huashen218/convxai-cia-dataset huggingface dataset:
How Does SimSiam Avoid Collapse Without Negative Samples? A Unified Understanding with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning
Keywords: SimSiam, Negative samples, SSL, Collapse, Covariance

To avoid collapse in self-supervised learning (SSL), a contrastive loss is widely used but often requires a large number of negative samples. Without negative samples yet achieving competitive performance, a recent work~\citep{chen2021exploring} has attracted significant attention for providing a minimalist simple Siamese (SimSiam) method to avoid collapse. However, the reason for how it avoids collapse without negative samples remains not fully clear and our investigation starts by revisiting the explanatory claims in the original SimSiam. After refuting their claims, we introduce vector decomposition for analyzing the collapse based on the gradient analysis of the $l_2$-normalized representation vector. This yields a unified perspective on how negative samples and SimSiam alleviate collapse. Such a unified perspective comes timely for understanding the recent progress in SSL.
Attention-based Interpretability with Concept Transformers
Keywords: attention, transformer, concepts, interpretability

Attention is a mechanism that has been instrumental in driving remarkable performance gains of deep neural network models in a host of visual, NLP and multimodal tasks.
        One additional notable aspect of attention is that it conveniently exposes the ``reasoning'' behind each particular output generated by the model.
        Specifically, attention scores over input regions or intermediate features have been interpreted as a measure of the contribution of the attended element to the model inference.
        While the debate in regard to the interpretability of attention is still not settled, researchers have pointed out the existence of architectures and scenarios that afford a meaningful interpretation of the attention mechanism.
        
        Here we propose the generalization of attention from low-level input features to high-level concepts as a mechanism to ensure the interpretability of attention scores within a given application domain.
        In particular, we design the ConceptTransformer, a deep learning module that exposes explanations of the output of a model in which it is embedded in terms of attention over user-defined high-level concepts.
        Such explanations are \emph{plausible} (i.e.\ convincing to the human user) and \emph{faithful} (i.e.\ truly reflective of the reasoning process of the model).
        Plausibility of such explanations is obtained by construction by training the attention heads to conform with known relations between inputs, concepts and outputs dictated by domain knowledge.
        Faithfulness is achieved by design by enforcing a linear relation between the transformer value vectors that represent the concepts and their contribution to the classification log-probabilities.
        
        We validate our ConceptTransformer module on established explainability benchmarks and show how it can be used to infuse domain knowledge into classifiers to improve accuracy, and conversely to extract concept-based explanations of classification outputs. Code to reproduce our results is available at: \url{https://github.com/ibm/concept_transformer}.
Inductive Relation Prediction Using Analogy Subgraph Embeddings
Keywords: Link Prediction, Relation Modelling, Heterogeneous Graphs, Knowledge Graphs

Prevailing methods for relation prediction in heterogeneous graphs aim at learning latent representations (i.e., embeddings) of observed nodes and relations, and thus are limited to the transductive setting where the relation types must be known during training.  Here,  we propose ANalogy  SubGraphEmbeddingLearning (GraphANGEL), a novel relation prediction framework that predicts relations5between each node pair based on the subgraphs containing the pair, as well as other  (analogy)  subgraphs with the same graph patterns.   Each graph pattern explicitly represents a specific logical rule, which contributes to an inductive bias that facilitates generalization to unseen relations and leads to more explainable predictive models. Moreover, our method also removes the limited neighborhood constraint of graph neural networks. Our model consistently outperforms existing models on heterogeneous graph based recommendation as well as knowledge graph completion.  We also empirically demonstrate our model’s capability in generalizing to new relations while producing explainable heat maps of attention scores across the discovered logic.
Reinforcement Learning in Presence of Discrete Markovian Context Evolution
Keywords: context-dependent Reinforcement Learning, model-based reinforcement learning, hierarchical Dirichlet process

We consider a context-dependent Reinforcement Learning (RL) setting, which is characterized by: a) an unknown finite number of not directly observable contexts; b) abrupt (discontinuous) context changes occurring during an episode; and c) Markovian context evolution. We argue that this challenging case is often met in applications and we tackle it using a Bayesian model-based approach and variational inference. We adapt a sticky Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP) prior for model learning, which is arguably best-suited for infinite Markov chain modeling. We then derive a context distillation procedure, which identifies and removes spurious contexts in an unsupervised fashion. We argue that the combination of these two components allows inferring the number of contexts from data thus dealing with the context cardinality assumption. We then find the representation of the optimal policy enabling efficient policy learning using off-the-shelf RL algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate empirically (using gym environments cart-pole swing-up, drone, intersection) that our approach succeeds where state-of-the-art methods of other frameworks fail and elaborate on the reasons for such failures.
Optimal Transport for Long-Tailed Recognition with Learnable Cost Matrix
Keywords: Long-tailed recognition, imbalanced classification, optimal transport

It is attracting attention to the long-tailed recognition problem, a burning issue that has become very popular recently. Distinctive from conventional recognition is that it posits that the allocation of the training set is supremely distorted. Predictably, it will pose challenges to the generalisation behaviour of the model. Approaches to these challenges revolve into two groups: firstly, training-aware methods, with the aim of enhancing the generalisability of the model by exploiting its potential in the training period; and secondly, post-hoc correction, liberally coupled with training-aware methods, which is intended to refine the predictions to the extent possible in the post-processing stage, offering the advantages of simplicity and effectiveness. This paper introduces an alternative direction to do the post-hoc correction, which goes beyond the statistical methods. Mathematically, we approach this issue from the perspective of optimal transport (OT), yet, choosing the exact cost matrix when applying OT is challenging and requires expert knowledge of various tasks. To overcome this limitation, we propose to employ linear mapping to learn the cost matrix without necessary configurations adaptively. Testing our methods in practice, along with high efficiency and excellent performance, our method surpasses all previous methods and has the best performance to date.
PriorGrad: Improving Conditional Denoising Diffusion Models with Data-Dependent Adaptive Prior
Keywords: diffusion-based model, generative model, speech synthesis

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models have been recently proposed to generate high-quality samples by estimating the gradient of the data density. The framework assumes the prior noise as a standard Gaussian distribution, whereas the corresponding data distribution may be more complicated than the standard Gaussian distribution, which potentially introduces inefficiency in denoising the prior noise into the data sample because of the discrepancy between the data and the prior. In this paper, we propose PriorGrad to improve the efficiency of the conditional diffusion model (for example, a vocoder using a mel-spectrogram as the condition) by applying an adaptive prior derived from the data statistics based on the conditional information. We formulate the training and sampling procedures of PriorGrad and demonstrate the advantages of an adaptive prior through a theoretical analysis. Focusing on the audio domain, we consider the recently proposed diffusion-based audio generative models based on both the spectral and time domains and show that PriorGrad achieves faster convergence and superior performance, leading to an improved perceptual quality and tolerance to a smaller network capacity, and thereby demonstrating the efficiency of a data-dependent adaptive prior.
Target-Side Input Augmentation for Sequence to Sequence Generation
Keywords: Sequence Gerneration, Data Augmentation

Autoregressive sequence generation, a prevalent task in machine learning and natural language processing, generates every target token conditioned on both a source input and previously generated target tokens. Previous data augmentation methods, which have been shown to be effective for the task, mainly enhance source inputs (e.g., injecting noise into the source sequence by random swapping or masking, back translation, etc.) while overlooking the target-side augmentation. In this work, we propose a target-side augmentation method for sequence generation. In training, we use the decoder output probability distributions as soft indicators, which are multiplied with target token embeddings, to build pseudo tokens. These soft pseudo tokens are then used as target tokens to enhance the training. We conduct comprehensive experiments on various sequence generation tasks, including dialog generation, machine translation, and abstractive summarization. Without using any extra labeled data or introducing additional model parameters, our method significantly outperforms strong baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/TARGET-SIDE-DATA-AUG/TSDASG.
UniFormer: Unified Transformer for Efficient Spatial-Temporal Representation Learning
Keywords: Spatial-Temporal Representation Learning, 3D Convolution, Transformer

It is a challenging task to learn rich and multi-scale spatiotemporal semantics from high-dimensional videos, due to large local redundancy and complex global dependency between video frames. The recent advances in this research have been mainly driven by 3D convolutional neural networks and vision transformers. Although 3D convolution can efficiently aggregate local context to suppress local redundancy from a small 3D neighborhood, it lacks the capability to capture global dependency because of the limited receptive field. Alternatively, vision transformers can effectively capture long-range dependency by self-attention mechanism, while having the limitation on reducing local redundancy with blind similarity comparison among all the tokens in each layer. Based on these observations, we propose a novel Unified transFormer (UniFormer) which seamlessly integrates merits of 3D convolution and spatiotemporal self-attention in a concise transformer format, and achieves a preferable balance between computation and accuracy. Different from traditional transformers, our relation aggregator can tackle both spatiotemporal redundancy and dependency, by learning local and global token affinity respectively in shallow and deep layers. We conduct extensive experiments on the popular video benchmarks, e.g., Kinetics-400, Kinetics-600, and Something-Something V1&V2. With only ImageNet-1K pretraining, our UniFormer achieves 82.9%/84.8% top-1 accuracy on Kinetics-400/Kinetics-600, while requiring 10x fewer GFLOPs than other state-of-the-art methods. For Something-Something V1 and V2, our UniFormer achieves new state-of-the-art performances of 60.9% and 71.2% top-1 accuracy respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/Sense-X/UniFormer.
Inverse Online Learning: Understanding Non-Stationary and Reactionary Policies
Keywords: Decision Modelling, Imitation Learning, Inverse Online Learning

Human decision making is well known to be imperfect and the ability to analyse such processes individually is crucial when attempting to aid or improve a decision-maker's ability to perform a task, e.g. to alert them to potential biases or oversights on their part. To do so, it is necessary to develop interpretable representations of how agents make decisions and how this process changes over time as the agent learns online in reaction to the accrued experience. To then understand the decision-making processes underlying a set of observed trajectories, we cast the policy inference problem as the inverse to this online learning problem. By interpreting actions within a potential outcomes framework, we introduce a meaningful mapping based on agents choosing an action they believe to have the greatest treatment effect. We introduce a practical algorithm for retrospectively estimating such perceived effects, alongside the process through which agents update them, using a novel architecture built upon an expressive family of deep state-space models. Through application to the analysis of UNOS organ donation acceptance decisions, we demonstrate that our approach can bring valuable insights into the factors that govern decision processes and how they change over time.
Multi-Mode Deep Matrix and Tensor Factorization

Recently, deep linear and nonlinear matrix factorizations gain increasing attention in the area of machine learning. Existing deep nonlinear matrix factorization methods can only exploit partial nonlinearity of the data and are not effective in handling matrices of which the number of rows is comparable to the number of columns. On the other hand, there is still a gap between deep learning and tensor decomposition. This paper presents a framework of multi-mode deep matrix and tensor factorizations to explore and exploit the full nonlinearity of the data in matrices and tensors. We use the factorization methods to solve matrix and tensor completion problems and prove that our methods have tighter generalization error bounds than conventional matrix and tensor factorization methods. The experiments on synthetic data and real datasets showed that the proposed methods have much higher recovery accuracy than many baselines.
LORD: Lower-Dimensional Embedding of Log-Signature in Neural Rough Differential Equations

The problem of processing very long time-series data (e.g., a length of more than 10,000) is a long-standing research problem in machine learning. Recently, one breakthrough, called neural rough differential equations (NRDEs), has been proposed and has shown that it is able to process such data. Their main concept is to use the log-signature transform, which is known to be more efficient than the Fourier transform for irregular long time-series, to convert a very long time-series sample into a relatively shorter series of feature vectors. However, the log-signature transform causes non-trivial spatial overheads. To this end, we present the method of LOweR-Dimensional embedding of log-signature (LORD), where we define an NRDE-based autoencoder to implant the higher-depth log-signature knowledge into the lower-depth log-signature. We show that the encoder successfully combines the higher-depth and the lower-depth log-signature knowledge, which greatly stabilizes the training process and increases the model accuracy. In our experiments with benchmark datasets, the improvement ratio by our method is up to 75\% in terms of various classification and forecasting evaluation metrics.
Generalized Natural Gradient Flows in Hidden Convex-Concave Games and GANs

Game-theoretic formulations in machine learning have recently risen in prominence, whereby entire modeling paradigms are best captured as zero-sum games. Despite their popularity, however, their dynamics are still poorly understood. This lack of theory is often substantiated with painful empirical observations of volatile training dynamics and even divergence. Such results highlight the need to develop an appropriate theory with convergence guarantees that are powerful enough to inform practice. This paper studies the generalized Gradient Descent-Ascent (GDA) flow in a large class of non-convex non-concave Zero-Sum games dubbed Hidden Convex-Concave games, a class of games that includes GANs. We focus on two specific geometries: a novel geometry induced by the hidden convex-concave structure that we call the hidden mapping geometry and the Fisher information geometry. For the hidden mapping geometry, we prove global convergence under mild assumptions. In the case of Fisher information geometry, we provide a complete picture of the dynamics in an interesting special setting of team competition via invariant function analysis.
Offline Neural Contextual Bandits: Pessimism, Optimization and Generalization
Keywords: offline policy learning, offline contextual bandits, neural network function approximation

Offline policy learning (OPL) leverages existing data collected a priori for policy optimization without any active exploration. Despite the prevalence and recent interest in this problem, its theoretical and algorithmic foundations in function approximation settings remain under-developed. In this paper, we consider this problem on the axes of distributional shift, optimization, and generalization in offline contextual bandits with neural networks. In particular, we propose a provably efficient offline contextual bandit with neural network function approximation that does not require any functional assumption on the reward. We show that our method provably generalizes over unseen contexts under a milder condition for distributional shift than the existing OPL works. Notably, unlike any other OPL method, our method learns from the offline data in an online manner using stochastic gradient descent, allowing us to leverage the benefits of online learning into an offline setting. Moreover, we show that our method is more computationally efficient and has a better dependence on the effective dimension of the neural network than an online counterpart. Finally, we demonstrate the empirical effectiveness of our method in a range of synthetic and real-world OPL problems.
THOMAS: Trajectory Heatmap Output with learned Multi-Agent Sampling
Keywords: Trajectory prediction, Multi-agent, Motion forecasting, Motion estimation, Autonomous driving

In this paper, we propose THOMAS, a joint multi-agent trajectory prediction framework allowing for an efficient and consistent prediction of multi-agent multi-modal trajectories. We present a unified model architecture for simultaneous agent future heatmap estimation, in which we leverage hierarchical and sparse image generation for fast and memory-efficient inference. We propose a learnable trajectory recombination model that takes as input a set of predicted trajectories for each agent and outputs its consistent reordered recombination. This recombination module is able to realign the initially independent modalities so that they do no collide and are coherent with each other.  We report our results on the Interaction multi-agent prediction challenge and rank $1^{st}$ on the online test leaderboard.
CLEVA-Compass: A Continual Learning Evaluation Assessment Compass to Promote Research Transparency and Comparability
Keywords: continual learning, lifelong learning, machine learning evaluation

What is the state of the art in continual machine learning? Although a natural question for predominant static benchmarks, the notion to train systems in a lifelong manner entails a plethora of additional challenges with respect to set-up and evaluation.  The latter have recently sparked a growing amount of critiques on prominent algorithm-centric perspectives and evaluation protocols being too narrow, resulting in several attempts at constructing guidelines in favor of specific desiderata or arguing against the validity of prevalent assumptions.  In this work, we depart from this mindset and argue that the goal of a precise formulation of desiderata is an ill-posed one, as diverse applications may always warrant distinct scenarios. Instead, we introduce the Continual Learning EValuation Assessment Compass: the CLEVA-Compass. The compass provides the visual means to both identify how approaches are practically reported and how works can simultaneously be contextualized in the broader literature landscape.  In addition to promoting compact specification in the spirit of recent replication trends, it thus provides an intuitive chart to understand the priorities of individual systems, where they resemble each other, and what elements are missing towards a fair comparison.
Neural Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming
Keywords: data-driven algorithm design, learning to optimize, multi-stage stochastic optimization, primal-dual dynamic programming

Stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP) is a state-of-the-art method for solving multi-stage stochastic optimization, widely used for modeling real-world process optimization tasks. Unfortunately, SDDP has a worst-case complexity that scales exponentially in the number of decision variables, which severely limits applicability to only low dimensional problems. To overcome this limitation, we extend SDDP by introducing a trainable neural model that learns to map problem instances to a piece-wise linear value function within intrinsic low-dimension space, which is architected specifically to interact with a base SDDP solver, so that can accelerate optimization performance on new instances. The proposed Neural Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming ($$\nu$$-SDDP) continually self-improves by solving successive problems. An empirical investigation demonstrates that $$\nu$$-SDDP can significantly reduce problem solving cost without sacrificing solution quality over competitors such as SDDP and reinforcement learning algorithms, across a range of synthetic and real-world process optimization problems.
DemoDICE: Offline Imitation Learning with Supplementary Imperfect Demonstrations
Keywords: imitation learning, offline imitation learning, imperfect demonstration, non-expert demonstration

We consider offline imitation learning (IL), which aims to mimic the expert's behavior from its demonstration without further interaction with the environment. One of the main challenges in offline IL is to deal with the narrow support of the data distribution exhibited by the expert demonstrations that cover only a small fraction of the state and the action spaces. As a result, offline IL algorithms that rely only on expert demonstrations are very unstable since the situation easily deviates from those in the expert demonstrations. In this paper, we assume additional demonstration data of unknown degrees of optimality, which we call imperfect demonstrations. Under this setting, we propose DemoDICE, which effectively utilizes imperfect demonstrations by matching the stationary distribution of a policy with experts' distribution while penalizing its deviation from the overall demonstrations. Compared with the recent IL algorithms that adopt adversarial minimax training objectives, we substantially stabilize overall learning process by reducing minimax optimization to a direct convex optimization in a principled manner. Using extensive tasks, we show that DemoDICE achieves promising results in the offline IL from expert and imperfect demonstrations.