Distributional Robustness and Inequity Mitigation in Disaster Preparedness of Humanitarian Operations
Hongming Li
Ning Zhu
Michael Pinedo
Shoufeng Ma
Problem definition: In this paper, we study a predisaster relief network design problem with uncertain demands. The aim is to determine the … (voir plus)prepositioning and reallocation of relief supplies. Motivated by the call of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) to leave no one behind, we consider three important practical aspects of humanitarian operations: shortages, equity, and uncertainty. Methodology/results: We first employ a form of robust satisficing measure, which we call the shortage severity measure, to evaluate the severity of the shortage caused by uncertain demand in a context with limited distribution information. Because shortages often raise concerns about equity, we then formulate a mixed-integer lexicographic optimization problem with nonconvex objectives and design a new branch-and-bound algorithm to identify the exact solution. We also propose two approaches for identifying optimal postdisaster adaptable resource reallocation: an exact approach and a conservative approximation that is more computationally efficient. Our case study considers the 2010 Yushu earthquake, which occurred in northwestern China, and demonstrates the value of our methodology in mitigating geographical inequities and reducing shortages. Managerial implications: In our case study, we show that (i) incorporating equity in both predisaster deployment and postdisaster reallocation can produce substantially more equitable shortage prevention strategies while sacrificing only a reasonable amount of total shortage; (ii) increasing donations/budgets may not necessarily alleviate the shortage suffered by the most vulnerable individuals if equity is not fully considered; and (iii) exploiting disaster magnitude information when quantifying uncertainty can help alleviate geographical inequities caused by uncertain relief demands. Funding: This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [Grant RGPIN-2016-05208], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 71971154, 72010107004, 72091214, and 72122015], and the Canada Research Chairs [Grant CRC-2018-00105]. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2023.1230 .
Dosimetry of [18F]TRACK, the first PET tracer for imaging of TrkB/C receptors in humans
Alexander Thiel
Alexey Kostikov
Hailey Ahn
Youstina Daoud
Jean-Paul Soucy
Stephan Blinder
Carolin Jaworski
Carmen Wängler
Björn Wängler
Freimut Juengling
Ralf Schirrmacher
Ghost on the Shell: An Expressive Representation of General 3D Shapes
Zhen Liu
Yao Feng
Yuliang Xiu
Weiyang Liu
Michael J. Black
Bernhard Schölkopf
Hazards from Increasingly Accessible Fine-Tuning of Downloadable Foundation Models
Alan Chan
Benjamin Bucknall
Herbie Bradley
Hazards from Increasingly Accessible Fine-Tuning of Downloadable Foundation Models
Alan Chan
Benjamin Bucknall
Herbie Bradley
Towards contrast-agnostic soft segmentation of the spinal cord
Sandrine Bédard
Enamundram Naga Karthik
Charidimos Tsagkas
Emanuele Pravatà
Cristina Granziera
Andrew C. Smith
Kenneth Arnold Weber
Spinal cord segmentation is clinically relevant and is notably used to compute spinal cord cross-sectional area (CSA) for the diagnosis and … (voir plus)monitoring of cord compression or neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis. While several semi and automatic methods exist, one key limitation remains: the segmentation depends on the MRI contrast, resulting in different CSA across contrasts. This is partly due to the varying appearance of the boundary between the spinal cord and the cerebrospinal fluid that depends on the sequence and acquisition parameters. This contrast-sensitive CSA adds variability in multi-center studies where protocols can vary, reducing the sensitivity to detect subtle atrophies. Moreover, existing methods enhance the CSA variability by training one model per contrast, while also producing binary masks that do not account for partial volume effects. In this work, we present a deep learning-based method that produces soft segmentations of the spinal cord. Using the Spine Generic Public Database of healthy participants (
Unsupervised Improvement of Audio-Text Cross-Modal Representations
Zhepei Wang
Krishna Subramani
Junkai Wu
Tiago Tavares
Fabio Ayres
Paris Smaragdis
Recent advances in using language models to obtain cross-modal audio-text representations have overcome the limitations of conventional trai… (voir plus)ning approaches that use predefined labels. This has allowed the community to make progress in tasks like zero-shot classification, which would otherwise not be possible. However, learning such representations requires a large amount of human-annotated audio-text pairs. In this paper, we study unsupervised approaches to improve the learning framework of such representations with unpaired text and audio. We explore domain-unspecific and domain-specific curation methods to create audio-text pairs that we use to further improve the model. We also show that when domain-specific curation is used in conjunction with a soft-labeled contrastive loss, we are able to obtain significant improvement in terms of zero-shot classification performance on downstream sound event classification or acoustic scene classification tasks.
A Novel Information-Theoretic Objective to Disentangle Representations for Fair Classification
Pierre Colombo
Nathan Noiry
Guillaume Staerman
Fundamental Limits of Membership Inference Attacks on Machine Learning Models
Eric Aubinais
Elisabeth Gassiat
Membership inference attacks (MIA) can reveal whether a particular data point was part of the training dataset, potentially exposing sensiti… (voir plus)ve information about individuals. This article provides theoretical guarantees by exploring the fundamental statistical limitations associated with MIAs on machine learning models. More precisely, we first derive the statistical quantity that governs the effectiveness and success of such attacks. We then deduce that in a very general regression setting with overfitting algorithms, attacks may have a high probability of success. Finally, we investigate several situations for which we provide bounds on this quantity of interest. Our results enable us to deduce the accuracy of potential attacks based on the number of samples and other structural parameters of learning models. In certain instances, these parameters can be directly estimated from the dataset.
Surprise-Adaptive Intrinsic Motivation for Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning
Adriana Hugessen
Roger Creus Castanyer
Detection and evaluation of bias-inducing features in machine learning
Moses Openja
gabriel laberge
Graph embedding and transfer learning can help predict potential species interaction networks despite data limitations
Tanya Strydom
Salomé Bouskila
Francis Banville
Ceres Barros
Dominique Caron
Maxwell J. Farrell
Marie‐Josée Fortin
Benjamin Mercier
Rogini Runghen
Giulio V. Dalla Riva
Timothée Poisot
Metawebs (networks of potential interactions within a species pool) are a powerful abstraction to understand how large‐scale species inter… (voir plus)action networks are structured. Because metawebs are typically expressed at large spatial and taxonomic scales, assembling them is a tedious and costly process; predictive methods can help circumvent the limitations in data deficiencies, by providing a first approximation of metawebs. One way to improve our ability to predict metawebs is to maximize available information by using graph embeddings, as opposed to an exhaustive list of species interactions. Graph embedding is an emerging field in machine learning that holds great potential for ecological problems. Here, we outline how the challenges associated with inferring metawebs line‐up with the advantages of graph embeddings; followed by a discussion as to how the choice of the species pool has consequences on the reconstructed network, specifically as to the role of human‐made (or arbitrarily assigned) boundaries and how these may influence ecological hypotheses.