Abstract This paper tackles the limitation of a closed-world object detection model that was trained on one species. The expectation for this model is that it will not generalize well to recognize the instances of new species if they were present in the incoming data stream. We propose a novel object detection framework for this open-world setting that is suitable for applications that monitor wildlife, ocean life, livestock, plant phenotype and crops that typically feature one species in the image. Our method leverages labeled samples from one species in combination with a novelty detection method and Segment Anything Model, a vision foundation model, to (1) identify the presence of new species in unlabeled images, (2) localize their instances, and (3) retrain the initial model with the localized novel class instances. The resulting integrated system assimilates and learns from unlabeled samples of the new classes while not “forgetting” the original species the model was trained on. We demonstrate our findings on two different domains, (1) wildlife detection and (2) plant detection. Our method achieves an AP of 56.2 (for 4 novel species) to 61.6 (for 1 novel species) for wildlife domain, without relying on any ground truth data in the background.

We present Clifford-Steerable Convolutional Neural Networks (CS-CNNs), a novel class of ${\operatorname{E}}(p, q)$-equivariant CNNs. CS-CNNs process multivector fields on pseudo-Euclidean spaces $\mathbb{R}^{p,q}$. They specialize, for instance, to ${\operatorname{E}}(3)$-equivariance on $\mathbb{R}^3$ and Poincaré-equivariance on Minkowski spacetime $\mathbb{R}^{1,3}$. Our approach is based on an implicit parametrization of ${\operatorname{O}}(p,q)$-steerable kernels via Clifford group equivariant neural networks. We significantly and consistently outperform baseline methods on fluid dynamics as well as relativistic electrodynamics forecasting tasks.

In this work, we explain the setup for a technical, graduate-level course on Fairness, Accountability, Confidentiality, and Transparency in Artificial Intelligence (FACT-AI) at the University of Amsterdam, which teaches FACT-AI concepts through the lens of reproducibility. The focal point of the course is a group project based on reproducing existing FACT-AI algorithms from top AI conferences and writing a corresponding report. In the first iteration of the course, we created an open source repository with the code implementations from the group projects. In the second iteration, we encouraged students to submit their group projects to the Machine Learning Reproducibility Challenge, resulting in 9 reports from our course being accepted for publication in the ReScience journal. We reflect on our experience teaching the course over two years, where one year coincided with a global pandemic, and propose guidelines for teaching FACT-AI through reproducibility in graduate-level AI study programs. We hope this can be a useful resource for instructors who want to set up similar courses in the future.

Model interpretability has become an important problem in machine learning (ML) due to the increased effect algorithmic decisions have on humans. Counterfactual explanations can help users understand not only why ML models make certain decisions, but also how these decisions can be changed. We frame the problem of finding counterfactual explanations as an optimization task and extend previous work that could only be applied to differentiable models. In order to accommodate non-differentiable models such as tree ensembles, we use probabilistic model approximations in the optimization framework. We introduce an approximation technique that is effective for finding counterfactual explanations for predictions of the original model and show that our counterfactual examples are significantly closer to the original instances than those produced by other methods specifically designed for tree ensembles.

Given the increasing promise of graph neural networks (GNNs) in real-world applications, several methods have been developed for explaining their predictions. Existing methods for interpreting predictions from GNNs have primarily focused on generating subgraphs that are especially relevant for a particular prediction. However, such methods are not counterfactual (CF) in nature: given a prediction, we want to understand how the prediction can be changed in order to achieve an alternative outcome. In this work, we propose a method for generating CF explanations for GNNs: the minimal perturbation to the input (graph) data such that the prediction changes. Using only edge deletions, we find that our method, CF-GNNExplainer, can generate CF explanations for the majority of instances across three widely used datasets for GNN explanations, while removing less than 3 edges on average, with at least $94%$ accuracy. This indicates that CF-GNNExplainer primarily removes edges that are crucial for the original predictions, resulting in minimal CF explanations.

While recent progress in the field of machine learning (ML) and information retrieval (IR) has been significant, the reproducibility of these cutting-edge results is often lacking, with many submissions failing to provide the necessary information in order to ensure subsequent reproducibility. Despite the introduction of self-check mechanisms before submission (such as the Reproducibility Checklist, criteria for evaluating reproducibility during reviewing at several major conferences, artifact review and badging framework, and dedicated reproducibility tracks and challenges at major IR conferences, the motivation for executing reproducible research is lacking in the broader information community. We propose this tutorial as a gentle introduction to help ensure reproducible research in IR, with a specific emphasis on ML aspects of IR research.