pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Residual Bootstrap Exploration for Bandit Algorithms
Authors: Chi-Hua Wang, Yang Yu, Botao Hao, Guang Cheng
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Multi-Armed Bandits, Thompson Sampling

In this paper, we propose a novel perturbation-based exploration method in bandit algorithms with bounded or unbounded rewards, called residual bootstrap exploration (\texttt{ReBoot}). The \texttt{ReBoot} enforces exploration by injecting data-driven randomness through a residual-based perturbation mechanism. This novel mechanism captures the underlying distributional properties of fitting errors, and more importantly boosts exploration to escape from suboptimal solutions (for small sample sizes) by inflating variance level in an \textit{unconventional} way. In theory, with appropriate variance inflation level, \texttt{ReBoot} provably secures instance-dependent logarithmic regret in Gaussian multi-armed bandits. We evaluate the \texttt{ReBoot} in different synthetic multi-armed bandits problems and observe that the \texttt{ReBoot} performs better for unbounded rewards and more robustly than \texttt{Giro} \cite{kveton2018garbage} and \texttt{PHE} \cite{kveton2019perturbed}, with comparable computational efficiency to the Thompson sampling method.
Simultaneous Inference for Massive Data: Distributed Bootstrap
Authors: Yang Yu, Shih-Kang Chao, Guang Cheng
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1

In this paper, we propose a bootstrap method applied to massive data processed distributedly in a large number of machines. This new method is computationally efficient in that we bootstrap on the master machine without over-resampling, typically required by existing methods \cite{kleiner2014scalable,sengupta2016subsampled}, while provably achieving optimal statistical efficiency with minimal communication. Our method does not require repeatedly re-fitting the model but only applies multiplier bootstrap in the master machine on the gradients received from the worker machines. Simulations validate our theory.
Descriptive and Predictive Analysis of Euroleague Basketball Games and the Wisdom of Basketball Crowds
Authors: Georgios Giasemidis
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Binary Classification, Descriptive, Prediction

In this study we focus on the prediction of basketball games in the Euroleague competition using machine learning modelling. The prediction is a binary classification problem, predicting whether a match finishes 1 (home win) or 2 (away win). Data is collected from the Euroleague's official website for the seasons 2016-2017, 2017-2018 and 2018-2019, i.e. in the new format era. Features are extracted from matches' data and off-the-shelf supervised machine learning techniques are applied. We calibrate and validate our models. We find that simple machine learning models give accuracy not greater than 67% on the test set, worse than some sophisticated benchmark models. Additionally, the importance of this study lies in the "wisdom of the basketball crowd" and we demonstrate how the predicting power of a collective group of basketball enthusiasts can outperform machine learning models discussed in this study. We argue why the accuracy level of this group of "experts" should be set as the benchmark for future studies in the prediction of (European) basketball games using machine learning.
Propose, Test, Release: Differentially private estimation with high probability
Authors: Victor-Emmanuel Brunel, Marco Avella-Medina
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

We derive concentration inequalities for differentially private median and mean estimators building on the "Propose, Test, Release" (PTR) mechanism introduced by Dwork and Lei (2009). We introduce a new general version of the PTR mechanism that allows us to derive high probability error bounds for differentially private estimators. Our algorithms provide the first statistical guarantees for differentially private estimation of the median and mean without any boundedness assumptions on the data, and without assuming that the target population parameter lies in some known bounded interval. Our procedures do not rely on any truncation of the data and provide the first sub-Gaussian high probability bounds for differentially private median and mean estimation, for possibly heavy tailed random variables.
Robust Pruning at Initialization
Authors: Soufiane Hayou, Jean-Francois Ton, Arnaud Doucet, Yee Whye Teh
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1

Overparameterized Neural Networks (NN) display state-of-the-art performance. However, there is a growing need for smaller, energy-efficient, neural networks tobe able to use machine learning applications on devices with limited computational resources. A popular approach consists of using pruning techniques. While these techniques have traditionally focused on pruning pre-trained NN (LeCun et al.,1990; Hassibi et al., 1993), recent work by Lee et al. (2018) has shown promising results when pruning at initialization. However, for Deep NNs, such procedures remain unsatisfactory as the resulting pruned networks can be difficult to train and, for instance, they do not prevent one layer from being fully pruned. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of Magnitude and Gradient based pruning at initialization and training of sparse architectures. This allows us to propose novel principled approaches which we validate experimentally on a variety of NN architectures.
Comparative Visual Analytics for Assessing Medical Records with Sequence Embedding
Authors: Rongchen Guo, Takanori Fujiwara, Yiran Li, Kelly M. Lima, Soman Sen, Nam K. Tran, Kwan-Liu Ma
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00

Machine learning for data-driven diagnosis has been actively studied in medicine to provide better healthcare. Supporting analysis of a patient cohort similar to a patient under treatment is a key task for clinicians to make decisions with high confidence. However, such analysis is not straightforward due to the characteristics of medical records: high dimensionality, irregularity in time, and sparsity. To address this challenge, we introduce a method for similarity calculation of medical records. Our method employs event and sequence embeddings. While we use an autoencoder for the event embedding, we apply its variant with the self-attention mechanism for the sequence embedding. Moreover, in order to better handle the irregularity of data, we enhance the self-attention mechanism with consideration of different time intervals. We have developed a visual analytics system to support comparative studies of patient records. To make a comparison of sequences with different lengths easier, our system incorporates a sequence alignment method. Through its interactive interface, the user can quickly identify patients of interest and conveniently review both the temporal and multivariate aspects of the patient records. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our design and system with case studies using a real-world dataset from the neonatal intensive care unit of UC Davis.
Keep Doing What Worked: Behavioral Modelling Priors for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Noah Y. Siegel, Jost Tobias Springenberg, Felix Berkenkamp, Abbas Abdolmaleki, Michael Neunert, Thomas Lampe, Roland Hafner, Nicolas Heess, Martin Riedmiller
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Multi-Task Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms promise to be applicable in settings where only a fixed data-set (batch) of environment interactions is available and no new experience can be acquired. This property makes these algorithms appealing for real world problems such as robot control. In practice, however, standard off-policy algorithms fail in the batch setting for continuous control. In this paper, we propose a simple solution to this problem. It admits the use of data generated by arbitrary behavior policies and uses a learned prior -- the advantage-weighted behavior model (ABM) -- to bias the RL policy towards actions that have previously been executed and are likely to be successful on the new task. Our method can be seen as an extension of recent work on batch-RL that enables stable learning from conflicting data-sources. We find improvements on competitive baselines in a variety of RL tasks -- including standard continuous control benchmarks and multi-task learning for simulated and real-world robots.
Bandits with Mean Bounds
Authors: Nihal Sharma, Soumya Basu, Karthikeyan Shanmugam, Sanjay Shakkottai
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00

We study a variant of the bandit problem where side information in the form of bounds on the mean of each arm is provided. We prove that these translate to tighter estimates of subgaussian factors and develop novel algorithms that exploit these estimates. In the linear setting, we present the Restricted-set OFUL (R-OFUL) algorithm that additionally uses the geometric properties of the problem to (potentially) restrict the set of arms being played and reduce exploration rates for suboptimal arms. In the stochastic case, we propose the non-optimistic Global Under-Explore (GLUE) algorithm which employs the inferred subgaussian estimates to adapt the rate of exploration for the arms. We analyze the regret of R-OFUL and GLUE, showing that our regret upper bounds are never worse than that of the standard OFUL and UCB algorithms respectively. Further, we also consider a practically motivated setting of learning from confounded logs where mean bounds appear naturally.
On conditional versus marginal bias in multi-armed bandits
Authors: Jaehyeok Shin, Aaditya Ramdas, Alessandro Rinaldo
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits

The bias of the sample means of the arms in multi-armed bandits is an important issue in adaptive data analysis that has recently received considerable attention in the literature. Existing results relate in precise ways the sign and magnitude of the bias to various sources of data adaptivity, but do not apply to the conditional inference setting in which the sample means are computed only if some specific conditions are satisfied. In this paper, we characterize the sign of the conditional bias of monotone functions of the rewards, including the sample mean. Our results hold for arbitrary conditioning events and leverage natural monotonicity properties of the data collection policy. We further demonstrate, through several examples from sequential testing and best arm identification, that the sign of the conditional and marginal bias of the sample mean of an arm can be different, depending on the conditioning event. Our analysis offers new and interesting perspectives on the subtleties of assessing the bias in data adaptive settings.
PrivacyFL: A simulator for privacy-preserving and secure federated learning
Authors: Vaikkunth Mugunthan, Anton Peraire-Bueno, Lalana Kagal
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Federated learning is a technique that enables distributed clients to collaboratively learn a shared machine learning model while keeping their training data localized. This reduces data privacy risks, however, privacy concerns still exist since it is possible to leak information about the training dataset from the trained model's weights or parameters. Setting up a federated learning environment, especially with security and privacy guarantees, is a time-consuming process with numerous configurations and parameters that can be manipulated. In order to help clients ensure that collaboration is feasible and to check that it improves their model accuracy, a real-world simulator for privacy-preserving and secure federated learning is required. In this paper, we introduce PrivacyFL, which is an extensible, easily configurable and scalable simulator for federated learning environments. Its key features include latency simulation, robustness to client departure, support for both centralized and decentralized learning, and configurable privacy and security mechanisms based on differential privacy and secure multiparty computation. In this paper, we motivate our research, describe the architecture of the simulator and associated protocols, and discuss its evaluation in numerous scenarios that highlight its wide range of functionality and its advantages. Our paper addresses a significant real-world problem: checking the feasibility of participating in a federated learning environment under a variety of circumstances. It also has a strong practical impact because organizations such as hospitals, banks, and research institutes, which have large amounts of sensitive data and would like to collaborate, would greatly benefit from having a system that enables them to do so in a privacy-preserving and secure manner.
From Poincaré Recurrence to Convergence in Imperfect Information Games: Finding Equilibrium via Regularization
Authors: Julien Perolat, Remi Munos, Jean-Baptiste Lespiau, Shayegan Omidshafiei, Mark Rowland, Pedro Ortega, Neil Burch, Thomas Anthony, David Balduzzi, Bart De Vylder, Georgios Piliouras, Marc Lanctot, Karl Tuyls
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00

In this paper we investigate the Follow the Regularized Leader dynamics in sequential imperfect information games (IIG). We generalize existing results of Poincar\'e recurrence from normal-form games to zero-sum two-player imperfect information games and other sequential game settings. We then investigate how adapting the reward (by adding a regularization term) of the game can give strong convergence guarantees in monotone games. We continue by showing how this reward adaptation technique can be leveraged to build algorithms that converge exactly to the Nash equilibrium. Finally, we show how these insights can be directly used to build state-of-the-art model-free algorithms for zero-sum two-player Imperfect Information Games (IIG).
Strength from Weakness: Fast Learning Using Weak Supervision
Authors: Joshua Robinson, Stefanie Jegelka, Suvrit Sra
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Weakly-supervised Learning

We study generalization properties of weakly supervised learning. That is, learning where only a few "strong" labels (the actual target of our prediction) are present but many more "weak" labels are available. In particular, we show that having access to weak labels can significantly accelerate the learning rate for the strong task to the fast rate of $\mathcal{O}(\nicefrac1n)$, where $n$ denotes the number of strongly labeled data points. This acceleration can happen even if by itself the strongly labeled data admits only the slower $\mathcal{O}(\nicefrac{1}{\sqrt{n}})$ rate. The actual acceleration depends continuously on the number of weak labels available, and on the relation between the two tasks. Our theoretical results are reflected empirically across a range of tasks and illustrate how weak labels speed up learning on the strong task.
Estimating Training Data Influence by Tracing Gradient Descent
Authors: Garima Pruthi, Frederick Liu, Mukund Sundararajan, Satyen Kale
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

We introduce a method called TracIn that computes the influence of a training example on a prediction made by the model. The idea is to trace how the loss on the test point changes during the training process whenever the training example of interest was utilized. We provide a scalable implementation of TracIn via: (a) a first-order gradient approximation to the exact computation, (b) saved checkpoints of standard training procedures, and (c) cherry-picking layers of a deep neural network. In contrast with previously proposed methods, TracIn is simple to implement; all it needs is the ability to work with gradients, checkpoints, and loss functions. The method is general. It applies to any machine learning model trained using stochastic gradient descent or a variant of it, agnostic of architecture, domain and task. We expect the method to be widely useful within processes that study and improve training data.
Entrywise convergence of iterative methods for eigenproblems
Authors: Vasileios Charisopoulos, Austin R. Benson, Anil Damle
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

Several problems in machine learning, statistics, and other fields rely on computing eigenvectors. For large scale problems, the computation of these eigenvectors is typically performed via iterative schemes such as subspace iteration or Krylov methods. While there is classical and comprehensive analysis for subspace convergence guarantees with respect to the spectral norm, in many modern applications other notions of subspace distance are more appropriate. Recent theoretical work has focused on perturbations of subspaces measured in the $\ell_{2 \to \infty}$ norm, but does not consider the actual computation of eigenvectors. Here we address the convergence of subspace iteration when distances are measured in the $\ell_{2 \to \infty}$ norm and provide deterministic bounds. We complement our analysis with a practical stopping criterion and demonstrate its applicability via numerical experiments. Our results show that one can get comparable performance on downstream tasks while requiring fewer iterations, thereby saving substantial computational time.
Guiding Graph Embeddings using Path-Ranking Methods for Error Detection innoisy Knowledge Graphs
Authors: K. Bougiatiotis, R. Fasoulis, F. Aisopos, A. Nentidis, G. Paliouras
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Representation Learning

Nowadays Knowledge Graphs constitute a mainstream approach for the representation of relational information on big heterogeneous data, however, they may contain a big amount of imputed noise when constructed automatically. To address this problem, different error detection methodologies have been proposed, mainly focusing on path ranking and representation learning. This work presents various mainstream approaches and proposes a hybrid and modular methodology for the task. We compare different methods on two benchmarks and one real-world biomedical publications dataset, showcasing the potential of our approach and providing insights on graph embeddings when dealing with noisy Knowledge Graphs.
AdvMS: A Multi-source Multi-cost Defense Against Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Xiao Wang, Siyue Wang, Pin-Yu Chen, Xue Lin, Peter Chin
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Malware Detection, Self-Driving Cars

Designing effective defense against adversarial attacks is a crucial topic as deep neural networks have been proliferated rapidly in many security-critical domains such as malware detection and self-driving cars. Conventional defense methods, although shown to be promising, are largely limited by their single-source single-cost nature: The robustness promotion tends to plateau when the defenses are made increasingly stronger while the cost tends to amplify. In this paper, we study principles of designing multi-source and multi-cost schemes where defense performance is boosted from multiple defending components. Based on this motivation, we propose a multi-source and multi-cost defense scheme, Adversarially Trained Model Switching (AdvMS), that inherits advantages from two leading schemes: adversarial training and random model switching. We show that the multi-source nature of AdvMS mitigates the performance plateauing issue and the multi-cost nature enables improving robustness at a flexible and adjustable combination of costs over different factors which can better suit specific restrictions and needs in practice.
MonoLayout: Amodal scene layout from a single image
Authors: Kaustubh Mani, Swapnil Daga, Shubhika Garg, N. Sai Shankar, Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula, K. Madhava Krishna
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Amodal Layout Estimation, Sensor Fusion

In this paper, we address the novel, highly challenging problem of estimating the layout of a complex urban driving scenario. Given a single color image captured from a driving platform, we aim to predict the bird's-eye view layout of the road and other traffic participants. The estimated layout should reason beyond what is visible in the image, and compensate for the loss of 3D information due to projection. We dub this problem amodal scene layout estimation, which involves "hallucinating" scene layout for even parts of the world that are occluded in the image. To this end, we present MonoLayout, a deep neural network for real-time amodal scene layout estimation from a single image. We represent scene layout as a multi-channel semantic occupancy grid, and leverage adversarial feature learning to hallucinate plausible completions for occluded image parts. Due to the lack of fair baseline methods, we extend several state-of-the-art approaches for road-layout estimation and vehicle occupancy estimation in bird's-eye view to the amodal setup for rigorous evaluation. By leveraging temporal sensor fusion to generate training labels, we significantly outperform current art over a number of datasets. On the KITTI and Argoverse datasets, we outperform all baselines by a significant margin. We also make all our annotations, and code publicly available. A video abstract of this paper is available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcroGyo6yRQ .
Fine tuning U-Net for ultrasound image segmentation: which layers?
Authors: Mina Amiri, Rupert Brooks, Hassan Rivaz
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Fine-tuning a network which has been trained on a large dataset is an alternative to full training in order to overcome the problem of scarce and expensive data in medical applications. While the shallow layers of the network are usually kept unchanged, deeper layers are modified according to the new dataset. This approach may not work for ultrasound images due to their drastically different appearance. In this study, we investigated the effect of fine-tuning different layers of a U-Net which was trained on segmentation of natural images in breast ultrasound image segmentation. Tuning the contracting part and fixing the expanding part resulted in substantially better results compared to fixing the contracting part and tuning the expanding part. Furthermore, we showed that starting to fine-tune the U-Net from the shallow layers and gradually including more layers will lead to a better performance compared to fine-tuning the network from the deep layers moving back to shallow layers. We did not observe the same results on segmentation of X-ray images, which have different salient features compared to ultrasound, it may therefore be more appropriate to fine-tune the shallow layers rather than deep layers. Shallow layers learn lower level features (including speckle pattern, and probably the noise and artifact properties) which are critical in automatic segmentation in this modality.
SD-GAN: Structural and Denoising GAN reveals facial parts under occlusion
Authors: Samik Banerjee, Sukhendu Das
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Face Recognition, Generative Adversarial Network, SSIM

Certain facial parts are salient (unique) in appearance, which substantially contribute to the holistic recognition of a subject. Occlusion of these salient parts deteriorates the performance of face recognition algorithms. In this paper, we propose a generative model to reconstruct the missing parts of the face which are under occlusion. The proposed generative model (SD-GAN) reconstructs a face preserving the illumination variation and identity of the face. A novel adversarial training algorithm has been designed for a bimodal mutually exclusive Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model, for faster convergence. A novel adversarial "structural" loss function is also proposed, comprising of two components: a holistic and a local loss, characterized by SSIM and patch-wise MSE. Ablation studies on real and synthetically occluded face datasets reveal that our proposed technique outperforms the competing methods by a considerable margin, even for boosting the performance of Face Recognition.