Time series is a special type of sequence data, a set of observations collected at even intervals of time and ordered chronologically. Existing deep learning techniques use generic sequence models (e.g., recurrent neural network, Transformer model, or temporal convolutional network) for time series analysis, which ignore some of its unique properties. For example, the downsampling of time series data often preserves most of the information in the data, while this is not true for general sequence data such as text sequence and DNA sequence. Motivated by the above, in this paper, we propose a novel neural network architecture and apply it for the time series forecasting problem, wherein we conduct sample convolution and interaction at multiple resolutions for temporal modeling. The proposed architecture, namelySCINet, facilitates extracting features with enhanced predictability. Experimental results show that SCINet achieves significant prediction accuracy improvement over existing solutions across various real-world time series forecasting datasets. In particular, it can achieve high fore-casting accuracy for those temporal-spatial datasets without using sophisticated spatial modeling techniques. Our codes and data are presented in the supplemental material.

Learning to classify time series with limited data is a practical yet challenging problem. Current methods are primarily based on hand-designed feature extraction rules or domain-specific data augmentation. Motivated by the advances in deep speech processing models and the fact that voice data are univariate temporal signals, in this paper, we propose Voice2Series (V2S), a novel end-to-end approach that reprograms acoustic models for time series classification, through input transformation learning and output label mapping. Leveraging the representation learning power of a large-scale pre-trained speech processing model, on 30 different time series tasks we show that V2S either outperforms or is tied with state-of-the-art methods on 20 tasks, and improves their average accuracy by 1.84%. We further provide a theoretical justification of V2S by proving its population risk is upper bounded by the source risk and a Wasserstein distance accounting for feature alignment via reprogramming. Our results offer new and effective means to time series classification.

This paper presents an end-to-end semi-supervised object detection approach, in contrast to previous more complex multi-stage methods. The end-to-end training gradually improves pseudo label qualities during the curriculum, and the more and more accurate pseudo labels in turn benefit object detection training. We also propose two simple yet effective techniques within this framework: a soft teacher mechanism where the classification loss of each unlabeled bounding box is weighed by the classification score produced by the teacher network; a box jittering approach to select reliable pseudo boxes for the learning of box regression. On COCO benchmark, the proposed approach outperforms previous methods by a large margin under various labeling ratios, i.e. 1\%, 5\% and 10\%. Moreover, our approach proves to perform also well when the amount of labeled data is relatively large. For example, it can improve a 40.9 mAP baseline detector trained using the full COCO training set by +3.6 mAP, reaching 44.5 mAP, by leveraging the 123K unlabeled images of COCO. On the state-of-the-art Swin Transformer-based object detector (58.9 mAP on test-dev), it can still significantly improve the detection accuracy by +1.5 mAP, reaching 60.4 mAP, and improve the instance segmentation accuracy by +1.2 mAP, reaching 52.4 mAP, pushing the new state-of-the-art.

Reducing computation cost, inference latency, and memory footprint of neural networks are frequently cited as research motivations for pruning and sparsity. However, operationalizing those benefits and understanding the end-to-end effect of algorithm design and regularization on the runtime execution is not often examined in depth. Here we apply structured and unstructured pruning to attention weights of transformer blocks of the BERT language model, while also expanding block sparse representation (BSR) operations in the TVM compiler. Integration of BSR operations enables the TVM runtime execution to leverage structured pattern sparsity induced by model regularization. This integrated view of pruning algorithms enables us to study relationships between modeling decisions and their direct impact on sparsity-enhanced execution. Our main findings are: 1) we validate that performance benefits of structured sparsity block regularization must be enabled by the BSR augmentations to TVM, with 4x speedup relative to vanilla PyTorch and 2.2x speedup relative to standard TVM compilation (without expanded BSR support).

While machine learning algorithms excel at many challenging visual tasks, it is unclear that they can make predictions about commonplace real world physical events. Here, we present a visual and physical prediction benchmark that precisely measures this capability. In realistically simulating a wide variety of physical phenomena -- rigid and soft-body collisions, stable multi-object configurations, rolling and sliding, projectile motion -- our dataset presents a more comprehensive challenge than existing benchmarks. Moreover, we have collected human responses for our stimuli so that model predictions can be directly compared to human judgments. We compare an array of algorithms -- varying in their architecture, learning objective, input-output structure, and training data -- on their ability to make diverse physical predictions. We find that graph neural networks with access to the physical state best capture human behavior, whereas among models that receive only visual input, those with object-centric representations or pretraining do best but fall far short of human accuracy. This suggests that extracting physically meaningful representations of scenes is the main bottleneck to achieving human-like visual prediction. We thus demonstrate how our benchmark can identify areas for improvement and measure progress on this key aspect of physical understanding.

Explainable artificial intelligence has rapidly emerged since lawmakers have started requiring interpretable models for safety-critical domains. Concept-based neural networks have arisen as explainable-by-design methods as they leverage human-understandable symbols (i.e. concepts) to predict class memberships. However, most of these approaches focus on the identification of the most relevant concepts but do not provide concise, formal explanations of how such concepts are leveraged by the classifier to make predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end differentiable approach enabling the extraction of logic explanations from neural networks using the formalism of First-Order Logic. The method relies on an entropy-based criterion which automatically identifies the most relevant concepts. We consider four different case studies to demonstrate that: (i) this entropy-based criterion enables the distillation of concise logic explanations in safety-critical domains from clinical data to computer vision; (ii) the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art white-box models in terms of classification accuracy.

We introduce a new general identifiable framework for principled disentanglement referred to as Structured Nonlinear Independent Component Analysis (SNICA). Our contribution is to extend the identifiability theory of deep generative models for a very broad class of structured models. While previous works have shown identifiability for specific classes of time-series models, our theorems extend this to more general temporal structures as well as to models with more complex structures such as spatial dependencies. In particular, we establish the major result that identifiability for this framework holds even in the presence of noise of unknown distribution. The SNICA setting therefore subsumes all the existing nonlinear ICA models for time-series and also allows for new much richer identifiable models. Finally, as an example of our framework's flexibility, we introduce the first nonlinear ICA model for time-series that combines the following very useful properties: it accounts for both nonstationarity and autocorrelation in a fully unsupervised setting; performs dimensionality reduction; models hidden states; and enables principled estimation and inference by variational maximum-likelihood.

Machine learning systems based on minimizing average error have been shown to perform inconsistently across notable subsets of the data, which is not exposed by a low average error for the entire dataset. In consequential social and economic applications, where data represent people, this can lead to discrimination of underrepresented gender and ethnic groups. Given the importance of bias mitigation in machine learning, the topic leads to contentious debates on how to ensure fairness in practice (data bias versus algorithmic bias). Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) seemingly addresses this problem by minimizing the worst expected risk across subpopulations. We establish theoretical results that clarify the relation between DRO and the optimization of the same loss averaged on an adequately weighted training dataset. The results cover finite and infinite number of training distributions, as well as convex and non-convex loss functions. We show that neither DRO nor curating the training set should be construed as a complete solution for bias mitigation: in the same way that there is no universally robust training set, there is no universal way to setup a DRO problem and ensure a socially acceptable set of results. We then leverage these insights to provide a mininal set of practical recommendations for addressing bias with DRO. Finally, we discuss ramifications of our results in other related applications of DRO, using an example of adversarial robustness. Our results show that there is merit to both the algorithm-focused and the data-focused side of the bias debate, as long as arguments in favor of these positions are precisely qualified and backed by relevant mathematics known today.

Deep neural networks need large amounts of labeled data to achieve good performance. In real-world applications, labels are usually collected from non-experts such as crowdsourcing to save cost and thus are noisy. In the past few years, deep learning methods for dealing with noisy labels have been developed, many of which are based on the small-loss criterion. However, there are few theoretical analyses to explain why these methods could learn well from noisy labels. In this paper, we theoretically explain why the widely-used small-loss criterion works. Based on the explanation, we re-formalize the vanilla small-loss criterion to better tackle noisy labels. The experimental results verify our theoretical explanation and also demonstrate the effectiveness of the reformalization.

Pruning the weights of randomly initialized neural networks plays an important role in the context of lottery ticket hypothesis. Ramanujan et al. (2020) empirically showed that only pruning the weights can achieve remarkable performance instead of optimizing the weight values. However, to achieve the same level of performance as the weight optimization, the pruning approach requires more parameters in the networks before pruning and thus more memory space. To overcome this parameter inefficiency, we introduce a novel framework to prune randomly initialized neural networks with iteratively randomizing weight values (IteRand). Theoretically, we prove an approximation theorem in our framework, which indicates that the randomizing operations are provably effective to reduce the required number of the parameters. We also empirically demonstrate the parameter efficiency in multiple experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet.