image classifiers robust to a wide range of real-world variability is a challenging task. Here, we describe a candidate deep learning solution for the Mitosis Domain Generalization Challenge 2022 (MIDOG) to address the problem of generalization for mitosis detection in images of hematoxylin-eosin-stained histology slides under high variability (scanner, tissue type and species variability). Our approach consists in training a rotation-invariant deep learning model using aggressive data augmentation with a training set enriched with hard negative examples and automatically selected negative examples from the unlabeled part of the challenge dataset. To optimize the performance of our models, we investigated a hard negative mining regime search procedure that lead us to train our best model using a subset of image patches representing 19.6% of our training partition of the challenge dataset. Our candidate model ensemble achieved a F1-score of .697 on the final test set after automated evaluation on the challenge platform, achieving the third best overall score in the MIDOG 2022 Challenge.

Reading comprehension of legal text can be a particularly challenging task due to the length and complexity of legal clauses and a shortage of expert-annotated datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce the Merger Agreement Understanding Dataset (MAUD), an expert-annotated reading comprehension dataset based on the American Bar Association's 2021 Public Target Deal Points Study, with over 39,000 examples and over 47,000 total annotations. Our fine-tuned Transformer baselines show promising results, with models performing well above random on most questions. However, on a large subset of questions, there is still room for significant improvement. As the only expert-annotated merger agreement dataset, MAUD is valuable as a benchmark for both the legal profession and the NLP community.

Missing values are a common problem in data science and machine learning. Removing instances with missing values can adversely affect the quality of further data analysis. This is exacerbated when there are relatively many more features than instances, and thus the proportion of affected instances is high. Such a scenario is common in many important domains, for example, single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) datasets provide a large number of features over a genome for a relatively small number of individuals. To preserve as much information as possible prior to modeling, a rigorous imputation scheme is acutely needed. While Denoising Autoencoders is a state-of-the-art method for imputation in high-dimensional data, they still require enough complete cases to be trained on which is often not available in real-world problems. In this paper, we consider missing value imputation as a multi-label classification problem and propose Chains of Autoreplicative Random Forests. Using multi-label Random Forests instead of neural networks works well for low-sampled data as there are fewer parameters to optimize. Experiments on several SNP datasets show that our algorithm effectively imputes missing values based only on information from the dataset and exhibits better performance than standard algorithms that do not require any additional information. In this paper, the algorithm is implemented specifically for SNP data, but it can easily be adapted for other cases of missing value imputation.

The literature on machine learning in the context of data streams is vast and growing. However, many of the defining assumptions regarding data-stream learning tasks are too strong to hold in practice, or are even contradictory such that they cannot be met in the contexts of supervised learning. Algorithms are chosen and designed based on criteria which are often not clearly stated, for problem settings not clearly defined, tested in unrealistic settings, and/or in isolation from related approaches in the wider literature. This puts into question the potential for real-world impact of many approaches conceived in such contexts, and risks propagating a misguided research focus. We propose to tackle these issues by reformulating the fundamental definitions and settings of supervised data-stream learning with regard to contemporary considerations of concept drift and temporal dependence; and we take a fresh look at what constitutes a supervised data-stream learning task, and a reconsideration of algorithms that may be applied to tackle such tasks. Through and in reflection of this formulation and overview, helped by an informal survey of industrial players dealing with real-world data streams, we provide recommendations. Our main emphasis is that learning from data streams does not impose a single-pass or online-learning approach, or any particular learning regime; and any constraints on memory and time are not specific to streaming. Meanwhile, there exist established techniques for dealing with temporal dependence and concept drift, in other areas of the literature. For the data streams community, we thus encourage a shift in research focus, from dealing with often-artificial constraints and assumptions on the learning mode, to issues such as robustness, privacy, and interpretability which are increasingly relevant to learning in data streams in academic and industrial settings.

Real-life tools for decision-making in many critical domains are based on ranking results. With the increasing awareness of algorithmic fairness, recent works have presented measures for fairness in ranking. Many of those definitions consider the representation of different ``protected groups'', in the top-$k$ ranked items, for any reasonable $k$. Given the protected groups, confirming algorithmic fairness is a simple task. However, the groups' definitions may be unknown in advance. In this paper, we study the problem of detecting groups with biased representation in the top-$k$ ranked items, eliminating the need to pre-define protected groups. The number of such groups possible can be exponential, making the problem hard. We propose efficient search algorithms for two different fairness measures: global representation bounds, and proportional representation. Then we propose a method to explain the bias in the representations of groups utilizing the notion of Shapley values. We conclude with an experimental study, showing the scalability of our approach and demonstrating the usefulness of the proposed algorithms.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision loss in the world, and early DR detection is necessary to prevent vision loss and support an appropriate treatment. In this work, we leverage interactive machine learning and introduce a joint learning framework, termed DRG-Net, to effectively learn both disease grading and multi-lesion segmentation. Our DRG-Net consists of two modules: (i) DRG-AI-System to classify DR Grading, localize lesion areas, and provide visual explanations; (ii) DRG-Expert-Interaction to receive feedback from user-expert and improve the DRG-AI-System. To deal with sparse data, we utilize transfer learning mechanisms to extract invariant feature representations by using Wasserstein distance and adversarial learning-based entropy minimization. Besides, we propose a novel attention strategy at both low- and high-level features to automatically select the most significant lesion information and provide explainable properties. In terms of human interaction, we further develop DRG-Net as a tool that enables expert users to correct the system's predictions, which may then be used to update the system as a whole. Moreover, thanks to the attention mechanism and loss functions constraint between lesion features and classification features, our approach can be robust given a certain level of noise in the feedback of users. We have benchmarked DRG-Net on the two largest DR datasets, i.e., IDRID and FGADR, and compared it to various state-of-the-art deep learning networks. In addition to outperforming other SOTA approaches, DRG-Net is effectively updated using user feedback, even in a weakly-supervised manner.