The core issue in semi-supervised learning (SSL) lies in how to effectively leverage unlabeled data, whereas most existing methods tend to put a great emphasis on the utilization of high-confidence samples yet seldom fully explore the usage of low-confidence samples. In this paper, we aim to utilize low-confidence samples in a novel way with our proposed mutex-based consistency regularization, namely MutexMatch. Specifically, the high-confidence samples are required to exactly predict "what it is" by conventional True-Positive Classifier, while the low-confidence samples are employed to achieve a simpler goal -- to predict with ease "what it is not" by True-Negative Classifier. In this sense, we not only mitigate the pseudo-labeling errors but also make full use of the low-confidence unlabeled data by consistency of dissimilarity degree. MutexMatch achieves superior performance on multiple benchmark datasets, i.e., CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, STL-10, mini-ImageNet and Tiny-ImageNet. More importantly, our method further shows superiority when the amount of labeled data is scarce, e.g., 92.23% accuracy with only 20 labeled data on CIFAR-10. Our code and model weights have been released at https://github.com/NJUyued/MutexMatch4SSL.

Algorithmic stability is a concept from learning theory that expresses the degree to which changes to the input data (e.g., removal of a single data point) may affect the outputs of a regression algorithm. Knowing an algorithm's stability properties is often useful for many downstream applications -- for example, stability is known to lead to desirable generalization properties and predictive inference guarantees. However, many modern algorithms currently used in practice are too complex for a theoretical analysis of their stability properties, and thus we can only attempt to establish these properties through an empirical exploration of the algorithm's behavior on various data sets. In this work, we lay out a formal statistical framework for this kind of "black-box testing" without any assumptions on the algorithm or the data distribution and establish fundamental bounds on the ability of any black-box test to identify algorithmic stability.

The more a feature decreases the impurity, the more important the feature is. In random forests, the impurity decrease from each feature can be averaged across trees to determine the final importance of the variable.

An important class of techniques for resonant anomaly detection in high energy physics builds models that can distinguish between reference and target datasets, where only the latter has appreciable signal. Such techniques, including Classification Without Labels (CWoLa) and Simulation Assisted Likelihood-free Anomaly Detection (SALAD) rely on a single reference dataset. They cannot take advantage of commonly-available multiple datasets and thus cannot fully exploit available information. In this work, we propose generalizations of CWoLa and SALAD for settings where multiple reference datasets are available, building on weak supervision techniques. We demonstrate improved performance in a number of settings with realistic and synthetic data. As an added benefit, our generalizations enable us to provide finite-sample guarantees, improving on existing asymptotic analyses.

State-of-the-art machine translation evaluation metrics are based on black-box language models. Hence, recent works consider their explainability with the goals of better understandability for humans and better metric analysis, including failure cases. In contrast, we explicitly leverage explanations to boost the metrics' performance. In particular, we perceive explanations as word-level scores, which we convert, via power means, into sentence-level scores. We combine this sentence-level score with the original metric to obtain a better metric. Our extensive evaluation and analysis across 5 datasets, 5 metrics and 4 explainability techniques shows that some configurations reliably improve the original metrics' correlation with human judgment. On two held datasets for testing, we obtain improvements in 15/18 resp. 4/4 cases. The gains in Pearson correlation are up to 0.032 resp. 0.055. We make our code available.

There is significant interest in deploying machine learning algorithms for diagnostic radiology, as modern learning techniques have made it possible to detect abnormalities in medical images within minutes. While machine-assisted diagnoses cannot yet reliably replace human reviews of images by a radiologist, they could inform prioritization rules for determining the order by which to review patient cases so that patients with time-sensitive conditions could benefit from early intervention. We study this scenario by formulating it as a learning-augmented online scheduling problem. We are given information about each arriving patient's urgency level in advance, but these predictions are inevitably error-prone. In this formulation, we face the challenges of decision making under imperfect information, and of responding dynamically to prediction error as we observe better data in real-time. We propose a simple online policy and show that this policy is in fact the best possible in certain stylized settings. We also demonstrate that our policy achieves the two desiderata of online algorithms with predictions: consistency (performance improvement with prediction accuracy) and robustness (protection against the worst case). We complement our theoretical findings with empirical evaluations of the policy under settings that more accurately reflect clinical scenarios in the real world.

The estimation of cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) is an important learning task with a great variety of downstream applications, such as risk assessments in predictions and decision making. In this paper, we study functional regression of contextual CDFs where each data point is sampled from a linear combination of context dependent CDF basis functions. We propose functional ridge-regression-based estimation methods that estimate CDFs accurately everywhere. In particular, given $n$ samples with $d$ basis functions, we show estimation error upper bounds of $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{d/n})$ for fixed design, random design, and adversarial context cases. We also derive matching information theoretic lower bounds, establishing minimax optimality for CDF functional regression. Furthermore, we remove the burn-in time in the random design setting using an alternative penalized estimator. Then, we consider agnostic settings where there is a mismatch in the data generation process. We characterize the error of the proposed estimators in terms of the mismatched error, and show that the estimators are well-behaved under model mismatch. Finally, to complete our study, we formalize infinite dimensional models where the parameter space is an infinite dimensional Hilbert space, and establish self-normalized estimation error upper bounds for this setting.

While mislabeled or ambiguously-labeled samples in the training set could negatively affect the performance of deep models, diagnosing the dataset and identifying mislabeled samples helps to improve the generalization power. Training dynamics, i.e., the traces left by iterations of optimization algorithms, have recently been proved to be effective to localize mislabeled samples with hand-crafted features. In this paper, beyond manually designed features, we introduce a novel learning-based solution, leveraging a noise detector, instanced by an LSTM network, which learns to predict whether a sample was mislabeled using the raw training dynamics as input. Specifically, the proposed method trains the noise detector in a supervised manner using the dataset with synthesized label noises and can adapt to various datasets (either naturally or synthesized label-noised) without retraining. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed method. We train the noise detector based on the synthesized label-noised CIFAR dataset and test such noise detector on Tiny ImageNet, CUB-200, Caltech-256, WebVision and Clothing1M. Results show that the proposed method precisely detects mislabeled samples on various datasets without further adaptation, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Besides, more experiments demonstrate that the mislabel identification can guide a label correction, namely data debugging, providing orthogonal improvements of algorithm-centric state-of-the-art techniques from the data aspect.

An increasing amount of research is being devoted to applying machine learning methods to electronic health record (EHR) data for various clinical purposes. This growing area of research has exposed the challenges of the accessibility of EHRs. MIMIC is a popular, public, and free EHR dataset in a raw format that has been used in numerous studies. The absence of standardized pre-processing steps can be, however, a significant barrier to the wider adoption of this rare resource. Additionally, this absence can reduce the reproducibility of the developed tools and limit the ability to compare the results among similar studies. In this work, we provide a greatly customizable pipeline to extract, clean, and pre-process the data available in the fourth version of the MIMIC dataset (MIMIC-IV). The pipeline also presents an end-to-end wizard-like package supporting predictive model creations and evaluations. The pipeline covers a range of clinical prediction tasks which can be broadly classified into four categories - readmission, length of stay, mortality, and phenotype prediction.

The development of deep neural networks has improved representation learning in various domains, including textual, graph structural, and relational triple representations. This development opened the door to new relation extraction beyond the traditional text-oriented relation extraction. However, research on the effectiveness of considering multiple heterogeneous domain information simultaneously is still under exploration, and if a model can take an advantage of integrating heterogeneous information, it is expected to exhibit a significant contribution to many problems in the world. This thesis works on Drug-Drug Interactions (DDIs) from the literature as a case study and realizes relation extraction utilizing heterogeneous domain information. First, a deep neural relation extraction model is prepared and its attention mechanism is analyzed. Next, a method to combine the drug molecular structure information and drug description information to the input sentence information is proposed, and the effectiveness of utilizing drug molecular structures and drug descriptions for the relation extraction task is shown. Then, in order to further exploit the heterogeneous information, drug-related items, such as protein entries, medical terms and pathways are collected from multiple existing databases and a new data set in the form of a knowledge graph (KG) is constructed. A link prediction task on the constructed data set is conducted to obtain embedding representations of drugs that contain the heterogeneous domain information. Finally, a method that integrates the input sentence information and the heterogeneous KG information is proposed. The proposed model is trained and evaluated on a widely used data set, and as a result, it is shown that utilizing heterogeneous domain information significantly improves the performance of relation extraction from the literature.