pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Offline Reinforcement Learning with Causal Structured World Models
Authors: Zheng-Mao Zhu, Xiong-Hui Chen, Hong-Long Tian, Kun Zhang, Yang Yu
Date: 2022-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Offline RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Model-based methods have recently shown promising for offline reinforcement learning (RL), aiming to learn good policies from historical data without interacting with the environment. Previous model-based offline RL methods learn fully connected nets as world-models that map the states and actions to the next-step states. However, it is sensible that a world-model should adhere to the underlying causal effect such that it will support learning an effective policy generalizing well in unseen states. In this paper, We first provide theoretical results that causal world-models can outperform plain world-models for offline RL by incorporating the causal structure into the generalization error bound. We then propose a practical algorithm, oFfline mOdel-based reinforcement learning with CaUsal Structure (FOCUS), to illustrate the feasibility of learning and leveraging causal structure in offline RL. Experimental results on two benchmarks show that FOCUS reconstructs the underlying causal structure accurately and robustly. Consequently, it performs better than the plain model-based offline RL algorithms and other causal model-based RL algorithms.
PAC Statistical Model Checking of Mean Payoff in Discrete- and Continuous-Time MDP
Authors: Chaitanya Agarwal, Shibashis Guha, Jan Křetínský, M. Pazhamalai
Date: 2022-06-03 00:00:00

Markov decision processes (MDP) and continuous-time MDP (CTMDP) are the fundamental models for non-deterministic systems with probabilistic uncertainty. Mean payoff (a.k.a. long-run average reward) is one of the most classic objectives considered in their context. We provide the first algorithm to compute mean payoff probably approximately correctly in unknown MDP; further, we extend it to unknown CTMDP. We do not require any knowledge of the state space, only a lower bound on the minimum transition probability, which has been advocated in literature. In addition to providing probably approximately correct (PAC) bounds for our algorithm, we also demonstrate its practical nature by running experiments on standard benchmarks.
Safety Certification for Stochastic Systems via Neural Barrier Functions
Authors: Frederik Baymler Mathiesen, Simeon Calvert, Luca Laurenti
Date: 2022-06-03 00:00:00

Providing non-trivial certificates of safety for non-linear stochastic systems is an important open problem that limits the wider adoption of autonomous systems in safety-critical applications. One promising solution to address this problem is barrier functions. The composition of a barrier function with a stochastic system forms a supermartingale, thus enabling the computation of the probability that the system stays in a safe set over a finite time horizon via martingale inequalities. However, existing approaches to find barrier functions for stochastic systems generally rely on convex optimization programs that restrict the search of a barrier to a small class of functions such as low degree SoS polynomials and can be computationally expensive. In this paper, we parameterize a barrier function as a neural network and show that techniques for robust training of neural networks can be successfully employed to find neural barrier functions. Specifically, we leverage bound propagation techniques to certify that a neural network satisfies the conditions to be a barrier function via linear programming and then employ the resulting bounds at training time to enforce the satisfaction of these conditions. We also present a branch-and-bound scheme that makes the certification framework scalable. We show that our approach outperforms existing methods in several case studies and often returns certificates of safety that are orders of magnitude larger.
Indirect Active Learning
Authors: Shashank Singh
Date: 2022-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

Traditional models of active learning assume a learner can directly manipulate or query a covariate $X$ in order to study its relationship with a response $Y$. However, if $X$ is a feature of a complex system, it may be possible only to indirectly influence $X$ by manipulating a control variable $Z$, a scenario we refer to as Indirect Active Learning. Under a nonparametric model of Indirect Active Learning with a fixed budget, we study minimax convergence rates for estimating the relationship between $X$ and $Y$ locally at a point, obtaining different rates depending on the complexities and noise levels of the relationships between $Z$ and $X$ and between $X$ and $Y$. We also identify minimax rates for passive learning under comparable assumptions. In many cases, our results show that, while there is an asymptotic benefit to active learning, this benefit is fully realized by a simple two-stage learner that runs two passive experiments in sequence.
XPASC: Measuring Generalization in Weak Supervision by Explainability and Association
Authors: Luisa März, Ehsaneddin Asgari, Fabienne Braune, Franziska Zimmermann, Benjamin Roth
Date: 2022-06-03 00:00:00

Weak supervision is leveraged in a wide range of domains and tasks due to its ability to create massive amounts of labeled data, requiring only little manual effort. Standard approaches use labeling functions to specify signals that are relevant for the labeling. It has been conjectured that weakly supervised models over-rely on those signals and as a result suffer from overfitting. To verify this assumption, we introduce a novel method, XPASC (eXPlainability-Association SCore), for measuring the generalization of a model trained with a weakly supervised dataset. Considering the occurrences of features, classes and labeling functions in a dataset, XPASC takes into account the relevance of each feature for the predictions of the model as well as the associations of the feature with the class and the labeling function, respectively. The association in XPASC can be measured in two variants: XPASC-CHI SQAURE measures associations relative to their statistical significance, while XPASC-PPMI measures association strength more generally. We use XPASC to analyze KnowMAN, an adversarial architecture intended to control the degree of generalization from the labeling functions and thus to mitigate the problem of overfitting. On one hand, we show that KnowMAN is able to control the degree of generalization through a hyperparameter. On the other hand, results and qualitative analysis show that generalization and performance do not relate one-to-one, and that the highest degree of generalization does not necessarily imply the best performance. Therefore methods that allow for controlling the amount of generalization can achieve the right degree of benign overfitting. Our contributions in this study are i) the XPASC score to measure generalization in weakly-supervised models, ii) evaluation of XPASC across datasets and models and iii) the release of the XPASC implementation.
Modeling electronic health record data using a knowledge-graph-embedded topic model
Authors: Yuesong Zou, Ahmad Pesaranghader, Aman Verma, David Buckeridge, Yue Li
Date: 2022-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Clinical Knowledge, Imputation, Knowledge Graphs

The rapid growth of electronic health record (EHR) datasets opens up promising opportunities to understand human diseases in a systematic way. However, effective extraction of clinical knowledge from the EHR data has been hindered by its sparsity and noisy information. We present KG-ETM, an end-to-end knowledge graph-based multimodal embedded topic model. KG-ETM distills latent disease topics from EHR data by learning the embedding from the medical knowledge graphs. We applied KG-ETM to a large-scale EHR dataset consisting of over 1 million patients. We evaluated its performance based on EHR reconstruction and drug imputation. KG-ETM demonstrated superior performance over the alternative methods on both tasks. Moreover, our model learned clinically meaningful graph-informed embedding of the EHR codes. In additional, our model is also able to discover interpretable and accurate patient representations for patient stratification and drug recommendations.
On the Generalization of Wasserstein Robust Federated Learning
Authors: Tung-Anh Nguyen, Tuan Dung Nguyen, Long Tan Le, Canh T. Dinh, Nguyen H. Tran
Date: 2022-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Federated Learning

In federated learning, participating clients typically possess non-i.i.d. data, posing a significant challenge to generalization to unseen distributions. To address this, we propose a Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization scheme called WAFL. Leveraging its duality, we frame WAFL as an empirical surrogate risk minimization problem, and solve it using a local SGD-based algorithm with convergence guarantees. We show that the robustness of WAFL is more general than related approaches, and the generalization bound is robust to all adversarial distributions inside the Wasserstein ball (ambiguity set). Since the center location and radius of the Wasserstein ball can be suitably modified, WAFL shows its applicability not only in robustness but also in domain adaptation. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that WAFL generalizes better than the vanilla FedAvg in non-i.i.d. settings, and is more robust than other related methods in distribution shift settings. Further, using benchmark datasets we show that WAFL is capable of generalizing to unseen target domains.
Rate-Optimal Online Convex Optimization in Adaptive Linear Control
Authors: Asaf Cassel, Alon Cohen, Tomer Koren
Date: 2022-06-03 00:00:00

We consider the problem of controlling an unknown linear dynamical system under adversarially changing convex costs and full feedback of both the state and cost function. We present the first computationally-efficient algorithm that attains an optimal $\smash{\sqrt{T}}$-regret rate compared to the best stabilizing linear controller in hindsight, while avoiding stringent assumptions on the costs such as strong convexity. Our approach is based on a careful design of non-convex lower confidence bounds for the online costs, and uses a novel technique for computationally-efficient regret minimization of these bounds that leverages their particular non-convex structure.
Impact of the composition of feature extraction and class sampling in medicare fraud detection
Authors: Akrity Kumari, Narinder Singh Punn, Sanjay Kumar Sonbhadra, Sonali Agarwal
Date: 2022-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Fraud Detection

With healthcare being critical aspect, health insurance has become an important scheme in minimizing medical expenses. Following this, the healthcare industry has seen a significant increase in fraudulent activities owing to increased insurance, and fraud has become a significant contributor to rising medical care expenses, although its impact can be mitigated using fraud detection techniques. To detect fraud, machine learning techniques are used. The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) of the United States federal government released "Medicare Part D" insurance claims is utilized in this study to develop fraud detection system. Employing machine learning algorithms on a class-imbalanced and high dimensional medicare dataset is a challenging task. To compact such challenges, the present work aims to perform feature extraction following data sampling, afterward applying various classification algorithms, to get better performance. Feature extraction is a dimensionality reduction approach that converts attributes into linear or non-linear combinations of the actual attributes, generating a smaller and more diversified set of attributes and thus reducing the dimensions. Data sampling is commonlya used to address the class imbalance either by expanding the frequency of minority class or reducing the frequency of majority class to obtain approximately equal numbers of occurrences for both classes. The proposed approach is evaluated through standard performance metrics. Thus, to detect fraud efficiently, this study applies autoencoder as a feature extraction technique, synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) as a data sampling technique, and various gradient boosted decision tree-based classifiers as a classification algorithm. The experimental results show the combination of autoencoders followed by SMOTE on the LightGBM classifier achieved best results.
Hybrid Parameter Search and Dynamic Model Selection for Mixed-Variable Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Hengrui Luo, Younghyun Cho, James W. Demmel, Xiaoye S. Li, Yang Liu
Date: 2022-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Gaussian Processes, Model Selection, Position

This paper presents a new type of hybrid model for Bayesian optimization (BO) adept at managing mixed variables, encompassing both quantitative (continuous and integer) and qualitative (categorical) types. Our proposed new hybrid models (named hybridM) merge the Monte Carlo Tree Search structure (MCTS) for categorical variables with Gaussian Processes (GP) for continuous ones. hybridM leverages the upper confidence bound tree search (UCTS) for MCTS strategy, showcasing the tree architecture's integration into Bayesian optimization. Our innovations, including dynamic online kernel selection in the surrogate modeling phase and a unique UCTS search strategy, position our hybrid models as an advancement in mixed-variable surrogate models. Numerical experiments underscore the superiority of hybrid models, highlighting their potential in Bayesian optimization.
Generalization for multiclass classification with overparameterized linear models
Authors: Vignesh Subramanian, Rahul Arya, Anant Sahai
Date: 2022-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Classification

Via an overparameterized linear model with Gaussian features, we provide conditions for good generalization for multiclass classification of minimum-norm interpolating solutions in an asymptotic setting where both the number of underlying features and the number of classes scale with the number of training points. The survival/contamination analysis framework for understanding the behavior of overparameterized learning problems is adapted to this setting, revealing that multiclass classification qualitatively behaves like binary classification in that, as long as there are not too many classes (made precise in the paper), it is possible to generalize well even in some settings where the corresponding regression tasks would not generalize. Besides various technical challenges, it turns out that the key difference from the binary classification setting is that there are relatively fewer positive training examples of each class in the multiclass setting as the number of classes increases, making the multiclass problem "harder" than the binary one.
Instant Graph Neural Networks for Dynamic Graphs
Authors: Yanping Zheng, Hanzhi Wang, Zhewei Wei, Jiajun Liu, Sibo Wang
Date: 2022-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely used for modeling graph-structured data. With the development of numerous GNN variants, recent years have witnessed groundbreaking results in improving the scalability of GNNs to work on static graphs with millions of nodes. However, how to instantly represent continuous changes of large-scale dynamic graphs with GNNs is still an open problem. Existing dynamic GNNs focus on modeling the periodic evolution of graphs, often on a snapshot basis. Such methods suffer from two drawbacks: first, there is a substantial delay for the changes in the graph to be reflected in the graph representations, resulting in losses on the model's accuracy; second, repeatedly calculating the representation matrix on the entire graph in each snapshot is predominantly time-consuming and severely limits the scalability. In this paper, we propose Instant Graph Neural Network (InstantGNN), an incremental computation approach for the graph representation matrix of dynamic graphs. Set to work with dynamic graphs with the edge-arrival model, our method avoids time-consuming, repetitive computations and allows instant updates on the representation and instant predictions. Graphs with dynamic structures and dynamic attributes are both supported. The upper bounds of time complexity of those updates are also provided. Furthermore, our method provides an adaptive training strategy, which guides the model to retrain at moments when it can make the greatest performance gains. We conduct extensive experiments on several real-world and synthetic datasets. Empirical results demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while having orders-of-magnitude higher efficiency than existing methods.
Regularization-wise double descent: Why it occurs and how to eliminate it
Authors: Fatih Furkan Yilmaz, Reinhard Heckel
Date: 2022-06-03 00:00:00

The risk of overparameterized models, in particular deep neural networks, is often double-descent shaped as a function of the model size. Recently, it was shown that the risk as a function of the early-stopping time can also be double-descent shaped, and this behavior can be explained as a super-position of bias-variance tradeoffs. In this paper, we show that the risk of explicit L2-regularized models can exhibit double descent behavior as a function of the regularization strength, both in theory and practice. We find that for linear regression, a double descent shaped risk is caused by a superposition of bias-variance tradeoffs corresponding to different parts of the model and can be mitigated by scaling the regularization strength of each part appropriately. Motivated by this result, we study a two-layer neural network and show that double descent can be eliminated by adjusting the regularization strengths for the first and second layer. Lastly, we study a 5-layer CNN and ResNet-18 trained on CIFAR-10 with label noise, and CIFAR-100 without label noise, and demonstrate that all exhibit double descent behavior as a function of the regularization strength.
Completion Time Minimization of Fog-RAN-Assisted Federated Learning With Rate-Splitting Transmission
Authors: Seok-Hwan Park, Hoon Lee
Date: 2022-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Quantization

This work studies federated learning (FL) over a fog radio access network, in which multiple internet-of-things (IoT) devices cooperatively learn a shared machine learning model by communicating with a cloud server (CS) through distributed access points (APs). Under the assumption that the fronthaul links connecting APs to CS have finite capacity, a rate-splitting transmission at IoT devices (IDs) is proposed which enables hybrid edge and cloud decoding of split uplink messages. The problem of completion time minimization for FL is tackled by optimizing the rate-splitting transmission and fronthaul quantization strategies along with training hyperparameters such as precision and iteration numbers. Numerical results show that the proposed rate-splitting transmission achieves notable gains over benchmark schemes which rely solely on edge or cloud decoding.
Adversarial Unlearning: Reducing Confidence Along Adversarial Directions
Authors: Amrith Setlur, Benjamin Eysenbach, Virginia Smith, Sergey Levine
Date: 2022-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Supervised learning methods trained with maximum likelihood objectives often overfit on training data. Most regularizers that prevent overfitting look to increase confidence on additional examples (e.g., data augmentation, adversarial training), or reduce it on training data (e.g., label smoothing). In this work we propose a complementary regularization strategy that reduces confidence on self-generated examples. The method, which we call RCAD (Reducing Confidence along Adversarial Directions), aims to reduce confidence on out-of-distribution examples lying along directions adversarially chosen to increase training loss. In contrast to adversarial training, RCAD does not try to robustify the model to output the original label, but rather regularizes it to have reduced confidence on points generated using much larger perturbations than in conventional adversarial training. RCAD can be easily integrated into training pipelines with a few lines of code. Despite its simplicity, we find on many classification benchmarks that RCAD can be added to existing techniques (e.g., label smoothing, MixUp training) to increase test accuracy by 1-3% in absolute value, with more significant gains in the low data regime. We also provide a theoretical analysis that helps to explain these benefits in simplified settings, showing that RCAD can provably help the model unlearn spurious features in the training data.
HEX: Human-in-the-loop Explainability via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Michael T. Lash
Date: 2022-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Federated Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The use of machine learning (ML) models in decision-making contexts, particularly those used in high-stakes decision-making, are fraught with issue and peril since a person - not a machine - must ultimately be held accountable for the consequences of the decisions made using such systems. Machine learning explainability (MLX) promises to provide decision-makers with prediction-specific rationale, assuring them that the model-elicited predictions are made for the right reasons and are thus reliable. Few works explicitly consider this key human-in-the-loop (HITL) component, however. In this work we propose HEX, a human-in-the-loop deep reinforcement learning approach to MLX. HEX incorporates 0-distrust projection to synthesize decider specific explanation-providing policies from any arbitrary classification model. HEX is also constructed to operate in limited or reduced training data scenarios, such as those employing federated learning. Our formulation explicitly considers the decision boundary of the ML model in question, rather than the underlying training data, which is a shortcoming of many model-agnostic MLX methods. Our proposed methods thus synthesize HITL MLX policies that explicitly capture the decision boundary of the model in question for use in limited data scenarios.
Equipping Black-Box Policies with Model-Based Advice for Stable Nonlinear Control
Authors: Tongxin Li, Ruixiao Yang, Guannan Qu, Yiheng Lin, Steven Low, Adam Wierman
Date: 2022-06-02 00:00:00

Machine-learned black-box policies are ubiquitous for nonlinear control problems. Meanwhile, crude model information is often available for these problems from, e.g., linear approximations of nonlinear dynamics. We study the problem of equipping a black-box control policy with model-based advice for nonlinear control on a single trajectory. We first show a general negative result that a naive convex combination of a black-box policy and a linear model-based policy can lead to instability, even if the two policies are both stabilizing. We then propose an adaptive $\lambda$-confident policy, with a coefficient $\lambda$ indicating the confidence in a black-box policy, and prove its stability. With bounded nonlinearity, in addition, we show that the adaptive $\lambda$-confident policy achieves a bounded competitive ratio when a black-box policy is near-optimal. Finally, we propose an online learning approach to implement the adaptive $\lambda$-confident policy and verify its efficacy in case studies about the CartPole problem and a real-world electric vehicle (EV) charging problem with data bias due to COVID-19.