huashen218/convxai-cia-dataset huggingface dataset:
CoCo: Controllable Counterfactuals for Evaluating Dialogue State Trackers
Keywords: task-oriented dialogue, dialogue state tracking, robustness, dst, evaluation

Dialogue state trackers have made significant progress on benchmark datasets, but their generalization capability to novel and realistic scenarios beyond the held- out conversations is less understood. We propose controllable counterfactuals (COCO) to bridge this gap and evaluate dialogue state tracking (DST) models on novel scenarios, i.e., would the system successfully tackle the request if the user responded differently but still consistently with the dialogue flow? COCO leverages turn-level belief states as counterfactual conditionals to produce novel conversation scenarios in two steps: (i) counterfactual goal generation at turn- level by dropping and adding slots followed by replacing slot values, (ii) counterfactual conversation generation that is conditioned on (i) and consistent with the dialogue flow. Evaluating state-of-the-art DST models on MultiWOZ dataset with COCO-generated counterfactuals results in a significant performance drop of up to 30.8% (from 49.4% to 18.6%) in absolute joint goal accuracy. In comparison, widely used techniques like paraphrasing only affect the accuracy by at most 2%. Human evaluations show that COCO-generated conversations perfectly reflect the underlying user goal with more than 95% accuracy and are as human-like as the original conversations, further strengthening its reliability and promise to be adopted as part of the robustness evaluation of DST models.
AdaGCN: Adaboosting Graph Convolutional Networks into Deep Models
Keywords: Graph Neural Networks, AdaBoost

The design of deep graph models still remains to be investigated and the crucial part is how to explore and exploit the knowledge from different hops of neighbors in an efficient way. In this paper, we propose a novel RNN-like deep graph neural network architecture by incorporating AdaBoost into the computation of network; and the proposed graph convolutional network called AdaGCN~(Adaboosting Graph Convolutional Network) has the ability to efficiently extract knowledge from high-order neighbors of current nodes and then integrates knowledge from different hops of neighbors into the network in an Adaboost way. Different from other graph neural networks that directly stack many graph convolution layers, AdaGCN shares the same base neural network architecture among all ``layers'' and is recursively optimized, which is similar to an RNN. Besides, We also theoretically established the connection between AdaGCN and existing graph convolutional methods, presenting the benefits of our proposal. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the consistent state-of-the-art prediction performance on graphs across different label rates and the computational advantage of our approach AdaGCN~\footnote{Code is available at \url{https://github.com/datake/AdaGCN}.}.
Learning What To Do by Simulating the Past
Keywords: imitation learning, reward learning, reinforcement learning

Since reward functions are hard to specify, recent work has focused on learning policies from human feedback. However, such approaches are impeded by the expense of acquiring such feedback. Recent work proposed that agents have access to a source of information that is effectively free: in any environment that humans have acted in, the state will already be optimized for human preferences, and thus an agent can extract information about what humans want from the state. Such learning is possible in principle, but requires simulating all possible past trajectories that could have led to the observed state. This is feasible in gridworlds, but how do we scale it to complex tasks? In this work, we show that by combining a learned feature encoder with learned inverse models, we can enable agents to simulate human actions backwards in time to infer what they must have done. The resulting algorithm is able to reproduce a specific skill in MuJoCo environments given a single state sampled from the optimal policy for that skill.
CcGAN: Continuous Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Image Generation
Keywords: Conditional generative adversarial networks, image generation, continuous and scalar conditions

This work proposes the continuous conditional generative adversarial network (CcGAN), the first generative model for image generation conditional on continuous, scalar conditions (termed regression labels). Existing conditional GANs (cGANs) are mainly designed for categorical conditions (e.g., class labels); conditioning on a continuous label is mathematically distinct and raises two fundamental problems: (P1) Since there may be very few (even zero) real images for some regression labels, minimizing existing empirical versions of cGAN losses (a.k.a. empirical cGAN losses) often fails in practice; (P2) Since regression labels are scalar and infinitely many, conventional label input methods (e.g., combining a hidden map of the generator/discriminator with a one-hot encoded label) are not applicable. The proposed CcGAN solves the above problems, respectively, by (S1) reformulating existing empirical cGAN losses to be appropriate for the continuous scenario; and (S2) proposing a novel method to incorporate regression labels into the generator and the discriminator. The reformulation in (S1) leads to two novel empirical discriminator losses, termed the hard vicinal discriminator loss (HVDL) and the soft vicinal discriminator loss (SVDL) respectively, and a novel empirical generator loss. The error bounds of a discriminator trained with HVDL and SVDL are derived under mild assumptions in this work. A new benchmark dataset, RC-49, is also proposed for generative image modeling conditional on regression labels. Our experiments on the Circular 2-D Gaussians, RC-49, and UTKFace datasets show that CcGAN is able to generate diverse, high-quality samples from the image distribution conditional on a given regression label. Moreover, in these experiments, CcGAN substantially outperforms cGAN both visually and quantitatively.
ANOCE: Analysis of Causal Effects with Multiple Mediators via Constrained Structural Learning
Keywords: Causal network, Constrained optimization, COVID-19, Individual mediation effects, Structure learning

In the era of causal revolution, identifying the causal effect of an exposure on the outcome of interest is an important problem in many areas, such as epidemics, medicine, genetics, and economics. Under a general causal graph, the exposure may have a direct effect on the outcome and also an indirect effect regulated by a set of mediators. An analysis of causal effects that interprets the causal mechanism contributed through mediators is hence challenging but on demand. To the best of our knowledge, there are no feasible algorithms that give an exact decomposition of the indirect effect on the level of individual mediators, due to common interaction among mediators in the complex graph. In this paper, we establish a new statistical framework to comprehensively characterize causal effects with multiple mediators, namely, ANalysis Of Causal Effects (ANOCE), with a newly introduced definition of the mediator effect, under the linear structure equation model. We further propose a constrained causal structure learning method by incorporating a novel identification constraint that specifies the temporal causal relationship of variables. The proposed algorithm is applied to investigate the causal effects of 2020 Hubei lockdowns on reducing the spread of the coronavirus in Chinese major cities out of Hubei.
Direction Matters: On the Implicit Bias of Stochastic Gradient Descent with Moderate Learning Rate
Keywords: SGD, regularization, implicit bias

Understanding the algorithmic bias of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the key challenges in modern machine learning and deep learning theory. Most of the existing works, however, focus on very small or even infinitesimal learning rate regime, and fail to cover practical scenarios where the learning rate is moderate and annealing. In this paper, we make an initial attempt to characterize the particular regularization effect of SGD in the moderate learning rate regime by studying its behavior for optimizing an overparameterized linear regression problem. In this case, SGD and GD are known to converge to the unique minimum-norm solution; however, with the moderate and annealing learning rate, we show that they exhibit different directional bias: SGD converges along the large eigenvalue directions of the data matrix, while GD goes after the small eigenvalue directions. Furthermore, we show that such directional bias does matter when early stopping is adopted, where the SGD output is nearly optimal but the GD output is suboptimal. Finally, our theory explains several folk arts in practice used for SGD hyperparameter tuning, such as (1) linearly scaling the initial learning rate with batch size; and (2) overrunning SGD with high learning rate even when the loss stops decreasing.
A Design Space Study for LISTA and Beyond

In recent years, great success has been witnessed in building problem-specific deep networks from unrolling iterative algorithms, for solving inverse problems and beyond. Unrolling is believed to incorporate the model-based prior with the learning capacity of deep learning. This paper revisits \textit{the role of unrolling as a design approach for deep networks}: to what extent its resulting special architecture is superior, and can we find better? Using LISTA for sparse recovery as a representative example, we conduct the first thorough \textit{design space study} for the unrolled models.  Among all possible variations, we focus on extensively varying the connectivity patterns and neuron types, leading to a gigantic design space arising from LISTA. To efficiently explore this space and identify top performers, we leverage the emerging tool of neural architecture search (NAS). We carefully examine the searched top architectures in a number of settings, and are able to discover networks that consistently better than LISTA. We further present more visualization and analysis to ``open the black box", and find that the searched top architectures demonstrate highly consistent and potentially transferable patterns. We hope our study to spark more reflections and explorations on how to better mingle model-based optimization prior and data-driven learning.
PAC Confidence Predictions for Deep Neural Network Classifiers
Keywords: classification, calibration, probably approximated correct guarantee, fast DNN inference, safe planning

A key challenge for deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) in safety critical settings is the need to provide rigorous ways to quantify their uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for constructing predicted classification confidences for DNNs that comes with provable correctness guarantees. Our approach uses Clopper-Pearson confidence intervals for the Binomial distribution in conjunction with the histogram binning approach to calibrated prediction. In addition, we demonstrate how our predicted confidences can be used to enable downstream guarantees in two settings: (i) fast DNN inference, where we demonstrate how to compose a fast but inaccurate DNN with an accurate but slow DNN in a rigorous way to improve performance without sacrificing accuracy, and (ii) safe planning, where we guarantee safety when using a DNN to predict whether a given action is safe based on visual observations. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our approach can be used to provide guarantees for state-of-the-art DNNs.
X2T: Training an X-to-Text Typing Interface with Online Learning from User Feedback
Keywords: reinforcement learning, human-computer interaction

We aim to help users communicate their intent to machines using flexible, adaptive interfaces that translate arbitrary user input into desired actions. In this work, we focus on assistive typing applications in which a user cannot operate a keyboard, but can instead supply other inputs, such as webcam images that capture eye gaze or neural activity measured by a brain implant. Standard methods train a model on a fixed dataset of user inputs, then deploy a static interface that does not learn from its mistakes; in part, because extracting an error signal from user behavior can be challenging. We investigate a simple idea that would enable such interfaces to improve over time, with minimal additional effort from the user: online learning from user feedback on the accuracy of the interface's actions. In the typing domain, we leverage backspaces as feedback that the interface did not perform the desired action. We propose an algorithm called x-to-text (X2T) that trains a predictive model of this feedback signal, and uses this model to fine-tune any existing, default interface for translating user input into actions that select words or characters. We evaluate X2T through a small-scale online user study with 12 participants who type sentences by gazing at their desired words, a large-scale observational study on handwriting samples from 60 users, and a pilot study with one participant using an electrocorticography-based brain-computer interface. The results show that X2T learns to outperform a non-adaptive default interface, stimulates user co-adaptation to the interface, personalizes the interface to individual users, and can leverage offline data collected from the default interface to improve its initial performance and accelerate online learning.
Discrete Graph Structure Learning for Forecasting Multiple Time Series
Keywords: Time series forecasting, graph neural network, graph structure learning

Time series forecasting is an extensively studied subject in statistics, economics, and computer science. Exploration of the correlation and causation among the variables in a multivariate time series shows promise in enhancing the performance of a time series model. When using deep neural networks as forecasting models, we hypothesize that exploiting the pairwise information among multiple (multivariate) time series also improves their forecast. If an explicit graph structure is known, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been demonstrated as powerful tools to exploit the structure. In this work, we propose learning the structure simultaneously with the GNN if the graph is unknown. We cast the problem as learning a probabilistic graph model through optimizing the mean performance over the graph distribution. The distribution is parameterized by a neural network so that discrete graphs can be sampled differentiably through reparameterization. Empirical evaluations show that our method is simpler, more efficient, and better performing than a recently proposed bilevel learning approach for graph structure learning, as well as a broad array of forecasting models, either deep or non-deep learning based, and graph or non-graph based.
Task-Agnostic Morphology Evolution
Keywords: morphology, unsupervised, evolution, information theory, empowerment

Deep reinforcement learning primarily focuses on learning behavior, usually overlooking the fact that an agent's function is largely determined by form. So, how should one go about finding a morphology fit for solving tasks in a given environment? Current approaches that co-adapt morphology and behavior use a specific task's reward as a signal for morphology optimization. However, this often requires expensive policy optimization and results in task-dependent morphologies that are not built to generalize. In this work, we propose a new approach, Task-Agnostic Morphology Evolution (TAME), to alleviate both of these issues. Without any task or reward specification, TAME evolves morphologies by only applying randomly sampled action primitives on a population of agents. This is accomplished using an information-theoretic objective that efficiently ranks agents by their ability to reach diverse states in the environment and the causality of their actions. Finally, we empirically demonstrate that across 2D, 3D, and manipulation environments TAME can evolve morphologies that match the multi-task performance of those learned with task supervised algorithms. Our code and videos can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/task-agnostic-evolution .
Deep Equals Shallow for ReLU Networks in Kernel Regimes
Keywords: deep learning, kernels, approximation, neural tangent kernels

Deep networks are often considered to be more expressive than shallow ones in terms of approximation. Indeed, certain functions can be approximated by deep networks provably more efficiently than by shallow ones, however, no tractable algorithms are known for learning such deep models. Separately, a recent line of work has shown that deep networks trained with gradient descent may behave like (tractable) kernel methods in a certain over-parameterized regime, where the kernel is determined by the architecture and initialization, and this paper focuses on approximation for such kernels. We show that for ReLU activations, the kernels derived from deep fully-connected networks have essentially the same approximation properties as their shallow two-layer counterpart, namely the same eigenvalue decay for the corresponding integral operator. This highlights the limitations of the kernel framework for understanding the benefits of such deep architectures. Our main theoretical result relies on characterizing such eigenvalue decays through differentiability properties of the kernel function, which also easily applies to the study of other kernels defined on the sphere.
Loss Function Discovery for Object Detection via Convergence-Simulation Driven Search
Keywords: Object detection, AutoML, Evolutionary algorithm, Loss function search

Designing proper loss functions for vision tasks has been a long-standing research direction to advance the capability of existing models. For object detection, the well-established classification and regression loss functions have been carefully designed by considering diverse learning challenges (e.g. class imbalance, hard negative samples, and scale variances). Inspired by the recent progress in network architecture search, it is interesting to explore the possibility of discovering new loss function formulations via directly searching the primitive operation combinations. So that the learned losses not only fit for diverse object detection challenges to alleviate huge human efforts, but also have better alignment with evaluation metric and good mathematical convergence property. Beyond the previous auto-loss works on face recognition and image classification, our work makes the first attempt to discover new loss functions for the challenging object detection from primitive operation levels and finds the searched losses are insightful. We propose an effective convergence-simulation driven evolutionary search algorithm, called CSE-Autoloss, for speeding up the search progress by regularizing the mathematical rationality of loss candidates via two progressive convergence simulation modules: convergence property verification and model optimization simulation. CSE-Autoloss involves the search space (i.e. 21 mathematical operators, 3 constant-type inputs, and 3 variable-type inputs) that cover a wide range of the possible variants of existing losses and discovers best-searched loss function combination within a short time (around 1.5 wall-clock days with 20x speedup in comparison to the vanilla evolutionary algorithm). We conduct extensive evaluations of loss function search on popular detectors and validate the good generalization capability of searched losses across diverse architectures and various datasets. Our experiments show that the best-discovered loss function combinations outperform default combinations (Cross-entropy/Focal loss for classification and L1 loss for regression) by 1.1% and 0.8% in terms of mAP for two-stage and one-stage detectors on COCO respectively. Our searched losses are available at https://github.com/PerdonLiu/CSE-Autoloss.
Effective Distributed Learning with Random Features: Improved Bounds and Algorithms
Keywords: Risk bound, statistical learning theory, kernel methods

In this paper, we study the statistical properties of distributed kernel ridge regression together with random features (DKRR-RF), and obtain optimal generalization bounds under the basic setting, which can substantially relax the restriction on the number of local machines in the existing state-of-art bounds. Specifically, we first show that the simple combination of divide-and-conquer technique and random features can achieve the same statistical accuracy as the exact KRR in expectation requiring only O(|D|) memory and O(|D|1.5) time. Then, beyond the generalization bounds in expectation that demonstrate the average information for multiple trails, we derive generalization bounds in probability to capture the learning performance for a single trail. Finally, we propose an effective communication strategy to further improve the performance of DKRR-RF, and validate the theoretical bounds via numerical experiments.
On InstaHide, Phase Retrieval, and Sparse Matrix Factorization
Keywords: Distributed learning, InstaHide, phase retrieval, matrix factorization

In this work, we examine the security of InstaHide, a scheme recently proposed by \cite{hsla20} for preserving the security of private datasets in the context of distributed learning. To generate a synthetic training example to be shared among the distributed learners, InstaHide takes a convex combination of private feature vectors and randomly flips the sign of each entry of the resulting vector with probability 1/2. A salient question is whether this scheme is secure in any provable sense, perhaps under a plausible complexity-theoretic assumption. 
        
        The answer to this turns out to be quite subtle and closely related to the average-case complexity of a multi-task, missing-data version of the classic problem of phase retrieval that is interesting in its own right. Motivated by this connection, under the standard distributional assumption that the public/private feature vectors are isotropic Gaussian, we design an algorithm that can actually recover a private vector using only the public vectors and a sequence of synthetic vectors generated by InstaHide.
Anchor & Transform: Learning Sparse Embeddings for Large Vocabularies
Keywords: sparse embeddings, large vocabularies, text classification, language modeling, recommendation systems

Learning continuous representations of discrete objects such as text, users, movies, and URLs lies at the heart of many applications including language and user modeling. When using discrete objects as input to neural networks, we often ignore the underlying structures (e.g., natural groupings and similarities) and embed the objects independently into individual vectors. As a result, existing methods do not scale to large vocabulary sizes. In this paper, we design a simple and efficient embedding algorithm that learns a small set of anchor embeddings and a sparse transformation matrix. We call our method Anchor & Transform (ANT) as the embeddings of discrete objects are a sparse linear combination of the anchors, weighted according to the transformation matrix. ANT is scalable, flexible, and end-to-end trainable. We further provide a statistical interpretation of our algorithm as a Bayesian nonparametric prior for embeddings that encourages sparsity and leverages natural groupings among objects. By deriving an approximate inference algorithm based on Small Variance Asymptotics, we obtain a natural extension that automatically learns the optimal number of anchors instead of having to tune it as a hyperparameter. On text classification, language modeling, and movie recommendation benchmarks, we show that ANT is particularly suitable for large vocabulary sizes and demonstrates stronger performance with fewer parameters (up to 40x compression) as compared to existing compression baselines.