在这项比赛中，参与者将使用时间序列数据在教育背景下解决机器学习的两个基本因果挑战。首先是确定不同构造之间的因果关系，其中构造被定义为学习的最小要素。第二个挑战是预测学习一个结构对回答其他结构问题的能力的影响。应对这些挑战将使学生的知识获取优化，这可以部署在影响数百万学生的真正的edtech解决方案中。参与者将在理想化的环境中运行这些任务，并具有合成数据和现实情况，并通过一系列A/B测试收集的评估数据。

对使用因果机器学习模型做出的决策的现实测试是成功应用的基本先决条件。我们专注于评估和改善上下文治疗作业决策：这些是适用于例如客户，每个都有自己的上下文信息，以最大程度地获得奖励。在本文中，我们介绍了一个模型不足的框架，用于收集数据，以通过贝叶斯实验设计评估和改善上下文决策。具体而言，我们的方法用于对过去治疗作业的遗憾的数据有效评估。与A/B测试之类的方法不同，我们的方法避免了分配已知是高度优势的治疗方法，同时进行一些探索以收集相关信息。我们通过引入一个基于信息的设计目标来实现这一目标，我们优化了端到端。我们的方法适用于离散和连续治疗。在几项仿真研究中，将我们的信息理论方法与基准者进行比较，这表明了我们提出的方法的出色表现。

强化学习（RL）涉及在未知系统中执行探索性动作。这可以将学习代理放在危险且潜在的灾难性系统中。当前在RL中解决安全学习的方法同时权衡了安全探索和任务实现。在本文中，我们介绍了新一代的RL求解器，这些求解器学会最大程度地减少安全性违规行为，同时在安全政策可以容忍的范围内最大化任务奖励。我们的方法引入了一个新型的两人框架，用于安全RL，称为分配探索安全培训算法（DESTA）。 DESTA的核心是两种自适应代理之间的游戏：安全代理，其任务是最大程度地减少安全违规行为和任务代理，其目标是最大程度地提高环境奖励。具体而言，安全代理可以在任何给定点有选择地控制系统，以防止任务代理在任何其他州自由执行其策略时违反安全性。该框架使安全代理能够学会在培训和测试时间中最大程度地减少未来安全违规行为的某些行动，而任务代理人执行的动作可以最大程度地提高其他任何地方的任务绩效。从理论上讲，我们证明DESTA会汇合到稳定的点，从而最大程度地违反了对预验证的政策的行为。从经验上讲，我们表明了DESTA提高现有政策安全性的能力，其次，当对任务代理和安全代理人同时培训时，构建安全的RL政策。我们展示了DESTA在Lunar Lander和Openai Gym的Frozen Lake中的领先RL方法的出色表现。

Dense prediction tasks such as segmentation and detection of pathological entities hold crucial clinical value in the digital pathology workflow. However, obtaining dense annotations on large cohorts is usually tedious and expensive. Contrastive learning (CL) is thus often employed to leverage large volumes of unlabeled data to pre-train the backbone network. To boost CL for dense prediction, some studies have proposed variations of dense matching objectives in pre-training. However, our analysis shows that employing existing dense matching strategies on histopathology images enforces invariance among incorrect pairs of dense features and, thus, is imprecise. To address this, we propose a precise location-based matching mechanism that utilizes the overlapping information between geometric transformations to precisely match regions in two augmentations. Extensive experiments on two pretraining datasets (TCGA-BRCA, NCT-CRC-HE) and three downstream datasets (GlaS, CRAG, BCSS) highlight the superiority of our method in semantic and instance segmentation tasks. Our method outperforms previous dense matching methods by up to 7.2 % in average precision for detection and 5.6 % in average precision for instance segmentation tasks. Additionally, by using our matching mechanism in the three popular contrastive learning frameworks, MoCo-v2, VICRegL and ConCL, the average precision in detection is improved by 0.7 % to 5.2 % and the average precision in segmentation is improved by 0.7 % to 4.0 %, demonstrating its generalizability.

The proliferation of automatic faithfulness metrics for summarization has produced a need for benchmarks to evaluate them. While existing benchmarks measure the correlation with human judgements of faithfulness on model-generated summaries, they are insufficient for diagnosing whether metrics are: 1) consistent, i.e., decrease as errors are introduced into a summary, 2) effective on human-written texts, and 3) sensitive to different error types (as summaries can contain multiple errors). To address these needs, we present a benchmark of unfaithful minimal pairs (BUMP), a dataset of 889 human-written, minimally different summary pairs, where a single error (from an ontology of 7 types) is introduced to a summary from the CNN/DailyMail dataset to produce an unfaithful summary. We find BUMP complements existing benchmarks in a number of ways: 1) the summaries in BUMP are harder to discriminate and less probable under SOTA summarization models, 2) BUMP enables measuring the consistency of metrics, and reveals that the most discriminative metrics tend not to be the most consistent, 3) BUMP enables the measurement of metrics' performance on individual error types and highlights areas of weakness for future work.

Recent advances in safety-critical risk-aware control are predicated on apriori knowledge of the disturbances a system might face. This paper proposes a method to efficiently learn these disturbances online, in a risk-aware context. First, we introduce the concept of a Surface-at-Risk, a risk measure for stochastic processes that extends Value-at-Risk -- a commonly utilized risk measure in the risk-aware controls community. Second, we model the norm of the state discrepancy between the model and the true system evolution as a scalar-valued stochastic process and determine an upper bound to its Surface-at-Risk via Gaussian Process Regression. Third, we provide theoretical results on the accuracy of our fitted surface subject to mild assumptions that are verifiable with respect to the data sets collected during system operation. Finally, we experimentally verify our procedure by augmenting a drone's controller and highlight performance increases achieved via our risk-aware approach after collecting less than a minute of operating data.

Importance: Social determinants of health (SDOH) are known to be associated with increased risk of suicidal behaviors, but few studies utilized SDOH from unstructured electronic health record (EHR) notes. Objective: To investigate associations between suicide and recent SDOH, identified using structured and unstructured data. Design: Nested case-control study. Setting: EHR data from the US Veterans Health Administration (VHA). Participants: 6,122,785 Veterans who received care in the US VHA between October 1, 2010, and September 30, 2015. Exposures: Occurrence of SDOH over a maximum span of two years compared with no occurrence of SDOH. Main Outcomes and Measures: Cases of suicide deaths were matched with 4 controls on birth year, cohort entry date, sex, and duration of follow-up. We developed an NLP system to extract SDOH from unstructured notes. Structured data, NLP on unstructured data, and combining them yielded seven, eight and nine SDOH respectively. Adjusted odds ratios (aORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated using conditional logistic regression. Results: In our cohort, 8,821 Veterans committed suicide during 23,725,382 person-years of follow-up (incidence rate 37.18 /100,000 person-years). Our cohort was mostly male (92.23%) and white (76.99%). Across the six common SDOH as covariates, NLP-extracted SDOH, on average, covered 84.38% of all SDOH occurrences. All SDOH, measured by structured data and NLP, were significantly associated with increased risk of suicide. The SDOH with the largest effects was legal problems (aOR=2.67, 95% CI=2.46-2.89), followed by violence (aOR=2.26, 95% CI=2.11-2.43). NLP-extracted and structured SDOH were also associated with suicide. Conclusions and Relevance: NLP-extracted SDOH were always significantly associated with increased risk of suicide among Veterans, suggesting the potential of NLP in public health studies.

Fires have destructive power when they break out and affect their surroundings on a devastatingly large scale. The best way to minimize their damage is to detect the fire as quickly as possible before it has a chance to grow. Accordingly, this work looks into the potential of AI to detect and recognize fires and reduce detection time using object detection on an image stream. Object detection has made giant leaps in speed and accuracy over the last six years, making real-time detection feasible. To our end, we collected and labeled appropriate data from several public sources, which have been used to train and evaluate several models based on the popular YOLOv4 object detector. Our focus, driven by a collaborating industrial partner, is to implement our system in an industrial warehouse setting, which is characterized by high ceilings. A drawback of traditional smoke detectors in this setup is that the smoke has to rise to a sufficient height. The AI models brought forward in this research managed to outperform these detectors by a significant amount of time, providing precious anticipation that could help to minimize the effects of fires further.

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to transfer knowledge learned from a source domain to an unlabeled target domain, where the source data is unavailable during adaptation. Existing approaches for SFDA focus on self-training usually including well-established entropy minimization techniques. One of the main challenges in SFDA is to reduce accumulation of errors caused by domain misalignment. A recent strategy successfully managed to reduce error accumulation by pseudo-labeling the target samples based on class-wise prototypes (centroids) generated by their clustering in the representation space. However, this strategy also creates cases for which the cross-entropy of a pseudo-label and the minimum entropy have a conflict in their objectives. We call this conflict the centroid-hypothesis conflict. We propose to reconcile this conflict by aligning the entropy minimization objective with that of the pseudo labels' cross entropy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of aligning the two loss objectives on three domain adaptation datasets. In addition, we provide state-of-the-art results using up-to-date architectures also showing the consistency of our method across these architectures.

We present a method for controlling a swarm using its spectral decomposition -- that is, by describing the set of trajectories of a swarm in terms of a spatial distribution throughout the operational domain -- guaranteeing scale invariance with respect to the number of agents both for computation and for the operator tasked with controlling the swarm. We use ergodic control, decentralized across the network, for implementation. In the DARPA OFFSET program field setting, we test this interface design for the operator using the STOMP interface -- the same interface used by Raytheon BBN throughout the duration of the OFFSET program. In these tests, we demonstrate that our approach is scale-invariant -- the user specification does not depend on the number of agents; it is persistent -- the specification remains active until the user specifies a new command; and it is real-time -- the user can interact with and interrupt the swarm at any time. Moreover, we show that the spectral/ergodic specification of swarm behavior degrades gracefully as the number of agents goes down, enabling the operator to maintain the same approach as agents become disabled or are added to the network. We demonstrate the scale-invariance and dynamic response of our system in a field relevant simulator on a variety of tactical scenarios with up to 50 agents. We also demonstrate the dynamic response of our system in the field with a smaller team of agents. Lastly, we make the code for our system available.