pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep Message Passing on Sets
Authors: Yifeng Shi, Junier Oliva, Marc Niethammer
Date: 2019-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Relational Reasoning

Modern methods for learning over graph input data have shown the fruitfulness of accounting for relationships among elements in a collection. However, most methods that learn over set input data use only rudimentary approaches to exploit intra-collection relationships. In this work we introduce Deep Message Passing on Sets (DMPS), a novel method that incorporates relational learning for sets. DMPS not only connects learning on graphs with learning on sets via deep kernel learning, but it also bridges message passing on sets and traditional diffusion dynamics commonly used in denoising models. Based on these connections, we develop two new blocks for relational learning on sets: the set-denoising block and the set-residual block. The former is motivated by the connection between message passing on general graphs and diffusion-based denoising models, whereas the latter is inspired by the well-known residual network. In addition to demonstrating the interpretability of our model by learning the true underlying relational structure experimentally, we also show the effectiveness of our approach on both synthetic and real-world datasets by achieving results that are competitive with or outperform the state-of-the-art.
Uncertainty Quantification with Statistical Guarantees in End-to-End Autonomous Driving Control
Authors: Rhiannon Michelmore, Matthew Wicker, Luca Laurenti, Luca Cardelli, Yarin Gal, Marta Kwiatkowska
Date: 2019-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Bayesian Inference, Collision Avoidance, Decision Making, Uncertainty Quantification

Deep neural network controllers for autonomous driving have recently benefited from significant performance improvements, and have begun deployment in the real world. Prior to their widespread adoption, safety guarantees are needed on the controller behaviour that properly take account of the uncertainty within the model as well as sensor noise. Bayesian neural networks, which assume a prior over the weights, have been shown capable of producing such uncertainty measures, but properties surrounding their safety have not yet been quantified for use in autonomous driving scenarios. In this paper, we develop a framework based on a state-of-the-art simulator for evaluating end-to-end Bayesian controllers. In addition to computing pointwise uncertainty measures that can be computed in real time and with statistical guarantees, we also provide a method for estimating the probability that, given a scenario, the controller keeps the car safe within a finite horizon. We experimentally evaluate the quality of uncertainty computation by several Bayesian inference methods in different scenarios and show how the uncertainty measures can be combined and calibrated for use in collision avoidance. Our results suggest that uncertainty estimates can greatly aid decision making in autonomous driving.
Deep Reinforcement Learning with Modulated Hebbian plus Q Network Architecture
Authors: Pawel Ladosz, Eseoghene Ben-Iwhiwhu, Jeffery Dick, Yang Hu, Nicholas Ketz, Soheil Kolouri, Jeffrey L. Krichmar, Praveen Pilly, Andrea Soltoggio
Date: 2019-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper presents a new neural architecture that combines a modulated Hebbian network (MOHN) with DQN, which we call modulated Hebbian plus Q network architecture (MOHQA). The hypothesis is that such a combination allows MOHQA to solve difficult partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) problems which impair temporal difference (TD)-based RL algorithms such as DQN, as the TD error cannot be easily derived from observations. The key idea is to use a Hebbian network with bio-inspired neural traces in order to bridge temporal delays between actions and rewards when confounding observations and sparse rewards result in inaccurate TD errors. In MOHQA, DQN learns low level features and control, while the MOHN contributes to the high-level decisions by associating rewards with past states and actions. Thus the proposed architecture combines two modules with significantly different learning algorithms, a Hebbian associative network and a classical DQN pipeline, exploiting the advantages of both. Simulations on a set of POMDPs and on the MALMO environment show that the proposed algorithm improved DQN's results and even outperformed control tests with A2C, QRDQN+LSTM and REINFORCE algorithms on some POMDPs with confounding stimuli and sparse rewards.
MaLTESE: Large-Scale Simulation-Driven Machine Learning for Transient Driving Cycles
Authors: Shashi M. Aithal, Prasanna Balaprakash
Date: 2019-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Transfer Learning

Optimal engine operation during a transient driving cycle is the key to achieving greater fuel economy, engine efficiency, and reduced emissions. In order to achieve continuously optimal engine operation, engine calibration methods use a combination of static correlations obtained from dynamometer tests for steady-state operating points and road and/or track performance data. As the parameter space of control variables, design variable constraints, and objective functions increases, the cost and duration for optimal calibration become prohibitively large. In order to reduce the number of dynamometer tests required for calibrating modern engines, a large-scale simulation-driven machine learning approach is presented in this work. A parallel, fast, robust, physics-based reduced-order engine simulator is used to obtain performance and emission characteristics of engines over a wide range of control parameters under various transient driving conditions (drive cycles). We scale the simulation up to 3,906 nodes of the Theta supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility to generate data required to train a machine learning model. The trained model is then used to predict various engine parameters of interest. Our results show that a deep-neural-network-based surrogate model achieves high accuracy for various engine parameters such as exhaust temperature, exhaust pressure, nitric oxide, and engine torque. Once trained, the deep-neural-network-based surrogate model is fast for inference: it requires about 16 micro sec for predicting the engine performance and emissions for a single design configuration compared with about 0.5 s per configuration with the engine simulator. Moreover, we demonstrate that transfer learning and retraining can be leveraged to incrementally retrain the surrogate model to cope with new configurations that fall outside the training data space.
HAWKEYE: Adversarial Example Detector for Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Jinkyu Koo, Michael Roth, Saurabh Bagchi
Date: 2019-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Adversarial examples (AEs) are images that can mislead deep neural network (DNN) classifiers via introducing slight perturbations into original images. Recent work has shown that detecting AEs can be more effective against AEs than preventing them from being generated. However, the state-of-the-art AE detection still shows a high false positive rate, thereby rejecting a considerable amount of normal images. To address this issue, we propose HAWKEYE, which is a separate neural network that analyzes the output layer of the DNN, and detects AEs. HAWKEYE's AE detector utilizes a quantized version of an input image as a reference, and is trained to distinguish the variation characteristics of the DNN output on an input image from the DNN output on its reference image. We also show that cascading our AE detectors that are trained for different quantization step sizes can drastically reduce a false positive rate, while keeping a detection rate high.
Classification in asymmetric spaces via sample compression
Authors: Lee-Ad Gottlieb, Shira Ozeri
Date: 2019-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

We initiate the rigorous study of classification in quasi-metric spaces. These are point sets endowed with a distance function that is non-negative and also satisfies the triangle inequality, but is asymmetric. We develop and refine a learning algorithm for quasi-metrics based on sample compression and nearest neighbor, and prove that it has favorable statistical properties.
Minimal Learning Machine: Theoretical Results and Clustering-Based Reference Point Selection
Authors: Joonas Hämäläinen, Alisson S. C. Alencar, Tommi Kärkkäinen, César L. C. Mattos, Amauri H. Souza Júnior, João P. P. Gomes
Date: 2019-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

The Minimal Learning Machine (MLM) is a nonlinear supervised approach based on learning a linear mapping between distance matrices computed in the input and output data spaces, where distances are calculated using a subset of points called reference points. Its simple formulation has attracted several recent works on extensions and applications. In this paper, we aim to address some open questions related to the MLM. First, we detail theoretical aspects that assure the interpolation and universal approximation capabilities of the MLM, which were previously only empirically verified. Second, we identify the task of selecting reference points as having major importance for the MLM's generalization capability. Several clustering-based methods for reference point selection in regression scenarios are then proposed and analyzed. Based on an extensive empirical evaluation, we conclude that the evaluated methods are both scalable and useful. Specifically, for a small number of reference points, the clustering-based methods outperformed the standard random selection of the original MLM formulation.
Towards Interpreting Recurrent Neural Networks through Probabilistic Abstraction
Authors: Guoliang Dong, Jingyi Wang, Jun Sun, Yang Zhang, Xinyu Wang, Ting Dai, Jin Song Dong, Xingen Wang
Date: 2019-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Object Recognition

Neural networks are becoming a popular tool for solving many real-world problems such as object recognition and machine translation, thanks to its exceptional performance as an end-to-end solution. However, neural networks are complex black-box models, which hinders humans from interpreting and consequently trusting them in making critical decisions. Towards interpreting neural networks, several approaches have been proposed to extract simple deterministic models from neural networks. The results are not encouraging (e.g., low accuracy and limited scalability), fundamentally due to the limited expressiveness of such simple models. In this work, we propose an approach to extract probabilistic automata for interpreting an important class of neural networks, i.e., recurrent neural networks. Our work distinguishes itself from existing approaches in two important ways. One is that probability is used to compensate for the loss of expressiveness. This is inspired by the observation that human reasoning is often `probabilistic'. The other is that we adaptively identify the right level of abstraction so that a simple model is extracted in a request-specific way. We conduct experiments on several real-world datasets using state-of-the-art architectures including GRU and LSTM. The result shows that our approach significantly improves existing approaches in terms of accuracy or scalability. Lastly, we demonstrate the usefulness of the extracted models through detecting adversarial texts.
Learning Universal Graph Neural Network Embeddings With Aid Of Transfer Learning
Authors: Saurabh Verma, Zhi-Li Zhang
Date: 2019-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Graph Classification, Graph Embedding, Graph Learning, Graph Neural Network, Transfer Learning

Learning powerful data embeddings has become a center piece in machine learning, especially in natural language processing and computer vision domains. The crux of these embeddings is that they are pretrained on huge corpus of data in a unsupervised fashion, sometimes aided with transfer learning. However currently in the graph learning domain, embeddings learned through existing graph neural networks (GNNs) are task dependent and thus cannot be shared across different datasets. In this paper, we present a first powerful and theoretically guaranteed graph neural network that is designed to learn task-independent graph embeddings, thereafter referred to as deep universal graph embedding (DUGNN). Our DUGNN model incorporates a novel graph neural network (as a universal graph encoder) and leverages rich Graph Kernels (as a multi-task graph decoder) for both unsupervised learning and (task-specific) adaptive supervised learning. By learning task-independent graph embeddings across diverse datasets, DUGNN also reaps the benefits of transfer learning. Through extensive experiments and ablation studies, we show that the proposed DUGNN model consistently outperforms both the existing state-of-art GNN models and Graph Kernels by an increased accuracy of 3% - 8% on graph classification benchmark datasets.
Verified Uncertainty Calibration
Authors: Ananya Kumar, Percy Liang, Tengyu Ma
Date: 2019-09-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Weather Forecasting

Applications such as weather forecasting and personalized medicine demand models that output calibrated probability estimates---those representative of the true likelihood of a prediction. Most models are not calibrated out of the box but are recalibrated by post-processing model outputs. We find in this work that popular recalibration methods like Platt scaling and temperature scaling are (i) less calibrated than reported, and (ii) current techniques cannot estimate how miscalibrated they are. An alternative method, histogram binning, has measurable calibration error but is sample inefficient---it requires $O(B/\epsilon^2)$ samples, compared to $O(1/\epsilon^2)$ for scaling methods, where $B$ is the number of distinct probabilities the model can output. To get the best of both worlds, we introduce the scaling-binning calibrator, which first fits a parametric function to reduce variance and then bins the function values to actually ensure calibration. This requires only $O(1/\epsilon^2 + B)$ samples. Next, we show that we can estimate a model's calibration error more accurately using an estimator from the meteorological community---or equivalently measure its calibration error with fewer samples ($O(\sqrt{B})$ instead of $O(B)$). We validate our approach with multiclass calibration experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, where we obtain a 35% lower calibration error than histogram binning and, unlike scaling methods, guarantees on true calibration. In these experiments, we also estimate the calibration error and ECE more accurately than the commonly used plugin estimators. We implement all these methods in a Python library: https://pypi.org/project/uncertainty-calibration
Heterogeneous-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: Make the Community Detection Much Better
Authors: Yaping Zheng, Shiyi Chen, Xinni Zhang, Xiaofeng Zhang, Xiaofei Yang, Di Wang
Date: 2019-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection

Community detection has long been an important yet challenging task to analyze complex networks with a focus on detecting topological structures of graph data. Essentially, real-world graph data contains various features, node and edge types which dynamically vary over time, and this invalidates most existing community detection approaches. To cope with these issues, this paper proposes the heterogeneous-temporal graph convolutional networks (HTGCN) to detect communities from hetergeneous and temporal graphs. Particularly, we first design a heterogeneous GCN component to acquire feature representations for each heterogeneous graph at each time step. Then, a residual compressed aggregation component is proposed to represent "dynamic" features for "varying" communities, which are then aggregated with "static" features extracted from current graph. Extensive experiments are evaluated on two real-world datasets, i.e., DBLP and IMDB. The promising results demonstrate that the proposed HTGCN is superior to both benchmark and the state-of-the-art approaches, e.g., GCN, GAT, GNN, LGNN, HAN and STAR, with respect to a number of evaluation criteria.
Scalable Kernel Learning via the Discriminant Information
Authors: Mert Al, Zejiang Hou, Sun-Yuan Kung
Date: 2019-09-23 00:00:00

Kernel approximation methods create explicit, low-dimensional kernel feature maps to deal with the high computational and memory complexity of standard techniques. This work studies a supervised kernel learning methodology to optimize such mappings. We utilize the Discriminant Information criterion, a measure of class separability with a strong connection to Discriminant Analysis. By generalizing this measure to cover a wider range of kernel maps and learning settings, we develop scalable methods to learn kernel features with high discriminant power. Experimental results on several datasets showcase that our techniques can improve optimization and generalization performances over state of the art kernel learning methods.
PAC Reinforcement Learning without Real-World Feedback
Authors: Yuren Zhong, Aniket Anand Deshmukh, Clayton Scott
Date: 2019-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This work studies reinforcement learning in the Sim-to-Real setting, in which an agent is first trained on a number of simulators before being deployed in the real world, with the aim of decreasing the real-world sample complexity requirement. Using a dynamic model known as a rich observation Markov decision process (ROMDP), we formulate a theoretical framework for Sim-to-Real in the situation where feedback in the real world is not available. We establish real-world sample complexity guarantees that are smaller than what is currently known for directly (i.e., without access to simulators) learning a ROMDP with feedback.
Deep neural network approximations for Monte Carlo algorithms
Authors: Philipp Grohs, Arnulf Jentzen, Diyora Salimova
Date: 2019-08-28 00:00:00

Recently, it has been proposed in the literature to employ deep neural networks (DNNs) together with stochastic gradient descent methods to approximate solutions of PDEs. There are also a few results in the literature which prove that DNNs can approximate solutions of certain PDEs without the curse of dimensionality in the sense that the number of real parameters used to describe the DNN grows at most polynomially both in the PDE dimension and the reciprocal of the prescribed approximation accuracy. One key argument in most of these results is, first, to use a Monte Carlo approximation scheme which can approximate the solution of the PDE under consideration at a fixed space-time point without the curse of dimensionality and, thereafter, to prove that DNNs are flexible enough to mimic the behaviour of the used approximation scheme. Having this in mind, one could aim for a general abstract result which shows under suitable assumptions that if a certain function can be approximated by any kind of (Monte Carlo) approximation scheme without the curse of dimensionality, then this function can also be approximated with DNNs without the curse of dimensionality. It is a key contribution of this article to make a first step towards this direction. In particular, the main result of this paper, essentially, shows that if a function can be approximated by means of some suitable discrete approximation scheme without the curse of dimensionality and if there exist DNNs which satisfy certain regularity properties and which approximate this discrete approximation scheme without the curse of dimensionality, then the function itself can also be approximated with DNNs without the curse of dimensionality. As an application of this result we establish that solutions of suitable Kolmogorov PDEs can be approximated with DNNs without the curse of dimensionality.
Safer End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Conditional Imitation Learning and Command Augmentation
Authors: Renhao Wang, Adam Scibior, Frank Wood
Date: 2019-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Imitation Learning

Imitation learning is a promising approach to end-to-end training of autonomous vehicle controllers. Typically the driving process with such approaches is entirely automatic and black-box, although in practice it is desirable to control the vehicle through high-level commands, such as telling it which way to go at an intersection. In existing work this has been accomplished by the application of a branched neural architecture, since directly providing the command as an additional input to the controller often results in the command being ignored. In this work we overcome this limitation by learning a disentangled probabilistic latent variable model that generates the steering commands. We achieve faithful command-conditional generation without using a branched architecture and demonstrate improved stability of the controller, applying only a variational objective without any domain-specific adjustments. On top of that, we extend our model with an additional latent variable and augment the dataset to train a controller that is robust to unsafe commands, such as asking it to turn into a wall. The main contribution of this work is a recipe for building controllable imitation driving agents that improves upon multiple aspects of the current state of the art relating to robustness and interpretability.
Particle Smoothing Variational Objectives
Authors: Antonio Khalil Moretti, Zizhao Wang, Luhuan Wu, Iddo Drori, Itsik Pe'er
Date: 2019-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

A body of recent work has focused on constructing a variational family of filtered distributions using Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC). Inspired by this work, we introduce Particle Smoothing Variational Objectives (SVO), a novel backward simulation technique and smoothed approximate posterior defined through a subsampling process. SVO augments support of the proposal and boosts particle diversity. Recent literature argues that increasing the number of samples K to obtain tighter variational bounds may hurt the proposal learning, due to a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of gradient estimators decreasing at the rate $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{K})$. As a second contribution, we develop theoretical and empirical analysis of the SNR in filtering SMC, which motivates our choice of biased gradient estimators. We prove that introducing bias by dropping Categorical terms from the gradient estimate or using Gumbel-Softmax mitigates the adverse effect on the SNR. We apply SVO to three nonlinear latent dynamics tasks and provide statistics to rigorously quantify the predictions of filtered and smoothed objectives. SVO consistently outperforms filtered objectives when given fewer Monte Carlo samples on three nonlinear systems of increasing complexity.