不观察到的混淆是估算因果效应时的主要挑战之一。我们提出了一种因果还原方法，给出因果模型，用一个潜在的混淆器取代了一个任意数量的可能的高维潜在混淆，这些混淆是在同一空间中的价值观，而不改变原因的观察和介入分布模特需要。这使我们能够以合并数据的原则方式估计因果效应而不依赖于普遍但往往不切实际的假设，即所有的混乱。我们在三种不同的设置中应用了我们的因果化。在第一个设置中，我们假设治疗和结果是离散的。随后的因果还原暗示可以利用估计目的的观察和介入分布之间的界限。在某些情况下具有高度不平衡的观察样本的情况下，通过掺入观察数据，可以提高因果效应估计的准确性。其次，对于连续变量并假设线性高斯模型，我们导出了对观察和介入分布的参数的平等约束。第三，对于一般连续设置（可能是非线性或非高斯），我们使用标准化流量参数化减少的因果模型，灵活的易于可逆的非线性变换。我们对合成数据进行一系列实验，发现在几个情况下，在不牺牲精度的情况下添加观察训练样本时，可以减少介入样本的数量。

Neural compression offers a domain-agnostic approach to creating codecs for lossy or lossless compression via deep generative models. For sequence compression, however, most deep sequence models have costs that scale with the sequence length rather than the sequence complexity. In this work, we instead treat data sequences as observations from an underlying continuous-time process and learn how to efficiently discretize while retaining information about the full sequence. As a consequence of decoupling sequential information from its temporal discretization, our approach allows for greater compression rates and smaller computational complexity. Moreover, the continuous-time approach naturally allows us to decode at different time intervals. We empirically verify our approach on multiple domains involving compression of video and motion capture sequences, showing that our approaches can automatically achieve reductions in bit rates by learning how to discretize.

The future of population-based breast cancer screening is likely personalized strategies based on clinically relevant risk models. Mammography-based risk models should remain robust to domain shifts caused by different populations and mammographic devices. Modern risk models do not ensure adaptation across vendor-domains and are often conflated to unintentionally rely on both precursors of cancer and systemic/global mammographic information associated with short- and long-term risk, respectively, which might limit performance. We developed a robust, cross-vendor model for long-term risk assessment. An augmentation-based domain adaption technique, based on flavorization of mammographic views, ensured generalization to an unseen vendor-domain. We trained on samples without diagnosed/potential malignant findings to learn systemic/global breast tissue features, called mammographic texture, indicative of future breast cancer. However, training so may cause erratic convergence. By excluding noise-inducing samples and designing a case-control dataset, a robust ensemble texture model was trained. This model was validated in two independent datasets. In 66,607 Danish women with flavorized Siemens views, the AUC was 0.71 and 0.65 for prediction of interval cancers within two years (ICs) and from two years after screening (LTCs), respectively. In a combination with established risk factors, the model's AUC increased to 0.68 for LTCs. In 25,706 Dutch women with Hologic-processed views, the AUCs were not different from the AUCs in Danish women with flavorized views. The results suggested that the model robustly estimated long-term risk while adapting to an unseen processed vendor-domain. The model identified 8.1% of Danish women accounting for 20.9% of ICs and 14.2% of LTCs.

This paper extends quantile factor analysis to a probabilistic variant that incorporates regularization and computationally efficient variational approximations. By means of synthetic and real data experiments it is established that the proposed estimator can achieve, in many cases, better accuracy than a recently proposed loss-based estimator. We contribute to the literature on measuring uncertainty by extracting new indexes of low, medium and high economic policy uncertainty, using the probabilistic quantile factor methodology. Medium and high indexes have clear contractionary effects, while the low index is benign for the economy, showing that not all manifestations of uncertainty are the same.

We introduce organism networks, which function like a single neural network but are composed of several neural particle networks; while each particle network fulfils the role of a single weight application within the organism network, it is also trained to self-replicate its own weights. As organism networks feature vastly more parameters than simpler architectures, we perform our initial experiments on an arithmetic task as well as on simplified MNIST-dataset classification as a collective. We observe that individual particle networks tend to specialise in either of the tasks and that the ones fully specialised in the secondary task may be dropped from the network without hindering the computational accuracy of the primary task. This leads to the discovery of a novel pruning-strategy for sparse neural networks

Overfitting is a problem in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) that causes poor generalization of models on unseen data. To remediate this problem, many new and diverse data augmentation methods (DA) have been proposed to supplement or generate more training data, and thereby increase its quality. In this work, we propose a new data augmentation algorithm: VoronoiPatches (VP). We primarily utilize non-linear recombination of information within an image, fragmenting and occluding small information patches. Unlike other DA methods, VP uses small convex polygon-shaped patches in a random layout to transport information around within an image. Sudden transitions created between patches and the original image can, optionally, be smoothed. In our experiments, VP outperformed current DA methods regarding model variance and overfitting tendencies. We demonstrate data augmentation utilizing non-linear re-combination of information within images, and non-orthogonal shapes and structures improves CNN model robustness on unseen data.

An optimal delivery of arguments is key to persuasion in any debate, both for humans and for AI systems. This requires the use of clear and fluent claims relevant to the given debate. Prior work has studied the automatic assessment of argument quality extensively. Yet, no approach actually improves the quality so far. Our work is the first step towards filling this gap. We propose the task of claim optimization: to rewrite argumentative claims to optimize their delivery. As an initial approach, we first generate a candidate set of optimized claims using a sequence-to-sequence model, such as BART, while taking into account contextual information. Our key idea is then to rerank generated candidates with respect to different quality metrics to find the best optimization. In automatic and human evaluation, we outperform different reranking baselines on an English corpus, improving 60% of all claims (worsening 16% only). Follow-up analyses reveal that, beyond copy editing, our approach often specifies claims with details, whereas it adds less evidence than humans do. Moreover, its capabilities generalize well to other domains, such as instructional texts.

We consider distributed learning in the presence of slow and unresponsive worker nodes, referred to as stragglers. In order to mitigate the effect of stragglers, gradient coding redundantly assigns partial computations to the worker such that the overall result can be recovered from only the non-straggling workers. Gradient codes are designed to tolerate a fixed number of stragglers. Since the number of stragglers in practice is random and unknown a priori, tolerating a fixed number of stragglers can yield a sub-optimal computation load and can result in higher latency. We propose a gradient coding scheme that can tolerate a flexible number of stragglers by carefully concatenating gradient codes for different straggler tolerance. By proper task scheduling and small additional signaling, our scheme adapts the computation load of the workers to the actual number of stragglers. We analyze the latency of our proposed scheme and show that it has a significantly lower latency than gradient codes.

With the rise of AI and automation, moral decisions are being put into the hands of algorithms that were formerly the preserve of humans. In autonomous driving, a variety of such decisions with ethical implications are made by algorithms for behavior and trajectory planning. Therefore, we present an ethical trajectory planning algorithm with a framework that aims at a fair distribution of risk among road users. Our implementation incorporates a combination of five essential ethical principles: minimization of the overall risk, priority for the worst-off, equal treatment of people, responsibility, and maximum acceptable risk. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first ethical algorithm for trajectory planning of autonomous vehicles in line with the 20 recommendations from the EU Commission expert group and with general applicability to various traffic situations. We showcase the ethical behavior of our algorithm in selected scenarios and provide an empirical analysis of the ethical principles in 2000 scenarios. The code used in this research is available as open-source software.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.