pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Memory Population in Continual Learning via Outlier Elimination
Authors: Julio Hurtado, Alain Raymond-Saez, Vladimir Araujo, Vincenzo Lomonaco, Alvaro Soto, Davide Bacciu
Date: 2022-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Catastrophic forgetting, the phenomenon of forgetting previously learned tasks when learning a new one, is a major hurdle in developing continual learning algorithms. A popular method to alleviate forgetting is to use a memory buffer, which stores a subset of previously learned task examples for use during training on new tasks. The de facto method of filling memory is by randomly selecting previous examples. However, this process could introduce outliers or noisy samples that could hurt the generalization of the model. This paper introduces Memory Outlier Elimination (MOE), a method for identifying and eliminating outliers in the memory buffer by choosing samples from label-homogeneous subpopulations. We show that a space with a high homogeneity is related to a feature space that is more representative of the class distribution. In practice, MOE removes a sample if it is surrounded by samples from different labels. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MOE on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and CORe50, outperforming previous well-known memory population methods.
Saliency-Regularized Deep Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Guangji Bai, Liang Zhao
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Multi-Task Learning, Relation

Multitask learning is a framework that enforces multiple learning tasks to share knowledge to improve their generalization abilities. While shallow multitask learning can learn task relations, it can only handle predefined features. Modern deep multitask learning can jointly learn latent features and task sharing, but they are obscure in task relation. Also, they predefine which layers and neurons should share across tasks and cannot learn adaptively. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a new multitask learning framework that jointly learns latent features and explicit task relations by complementing the strength of existing shallow and deep multitask learning scenarios. Specifically, we propose to model the task relation as the similarity between task input gradients, with a theoretical analysis of their equivalency. In addition, we innovatively propose a multitask learning objective that explicitly learns task relations by a new regularizer. Theoretical analysis shows that the generalizability error has been reduced thanks to the proposed regularizer. Extensive experiments on several multitask learning and image classification benchmarks demonstrate the proposed method effectiveness, efficiency as well as reasonableness in the learned task relation patterns.
Data-Driven Modeling of Noise Time Series with Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Adam Wunderlich, Jack Sklar
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Random noise arising from physical processes is an inherent characteristic of measurements and a limiting factor for most signal processing and data analysis tasks. Given the recent interest in generative adversarial networks (GANs) for data-driven modeling, it is important to determine to what extent GANs can faithfully reproduce noise in target data sets. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation that aims to shed light on this issue for time series. Namely, we assess two general-purpose GANs for time series that are based on the popular deep convolutional GAN (DCGAN) architecture, a direct time-series model and an image-based model that uses a short-time Fourier transform (STFT) data representation. The GAN models are trained and quantitatively evaluated using distributions of simulated noise time series with known ground-truth parameters. Target time series distributions include a broad range of noise types commonly encountered in physical measurements, electronics, and communication systems: band-limited thermal noise, power law noise, shot noise, and impulsive noise. We find that GANs are capable of learning many noise types, although they predictably struggle when the GAN architecture is not well suited to some aspects of the noise, e.g., impulsive time-series with extreme outliers. Our findings provide insights into the capabilities and potential limitations of current approaches to time-series GANs and highlight areas for further research. In addition, our battery of tests provides a useful benchmark to aid the development of deep generative models for time series.
Mathematical Foundations of Graph-Based Bayesian Semi-Supervised Learning
Authors: Nicolas García Trillos, Daniel Sanz-Alonso, Ruiyi Yang
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, TAG

In recent decades, science and engineering have been revolutionized by a momentous growth in the amount of available data. However, despite the unprecedented ease with which data are now collected and stored, labeling data by supplementing each feature with an informative tag remains to be challenging. Illustrative tasks where the labeling process requires expert knowledge or is tedious and time-consuming include labeling X-rays with a diagnosis, protein sequences with a protein type, texts by their topic, tweets by their sentiment, or videos by their genre. In these and numerous other examples, only a few features may be manually labeled due to cost and time constraints. How can we best propagate label information from a small number of expensive labeled features to a vast number of unlabeled ones? This is the question addressed by semi-supervised learning (SSL). This article overviews recent foundational developments on graph-based Bayesian SSL, a probabilistic framework for label propagation using similarities between features. SSL is an active research area and a thorough review of the extant literature is beyond the scope of this article. Our focus will be on topics drawn from our own research that illustrate the wide range of mathematical tools and ideas that underlie the rigorous study of the statistical accuracy and computational efficiency of graph-based Bayesian SSL.
Folding over Neural Networks
Authors: Minh Nguyen, Nicolas Wu
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00

Neural networks are typically represented as data structures that are traversed either through iteration or by manual chaining of method calls. However, a deeper analysis reveals that structured recursion can be used instead, so that traversal is directed by the structure of the network itself. This paper shows how such an approach can be realised in Haskell, by encoding neural networks as recursive data types, and then their training as recursion scheme patterns. In turn, we promote a coherent implementation of neural networks that delineates between their structure and semantics, allowing for compositionality in both how they are built and how they are trained.
Distributed Online System Identification for LTI Systems Using Reverse Experience Replay
Authors: Ting-Jui Chang, Shahin Shahrampour
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00

Identification of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems plays an important role in control and reinforcement learning. Both asymptotic and finite-time offline system identification are well-studied in the literature. For online system identification, the idea of stochastic-gradient descent with reverse experience replay (SGD-RER) was recently proposed, where the data sequence is stored in several buffers and the stochastic-gradient descent (SGD) update performs backward in each buffer to break the time dependency between data points. Inspired by this work, we study distributed online system identification of LTI systems over a multi-agent network. We consider agents as identical LTI systems, and the network goal is to jointly estimate the system parameters by leveraging the communication between agents. We propose DSGD-RER, a distributed variant of the SGD-RER algorithm, and theoretically characterize the improvement of the estimation error with respect to the network size. Our numerical experiments certify the reduction of estimation error as the network size grows.
Generating gender-ambiguous voices for privacy-preserving speech recognition
Authors: Dimitrios Stoidis, Andrea Cavallaro
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Generative Adversarial Network, Privacy Preserving, Representation Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Our voice encodes a uniquely identifiable pattern which can be used to infer private attributes, such as gender or identity, that an individual might wish not to reveal when using a speech recognition service. To prevent attribute inference attacks alongside speech recognition tasks, we present a generative adversarial network, GenGAN, that synthesises voices that conceal the gender or identity of a speaker. The proposed network includes a generator with a U-Net architecture that learns to fool a discriminator. We condition the generator only on gender information and use an adversarial loss between signal distortion and privacy preservation. We show that GenGAN improves the trade-off between privacy and utility compared to privacy-preserving representation learning methods that consider gender information as a sensitive attribute to protect.
Learning to Increase the Power of Conditional Randomization Tests
Authors: Shalev Shaer, Yaniv Romano
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00

The model-X conditional randomization test is a generic framework for conditional independence testing, unlocking new possibilities to discover features that are conditionally associated with a response of interest while controlling type-I error rates. An appealing advantage of this test is that it can work with any machine learning model to design powerful test statistics. In turn, the common practice in the model-X literature is to form a test statistic using machine learning models, trained to maximize predictive accuracy with the hope to attain a test with good power. However, the ideal goal here is to drive the model (during training) to maximize the power of the test, not merely the predictive accuracy. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing, for the first time, novel model-fitting schemes that are designed to explicitly improve the power of model-X tests. This is done by introducing a new cost function that aims at maximizing the test statistic used to measure violations of conditional independence. Using synthetic and real data sets, we demonstrate that the combination of our proposed loss function with various base predictive models (lasso, elastic net, and deep neural networks) consistently increases the number of correct discoveries obtained, while maintaining type-I error rates under control.
Comparative Analysis of Time Series Forecasting Approaches for Household Electricity Consumption Prediction
Authors: Muhammad Bilal, Hyeok Kim, Muhammad Fayaz, Pravin Pawar
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: energy management, Gaussian Processes, Management, regression, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

As a result of increasing population and globalization, the demand for energy has greatly risen. Therefore, accurate energy consumption forecasting has become an essential prerequisite for government planning, reducing power wastage and stable operation of the energy management system. In this work we present a comparative analysis of major machine learning models for time series forecasting of household energy consumption. Specifically, we use Weka, a data mining tool to first apply models on hourly and daily household energy consumption datasets available from Kaggle data science community. The models applied are: Multilayer Perceptron, K Nearest Neighbor regression, Support Vector Regression, Linear Regression, and Gaussian Processes. Secondly, we also implemented time series forecasting models, ARIMA and VAR, in python to forecast household energy consumption of selected South Korean households with and without weather data. Our results show that the best methods for the forecasting of energy consumption prediction are Support Vector Regression followed by Multilayer Perceptron and Gaussian Process Regression.
Recipe for Fast Large-scale SVM Training: Polishing, Parallelism, and more RAM!
Authors: Tobias Glasmachers
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Support vector machines (SVMs) are a standard method in the machine learning toolbox, in particular for tabular data. Non-linear kernel SVMs often deliver highly accurate predictors, however, at the cost of long training times. That problem is aggravated by the exponential growth of data volumes over time. It was tackled in the past mainly by two types of techniques: approximate solvers, and parallel GPU implementations. In this work, we combine both approaches to design an extremely fast dual SVM solver. We fully exploit the capabilities of modern compute servers: many-core architectures, multiple high-end GPUs, and large random access memory. On such a machine, we train a large-margin classifier on the ImageNet data set in 24 minutes.
Mental Illness Classification on Social Media Texts using Deep Learning and Transfer Learning
Authors: Iqra Ameer, Muhammad Arif, Grigori Sidorov, Helena Gòmez-Adorno, Alexander Gelbukh
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Transfer Learning

Given the current social distance restrictions across the world, most individuals now use social media as their major medium of communication. Millions of people suffering from mental diseases have been isolated due to this, and they are unable to get help in person. They have become more reliant on online venues to express themselves and seek advice on dealing with their mental disorders. According to the World health organization (WHO), approximately 450 million people are affected. Mental illnesses, such as depression, anxiety, etc., are immensely common and have affected an individuals' physical health. Recently Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods have been presented to help mental health providers, including psychiatrists and psychologists, in decision making based on patients' authentic information (e.g., medical records, behavioral data, social media utilization, etc.). AI innovations have demonstrated predominant execution in numerous real-world applications broadening from computer vision to healthcare. This study analyzes unstructured user data on the Reddit platform and classifies five common mental illnesses: depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and PTSD. We trained traditional machine learning, deep learning, and transfer learning multi-class models to detect mental disorders of individuals. This effort will benefit the public health system by automating the detection process and informing appropriate authorities about people who require emergency assistance.
Government Intervention in Catastrophe Insurance Markets: A Reinforcement Learning Approach
Authors: Menna Hassan, Nourhan Sakr, Arthur Charpentier
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper designs a sequential repeated game of a micro-founded society with three types of agents: individuals, insurers, and a government. Nascent to economics literature, we use Reinforcement Learning (RL), closely related to multi-armed bandit problems, to learn the welfare impact of a set of proposed policy interventions per $1 spent on them. The paper rigorously discusses the desirability of the proposed interventions by comparing them against each other on a case-by-case basis. The paper provides a framework for algorithmic policy evaluation using calibrated theoretical models which can assist in feasibility studies.
Linguistically inspired roadmap for building biologically reliable protein language models
Authors: Mai Ha Vu, Rahmad Akbar, Philippe A. Robert, Bartlomiej Swiatczak, Victor Greiff, Geir Kjetil Sandve, Dag Trygve Truslew Haug
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Interpretable Machine Learning

Deep neural-network-based language models (LMs) are increasingly applied to large-scale protein sequence data to predict protein function. However, being largely black-box models and thus challenging to interpret, current protein LM approaches do not contribute to a fundamental understanding of sequence-function mappings, hindering rule-based biotherapeutic drug development. We argue that guidance drawn from linguistics, a field specialized in analytical rule extraction from natural language data, can aid with building more interpretable protein LMs that are more likely to learn relevant domain-specific rules. Differences between protein sequence data and linguistic sequence data require the integration of more domain-specific knowledge in protein LMs compared to natural language LMs. Here, we provide a linguistics-based roadmap for protein LM pipeline choices with regard to training data, tokenization, token embedding, sequence embedding, and model interpretation. Incorporating linguistic ideas into protein LMs enables the development of next-generation interpretable machine-learning models with the potential of uncovering the biological mechanisms underlying sequence-function relationships.
Renaissance Robot: Optimal Transport Policy Fusion for Learning Diverse Skills
Authors: Julia Tan, Ransalu Senanayake, Fabio Ramos
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach to solving complex robotics problems. However, the process of learning through trial-and-error interactions is often highly time-consuming, despite recent advancements in RL algorithms. Additionally, the success of RL is critically dependent on how well the reward-shaping function suits the task, which is also time-consuming to design. As agents trained on a variety of robotics problems continue to proliferate, the ability to reuse their valuable learning for new domains becomes increasingly significant. In this paper, we propose a post-hoc technique for policy fusion using Optimal Transport theory as a robust means of consolidating the knowledge of multiple agents that have been trained on distinct scenarios. We further demonstrate that this provides an improved weights initialisation of the neural network policy for learning new tasks, requiring less time and computational resources than either retraining the parent policies or training a new policy from scratch. Ultimately, our results on diverse agents commonly used in deep RL show that specialised knowledge can be unified into a "Renaissance agent", allowing for quicker learning of new skills.
Task-Oriented Sensing, Computation, and Communication Integration for Multi-Device Edge AI
Authors: Dingzhu Wen, Peixi Liu, Guangxu Zhu, Yuanming Shi, Jie Xu, Yonina C. Eldar, Shuguang Cui
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Integrated sensing and communication, ISAC, Management, Quantization

This paper studies a new multi-device edge artificial-intelligent (AI) system, which jointly exploits the AI model split inference and integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) to enable low-latency intelligent services at the network edge. In this system, multiple ISAC devices perform radar sensing to obtain multi-view data, and then offload the quantized version of extracted features to a centralized edge server, which conducts model inference based on the cascaded feature vectors. Under this setup and by considering classification tasks, we measure the inference accuracy by adopting an approximate but tractable metric, namely discriminant gain, which is defined as the distance of two classes in the Euclidean feature space under normalized covariance. To maximize the discriminant gain, we first quantify the influence of the sensing, computation, and communication processes on it with a derived closed-form expression. Then, an end-to-end task-oriented resource management approach is developed by integrating the three processes into a joint design. This integrated sensing, computation, and communication (ISCC) design approach, however, leads to a challenging non-convex optimization problem, due to the complicated form of discriminant gain and the device heterogeneity in terms of channel gain, quantization level, and generated feature subsets. Remarkably, the considered non-convex problem can be optimally solved based on the sum-of-ratios method. This gives the optimal ISCC scheme, that jointly determines the transmit power and time allocation at multiple devices for sensing and communication, as well as their quantization bits allocation for computation distortion control. By using human motions recognition as a concrete AI inference task, extensive experiments are conducted to verify the performance of our derived optimal ISCC scheme.
An Empirical Evaluation of $k$-Means Coresets
Authors: Chris Schwiegelshohn, Omar Ali Sheikh-Omar
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Coresets are among the most popular paradigms for summarizing data. In particular, there exist many high performance coresets for clustering problems such as $k$-means in both theory and practice. Curiously, there exists no work on comparing the quality of available $k$-means coresets. In this paper we perform such an evaluation. There currently is no algorithm known to measure the distortion of a candidate coreset. We provide some evidence as to why this might be computationally difficult. To complement this, we propose a benchmark for which we argue that computing coresets is challenging and which also allows us an easy (heuristic) evaluation of coresets. Using this benchmark and real-world data sets, we conduct an exhaustive evaluation of the most commonly used coreset algorithms from theory and practice.
On Convergence of Gradient Descent Ascent: A Tight Local Analysis
Authors: Haochuan Li, Farzan Farnia, Subhro Das, Ali Jadbabaie
Date: 2022-07-03 00:00:00

Gradient Descent Ascent (GDA) methods are the mainstream algorithms for minimax optimization in generative adversarial networks (GANs). Convergence properties of GDA have drawn significant interest in the recent literature. Specifically, for $\min_{\mathbf{x}} \max_{\mathbf{y}} f(\mathbf{x};\mathbf{y})$ where $f$ is strongly-concave in $\mathbf{y}$ and possibly nonconvex in $\mathbf{x}$, (Lin et al., 2020) proved the convergence of GDA with a stepsize ratio $\eta_{\mathbf{y}}/\eta_{\mathbf{x}}=\Theta(\kappa^2)$ where $\eta_{\mathbf{x}}$ and $\eta_{\mathbf{y}}$ are the stepsizes for $\mathbf{x}$ and $\mathbf{y}$ and $\kappa$ is the condition number for $\mathbf{y}$. While this stepsize ratio suggests a slow training of the min player, practical GAN algorithms typically adopt similar stepsizes for both variables, indicating a wide gap between theoretical and empirical results. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by analyzing the \emph{local convergence} of general \emph{nonconvex-nonconcave} minimax problems. We demonstrate that a stepsize ratio of $\Theta(\kappa)$ is necessary and sufficient for local convergence of GDA to a Stackelberg Equilibrium, where $\kappa$ is the local condition number for $\mathbf{y}$. We prove a nearly tight convergence rate with a matching lower bound. We further extend the convergence guarantees to stochastic GDA and extra-gradient methods (EG). Finally, we conduct several numerical experiments to support our theoretical findings.