pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Shared Interest: Measuring Human-AI Alignment to Identify Recurring Patterns in Model Behavior
Authors: Angie Boggust, Benjamin Hoover, Arvind Satyanarayan, Hendrik Strobelt
Date: 2021-07-20 00:00:00

Saliency methods -- techniques to identify the importance of input features on a model's output -- are a common step in understanding neural network behavior. However, interpreting saliency requires tedious manual inspection to identify and aggregate patterns in model behavior, resulting in ad hoc or cherry-picked analysis. To address these concerns, we present Shared Interest: metrics for comparing model reasoning (via saliency) to human reasoning (via ground truth annotations). By providing quantitative descriptors, Shared Interest enables ranking, sorting, and aggregating inputs, thereby facilitating large-scale systematic analysis of model behavior. We use Shared Interest to identify eight recurring patterns in model behavior, such as cases where contextual features or a subset of ground truth features are most important to the model. Working with representative real-world users, we show how Shared Interest can be used to decide if a model is trustworthy, uncover issues missed in manual analyses, and enable interactive probing.
Offline Preference-Based Apprenticeship Learning
Authors: Daniel Shin, Daniel S. Brown, Anca D. Dragan
Date: 2021-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Offline RL

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the agent might have access to offline data from related tasks in the same target environment. While offline data is increasingly being used to aid policy optimization via offline RL, our observation is that it can be a surprisingly rich source of information for preference learning as well. We propose an approach that uses an offline dataset to craft preference queries via pool-based active learning, learns a distribution over reward functions, and optimizes a corresponding policy via offline RL. Crucially, our proposed approach does not require actual physical rollouts or an accurate simulator for either the reward learning or policy optimization steps. To test our approach, we identify a subset of existing offline RL benchmarks that are well suited for offline reward learning and also propose new offline apprenticeship learning benchmarks which allow for more open-ended behaviors. Our empirical results suggest that combining offline RL with learned human preferences can enable an agent to learn to perform novel tasks that were not explicitly shown in the offline data.
Active operator inference for learning low-dimensional dynamical-system models from noisy data
Authors: Wayne Isaac Tan Uy, Yuepeng Wang, Yuxiao Wen, Benjamin Peherstorfer
Date: 2021-07-20 00:00:00

Noise poses a challenge for learning dynamical-system models because already small variations can distort the dynamics described by trajectory data. This work builds on operator inference from scientific machine learning to infer low-dimensional models from high-dimensional state trajectories polluted with noise. The presented analysis shows that, under certain conditions, the inferred operators are unbiased estimators of the well-studied projection-based reduced operators from traditional model reduction. Furthermore, the connection between operator inference and projection-based model reduction enables bounding the mean-squared errors of predictions made with the learned models with respect to traditional reduced models. The analysis also motivates an active operator inference approach that judiciously samples high-dimensional trajectories with the aim of achieving a low mean-squared error by reducing the effect of noise. Numerical experiments with high-dimensional linear and nonlinear state dynamics demonstrate that predictions obtained with active operator inference have orders of magnitude lower mean-squared errors than operator inference with traditional, equidistantly sampled trajectory data.
ByPE-VAE: Bayesian Pseudocoresets Exemplar VAE
Authors: Qingzhong Ai, Lirong He, Shiyu Liu, Zenglin Xu
Date: 2021-07-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Density Estimation, Representation Learning, Stochastic Optimization

Recent studies show that advanced priors play a major role in deep generative models. Exemplar VAE, as a variant of VAE with an exemplar-based prior, has achieved impressive results. However, due to the nature of model design, an exemplar-based model usually requires vast amounts of data to participate in training, which leads to huge computational complexity. To address this issue, we propose Bayesian Pseudocoresets Exemplar VAE (ByPE-VAE), a new variant of VAE with a prior based on Bayesian pseudocoreset. The proposed prior is conditioned on a small-scale pseudocoreset rather than the whole dataset for reducing the computational cost and avoiding overfitting. Simultaneously, we obtain the optimal pseudocoreset via a stochastic optimization algorithm during VAE training aiming to minimize the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the prior based on the pseudocoreset and that based on the whole dataset. Experimental results show that ByPE-VAE can achieve competitive improvements over the state-of-the-art VAEs in the tasks of density estimation, representation learning, and generative data augmentation. Particularly, on a basic VAE architecture, ByPE-VAE is up to 3 times faster than Exemplar VAE while almost holding the performance. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/Aiqz/ByPE-VAE}.
Transfer Learning for Credit Card Fraud Detection: A Journey from Research to Production
Authors: Wissam Siblini, Guillaume Coter, Rémy Fabry, Liyun He-Guelton, Frédéric Oblé, Bertrand Lebichot, Yann-Aël Le Borgne, Gianluca Bontempi
Date: 2021-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Fraud Detection, Transfer Learning

The dark face of digital commerce generalization is the increase of fraud attempts. To prevent any type of attacks, state-of-the-art fraud detection systems are now embedding Machine Learning (ML) modules. The conception of such modules is only communicated at the level of research and papers mostly focus on results for isolated benchmark datasets and metrics. But research is only a part of the journey, preceded by the right formulation of the business problem and collection of data, and followed by a practical integration. In this paper, we give a wider vision of the process, on a case study of transfer learning for fraud detection, from business to research, and back to business.
An Embedding of ReLU Networks and an Analysis of their Identifiability
Authors: Pierre Stock, Rémi Gribonval
Date: 2021-07-20 00:00:00

Neural networks with the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) nonlinearity are described by a vector of parameters $\theta$, and realized as a piecewise linear continuous function $R_{\theta}: x \in \mathbb R^{d} \mapsto R_{\theta}(x) \in \mathbb R^{k}$. Natural scalings and permutations operations on the parameters $\theta$ leave the realization unchanged, leading to equivalence classes of parameters that yield the same realization. These considerations in turn lead to the notion of identifiability -- the ability to recover (the equivalence class of) $\theta$ from the sole knowledge of its realization $R_{\theta}$. The overall objective of this paper is to introduce an embedding for ReLU neural networks of any depth, $\Phi(\theta)$, that is invariant to scalings and that provides a locally linear parameterization of the realization of the network. Leveraging these two key properties, we derive some conditions under which a deep ReLU network is indeed locally identifiable from the knowledge of the realization on a finite set of samples $x_{i} \in \mathbb R^{d}$. We study the shallow case in more depth, establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for the network to be identifiable from a bounded subset $\mathcal X \subseteq \mathbb R^{d}$.
CANITA: Faster Rates for Distributed Convex Optimization with Communication Compression
Authors: Zhize Li, Peter Richtárik
Date: 2021-07-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Distributed Optimization, Federated Learning

Due to the high communication cost in distributed and federated learning, methods relying on compressed communication are becoming increasingly popular. Besides, the best theoretically and practically performing gradient-type methods invariably rely on some form of acceleration/momentum to reduce the number of communications (faster convergence), e.g., Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent (Nesterov, 1983, 2004) and Adam (Kingma and Ba, 2014). In order to combine the benefits of communication compression and convergence acceleration, we propose a \emph{compressed and accelerated} gradient method based on ANITA (Li, 2021) for distributed optimization, which we call CANITA. Our CANITA achieves the \emph{first accelerated rate} $O\bigg(\sqrt{\Big(1+\sqrt{\frac{\omega^3}{n}}\Big)\frac{L}{\epsilon}} + \omega\big(\frac{1}{\epsilon}\big)^{\frac{1}{3}}\bigg)$, which improves upon the state-of-the-art non-accelerated rate $O\left((1+\frac{\omega}{n})\frac{L}{\epsilon} + \frac{\omega^2+\omega}{\omega+n}\frac{1}{\epsilon}\right)$ of DIANA (Khaled et al., 2020) for distributed general convex problems, where $\epsilon$ is the target error, $L$ is the smooth parameter of the objective, $n$ is the number of machines/devices, and $\omega$ is the compression parameter (larger $\omega$ means more compression can be applied, and no compression implies $\omega=0$). Our results show that as long as the number of devices $n$ is large (often true in distributed/federated learning), or the compression $\omega$ is not very high, CANITA achieves the faster convergence rate $O\Big(\sqrt{\frac{L}{\epsilon}}\Big)$, i.e., the number of communication rounds is $O\Big(\sqrt{\frac{L}{\epsilon}}\Big)$ (vs. $O\big(\frac{L}{\epsilon}\big)$ achieved by previous works). As a result, CANITA enjoys the advantages of both compression (compressed communication in each round) and acceleration (much fewer communication rounds).
Feature-Filter: Detecting Adversarial Examples through Filtering off Recessive Features
Authors: Hui Liu, Bo Zhao, Minzhi Ji, Yuefeng Peng, Jiabao Guo, Peng Liu
Date: 2021-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are under threat from adversarial example attacks. The adversary can easily change the outputs of DNNs by adding small well-designed perturbations to inputs. Adversarial example detection is a fundamental work for robust DNNs-based service. Adversarial examples show the difference between humans and DNNs in image recognition. From a human-centric perspective, image features could be divided into dominant features that are comprehensible to humans, and recessive features that are incomprehensible to humans, yet are exploited by DNNs. In this paper, we reveal that imperceptible adversarial examples are the product of recessive features misleading neural networks, and an adversarial attack is essentially a kind of method to enrich these recessive features in the image. The imperceptibility of the adversarial examples indicates that the perturbations enrich recessive features, yet hardly affect dominant features. Therefore, adversarial examples are sensitive to filtering off recessive features, while benign examples are immune to such operation. Inspired by this idea, we propose a label-only adversarial detection approach that is referred to as feature-filter. Feature-filter utilizes discrete cosine transform to approximately separate recessive features from dominant features, and gets a mutant image that is filtered off recessive features. By only comparing DNN's prediction labels on the input and its mutant, feature-filter can real-time detect imperceptible adversarial examples at high accuracy and few false positives.
Parametric Scattering Networks
Authors: Shanel Gauthier, Benjamin Thérien, Laurent Alsène-Racicot, Muawiz Chaudhary, Irina Rish, Eugene Belilovsky, Michael Eickenberg, Guy Wolf
Date: 2021-07-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Image Classification, Small Data Image Classification

The wavelet scattering transform creates geometric invariants and deformation stability. In multiple signal domains, it has been shown to yield more discriminative representations compared to other non-learned representations and to outperform learned representations in certain tasks, particularly on limited labeled data and highly structured signals. The wavelet filters used in the scattering transform are typically selected to create a tight frame via a parameterized mother wavelet. In this work, we investigate whether this standard wavelet filterbank construction is optimal. Focusing on Morlet wavelets, we propose to learn the scales, orientations, and aspect ratios of the filters to produce problem-specific parameterizations of the scattering transform. We show that our learned versions of the scattering transform yield significant performance gains in small-sample classification settings over the standard scattering transform. Moreover, our empirical results suggest that traditional filterbank constructions may not always be necessary for scattering transforms to extract effective representations.
Predicting Driver Takeover Time in Conditionally Automated Driving
Authors: Jackie Ayoub, Na Du, X. Jessie Yang, Feng Zhou
Date: 2021-07-20 00:00:00

It is extremely important to ensure a safe takeover transition in conditionally automated driving. One of the critical factors that quantifies the safe takeover transition is takeover time. Previous studies identified the effects of many factors on takeover time, such as takeover lead time, non-driving tasks, modalities of the takeover requests (TORs), and scenario urgency. However, there is a lack of research to predict takeover time by considering these factors all at the same time. Toward this end, we used eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) to predict the takeover time using a dataset from a meta-analysis study [1]. In addition, we used SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanation) to analyze and explain the effects of the predictors on takeover time. We identified seven most critical predictors that resulted in the best prediction performance. Their main effects and interaction effects on takeover time were examined. The results showed that the proposed approach provided both good performance and explainability. Our findings have implications on the design of in-vehicle monitoring and alert systems to facilitate the interaction between the drivers and the automated vehicle.
Responsible and Regulatory Conform Machine Learning for Medicine: A Survey of Challenges and Solutions
Authors: Eike Petersen, Yannik Potdevin, Esfandiar Mohammadi, Stephan Zidowitz, Sabrina Breyer, Dirk Nowotka, Sandra Henn, Ludwig Pechmann, Martin Leucker, Philipp Rostalski, Christian Herzog
Date: 2021-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Federated Learning, Uncertainty Quantification

Machine learning is expected to fuel significant improvements in medical care. To ensure that fundamental principles such as beneficence, respect for human autonomy, prevention of harm, justice, privacy, and transparency are respected, medical machine learning systems must be developed responsibly. Many high-level declarations of ethical principles have been put forth for this purpose, but there is a severe lack of technical guidelines explicating the practical consequences for medical machine learning. Similarly, there is currently considerable uncertainty regarding the exact regulatory requirements placed upon medical machine learning systems. This survey provides an overview of the technical and procedural challenges involved in creating medical machine learning systems responsibly and in conformity with existing regulations, as well as possible solutions to address these challenges. First, a brief review of existing regulations affecting medical machine learning is provided, showing that properties such as safety, robustness, reliability, privacy, security, transparency, explainability, and nondiscrimination are all demanded already by existing law and regulations - albeit, in many cases, to an uncertain degree. Next, the key technical obstacles to achieving these desirable properties are discussed, as well as important techniques to overcome these obstacles in the medical context. We notice that distribution shift, spurious correlations, model underspecification, uncertainty quantification, and data scarcity represent severe challenges in the medical context. Promising solution approaches include the use of large and representative datasets and federated learning as a means to that end, the careful exploitation of domain knowledge, the use of inherently transparent models, comprehensive out-of-distribution model testing and verification, as well as algorithmic impact assessments.
Mining Topological Dependencies of Recurrent Congestion in Road Networks
Authors: Nicolas Tempelmeier, Udo Feuerhake, Oskar Wage, Elena Demidova
Date: 2021-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

The discovery of spatio-temporal dependencies within urban road networks that cause Recurrent Congestion (RC) patterns is crucial for numerous real-world applications, including urban planning and scheduling of public transportation services. While most existing studies investigate temporal patterns of RC phenomena, the influence of the road network topology on RC is often overlooked. This article proposes the ST-Discovery algorithm, a novel unsupervised spatio-temporal data mining algorithm that facilitates the effective data-driven discovery of RC dependencies induced by the road network topology using real-world traffic data. We factor out regularly reoccurring traffic phenomena, such as rush hours, mainly induced by the daytime, by modelling and systematically exploiting temporal traffic load outliers. We present an algorithm that first constructs connected subgraphs of the road network based on the traffic speed outliers. Second, the algorithm identifies pairs of subgraphs that indicate spatio-temporal correlations in their traffic load behaviour to identify topological dependencies within the road network. Finally, we rank the identified subgraph pairs based on the dependency score determined by our algorithm. Our experimental results demonstrate that ST-Discovery can effectively reveal topological dependencies in urban road networks.
Best-of-All-Worlds Bounds for Online Learning with Feedback Graphs
Authors: Liad Erez, Tomer Koren
Date: 2021-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: All

We study the online learning with feedback graphs framework introduced by Mannor and Shamir (2011), in which the feedback received by the online learner is specified by a graph $G$ over the available actions. We develop an algorithm that simultaneously achieves regret bounds of the form: $\smash{\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{\theta(G) T})}$ with adversarial losses; $\mathcal{O}(\theta(G)\operatorname{polylog}{T})$ with stochastic losses; and $\mathcal{O}(\theta(G)\operatorname{polylog}{T} + \smash{\sqrt{\theta(G) C})}$ with stochastic losses subject to $C$ adversarial corruptions. Here, $\theta(G)$ is the clique covering number of the graph $G$. Our algorithm is an instantiation of Follow-the-Regularized-Leader with a novel regularization that can be seen as a product of a Tsallis entropy component (inspired by Zimmert and Seldin (2019)) and a Shannon entropy component (analyzed in the corrupted stochastic case by Amir et al. (2020)), thus subtly interpolating between the two forms of entropies. One of our key technical contributions is in establishing the convexity of this regularizer and controlling its inverse Hessian, despite its complex product structure.
Precision-Weighted Federated Learning
Authors: Jonatan Reyes, Lisa Di Jorio, Cecile Low-Kam, Marta Kersten-Oertel
Date: 2021-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Federated Learning, image-classification, Image Classification

Federated Learning using the Federated Averaging algorithm has shown great advantages for large-scale applications that rely on collaborative learning, especially when the training data is either unbalanced or inaccessible due to privacy constraints. We hypothesize that Federated Averaging underestimates the full extent of heterogeneity of data when the aggregation is performed. We propose Precision-weighted Federated Learning a novel algorithm that takes into account the variance of the stochastic gradients when computing the weighted average of the parameters of models trained in a Federated Learning setting. With Precision-weighted Federated Learning, we provide an alternate averaging scheme that leverages the heterogeneity of the data when it has a large diversity of features in its composition. Our method was evaluated using standard image classification datasets with two different data partitioning strategies (IID/non-IID) to measure the performance and speed of our method in resource-constrained environments, such as mobile and IoT devices. We obtained a good balance between computational efficiency and convergence rates with Precision-weighted Federated Learning. Our performance evaluations show 9% better predictions with MNIST, 18% with Fashion-MNIST, and 5% with CIFAR-10 in the non-IID setting. Further reliability evaluations ratify the stability in our method by reaching a 99% reliability index with IID partitions and 96% with non-IID partitions. In addition, we obtained a 20x speedup on Fashion-MNIST with only 10 clients and up to 37x with 100 clients participating in the aggregation concurrently per communication round. The results indicate that Precision-weighted Federated Learning is an effective and faster alternative approach for aggregating private data, especially in domains where data is highly heterogeneous.
Proximal Policy Optimization for Tracking Control Exploiting Future Reference Information
Authors: Jana Mayer, Johannes Westermann, Juan Pedro Gutiérrez H. Muriedas, Uwe Mettin, Alexander Lampe
Date: 2021-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Policy Gradient Methods, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has gained increasing attention in control engineering. Especially, policy gradient methods are widely used. In this work, we improve the tracking performance of proximal policy optimization (PPO) for arbitrary reference signals by incorporating information about future reference values. Two variants of extending the argument of the actor and the critic taking future reference values into account are presented. In the first variant, global future reference values are added to the argument. For the second variant, a novel kind of residual space with future reference values applicable to model-free reinforcement learning is introduced. Our approach is evaluated against a PI controller on a simple drive train model. We expect our method to generalize to arbitrary references better than previous approaches, pointing towards the applicability of RL to control real systems.