pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Agnostic Interactive Imitation Learning: New Theory and Practical Algorithms
Authors: Yichen Li, Chicheng Zhang
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Imitation Learning

We study interactive imitation learning, where a learner interactively queries a demonstrating expert for action annotations, aiming to learn a policy that has performance competitive with the expert, using as few annotations as possible. We focus on the general agnostic setting where the expert demonstration policy may not be contained in the policy class used by the learner. We propose a new oracle-efficient algorithm MFTPL-P (abbreviation for Mixed Follow the Perturbed Leader with Poisson perturbations) with provable finite-sample guarantees, under the assumption that the learner is given access to samples from some ``explorative'' distribution over states. Our guarantees hold for any policy class, which is considerably broader than prior state of the art. We further propose Bootstrap-Dagger, a more practical variant that does not require additional sample access. Empirically, MFTPL-P and Bootstrap-Dagger notably surpass online and offline imitation learning baselines in continuous control tasks.
Molecular Property Prediction Based on Graph Structure Learning
Authors: Bangyi Zhao, Weixia Xu, Jihong Guan, Shuigeng Zhou
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery, Graph Neural Network, Graph structure learning, Molecular Property Prediction, Prediction, Property Prediction

Molecular property prediction (MPP) is a fundamental but challenging task in the computer-aided drug discovery process. More and more recent works employ different graph-based models for MPP, which have made considerable progress in improving prediction performance. However, current models often ignore relationships between molecules, which could be also helpful for MPP. For this sake, in this paper we propose a graph structure learning (GSL) based MPP approach, called GSL-MPP. Specifically, we first apply graph neural network (GNN) over molecular graphs to extract molecular representations. Then, with molecular fingerprints, we construct a molecular similarity graph (MSG). Following that, we conduct graph structure learning on the MSG (i.e., molecule-level graph structure learning) to get the final molecular embeddings, which are the results of fusing both GNN encoded molecular representations and the relationships among molecules, i.e., combining both intra-molecule and inter-molecule information. Finally, we use these molecular embeddings to perform MPP. Extensive experiments on seven various benchmark datasets show that our method could achieve state-of-the-art performance in most cases, especially on classification tasks. Further visualization studies also demonstrate the good molecular representations of our method.
Sensor Data Simulation for Anomaly Detection of the Elderly Living Alone
Authors: Kai Tanaka, Mineichi Kudo, Keigo Kimura
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

With the increase of the number of elderly people living alone around the world, there is a growing demand for sensor-based detection of anomalous behaviors. Although smart homes with ambient sensors could be useful for detecting such anomalies, there is a problem of lack of sufficient real data for developing detection algorithms. For coping with this problem, several sensor data simulators have been proposed, but they have not been able to model appropriately the long-term transitions and correlations between anomalies that exist in reality. In this paper, therefore, we propose a novel sensor data simulator that can model these factors in generation of sensor data. Anomalies considered in this study were classified into three types of \textit{state anomalies}, \textit{activity anomalies}, and \textit{moving anomalies}. The simulator produces 10 years data in 100 min. including six anomalies, two for each type. Numerical evaluations show that this simulator is superior to the past simulators in the sense that it simulates well day-to-day variations of real data.
METER: A Dynamic Concept Adaptation Framework for Online Anomaly Detection
Authors: Jiaqi Zhu, Shaofeng Cai, Fang Deng, Beng Chin Ooi, Wenqiao Zhang
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Decision Making, Drift Detection

Real-time analytics and decision-making require online anomaly detection (OAD) to handle drifts in data streams efficiently and effectively. Unfortunately, existing approaches are often constrained by their limited detection capacity and slow adaptation to evolving data streams, inhibiting their efficacy and efficiency in handling concept drift, which is a major challenge in evolving data streams. In this paper, we introduce METER, a novel dynamic concept adaptation framework that introduces a new paradigm for OAD. METER addresses concept drift by first training a base detection model on historical data to capture recurring central concepts, and then learning to dynamically adapt to new concepts in data streams upon detecting concept drift. Particularly, METER employs a novel dynamic concept adaptation technique that leverages a hypernetwork to dynamically generate the parameter shift of the base detection model, providing a more effective and efficient solution than conventional retraining or fine-tuning approaches. Further, METER incorporates a lightweight drift detection controller, underpinned by evidential deep learning, to support robust and interpretable concept drift detection. We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation, and the results show that METER significantly outperforms existing OAD approaches in various application scenarios.
Layer Attack Unlearning: Fast and Accurate Machine Unlearning via Layer Level Attack and Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Hyunjune Kim, Sangyong Lee, Simon S. Woo
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Machine Unlearning

Recently, serious concerns have been raised about the privacy issues related to training datasets in machine learning algorithms when including personal data. Various regulations in different countries, including the GDPR grant individuals to have personal data erased, known as 'the right to be forgotten' or 'the right to erasure'. However, there has been less research on effectively and practically deleting the requested personal data from the training set while not jeopardizing the overall machine learning performance. In this work, we propose a fast and novel machine unlearning paradigm at the layer level called layer attack unlearning, which is highly accurate and fast compared to existing machine unlearning algorithms. We introduce the Partial-PGD algorithm to locate the samples to forget efficiently. In addition, we only use the last layer of the model inspired by the Forward-Forward algorithm for unlearning process. Lastly, we use Knowledge Distillation (KD) to reliably learn the decision boundaries from the teacher using soft label information to improve accuracy performance. We conducted extensive experiments with SOTA machine unlearning models and demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach for accuracy and end-to-end unlearning performance.
Hidden Minima in Two-Layer ReLU Networks
Authors: Yossi Arjevani
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00

The optimization problem associated to fitting two-layer ReLU networks having $d$~inputs, $k$~neurons, and labels generated by a target network, is considered. Two types of infinite families of spurious minima, giving one minimum per $d$, were recently found. The loss at minima belonging to the first type converges to zero as $d$ increases. In the second type, the loss remains bounded away from zero. That being so, how may one avoid minima belonging to the latter type? Fortunately, such minima are never detected by standard optimization methods. Motivated by questions concerning the nature of this phenomenon, we develop methods to study distinctive analytic properties of hidden minima. By existing analyses, the Hessian spectrum of both types agree modulo $O(d^{-1/2})$-terms -- not promising. Thus, rather, our investigation proceeds by studying curves along which the loss is minimized or maximized, generally referred to as tangency arcs. We prove that apparently far removed group representation-theoretic considerations concerning the arrangement of subspaces invariant to the action of subgroups of $S_d$, the symmetry group over $d$ symbols, relative to ones fixed by the action yield a precise description of all finitely many admissible types of tangency arcs. The general results used for the loss function reveal that arcs emanating from hidden minima differ, characteristically, by their structure and symmetry, precisely on account of the $O(d^{-1/2})$-eigenvalue terms absent in previous work, indicating in particular the subtlety of the analysis. The theoretical results, stated and proved for o-minimal structures, show that the set comprising all tangency arcs is topologically sufficiently tame to enable a numerical construction of tangency arcs and so compare how minima, both types, are positioned relative to adjacent critical points.
Sparse PCA with Oracle Property
Authors: Quanquan Gu, Zhaoran Wang, Han Liu
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2014 12

In this paper, we study the estimation of the $k$-dimensional sparse principal subspace of covariance matrix $\Sigma$ in the high-dimensional setting. We aim to recover the oracle principal subspace solution, i.e., the principal subspace estimator obtained assuming the true support is known a priori. To this end, we propose a family of estimators based on the semidefinite relaxation of sparse PCA with novel regularizations. In particular, under a weak assumption on the magnitude of the population projection matrix, one estimator within this family exactly recovers the true support with high probability, has exact rank-$k$, and attains a $\sqrt{s/n}$ statistical rate of convergence with $s$ being the subspace sparsity level and $n$ the sample size. Compared to existing support recovery results for sparse PCA, our approach does not hinge on the spiked covariance model or the limited correlation condition. As a complement to the first estimator that enjoys the oracle property, we prove that, another estimator within the family achieves a sharper statistical rate of convergence than the standard semidefinite relaxation of sparse PCA, even when the previous assumption on the magnitude of the projection matrix is violated. We validate the theoretical results by numerical experiments on synthetic datasets.
Learning the Dynamic Correlations and Mitigating Noise by Hierarchical Convolution for Long-term Sequence Forecasting
Authors: Zhihao Yu, Liantao Ma, Yasha Wang, Junfeng Zhao
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Deep learning algorithms, especially Transformer-based models, have achieved significant performance by capturing long-range dependencies and historical information. However, the power of convolution has not been fully investigated. Moreover, most existing works ignore the dynamic interaction among variables and evolutionary noise in series. Addressing these issues, we propose a Hierarchical Memorizing Network (HMNet). In particular, a hierarchical convolution structure is introduced to extract the information from the series at various scales. Besides, we propose a dynamic variable interaction module to learn the varying correlation and an adaptive denoising module to search and exploit similar patterns to alleviate noises. These modules can cooperate with the hierarchical structure from the perspective of fine to coarse grain. Experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that HMNet significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models by 10.6% on MSE and 5.7% on MAE. Our code is released at https://github.com/yzhHoward/HMNet.
Learning Scalable Structural Representations for Link Prediction with Bloom Signatures
Authors: Tianyi Zhang, Haoteng Yin, Rongzhe Wei, Pan Li, Anshumali Shrivastava
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Link Prediction, Prediction

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown great potential in learning on graphs, but they are known to perform sub-optimally on link prediction tasks. Existing GNNs are primarily designed to learn node-wise representations and usually fail to capture pairwise relations between target nodes, which proves to be crucial for link prediction. Recent works resort to learning more expressive edge-wise representations by enhancing vanilla GNNs with structural features such as labeling tricks and link prediction heuristics, but they suffer from high computational overhead and limited scalability. To tackle this issue, we propose to learn structural link representations by augmenting the message-passing framework of GNNs with Bloom signatures. Bloom signatures are hashing-based compact encodings of node neighborhoods, which can be efficiently merged to recover various types of edge-wise structural features. We further show that any type of neighborhood overlap-based heuristic can be estimated by a neural network that takes Bloom signatures as input. GNNs with Bloom signatures are provably more expressive than vanilla GNNs and also more scalable than existing edge-wise models. Experimental results on five standard link prediction benchmarks show that our proposed model achieves comparable or better performance than existing edge-wise GNN models while being 3-200 $\times$ faster and more memory-efficient for online inference.
Backstepping Neural Operators for $2\times 2$ Hyperbolic PDEs
Authors: Shanshan Wang, Mamadou Diagne, Miroslav Krstić
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00

Deep neural network approximation of nonlinear operators, commonly referred to as DeepONet, has proven capable of approximating PDE backstepping designs in which a single Goursat-form PDE governs a single feedback gain function. In boundary control of coupled PDEs, coupled Goursat-form PDEs govern two or more gain kernels-a PDE structure unaddressed thus far with DeepONet. In this paper, we explore the subject of approximating systems of gain kernel PDEs for hyperbolic PDE plants by considering a simple counter-convecting $2\times 2$ coupled system in whose control a $2\times 2$ kernel PDE system in Goursat form arises. Engineering applications include oil drilling, the Saint-Venant model of shallow water waves, and the Aw-Rascle-Zhang model of stop-and-go instability in congested traffic flow. We establish the continuity of the mapping from a total of five plant PDE functional coefficients to the kernel PDE solutions, prove the existence of an arbitrarily close DeepONet approximation to the kernel PDEs, and ensure that the DeepONet-approximated gains guarantee stabilization when replacing the exact backstepping gain kernels. Taking into account anti-collocated boundary actuation and sensing, our $L^2$-Globally-exponentially stabilizing (GES) approximate gain kernel-based output feedback design implies the deep learning of both the controller's and the observer's gains. Moreover, the encoding of the output-feedback law into DeepONet ensures semi-global practical exponential stability (SG-PES). The DeepONet operator speeds up the computation of the controller gains by multiple orders of magnitude. Its theoretically proven stabilizing capability is demonstrated through simulations.
SuperServe: Fine-Grained Inference Serving for Unpredictable Workloads
Authors: Alind Khare, Dhruv Garg, Sukrit Kalra, Snigdha Grandhi, Ion Stoica, Alexey Tumanov
Date: 2023-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

The increasing deployment of ML models on the critical path of production applications in both datacenter and the edge requires ML inference serving systems to serve these models under unpredictable and bursty request arrival rates. Serving models under such conditions requires these systems to strike a careful balance between the latency and accuracy requirements of the application and the overall efficiency of utilization of scarce resources. State-of-the-art systems resolve this tension by either choosing a static point in the latency-accuracy tradeoff space to serve all requests or load specific models on the critical path of request serving. In this work, we instead resolve this tension by simultaneously serving the entire-range of models spanning the latency-accuracy tradeoff space. Our novel mechanism, SubNetAct, achieves this by carefully inserting specialized operators in weight-shared SuperNetworks. These operators enable SubNetAct to dynamically route requests through the network to meet a latency and accuracy target. SubNetAct requires upto 2.6x lower memory to serve a vastly-higher number of models than prior state-of-the-art. In addition, SubNetAct's near-instantaneous actuation of models unlocks the design space of fine-grained, reactive scheduling policies. We explore the design of one such extremely effective policy, SlackFit and instantiate both SubNetAct and SlackFit in a real system, SuperServe. SuperServe achieves 4.67% higher accuracy for the same SLO attainment and 2.85x higher SLO attainment for the same accuracy on a trace derived from the real-world Microsoft Azure Functions workload and yields the best trade-offs on a wide range of extremely-bursty synthetic traces automatically.
Infinite dSprites for Disentangled Continual Learning: Separating Memory Edits from Generalization
Authors: Sebastian Dziadzio, Çağatay Yıldız, Gido M. van de Ven, Tomasz Trzciński, Tinne Tuytelaars, Matthias Bethge
Date: 2023-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Continual Learning, Disentanglement, Memorization, open-set classification

The ability of machine learning systems to learn continually is hindered by catastrophic forgetting, the tendency of neural networks to overwrite previously acquired knowledge when learning a new task. Existing methods mitigate this problem through regularization, parameter isolation, or rehearsal, but they are typically evaluated on benchmarks comprising only a handful of tasks. In contrast, humans are able to learn over long time horizons in dynamic, open-world environments, effortlessly memorizing unfamiliar objects and reliably recognizing them under various transformations. To make progress towards closing this gap, we introduce Infinite dSprites, a parsimonious tool for creating continual classification and disentanglement benchmarks of arbitrary length and with full control over generative factors. We show that over a sufficiently long time horizon, the performance of all major types of continual learning methods deteriorates on this simple benchmark. This result highlights an important and previously overlooked aspect of continual learning: given a finite modelling capacity and an arbitrarily long learning horizon, efficient learning requires memorizing class-specific information and accumulating knowledge about general mechanisms. In a simple setting with direct supervision on the generative factors, we show how learning class-agnostic transformations offers a way to circumvent catastrophic forgetting and improve classification accuracy over time. Our approach sets the stage for continual learning over hundreds of tasks with explicit control over memorization and forgetting, emphasizing open-set classification and one-shot generalization.
Foundations of Reinforcement Learning and Interactive Decision Making
Authors: Dylan J. Foster, Alexander Rakhlin
Date: 2023-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Multi-Armed Bandits, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

These lecture notes give a statistical perspective on the foundations of reinforcement learning and interactive decision making. We present a unifying framework for addressing the exploration-exploitation dilemma using frequentist and Bayesian approaches, with connections and parallels between supervised learning/estimation and decision making as an overarching theme. Special attention is paid to function approximation and flexible model classes such as neural networks. Topics covered include multi-armed and contextual bandits, structured bandits, and reinforcement learning with high-dimensional feedback.
Landslide Detection and Segmentation Using Remote Sensing Images and Deep Neural Network
Authors: Cam Le, Lam Pham, Jasmin Lampert, Matthias Schlögl, Alexander Schindler
Date: 2023-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering

Knowledge about historic landslide event occurrence is important for supporting disaster risk reduction strategies. Building upon findings from 2022 Landslide4Sense Competition, we propose a deep neural network based system for landslide detection and segmentation from multisource remote sensing image input. We use a U-Net trained with Cross Entropy loss as baseline model. We then improve the U-Net baseline model by leveraging a wide range of deep learning techniques. In particular, we conduct feature engineering by generating new band data from the original bands, which helps to enhance the quality of remote sensing image input. Regarding the network architecture, we replace traditional convolutional layers in the U-Net baseline by a residual-convolutional layer. We also propose an attention layer which leverages the multi-head attention scheme. Additionally, we generate multiple output masks with three different resolutions, which creates an ensemble of three outputs in the inference process to enhance the performance. Finally, we propose a combined loss function which leverages Focal loss and IoU loss to train the network. Our experiments on the development set of the Landslide4Sense challenge achieve an F1 score and an mIoU score of 84.07 and 76.07, respectively. Our best model setup outperforms the challenge baseline and the proposed U-Net baseline, improving the F1 score/mIoU score by 6.8/7.4 and 10.5/8.8, respectively.
Computational Tradeoffs of Optimization-Based Bound Tightening in ReLU Networks
Authors: Fabian Badilla, Marcos Goycoolea, Gonzalo Muñoz, Thiago Serra
Date: 2023-12-27 00:00:00

The use of Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) models to represent neural networks with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activations has become increasingly widespread in the last decade. This has enabled the use of MILP technology to test-or stress-their behavior, to adversarially improve their training, and to embed them in optimization models leveraging their predictive power. Many of these MILP models rely on activation bounds. That is, bounds on the input values of each neuron. In this work, we explore the tradeoff between the tightness of these bounds and the computational effort of solving the resulting MILP models. We provide guidelines for implementing these models based on the impact of network structure, regularization, and rounding.
Fault Tolerant Serverless VFL Over Dynamic Device Environment
Authors: Surojit Ganguli, Zeyu Zhou, Christopher G. Brinton, David I. Inouye
Date: 2023-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Vertical Federated Learning

Vertical Federated learning (VFL) is a class of FL where each client shares the same set of samples but only owns a subset of the features. Usually, VFL assumes perfect hardware and communication capabilities. However, this assumption hinders the broad deployment of VFL, particularly on a network of edge devices, which are heterogeneous in their in-situ capabilities while any device may connect/disconnect from the network over time. To address this gap, we study the test time performance of VFL under dynamic network conditions, which we call DN-VFL. We first formalize DN-VFL, including a message passing distributed inference algorithm, the corresponding risk, and a serverless setup. We develop a novel DN-VFL approach called Multiple Aggregation with Gossip Rounds and Simulated Faults (MAGS) that synthesizes replication, gossiping, and selective feature omission to improve performance significantly over baselines. Furthermore, we propose metrics and extensively analyze MAGS using a simulated sensor network. The results show that naively using VFL for DN-VFL is not the best approach. Rather, MAGS present a better alternative to handle changes in the network during inference.