pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
L2ight: Enabling On-Chip Learning for Optical Neural Networks via Efficient in-situ Subspace Optimization
Authors: Jiaqi Gu, Hanqing Zhu, Chenghao Feng, Zixuan Jiang, Ray T. Chen, David Z. Pan
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

Silicon-photonics-based optical neural network (ONN) is a promising hardware platform that could represent a paradigm shift in efficient AI with its CMOS-compatibility, flexibility, ultra-low execution latency, and high energy efficiency. In-situ training on the online programmable photonic chips is appealing but still encounters challenging issues in on-chip implementability, scalability, and efficiency. In this work, we propose a closed-loop ONN on-chip learning framework L2ight to enable scalable ONN mapping and efficient in-situ learning. L2ight adopts a three-stage learning flow that first calibrates the complicated photonic circuit states under challenging physical constraints, then performs photonic core mapping via combined analytical solving and zeroth-order optimization. A subspace learning procedure with multi-level sparsity is integrated into L2ight to enable in-situ gradient evaluation and fast adaptation, unleashing the power of optics for real on-chip intelligence. Extensive experiments demonstrate our proposed L2ight outperforms prior ONN training protocols with 3-order-of-magnitude higher scalability and over 30X better efficiency, when benchmarked on various models and learning tasks. This synergistic framework is the first scalable on-chip learning solution that pushes this emerging field from intractable to scalable and further to efficient for next-generation self-learnable photonic neural chips. From a co-design perspective, L2ight also provides essential insights for hardware-restricted unitary subspace optimization and efficient sparse training. We open-source our framework at https://github.com/JeremieMelo/L2ight.
Minimax Optimal Quantile and Semi-Adversarial Regret via Root-Logarithmic Regularizers
Authors: Jeffrey Negrea, Blair Bilodeau, Nicolò Campolongo, Francesco Orabona, Daniel M. Roy
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

Quantile (and, more generally, KL) regret bounds, such as those achieved by NormalHedge (Chaudhuri, Freund, and Hsu 2009) and its variants, relax the goal of competing against the best individual expert to only competing against a majority of experts on adversarial data. More recently, the semi-adversarial paradigm (Bilodeau, Negrea, and Roy 2020) provides an alternative relaxation of adversarial online learning by considering data that may be neither fully adversarial nor stochastic (i.i.d.). We achieve the minimax optimal regret in both paradigms using FTRL with separate, novel, root-logarithmic regularizers, both of which can be interpreted as yielding variants of NormalHedge. We extend existing KL regret upper bounds, which hold uniformly over target distributions, to possibly uncountable expert classes with arbitrary priors; provide the first full-information lower bounds for quantile regret on finite expert classes (which are tight); and provide an adaptively minimax optimal algorithm for the semi-adversarial paradigm that adapts to the true, unknown constraint faster, leading to uniformly improved regret bounds over existing methods.
You Are the Best Reviewer of Your Own Papers: An Owner-Assisted Scoring Mechanism
Authors: Weijie J. Su
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00

I consider a setting where reviewers offer very noisy scores for several items for the selection of high-quality ones (e.g., peer review of large conference proceedings), whereas the owner of these items knows the true underlying scores but prefers not to provide this information. To address this withholding of information, in this paper, I introduce the Isotonic Mechanism, a simple and efficient approach to improving imprecise raw scores by leveraging certain information that the owner is incentivized to provide. This mechanism takes the ranking of the items from best to worst provided by the owner as input, in addition to the raw scores provided by the reviewers. It reports the adjusted scores for the items by solving a convex optimization problem. Under certain conditions, I show that the owner's optimal strategy is to honestly report the true ranking of the items to her best knowledge in order to maximize the expected utility. Moreover, I prove that the adjusted scores provided by this owner-assisted mechanism are significantly more accurate than the raw scores provided by the reviewers. This paper concludes with several extensions of the Isotonic Mechanism and some refinements of the mechanism for practical consideration.
Convolutional Deep Exponential Families
Authors: Chengkuan Hong, Christian R. Shelton
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00

We describe convolutional deep exponential families (CDEFs) in this paper. CDEFs are built based on deep exponential families, deep probabilistic models that capture the hierarchical dependence between latent variables. CDEFs greatly reduce the number of free parameters by tying the weights of DEFs. Our experiments show that CDEFs are able to uncover time correlations with a small amount of data.
Reinforcement Learning in Linear MDPs: Constant Regret and Representation Selection
Authors: Matteo Papini, Andrea Tirinzoni, Aldo Pacchiano, Marcello Restelli, Alessandro Lazaric, Matteo Pirotta
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We study the role of the representation of state-action value functions in regret minimization in finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with linear structure. We first derive a necessary condition on the representation, called universally spanning optimal features (UNISOFT), to achieve constant regret in any MDP with linear reward function. This result encompasses the well-known settings of low-rank MDPs and, more generally, zero inherent Bellman error (also known as the Bellman closure assumption). We then demonstrate that this condition is also sufficient for these classes of problems by deriving a constant regret bound for two optimistic algorithms (LSVI-UCB and ELEANOR). Finally, we propose an algorithm for representation selection and we prove that it achieves constant regret when one of the given representations, or a suitable combination of them, satisfies the UNISOFT condition.
Masked LARk: Masked Learning, Aggregation and Reporting worKflow
Authors: Joseph J. Pfeiffer III, Denis Charles, Davis Gilton, Young Hun Jung, Mehul Parsana, Erik Anderson
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

Today, many web advertising data flows involve passive cross-site tracking of users. Enabling such a mechanism through the usage of third party tracking cookies (3PC) exposes sensitive user data to a large number of parties, with little oversight on how that data can be used. Thus, most browsers are moving towards removal of 3PC in subsequent browser iterations. In order to substantially improve end-user privacy while allowing sites to continue to sustain their business through ad funding, new privacy-preserving primitives need to be introduced. In this paper, we discuss a new proposal, called Masked LARk, for aggregation of user engagement measurement and model training that prevents cross-site tracking, while remaining (a) flexible, for engineering development and maintenance, (b) secure, in the sense that cross-site tracking and tracing are blocked and (c) open for continued model development and training, allowing advertisers to serve relevant ads to interested users. We introduce a secure multi-party compute (MPC) protocol that utilizes "helper" parties to train models, so that once data leaves the browser, no downstream system can individually construct a complete picture of the user activity. For training, our key innovation is through the usage of masking, or the obfuscation of the true labels, while still allowing a gradient to be accurately computed in aggregate over a batch of data. Our protocol only utilizes light cryptography, at such a level that an interested yet inexperienced reader can understand the core algorithm. We develop helper endpoints that implement this system, and give example usage of training in PyTorch.
When is BERT Multilingual? Isolating Crucial Ingredients for Cross-lingual Transfer
Authors: Ameet Deshpande, Partha Talukdar, Karthik Narasimhan
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2022 7
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer

While recent work on multilingual language models has demonstrated their capacity for cross-lingual zero-shot transfer on downstream tasks, there is a lack of consensus in the community as to what shared properties between languages enable such transfer. Analyses involving pairs of natural languages are often inconclusive and contradictory since languages simultaneously differ in many linguistic aspects. In this paper, we perform a large-scale empirical study to isolate the effects of various linguistic properties by measuring zero-shot transfer between four diverse natural languages and their counterparts constructed by modifying aspects such as the script, word order, and syntax. Among other things, our experiments show that the absence of sub-word overlap significantly affects zero-shot transfer when languages differ in their word order, and there is a strong correlation between transfer performance and word embedding alignment between languages (e.g., R=0.94 on the task of NLI). Our results call for focus in multilingual models on explicitly improving word embedding alignment between languages rather than relying on its implicit emergence.
Combining Vagueness Detection with Deep Learning to Identify Fake News
Authors: Paul Guélorget, Benjamin Icard, Guillaume Gadek, Souhir Gahbiche, Sylvain Gatepaille, Ghislain Atemezing, Paul Égré
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

In this paper, we combine two independent detection methods for identifying fake news: the algorithm VAGO uses semantic rules combined with NLP techniques to measure vagueness and subjectivity in texts, while the classifier FAKE-CLF relies on Convolutional Neural Network classification and supervised deep learning to classify texts as biased or legitimate. We compare the results of the two methods on four corpora. We find a positive correlation between the vagueness and subjectivity measures obtained by VAGO, and the classification of text as biased by FAKE-CLF. The comparison yields mutual benefits: VAGO helps explain the results of FAKE-CLF. Conversely FAKE-CLF helps us corroborate and expand VAGO's database. The use of two complementary techniques (rule-based vs data-driven) proves a fruitful approach for the challenging problem of identifying fake news.
TRAIL: Near-Optimal Imitation Learning with Suboptimal Data
Authors: Mengjiao Yang, Sergey Levine, Ofir Nachum
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Imitation Learning

The aim in imitation learning is to learn effective policies by utilizing near-optimal expert demonstrations. However, high-quality demonstrations from human experts can be expensive to obtain in large numbers. On the other hand, it is often much easier to obtain large quantities of suboptimal or task-agnostic trajectories, which are not useful for direct imitation, but can nevertheless provide insight into the dynamical structure of the environment, showing what could be done in the environment even if not what should be done. We ask the question, is it possible to utilize such suboptimal offline datasets to facilitate provably improved downstream imitation learning? In this work, we answer this question affirmatively and present training objectives that use offline datasets to learn a factored transition model whose structure enables the extraction of a latent action space. Our theoretical analysis shows that the learned latent action space can boost the sample-efficiency of downstream imitation learning, effectively reducing the need for large near-optimal expert datasets through the use of auxiliary non-expert data. To learn the latent action space in practice, we propose TRAIL (Transition-Reparametrized Actions for Imitation Learning), an algorithm that learns an energy-based transition model contrastively, and uses the transition model to reparametrize the action space for sample-efficient imitation learning. We evaluate the practicality of our objective through experiments on a set of navigation and locomotion tasks. Our results verify the benefits suggested by our theory and show that TRAIL is able to improve baseline imitation learning by up to 4x in performance.
Subtleties in the trainability of quantum machine learning models
Authors: Supanut Thanasilp, Samson Wang, Nhat A. Nghiem, Patrick J. Coles, M. Cerezo
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Quantum Machine Learning, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

A new paradigm for data science has emerged, with quantum data, quantum models, and quantum computational devices. This field, called Quantum Machine Learning (QML), aims to achieve a speedup over traditional machine learning for data analysis. However, its success usually hinges on efficiently training the parameters in quantum neural networks, and the field of QML is still lacking theoretical scaling results for their trainability. Some trainability results have been proven for a closely related field called Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs). While both fields involve training a parametrized quantum circuit, there are crucial differences that make the results for one setting not readily applicable to the other. In this work we bridge the two frameworks and show that gradient scaling results for VQAs can also be applied to study the gradient scaling of QML models. Our results indicate that features deemed detrimental for VQA trainability can also lead to issues such as barren plateaus in QML. Consequently, our work has implications for several QML proposals in the literature. In addition, we provide theoretical and numerical evidence that QML models exhibit further trainability issues not present in VQAs, arising from the use of a training dataset. We refer to these as dataset-induced barren plateaus. These results are most relevant when dealing with classical data, as here the choice of embedding scheme (i.e., the map between classical data and quantum states) can greatly affect the gradient scaling.
Dynamic Review-based Recommenders
Authors: Kostadin Cvejoski, Ramses J. Sanchez, Christian Bauckhage, Cesar Ojeda
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems, Review Generation

Just as user preferences change with time, item reviews also reflect those same preference changes. In a nutshell, if one is to sequentially incorporate review content knowledge into recommender systems, one is naturally led to dynamical models of text. In the present work we leverage the known power of reviews to enhance rating predictions in a way that (i) respects the causality of review generation and (ii) includes, in a bidirectional fashion, the ability of ratings to inform language review models and vice-versa, language representations that help predict ratings end-to-end. Moreover, our representations are time-interval aware and thus yield a continuous-time representation of the dynamics. We provide experiments on real-world datasets and show that our methodology is able to outperform several state-of-the-art models. Source code for all models can be found at [1].
Deciphering the Language of Nature: A transformer-based language model for deleterious mutations in proteins
Authors: Theodore Jiang, Li Fang, Kai Wang
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Various machine-learning models, including deep neural network models, have already been developed to predict deleteriousness of missense (non-synonymous) mutations. Potential improvements to the current state of the art, however, may still benefit from a fresh look at the biological problem using more sophisticated self-adaptive machine-learning approaches. Recent advances in the natural language processing field show transformer models-a type of deep neural network-to be particularly powerful at modeling sequence information with context dependence. In this study, we introduce MutFormer, a transformer-based model for the prediction of deleterious missense mutations, which uses reference and mutated protein sequences from the human genome as the primary features. MutFormer takes advantage of a combination of self-attention layers and convolutional layers to learn both long-range and short-range dependencies between amino acid mutations in a protein sequence. In this study, we first pre-trained MutFormer on reference protein sequences and mutated protein sequences resulting from common genetic variants observed in human populations. We next examined different fine-tuning methods to successfully apply the model to deleteriousness prediction of missense mutations. Finally, we evaluated MutFormer's performance on multiple testing data sets. We found that MutFormer showed similar or improved performance over a variety of existing tools, including those that used conventional machine-learning approaches. We conclude that MutFormer successfully considers sequence features that are not explored in previous studies and could potentially complement existing computational predictions or empirically generated functional scores to improve our understanding of disease variants.
Generalized Shape Metrics on Neural Representations
Authors: Alex H. Williams, Erin Kunz, Simon Kornblith, Scott W. Linderman
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

Understanding the operation of biological and artificial networks remains a difficult and important challenge. To identify general principles, researchers are increasingly interested in surveying large collections of networks that are trained on, or biologically adapted to, similar tasks. A standardized set of analysis tools is now needed to identify how network-level covariates -- such as architecture, anatomical brain region, and model organism -- impact neural representations (hidden layer activations). Here, we provide a rigorous foundation for these analyses by defining a broad family of metric spaces that quantify representational dissimilarity. Using this framework we modify existing representational similarity measures based on canonical correlation analysis to satisfy the triangle inequality, formulate a novel metric that respects the inductive biases in convolutional layers, and identify approximate Euclidean embeddings that enable network representations to be incorporated into essentially any off-the-shelf machine learning method. We demonstrate these methods on large-scale datasets from biology (Allen Institute Brain Observatory) and deep learning (NAS-Bench-101). In doing so, we identify relationships between neural representations that are interpretable in terms of anatomical features and model performance.
Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks Learned by Transduction
Authors: Jiefeng Chen, Xi Wu, Yang Guo, YIngyu Liang, Somesh Jha
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Bilevel Optimization, Transductive Learning

There has been emerging interest in using transductive learning for adversarial robustness (Goldwasser et al., NeurIPS 2020; Wu et al., ICML 2020; Wang et al., ArXiv 2021). Compared to traditional defenses, these defense mechanisms "dynamically learn" the model based on test-time input; and theoretically, attacking these defenses reduces to solving a bilevel optimization problem, which poses difficulty in crafting adaptive attacks. In this paper, we examine these defense mechanisms from a principled threat analysis perspective. We formulate and analyze threat models for transductive-learning based defenses, and point out important subtleties. We propose the principle of attacking model space for solving bilevel attack objectives, and present Greedy Model Space Attack (GMSA), an attack framework that can serve as a new baseline for evaluating transductive-learning based defenses. Through systematic evaluation, we show that GMSA, even with weak instantiations, can break previous transductive-learning based defenses, which were resilient to previous attacks, such as AutoAttack. On the positive side, we report a somewhat surprising empirical result of "transductive adversarial training": Adversarially retraining the model using fresh randomness at the test time gives a significant increase in robustness against attacks we consider.
Anomaly-Injected Deep Support Vector Data Description for Text Outlier Detection
Authors: Zeyu You, Yichu Zhou, Tao Yang, Wei Fan
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Outlier Detection

Anomaly detection or outlier detection is a common task in various domains, which has attracted significant research efforts in recent years. Existing works mainly focus on structured data such as numerical or categorical data; however, anomaly detection on unstructured textual data is less attended. In this work, we target the textual anomaly detection problem and propose a deep anomaly-injected support vector data description (AI-SVDD) framework. AI-SVDD not only learns a more compact representation of the data hypersphere but also adopts a small number of known anomalies to increase the discriminative power. To tackle text input, we employ a multilayer perceptron (MLP) network in conjunction with BERT to obtain enriched text representations. We conduct experiments on three text anomaly detection applications with multiple datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed AI-SVDD is promising and outperforms existing works.
Designing Machine Learning Surrogates using Outputs of Molecular Dynamics Simulations as Soft Labels
Authors: J. C. S. Kadupitiya, Nasim Anousheh, Vikram Jadhao
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00

Molecular dynamics simulations are powerful tools to extract the microscopic mechanisms characterizing the properties of soft materials. We recently introduced machine learning surrogates for molecular dynamics simulations of soft materials and demonstrated that artificial neural network based regression models can successfully predict the relationships between the input material attributes and the simulation outputs. Here, we show that statistical uncertainties associated with the outputs of molecular dynamics simulations can be utilized to train artificial neural networks and design machine learning surrogates with higher accuracy and generalizability. We design soft labels for the simulation outputs by incorporating the uncertainties in the estimated average output quantities, and introduce a modified loss function that leverages these soft labels during training to significantly reduce the surrogate prediction error for input systems in the unseen test data. The approach is illustrated with the design of a surrogate for molecular dynamics simulations of confined electrolytes to predict the complex relationship between the input electrolyte attributes and the output ionic structure. The surrogate predictions for the ionic density profiles show excellent agreement with the ground truth results produced using molecular dynamics simulations. The high accuracy and small inference times associated with the surrogate predictions provide quick access to quantities derived using the number density profiles and facilitate rapid sensitivity analysis.