Right for the Right Reason: Training Agnostic Networks

We consider the problem of a neural network being requested to classify images (or other inputs) without making implicit use of a "protected concept", that is a concept that should not play any role in the decision of the network. Typically these concepts include information such as gender or race, or other contextual information such as image backgrounds that might be implicitly reflected in unknown correlations with other variables, making it insufficient to simply remove them from the input features. In other words, making accurate predictions is not good enough if those predictions rely on information that should not be used: predictive performance is not the only important metric for learning systems. We apply a method developed in the context of domain adaptation to address this problem of "being right for the right reason", where we request a classifier to make a decision in a way that is entirely 'agnostic' to a given protected concept (e.g. gender, race, background etc.), even if this could be implicitly reflected in other attributes via unknown correlations. After defining the concept of an 'agnostic model', we demonstrate how the Domain-Adversarial Neural Network can remove unwanted information from a model using a gradient reversal layer.Comment: Author's original versio

Sc-strengthened commercial purity aluminum under high pressure

Abstract Aluminum alloyed with approximately 1,000 at. ppm Sc was studied by high-pressure energy dispersive X-ray diffraction in two different states, homogenized and aged to peak microhardness. The microhardness of the aged sample is about three times higher than the microhardness of the homogenized sample (as a result of the formation of nanosize Al 3 Sc precipitates in the aged sample). The results, which were refined using the Rietveld analysis technique, indicate a single cubic phase with no phase transition up to a pressure of 32 GPa. The Vinet equation was used to fit the volume-pressure curve to the equation-of-state. The bulk modulus (B 0 ) is found to be 73 ± 5 GPa, and is equal to the value measured for an unalloyed aluminum sample. The fact that the bulk modulus does not change, despite a large difference in microhardness between the samples, is the result of the different origins of the two quantities

GUN: An Efficient Execution Strategy for Querying the Web of Data

International audienceLocal-As-View (LAV) mediators provide a uniform interface to a federation of heterogeneous data sources, attempting to execute queries against the federation. LAV mediators rely on query rewriters to translate mediator queries into equivalent queries on the federated data sources. The query rewriting problem in LAV mediators has shown to be NP-complete, and there may be an exponential number of rewritings, making unfeasible the execution or even generation of all the rewritings for some queries. The complexity of this problem can be particularly impacted when queries and data sources are described using SPARQL conjunctive queries, for which millions of rewritings could be generated. We aim at providing an efficient solution to the problem of executing LAV SPARQL query rewritings while the gathered answer is as complete as possible. We formulate the Result-Maximal k-Execution problem (ReMakE) as the problem of maximizing the query results obtained from the execution of only k rewritings. Additionally, a novel query execution strategy called GUN is proposed to solve the ReMakE problem. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that GUN outperforms traditional techniques in terms of answer completeness and execution time

Effects of vacancies on phonon entropy of B2 FeAl

The phonon density of states (DOS) and phonon entropy of B2 FeAl were determined as functions of the Fe site vacancy concentration using several scattering techniques and were computed from first principles. Measurements at elevated temperature and pressure were performed to explore volume effects, test the usefulness of the quasiharmonic (QH) approximation, and provide comparison for the first-principles calculations. The average temperature and pressure dependencies of phonons were consistent with the QH model. The decrease in specific volume associated with the introduction of vacancies causes a stiffening of the DOS that was captured well with the experimentally determined Grüneisen parameter. Features associated with vacancies in the DOS are not well explained by this model, however, especially in the gap between the acoustic and optic branches. First-principles calculations indicated that these modes are primarily associated with vibrations of Al atoms in the first-nearest-neighbor shell of the vacancy, with some vibration amplitude also involving the second-nearest-neighbor Fe atoms. At the vacancy concentrations of study, the phonon entropy of vacancy formation was found to be approximately −1.7k_B/atom, about half as large and of opposite sign as the configurational entropy of vacancy formation

Phonon densities of states of face-centered-cubic Ni-Fe alloys

Inelastic neutron scattering and nuclear resonant inelastic x-ray scattering were used to determine the phonon densities of states of face-centered-cubic Ni-Fe alloys. Increasing Fe concentration results in an average softening of the phonon modes. Chemical ordering of the Ni_(0.72)Fe_(0.28) alloy results in a reduction of the partial vibrational entropy of the Fe atoms but does not significantly change the partial vibrational entropy of the Ni atoms. Changes in the phonon densities of states with composition and chemical ordering are discussed and analyzed with a cluster expansion method

Large sulfur isotope fractionations in Martian sediments at Gale crater

Variability in the sulfur isotopic composition in sediments can reflect atmospheric, geologic and biological processes. Evidence for ancient fluvio-lacustrine environments at Gale crater on Mars and a lack of efficient crustal recycling mechanisms on the planet suggests a surface environment that was once warm enough to allow the presence of liquid water, at least for discrete periods of time, and implies a greenhouse effect that may have been influenced by sulfur-bearing volcanic gases. Here we report in situ analyses of the sulfur isotopic compositions of SO2 volatilized from ten sediment samples acquired by NASA’s Curiosity rover along a 13 km traverse of Gale crater. We find large variations in sulfur isotopic composition that exceed those measured for Martian meteorites and show both depletion and enrichment in 34S. Measured values of δ34S range from −47 ± 14‰ to 28 ± 7‰, similar to the range typical of terrestrial environments. Although limited geochronological constraints on the stratigraphy traversed by Curiosity are available, we propose that the observed sulfur isotopic signatures at Gale crater can be explained by equilibrium fractionation between sulfate and sulfide in an impact-driven hydrothermal system and atmospheric processing of sulfur-bearing gases during transient warm periods

Context-aware access to heterogeneous resources through on-the-fly mashups

Current scenarios for app development are characterized by rich resources that often overwhelm the final users, especially in mobile app usage situations. It is therefore important to define design methods that enable dynamic filtering of the pertinent resources and appropriate tailoring of the retrieved content. This paper presents a design framework based on the specification of the possible contexts deemed relevant to a given application domain and on their mapping onto an integrated schema of the resources underlying the app. The context and the integrated schema enable the instantiation at runtime of templates of app pages in function of the context characterizing the user’s current situation of use

Processing Regular Path Queries on Arbitrarily Distributed Data

Regular Path Queries (RPQs) are a type of graph query where answers are pairs of nodes connected by a sequence of edges matching a regular expression. We study the techniques to process such queries on a distributed graph of data. While many techniques assume the location of each data element (node or edge) is known, when the components of the distributed system are autonomous, the data will be arbitrarily distributed. As the different query processing strategies are equivalently costly in the worst case, we isolate query-dependent cost factors and present a method to choose between strategies, using new query cost estimation techniques. We evaluate our techniques using meaningful queries on biomedical data