解决扩大流行病学推断对复杂和异质模型的挑战，我们引入了泊松近似可能性（PAL）方法。 PAL是从有限人口，随机隔室模型的近似滤波方程中得出的，并且较大的人口限制驱动了最大PAL估计器的一致性。我们的理论结果似乎是基于大量的部分观察到的关于大量人群限制的部分随机隔室模型的第一个基于可能性的参数估计一致性结果。与基于仿真的方法（例如近似贝叶斯计算和顺序蒙特卡洛）相比，PALS易于实现，仅涉及基本算术操作，而无需调整参数。并快速评估，不需要模型的模拟，并且具有与人口规模无关的计算成本。通过示例，我们演示了PAL的如何：嵌入延迟的接受粒子马尔可夫链蒙特卡洛中以促进贝叶斯的推断；用于拟合流感的年龄结构化模型，利用Stan的自动分化；并应用于校准麻疹的空间元群模型。

给定图形或相似性矩阵，我们考虑了恢复节点之间真实距离的概念以及它们的真实位置的问题。我们证明这可以通过两个步骤完成：矩阵分解，然后进行非线性尺寸降低。这种组合之所以有效，是因为在第一步中获得的点云一直生活在歧管上，其中潜在距离被编码为地球距离。因此，一个非线性降低尺寸的工具，即近似地球距离，可以恢复潜在位置，直至简单的转换。我们详细说明了使用光谱嵌入，其次是ISOMAP的情况，并为其他技术组合提供了令人鼓舞的实验证据。

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.

Scientists and philosophers have debated whether humans can trust advanced artificial intelligence (AI) agents to respect humanity's best interests. Yet what about the reverse? Will advanced AI agents trust humans? Gauging an AI agent's trust in humans is challenging because--absent costs for dishonesty--such agents might respond falsely about their trust in humans. Here we present a method for incentivizing machine decisions without altering an AI agent's underlying algorithms or goal orientation. In two separate experiments, we then employ this method in hundreds of trust games between an AI agent (a Large Language Model (LLM) from OpenAI) and a human experimenter (author TJ). In our first experiment, we find that the AI agent decides to trust humans at higher rates when facing actual incentives than when making hypothetical decisions. Our second experiment replicates and extends these findings by automating game play and by homogenizing question wording. We again observe higher rates of trust when the AI agent faces real incentives. Across both experiments, the AI agent's trust decisions appear unrelated to the magnitude of stakes. Furthermore, to address the possibility that the AI agent's trust decisions reflect a preference for uncertainty, the experiments include two conditions that present the AI agent with a non-social decision task that provides the opportunity to choose a certain or uncertain option; in those conditions, the AI agent consistently chooses the certain option. Our experiments suggest that one of the most advanced AI language models to date alters its social behavior in response to incentives and displays behavior consistent with trust toward a human interlocutor when incentivized.

Despite recent success in large language model (LLM) reasoning, LLMs still struggle with hierarchical multi-step reasoning like generating complex programs. In these cases, humans often start with a high-level algorithmic design and implement each part gradually. We introduce Parsel, a framework enabling automatic implementation and validation of complex algorithms with code LLMs, based on hierarchical function descriptions in natural language. Parsel can be used across domains requiring hierarchical reasoning, e.g. code synthesis, theorem proving, and robotic planning. We demonstrate Parsel's capabilities by using it to generate complex programs that cannot currently be automatically implemented from one description and backtranslating Python programs in the APPS dataset. Beyond modeling capabilities, Parsel allows problem-solving with high-level algorithmic designs, benefiting both students and professional programmers.

Reinforcement learning can enable robots to navigate to distant goals while optimizing user-specified reward functions, including preferences for following lanes, staying on paved paths, or avoiding freshly mowed grass. However, online learning from trial-and-error for real-world robots is logistically challenging, and methods that instead can utilize existing datasets of robotic navigation data could be significantly more scalable and enable broader generalization. In this paper, we present ReViND, the first offline RL system for robotic navigation that can leverage previously collected data to optimize user-specified reward functions in the real-world. We evaluate our system for off-road navigation without any additional data collection or fine-tuning, and show that it can navigate to distant goals using only offline training from this dataset, and exhibit behaviors that qualitatively differ based on the user-specified reward function.

While skin cancer classification has been a popular and valuable deep learning application for years, there has been little consideration of the context in which testing images are taken. Traditional melanoma classifiers rely on the assumption that their testing environments are analogous to the structured images on which they are trained. This paper combats this notion, arguing that mole size, a vital attribute in professional dermatology, is a red herring in automated melanoma detection. Although malignant melanomas are consistently larger than benign melanomas, this distinction proves unreliable and harmful when images cannot be contextually scaled. This implementation builds a custom model that eliminates size as a training feature to prevent overfitting to incorrect parameters. Additionally, random rotation and contrast augmentations are performed to simulate the real-world use of melanoma detection applications. Several custom models with varying forms of data augmentation are implemented to demonstrate the most significant features of the generalization abilities of mole classifiers. These implementations show that user unpredictability is crucial when utilizing such applications. The caution required when manually modifying data is acknowledged, as data loss and biased conclusions are necessary considerations in this process. Additionally, mole size inconsistency and its significance are discussed in both the dermatology and deep learning communities.

Photo-identification (photo-id) is one of the main non-invasive capture-recapture methods utilised by marine researchers for monitoring cetacean (dolphin, whale, and porpoise) populations. This method has historically been performed manually resulting in high workload and cost due to the vast number of images collected. Recently automated aids have been developed to help speed-up photo-id, although they are often disjoint in their processing and do not utilise all available identifying information. Work presented in this paper aims to create a fully automatic photo-id aid capable of providing most likely matches based on all available information without the need for data pre-processing such as cropping. This is achieved through a pipeline of computer vision models and post-processing techniques aimed at detecting cetaceans in unedited field imagery before passing them downstream for individual level catalogue matching. The system is capable of handling previously uncatalogued individuals and flagging these for investigation thanks to catalogue similarity comparison. We evaluate the system against multiple real-life photo-id catalogues, achieving mAP@IOU[0.5] = 0.91, 0.96 for the task of dorsal fin detection on catalogues from Tanzania and the UK respectively and 83.1, 97.5% top-10 accuracy for the task of individual classification on catalogues from the UK and USA.

Automated Machine Learning-based systems' integration into a wide range of tasks has expanded as a result of their performance and speed. Although there are numerous advantages to employing ML-based systems, if they are not interpretable, they should not be used in critical, high-risk applications where human lives are at risk. To address this issue, researchers and businesses have been focusing on finding ways to improve the interpretability of complex ML systems, and several such methods have been developed. Indeed, there are so many developed techniques that it is difficult for practitioners to choose the best among them for their applications, even when using evaluation metrics. As a result, the demand for a selection tool, a meta-explanation technique based on a high-quality evaluation metric, is apparent. In this paper, we present a local meta-explanation technique which builds on top of the truthfulness metric, which is a faithfulness-based metric. We demonstrate the effectiveness of both the technique and the metric by concretely defining all the concepts and through experimentation.

Recent years have witnessed a growth in mathematics for deep learning--which seeks a deeper understanding of the concepts of deep learning with mathematics, and explores how to make it more robust--and deep learning for mathematics, where deep learning algorithms are used to solve problems in mathematics. The latter has popularised the field of scientific machine learning where deep learning is applied to problems in scientific computing. Specifically, more and more neural network architectures have been developed to solve specific classes of partial differential equations (PDEs). Such methods exploit properties that are inherent to PDEs and thus solve the PDEs better than classical feed-forward neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and convolutional neural networks. This has had a great impact in the area of mathematical modeling where parametric PDEs are widely used to model most natural and physical processes arising in science and engineering, In this work, we review such methods and extend them for parametric studies as well as for solving the related inverse problems. We equally proceed to show their relevance in some industrial applications.