pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Maximizing Global Model Appeal in Federated Learning
Authors: Yae Jee Cho, Divyansh Jhunjhunwala, Tian Li, Virginia Smith, Gauri Joshi
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, model

Federated learning typically considers collaboratively training a global model using local data at edge clients. Clients may have their own individual requirements, such as having a minimal training loss threshold, which they expect to be met by the global model. However, due to client heterogeneity, the global model may not meet each client's requirements, and only a small subset may find the global model appealing. In this work, we explore the problem of the global model lacking appeal to the clients due to not being able to satisfy local requirements. We propose MaxFL, which aims to maximize the number of clients that find the global model appealing. We show that having a high global model appeal is important to maintain an adequate pool of clients for training, and can directly improve the test accuracy on both seen and unseen clients. We provide convergence guarantees for MaxFL and show that MaxFL achieves a $22$-$40\%$ and $18$-$50\%$ test accuracy improvement for the training clients and unseen clients respectively, compared to a wide range of FL modeling approaches, including those that tackle data heterogeneity, aim to incentivize clients, and learn personalized or fair models.
Adversarial Bandits against Arbitrary Strategies
Authors: Jung-hun Kim, Se-Young Yun
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00

We study the adversarial bandit problem against arbitrary strategies, in which $S$ is the parameter for the hardness of the problem and this parameter is not given to the agent. To handle this problem, we adopt the master-base framework using the online mirror descent method (OMD). We first provide a master-base algorithm with simple OMD, achieving $\tilde{O}(S^{1/2}K^{1/3}T^{2/3})$, in which $T^{2/3}$ comes from the variance of loss estimators. To mitigate the impact of the variance, we propose using adaptive learning rates for OMD and achieve $\tilde{O}(\min\{\mathbb{E}[\sqrt{SKT\rho_T(h^\dagger)}],S\sqrt{KT}\})$, where $\rho_T(h^\dagger)$ is a variance term for loss estimators.
GraMeR: Graph Meta Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Objective Influence Maximization
Authors: Sai Munikoti, Balasubramaniam Natarajan, Mahantesh Halappanavar
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Marketing, Meta-Learning, Meta Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Influence maximization (IM) is a combinatorial problem of identifying a subset of nodes called the seed nodes in a network (graph), which when activated, provide a maximal spread of influence in the network for a given diffusion model and a budget for seed set size. IM has numerous applications such as viral marketing, epidemic control, sensor placement and other network-related tasks. However, the uses are limited due to the computational complexity of current algorithms. Recently, learning heuristics for IM have been explored to ease the computational burden. However, there are serious limitations in current approaches such as: (1) IM formulations only consider influence via spread and ignore self activation; (2) scalability to large graphs; (3) generalizability across graph families; (4) low computational efficiency with a large running time to identify seed sets for every test network. In this work, we address each of these limitations through a unique approach that involves (1) formulating a generic IM problem as a Markov decision process that handles both intrinsic and influence activations; (2) employing double Q learning to estimate seed nodes; (3) ensuring scalability via sub-graph based representations; and (4) incorporating generalizability via meta-learning across graph families. Extensive experiments are carried out in various standard networks to validate performance of the proposed Graph Meta Reinforcement learning (GraMeR) framework. The results indicate that GraMeR is multiple orders faster and generic than conventional approaches.
Walle: An End-to-End, General-Purpose, and Large-Scale Production System for Device-Cloud Collaborative Machine Learning
Authors: Chengfei Lv, Chaoyue Niu, Renjie Gu, Xiaotang Jiang, Zhaode Wang, Bin Liu, Ziqi Wu, Qiulin Yao, Congyu Huang, Panos Huang, Tao Huang, Hui Shu, Jinde Song, Bin Zou, Peng Lan, Guohuan Xu, Fei Wu, Shaojie Tang, Fan Wu, Guihai Chen
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00

To break the bottlenecks of mainstream cloud-based machine learning (ML) paradigm, we adopt device-cloud collaborative ML and build the first end-to-end and general-purpose system, called Walle, as the foundation. Walle consists of a deployment platform, distributing ML tasks to billion-scale devices in time; a data pipeline, efficiently preparing task input; and a compute container, providing a cross-platform and high-performance execution environment, while facilitating daily task iteration. Specifically, the compute container is based on Mobile Neural Network (MNN), a tensor compute engine along with the data processing and model execution libraries, which are exposed through a refined Python thread-level virtual machine (VM) to support diverse ML tasks and concurrent task execution. The core of MNN is the novel mechanisms of operator decomposition and semi-auto search, sharply reducing the workload in manually optimizing hundreds of operators for tens of hardware backends and further quickly identifying the best backend with runtime optimization for a computation graph. The data pipeline introduces an on-device stream processing framework to enable processing user behavior data at source. The deployment platform releases ML tasks with an efficient push-then-pull method and supports multi-granularity deployment policies. We evaluate Walle in practical e-commerce application scenarios to demonstrate its effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability. Extensive micro-benchmarks also highlight the superior performance of MNN and the Python thread-level VM. Walle has been in large-scale production use in Alibaba, while MNN has been open source with a broad impact in the community.
Adaptive Sampling for Discovery
Authors: Ziping Xu, Eunjae Shim, Ambuj Tewari, Paul Zimmerman
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Drug Discovery, Sequential Decision Making

In this paper, we study a sequential decision-making problem, called Adaptive Sampling for Discovery (ASD). Starting with a large unlabeled dataset, algorithms for ASD adaptively label the points with the goal to maximize the sum of responses. This problem has wide applications to real-world discovery problems, for example drug discovery with the help of machine learning models. ASD algorithms face the well-known exploration-exploitation dilemma. The algorithm needs to choose points that yield information to improve model estimates but it also needs to exploit the model. We rigorously formulate the problem and propose a general information-directed sampling (IDS) algorithm. We provide theoretical guarantees for the performance of IDS in linear, graph and low-rank models. The benefits of IDS are shown in both simulation experiments and real-data experiments for discovering chemical reaction conditions.
Lepton Flavour Violation Identification in Tau Decay ($τ^{-} \rightarrow μ^{-}μ^{-}μ^{+}$) Using Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Reymond Mesuga
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00

The discovery of neutrino oscillation, proving that neutrinos do have masses, reveals the misfits of particles in the current Standard Model (SM) theory. In theory, neutrinos having masses could result in lepton flavour not being a symmetry called Lepton Flavour Violation (LFV). While SM theory extensions allowed LFV processes, their branching fractions are too small, making them unobservable even with the strongest equipment up-to-date. With that, scientists in recent years have generated LFV-like processes from the combined LHCb and Monte-Carlo-Simulated data in an attempt to identify LFV using Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL). In this paper, the performance of several algorithms in AI has been presented, such as XGBoost, LightGBM, custom 1-D Dense Block Neural Networks (DBNNs), and custom 1-D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in identifying LFV signals, specifically $\tau^{-} \rightarrow \mu^{-}\mu^{-}\mu^{+}$ decay from the combined LHCb and Monte-Carlo-Simulated data that imitates the signatures of the said decay. Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) and Cramer-von Mises (CvM) tests were also conducted to verify the validity of predictions for each of the trained algorithms. The result shows decent performances among algorithms, except for the LightGBM, for failing the CvM test, and a 20-layered CNN for having recorded a considerably low AUC. Meanwhile, XGBoost and a 10-layered DBNN recorded the highest AUC of 0.88. The main contribution of this paper is the extensive experiment involving custom DBNN and CNN algorithms in different layers, all of which have been rarely used in the past years in identifying LFV-like signatures, unlike GBMs and tree-based algorithms, which have been more popular in the said task.
Robust Weight Perturbation for Adversarial Training
Authors: Chaojian Yu, Bo Han, Mingming Gong, Li Shen, Shiming Ge, Bo Du, Tongliang Liu
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

Overfitting widely exists in adversarial robust training of deep networks. An effective remedy is adversarial weight perturbation, which injects the worst-case weight perturbation during network training by maximizing the classification loss on adversarial examples. Adversarial weight perturbation helps reduce the robust generalization gap; however, it also undermines the robustness improvement. A criterion that regulates the weight perturbation is therefore crucial for adversarial training. In this paper, we propose such a criterion, namely Loss Stationary Condition (LSC) for constrained perturbation. With LSC, we find that it is essential to conduct weight perturbation on adversarial data with small classification loss to eliminate robust overfitting. Weight perturbation on adversarial data with large classification loss is not necessary and may even lead to poor robustness. Based on these observations, we propose a robust perturbation strategy to constrain the extent of weight perturbation. The perturbation strategy prevents deep networks from overfitting while avoiding the side effect of excessive weight perturbation, significantly improving the robustness of adversarial training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art adversarial training methods.
Bayesian Low-Rank Interpolative Decomposition for Complex Datasets
Authors: Jun Lu
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, feature selection

In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic model for learning interpolative decomposition (ID), which is commonly used for feature selection, low-rank approximation, and identifying hidden patterns in data, where the matrix factors are latent variables associated with each data dimension. Prior densities with support on the specified subspace are used to address the constraint for the magnitude of the factored component of the observed matrix. Bayesian inference procedure based on Gibbs sampling is employed. We evaluate the model on a variety of real-world datasets including CCLE EC50, CCLE IC50, CTRP EC50,and MovieLens 100K datasets with different sizes, and dimensions, and show that the proposed Bayesian ID GBT and GBTN models lead to smaller reconstructive errors compared to existing randomized approaches.
Universality of Group Convolutional Neural Networks Based on Ridgelet Analysis on Groups
Authors: Sho Sonoda, Isao Ishikawa, Masahiro Ikeda
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00

We show the universality of depth-2 group convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) in a unified and constructive manner based on the ridgelet theory. Despite widespread use in applications, the approximation property of (G)CNNs has not been well investigated. The universality of (G)CNNs has been shown since the late 2010s. Yet, our understanding on how (G)CNNs represent functions is incomplete because the past universality theorems have been shown in a case-by-case manner by manually/carefully assigning the network parameters depending on the variety of convolution layers, and in an indirect manner by converting/modifying the (G)CNNs into other universal approximators such as invariant polynomials and fully-connected networks. In this study, we formulate a versatile depth-2 continuous GCNN $S[\gamma]$ as a nonlinear mapping between group representations, and directly obtain an analysis operator, called the ridgelet trasform, that maps a given function $f$ to the network parameter $\gamma$ so that $S[\gamma]=f$. The proposed GCNN covers typical GCNNs such as the cyclic convolution on multi-channel images, networks on permutation-invariant inputs (Deep Sets), and $\mathrm{E}(n)$-equivariant networks. The closed-form expression of the ridgelet transform can describe how the network parameters are organized to represent a function. While it has been known only for fully-connected networks, this study is the first to obtain the ridgelet transform for GCNNs. By discretizing the closed-form expression, we can systematically generate a constructive proof of the $cc$-universality of finite GCNNs. In other words, our universality proofs are more unified and constructive than previous proofs.
Excess Risk of Two-Layer ReLU Neural Networks in Teacher-Student Settings and its Superiority to Kernel Methods
Authors: Shunta Akiyama, Taiji Suzuki
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00

While deep learning has outperformed other methods for various tasks, theoretical frameworks that explain its reason have not been fully established. To address this issue, we investigate the excess risk of two-layer ReLU neural networks in a teacher-student regression model, in which a student network learns an unknown teacher network through its outputs. Especially, we consider the student network that has the same width as the teacher network and is trained in two phases: first by noisy gradient descent and then by the vanilla gradient descent. Our result shows that the student network provably reaches a near-global optimal solution and outperforms any kernel methods estimator (more generally, linear estimators), including neural tangent kernel approach, random feature model, and other kernel methods, in a sense of the minimax optimal rate. The key concept inducing this superiority is the non-convexity of the neural network models. Even though the loss landscape is highly non-convex, the student network adaptively learns the teacher neurons.
Mitigating Out-of-Distribution Data Density Overestimation in Energy-Based Models
Authors: Beomsu Kim, Jong Chul Ye
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00

Deep energy-based models (EBMs), which use deep neural networks (DNNs) as energy functions, are receiving increasing attention due to their ability to learn complex distributions. To train deep EBMs, the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) with short-run Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) is often used. While the MLE with short-run LMC is computationally efficient compared to an MLE with full Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), it often assigns high density to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. To address this issue, here we systematically investigate why the MLE with short-run LMC can converge to EBMs with wrong density estimates, and reveal that the heuristic modifications to LMC introduced by previous works were the main problem. We then propose a Uniform Support Partitioning (USP) scheme that optimizes a set of points to evenly partition the support of the EBM and then uses the resulting points to approximate the EBM-MLE loss gradient. We empirically demonstrate that USP avoids the pitfalls of short-run LMC, leading to significantly improved OOD data detection performance on Fashion-MNIST.
TaSIL: Taylor Series Imitation Learning
Authors: Daniel Pfrommer, Thomas T. C. K. Zhang, Stephen Tu, Nikolai Matni
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Imitation Learning, MuJoCo

We propose Taylor Series Imitation Learning (TaSIL), a simple augmentation to standard behavior cloning losses in the context of continuous control. TaSIL penalizes deviations in the higher-order Taylor series terms between the learned and expert policies. We show that experts satisfying a notion of $\textit{incremental input-to-state stability}$ are easy to learn, in the sense that a small TaSIL-augmented imitation loss over expert trajectories guarantees a small imitation loss over trajectories generated by the learned policy. We provide sample-complexity bounds for TaSIL that scale as $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/n)$ in the realizable setting, for $n$ the number of expert demonstrations. Finally, we demonstrate experimentally the relationship between the robustness of the expert policy and the order of Taylor expansion required in TaSIL, and compare standard Behavior Cloning, DART, and DAgger with TaSIL-loss-augmented variants. In all cases, we show significant improvement over baselines across a variety of MuJoCo tasks.
Last-iterate convergence analysis of stochastic momentum methods for neural networks
Authors: Dongpo Xu, Jinlan Liu, Yinghua Lu, Jun Kong, Danilo Mandic
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Stochastic Optimization

The stochastic momentum method is a commonly used acceleration technique for solving large-scale stochastic optimization problems in artificial neural networks. Current convergence results of stochastic momentum methods under non-convex stochastic settings mostly discuss convergence in terms of the random output and minimum output. To this end, we address the convergence of the last iterate output (called last-iterate convergence) of the stochastic momentum methods for non-convex stochastic optimization problems, in a way conformal with traditional optimization theory. We prove the last-iterate convergence of the stochastic momentum methods under a unified framework, covering both stochastic heavy ball momentum and stochastic Nesterov accelerated gradient momentum. The momentum factors can be fixed to be constant, rather than time-varying coefficients in existing analyses. Finally, the last-iterate convergence of the stochastic momentum methods is verified on the benchmark MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets.
BinauralGrad: A Two-Stage Conditional Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Binaural Audio Synthesis
Authors: Yichong Leng, Zehua Chen, Junliang Guo, Haohe Liu, Jiawei Chen, Xu Tan, Danilo Mandic, Lei He, Xiang-Yang Li, Tao Qin, Sheng Zhao, Tie-Yan Liu
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Synthesis

Binaural audio plays a significant role in constructing immersive augmented and virtual realities. As it is expensive to record binaural audio from the real world, synthesizing them from mono audio has attracted increasing attention. This synthesis process involves not only the basic physical warping of the mono audio, but also room reverberations and head/ear related filtrations, which, however, are difficult to accurately simulate in traditional digital signal processing. In this paper, we formulate the synthesis process from a different perspective by decomposing the binaural audio into a common part that shared by the left and right channels as well as a specific part that differs in each channel. Accordingly, we propose BinauralGrad, a novel two-stage framework equipped with diffusion models to synthesize them respectively. Specifically, in the first stage, the common information of the binaural audio is generated with a single-channel diffusion model conditioned on the mono audio, based on which the binaural audio is generated by a two-channel diffusion model in the second stage. Combining this novel perspective of two-stage synthesis with advanced generative models (i.e., the diffusion models),the proposed BinauralGrad is able to generate accurate and high-fidelity binaural audio samples. Experiment results show that on a benchmark dataset, BinauralGrad outperforms the existing baselines by a large margin in terms of both object and subject evaluation metrics (Wave L2: 0.128 vs. 0.157, MOS: 3.80 vs. 3.61). The generated audio samples (https://speechresearch.github.io/binauralgrad) and code (https://github.com/microsoft/NeuralSpeech/tree/master/BinauralGrad) are available online.
Non-Stationary Bandits under Recharging Payoffs: Improved Planning with Sublinear Regret
Authors: Orestis Papadigenopoulos, Constantine Caramanis, Sanjay Shakkottai
Date: 2022-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

The stochastic multi-armed bandit setting has been recently studied in the non-stationary regime, where the mean payoff of each action is a non-decreasing function of the number of rounds passed since it was last played. This model captures natural behavioral aspects of the users which crucially determine the performance of recommendation platforms, ad placement systems, and more. Even assuming prior knowledge of the mean payoff functions, computing an optimal planning in the above model is NP-hard, while the state-of-the-art is a $1/4$-approximation algorithm for the case where at most one arm can be played per round. We first focus on the setting where the mean payoff functions are known. In this setting, we significantly improve the best-known guarantees for the planning problem by developing a polynomial-time $(1-{1}/{e})$-approximation algorithm (asymptotically and in expectation), based on a novel combination of randomized LP rounding and a time-correlated (interleaved) scheduling method. Furthermore, our algorithm achieves improved guarantees -- compared to prior work -- for the case where more than one arm can be played at each round. Moving to the bandit setting, when the mean payoff functions are initially unknown, we show how our algorithm can be transformed into a bandit algorithm with sublinear regret.
Bayes Classification using an approximation to the Joint Probability Distribution of the Attributes
Authors: Patrick Hosein, Kevin Baboolal
Date: 2022-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

The Naive-Bayes classifier is widely used due to its simplicity, speed and accuracy. However this approach fails when, for at least one attribute value in a test sample, there are no corresponding training samples with that attribute value. This is known as the zero frequency problem and is typically addressed using Laplace Smoothing. However, Laplace Smoothing does not take into account the statistical characteristics of the neighbourhood of the attribute values of the test sample. Gaussian Naive Bayes addresses this but the resulting Gaussian model is formed from global information. We instead propose an approach that estimates conditional probabilities using information in the neighbourhood of the test sample. In this case we no longer need to make the assumption of independence of attribute values and hence consider the joint probability distribution conditioned on the given class which means our approach (unlike the Gaussian and Laplace approaches) takes into consideration dependencies among the attribute values. We illustrate the performance of the proposed approach on a wide range of datasets taken from the University of California at Irvine (UCI) Machine Learning Repository. We also include results for the $k$-NN classifier and demonstrate that the proposed approach is simple, robust and outperforms standard approaches.