Related papers: Countering Violent Extremism: A mathematical model
The broad concept of emergence is instrumental in various of the most challenging open scientific questions -- yet, few quantitative theories of what constitutes emergent phenomena have been proposed. This article introduces a formal theory…
This paper proposes a suite of rationality measures and associated theory for reinforcement learning agents, a property increasingly critical yet rarely explored. We define an action in deployment to be perfectly rational if it maximises…
The complexity of armed conflicts is expressed in the number of fatalities that may span several orders of magnitude. This study presents a minimalist, physics-informed approach to estimating the likelihood of extreme conflict fatalities at…
Accounting for model uncertainty in risk management and option pricing leads to infinite dimensional optimization problems which are both analytically and numerically intractable. In this article we study when this hurdle can be overcome…
We propose a discrete model for how opinion about a given phenomenon, about which various groups of a population have different degrees of enthusiasm, such as fanaticism and extreme social and political positions, including terrorism, may…
Extreme polarization can undermine democracy by making compromise impossible and transforming politics into a zero-sum game. Ideological polarization - the extent to which political views are widely dispersed - is already strong among…
Optimizing static risk-averse objectives in Markov decision processes is difficult because they do not admit standard dynamic programming equations common in Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Dynamic programming decompositions that…
In the presence of model risk, it is well-established to replace classical expected values by worst-case expectations over all models within a fixed radius from a given reference model. This is the "robustness" approach. We show that…
Clinical risk prediction models are regularly updated as new data, often with additional covariates, become available. We propose CARE (Convex Aggregation of relative Risk Estimators) as a general approach for combining existing "external"…
We develop a family of accelerated stochastic algorithms that minimize sums of convex functions. Our algorithms improve upon the fastest running time for empirical risk minimization (ERM), and in particular linear least-squares regression,…
We make inroads into understanding the robustness of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to adversarial attacks and other input perturbations. While previous work has developed algorithmic approaches to attacking and defending VAEs, there…
By integrating dynamics models into model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods, model-based value expansion (MVE) algorithms have shown a significant advantage in sample efficiency as well as value estimation. However, these methods…
Risk management is particularly concerned with extreme events, but analysing these events is often hindered by the scarcity of data, especially in a multivariate context. This data scarcity complicates risk management efforts. Various tools…
Dynamical systems of a new kind are described, which are motivated by the problem of constructing diffeomorphism invariant quantum theories. These are based on the extremization of a non-local and non-additive quantity that we call the…
Who joins extremist movements? Answering this question poses considerable methodological challenges. Survey techniques are infeasible and selective samples provide no counterfactual. Recruits can be assigned to contextual units, but this is…
We consider the problem of evaluating risk for a system that is modeled by a complex stochastic simulation with many possible input parameter values. Two sources of computational burden can be identified: the effort associated with…
We propose VIBE, a model-agnostic framework that trains classifiers resilient to backdoor attacks. The key concept behind our approach is to treat malicious inputs and corrupted labels from the training dataset as observed random variables,…
Resilience is a rehashed concept in natural hazard management - resilience of cities to earthquakes, to floods, to fire, etc. In a word, a system is said to be resilient if there exists a strategy that can drive the system state back to…
ICS environments are vital to the operation of critical infrastructure such as power grids, water treatment facilities, and manufacturing plants. However, these systems are vulnerable to cyber attacks due to their reliance on interconnected…
Although the recent progress is substantial, deep learning methods can be vulnerable to the maliciously generated adversarial examples. In this paper, we present a novel training procedure and a thresholding test strategy, towards robust…