pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Restless Bandits with Many Arms: Beating the Central Limit Theorem
Authors: Xiangyu Zhang, Peter I. Frazier
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Management, Recommendation Systems

We consider finite-horizon restless bandits with multiple pulls per period, which play an important role in recommender systems, active learning, revenue management, and many other areas. While an optimal policy can be computed, in principle, using dynamic programming, the computation required scales exponentially in the number of arms $N$. Thus, there is substantial value in understanding the performance of index policies and other policies that can be computed efficiently for large $N$. We study the growth of the optimality gap, i.e., the loss in expected performance compared to an optimal policy, for such policies in a classical asymptotic regime proposed by Whittle in which $N$ grows while holding constant the fraction of arms that can be pulled per period. Intuition from the Central Limit Theorem and the tightest previous theoretical bounds suggest that this optimality gap should grow like $O(\sqrt{N})$. Surprisingly, we show that it is possible to outperform this bound. We characterize a non-degeneracy condition and a wide class of novel practically-computable policies, called fluid-priority policies, in which the optimality gap is $O(1)$. These include most widely-used index policies. When this non-degeneracy condition does not hold, we show that fluid-priority policies nevertheless have an optimality gap that is $O(\sqrt{N})$, significantly generalizing the class of policies for which convergence rates are known. We demonstrate that fluid-priority policies offer state-of-the-art performance on a collection of restless bandit problems in numerical experiments.
H-Transformer-1D: Fast One-Dimensional Hierarchical Attention for Sequences
Authors: Zhenhai Zhu, Radu Soricut
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Language Modelling

We describe an efficient hierarchical method to compute attention in the Transformer architecture. The proposed attention mechanism exploits a matrix structure similar to the Hierarchical Matrix (H-Matrix) developed by the numerical analysis community, and has linear run time and memory complexity. We perform extensive experiments to show that the inductive bias embodied by our hierarchical attention is effective in capturing the hierarchical structure in the sequences typical for natural language and vision tasks. Our method is superior to alternative sub-quadratic proposals by over +6 points on average on the Long Range Arena benchmark. It also sets a new SOTA test perplexity on One-Billion Word dataset with 5x fewer model parameters than that of the previous-best Transformer-based models.
A brief note on understanding neural networks as Gaussian processes
Authors: Mengwu Guo
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, regression

As a generalization of the work in [Lee et al., 2017], this note briefly discusses when the prior of a neural network output follows a Gaussian process, and how a neural-network-induced Gaussian process is formulated. The posterior mean functions of such a Gaussian process regression lie in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space defined by the neural-network-induced kernel. In the case of two-layer neural networks, the induced Gaussian processes provide an interpretation of the reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces whose union forms a Barron space.
GCExplainer: Human-in-the-Loop Concept-based Explanations for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Lucie Charlotte Magister, Dmitry Kazhdan, Vikash Singh, Pietro Liò
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Classification, Node Classification

While graph neural networks (GNNs) have been shown to perform well on graph-based data from a variety of fields, they suffer from a lack of transparency and accountability, which hinders trust and consequently the deployment of such models in high-stake and safety-critical scenarios. Even though recent research has investigated methods for explaining GNNs, these methods are limited to single-instance explanations, also known as local explanations. Motivated by the aim of providing global explanations, we adapt the well-known Automated Concept-based Explanation approach (Ghorbani et al., 2019) to GNN node and graph classification, and propose GCExplainer. GCExplainer is an unsupervised approach for post-hoc discovery and extraction of global concept-based explanations for GNNs, which puts the human in the loop. We demonstrate the success of our technique on five node classification datasets and two graph classification datasets, showing that we are able to discover and extract high-quality concept representations by putting the human in the loop. We achieve a maximum completeness score of 1 and an average completeness score of 0.753 across the datasets. Finally, we show that the concept-based explanations provide an improved insight into the datasets and GNN models compared to the state-of-the-art explanations produced by GNNExplainer (Ying et al., 2019).
Logspace Reducibility From Secret Leakage Planted Clique
Authors: Jay Mardia
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

The planted clique problem is well-studied in the context of observing, explaining, and predicting interesting computational phenomena associated with statistical problems. When equating computational efficiency with the existence of polynomial time algorithms, the computational hardness of (some variant of) the planted clique problem can be used to infer the computational hardness of a host of other statistical problems. Is this ability to transfer computational hardness from (some variant of) the planted clique problem to other statistical problems robust to changing our notion of computational efficiency to space efficiency? We answer this question affirmatively for three different statistical problems, namely Sparse PCA, submatrix detection, and testing almost k-wise independence. The key challenge is that space efficient randomized reductions need to repeatedly access the randomness they use. Known reductions to these problems are all randomized and need polynomially many random bits to implement. Since we can not store polynomially many random bits in memory, it is unclear how to implement these existing reductions space efficiently. There are two ideas involved in circumventing this issue and implementing known reductions to these problems space efficiently. 1. When solving statistical problems, we can use parts of the input itself as randomness. 2. Secret leakage variants of the planted clique problem with appropriate secret leakage can be more useful than the standard planted clique problem when we want to use parts of the input as randomness. (abstract shortened due to arxiv constraints)
A Study on Speech Enhancement Based on Diffusion Probabilistic Model
Authors: Yen-Ju Lu, Yu Tsao, Shinji Watanabe
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Diffusion probabilistic models have demonstrated an outstanding capability to model natural images and raw audio waveforms through a paired diffusion and reverse processes. The unique property of the reverse process (namely, eliminating non-target signals from the Gaussian noise and noisy signals) could be utilized to restore clean signals. Based on this property, we propose a diffusion probabilistic model-based speech enhancement (DiffuSE) model that aims to recover clean speech signals from noisy signals. The fundamental architecture of the proposed DiffuSE model is similar to that of DiffWave--a high-quality audio waveform generation model that has a relatively low computational cost and footprint. To attain better enhancement performance, we designed an advanced reverse process, termed the supportive reverse process, which adds noisy speech in each time-step to the predicted speech. The experimental results show that DiffuSE yields performance that is comparable to related audio generative models on the standardized Voice Bank corpus SE task. Moreover, relative to the generally suggested full sampling schedule, the proposed supportive reverse process especially improved the fast sampling, taking few steps to yield better enhancement results over the conventional full step inference process.
Neural Circuit Synthesis from Specification Patterns
Authors: Frederik Schmitt, Christopher Hahn, Markus N. Rabe, Bernd Finkbeiner
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

We train hierarchical Transformers on the task of synthesizing hardware circuits directly out of high-level logical specifications in linear-time temporal logic (LTL). The LTL synthesis problem is a well-known algorithmic challenge with a long history and an annual competition is organized to track the improvement of algorithms and tooling over time. New approaches using machine learning might open a lot of possibilities in this area, but suffer from the lack of sufficient amounts of training data. In this paper, we consider a method to generate large amounts of additional training data, i.e., pairs of specifications and circuits implementing them. We ensure that this synthetic data is sufficiently close to human-written specifications by mining common patterns from the specifications used in the synthesis competitions. We show that hierarchical Transformers trained on this synthetic data solve a significant portion of problems from the synthesis competitions, and even out-of-distribution examples from a recent case study.
Decision-forest voting scheme for classification of rare classes in network intrusion detection
Authors: Jan Brabec, Lukas Machlica
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Intrusion Detection, Malware Detection, Multi-class Classification, Network Intrusion Detection

In this paper, Bayesian based aggregation of decision trees in an ensemble (decision forest) is investigated. The focus is laid on multi-class classification with number of samples significantly skewed toward one of the classes. The algorithm leverages out-of-bag datasets to estimate prediction errors of individual trees, which are then used in accordance with the Bayes rule to refine the decision of the ensemble. The algorithm takes prevalence of individual classes into account and does not require setting of any additional parameters related to class weights or decision-score thresholds. Evaluation is based on publicly available datasets as well as on an proprietary dataset comprising network traffic telemetry from hundreds of enterprise networks with over a million of users overall. The aim is to increase the detection capabilities of an operating malware detection system. While we were able to keep precision of the system higher than 94\%, that is only 6 out of 100 detections shown to the network administrator are false alarms, we were able to achieve increase of approximately 7\% in the number of detections. The algorithm effectively handles large amounts of data, and can be used in conjunction with most of the state-of-the-art algorithms used to train decision forests.
Graph Representation Learning on Tissue-Specific Multi-Omics
Authors: Amine Amor, Pietro Lio', Vikash Singh, Ramon Viñas Torné, Helena Andres Terre
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Graph Representation Learning, Link Prediction, Prediction, Representation Learning

Combining different modalities of data from human tissues has been critical in advancing biomedical research and personalised medical care. In this study, we leverage a graph embedding model (i.e VGAE) to perform link prediction on tissue-specific Gene-Gene Interaction (GGI) networks. Through ablation experiments, we prove that the combination of multiple biological modalities (i.e multi-omics) leads to powerful embeddings and better link prediction performances. Our evaluation shows that the integration of gene methylation profiles and RNA-sequencing data significantly improves the link prediction performance. Overall, the combination of RNA-sequencing and gene methylation data leads to a link prediction accuracy of 71% on GGI networks. By harnessing graph representation learning on multi-omics data, our work brings novel insights to the current literature on multi-omics integration in bioinformatics.
Deep Learning Explicit Differentiable Predictive Control Laws for Buildings
Authors: Jan Drgona, Aaron Tuor, Soumya Vasisht, Elliott Skomski, Draguna Vrabie
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Model Predictive Control

We present a differentiable predictive control (DPC) methodology for learning constrained control laws for unknown nonlinear systems. DPC poses an approximate solution to multiparametric programming problems emerging from explicit nonlinear model predictive control (MPC). Contrary to approximate MPC, DPC does not require supervision by an expert controller. Instead, a system dynamics model is learned from the observed system's dynamics, and the neural control law is optimized offline by leveraging the differentiable closed-loop system model. The combination of a differentiable closed-loop system and penalty methods for constraint handling of system outputs and inputs allows us to optimize the control law's parameters directly by backpropagating economic MPC loss through the learned system model. The control performance of the proposed DPC method is demonstrated in simulation using learned model of multi-zone building thermal dynamics.
Power of human-algorithm collaboration in solving combinatorial optimization problems
Authors: Tapani Toivonen
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

Many combinatorial optimization problems are often considered intractable to solve exactly or by approximation. An example of such problem is maximum clique which -- under standard assumptions in complexity theory -- cannot be solved in sub-exponential time or be approximated within polynomial factor efficiently. We show that if a polynomial time algorithm can query informative Gaussian priors from an expert $poly(n)$ times, then a class of combinatorial optimization problems can be solved efficiently in expectation up to a multiplicative factor $\epsilon$ where $\epsilon$ is arbitrary constant. While our proposed methods are merely theoretical, they cast new light on how to approach solving these problems that have been usually considered intractable.
SGD with a Constant Large Learning Rate Can Converge to Local Maxima
Authors: Liu Ziyin, Botao Li, James B. Simon, Masahito Ueda
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00

Previous works on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) often focus on its success. In this work, we construct worst-case optimization problems illustrating that, when not in the regimes that the previous works often assume, SGD can exhibit many strange and potentially undesirable behaviors. Specifically, we construct landscapes and data distributions such that (1) SGD converges to local maxima, (2) SGD escapes saddle points arbitrarily slowly, (3) SGD prefers sharp minima over flat ones, and (4) AMSGrad converges to local maxima. We also realize results in a minimal neural network-like example. Our results highlight the importance of simultaneously analyzing the minibatch sampling, discrete-time updates rules, and realistic landscapes to understand the role of SGD in deep learning.
Identifying the fragment structure of the organic compounds by deeply learning the original NMR data
Authors: Chongcan Li, Yong Cong, Weihua Deng
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection

We preprocess the raw NMR spectrum and extract key characteristic features by using two different methodologies, called equidistant sampling and peak sampling for subsequent substructure pattern recognition; meanwhile may provide the alternative strategy to address the imbalance issue of the NMR dataset frequently encountered in dataset collection of statistical modeling and establish two conventional SVM and KNN models to assess the capability of two feature selection, respectively. Our results in this study show that the models using the selected features of peak sampling outperform the ones using the other. Then we build the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model trained by Data B collected from peak sampling. Furthermore, we illustrate the easier optimization of hyper parameters and the better generalization ability of the RNN deep learning model by comparison with traditional machine learning SVM and KNN models in detail.
WiP Abstract : Robust Out-of-distribution Motion Detection and Localization in Autonomous CPS
Authors: Yeli Feng, Arvind Easwaran
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Motion Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection, Representation Learning

Highly complex deep learning models are increasingly integrated into modern cyber-physical systems (CPS), many of which have strict safety requirements. One problem arising from this is that deep learning lacks interpretability, operating as a black box. The reliability of deep learning is heavily impacted by how well the model training data represents runtime test data, especially when the input space dimension is high as natural images. In response, we propose a robust out-of-distribution (OOD) detection framework. Our approach detects unusual movements from driving video in real-time by combining classical optic flow operation with representation learning via variational autoencoder (VAE). We also design a method to locate OOD factors in images. Evaluation on a driving simulation data set shows that our approach is statistically more robust than related works.
Federated Causal Inference in Heterogeneous Observational Data
Authors: Ruoxuan Xiong, Allison Koenecke, Michael Powell, Zhu Shen, Joshua T. Vogelstein, Susan Athey
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference

We are interested in estimating the effect of a treatment applied to individuals at multiple sites, where data is stored locally for each site. Due to privacy constraints, individual-level data cannot be shared across sites; the sites may also have heterogeneous populations and treatment assignment mechanisms. Motivated by these considerations, we develop federated methods to draw inference on the average treatment effects of combined data across sites. Our methods first compute summary statistics locally using propensity scores and then aggregate these statistics across sites to obtain point and variance estimators of average treatment effects. We show that these estimators are consistent and asymptotically normal. To achieve these asymptotic properties, we find that the aggregation schemes need to account for the heterogeneity in treatment assignments and in outcomes across sites. We demonstrate the validity of our federated methods through a comparative study of two large medical claims databases.
Federated Learning with Fair Worker Selection: A Multi-Round Submodular Maximization Approach
Authors: Fengjiao Li, Jia Liu, Bo Ji
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Federated Learning

In this paper, we study the problem of fair worker selection in Federated Learning systems, where fairness serves as an incentive mechanism that encourages more workers to participate in the federation. Considering the achieved training accuracy of the global model as the utility of the selected workers, which is typically a monotone submodular function, we formulate the worker selection problem as a new multi-round monotone submodular maximization problem with cardinality and fairness constraints. The objective is to maximize the time-average utility over multiple rounds subject to an additional fairness requirement that each worker must be selected for a certain fraction of time. While the traditional submodular maximization with a cardinality constraint is already a well-known NP-Hard problem, the fairness constraint in the multi-round setting adds an extra layer of difficulty. To address this novel challenge, we propose three algorithms: Fair Continuous Greedy (FairCG1 and FairCG2) and Fair Discrete Greedy (FairDG), all of which satisfy the fairness requirement whenever feasible. Moreover, we prove nontrivial lower bounds on the achieved time-average utility under FairCG1 and FairCG2. In addition, by giving a higher priority to fairness, FairDG ensures a stronger short-term fairness guarantee, which holds in every round. Finally, we perform extensive simulations to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in terms of the time-average utility and fairness satisfaction.
Invariance-based Multi-Clustering of Latent Space Embeddings for Equivariant Learning
Authors: Chandrajit Bajaj, Avik Roy, Haoran Zhang
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have been shown to be remarkably effective in recovering model latent spaces for several computer vision tasks. However, currently trained VAEs, for a number of reasons, seem to fall short in learning invariant and equivariant clusters in latent space. Our work focuses on providing solutions to this problem and presents an approach to disentangle equivariance feature maps in a Lie group manifold by enforcing deep, group-invariant learning. Simultaneously implementing a novel separation of semantic and equivariant variables of the latent space representation, we formulate a modified Evidence Lower BOund (ELBO) by using a mixture model pdf like Gaussian mixtures for invariant cluster embeddings that allows superior unsupervised variational clustering. Our experiments show that this model effectively learns to disentangle the invariant and equivariant representations with significant improvements in the learning rate and an observably superior image recognition and canonical state reconstruction compared to the currently best deep learning models.
Efficient inference of interventional distributions
Authors: Arnab Bhattacharyya, Sutanu Gayen, Saravanan Kandasamy, Vedant Raval, N. V. Vinodchandran
Date: 2021-07-25 00:00:00

We consider the problem of efficiently inferring interventional distributions in a causal Bayesian network from a finite number of observations. Let $\mathcal{P}$ be a causal model on a set $\mathbf{V}$ of observable variables on a given causal graph $G$. For sets $\mathbf{X},\mathbf{Y}\subseteq \mathbf{V}$, and setting ${\bf x}$ to $\mathbf{X}$, let $P_{\bf x}(\mathbf{Y})$ denote the interventional distribution on $\mathbf{Y}$ with respect to an intervention ${\bf x}$ to variables ${\bf x}$. Shpitser and Pearl (AAAI 2006), building on the work of Tian and Pearl (AAAI 2001), gave an exact characterization of the class of causal graphs for which the interventional distribution $P_{\bf x}({\mathbf{Y}})$ can be uniquely determined. We give the first efficient version of the Shpitser-Pearl algorithm. In particular, under natural assumptions, we give a polynomial-time algorithm that on input a causal graph $G$ on observable variables $\mathbf{V}$, a setting ${\bf x}$ of a set $\mathbf{X} \subseteq \mathbf{V}$ of bounded size, outputs succinct descriptions of both an evaluator and a generator for a distribution $\hat{P}$ that is $\varepsilon$-close (in total variation distance) to $P_{\bf x}({\mathbf{Y}})$ where $Y=\mathbf{V}\setminus \mathbf{X}$, if $P_{\bf x}(\mathbf{Y})$ is identifiable. We also show that when $\mathbf{Y}$ is an arbitrary set, there is no efficient algorithm that outputs an evaluator of a distribution that is $\varepsilon$-close to $P_{\bf x}({\mathbf{Y}})$ unless all problems that have statistical zero-knowledge proofs, including the Graph Isomorphism problem, have efficient randomized algorithms.