Neural networks have been criticized for their lack of easy interpretation, which undermines confidence in their use for important applications. Here, we introduce a novel technique, interpreting a trained neural network by investigating its flip points. A flip point is any point that lies on the boundary between two output classes: e.g. for a neural network with a binary yes/no output, a flip point is any input that generates equal scores for "yes" and "no". The flip point closest to a given input is of particular importance, and this point is the solution to a well-posed optimization problem. This paper gives an overview of the uses of flip points and how they are computed. Through results on standard datasets, we demonstrate how flip points can be used to provide detailed interpretation of the output produced by a neural network. Moreover, for a given input, flip points enable us to measure confidence in the correctness of outputs much more effectively than softmax score. They also identify influential features of the inputs, identify bias, and find changes in the input that change the output of the model. We show that distance between an input and the closest flip point identifies the most influential points in the training data. Using principal component analysis (PCA) and rank-revealing QR factorization (RR-QR), the set of directions from each training input to its closest flip point provides explanations of how a trained neural network processes an entire dataset: what features are most important for classification into a given class, which features are most responsible for particular misclassifications, how an adversary might fool the network, etc. Although we investigate flip points for neural networks, their usefulness is actually model-agnostic.

When learning policies for real-world domains, two important questions arise: (i) how to efficiently use pre-collected off-policy, non-optimal behavior data; and (ii) how to mediate among different competing objectives and constraints. We thus study the problem of batch policy learning under multiple constraints, and offer a systematic solution. We first propose a flexible meta-algorithm that admits any batch reinforcement learning and online learning procedure as subroutines. We then present a specific algorithmic instantiation and provide performance guarantees for the main objective and all constraints. To certify constraint satisfaction, we propose a new and simple method for off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) and derive PAC-style bounds. Our algorithm achieves strong empirical results in different domains, including in a challenging problem of simulated car driving subject to multiple constraints such as lane keeping and smooth driving. We also show experimentally that our OPE method outperforms other popular OPE techniques on a standalone basis, especially in a high-dimensional setting.

Recall assistance methods are among the key aspects that improve the accuracy of online dietary assessment surveys. These methods still mainly rely on experience of trained interviewers with nutritional background, but data driven approaches could improve cost-efficiency and scalability of automated dietary assessment. We evaluated the effectiveness of a recommender algorithm developed for an online dietary assessment system called Intake24, that automates the multiple-pass 24-hour recall method. The recommender builds a model of eating behavior from recalls collected in past surveys. Based on foods they have already selected, the model is used to remind respondents of associated foods that they may have omitted to report. The performance of prompts generated by the model was compared to that of prompts hand-coded by nutritionists in two dietary studies. The results of our studies demonstrate that the recommender system is able to capture a higher number of foods omitted by respondents of online dietary surveys than prompts hand-coded by nutritionists. However, the considerably lower precision of generated prompts indicates an opportunity for further improvement of the system.

This paper provides a taxonomy for the licensing of data in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The paper's goal is to build towards a common framework for data licensing akin to the licensing of open source software. Increased transparency and resolving conceptual ambiguities in existing licensing language are two noted benefits of the approach proposed in the paper. In parallel, such benefits may help foster fairer and more efficient markets for data through bringing about clearer tools and concepts that better define how data can be used in the fields of AI and ML. The paper's approach is summarized in a new family of data license language - \textit{the Montreal Data License (MDL)}. Alongside this new license, the authors and their collaborators have developed a web-based tool to generate license language espousing the taxonomies articulated in this paper.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found limited success beyond simulated applications, and one main reason is the absence of safety guarantees during the learning process. Real world systems would realistically fail or break before an optimal controller can be learned. To address this issue, we propose a controller architecture that combines (1) a model-free RL-based controller with (2) model-based controllers utilizing control barrier functions (CBFs) and (3) on-line learning of the unknown system dynamics, in order to ensure safety during learning. Our general framework leverages the success of RL algorithms to learn high-performance controllers, while the CBF-based controllers both guarantee safety and guide the learning process by constraining the set of explorable polices. We utilize Gaussian Processes (GPs) to model the system dynamics and its uncertainties. Our novel controller synthesis algorithm, RL-CBF, guarantees safety with high probability during the learning process, regardless of the RL algorithm used, and demonstrates greater policy exploration efficiency. We test our algorithm on (1) control of an inverted pendulum and (2) autonomous car-following with wireless vehicle-to-vehicle communication, and show that our algorithm attains much greater sample efficiency in learning than other state-of-the-art algorithms and maintains safety during the entire learning process.

We propose a novel method for computing exact pointwise robustness of deep neural networks for a number of $\ell_p$ norms. Our algorithm, GeoCert, finds the largest $\ell_p$ ball centered at an input point $x_0$, within which the output class of a given neural network with ReLU nonlinearities remains unchanged. We relate the problem of computing pointwise robustness of these networks to that of growing a norm ball inside a non-convex polytope. This is a challenging problem in general, as we discuss; however, we prove a useful structural result about the geometry of the piecewise linear components of ReLU networks. This result allows for an efficient convex decomposition of the problem. Specifically we show that if polytopes satisfy a technical condition that we call being 'perfectly-glued', then we can find the largest ball inside their union in polynomial time. Our method is efficient and can certify pointwise robustness for any norm where p is greater or equal to 1.

Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM) is an extremely powerful supervised learning algorithm that is widely used in practice. GBM routinely features as a leading algorithm in machine learning competitions such as Kaggle and the KDDCup. In this work, we propose Accelerated Gradient Boosting Machine (AGBM) by incorporating Nesterov's acceleration techniques into the design of GBM. The difficulty in accelerating GBM lies in the fact that weak (inexact) learners are commonly used, and therefore the errors can accumulate in the momentum term. To overcome it, we design a "corrected pseudo residual" and fit best weak learner to this corrected pseudo residual, in order to perform the z-update. Thus, we are able to derive novel computational guarantees for AGBM. This is the first GBM type of algorithm with theoretically-justified accelerated convergence rate. Finally we demonstrate with a number of numerical experiments the effectiveness of AGBM over conventional GBM in obtaining a model with good training and/or testing data fidelity.

Many emerging use cases of data mining and machine learning operate on large datasets with data from heterogeneous sources, specifically with both sparse and dense components. For example, dense deep neural network embedding vectors are often used in conjunction with sparse textual features to provide high dimensional hybrid representation of documents. Efficient search in such hybrid spaces is very challenging as the techniques that perform well for sparse vectors have little overlap with those that work well for dense vectors. Popular techniques like Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) and its data-dependent variants also do not give good accuracy in high dimensional hybrid spaces. Even though hybrid scenarios are becoming more prevalent, currently there exist no efficient techniques in literature that are both fast and accurate. In this paper, we propose a technique that approximates the inner product computation in hybrid vectors, leading to substantial speedup in search while maintaining high accuracy. We also propose efficient data structures that exploit modern computer architectures, resulting in orders of magnitude faster search than the existing baselines. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated on several datasets including a very large scale industrial dataset containing one billion vectors in a billion dimensional space, achieving over 10x speedup and higher accuracy against competitive baselines.

Energy based models (EBMs) are appealing due to their generality and simplicity in likelihood modeling, but have been traditionally difficult to train. We present techniques to scale MCMC based EBM training, on continuous neural networks, and show its success on the high-dimensional data domains of ImageNet32x32, ImageNet128x128, CIFAR-10, and robotic hand trajectories, achieving significantly better samples than other likelihood models and on par with contemporary GAN approaches, while covering all modes of the data. We highlight unique capabilities of implicit generation, such as energy compositionality and corrupt image reconstruction and completion. Finally, we show that EBMs generalize well and are able to achieve state-of-the-art out-of-distribution classification, exhibit adversarially robust classification, coherent long term predicted trajectory roll-outs, and generate zero-shot compositions of models.

Clinical outcome prediction based on the Electronic Health Record (EHR) plays a crucial role in improving the quality of healthcare. Conventional deep sequential models fail to capture the rich temporal patterns encoded in the longand irregular clinical event sequences. We make the observation that clinical events at a long time scale exhibit strongtemporal patterns, while events within a short time period tend to be disordered co-occurrence. We thus propose differentiated mechanisms to model clinical events at different time scales. Our model learns hierarchical representationsof event sequences, to adaptively distinguish between short-range and long-range events, and accurately capture coretemporal dependencies. Experimental results on real clinical data show that our model greatly improves over previous state-of-the-art models, achieving AUC scores of 0.94 and 0.90 for predicting death and ICU admission respectively, Our model also successfully identifies important events for different clinical outcome prediction tasks