nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Trusted Multi-View Classification
Authors: Zongbo Han, Changqing Zhang, Huazhu Fu, Joey Tianyi Zhou

Multi-view classification (MVC) generally focuses on improving classification accuracy by using information from different views, typically integrating them into a unified comprehensive representation for downstream tasks. However, it is also crucial to dynamically assess the quality of a view for different samples in order to provide reliable uncertainty estimations, which indicate whether predictions can be trusted. To this end, we propose a novel multi-view classification method, termed trusted multi-view classification, which provides a new paradigm for multi-view learning by dynamically integrating different views at an evidence level. The algorithm jointly utilizes multiple views to promote both classification reliability (uncertainty estimation during testing) and robustness (out-of-distribution-awareness during training) by integrating evidence from each view. To achieve this, the Dirichlet distribution is used to model the distribution of the class probabilities, parameterized with evidence from different views and integrated with the Dempster-Shafer theory. The unified learning framework induces accurate uncertainty and accordingly endows the model with both reliability and robustness for out-of-distribution samples. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed model in accuracy, reliability and robustness.
Learning Algebraic Representation for Abstract Spatial-Temporal Reasoning
Authors: Chi Zhang, Sirui Xie, Baoxiong Jia, Yixin Zhu, Ying Nian Wu, Song-Chun Zhu

Is intelligence realized by connectionist or classicist? While connectionist approaches have achieved superhuman performance, there has been growing evidence that such task-specific superiority is particularly fragile in systematic generalization. This observation lies in the central debate (Fodor et al., 1988; Fodor &McLaughlin, 1990) between connectionist and classicist, wherein the latter continually advocates an algebraic treatment in cognitive architectures. In this work, we follow the classicist's call and propose a hybrid approach to improve systematic generalization in reasoning. Specifically, we showcase a prototype with algebraic representations for the abstract spatial-temporal reasoning task of Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPM) and present the ALgebra-Aware Neuro-Semi-Symbolic (ALANS$^2$) learner. The ALANS$^2$ learner is motivated by abstract algebra and the representation theory. It consists of a neural visual perception frontend and an algebraic abstract reasoning backend: the frontend summarizes the visual information from object-based representations, while the backend transforms it into an algebraic structure and induces the hidden operator on-the-fly. The induced operator is later executed to predict the answer's representation, and the choice most similar to the prediction is selected as the solution. Extensive experiments show that by incorporating an algebraic treatment, the ALANS$^2$ learner outperforms various pure connectionist models in domains requiring systematic generalization. We further show that the algebraic representation learned can be decoded by isomorphism and used to generate an answer.
Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Train and Evaluate Instructional Sequencing Policies for an Intelligent Tutoring System
Authors: Jithendaraa Subramanian, David Mostow

We present STEP, a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning solution to the problem of learning instructional sequencing.  STEP has three components: 1. Simulate the student by fitting a knowledge tracing model to data logged by an intelligent tutoring system. 2. Train instructional sequencing policies by using Proximal Policy Optimization. 3. Evaluate the learned instructional policies by estimating their local and global impact on learning gains.  STEP leverages the student model by representing the student’s knowledge state as a probability vector of knowing each skill and using the student’s estimated learning gains as its reward function to evaluate candidate policies.  A learned policy represents a mapping from each state to an action that maximizes the reward, i.e. the upward distance to the next state in the multi-dimensional space. We use STEP to discover and evaluate potential improvements to a literacy and numeracy tutor used by hundreds of children in Tanzania.
Policy Optimization with Stochastic Mirror Descent
Authors: Long Yang, Gang Zheng, Zavier Zhang, Yu Zhang, Qian Zheng, Jun Wen, Gang Pana sample efficient policy gradient method with stochastic mirror descent.

Improving sample efficiency has been a longstanding goal in reinforcement learning.
In this paper, we propose the $\mathtt{VRMPO}$: a sample efficient policy gradient method with stochastic mirror descent.
A novel variance reduced policy gradient estimator is the key of $\mathtt{VRMPO}$ to improve sample efficiency.
Our $\mathtt{VRMPO}$ needs only $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$ sample trajectories to achieve an $\epsilon$-approximate first-order stationary point, 
which matches the best-known sample complexity.
We conduct extensive experiments to show our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art policy gradient methods in various settings.
Hyper-Regularization: An Adaptive Choice for the Learning Rate in Gradient Descent
Authors: Guangzeng Xie, Hao Jin, Dachao Lin, Zhihua Zhang

We present a novel approach for adaptively selecting the learning rate in gradient descent methods.  Specifically, we impose a regularization term on the learning rate via a generalized distance, and cast the joint updating process of the parameter and the learning rate into a maxmin problem. Some existing schemes such as AdaGrad (diagonal version) and WNGrad can be rederived from our approach. Based on our approach, the updating rules for the learning rate do not rely on the smoothness constant of optimization problems and are robust to the initial learning rate. We theoretically analyze our approach in full batch and online learning settings, which achieves comparable performances with other first-order gradient-based algorithms in terms of accuracy as well as convergence rate.
PI3NN: Out-of-distribution-aware Prediction Intervals from Three Neural Networks
Authors: Siyan Liu, Pei Zhang, Dan Lu, Guannan Zhang

We propose a novel prediction interval (PI) method for uncertainty quantification, which addresses three major issues with the state-of-the-art PI methods. First, existing PI methods require retraining of neural networks (NNs) for every given confidence level and suffer from the crossing issue in calculating multiple PIs. Second, they usually rely on customized loss functions with extra sensitive hyperparameters for which fine tuning is required to achieve a well-calibrated PI. Third, they usually underestimate uncertainties of out-of-distribution (OOD) samples leading to over-confident PIs. Our PI3NN method calculates PIs from linear combinations of three NNs, each of which is independently trained using the standard mean squared error loss. The coefficients of the linear combinations are computed using root-finding algorithms to ensure tight PIs for a given confidence level. We theoretically prove that PI3NN can calculate PIs for a series of confidence levels without retraining NNs and it completely avoids the crossing issue. Additionally, PI3NN does not introduce any unusual hyperparameters resulting in a stable performance. Furthermore, we address OOD identification challenge by introducing an initialization scheme which provides reasonably larger PIs of the OOD samples than those of the in-distribution samples. Benchmark and real-world experiments show that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches with respect to predictive uncertainty quality, robustness, and OOD samples identification.
Unsupervised Learning of Node Embeddings by Detecting Communities
Authors: Chi Thang Duong, Dung Hoang, Truong Giang Le Ba, Thanh Le Cong, Hongzhi Yin, Matthias Weidlich, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, Karl Aberer

We present Deep MinCut (DMC), an unsupervised approach to learn node embeddings for graph-structured data. It derives node representations based on their membership in communities. As such, the embeddings directly provide interesting insights into the graph structure, so that the separate node clustering step of existing methods is no longer needed. DMC learns both, node embeddings and communities, simultaneously by minimizing the mincut loss, which captures the number of connections between communities. Striving for high scalability, we also propose a training process for DMC based on minibatches. We provide empirical evidence that the communities learned by DMC are meaningful and that the node embeddings are competitive in different node classification benchmarks.
Model-Targeted Poisoning Attacks with Provable Convergence
Authors: Fnu Suya, Saeed Mahloujifar, David Evans, Yuan Tian

In a poisoning attack, an adversary with control over a small fraction of the training data attempts to select that data in a way that induces a model that misbehaves in a particular way desired by the adversary, such as misclassifying certain inputs. We propose an efficient poisoning attack that can target a desired model based on online convex optimization. Unlike previous model-targeted poisoning attacks, our attack comes with provable convergence to any achievable target classifier. The distance from the induced classifier to the target classifier is inversely proportional to the square root of the number of poisoning points. We also provide a lower bound on the minimum number of poisoning points needed to achieve a given target classifier. Our attack is the first model-targeted poisoning attack that provides provable convergence, and in our experiments it either exceeds or matches the best state-of-the-art attacks in terms of attack success rate and distance to the target model. In addition, as an online attack our attack can incrementally determine nearly optimal poisoning points.
Red Alarm for Pre-trained Models: Universal Vulnerability to Neuron-Level Backdoor Attacks
Authors: Zhengyan Zhang, Guangxuan Xiao, Yongwei Li, Tian Lv, Fanchao Qi, Zhiyuan Liu, Yasheng Wang, Xin Jiang, Maosong Sun

The pre-training-then-fine-tuning paradigm has been widely used in deep learning. Due to the huge computation cost for pre-training, practitioners usually download pre-trained models from the Internet and fine-tune them on downstream datasets while the downloaded models may suffer backdoor attacks. Different from previous attacks aiming at a target task, we show that a backdoored pre-trained model can behave maliciously in various downstream tasks without foreknowing task information. Attackers can restrict the output representations of trigger-embedded samples to arbitrary predefined values through additional training, namely Neuron-level Backdoor Attack (NeuBA). Since fine-tuning has little effect on model parameters, the fine-tuned model will retain the backdoor functionality and predict a specific label for the samples embedded with the same trigger. To provoke multiple labels in a specific task, attackers can introduce several triggers with contrastive predefined values. In the experiments of both natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), we show that NeuBA can well control the predictions for trigger-embedded instances with different trigger designs. Our findings sound a red alarm for the wide use of pre-trained models. Finally, we apply several defense methods to NeuBA and find that model pruning is a promising technique to resist NeuBA by omitting backdoored neurons.
Kernel of CycleGAN as a principal homogeneous space
Authors: Nikita Moriakov, Jonas Adler, Jonas Teuwen

Unpaired image-to-image translation has attracted significant interest due to the invention of CycleGAN, a method which utilizes a combination of adversarial and cycle consistency losses to avoid the need for paired data. It is known that the CycleGAN problem might admit multiple solutions, and our goal in this paper is to analyze the space of exact solutions and to give perturbation bounds for approximate solutions. We show theoretically that the exact solution space is invariant with respect to automorphisms of the underlying probability spaces, and, furthermore, that the group of automorphisms acts freely and transitively on the space of exact solutions. We examine the case of zero pure CycleGAN loss first in its generality, and, subsequently, expand our analysis to approximate solutions for extended CycleGAN loss where identity loss term is included. In order to demonstrate that these results are applicable, we show that under mild conditions nontrivial smooth automorphisms exist. Furthermore, we provide empirical evidence that neural networks can learn these automorphisms with unexpected and unwanted results. We conclude that finding optimal solutions to the CycleGAN loss does not necessarily lead to the envisioned result in image-to-image translation tasks and that underlying hidden symmetries can render the result useless.
Human-Level Performance in No-Press Diplomacy via Equilibrium Search
Authors: Jonathan Gray, Adam Lerer, Anton Bakhtin, Noam Brown

Prior AI breakthroughs in complex games have focused on either the purely adversarial or purely cooperative settings. In contrast, Diplomacy is a game of shifting alliances that involves both cooperation and competition. For this reason, Diplomacy has proven to be a formidable research challenge. In this paper we describe an agent for the no-press variant of Diplomacy that combines supervised learning on human data with one-step lookahead search via regret minimization. Regret minimization techniques have been behind previous AI successes in adversarial games, most notably poker, but have not previously been shown to be successful in large-scale games involving cooperation. We show that our agent greatly exceeds the performance of past no-press Diplomacy bots, is unexploitable by expert humans, and ranks in the top 2% of human players when playing anonymous games on a popular Diplomacy website.
The Role of Embedding Complexity in Domain-invariant Representations
Authors: Ching-Yao Chuang, Antonio Torralba, Stefanie Jegelka

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to generalize the hypothesis trained in a source domain to an unlabeled target domain. One popular approach to this problem is to learn domain-invariant embeddings for both domains. In this work, we study, theoretically and empirically, the effect of the embedding complexity on generalization to the target domain. In particular, this complexity affects an upper bound on the target risk; this is reflected in experiments, too. Next, we specify our theoretical framework to multilayer neural networks. As a result, we develop a strategy that mitigates sensitivity to the embedding complexity, and empirically achieves performance on par with or better than the best layer-dependent complexity tradeoff.
AttackDist: Characterizing Zero-day Adversarial Samples by Counter Attack
Authors: Simin Chen, Zihe Song, Lei Ma, Cong Liu, Wei Yang

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been shown vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which could produce adversarial samples that easily fool the state-of-the-art DNNs. The harmfulness of adversarial attacks calls for the defense mechanisms under fire. However, the relationship between adversarial attacks and defenses is like spear and shield. Whenever a defense method is proposed, a new attack would be followed to bypass the defense immediately. Devising a definitive defense against new attacks~(zero-day attacks) is proven to be challenging. We tackle this challenge by characterizing the intrinsic properties of adversarial samples, via measuring the norm of the perturbation after a counterattack. Our method is based on the idea that, from an optimization perspective, adversarial samples would be closer to the decision boundary; thus the perturbation to counterattack adversarial samples would be significantly smaller than normal cases. Motivated by this, we propose AttackDist, an attack-agnostic property to characterize adversarial samples. We first theoretically clarify under which condition AttackDist can provide a certified detecting performance, then show that a potential application of AttackDist is distinguishing zero-day adversarial examples without knowing the mechanisms of new attacks. As a proof-of-concept, we evaluate AttackDist on two widely used benchmarks. The evaluation results show that AttackDist can outperform the state-of-the-art detection measures by large margins in detecting zero-day adversarial attacks.
Conditional Networks
Authors: Anthony Ortiz, Kris Sankaran, Olac Fuentes, Christopher Kiekintveld, Pascal Vincent, Yoshua Bengio, Doina Precup

In this work we tackle the problem of out-of-distribution generalization through conditional computation. Real-world applications often exhibit a larger distributional shift between training and test data than most datasets used in research. On the other hand, training data in such applications often comes with additional annotation. We propose a method for leveraging this extra information by using an auxiliary network that modulates activations of the main network.  We show that this approach improves performance over a strong baseline on the Inria Aerial Image Labeling and the Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes (TIL) Datasets, which by design evaluate out-of-distribution generalization in both semantic segmentation and image classification.
Pretrained models are active learners
Authors: Alex Tamkin, Dat Nguyen, Salil Deshpande, Jesse Mu, Noah Goodman

An important barrier to the safe deployment of machine learning systems is the risk of \emph{task ambiguity}, where multiple behaviors are consistent with the provided examples. We investigate whether pretrained models are better active learners, capable of asking for example labels that \textit{disambiguate} between the possible tasks a user may be trying to specify. Across a range of image and text datasets with spurious correlations, latent minority groups, or domain shifts, finetuning pretrained models with data acquired through simple uncertainty sampling achieves the same accuracy with \textbf{up to 6$\times$ fewer labels} compared to random sampling. Moreover, the examples chosen by these models are preferentially minority classes or informative examples where the spurious feature and class label are decorrelated. Notably, gains from active learning are not seen in unpretrained models, which do not select such examples, suggesting that the ability to actively learn is an emergent property of the pretraining process.
CaLFADS: latent factor analysis of dynamical systems in calcium imaging data
Authors: Luke Yuri Prince, Shahab Bakhtiari, Colleen J Gillon, Blake Aaron Richards

Dynamic latent variable modelling has been a hugely powerful tool in understanding how spiking activity in populations of neurons can perform computations necessary for adaptive behaviour. The success of such approaches has been enabled by the ability to construct models derived with the characterization of spiking activity as point-processes since spiking dynamics occur on a much faster time-scale than the computational dynamics being inferred. Other experimental techniques, such as calcium imaging, pose a problem for latent variable modelling of computational dynamics, since the time-scales of calcium dynamics and computational dynamics overlap. As such, the success of dynamic latent variable modelling in calcium imaging data rests on being able to disentangle the contribution of these two sources of variation. Here we extend recent advances using variational autoencoders to analyze neural data, by incorporating a ladder architecture that can infer a hierarchy of dynamical systems. Using built-in inductive biases for calcium dynamics, we can capture calcium flux as well as underlying dynamics of neural computation. First, we demonstrate with synthetic calcium data that we can correctly infer an underlying Lorenz attractor at the same time as calcium dynamics. Next, we show that we can infer appropriate rotational dynamics in spiking data from macaque motor cortex after it has been converted into calcium fluorescence data via a calcium dynamics model. Finally, we show that our method applied to real calcium imaging data from primary visual cortex in mice allows us to infer latent factors that carry salient sensory information about unexpected stimuli. These results demonstrate that variational ladder autoencoders are a promising approach for inferring hierarchical dynamics in experimental settings where the measured variable has its own slow dynamics, such as calcium imaging data, thereby providing the neuroscience community with a new analysis tool for a wider array of data modalities.
Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Generation
Authors: Yaniv Taigman, Adam Polyak, Lior Wolf

We study the problem of transferring a sample in one domain to an analog sample in another domain. Given two related domains, S and T, we would like to learn a generative function G that maps an input sample from S to the domain T, such that the output of a given representation function f, which accepts inputs in either domains, would remain unchanged. Other than f, the training data is unsupervised and consist of a set of samples from each domain, without any mapping between them. The Domain Transfer Network (DTN) we present employs a compound loss function that includes a multiclass GAN loss, an f preserving component, and a regularizing component that encourages G to map samples from T to themselves. We apply our method to visual domains including digits and face images and demonstrate its ability to generate convincing novel images of previously unseen entities, while preserving their identity.
A2BCD: Asynchronous Acceleration with Optimal Complexity
Authors: Robert Hannah, Fei Feng, Wotao Yin

In this paper, we propose the Asynchronous Accelerated Nonuniform Randomized Block Coordinate Descent algorithm (A2BCD). We prove A2BCD converges linearly to a solution of the convex minimization problem at the same rate as NU_ACDM, so long as the maximum delay is not too large. This is the first asynchronous Nesterov-accelerated algorithm that attains any provable speedup. Moreover, we then prove that these algorithms both have optimal complexity. Asynchronous algorithms complete much faster iterations, and A2BCD has optimal complexity. Hence we observe in experiments that A2BCD is the top-performing coordinate descent algorithm, converging up to 4-5x faster than NU_ACDM on some data sets in terms of wall-clock time. To motivate our theory and proof techniques, we also derive and analyze a continuous-time analog of our algorithm and prove it converges at the same rate.
Depth separation and weight-width trade-offs for sigmoidal neural networks
Authors: Amit Deshpande, Navin Goyal, Sushrut Karmalkar

Some recent work has shown separation between the expressive power of depth-2 and depth-3 neural networks. These separation results are shown by constructing functions and input distributions, so that the function is well-approximable by a depth-3 neural network of polynomial size but it cannot be well-approximated under the chosen input distribution by any depth-2 neural network of polynomial size. These results are not robust and require carefully chosen functions as well as input distributions.

We show a similar separation between the expressive power of depth-2 and depth-3 sigmoidal neural networks over a large class of input distributions, as long as the weights are polynomially bounded. While doing so, we also show that depth-2 sigmoidal neural networks with small width and small weights can be well-approximated by low-degree multivariate polynomials.