Bayesian Learning
Physics-aware, probabilistic model order reduction with guaranteed stability
Kaltenbach, Sebastian, Koutsourelakis, Phaedon-Stelios
Given (small amounts of) time-series' data from a high-dimensional, fine-grained, multiscale dynamical system, we propose a generative framework for learning an effective, lower-dimensional, coarse-grained dynamical model that is predictive of the fine-grained system's long-term evolution but also of its behavior under different initial conditions. We target fine-grained models as they arise in physical applications (e.g. molecular dynamics, agent-based models), the dynamics of which are strongly non-stationary but their transition to equilibrium is governed by unknown slow processes which are largely inaccessible by brute-force simulations. Approaches based on domain knowledge heavily rely on physical insight in identifying temporally slow features and fail to enforce the long-term stability of the learned dynamics. On the other hand, purely statistical frameworks lack interpretability and rely on large amounts of expensive simulation data (long and multiple trajectories) as they cannot infuse domain knowledge. The generative framework proposed achieves the aforementioned desiderata by employing a flexible prior on the complex plane for the latent, slow processes, and an intermediate layer of physics-motivated latent variables that reduces reliance on data and imbues inductive bias. In contrast to existing schemes, it does not require the a priori definition of projection operators from the fine-grained description and addresses simultaneously the tasks of dimensionality reduction and model estimation. We demonstrate its efficacy and accuracy in multiscale physical systems of particle dynamics where probabilistic, long-term predictions of phenomena not contained in the training data are produced.
Video action recognition for lane-change classification and prediction of surrounding vehicles
Biparva, Mahdi, Fernández-Llorca, David, Izquierdo-Gonzalo, Rubén, Tsotsos, John K.
In highway scenarios, an alert human driver will typically anticipate early cut-in/cut-out maneuvers of surrounding vehicles using visual cues mainly. Autonomous vehicles must anticipate these situations at an early stage too, to increase their safety and efficiency. In this work, lane-change recognition and prediction tasks are posed as video action recognition problems. Up to four different two-stream-based approaches, that have been successfully applied to address human action recognition, are adapted here by stacking visual cues from forward-looking video cameras to recognize and anticipate lane-changes of target vehicles. We study the influence of context and observation horizons on performance, and different prediction horizons are analyzed. The different models are trained and evaluated using the PREVENTION dataset. The obtained results clearly demonstrate the potential of these methodologies to serve as robust predictors of future lane-changes of surrounding vehicles proving an accuracy higher than 90% in time horizons of between 1-2 seconds.
Should Ensemble Members Be Calibrated?
Underlying the use of statistical approaches for a wide range of applications is the assumption that the probabilities obtained from a statistical model are representative of the "true" probability that event, or outcome, will occur. Unfortunately, for modern deep neural networks this is not the case, they are often observed to be poorly calibrated. Additionally, these deep learning approaches make use of large numbers of model parameters, motivating the use of Bayesian, or ensemble approximation, approaches to handle issues with parameter estimation. This paper explores the application of calibration schemes to deep ensembles from both a theoretical perspective and empirically on a standard image classification task, CIFAR-100. The underlying theoretical requirements for calibration, and associated calibration criteria, are first described. It is shown that well calibrated ensemble members will not necessarily yield a well calibrated ensemble prediction, and if the ensemble prediction is well calibrated its performance cannot exceed that of the average performance of the calibrated ensemble members. On CIFAR-100 the impact of calibration for ensemble prediction, and associated calibration is evaluated. Additionally the situation where multiple different topologies are combined together is discussed.
X-CAL: Explicit Calibration for Survival Analysis
Goldstein, Mark, Han, Xintian, Puli, Aahlad, Perotte, Adler J., Ranganath, Rajesh
Survival analysis models the distribution of time until an event of interest, such as discharge from the hospital or admission to the ICU. When a model's predicted number of events within any time interval is similar to the observed number, it is called well-calibrated. A survival model's calibration can be measured using, for instance, distributional calibration (D-CALIBRATION) [Haider et al., 2020] which computes the squared difference between the observed and predicted number of events within different time intervals. Classically, calibration is addressed in post-training analysis. We develop explicit calibration (X-CAL), which turns D-CALIBRATION into a differentiable objective that can be used in survival modeling alongside maximum likelihood estimation and other objectives. X-CAL allows practitioners to directly optimize calibration and strike a desired balance between predictive power and calibration. In our experiments, we fit a variety of shallow and deep models on simulated data, a survival dataset based on MNIST, on length-of-stay prediction using MIMIC-III data, and on brain cancer data from The Cancer Genome Atlas. We show that the models we study can be miscalibrated. We give experimental evidence on these datasets that X-CAL improves D-CALIBRATION without a large decrease in concordance or likelihood.
Denoising Score Matching with Random Fourier Features
Olga, Tsimboy, Kapushev, Yermek, Burnaev, Evgeny, Oseledets, Ivan
The density estimation is one of the core problems in statistics. Despite this, existing techniques like maximum likelihood estimation are computationally inefficient due to the intractability of the normalizing constant. For this reason an interest to score matching has increased being independent on the normalizing constant. However, such estimator is consistent only for distributions with the full space support. One of the approaches to make it consistent is to add noise to the input data which is called Denoising Score Matching. In this work we derive analytical expression for the Denoising Score matching using the Kernel Exponential Family as a model distribution. The usage of the kernel exponential family is motivated by the richness of this class of densities. To tackle the computational complexity we use Random Fourier Features based approximation of the kernel function. The analytical expression allows to drop additional regularization terms based on the higher-order derivatives as they are already implicitly included. Moreover, the obtained expression explicitly depends on the noise variance, so the validation loss can be straightforwardly used to tune the noise level. Along with benchmark experiments, the model was tested on various synthetic distributions to study the behaviour of the model in different cases. The empirical study shows comparable quality to the competing approaches, while the proposed method being computationally faster. The latter one enables scaling up to complex high-dimensional data.
A Unified Framework for Online Trip Destination Prediction
Eberstein, Victor, Sjöblom, Jonas, Murgovski, Nikolce, Chehreghani, Morteza Haghir
Trip destination prediction is an area of increasing importance in many applications such as trip planning, autonomous driving and electric vehicles. Even though this problem could be naturally addressed in an online learning paradigm where data is arriving in a sequential fashion, the majority of research has rather considered the offline setting. In this paper, we present a unified framework for trip destination prediction in an online setting, which is suitable for both online training and online prediction. For this purpose, we develop two clustering algorithms and integrate them within two online prediction models for this problem. We investigate the different configurations of clustering algorithms and prediction models on a real-world dataset. By using traditional clustering metrics and accuracy, we demonstrate that both the clustering and the entire framework yield consistent results compared to the offline setting. Finally, we propose a novel regret metric for evaluating the entire online framework in comparison to its offline counterpart. This metric makes it possible to relate the source of erroneous predictions to either the clustering or the prediction model. Using this metric, we show that the proposed methods converge to a probability distribution resembling the true underlying distribution and enjoy a lower regret than all of the baselines.
Socially Responsible AI Algorithms: Issues, Purposes, and Challenges
Cheng, Lu, Varshney, Kush R., Liu, Huan
In the current era, people and society have grown increasingly reliant on Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. AI has the potential to drive us towards a future in which all of humanity flourishes. It also comes with substantial risks for oppression and calamity. Discussions about whether we should (re)trust AI have repeatedly emerged in recent years and in many quarters, including industry, academia, health care, services, and so on. Technologists and AI researchers have a responsibility to develop trustworthy AI systems. They have responded with great efforts of designing more responsible AI algorithms. However, existing technical solutions are narrow in scope and have been primarily directed towards algorithms for scoring or classification tasks, with an emphasis on fairness and unwanted bias. To build long-lasting trust between AI and human beings, we argue that the key is to think beyond algorithmic fairness and connect major aspects of AI that potentially cause AI's indifferent behavior. In this survey, we provide a systematic framework of Socially Responsible AI Algorithms that aims to examine the subjects of AI indifference and the need for socially responsible AI algorithms, define the objectives, and introduce the means by which we may achieve these objectives. We further discuss how to leverage this framework to improve societal well-being through protection, information, and prevention/mitigation.
Model-Based Machine Learning for Communications
Shlezinger, Nir, Farsad, Nariman, Eldar, Yonina C., Goldsmith, Andrea J.
Traditional communication systems design is dominated by methods that are based on statistical models. These statistical-model-based algorithms, which we refer to henceforth as model-based methods, rely on mathematical models that describe the transmission process, signal propagation, receiver noise, interference, and many other components of the system that affect the end-to-end signal transmission and reception. Such mathematical models use parameters that vary over time as the channel conditions, the environment, network traffic, or network topology change. Therefore, for optimal operation, many of the algorithms used in communication systems rely on the underlying mathematical models as well as the estimation of the model parameters. However, there are cases where this approach fails, in particular when the mathematical models for one or more of the system components are highly complex, hard to estimate, poorly understood, do not well-capture the underlying physics of the system, or do not lend themselves to computationally-efficient algorithms.
Benchmarking Simulation-Based Inference
Lueckmann, Jan-Matthis, Boelts, Jan, Greenberg, David S., Gonçalves, Pedro J., Macke, Jakob H.
Recent advances in probabilistic modelling have led to a large number of simulation-based inference algorithms which do not require numerical evaluation of likelihoods. However, a public benchmark with appropriate performance metrics for such 'likelihood-free' algorithms has been lacking. This has made it difficult to compare algorithms and identify their strengths and weaknesses. We set out to fill this gap: We provide a benchmark with inference tasks and suitable performance metrics, with an initial selection of algorithms including recent approaches employing neural networks and classical Approximate Bayesian Computation methods. We found that the choice of performance metric is critical, that even state-of-the-art algorithms have substantial room for improvement, and that sequential estimation improves sample efficiency. Neural network-based approaches generally exhibit better performance, but there is no uniformly best algorithm. We provide practical advice and highlight the potential of the benchmark to diagnose problems and improve algorithms. The results can be explored interactively on a companion website. All code is open source, making it possible to contribute further benchmark tasks and inference algorithms.
Data augmentation and feature selection for automatic model recommendation in computational physics
Daniel, Thomas, Casenave, Fabien, Akkari, Nissrine, Ryckelynck, David
Classification algorithms have recently found applications in computational physics for the selection of numerical methods or models adapted to the environment and the state of the physical system. For such classification tasks, labeled training data come from numerical simulations and generally correspond to physical fields discretized on a mesh. Three challenging difficulties arise: the lack of training data, their high dimensionality, and the non-applicability of common data augmentation techniques to physics data. This article introduces two algorithms to address these issues, one for dimensionality reduction via feature selection, and one for data augmentation. These algorithms are combined with a wide variety of classifiers for their evaluation. When combined with a stacking ensemble made of six multilayer perceptrons and a ridge logistic regression, they enable reaching an accuracy of 90% on our classification problem for nonlinear structural mechanics.