Publications

Neural Semantic Surface Maps
Luca Morreale
Vladimir Kim
Niloy J. Mitra
Normalization and effective learning rates in reinforcement learning
Clare Lyle
Zeyu Zheng
James Martens
Hado van Hasselt
Will Dabney
Do not trust what you trust: Miscalibration in Semi-supervised Learning
Shambhavi Mishra
Balamurali Murugesan
Ismail Ben Ayed
Jose Dolz
State-of-the-art semi-supervised learning (SSL) approaches rely on highly confident predictions to serve as pseudo-labels that guide the tra… (see more)ining on unlabeled samples. An inherent drawback of this strategy stems from the quality of the uncertainty estimates, as pseudo-labels are filtered only based on their degree of uncertainty, regardless of the correctness of their predictions. Thus, assessing and enhancing the uncertainty of network predictions is of paramount importance in the pseudo-labeling process. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that SSL methods based on pseudo-labels are significantly miscalibrated, and formally demonstrate the minimization of the min-entropy, a lower bound of the Shannon entropy, as a potential cause for miscalibration. To alleviate this issue, we integrate a simple penalty term, which enforces the logit distances of the predictions on unlabeled samples to remain low, preventing the network predictions to become overconfident. Comprehensive experiments on a variety of SSL image classification benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed solution systematically improves the calibration performance of relevant SSL models, while also enhancing their discriminative power, being an appealing addition to tackle SSL tasks.
NOx emissions prediction for MSWI process based on dynamic modular neural network
Haoshan Duan
Xi Meng
JunFei Qiao
Offline Multitask Representation Learning for Reinforcement Learning
Raman Arora
Songtao Feng
Thanh Nguyen-Tang
Mengdi Wang
Ming Yin
We study offline multitask representation learning in reinforcement learning (RL), where a learner is provided with an offline dataset from … (see more)different tasks that share a common representation and is asked to learn the shared representation. We theoretically investigate offline multitask low-rank RL, and propose a new algorithm called MORL for offline multitask representation learning. Furthermore, we examine downstream RL in reward-free, offline and online scenarios, where a new task is introduced to the agent that shares the same representation as the upstream offline tasks. Our theoretical results demonstrate the benefits of using the learned representation from the upstream offline task instead of directly learning the representation of the low-rank model.
Online Measurement of Dioxin Emission in Solid Waste Incineration Using Fuzzy Broad Learning
Heng Xia
Wen Yu
JunFei Qiao
Dioxin (DXN) is a persistent organic pollutant produced from municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI) processes. It is a crucial environmen… (see more)tal indicator to minimize emission concentration by using optimization control, but it is difficult to monitor in real time. Aiming at online soft-sensing of DXN emission, a novel fuzzy tree broad learning system (FTBLS) is proposed, which includes offline training and online measurement. In the offline training part, weighted k-means is presented to construct a typical sample pool for reduced learning costs of offline and online phases. Moreover, the novel FTBLS, which contains a feature mapping layer, enhance layer, and increment layer, by replacing the fuzzy decision tree with neurons applied to construct the offline model. In the online measurement part, recursive principal component analysis is used to monitor the time-varying characteristic of the MSWI process. To measure DXN emission, offline FTBLS is reused for normal samples; for drift samples, fast incremental learning is used for online updates. A DXN data from the actual MSWI process is employed to prove the usefulness of FTBLS, where the RMSE of training and testing data are 0.0099 and 0.0216, respectively. This result shows that FTBLS can effectively realize DXN online prediction.
Open-Set Multivariate Time-Series Anomaly Detection
Thi Kieu Khanh Ho
Open-Source Conversational AI with SpeechBrain 1.0
Adel Moumen
Sylvain de Langen
Yingzhi Wang
Zeyu Zhao
Shucong Zhang
Georgios Karakasidis
Pierre Champion
Aku Rouhe
Rudolf Braun … (see 11 more)
Florian Mai
Juan Zuluaga-Gomez
Seyed Mahed Mousavi
Andreas Nautsch
Xuechen Liu
Sangeet Sagar
Jarod Duret
Salima Mdhaffar
Gaëlle Laperrière
Yannick Estève
SpeechBrain is an open-source Conversational AI toolkit based on PyTorch, focused particularly on speech processing tasks such as speech rec… (see more)ognition, speech enhancement, speaker recognition, text-to-speech, and much more. It promotes transparency and replicability by releasing both the pre-trained models and the complete "recipes" of code and algorithms required for training them. This paper presents SpeechBrain 1.0, a significant milestone in the evolution of the toolkit, which now has over 200 recipes for speech, audio, and language processing tasks, and more than 100 models available on Hugging Face. SpeechBrain 1.0 introduces new technologies to support diverse learning modalities, Large Language Model (LLM) integration, and advanced decoding strategies, along with novel models, tasks, and modalities. It also includes a new benchmark repository, offering researchers a unified platform for evaluating models across diverse tasks.
Operational Research: Methods and Applications
Fotios Petropoulos
Gilbert Laporte
Emel Aktas
Sibel A. Alumur
Claudia Archetti
Hayriye Ayhan
Maria Battarra
Julia A. Bennell
Jean-Marie Bourjolly
John E. Boylan
Michele Breton
David Canca
Bo Chen
Cihan Tugrul Cicek
Louis Anthony Cox, Jr
Christine S.M. Currie
Erik Demeulemeester
Li Ding
Stephen M. Disney … (see 62 more)
Matthias Ehrgott
Martin J. Eppler
Gunes Erdogan
Bernard Fortz
L. Alberto Franco
Jens Frische
Salvatore Greco
Amanda J. Gregory
Raimo P. Hamalainen
Willy Herroelen
Mike Hewitt
Jan Holmstrom
John N. Hooker
Tugce Isik
Jill Johnes
Bahar Y. Kara
Ozlem Karsu
Katherine Kent
Charlotte Kohler
Martin Kunc
Yong-Hong Kuo
Judit Lienert
Adam N. Letchford
Janny Leung
Dong Li
Haitao Li
Ivana Ljubic
Andrea Lodi
Sebastian Lozano
Virginie Lurkin
Silvano Martello
Ian G. McHale
Gerald Midgley
John D.W. Morecroft
Akshay Mutha
Ceyda Oguz
Sanja Petrovic
Ulrich Pferschy
Harilaos N. Psaraftis
Sam Rose
Lauri Saarinen
Said Salhi
Jing-Sheng Song
Dimitrios Sotiros
Kathryn E. Stecke
Arne K. Strauss
Istenc Tarhan
Clemens Thielen
Paolo Toth
Greet Vanden Berghe
Christos Vasilakis
Vikrant Vaze
Daniele Vigo
Kai Virtanen
Xun Wang
Rafał Weron
Leroy White
Tom Van Woensel
Mike Yearworth
E. Alper Yıldırım
Georges Zaccour
Xuying Zhao
Throughout its history, Operational Research has evolved to include a variety of methods, models and algorithms that have been applied to a … (see more)diverse and wide range of contexts. This encyclopedic article consists of two main sections: methods and applications. The first aims to summarise the up-to-date knowledge and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art methods and key developments in the various subdomains of the field. The second offers a wide-ranging list of areas where Operational Research has been applied. The article is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion. It should be used as a point of reference or first-port-of-call for a diverse pool of readers: academics, researchers, students, and practitioners. The entries within the methods and applications sections are presented in alphabetical order. The authors dedicate this paper to the 2023 Turkey/Syria earthquake victims. We sincerely hope that advances in OR will play a role towards minimising the pain and suffering caused by this and future catastrophes.
Optimal Approximate Minimization of One-Letter Weighted Finite Automata
In this paper, we study the approximate minimization problem of weighted finite automata (WFAs): to compute the best possible approximation … (see more)of a WFA given a bound on the number of states. By reformulating the problem in terms of Hankel matrices, we leverage classical results on the approximation of Hankel operators, namely the celebrated Adamyan-Arov-Krein (AAK) theory. We solve the optimal spectral-norm approximate minimization problem for irredundant WFAs with real weights, defined over a one-letter alphabet. We present a theoretical analysis based on AAK theory, and bounds on the quality of the approximation in the spectral norm and
Optimal Zero-Shot Detector for Multi-Armed Attacks
Federica Granese
Marco Romanelli
This paper explores a scenario in which a malicious actor employs a multi-armed attack strategy to manipulate data samples, offering them va… (see more)rious avenues to introduce noise into the dataset. Our central objective is to protect the data by detecting any alterations to the input. We approach this defensive strategy with utmost caution, operating in an environment where the defender possesses significantly less information compared to the attacker. Specifically, the defender is unable to utilize any data samples for training a defense model or verifying the integrity of the channel. Instead, the defender relies exclusively on a set of pre-existing detectors readily available"off the shelf". To tackle this challenge, we derive an innovative information-theoretic defense approach that optimally aggregates the decisions made by these detectors, eliminating the need for any training data. We further explore a practical use-case scenario for empirical evaluation, where the attacker possesses a pre-trained classifier and launches well-known adversarial attacks against it. Our experiments highlight the effectiveness of our proposed solution, even in scenarios that deviate from the optimal setup.
Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning of Transformer-Based Language Models Using Dataset Pruning
Sayed Mohammadreza Tayaranian Hosseini
Seyyed Hasan Mozafari
Brett Meyer
The widespread use of transformer-based language models is in part owed to their ease of adaptation to various tasks. Fine-tuning is a metho… (see more)d of adapting pre-trained language models to a downstream task. The resource requirements for fine-tuning, although still less than pre-training, has been increasing due to the significant growth in the number of parameters of language models. Parameter efficient fine-tuning methods limit the set of model parameters that are updated during fine-tuning, leading to reductions in both memory usage and fine-tuning time. Dataset pruning is another method of efficient fine-tuning which removes training data points, thus reducing training time, while maintaining the evaluation performance of the fine-tuned model. In this work, we apply dataset pruning on top of parameter efficient fine-tuning to further reduce the hardware requirements of the fine-tuning. Our approach benefits from lower memory usage of parameter efficient methods while addressing their long fine-tuning time with dataset pruning. On average, our proposed method uses 22% of the fine-tuning dataset while updating only 0.5% of model parameters. As a result, while achieving an evaluation performance similar to full fine-tuning, our method reduces the peak memory usage of the fine-tuning by 40% and its wall clock time by 83%.