OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Identification of Causal Relationship between Amyloid-beta Accumulation and Alzheimer's Disease Progression via Counterfactual Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that is beginning with amyloidosis, followed by neuronal loss and deterioration in structure, function, and cognition. The accumulation of amyloid-beta in the brain, measured through 18F-florbetapir (AV45) positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, has been widely used for early diagnosis of AD. However, the relationship between amyloid-beta accumulation and AD pathophysiology remains unclear, and causal inference approaches are needed to uncover how amyloid-beta levels can impact AD development. In this paper, we propose a graph varying coefficient neural network (GVCNet) for estimating the individual treatment effect with continuous treatment levels using a graph convolutional neural network. We highlight the potential of causal inference approaches, including GVCNet, for measuring the regional causal connections between amyloid-beta accumulation and AD pathophysiology, which may serve as a robust tool for early diagnosis and tailored care.
Causal Reinforcement Learning: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Reinforcement learning is an essential paradigm for solving sequential decision problems under uncertainty. Despite many remarkable achievements in recent decades, applying reinforcement learning methods in the real world remains challenging. One of the main obstacles is that reinforcement learning agents lack a fundamental understanding of the world and must therefore learn from scratch through numerous trial-and-error interactions. They may also face challenges in providing explanations for their decisions and generalizing the acquired knowledge. Causality, however, offers a notable advantage as it can formalize knowledge in a systematic manner and leverage invariance for effective knowledge transfer. This has led to the emergence of causal reinforcement learning, a subfield of reinforcement learning that seeks to enhance existing algorithms by incorporating causal relationships into the learning process. In this survey, we comprehensively review the literature on causal reinforcement learning. We first introduce the basic concepts of causality and reinforcement learning, and then explain how causality can address core challenges in non-causal reinforcement learning. We categorize and systematically review existing causal reinforcement learning approaches based on their target problems and methodologies. Finally, we outline open issues and future directions in this emerging field.
Diverse Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Dialogue State Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

There has been significant interest in zero and few-shot learning for dialogue state tracking (DST) due to the high cost of collecting and annotating task-oriented dialogues. Recent work has demonstrated that in-context learning requires very little data and zero parameter updates, and even outperforms trained methods in the few-shot setting (Hu et al. 2022). We propose RefPyDST, which advances the state of the art with three advancements to in-context learning for DST. First, we formulate DST as a Python programming task, explicitly modeling language coreference as variable reference in Python. Second, since in-context learning depends highly on the context examples, we propose a method to retrieve a diverse set of relevant examples to improve performance. Finally, we introduce a novel re-weighting method during decoding that takes into account probabilities of competing surface forms, and produces a more accurate dialogue state prediction. We evaluate our approach using MultiWOZ and achieve state-of-the-art multi-domain joint-goal accuracy in zero and few-shot settings.
Practical Collaborative Perception: A Framework for Asynchronous and Multi-Agent 3D Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Occlusion is a major challenge for LiDAR-based object detection methods. This challenge becomes safety-critical in urban traffic where the ego vehicle must have reliable object detection to avoid collision while its field of view is severely reduced due to the obstruction posed by a large number of road users. Collaborative perception via Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, which leverages the diverse perspective thanks to the presence at multiple locations of connected agents to form a complete scene representation, is an appealing solution. State-of-the-art V2X methods resolve the performance-bandwidth tradeoff using a mid-collaboration approach where the Bird-Eye View images of point clouds are exchanged so that the bandwidth consumption is lower than communicating point clouds as in early collaboration, and the detection performance is higher than late collaboration, which fuses agents' output, thanks to a deeper interaction among connected agents. While achieving strong performance, the real-world deployment of most mid-collaboration approaches is hindered by their overly complicated architectures, involving learnable collaboration graphs and autoencoder-based compressor/ decompressor, and unrealistic assumptions about inter-agent synchronization. In this work, we devise a simple yet effective collaboration method that achieves a better bandwidth-performance tradeoff than prior state-of-the-art methods while minimizing changes made to the single-vehicle detection models and relaxing unrealistic assumptions on inter-agent synchronization. Experiments on the V2X-Sim dataset show that our collaboration method achieves 98\% of the performance of an early-collaboration method, while only consuming the equivalent bandwidth of a late-collaboration method.
An Optimal Multiple-Class Encoding Scheme for a Graph of Bounded Hadwiger Number
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

Since Jacobson [FOCS89] initiated the investigation of succinct graph encodings 35 years ago, there has been a long list of results on balancing the generality of the class, the speed, the succinctness of the encoding, and the query support. Let Cn denote the set consisting of the graphs in a class C that with at most n vertices. A class C is nontrivial if the information-theoretically min number log |Cn| of bits to distinguish the members of Cn is Omega(n). An encoding scheme based upon a single class C is C-opt if it takes a graph G of Cn and produces in deterministic O(n) time an encoded string of at most log |Cn| + o(log |Cn|) bits from which G can be recovered in O(n) time. Despite the extensive efforts in the literature, trees and general graphs were the only nontrivial classes C admitting C-opt encoding schemes that support the degree query in O(1) time. Basing an encoding scheme upon a single class ignores the possibility of a shorter encoded string using additional properties of the graph input. To leverage the inherent structures of individual graphs, we propose to base an encoding scheme upon of multiple classes: An encoding scheme based upon a family F of classes, accepting all graphs in UF, is F-opt if it is C-opt for each C in F. Having a C-opt encoding scheme for each C in F does not guarantee an F-opt encoding scheme. Under this more stringent criterion, we present an F-opt encoding scheme for a family F of an infinite number of classes such that UF comprises all graphs of bounded Hadwiger numbers. F consists of the nontrivial quasi-monotone classes of k-clique-minor-free graphs for each positive integer k. Our F-opt scheme supports queries of degree, adjacency, neighbor-listing, and bounded-distance shortest path in O(1) time per output. We broaden the graph classes admitting opt encoding schemes that also efficiently support fundamental queries.
Noisy Games: A Study on the Effect of Noise on Game Specifications
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

We consider misinformation games, i.e., multi-agent interactions where the players are misinformed with regards to the game that they play, essentially having an \emph{incorrect} understanding of the game setting, without being aware of their misinformation. In this paper, we introduce and study a new family of misinformation games, called Noisy games, where misinformation is due to structured (white) noise that affects additively the payoff values of players. We analyse the general properties of Noisy games and derive theoretical formulas related to ``behavioural consistency'', i.e., the probability that the players behaviour will not be significantly affected by the noise. We show several properties of these formulas, and present an experimental evaluation that validates and visualises these results.
EffSeg: Efficient Fine-Grained Instance Segmentation using Structure-Preserving Sparsity
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Many two-stage instance segmentation heads predict a coarse 28x28 mask per instance, which is insufficient to capture the fine-grained details of many objects. To address this issue, PointRend and RefineMask predict a 112x112 segmentation mask resulting in higher quality segmentations. Both methods however have limitations by either not having access to neighboring features (PointRend) or by performing computation at all spatial locations instead of sparsely (RefineMask). In this work, we propose EffSeg performing fine-grained instance segmentation in an efficient way by using our Structure-Preserving Sparsity (SPS) method based on separately storing the active features, the passive features and a dense 2D index map containing the feature indices. The goal of the index map is to preserve the 2D spatial configuration or structure between the features such that any 2D operation can still be performed. EffSeg achieves similar performance on COCO compared to RefineMask, while reducing the number of FLOPs by 71% and increasing the FPS by 29%. Code will be released.
Knowledge Graph for NLG in the context of conversational agents
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

The use of knowledge graphs (KGs) enhances the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the responses provided by a conversational agent. While generating answers during conversations consists in generating text from these KGs, it is still regarded as a challenging task that has gained significant attention in recent years. In this document, we provide a review of different architectures used for knowledge graph-to-text generation including: Graph Neural Networks, the Graph Transformer, and linearization with seq2seq models. We discuss the advantages and limitations of each architecture and conclude that the choice of architecture will depend on the specific requirements of the task at hand. We also highlight the importance of considering constraints such as execution time and model validity, particularly in the context of conversational agents. Based on these constraints and the availability of labeled data for the domains of DAVI, we choose to use seq2seq Transformer-based models (PLMs) for the Knowledge Graph-to-Text Generation task. We aim to refine benchmark datasets of kg-to-text generation on PLMs and to explore the emotional and multilingual dimensions in our future work. Overall, this review provides insights into the different approaches for knowledge graph-to-text generation and outlines future directions for research in this area.
Scalable variable selection for two-view learning tasks with projection operators
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper we propose a novel variable selection method for two-view settings, or for vector-valued supervised learning problems. Our framework is able to handle extremely large scale selection tasks, where number of data samples could be even millions. In a nutshell, our method performs variable selection by iteratively selecting variables that are highly correlated with the output variables, but which are not correlated with the previously chosen variables. To measure the correlation, our method uses the concept of projection operators and their algebra. With the projection operators the relationship, correlation, between sets of input and output variables can also be expressed by kernel functions, thus nonlinear correlation models can be exploited as well. We experimentally validate our approach, showing on both synthetic and real data its scalability and the relevance of the selected features. Keywords: Supervised variable selection, vector-valued learning, projection-valued measure, reproducing kernel Hilbert space
Unlocking the Potential of Deep Learning in Peak-Hour Series Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Unlocking the potential of deep learning in Peak-Hour Series Forecasting (PHSF) remains a critical yet underexplored task in various domains. While state-of-the-art deep learning models excel in regular Time Series Forecasting (TSF), they struggle to achieve comparable results in PHSF. This can be attributed to the challenges posed by the high degree of non-stationarity in peak-hour series, which makes direct forecasting more difficult than standard TSF. Additionally, manually extracting the maximum value from regular forecasting results leads to suboptimal performance due to models minimizing the mean deficit. To address these issues, this paper presents Seq2Peak, a novel framework designed specifically for PHSF tasks, bridging the performance gap observed in TSF models. Seq2Peak offers two key components: the CyclicNorm pipeline to mitigate the non-stationarity issue and a simple yet effective trainable-parameter-free peak-hour decoder with a hybrid loss function that utilizes both the original series and peak-hour series as supervised signals. Extensive experimentation on publicly available time series datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework, yielding a remarkable average relative improvement of 37.7% across four real-world datasets for both transformer- and non-transformer-based TSF models.
Prototypes as Explanation for Time Series Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Detecting abnormal patterns that deviate from a certain regular repeating pattern in time series is essential in many big data applications. However, the lack of labels, the dynamic nature of time series data, and unforeseeable abnormal behaviors make the detection process challenging. Despite the success of recent deep anomaly detection approaches, the mystical mechanisms in such black-box models have become a new challenge in safety-critical applications. The lack of model transparency and prediction reliability hinders further breakthroughs in such domains. This paper proposes ProtoAD, using prototypes as the example-based explanation for the state of regular patterns during anomaly detection. Without significant impact on the detection performance, prototypes shed light on the deep black-box models and provide intuitive understanding for domain experts and stakeholders. We extend the widely used prototype learning in classification problems into anomaly detection. By visualizing both the latent space and input space prototypes, we intuitively demonstrate how regular data are modeled and why specific patterns are considered abnormal.
A Language Model for Grammatical Error Correction in L2 Russian
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Grammatical error correction is one of the fundamental tasks in Natural Language Processing. For the Russian language, most of the spellcheckers available correct typos and other simple errors with high accuracy, but often fail when faced with non-native (L2) writing, since the latter contains errors that are not typical for native speakers. In this paper, we propose a pipeline involving a language model intended for correcting errors in L2 Russian writing. The language model proposed is trained on untagged texts of the Newspaper subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus, and the quality of the model is validated against the RULEC-GEC corpus.
A Stackelberg viral marketing design for two competing players
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

A Stackelberg duopoly model in which two firms compete to maximize their market share is considered. The firms offer a service/product to customers that are spread over several geographical regions (e.g., countries, provinces, or states). Each region has its own characteristics (spreading and recovery rates) of each service propagation. We consider that the spreading rate can be controlled by each firm and is subject to some investment that the firm does in each region. One of the main objectives of this work is to characterize the advertising budget allocation strategy for each firm across regions to maximize its market share when competing. To achieve this goal we propose a Stackelberg game model that is relatively simple while capturing the main effects of the competition for market share. {By characterizing the strong/weak Stackelberg equilibria of the game, we provide the associated budget allocation strategy.} In this setting, it is established under which conditions the solution of the game is the so-called ``winner takes all". Numerical results expand upon our theoretical findings and we provide the equilibrium characterization for an example.
Unified Conversational Models with System-Initiated Transitions between Chit-Chat and Task-Oriented Dialogues
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) have been separately developed under two different categories, task-oriented and chit-chat. The former focuses on achieving functional goals and the latter aims at creating engaging social conversations without special goals. Creating a unified conversational model that can engage in both chit-chat and task-oriented dialogue is a promising research topic in recent years. However, the potential ``initiative'' that occurs when there is a change between dialogue modes in one dialogue has rarely been explored. In this work, we investigate two kinds of dialogue scenarios, one starts from chit-chat implicitly involving task-related topics and finally switching to task-oriented requests; the other starts from task-oriented interaction and eventually changes to casual chat after all requested information is provided. We contribute two efficient prompt models which can proactively generate a transition sentence to trigger system-initiated transitions in a unified dialogue model. One is a discrete prompt model trained with two discrete tokens, the other one is a continuous prompt model using continuous prompt embeddings automatically generated by a classifier. We furthermore show that the continuous prompt model can also be used to guide the proactive transitions between particular domains in a multi-domain task-oriented setting.
Training Energy-Based Models with Diffusion Contrastive Divergences
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Energy-Based Models (EBMs) have been widely used for generative modeling. Contrastive Divergence (CD), a prevailing training objective for EBMs, requires sampling from the EBM with Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods (MCMCs), which leads to an irreconcilable trade-off between the computational burden and the validity of the CD. Running MCMCs till convergence is computationally intensive. On the other hand, short-run MCMC brings in an extra non-negligible parameter gradient term that is difficult to handle. In this paper, we provide a general interpretation of CD, viewing it as a special instance of our proposed Diffusion Contrastive Divergence (DCD) family. By replacing the Langevin dynamic used in CD with other EBM-parameter-free diffusion processes, we propose a more efficient divergence. We show that the proposed DCDs are both more computationally efficient than the CD and are not limited to a non-negligible gradient term. We conduct intensive experiments, including both synthesis data modeling and high-dimensional image denoising and generation, to show the advantages of the proposed DCDs. On the synthetic data learning and image denoising experiments, our proposed DCD outperforms CD by a large margin. In image generation experiments, the proposed DCD is capable of training an energy-based model for generating the Celab-A $32\times 32$ dataset, which is comparable to existing EBMs.
RRCNN: A novel signal decomposition approach based on recurrent residue convolutional neural network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The decomposition of non-stationary signals is an important and challenging task in the field of signal time-frequency analysis. In the recent two decades, many signal decomposition methods led by the empirical mode decomposition, which was pioneered by Huang et al. in 1998, have been proposed by different research groups. However, they still have some limitations. For example, they are generally prone to boundary and mode mixing effects and are not very robust to noise. Inspired by the successful applications of deep learning in fields like image processing and natural language processing, and given the lack in the literature of works in which deep learning techniques are used directly to decompose non-stationary signals into simple oscillatory components, we use the convolutional neural network, residual structure and nonlinear activation function to compute in an innovative way the local average of the signal, and study a new non-stationary signal decomposition method under the framework of deep learning. We discuss the training process of the proposed model and study the convergence analysis of the learning algorithm. In the experiments, we evaluate the performance of the proposed model from two points of view: the calculation of the local average and the signal decomposition. Furthermore, we study the mode mixing, noise interference, and orthogonality properties of the decomposed components produced by the proposed method. All results show that the proposed model allows for better handling boundary effect, mode mixing effect, robustness, and the orthogonality of the decomposed components than existing methods.
Ben-ge: Extending BigEarthNet with Geographical and Environmental Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep learning methods have proven to be a powerful tool in the analysis of large amounts of complex Earth observation data. However, while Earth observation data are multi-modal in most cases, only single or few modalities are typically considered. In this work, we present the ben-ge dataset, which supplements the BigEarthNet-MM dataset by compiling freely and globally available geographical and environmental data. Based on this dataset, we showcase the value of combining different data modalities for the downstream tasks of patch-based land-use/land-cover classification and land-use/land-cover segmentation. ben-ge is freely available and expected to serve as a test bed for fully supervised and self-supervised Earth observation applications.
Localized Data Work as a Precondition for Data-Centric ML: A Case Study of Full Lifecycle Crop Disease Identification in Ghana
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The Ghana Cashew Disease Identification with Artificial Intelligence (CADI AI) project demonstrates the importance of sound data work as a precondition for the delivery of useful, localized datacentric solutions for public good tasks such as agricultural productivity and food security. Drone collected data and machine learning are utilized to determine crop stressors. Data, model and the final app are developed jointly and made available to local farmers via a desktop application.