pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DFW-PP: Dynamic Feature Weighting based Popularity Prediction for Social Media Content
Authors: Viswanatha Reddy G, Chaitanya B S N V, Prathyush P, Sumanth M, Mrinalini C, Dileep Kumar P, Snehasis Mukherjee
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing

The increasing popularity of social media platforms makes it important to study user engagement, which is a crucial aspect of any marketing strategy or business model. The over-saturation of content on social media platforms has persuaded us to identify the important factors that affect content popularity. This comes from the fact that only an iota of the humongous content available online receives the attention of the target audience. Comprehensive research has been done in the area of popularity prediction using several Machine Learning techniques. However, we observe that there is still significant scope for improvement in analyzing the social importance of media content. We propose the DFW-PP framework, to learn the importance of different features that vary over time. Further, the proposed method controls the skewness of the distribution of the features by applying a log-log normalization. The proposed method is experimented with a benchmark dataset, to show promising results. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/chaitnayabasava/DFW-PP.
Mode and Ridge Estimation in Euclidean and Directional Product Spaces: A Mean Shift Approach
Authors: Yikun Zhang, Yen-Chi Chen
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00

The set of local modes and density ridge lines are important summary characteristics of the data-generating distribution. In this work, we focus on estimating local modes and density ridges from point cloud data in a product space combining two or more Euclidean and/or directional metric spaces. Specifically, our approach extends the (subspace constrained) mean shift algorithm to such product spaces, addressing potential challenges in the generalization process. We establish the algorithmic convergence of the proposed methods, along with practical implementation guidelines. Experiments on simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
On Model Selection Consistency of Lasso for High-Dimensional Ising Models
Authors: Xiangming Meng, Tomoyuki Obuchi, Yoshiyuki Kabashima
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Selection, regression, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

We theoretically analyze the model selection consistency of least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso), both with and without post-thresholding, for high-dimensional Ising models. For random regular (RR) graphs of size $p$ with regular node degree $d$ and uniform couplings $\theta_0$, it is rigorously proved that Lasso \textit{without post-thresholding} is model selection consistent in the whole paramagnetic phase with the same order of sample complexity $n=\Omega{(d^3\log{p})}$ as that of $\ell_1$-regularized logistic regression ($\ell_1$-LogR). This result is consistent with the conjecture in Meng, Obuchi, and Kabashima 2021 using the non-rigorous replica method from statistical physics and thus complements it with a rigorous proof. For general tree-like graphs, it is demonstrated that the same result as RR graphs can be obtained under mild assumptions of the dependency condition and incoherence condition. Moreover, we provide a rigorous proof of the model selection consistency of Lasso with post-thresholding for general tree-like graphs in the paramagnetic phase without further assumptions on the dependency and incoherence conditions. Experimental results agree well with our theoretical analysis.
FedMM: Saddle Point Optimization for Federated Adversarial Domain Adaptation
Authors: Yan Shen, Jian Du, Han Zhao, Benyu Zhang, Zhanghexuan Ji, Mingchen Gao
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Federated adversary domain adaptation is a unique distributed minimax training task due to the prevalence of label imbalance among clients, with each client only seeing a subset of the classes of labels required to train a global model. To tackle this problem, we propose a distributed minimax optimizer referred to as FedMM, designed specifically for the federated adversary domain adaptation problem. It works well even in the extreme case where each client has different label classes and some clients only have unsupervised tasks. We prove that FedMM ensures convergence to a stationary point with domain-shifted unsupervised data. On a variety of benchmark datasets, extensive experiments show that FedMM consistently achieves either significant communication savings or significant accuracy improvements over federated optimizers based on the gradient descent ascent (GDA) algorithm. When training from scratch, for example, it outperforms other GDA based federated average methods by around $20\%$ in accuracy over the same communication rounds; and it consistently outperforms when training from pre-trained models with an accuracy improvement from $5.4\%$ to $9\%$ for different networks.
Fast Projection onto the Capped Simplex with Applications to Sparse Regression in Bioinformatics
Authors: Andersen Ang, Jianzhu Ma, Nianjun Liu, Kun Huang, Yijie Wang
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: CPU, regression

We consider the problem of projecting a vector onto the so-called k-capped simplex, which is a hyper-cube cut by a hyperplane. For an n-dimensional input vector with bounded elements, we found that a simple algorithm based on Newton's method is able to solve the projection problem to high precision with a complexity roughly about O(n), which has a much lower computational cost compared with the existing sorting-based methods proposed in the literature. We provide a theory for partial explanation and justification of the method. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can produce a solution of the projection problem with high precision on large scale datasets, and the algorithm is able to significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods in terms of runtime (about 6-8 times faster than a commercial software with respect to CPU time for input vector with 1 million variables or more). We further illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on solving sparse regression in a bioinformatics problem. Empirical results on the GWAS dataset (with 1,500,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms) show that, when using the proposed method to accelerate the Projected Quasi-Newton (PQN) method, the accelerated PQN algorithm is able to handle huge-scale regression problem and it is more efficient (about 3-6 times faster) than the current state-of-the-art methods.
Case-based Reasoning for Better Generalization in Textual Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Mattia Atzeni, Shehzaad Dhuliawala, Keerthiram Murugesan, Mrinmaya Sachan
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Out-of-Distribution Generalization, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), text-based games

Text-based games (TBG) have emerged as promising environments for driving research in grounded language understanding and studying problems like generalization and sample efficiency. Several deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods with varying architectures and learning schemes have been proposed for TBGs. However, these methods fail to generalize efficiently, especially under distributional shifts. In a departure from deep RL approaches, in this paper, we propose a general method inspired by case-based reasoning to train agents and generalize out of the training distribution. The case-based reasoner collects instances of positive experiences from the agent's interaction with the world in the past and later reuses the collected experiences to act efficiently. The method can be applied in conjunction with any existing on-policy neural agent in the literature for TBGs. Our experiments show that the proposed approach consistently improves existing methods, obtains good out-of-distribution generalization, and achieves new state-of-the-art results on widely used environments.
Heterogeneous Graph-Based Multimodal Brain Network Learning
Authors: Gen Shi, Yifan Zhu, Wenjin Liu, Quanming Yao, Xuesong Li
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Disease Prediction, Graph Neural Network

Graph neural networks (GNNs) provide powerful insights for brain neuroimaging technology from the view of graphical networks. However, most existing GNN-based models assume that the neuroimaging-produced brain connectome network is a homogeneous graph with single types of nodes and edges. In fact, emerging studies have reported and emphasized the significance of heterogeneity among human brain activities, especially between the two cerebral hemispheres. Thus, homogeneous-structured brain network-based graph methods are insufficient for modelling complicated cerebral activity states. To overcome this problem, in this paper, we present a heterogeneous graph neural network (HebrainGNN) for multimodal brain neuroimaging fusion learning. We first model the brain network as a heterogeneous graph with multitype nodes (i.e., left and right hemispheric nodes) and multitype edges (i.e., intra- and interhemispheric edges). Then, we propose a self-supervised pretraining strategy based on a heterogeneous brain network to address the potential overfitting problem caused by the conflict between a large parameter size and a small medical data sample size. Our results show the superiority of the proposed model over other existing methods in brain-related disease prediction tasks. Ablation experiments show that our heterogeneous graph-based model attaches more importance to hemispheric connections that may be neglected due to their low strength by previous homogeneous graph models. Other experiments also indicate that our proposed model with a pretraining strategy alleviates the problem of limited labelled data and yields a significant improvement in accuracy.
Adversarial Attacks on Gaussian Process Bandits
Authors: Eric Han, Jonathan Scarlett
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Gaussian Processes

Gaussian processes (GP) are a widely-adopted tool used to sequentially optimize black-box functions, where evaluations are costly and potentially noisy. Recent works on GP bandits have proposed to move beyond random noise and devise algorithms robust to adversarial attacks. This paper studies this problem from the attacker's perspective, proposing various adversarial attack methods with differing assumptions on the attacker's strength and prior information. Our goal is to understand adversarial attacks on GP bandits from theoretical and practical perspectives. We focus primarily on targeted attacks on the popular GP-UCB algorithm and a related elimination-based algorithm, based on adversarially perturbing the function $f$ to produce another function $\tilde{f}$ whose optima are in some target region $\mathcal{R}_{\rm target}$. Based on our theoretical analysis, we devise both white-box attacks (known $f$) and black-box attacks (unknown $f$), with the former including a Subtraction attack and Clipping attack, and the latter including an Aggressive subtraction attack. We demonstrate that adversarial attacks on GP bandits can succeed in forcing the algorithm towards $\mathcal{R}_{\rm target}$ even with a low attack budget, and we test our attacks' effectiveness on a diverse range of objective functions.
TESDA: Transform Enabled Statistical Detection of Attacks in Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Chandramouli Amarnath, Aishwarya H. Balwani, Kwondo Ma, Abhijit Chatterjee
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are now the de facto choice for computer vision tasks such as image classification. However, their complexity and "black box" nature often renders the systems they're deployed in vulnerable to a range of security threats. Successfully identifying such threats, especially in safety-critical real-world applications is thus of utmost importance, but still very much an open problem. We present TESDA, a low-overhead, flexible, and statistically grounded method for {online detection} of attacks by exploiting the discrepancies they cause in the distributions of intermediate layer features of DNNs. Unlike most prior work, we require neither dedicated hardware to run in real-time, nor the presence of a Trojan trigger to detect discrepancies in behavior. We empirically establish our method's usefulness and practicality across multiple architectures, datasets and diverse attacks, consistently achieving detection coverages of above 95% with operation count overheads as low as 1-2%.
Online Target Q-learning with Reverse Experience Replay: Efficiently finding the Optimal Policy for Linear MDPs
Authors: Naman Agarwal, Syomantak Chaudhuri, Prateek Jain, Dheeraj Nagaraj, Praneeth Netrapalli
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Q-Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Q-learning is a popular Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm which is widely used in practice with function approximation (Mnih et al., 2015). In contrast, existing theoretical results are pessimistic about Q-learning. For example, (Baird, 1995) shows that Q-learning does not converge even with linear function approximation for linear MDPs. Furthermore, even for tabular MDPs with synchronous updates, Q-learning was shown to have sub-optimal sample complexity (Li et al., 2021;Azar et al., 2013). The goal of this work is to bridge the gap between practical success of Q-learning and the relatively pessimistic theoretical results. The starting point of our work is the observation that in practice, Q-learning is used with two important modifications: (i) training with two networks, called online network and target network simultaneously (online target learning, or OTL) , and (ii) experience replay (ER) (Mnih et al., 2015). While they have been observed to play a significant role in the practical success of Q-learning, a thorough theoretical understanding of how these two modifications improve the convergence behavior of Q-learning has been missing in literature. By carefully combining Q-learning with OTL and reverse experience replay (RER) (a form of experience replay), we present novel methods Q-Rex and Q-RexDaRe (Q-Rex + data reuse). We show that Q-Rex efficiently finds the optimal policy for linear MDPs (or more generally for MDPs with zero inherent Bellman error with linear approximation (ZIBEL)) and provide non-asymptotic bounds on sample complexity -- the first such result for a Q-learning method for this class of MDPs under standard assumptions. Furthermore, we demonstrate that Q-RexDaRe in fact achieves near optimal sample complexity in the tabular setting, improving upon the existing results for vanilla Q-learning.
Meta-Learning with Adjoint Methods
Authors: Shibo Li, Zheng Wang, Akil Narayan, Robert Kirby, Shandian Zhe
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning

Model Agnostic Meta Learning (MAML) is widely used to find a good initialization for a family of tasks. Despite its success, a critical challenge in MAML is to calculate the gradient w.r.t. the initialization of a long training trajectory for the sampled tasks, because the computation graph can rapidly explode and the computational cost is very expensive. To address this problem, we propose Adjoint MAML (A-MAML). We view gradient descent in the inner optimization as the evolution of an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE). To efficiently compute the gradient of the validation loss w.r.t. the initialization, we use the adjoint method to construct a companion, backward ODE. To obtain the gradient w.r.t. the initialization, we only need to run the standard ODE solver twice -- one is forward in time that evolves a long trajectory of gradient flow for the sampled task; the other is backward and solves the adjoint ODE. We need not create or expand any intermediate computational graphs, adopt aggressive approximations, or impose proximal regularizers in the training loss. Our approach is cheap, accurate, and adaptable to different trajectory lengths. We demonstrate the advantage of our approach in both synthetic and real-world meta-learning tasks.
Metadata Shaping: Natural Language Annotations for the Tail
Authors: Simran Arora, Sen Wu, Enci Liu, Christopher Re
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00

Language models (LMs) have made remarkable progress, but still struggle to generalize beyond the training data to rare linguistic patterns. Since rare entities and facts are prevalent in the queries users submit to popular applications such as search and personal assistant systems, improving the ability of LMs to reliably capture knowledge over rare entities is a pressing challenge studied in significant prior work. Noticing that existing approaches primarily modify the LM architecture or introduce auxiliary objectives to inject useful entity knowledge, we ask to what extent we could match the quality of these architectures using a base LM architecture, and only changing the data? We propose metadata shaping, a method in which readily available metadata, such as entity descriptions and categorical tags, are appended to examples based on information theoretic metrics. Intuitively, if metadata corresponding to popular entities overlap with metadata for rare entities, the LM may be able to better reason about the rare entities using patterns learned from similar popular entities. On standard entity-rich tasks (TACRED, FewRel, OpenEntity), with no changes to the LM whatsoever, metadata shaping exceeds the BERT-baseline by up to 5.3 F1 points, and achieves or competes with state-of-the-art results. We further show the improvements are up to 10x larger on examples containing tail versus popular entities.
Robustness Challenges in Model Distillation and Pruning for Natural Language Understanding
Authors: Mengnan Du, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Yu Cheng, Milad Shokouhi, Xia Hu, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression, Natural Language Understanding

Recent work has focused on compressing pre-trained language models (PLMs) like BERT where the major focus has been to improve the in-distribution performance for downstream tasks. However, very few of these studies have analyzed the impact of compression on the generalizability and robustness of compressed models for out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Towards this end, we study two popular model compression techniques including knowledge distillation and pruning and show that the compressed models are significantly less robust than their PLM counterparts on OOD test sets although they obtain similar performance on in-distribution development sets for a task. Further analysis indicates that the compressed models overfit on the shortcut samples and generalize poorly on the hard ones. We further leverage this observation to develop a regularization strategy for robust model compression based on sample uncertainty. Experimental results on several natural language understanding tasks demonstrate that our bias mitigation framework improves the OOD generalization of the compressed models, while not sacrificing the in-distribution task performance.
Nuances in Margin Conditions Determine Gains in Active Learning
Authors: Samory Kpotufe, Gan Yuan, Yunfan Zhao
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

We consider nonparametric classification with smooth regression functions, where it is well known that notions of margin in $E[Y|X]$ determine fast or slow rates in both active and passive learning. Here we elucidate a striking distinction between the two settings. Namely, we show that some seemingly benign nuances in notions of margin -- involving the uniqueness of the Bayes classifier, and which have no apparent effect on rates in passive learning -- determine whether or not any active learner can outperform passive learning rates. In particular, for Audibert-Tsybakov's margin condition (allowing general situations with non-unique Bayes classifiers), no active learner can gain over passive learning in commonly studied settings where the marginal on $X$ is near uniform. Our results thus negate the usual intuition from past literature that active rates should improve over passive rates in nonparametric settings.
Invariant Language Modeling
Authors: Maxime Peyrard, Sarvjeet Singh Ghotra, Martin Josifoski, Vidhan Agarwal, Barun Patra, Dean Carignan, Emre Kiciman, Robert West
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Large pretrained language models are critical components of modern NLP pipelines. Yet, they suffer from spurious correlations, poor out-of-domain generalization, and biases. Inspired by recent progress in causal machine learning, in particular the invariant risk minimization (IRM) paradigm, we propose invariant language modeling, a framework for learning invariant representations that generalize better across multiple environments. In particular, we adapt a game-theoretic formulation of IRM (IRM-games) to language models, where the invariance emerges from a specific training schedule in which all the environments compete to optimize their own environment-specific loss by updating subsets of the model in a round-robin fashion. We focus on controlled experiments to precisely demonstrate the ability of our method to (i) remove structured noise, (ii) ignore specific spurious correlations without affecting global performance, and (iii) achieve better out-of-domain generalization. These benefits come with a negligible computational overhead compared to standard training, do not require changing the local loss, and can be applied to any language model. We believe this framework is promising to help mitigate spurious correlations and biases in language models.
Surrogate- and invariance-boosted contrastive learning for data-scarce applications in science
Authors: Charlotte Loh, Thomas Christensen, Rumen Dangovski, Samuel Kim, Marin Soljacic
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Property Prediction

Deep learning techniques have been increasingly applied to the natural sciences, e.g., for property prediction and optimization or material discovery. A fundamental ingredient of such approaches is the vast quantity of labelled data needed to train the model; this poses severe challenges in data-scarce settings where obtaining labels requires substantial computational or labor resources. Here, we introduce surrogate- and invariance-boosted contrastive learning (SIB-CL), a deep learning framework which incorporates three ``inexpensive'' and easily obtainable auxiliary information sources to overcome data scarcity. Specifically, these are: 1)~abundant unlabeled data, 2)~prior knowledge of symmetries or invariances and 3)~surrogate data obtained at near-zero cost. We demonstrate SIB-CL's effectiveness and generality on various scientific problems, e.g., predicting the density-of-states of 2D photonic crystals and solving the 3D time-independent Schrodinger equation. SIB-CL consistently results in orders of magnitude reduction in the number of labels needed to achieve the same network accuracies.