pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Accelerating Distributed Deep Reinforcement Learning by In-Network Experience Sampling
Authors: Masaki Furukawa, Hiroki Matsutani
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

A computing cluster that interconnects multiple compute nodes is used to accelerate distributed reinforcement learning based on DQN (Deep Q-Network). In distributed reinforcement learning, Actor nodes acquire experiences by interacting with a given environment and a Learner node optimizes their DQN model. Since data transfer between Actor and Learner nodes increases depending on the number of Actor nodes and their experience size, communication overhead between them is one of major performance bottlenecks. In this paper, their communication is accelerated by DPDK-based network optimizations, and DPDK-based low-latency experience replay memory server is deployed between Actor and Learner nodes interconnected with a 40GbE (40Gbit Ethernet) network. Evaluation results show that, as a network optimization technique, kernel bypassing by DPDK reduces network access latencies to a shared memory server by 32.7% to 58.9%. As another network optimization technique, an in-network experience replay memory server between Actor and Learner nodes reduces access latencies to the experience replay memory by 11.7% to 28.1% and communication latencies for prioritized experience sampling by 21.9% to 29.1%.
Shared Independent Component Analysis for Multi-Subject Neuroimaging
Authors: Hugo Richard, Pierre Ablin, Bertrand Thirion, Alexandre Gramfort, Aapo Hyvärinen
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: MULTI-VIEW LEARNING

We consider shared response modeling, a multi-view learning problem where one wants to identify common components from multiple datasets or views. We introduce Shared Independent Component Analysis (ShICA) that models each view as a linear transform of shared independent components contaminated by additive Gaussian noise. We show that this model is identifiable if the components are either non-Gaussian or have enough diversity in noise variances. We then show that in some cases multi-set canonical correlation analysis can recover the correct unmixing matrices, but that even a small amount of sampling noise makes Multiset CCA fail. To solve this problem, we propose to use joint diagonalization after Multiset CCA, leading to a new approach called ShICA-J. We show via simulations that ShICA-J leads to improved results while being very fast to fit. While ShICA-J is based on second-order statistics, we further propose to leverage non-Gaussianity of the components using a maximum-likelihood method, ShICA-ML, that is both more accurate and more costly. Further, ShICA comes with a principled method for shared components estimation. Finally, we provide empirical evidence on fMRI and MEG datasets that ShICA yields more accurate estimation of the components than alternatives.
Tensor Network Kalman Filtering for Large-Scale LS-SVMs
Authors: Maximilian Lucassen, Johan A. K. Suykens, Kim Batselier
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Tensor Networks

Least squares support vector machines are a commonly used supervised learning method for nonlinear regression and classification. They can be implemented in either their primal or dual form. The latter requires solving a linear system, which can be advantageous as an explicit mapping of the data to a possibly infinite-dimensional feature space is avoided. However, for large-scale applications, current low-rank approximation methods can perform inadequately. For example, current methods are probabilistic due to their sampling procedures, and/or suffer from a poor trade-off between the ranks and approximation power. In this paper, a recursive Bayesian filtering framework based on tensor networks and the Kalman filter is presented to alleviate the demanding memory and computational complexities associated with solving large-scale dual problems. The proposed method is iterative, does not require explicit storage of the kernel matrix, and allows the formulation of early stopping conditions. Additionally, the framework yields confidence estimates of obtained models, unlike alternative methods. The performance is tested on two regression and three classification experiments, and compared to the Nystr\"om and fixed size LS-SVM methods. Results show that our method can achieve high performance and is particularly useful when alternative methods are computationally infeasible due to a slowly decaying kernel matrix spectrum.
TUNet: A Block-online Bandwidth Extension Model based on Transformers and Self-supervised Pretraining
Authors: Viet-Anh Nguyen, Anh H. T. Nguyen, Andy W. H. Khong
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Super-Resolution, Bandwidth Extension, Sensitivity

We introduce a block-online variant of the temporal feature-wise linear modulation (TFiLM) model to achieve bandwidth extension. The proposed architecture simplifies the UNet backbone of the TFiLM to reduce inference time and employs an efficient transformer at the bottleneck to alleviate performance degradation. We also utilize self-supervised pretraining and data augmentation to enhance the quality of bandwidth extended signals and reduce the sensitivity with respect to downsampling methods. Experiment results on the VCTK dataset show that the proposed method outperforms several recent baselines in both intrusive and non-intrusive metrics. Pretraining and filter augmentation also help stabilize and enhance the overall performance.
Vector-valued Distance and Gyrocalculus on the Space of Symmetric Positive Definite Matrices
Authors: Federico López, Beatrice Pozzetti, Steve Trettel, Michael Strube, Anna Wienhard
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Completion, Question Answering

We propose the use of the vector-valued distance to compute distances and extract geometric information from the manifold of symmetric positive definite matrices (SPD), and develop gyrovector calculus, constructing analogs of vector space operations in this curved space. We implement these operations and showcase their versatility in the tasks of knowledge graph completion, item recommendation, and question answering. In experiments, the SPD models outperform their equivalents in Euclidean and hyperbolic space. The vector-valued distance allows us to visualize embeddings, showing that the models learn to disentangle representations of positive samples from negative ones.
CS-Rep: Making Speaker Verification Networks Embracing Re-parameterization
Authors: Ruiteng Zhang, Jianguo Wei, Wenhuan Lu, Lin Zhang, Yantao Ji, Junhai Xu, Xugang Lu
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Verification

Automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems, which determine whether two speeches are from the same speaker, mainly focus on verification accuracy while ignoring inference speed. However, in real applications, both inference speed and verification accuracy are essential. This study proposes cross-sequential re-parameterization (CS-Rep), a novel topology re-parameterization strategy for multi-type networks, to increase the inference speed and verification accuracy of models. CS-Rep solves the problem that existing re-parameterization methods are unsuitable for typical ASV backbones. When a model applies CS-Rep, the training-period network utilizes a multi-branch topology to capture speaker information, whereas the inference-period model converts to a time-delay neural network (TDNN)-like plain backbone with stacked TDNN layers to achieve the fast inference speed. Based on CS-Rep, an improved TDNN with friendly test and deployment called Rep-TDNN is proposed. Compared with the state-of-the-art model ECAPA-TDNN, which is highly recognized in the industry, Rep-TDNN increases the actual inference speed by about 50% and reduces the EER by 10%. The code will be released.
MarS-FL: Enabling Competitors to Collaborate in Federated Learning
Authors: Xiaohu Wu, Han Yu
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Federated learning (FL) is rapidly gaining popularity and enables multiple data owners ({\em a.k.a.} FL participants) to collaboratively train machine learning models in a privacy-preserving way. A key unaddressed scenario is that these FL participants are in a competitive market, where market shares represent their competitiveness. Although they are interested to enhance the performance of their respective models through FL, market leaders (who are often data owners who can contribute significantly to building high performance FL models) want to avoid losing their market shares by enhancing their competitors' models. Currently, there is no modeling tool to analyze such scenarios and support informed decision-making. In this paper, we bridge this gap by proposing the \underline{mar}ket \underline{s}hare-based decision support framework for participation in \underline{FL} (MarS-FL). We introduce {\em two notions of $\delta$-stable market} and {\em friendliness} to measure the viability of FL and the market acceptability of FL. The FL participants' behaviours can then be predicted using game theoretic tools (i.e., their optimal strategies concerning participation in FL). If the market $\delta$-stability is achievable, the final model performance improvement of each FL-PT shall be bounded, which relates to the market conditions of FL applications. We provide tight bounds and quantify the friendliness, $\kappa$, of given market conditions to FL. Experimental results show the viability of FL in a wide range of market conditions. Our results are useful for identifying the market conditions under which collaborative FL model training is viable among competitors, and the requirements that have to be imposed while applying FL under these conditions.
On the Optimization Landscape of Maximum Mean Discrepancy
Authors: Itai Alon, Amir Globerson, Ami Wiesel
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00

Generative models have been successfully used for generating realistic signals. Because the likelihood function is typically intractable in most of these models, the common practice is to use "implicit" models that avoid likelihood calculation. However, it is hard to obtain theoretical guarantees for such models. In particular, it is not understood when they can globally optimize their non-convex objectives. Here we provide such an analysis for the case of Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) learning of generative models. We prove several optimality results, including for a Gaussian distribution with low rank covariance (where likelihood is inapplicable) and a mixture of Gaussians. Our analysis shows that that the MMD optimization landscape is benign in these cases, and therefore gradient based methods will globally minimize the MMD objective.
A deep learning driven pseudospectral PCE based FFT homogenization algorithm for complex microstructures
Authors: Alexander Henkes, Ismail Caylak, Rolf Mahnken
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

This work is directed to uncertainty quantification of homogenized effective properties for composite materials with complex, three dimensional microstructure. The uncertainties arise in the material parameters of the single constituents as well as in the fiber volume fraction. They are taken into account by multivariate random variables. Uncertainty quantification is achieved by an efficient surrogate model based on pseudospectral polynomial chaos expansion and artificial neural networks. An artificial neural network is trained on synthetic binary voxelized unit cells of composite materials with uncertain three dimensional microstructures, uncertain linear elastic material parameters and different loading directions. The prediction goals of the artificial neural network are the corresponding effective components of the elasticity tensor, where the labels for training are generated via a fast Fourier transform based numerical homogenization method. The trained artificial neural network is then used as a deterministic solver for a pseudospectral polynomial chaos expansion based surrogate model to achieve the corresponding statistics of the effective properties. Three numerical examples deal with the comparison of the presented method to the literature as well as the application to different microstructures. It is shown, that the proposed method is able to predict central moments of interest while being magnitudes faster to evaluate than traditional approaches.
Does your graph need a confidence boost? Convergent boosted smoothing on graphs with tabular node features
Authors: Jiuhai Chen, Jonas Mueller, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Soji Adeshina, Yangkun Wang, Tom Goldstein, David Wipf
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

For supervised learning with tabular data, decision tree ensembles produced via boosting techniques generally dominate real-world applications involving iid training/test sets. However for graph data where the iid assumption is violated due to structured relations between samples, it remains unclear how to best incorporate this structure within existing boosting pipelines. To this end, we propose a generalized framework for iterating boosting with graph propagation steps that share node/sample information across edges connecting related samples. Unlike previous efforts to integrate graph-based models with boosting, our approach is anchored in a principled meta loss function such that provable convergence can be guaranteed under relatively mild assumptions. Across a variety of non-iid graph datasets with tabular node features, our method achieves comparable or superior performance than both tabular and graph neural network models, as well as existing hybrid strategies that combine the two. Beyond producing better predictive performance than recently proposed graph models, our proposed techniques are easy to implement, computationally more efficient, and enjoy stronger theoretical guarantees (which make our results more reproducible).
Revisiting randomized choices in isolation forests
Authors: David Cortes
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Isolation forest or "iForest" is an intuitive and widely used algorithm for anomaly detection that follows a simple yet effective idea: in a given data distribution, if a threshold (split point) is selected uniformly at random within the range of some variable and data points are divided according to whether they are greater or smaller than this threshold, outlier points are more likely to end up alone or in the smaller partition. The original procedure suggested the choice of variable to split and split point within a variable to be done uniformly at random at each step, but this paper shows that "clustered" diverse outliers - oftentimes a more interesting class of outliers than others - can be more easily identified by applying a non-uniformly-random choice of variables and/or thresholds. Different split guiding criteria are compared and some are found to result in significantly better outlier discrimination for certain classes of outliers.
Scale-Free Adversarial Multi-Armed Bandit with Arbitrary Feedback Delays
Authors: Jiatai Huang, Yan Dai, Longbo Huang
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00

We consider the Scale-Free Adversarial Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem with unrestricted feedback delays. In contrast to the standard assumption that all losses are $[0,1]$-bounded, in our setting, losses can fall in a general bounded interval $[-L, L]$, unknown to the agent beforehand. Furthermore, the feedback of each arm pull can experience arbitrary delays. We propose a novel approach named Scale-Free Delayed INF (SFD-INF) for this novel setting, which combines a recent "convex combination trick" together with a novel doubling and skipping technique. We then present two instances of SFD-INF, each with carefully designed delay-adapted learning scales. The first one SFD-TINF uses $\frac 12$-Tsallis entropy regularizer and can achieve $\widetilde{\mathcal O}(\sqrt{K(D+T)}L)$ regret when the losses are non-negative, where $K$ is the number of actions, $T$ is the number of steps, and $D$ is the total feedback delay. This bound nearly matches the $\Omega((\sqrt{KT}+\sqrt{D\log K})L)$ lower-bound when regarding $K$ as a constant independent of $T$. The second one, SFD-LBINF, works for general scale-free losses and achieves a small-loss style adaptive regret bound $\widetilde{\mathcal O}(\sqrt{K\mathbb{E}[\tilde{\mathfrak L}_T^2]}+\sqrt{KDL})$, which falls to the $\widetilde{\mathcal O}(\sqrt{K(D+T)}L)$ regret in the worst case and is thus more general than SFD-TINF despite a more complicated analysis and several extra logarithmic dependencies. Moreover, both instances also outperform the existing algorithms for non-delayed (i.e., $D=0$) scale-free adversarial MAB problems, which can be of independent interest.
Semi-Supervised Federated Learning with non-IID Data: Algorithm and System Design
Authors: Zhe Zhang, Shiyao Ma, Jiangtian Nie, Yi Wu, Qiang Yan, Xiaoke Xu, Dusit Niyato
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) allows edge devices (or clients) to keep data locally while simultaneously training a shared high-quality global model. However, current research is generally based on an assumption that the training data of local clients have ground-truth. Furthermore, FL faces the challenge of statistical heterogeneity, i.e., the distribution of the client's local training data is non-independent identically distributed (non-IID). In this paper, we present a robust semi-supervised FL system design, where the system aims to solve the problem of data availability and non-IID in FL. In particular, this paper focuses on studying the labels-at-server scenario where there is only a limited amount of labeled data on the server and only unlabeled data on the clients. In our system design, we propose a novel method to tackle the problems, which we refer to as Federated Mixing (FedMix). FedMix improves the naive combination of FL and semi-supervised learning methods and designs parameter decomposition strategies for disjointed learning of labeled, unlabeled data, and global models. To alleviate the non-IID problem, we propose a novel aggregation rule based on the frequency of the client's participation in training, namely the FedFreq aggregation algorithm, which can adjust the weight of the corresponding local model according to this frequency. Extensive evaluations conducted on CIFAR-10 dataset show that the performance of our proposed method is significantly better than those of the current baseline. It is worth noting that our system is robust to different non-IID levels of client data.
EnTRPO: Trust Region Policy Optimization Method with Entropy Regularization
Authors: Sahar Roostaie, Mohammad Mehdi Ebadzadeh
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) is a popular and empirically successful policy search algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). It iteratively solved the surrogate problem which restricts consecutive policies to be close to each other. TRPO is an on-policy algorithm. On-policy methods bring many benefits, like the ability to gauge each resulting policy. However, they typically discard all the knowledge about the policies which existed before. In this work, we use a replay buffer to borrow from the off-policy learning setting to TRPO. Entropy regularization is usually used to improve policy optimization in reinforcement learning. It is thought to aid exploration and generalization by encouraging more random policy choices. We add an Entropy regularization term to advantage over {\pi}, accumulated over time steps, in TRPO. We call this update EnTRPO. Our experiments demonstrate EnTRPO achieves better performance for controlling a Cart-Pole system compared with the original TRPO
Partial Order in Chaos: Consensus on Feature Attributions in the Rashomon Set
Authors: Gabriel Laberge, Yann Pequignot, Alexandre Mathieu, Foutse khomh, Mario Marchand
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Additive models, Diversity, Feature Importance, Interpretable Machine Learning

Post-hoc global/local feature attribution methods are progressively being employed to understand the decisions of complex machine learning models. Yet, because of limited amounts of data, it is possible to obtain a diversity of models with good empirical performance but that provide very different explanations for the same prediction, making it hard to derive insight from them. In this work, instead of aiming at reducing the under-specification of model explanations, we fully embrace it and extract logical statements about feature attributions that are consistent across all models with good empirical performance (i.e. all models in the Rashomon Set). We show that partial orders of local/global feature importance arise from this methodology enabling more nuanced interpretations by allowing pairs of features to be incomparable when there is no consensus on their relative importance. We prove that every relation among features present in these partial orders also holds in the rankings provided by existing approaches. Finally, we present three use cases employing hypothesis spaces with tractable Rashomon Sets (Additive models, Kernel Ridge, and Random Forests) and show that partial orders allow one to extract consistent local and global interpretations of models despite their under-specification.
Multi-Faceted Hierarchical Multi-Task Learning for a Large Number of Tasks with Multi-dimensional Relations
Authors: Junning Liu, Zijie Xia, Yu Lei, Xinjian Li, Xu Wang
Date: 2021-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Recommendation Systems

There has been many studies on improving the efficiency of shared learning in Multi-Task Learning(MTL). Previous work focused on the "micro" sharing perspective for a small number of tasks, while in Recommender Systems(RS) and other AI applications, there are often demands to model a large number of tasks with multi-dimensional task relations. For example, when using MTL to model various user behaviors in RS, if we differentiate new users and new items from old ones, there will be a cartesian product style increase of tasks with multi-dimensional relations. This work studies the "macro" perspective of shared learning network design and proposes a Multi-Faceted Hierarchical MTL model(MFH). MFH exploits the multi-dimension task relations with a nested hierarchical tree structure which maximizes the shared learning. We evaluate MFH and SOTA models in a large industry video platform of 10 billion samples and results show that MFH outperforms SOTA MTL models significantly in both offline and online evaluations across all user groups, especially remarkable for new users with an online increase of 9.1\% in app time per user and 1.85\% in next-day retention rate. MFH now has been deployed in a large scale online video recommender system. MFH is especially beneficial to the cold-start problems in RS where new users and new items often suffer from a "local overfitting" phenomenon. However, the idea is actually generic and widely applicable to other MTL scenarios.