Modern approaches to supervised learning like deep neural networks (DNNs) typically implicitly assume that observed responses are statistically independent. In contrast, correlated data are prevalent in real-life large-scale applications, with typical sources of correlation including spatial, temporal and clustering structures. These correlations are either ignored by DNNs, or ad-hoc solutions are developed for specific use cases. We propose to use the mixed models framework to handle correlated data in DNNs. By treating the effects underlying the correlation structure as random effects, mixed models are able to avoid overfitted parameter estimates and ultimately yield better predictive performance. The key to combining mixed models and DNNs is using the Gaussian negative log-likelihood (NLL) as a natural loss function that is minimized with DNN machinery including stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Since NLL does not decompose like standard DNN loss functions, the use of SGD with NLL presents some theoretical and implementation challenges, which we address. Our approach which we call LMMNN is demonstrated to improve performance over natural competitors in various correlation scenarios on diverse simulated and real datasets. Our focus is on a regression setting and tabular datasets, but we also show some results for classification. Our code is available at https://github.com/gsimchoni/lmmnn.

To provide rigorous uncertainty quantification for online learning models, we develop a framework for constructing uncertainty sets that provably control risk -- such as coverage of confidence intervals, false negative rate, or F1 score -- in the online setting. This extends conformal prediction to apply to a larger class of online learning problems. Our method guarantees risk control at any user-specified level even when the underlying data distribution shifts drastically, even adversarially, over time in an unknown fashion. The technique we propose is highly flexible as it can be applied with any base online learning algorithm (e.g., a deep neural network trained online), requiring minimal implementation effort and essentially zero additional computational cost. We further extend our approach to control multiple risks simultaneously, so the prediction sets we generate are valid for all given risks. To demonstrate the utility of our method, we conduct experiments on real-world tabular time-series data sets showing that the proposed method rigorously controls various natural risks. Furthermore, we show how to construct valid intervals for an online image-depth estimation problem that previous sequential calibration schemes cannot handle.

This paper focuses on the data augmentation for low-resource NLP tasks where the training set is limited. The existing solutions either leverage task-independent heuristic rules (e.g., Synonym Replacement) or fine-tune general-purpose pre-trained language models (e.g., GPT2) using the limited training instances to produce new synthetic data. Consequently, they have trivial task-specific knowledge and are limited to yielding low-quality synthetic data. To combat this issue, we propose Knowledge Mixture Data Augmentation Model (KnowDA) which is an Seq2Seq language model pre-trained on a mixture of diverse NLP tasks under a novel framework of Knowledge Mixture Training (KoMT). The goal of KoMT is to condense diverse NLP task-specific knowledge into the single KnowDA model (i.e., all-in-one) such that KnowDA could utilize these knowledge to quickly grasp the inherent synthesis law of the target task through limited training instances. Specifically, KoMT reformulates input examples from various heterogeneous NLP tasks into a unified text-to-text format, and employs denoising training objectives in different granularity to learn to reconstruct partial or complete samples. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first attempt to apply 100+ NLP multi-task training for data augmentation. Extensive experiments show that i) the synthetic data produced by KnowDA successfully improves performance of the strong pre-trained language models (i.e., Bert, ALBert and Deberta) by a large margin on the low-resource NLP benchmark FewGLUE, CoNLL'03 and WikiAnn; ii) KnowDA successfully transfers the task knowledge to NLP tasks whose types are seen and unseen in KoMT.

To perform well, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods require significant memory resources and computational time. Also, sometimes these systems need additional environment information to achieve a good reward. However, it is more important for many applications and devices to reduce memory usage and computational times than to achieve the maximum reward. This paper presents a modified DRL method that performs reasonably well with compressed imagery data without requiring additional environment information and also uses less memory and time. We have designed a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with a variant of the Q-network that efficiently takes preprocessed image data as input and uses less memory. Furthermore, we use a simple reward mechanism and small experience replay memory so as to provide only the minimum necessary information. Our modified DRL method enables our autonomous agent to play Snake, a classical control game. The results show our model can achieve similar performance as other DRL methods.

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are a popular framework for modeling complex data distributions; they can be efficiently trained via variational inference by maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO), at the expense of a gap to the exact (log-)marginal likelihood. While VAEs are commonly used for disentangled representation learning, it is unclear why ELBO maximization would yield such representations, since unregularized maximum likelihood estimation generally cannot invert the data-generating process without additional assumptions. Yet, VAEs often succeed at this task. We seek to elucidate this apparent paradox by studying nonlinear VAEs in the limit of near-deterministic decoders. We first prove that, in this regime, the optimal encoder approximately inverts the decoder--a commonly used but unproven conjecture--which we refer to as self-consistency. Leveraging self-consistency, we show that the ELBO converges to a regularized log-likelihood. This allows VAEs to perform what has recently been termed independent mechanism analysis (IMA): it adds an inductive bias towards decoders with column-orthogonal Jacobians, which helps recovering the true latent factors. The gap between ELBO and log-likelihood is therefore welcome, since it bears unanticipated benefits for nonlinear representation learning. In experiments on synthetic and image data, we show that VAEs uncover the true latent factors when the data generating process satisfies the IMA assumption.

Despite rapid advancements in lifelong learning (LLL) research, a large body of research mainly focuses on improving the performance in the existing \textit{static} continual learning (CL) setups. These methods lack the ability to succeed in a rapidly changing \textit{dynamic} environment, where an AI agent needs to quickly learn new instances in a `single pass' from the non-i.i.d (also possibly temporally contiguous/coherent) data streams without suffering from catastrophic forgetting. For practical applicability, we propose a novel lifelong learning approach, which is streaming, i.e., a single input sample arrives in each time step, single pass, class-incremental, and subject to be evaluated at any moment. To address this challenging setup and various evaluation protocols, we propose a Bayesian framework, that enables fast parameter update, given a single training example, and enables any-time inference. We additionally propose an implicit regularizer in the form of snap-shot self-distillation, which effectively minimizes the forgetting further. We further propose an effective method that efficiently selects a subset of samples for online memory rehearsal and employs a new replay buffer management scheme that significantly boosts the overall performance. Our empirical evaluations and ablations demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the prior works by large margins.

In this study, the authors propose a computational cognitive model for sign language (SL) perception and comprehension with detailed algorithmic descriptions based on cognitive functionalities in human language processing. The semantic network model (SNM) that represents semantic relations between concepts, it is used as a form of knowledge representation. The proposed model is applied in the comprehension of sign language for classifier predicates. The spreading activation search method is initiated by labeling a set of source nodes (e.g. concepts in the semantic network) with weights or "activation" and then iteratively propagating or "spreading" that activation out to other nodes linked to the source nodes. The results demonstrate that the proposed search method improves the performance of sign language comprehension in the SNM.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated an impressive ability to perform arithmetic and symbolic reasoning tasks, when provided with a few examples at test time ("few-shot prompting"). Much of this success can be attributed to prompting methods such as "chain-of-thought'', which employ LLMs for both understanding the problem description by decomposing it into steps, as well as solving each step of the problem. While LLMs seem to be adept at this sort of step-by-step decomposition, LLMs often make logical and arithmetic mistakes in the solution part, even when the problem is decomposed correctly. In this paper, we present Program-Aided Language models (PAL): a novel approach that uses the LLM to read natural language problems and generate programs as the intermediate reasoning steps, but offloads the solution step to a runtime such as a Python interpreter. With PAL, decomposing the natural language problem into runnable steps remains the only learning task for the LLM, while solving is delegated to the interpreter. We demonstrate this synergy between a neural LLM and a symbolic interpreter across 13 mathematical, symbolic, and algorithmic reasoning tasks from BIG-Bench Hard and other benchmarks. In all these natural language reasoning tasks, generating code using an LLM and reasoning using a Python interpreter leads to more accurate results than much larger models. For example, PAL using Codex achieves state-of-the-art few-shot accuracy on the GSM8K benchmark of math word problems, surpassing PaLM-540B which uses chain-of-thought by absolute 15% top-1. Our code and data are publicly available at http://reasonwithpal.com/ .

As a framework for sequential decision-making, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been regarded as an essential component leading to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, RL is often criticized for having the same training environment as the test one, which also hinders its application in the real world. To mitigate this problem, Distributionally Robust RL (DRRL) is proposed to improve the worst performance in a set of environments that may contain the unknown test environment. Due to the nonlinearity of the robustness goal, most of the previous work resort to the model-based approach, learning with either an empirical distribution learned from the data or a simulator that can be sampled infinitely, which limits their applications in simple dynamics environments. In contrast, we attempt to design a DRRL algorithm that can be trained along a single trajectory, i.e., no repeated sampling from a state. Based on the standard Q-learning, we propose distributionally robust Q-learning with the single trajectory (DRQ) and its average-reward variant named differential DRQ. We provide asymptotic convergence guarantees and experiments for both settings, demonstrating their superiority in the perturbed environments against the non-robust ones.

In this article, we use probing to investigate phenomena that occur during fine-tuning and knowledge distillation of a BERT-based natural language understanding (NLU) model. Our ultimate purpose was to use probing to better understand practical production problems and consequently to build better NLU models. We designed experiments to see how fine-tuning changes the linguistic capabilities of BERT, what the optimal size of the fine-tuning dataset is, and what amount of information is contained in a distilled NLU based on a tiny Transformer. The results of the experiments show that the probing paradigm in its current form is not well suited to answer such questions. Structural, Edge and Conditional probes do not take into account how easy it is to decode probed information. Consequently, we conclude that quantification of information decodability is critical for many practical applications of the probing paradigm.