bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sequential Recommendation with Relation-Aware Kernelized Self-Attention
Authors: Ji Mingi , Joo Weonyoung , Song Kyungwoo , Kim Yoon-Yeong , Moon Il-Chul
Published: June 2020

Recent studies identified that sequential Recommendation is improved by the attention mechanism. By following this development, we propose Relation-Aware Kernelized Self-Attention (RKSA) adopting a self-attention mechanism of the Transformer with augmentation of a probabilistic model. The original self-attention of Transformer is a deterministic measure without relation-awareness. Therefore, we introduce a latent space to the self-attention, and the latent space models the recommendation context from relation as a multivariate skew-normal distribution with a kernelized covariance matrix from co-occurrences, item characteristics, and user information. This work merges the self-attention of the Transformer and the sequential recommendation by adding a probabilistic model of the recommendation task specifics. We experimented RKSA over the benchmark datasets, and RKSA shows significant improvements compared to the recent baseline models. Also, RKSA were able to produce a latent space model that answers the reasons for recommendation.
Generative Exploration and Exploitation
Authors: Jiang Jiechuan , Lu Zongqing
Published: June 2020

Sparse reward is one of the biggest challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we propose a novel method called Generative Exploration and Exploitation (GENE) to overcome sparse reward. GENE automatically generates start states to encourage the agent to explore the environment and to exploit received reward signals. GENE can adaptively tradeoff between exploration and exploitation according to the varying distributions of states experienced by the agent as the learning progresses. GENE relies on no prior knowledge about the environment and can be combined with any RL algorithm, no matter on-policy or off-policy, single-agent or multi-agent. Empirically, we demonstrate that GENE significantly outperforms existing methods in three tasks with only binary rewards, including Maze, Maze Ant, and Cooperative Navigation. Ablation studies verify the emergence of progressive exploration and automatic reversing.
A Unified Framework for Knowledge Intensive Gradient Boosting: Leveraging Human Experts for Noisy Sparse Domains
Authors: Kokel Harsha , Odom Phillip , Yang Shuo , Natarajan Sriraam
Published: June 2020

Incorporating richer human inputs including qualitative constraints such as monotonic and synergistic influences has long been adapted inside AI. Inspired by this, we consider the problem of using such influence statements in the successful gradient-boosting framework. We develop a unified framework for both classification and regression settings that can both effectively and efficiently incorporate such constraints to accelerate learning to a better model. Our results in a large number of standard domains and two particularly novel real-world domains demonstrate the superiority of using domain knowledge rather than treating the human as a mere labeler.
A Simple and Efficient Tensor Calculus
Authors: Laue Sören , Mitterreiter Matthias , Giesen Joachim
Published: June 2020

Computing derivatives of tensor expressions, also known as tensor calculus, is a fundamental task in machine learning. A key concern is the efficiency of evaluating the expressions and their derivatives that hinges on the representation of these expressions. Recently, an algorithm for computing higher order derivatives of tensor expressions like Jacobians or Hessians has been introduced that is a few orders of magnitude faster than previous state-of-the-art approaches. Unfortunately, the approach is based on Ricci notation and hence cannot be incorporated into automatic differentiation frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, autograd, or JAX that use the simpler Einstein notation. This leaves two options, to either change the underlying tensor representation in these frameworks or to develop a new, provably correct algorithm based on Einstein notation. Obviously, the first option is impractical. Hence, we pursue the second option. Here, we show that using Ricci notation is not necessary for an efficient tensor calculus and develop an equally efficient method for the simpler Einstein notation. It turns out that turning to Einstein notation enables further improvements that lead to even better efficiency.
Residual Neural Processes
Authors: Lee Byung-Jun , Hong Seunghoon , Kim Kee-Eung
Published: June 2020

A Neural Process (NP) is a map from a set of observed input-output pairs to a predictive distribution over functions, which is designed to mimic other stochastic processes' inference mechanisms. NPs are shown to work effectively in tasks that require complex distributions, where traditional stochastic processes struggle, e.g. image completion tasks. This paper concerns the practical capacity of set function approximators despite their universality. By delving deeper into the relationship between an NP and a Bayesian last layer (BLL), it is possible to see that NPs may struggle in simple examples, which other stochastic processes can easily solve. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective remedy; the Residual Neural Process (RNP) that leverages traditional BLL for faster training and better prediction. We demonstrate that the RNP shows faster convergence and better performance, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Robustness Certificates for Sparse Adversarial Attacks by Randomized Ablation
Authors: Levine Alexander , Feizi Soheil
Published: June 2020

Recently, techniques have been developed to provably guarantee the robustness of a classifier to adversarial perturbations of bounded L1 and L2 magnitudes by using randomized smoothing: the robust classification is a consensus of base classifications on randomly noised samples where the noise is additive. In this paper, we extend this technique to the L0 threat model. We propose an efficient and certifiably robust defense against sparse adversarial attacks by randomly ablating input features, rather than using additive noise. Experimentally, on MNIST, we can certify the classifications of over 50% of images to be robust to any distortion of at most 8 pixels. This is comparable to the observed empirical robustness of unprotected classifiers on MNIST to modern L0 attacks, demonstrating the tightness of the proposed robustness certificate. We also evaluate our certificate on ImageNet and CIFAR-10. Our certificates represent an improvement on those provided in a concurrent work (Lee et al. 2019) which uses random noise rather than ablation (median certificates of 8 pixels versus 4 pixels on MNIST; 16 pixels versus 1 pixel on ImageNet.) Additionally, we empirically demonstrate that our classifier is highly robust to modern sparse adversarial attacks on MNIST. Our classifications are robust, in median, to adversarial perturbations of up to 31 pixels, compared to 22 pixels reported as the state-of-the-art defense, at the cost of a slight decrease (around 2.3%) in the classification accuracy. Code and supplementary material is available at https://github.com/alevine0/randomizedAblation/.
Stochastically Robust Personalized Ranking for LSH Recommendation Retrieval
Authors: Le Dung D. , Lauw Hady W.
Published: June 2020

Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) has become one of the most commonly used approximate nearest neighbor search techniques to avoid the prohibitive cost of scanning through all data points. For recommender systems, LSH achieves efficient recommendation retrieval by encoding user and item vectors into binary hash codes, reducing the cost of exhaustively examining all the item vectors to identify the top-k items. However, conventional matrix factorization models may suffer from performance degeneration caused by randomly-drawn LSH hash functions, directly affecting the ultimate quality of the recommendations. In this paper, we propose a framework named øurmodel, which factors in the stochasticity of LSH hash functions when learning real-valued user and item latent vectors, eventually improving the recommendation accuracy after LSH indexing. Experiments on publicly available datasets show that the proposed framework not only effectively learns user's preferences for prediction, but also achieves high compatibility with LSH stochasticity, producing superior post-LSH indexing performances as compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Infrared-Visible Cross-Modal Person Re-Identification with an X Modality
Authors: Li Diangang , Wei Xing , Hong Xiaopeng , Gong Yihong
Published: June 2020

This paper focuses on the emerging Infrared-Visible cross-modal person re-identification task (IV-ReID), which takes infrared images as input and matches with visible color images. IV-ReID is important yet challenging, as there is a significant gap between the visible and infrared images. To reduce this ‘gap’, we introduce an auxiliary X modality as an assistant and reformulate infrared-visible dual-mode cross-modal learning as an X-Infrared-Visible three-mode learning problem. The X modality restates from RGB channels to a format with which cross-modal learning can be easily performed. With this idea, we propose an X-Infrared-Visible (XIV) ReID cross-modal learning framework. Firstly, the X modality is generated by a lightweight network, which is learnt in a self-supervised manner with the labels inherited from visible images. Secondly, under the XIV framework, cross-modal learning is guided by a carefully designed modality gap constraint, with information exchanged cross the visible, X, and infrared modalities. Extensive experiments are performed on two challenging datasets SYSU-MM01 and RegDB to evaluate the proposed XIV-ReID approach. Experimental results show that our method considerably achieves an absolute gain of over 7% in terms of rank 1 and mAP even compared with the latest state-of-the-art methods.
Solving General Elliptical Mixture Models through an Approximate Wasserstein Manifold
Authors: Li Shengxi , Yu Zeyang , Xiang Min , Mandic Danilo
Published: June 2020

We address the estimation problem for general finite mixture models, with a particular focus on the elliptical mixture models (EMMs). Compared to the widely adopted Kullback–Leibler divergence, we show that the Wasserstein distance provides a more desirable optimisation space. We thus provide a stable solution to the EMMs that is both robust to initialisations and reaches a superior optimum by adaptively optimising along a manifold of an approximate Wasserstein distance. To this end, we first provide a unifying account of computable and identifiable EMMs, which serves as a basis to rigorously address the underpinning optimisation problem. Due to a probability constraint, solving this problem is extremely cumbersome and unstable, especially under the Wasserstein distance. To relieve this issue, we introduce an efficient optimisation method on a statistical manifold defined under an approximate Wasserstein distance, which allows for explicit metrics and computable operations, thus significantly stabilising and improving the EMM estimation. We further propose an adaptive method to accelerate the convergence. Experimental results demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed EMM solver.
Coupled-View Deep Classifier Learning from Multiple Noisy Annotators
Authors: Li Shikun , Ge Shiming , Hua Yingying , Zhang Chunhui , Wen Hao , Liu Tengfei , Wang Weiqiang
Published: June 2020

Typically, learning a deep classifier from massive cleanly annotated instances is effective but impractical in many real-world scenarios. An alternative is collecting and aggregating multiple noisy annotations for each instance to train the classifier. Inspired by that, this paper proposes to learn deep classifier from multiple noisy annotators via a coupled-view learning approach, where the learning view from data is represented by deep neural networks for data classification and the learning view from labels is described by a Naive Bayes classifier for label aggregation. Such coupled-view learning is converted to a supervised learning problem under the mutual supervision of the aggregated and predicted labels, and can be solved via alternate optimization to update labels and refine the classifiers. To alleviate the propagation of incorrect labels, small-loss metric is proposed to select reliable instances in both views. A co-teaching strategy with class-weighted loss is further leveraged in the deep classifier learning, which uses two networks with different learning abilities to teach each other, and the diverse errors introduced by noisy labels can be filtered out by peer networks. By these strategies, our approach can finally learn a robust data classifier which less overfits to label noise. Experimental results on synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach.
Stochastic Online Learning with Probabilistic Graph Feedback
Authors: Li Shuai , Chen Wei , Wen Zheng , Leung Kwong-Sak
Published: June 2020

We consider a problem of stochastic online learning with general probabilistic graph feedback, where each directed edge in the feedback graph has probability pij. Two cases are covered. (a) The one-step case, where after playing arm i the learner observes a sample reward feedback of arm j with independent probability pij. (b) The cascade case where after playing arm i the learner observes feedback of all arms j in a probabilistic cascade starting from i – for each (i,j) with probability pij, if arm i is played or observed, then a reward sample of arm j would be observed with independent probability pij. Previous works mainly focus on deterministic graphs which corresponds to one-step case with pij ∈ {0,1}, an adversarial sequence of graphs with certain topology guarantees, or a specific type of random graphs. We analyze the asymptotic lower bounds and design algorithms in both cases. The regret upper bounds of the algorithms match the lower bounds with high probability.
Relation Inference among Sensor Time Series in Smart Buildings with Metric Learning
Authors: Li Shuheng , Hong Dezhi , Wang Hongning
Published: June 2020

Smart Building Technologies hold promise for better livability for residents and lower energy footprints. Yet, the rollout of these technologies, from demand response controls to fault detection and diagnosis, significantly lags behind and is impeded by the current practice of manual identification of sensing point relationships, e.g., how equipment is connected or which sensors are co-located in the same space. This manual process is still error-prone, albeit costly and laborious.We study relation inference among sensor time series. Our key insight is that, as equipment is connected or sensors co-locate in the same physical environment, they are affected by the same real-world events, e.g., a fan turning on or a person entering the room, thus exhibiting correlated changes in their time series data. To this end, we develop a deep metric learning solution that first converts the primitive sensor time series to the frequency domain, and then optimizes a representation of sensors that encodes their relations. Built upon the learned representation, our solution pinpoints the relationships among sensors via solving a combinatorial optimization problem. Extensive experiments on real-world buildings demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution.
Co-GCN for Multi-View Semi-Supervised Learning
Authors: Li Shu , Li Wen-Tao , Wang Wei
Published: June 2020

In many real-world applications, the data have several disjoint sets of features and each set is called as a view. Researchers have developed many multi-view learning methods in the past decade. In this paper, we bring Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) into multi-view learning and propose a novel multi-view semi-supervised learning method Co-GCN by adaptively exploiting the graph information from the multiple views with combined Laplacians. Experimental results on real-world data sets verify that Co-GCN can achieve better performance compared with state-of-the-art multi-view semi-supervised methods.
Neural Graph Embedding for Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Li Wei , Gong Shaogang , Zhu Xiatian
Published: June 2020

Existing neural architecture search (NAS) methods often operate in discrete or continuous spaces directly, which ignores the graphical topology knowledge of neural networks. This leads to suboptimal search performance and efficiency, given the factor that neural networks are essentially directed acyclic graphs (DAG). In this work, we address this limitation by introducing a novel idea of neural graph embedding (NGE). Specifically, we represent the building block (i.e. the cell) of neural networks with a neural DAG, and learn it by leveraging a Graph Convolutional Network to propagate and model the intrinsic topology information of network architectures. This results in a generic neural network representation integrable with different existing NAS frameworks. Extensive experiments show the superiority of NGE over the state-of-the-art methods on image classification and semantic segmentation.
Random Fourier Features via Fast Surrogate Leverage Weighted Sampling
Authors: Liu Fanghui , Huang Xiaolin , Chen Yudong , Yang Jie , Suykens Johan
Published: June 2020

In this paper, we propose a fast surrogate leverage weighted sampling strategy to generate refined random Fourier features for kernel approximation. Compared to the current state-of-the-art method that uses the leverage weighted scheme (Li et al. 2019), our new strategy is simpler and more effective. It uses kernel alignment to guide the sampling process and it can avoid the matrix inversion operator when we compute the leverage function. Given n observations and s random features, our strategy can reduce the time complexity for sampling from O(ns2+s3) to O(ns2), while achieving comparable (or even slightly better) prediction performance when applied to kernel ridge regression (KRR). In addition, we provide theoretical guarantees on the generalization performance of our approach, and in particular characterize the number of random features required to achieve statistical guarantees in KRR. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our algorithm achieves comparable prediction performance and takes less time cost when compared to (Li et al. 2019).
EC-GAN: Inferring Brain Effective Connectivity via Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Liu Jinduo , Ji Junzhong , Xun Guangxu , Yao Liuyi , Huai Mengdi , Zhang Aidong
Published: June 2020

Inferring effective connectivity between different brain regions from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data is an important advanced study in neuroinformatics in recent years. However, current methods have limited usage in effective connectivity studies due to the high noise and small sample size of fMRI data. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for inferring effective connectivity based on generative adversarial networks (GAN), named as EC-GAN. The proposed framework EC-GAN infers effective connectivity via an adversarial process, in which we simultaneously train two models: a generator and a discriminator. The generator consists of a set of effective connectivity generators based on structural equation models which can generate the fMRI time series of each brain region via effective connectivity. Meanwhile, the discriminator is employed to distinguish between the joint distributions of the real and generated fMRI time series. Experimental results on simulated data show that EC-GAN can better infer effective connectivity compared to other state-of-the-art methods. The real-world experiments indicate that EC-GAN can provide a new and reliable perspective analyzing the effective connectivity of fMRI data.
A Cluster-Weighted Kernel K-Means Method for Multi-View Clustering
Authors: Liu Jing , Cao Fuyuan , Gao Xiao-Zhi , Yu Liqin , Liang Jiye
Published: June 2020

Clustering by jointly exploiting information from multiple views can yield better performance than clustering on one single view. Some existing multi-view clustering methods aim at learning a weight for each view to determine its contribution to the final solution. However, the view-weighted scheme can only indicate the overall importance of a view, which fails to recognize the importance of each inner cluster of a view. A view with higher weight cannot guarantee all clusters in this view have higher importance than them in other views. In this paper, we propose a cluster-weighted kernel k-means method for multi-view clustering. Each inner cluster of each view is assigned a weight, which is learned based on the intra-cluster similarity of the cluster compared with all its corresponding clusters in different views, to make the cluster with higher intra-cluster similarity have a higher weight among the corresponding clusters. The cluster labels are learned simultaneously with the cluster weights in an alternative updating way, by minimizing the weighted sum-of-squared errors of the kernel k-means. Compared with the view-weighted scheme, the cluster-weighted scheme enhances the interpretability for the clustering results. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Attribute Propagation Network for Graph Zero-Shot Learning
Authors: Liu Lu , Zhou Tianyi , Long Guodong , Jiang Jing , Zhang Chengqi
Published: June 2020

The goal of zero-shot learning (ZSL) is to train a model to classify samples of classes that were not seen during training. To address this challenging task, most ZSL methods relate unseen test classes to seen(training) classes via a pre-defined set of attributes that can describe all classes in the same semantic space, so the knowledge learned on the training classes can be adapted to unseen classes. In this paper, we aim to optimize the attribute space for ZSL by training a propagation mechanism to refine the semantic attributes of each class based on its neighbors and related classes on a graph of classes. We show that the propagated attributes can produce classifiers for zero-shot classes with significantly improved performance in different ZSL settings. The graph of classes is usually free or very cheap to acquire such as WordNet or ImageNet classes. When the graph is not provided, given pre-defined semantic embeddings of the classes, we can learn a mechanism to generate the graph in an end-to-end manner along with the propagation mechanism. However, this graph-aided technique has not been well-explored in the literature. In this paper, we introduce the “attribute propagation network (APNet)”, which is composed of 1) a graph propagation model generating attribute vector for each class and 2) a parameterized nearest neighbor (NN) classifier categorizing an image to the class with the nearest attribute vector to the image's embedding. For better generalization over unseen classes, different from previous methods, we adopt a meta-learning strategy to train the propagation mechanism and the similarity metric for the NN classifier on multiple sub-graphs, each associated with a classification task over a subset of training classes. In experiments with two zero-shot learning settings and five benchmark datasets, APNet achieves either compelling performance or new state-of-the-art results.
Weighted-Sampling Audio Adversarial Example Attack
Authors: Liu Xiaolei , Wan Kun , Ding Yufei , Zhang Xiaosong , Zhu Qingxin
Published: June 2020

Recent studies have highlighted audio adversarial examples as a ubiquitous threat to state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition systems. Thorough studies on how to effectively generate adversarial examples are essential to prevent potential attacks. Despite many research on this, the efficiency and the robustness of existing works are not yet satisfactory. In this paper, we propose weighted-sampling audio adversarial examples, focusing on the numbers and the weights of distortion to reinforce the attack. Further, we apply a denoising method in the loss function to make the adversarial attack more imperceptible. Experiments show that our method is the first in the field to generate audio adversarial examples with low noise and high audio robustness at the minute time-consuming level 1.
Cost-Effective Incentive Allocation via Structured Counterfactual Inference
Authors: Lopez Romain , Li Chenchen , Yan Xiang , Xiong Junwu , Jordan Michael , Qi Yuan , Song Le
Published: June 2020

We address a practical problem ubiquitous in modern marketing campaigns, in which a central agent tries to learn a policy for allocating strategic financial incentives to customers and observes only bandit feedback. In contrast to traditional policy optimization frameworks, we take into account the additional reward structure and budget constraints common in this setting, and develop a new two-step method for solving this constrained counterfactual policy optimization problem. Our method first casts the reward estimation problem as a domain adaptation problem with supplementary structure, and then subsequently uses the estimators for optimizing the policy with constraints. We also establish theoretical error bounds for our estimation procedure and we empirically show that the approach leads to significant improvement on both synthetic and real datasets.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Discriminative Manifold Embedding and Alignment
Authors: Luo You-Wei , Ren Chuan-Xian , Ge Pengfei , Huang Ke-Kun , Yu Yu-Feng
Published: June 2020

Unsupervised domain adaptation is effective in leveraging the rich information from the source domain to the unsupervised target domain. Though deep learning and adversarial strategy make an important breakthrough in the adaptability of features, there are two issues to be further explored. First, the hard-assigned pseudo labels on the target domain are risky to the intrinsic data structure. Second, the batch-wise training manner in deep learning limits the description of the global structure. In this paper, a Riemannian manifold learning framework is proposed to achieve transferability and discriminability consistently. As to the first problem, this method establishes a probabilistic discriminant criterion on the target domain via soft labels. Further, this criterion is extended to a global approximation scheme for the second issue; such approximation is also memory-saving. The manifold metric alignment is exploited to be compatible with the embedding space. A theoretical error bound is derived to facilitate the alignment. Extensive experiments have been conducted to investigate the proposal and results of the comparison study manifest the superiority of consistent manifold learning framework.
Graph-Hist: Graph Classification from Latent Feature Histograms with Application to Bot Detection
Authors: Magelinski Thomas , Beskow David , Carley Kathleen M.
Published: June 2020

Neural networks are increasingly used for graph classification in a variety of contexts. Social media is a critical application area in this space, however the characteristics of social media graphs differ from those seen in most popular benchmark datasets. Social networks tend to be large and sparse, while benchmarks are small and dense. Classically, large and sparse networks are analyzed by studying the distribution of local properties. Inspired by this, we introduce Graph-Hist: an end-to-end architecture that extracts a graph's latent local features, bins nodes together along 1-D cross sections of the feature space, and classifies the graph based on this multi-channel histogram. We show that Graph-Hist improves state of the art performance on true social media benchmark datasets, while still performing well on other benchmarks. Finally, we demonstrate Graph-Hist's performance by conducting bot detection in social media. While sophisticated bot and cyborg accounts increasingly evade traditional detection methods, they leave artificial artifacts in their conversational graph that are detected through graph classification. We apply Graph-Hist to classify these conversational graphs. In the process, we confirm that social media graphs are different than most baselines and that Graph-Hist outperforms existing bot-detection models.
Neural Inheritance Relation Guided One-Shot Layer Assignment Search
Authors: Meng Rang , Chen Weijie , Xie Di , Zhang Yuan , Pu Shiliang
Published: June 2020

Layer assignment is seldom picked out as an independent research topic in neural architecture search. In this paper, for the first time, we systematically investigate the impact of different layer assignments to the network performance by building an architecture dataset of layer assignment on CIFAR-100. Through analyzing this dataset, we discover a neural inheritance relation among the networks with different layer assignments, that is, the optimal layer assignments for deeper networks always inherit from those for shallow networks. Inspired by this neural inheritance relation, we propose an efficient one-shot layer assignment search approach via inherited sampling. Specifically, the optimal layer assignment searched in the shallow network can be provided as a strong sampling priori to train and search the deeper ones in supernet, which extremely reduces the network search space. Comprehensive experiments carried out on CIFAR-100 illustrate the efficiency of our proposed method. Our search results are strongly consistent with the optimal ones directly selected from the architecture dataset. To further confirm the generalization of our proposed method, we also conduct experiments on Tiny-ImageNet and ImageNet. Our searched results are remarkably superior to the handcrafted ones under the unchanged computational budgets. The neural inheritance relation discovered in this paper can provide insights to the universal neural architecture search.
Improved Knowledge Distillation via Teacher Assistant
Authors: Mirzadeh Seyed Iman , Farajtabar Mehrdad , Li Ang , Levine Nir , Matsukawa Akihiro , Ghasemzadeh Hassan
Published: June 2020

Despite the fact that deep neural networks are powerful models and achieve appealing results on many tasks, they are too large to be deployed on edge devices like smartphones or embedded sensor nodes. There have been efforts to compress these networks, and a popular method is knowledge distillation, where a large (teacher) pre-trained network is used to train a smaller (student) network. However, in this paper, we show that the student network performance degrades when the gap between student and teacher is large. Given a fixed student network, one cannot employ an arbitrarily large teacher, or in other words, a teacher can effectively transfer its knowledge to students up to a certain size, not smaller. To alleviate this shortcoming, we introduce multi-step knowledge distillation, which employs an intermediate-sized network (teacher assistant) to bridge the gap between the student and the teacher. Moreover, we study the effect of teacher assistant size and extend the framework to multi-step distillation. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on CIFAR-10,100 and ImageNet datasets and on CNN and ResNet architectures substantiate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Metareasoning in Modular Software Systems: On-the-Fly Configuration Using Reinforcement Learning with Rich Contextual Representations
Authors: Modi Aditya , Dey Debadeepta , Agarwal Alekh , Swaminathan Adith , Nushi Besmira , Andrist Sean , Horvitz Eric
Published: June 2020

Assemblies of modular subsystems are being pressed into service to perform sensing, reasoning, and decision making in high-stakes, time-critical tasks in areas such as transportation, healthcare, and industrial automation. We address the opportunity to maximize the utility of an overall computing system by employing reinforcement learning to guide the configuration of the set of interacting modules that comprise the system. The challenge of doing system-wide optimization is a combinatorial problem. Local attempts to boost the performance of a specific module by modifying its configuration often leads to losses in overall utility of the system's performance as the distribution of inputs to downstream modules changes drastically. We present metareasoning techniques which consider a rich representation of the input, monitor the state of the entire pipeline, and adjust the configuration of modules on-the-fly so as to maximize the utility of a system's operation. We show significant improvement in both real-world and synthetic pipelines across a variety of reinforcement learning techniques.
Pairwise Fairness for Ranking and Regression
Authors: Narasimhan Harikrishna , Cotter Andrew , Gupta Maya , Wang Serena
Published: June 2020

We present pairwise fairness metrics for ranking models and regression models that form analogues of statistical fairness notions such as equal opportunity, equal accuracy, and statistical parity. Our pairwise formulation supports both discrete protected groups, and continuous protected attributes. We show that the resulting training problems can be efficiently and effectively solved using existing constrained optimization and robust optimization techniques developed for fair classification. Experiments illustrate the broad applicability and trade-offs of these methods.
Radial and Directional Posteriors for Bayesian Deep Learning
Authors: Oh Changyong , Adamczewski Kamil , Park Mijung
Published: June 2020

We propose a new variational family for Bayesian neural networks. We decompose the variational posterior into two components, where the radial component captures the strength of each neuron in terms of its magnitude; while the directional component captures the statistical dependencies among the weight parameters. The dependencies learned via the directional density provide better modeling performance compared to the widely-used Gaussian mean-field-type variational family. In addition, the strength of input and output neurons learned via our posterior provides a structured way to compress neural networks. Indeed, experiments show that our variational family improves predictive performance and yields compressed networks simultaneously.
Uncorrected Least-Squares Temporal Difference with Lambda-Return
Authors: Osogami Takayuki
Published: June 2020

Temporal difference, TD(λ), learning is a foundation of reinforcement learning and also of interest in its own right for the tasks of prediction. Recently, true online TD(λ) has been shown to closely approximate the “forward view” at every step, while conventional TD(λ) does this only at the end of an episode. We re-examine least-squares temporal difference, LSTD(λ), which has been derived from conventional TD(λ). We design Uncorrected LSTD(λ) in such a way that, when λ = 1, Uncorrected LSTD(1) is equivalent to the least-squares method for the linear regression of Monte Carlo (MC) return at every step, while conventional LSTD(1) has this equivalence only at the end of an episode, since the MC return is corrected to be unbiased. We prove that Uncorrected LSTD(λ) can have smaller variance than conventional LSTD(λ), and this allows Uncorrected LSTD(λ) to sometimes outperform conventional LSTD(λ) in practice. When λ = 0, however, Uncorrected LSTD(0) is not equivalent to LSTD. We thus also propose Mixed LSTD(λ), which % mixes the two LSTD(λ)s in a way that it matches conventional LSTD(λ) at λ = 0 and Uncorrected LSTD(λ) at λ = 1. In numerical experiments, we study how the three LSTD(λ)s behave under limited training data.
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting by Neuron-Level Plasticity Control
Authors: Paik Inyoung , Oh Sangjun , Kwak Taeyeong , Kim Injung
Published: June 2020

To address the issue of catastrophic forgetting in neural networks, we propose a novel, simple, and effective solution called neuron-level plasticity control (NPC). While learning a new task, the proposed method preserves the existing knowledge from the previous tasks by controlling the plasticity of the network at the neuron level. NPC estimates the importance value of each neuron and consolidates important neurons by applying lower learning rates, rather than restricting individual connection weights to stay close to the values optimized for the previous tasks. The experimental results on the several datasets show that neuron-level consolidation is substantially more effective compared to connection-level consolidation approaches.
Unsupervised Attributed Multiplex Network Embedding
Authors: Park Chanyoung , Kim Donghyun , Han Jiawei , Yu Hwanjo
Published: June 2020

Nodes in a multiplex network are connected by multiple types of relations. However, most existing network embedding methods assume that only a single type of relation exists between nodes. Even for those that consider the multiplexity of a network, they overlook node attributes, resort to node labels for training, and fail to model the global properties of a graph. We present a simple yet effective unsupervised network embedding method for attributed multiplex network called DMGI, inspired by Deep Graph Infomax (DGI) that maximizes the mutual information between local patches of a graph, and the global representation of the entire graph. We devise a systematic way to jointly integrate the node embeddings from multiple graphs by introducing 1) the consensus regularization framework that minimizes the disagreements among the relation-type specific node embeddings, and 2) the universal discriminator that discriminates true samples regardless of the relation types. We also show that the attention mechanism infers the importance of each relation type, and thus can be useful for filtering unnecessary relation types as a preprocessing step. Extensive experiments on various downstream tasks demonstrate that DMGI outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, even though DMGI is fully unsupervised.
Optimizing Nondecomposable Data Dependent Regularizers via Lagrangian Reparameterization Offers Significant Performance and Efficiency Gains
Authors: Ravi Sathya N. , Venkatesh Abhay , Fung Glenn M. , Singh Vikas
Published: June 2020

Data dependent regularization is known to benefit a wide variety of problems in machine learning. Often, these regularizers cannot be easily decomposed into a sum over a finite number of terms, e.g., a sum over individual example-wise terms. The Fβ measure, Area under the ROC curve (AUCROC) and Precision at a fixed recall (P@R) are some prominent examples that are used in many applications. We find that for most medium to large sized datasets, scalability issues severely limit our ability in leveraging the benefits of such regularizers. Importantly, the key technical impediment despite some recent progress is that, such objectives remain difficult to optimize via backpropapagation procedures. While an efficient general-purpose strategy for this problem still remains elusive, in this paper, we show that for many data-dependent nondecomposable regularizers that are relevant in applications, sizable gains in efficiency are possible with minimal code-level changes; in other words, no specialized tools or numerical schemes are needed. Our procedure involves a reparameterization followed by a partial dualization – this leads to a formulation that has provably cheap projection operators. We present a detailed analysis of runtime and convergence properties of our algorithm. On the experimental side, we show that a direct use of our scheme significantly improves the state of the art IOU measures reported for MSCOCO Stuff segmentation dataset.
Chained Representation Cycling: Learning to Estimate 3D Human Pose and Shape by Cycling Between Representations
Authors: Rueegg Nadine , Lassner Christoph , Black Michael , Schindler Konrad , Rueegg Nadine , Lassner Christoph , Black Michael , Schindler Konrad
Published: June 2020

The goal of many computer vision systems is to transform image pixels into 3D representations. Recent popular models use neural networks to regress directly from pixels to 3D object parameters. Such an approach works well when supervision is available, but in problems like human pose and shape estimation, it is difficult to obtain natural images with 3D ground truth. To go one step further, we propose a new architecture that facilitates unsupervised, or lightly supervised, learning. The idea is to break the problem into a series of transformations between increasingly abstract representations. Each step involves a cycle designed to be learnable without annotated training data, and the chain of cycles delivers the final solution. Specifically, we use 2D body part segments as an intermediate representation that contains enough information to be lifted to 3D, and at the same time is simple enough to be learned in an unsupervised way. We demonstrate the method by learning 3D human pose and shape from un-paired and un-annotated images. We also explore varying amounts of paired data and show that cycling greatly alleviates the need for paired data. While we present results for modeling humans, our formulation is general and can be applied to other vision problems.
Uncertainty-Aware Deep Classifiers Using Generative Models
Authors: Sensoy Murat , Kaplan Lance , Cerutti Federico , Saleki Maryam
Published: June 2020

Deep neural networks are often ignorant about what they do not know and overconfident when they make uninformed predictions. Some recent approaches quantify classification uncertainty directly by training the model to output high uncertainty for the data samples close to class boundaries or from the outside of the training distribution. These approaches use an auxiliary data set during training to represent out-of-distribution samples. However, selection or creation of such an auxiliary data set is non-trivial, especially for high dimensional data such as images. In this work we develop a novel neural network model that is able to express both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty to distinguish decision boundary and out-of-distribution regions of the feature space. To this end, variational autoencoders and generative adversarial networks are incorporated to automatically generate out-of-distribution exemplars for training. Through extensive analysis, we demonstrate that the proposed approach provides better estimates of uncertainty for in- and out-of-distribution samples, and adversarial examples on well-known data sets against state-of-the-art approaches including recent Bayesian approaches for neural networks and anomaly detection methods.
Stable Learning via Sample Reweighting
Authors: Shen Zheyan , Cui Peng , Zhang Tong , Kunag Kun
Published: June 2020

We consider the problem of learning linear prediction models with model misspecification bias. In such case, the collinearity among input variables may inflate the error of parameter estimation, resulting in instability of prediction results when training and test distributions do not match. In this paper we theoretically analyze this fundamental problem and propose a sample reweighting method that reduces collinearity among input variables. Our method can be seen as a pretreatment of data to improve the condition of design matrix, and it can then be combined with any standard learning method for parameter estimation and variable selection. Empirical studies on both simulation and real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in terms of more stable performance across different distributed data.
Morphism-Based Learning for Structured Data
Authors: Shin Kilho , Shepard Dave
Published: June 2020

In mathematics, morphism is a term that indicates structure-preserving mappings between mathematical structures of the same type. Linear transformations for linear spaces, homomorphisms for algebraic structures and continuous functions for topological spaces are examples. Many data researched in machine learning, on the other hand, can include mathematical structures in them. Strings are totally ordered sets, and trees can be understood not only as graphs but also as partially ordered sets with respect to an ancestor-to-descendent order and semigroups with respect to the binary operation to determine nearest common ancestor. In this paper, we propose a generic and theoretic framework to investigate similarity of structured data through structure-preserving one-to-one partial mappings, which we call morphisms. Through morphisms, useful and important methods studied in the literature can be abstracted into common concepts, although they have been studied separately. When we study new structures of data, we will be able to extend the legacy methods for the purpose of studying the new structure, if we can define morphisms properly. Also, this view reveals hidden relations between methods known in the literature and can let us understand them more clearly. For example, we see that the center star algorithm, which was originally developed to compute sequential multiple alignments, can be abstracted so that it not only applies to data structures other than strings but also can be used to solve problems of pattern extraction. The methods that we study in this paper include edit distance, multiple alignment, pattern extraction and kernel, but it is sure that there exist much more methods that can be abstracted within our framework.
Efficient Facial Feature Learning with Wide Ensemble-Based Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Siqueira Henrique , Magg Sven , Wermter Stefan
Published: June 2020

Ensemble methods, traditionally built with independently trained de-correlated models, have proven to be efficient methods for reducing the remaining residual generalization error, which results in robust and accurate methods for real-world applications. In the context of deep learning, however, training an ensemble of deep networks is costly and generates high redundancy which is inefficient. In this paper, we present experiments on Ensembles with Shared Representations (ESRs) based on convolutional networks to demonstrate, quantitatively and qualitatively, their data processing efficiency and scalability to large-scale datasets of facial expressions. We show that redundancy and computational load can be dramatically reduced by varying the branching level of the ESR without loss of diversity and generalization power, which are both important for ensemble performance. Experiments on large-scale datasets suggest that ESRs reduce the remaining residual generalization error on the AffectNet and FER+ datasets, reach human-level performance, and outperform state-of-the-art methods on facial expression recognition in the wild using emotion and affect concepts.
New Interpretations of Normalization Methods in Deep Learning
Authors: Sun Jiacheng , Cao Xiangyong , Liang Hanwen , Huang Weiran , Chen Zewei , Li Zhenguo
Published: June 2020

In recent years, a variety of normalization methods have been proposed to help training neural networks, such as batch normalization (BN), layer normalization (LN), weight normalization (WN), group normalization (GN), etc. However, some necessary tools to analyze all these normalization methods are lacking. In this paper, we first propose a lemma to define some necessary tools. Then, we use these tools to make a deep analysis on popular normalization methods and obtain the following conclusions: 1) Most of the normalization methods can be interpreted in a unified framework, namely normalizing pre-activations or weights onto a sphere; 2) Since most of the existing normalization methods are scaling invariant, we can conduct optimization on a sphere with scaling symmetry removed, which can help to stabilize the training of network; 3) We prove that training with these normalization methods can make the norm of weights increase, which could cause adversarial vulnerability as it amplifies the attack. Finally, a series of experiments are conducted to verify these claims.