Inferring the parameters of a stochastic model based on experimental observations is central to the scientific method. A particularly challenging setting is when the model is strongly indeterminate, i.e. when distinct sets of parameters yield identical observations. This arises in many practical situations, such as when inferring the distance and power of a radio source (is the source close and weak or far and strong?) or when estimating the amplifier gain and underlying brain activity of an electrophysiological experiment. In this work, we present hierarchical neural posterior estimation (HNPE), a novel method for cracking such indeterminacy by exploiting additional information conveyed by an auxiliary set of observations sharing global parameters. Our method extends recent developments in simulation-based inference (SBI) based on normalizing flows to Bayesian hierarchical models. We validate quantitatively our proposal on a motivating example amenable to analytical solutions and then apply it to invert a well known non-linear model from computational neuroscience, using both simulated and real EEG data.

Sign language translation (SLT) aims to interpret sign video sequences into text-based natural language sentences. Sign videos consist of continuous sequences of sign gestures with no clear boundaries in between. Existing SLT models usually represent sign visual features in a frame-wise manner so as to avoid needing to explicitly segmenting the videos into isolated signs. However, these methods neglect the temporal information of signs and lead to substantial ambiguity in translation. In this paper, we explore the temporal semantic structures of sign videos to learn more discriminative features. To this end, we first present a novel sign video segment representation which takes into account multiple temporal granularities, thus alleviating the need for accurate video segmentation. Taking advantage of the proposed segment representation, we develop a novel hierarchical sign video feature learning method via a temporal semantic pyramid network, called TSPNet. Specifically, TSPNet introduces an inter-scale attention to evaluate and enhance local semantic consistency of sign segments and an intra-scale attention to resolve semantic ambiguity by using non-local video context. Experiments show that our TSPNet outperforms the state-of-the-art with significant improvements on the BLEU score (from 9.58 to 13.41) and ROUGE score (from 31.80 to 34.96) on the largest commonly used SLT dataset.

Predictive coding (PC) has emerged as an influential normative model of neural computation with numerous extensions and applications. As such, much effort has been put into mapping PC faithfully onto the cortex, but there are issues that remain unresolved or controversial. In particular, current implementations often involve separate value and error neurons and require symmetric forward and backward weights across different brain regions. These features have not been experimentally confirmed. In this work, we show that the PC framework in the linear regime can be modified to map faithfully onto the cortical hierarchy in a manner compatible with empirical observations.

We study the problem of online multiclass classification in a setting where the learner's feedback is determined by an arbitrary directed graph. While including bandit feedback as a special case, feedback graphs allow a much richer set of applications, including filtering and label efficient classification.We introduce \textproc{Gappletron}, the first online multiclass algorithm that works with arbitrary feedback graphs. For this new algorithm,we prove surrogate regret bounds that hold, both in expectation and with high probability, for a large class of surrogate losses. Our bounds are of order $B\sqrt{\rho KT}$, where $B$ is the diameter of the prediction space, $K$ is the number of classes, $T$ is the time horizon, and $\rho$ is the domination number (a graph-theoretic parameter affecting the amount of exploration). In the full information case, we show that \textproc{Gappletron} achieves a constant surrogate regret of order $B^2K$. We also prove a general lower bound of order $\max\big\{B^2K,\sqrt{T}\big\}$ showing that our upper bounds are not significantly improvable. Experiments on synthetic data show that for various feedback graphs our algorithm is competitive against known baselines.

A central question in computational neuroscience is how structure determines function in neural networks. Recent large-scale connectomic studies have started to provide a wealth of structural information such as the distribution of excitatory/inhibitory cell and synapse types as well as the distribution of synaptic weights in the brains of different species. The emerging high-quality large structural datasets raise the question of what general functional principles can be gleaned from them. Motivated by this question, we developed a statistical mechanical theory of learning in neural networks that incorporates structural information as constraints. We derived an analytical solution for the memory capacity of the perceptron, a basic feedforward model of supervised learning, with constraint on the distribution of its weights.

Deep neural networks are shown to be susceptible to both adversarial attacks and backdoor attacks. Although many defenses against an individual type of the above attacks have been proposed, the interactions between the vulnerabilities of a network to both types of attacks have not been carefully investigated yet. In this paper, we conduct experiments to study whether adversarial robustness and backdoor robustness can affect each other and find a trade-off--by increasing the robustness of a network to adversarial examples, the network becomes more vulnerable to backdoor attacks. We then investigate the cause and show how such a trade-off can be exploited for either good or bad purposes. Our findings suggest that future research on defense should take both adversarial and backdoor attacks into account when designing algorithms or robustness measures to avoid pitfalls and a false sense of security.

Three people - including two police officers - have been killed in an explosion in Moscow, Russian authorities have said. Two traffic police officers saw a suspicious individual near a police car on the city's Yeletskaya Street, and when they approached the suspect to detain him, an explosive device was detonated, Russia's Investigative Committee has said. The two police officers died from their injuries, along with another individual who was standing nearby. The attack comes two days after a senior Russian general was killed in a car bombing in the capital on Monday. Lt Gen Fanil Sarvarov died after an explosive device - which had been planted under a car - was detonated.

Recently, game-playing agents based on AI techniques have demonstrated super-human performance in several sequential games, such as chess, Go, and poker. Surprisingly, the multi-agent learning techniques that allowed to reach these achievements do not take into account the actual behavior of the human player, potentially leading to an impressive gap in performances. In this paper, we address the problem of designing artificial agents that learn how to effectively exploit unknown human opponents while playing repeatedly against them in an online fashion. We study the case in which the agent's strategy during each repetition of the game is subject to constraints ensuring that the human's expected utility is within some lower and upper thresholds. Our framework encompasses several real-world problems, such as human engagement in repeated game playing and human education by means of serious games. As a first result, we formalize a set of linear inequalities encoding the conditions that the agent's strategy must satisfy at each iteration in order to do not violate the given bounds for the human's expected utility. Then, we use such formulation in an upper confidence bound algorithm, and we prove that the resulting procedure suffers from sublinear regret and guarantees that the constraints are satisfied with high probability at each iteration. Finally, we empirically evaluate the convergence of our algorithm on standard testbeds of sequential games.

We study the online restless bandit problem, where the state of each arm evolves according to a Markov chain, and the reward of pulling an arm depends on both the pulled arm and the current state of the corresponding Markov chain. In this paper, we propose Restless-UCB, a learning policy that follows the explore-then-commit framework. In Restless-UCB, we present a novel method to construct offline instances, which only requires $O(N)$ time-complexity ($N$ is the number of arms) and is exponentially better than the complexity of existing learning policy. We also prove that Restless-UCB achieves a regret upper bound of $\tilde{O}((N+M^3)T^{2\over 3})$, where $M$ is the Markov chain state space size and $T$ is the time horizon. Compared to existing algorithms, our result eliminates the exponential factor (in $M,N$) in the regret upper bound, due to a novel exploitation of the sparsity in transitions in general restless bandit problems. As a result, our analysis technique can also be adopted to tighten the regret bounds of existing algorithms. Finally, we conduct experiments based on real-world dataset, to compare the Restless-UCB policy with state-of-the-art benchmarks. Our results show that Restless-UCB outperforms existing algorithms in regret, and significantly reduces the running time.

Identifying the relevant variables for a classification model with correct confidence levels is a central but difficult task in high-dimension. Despite the core role of sparse logistic regression in statistics and machine learning, it still lacks a good solution for accurate inference in the regime where the number of features $p$ is as large as or larger than the number of samples $n$. Here we tackle this problem by improving the Conditional Randomization Test (CRT). The original CRT algorithm shows promise as a way to output p-values while making few assumptions on the distribution of the test statistics. As it comes with a prohibitive computational cost even in mildly high-dimensional problems, faster solutions based on distillation have been proposed. Yet, they rely on unrealistic hypotheses and result in low-power solutions. To improve this, we propose \emph{CRT-logit}, an algorithm that combines a variable-distillation step and a decorrelation step that takes into account the geometry of $\ell_1$-penalized logistic regression problem. We provide a theoretical analysis of this procedure, and demonstrate its effectiveness on simulations, along with experiments on large-scale brain-imaging and genomics datasets.