Statistical Learning
Adversarial Attack for Explanation Robustness of Rationalization Models
Zhang, Yuankai, Kong, Lingxiao, Wang, Haozhao, Li, Ruixuan, Wang, Jun, Li, Yuhua, Liu, Wei
Rationalization models, which select a subset of input text as rationale-crucial for humans to understand and trust predictions-have recently emerged as a prominent research area in eXplainable Artificial Intelligence. However, most of previous studies mainly focus on improving the quality of the rationale, ignoring its robustness to malicious attack. Specifically, whether the rationalization models can still generate high-quality rationale under the adversarial attack remains unknown. To explore this, this paper proposes UAT2E, which aims to undermine the explainability of rationalization models without altering their predictions, thereby eliciting distrust in these models from human users. UAT2E employs the gradient-based search on triggers and then inserts them into the original input to conduct both the non-target and target attack. Experimental results on five datasets reveal the vulnerability of rationalization models in terms of explanation, where they tend to select more meaningless tokens under attacks. Based on this, we make a series of recommendations for improving rationalization models in terms of explanation.
A New Perspective on ADHD Research: Knowledge Graph Construction with LLMs and Network Based Insights
Otal, Hakan T., Faraone, Stephen V., Canbaz, M. Abdullah
To explore how we can gain deeper insights on this topic, we performed a network analysis on a comprehensive knowledge graph (KG) of ADHD, constructed by integrating scientific literature and clinical data with the help of cutting-edge large language models. The analysis, including k-core techniques, identified critical nodes and relationships that are central to understanding the disorder. Building on these findings, we developed a context-aware chatbot using Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), enabling accurate and informed interactions. Our knowledge graph not only advances the understanding of ADHD but also provides a powerful tool for research and clinical applications.
Physics aware machine learning for micromagnetic energy minimization: recent algorithmic developments
Schaffer, Sebastian, Schrefl, Thomas, Oezelt, Harald, Mauser, Norbert J, Exl, Lukas
In this work, we explore advanced machine learning techniques for minimizing Gibbs free energy in full 3D micromagnetic simulations. Building on Brown's bounds for magnetostatic self-energy, we revisit their application in the context of variational formulations of the transmission problems for the scalar and vector potential. To overcome the computational challenges posed by whole-space integrals, we reformulate these bounds on a finite domain, making the method more efficient and scalable for numerical simulation. Our approach utilizes an alternating optimization scheme for joint minimization of Brown's energy bounds and the Gibbs free energy. The Cayley transform is employed to rigorously enforce the unit norm constraint, while R-functions are used to impose essential boundary conditions in the computation of magnetostatic fields. Our results highlight the potential of mesh-free Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) and Extreme Learning Machines (ELMs) when integrated with hard constraints, providing highly accurate approximations. These methods exhibit competitive performance compared to traditional numerical approaches, showing significant promise in computing magnetostatic fields and the application for energy minimization, such as the computation of hysteresis curves. This work opens the path for future directions of research on more complex geometries, such as grain structure models, and the application to large scale problem settings which are intractable with traditional numerical methods.
Hybrid Ensemble Deep Graph Temporal Clustering for Spatiotemporal Data
Nji, Francis Ndikum, Faruque, Omar, Cham, Mostafa, Vandana, Janeja, Wang, Jianwu
Classifying subsets based on spatial and temporal features is crucial to the analysis of spatiotemporal data given the inherent spatial and temporal variability. Since no single clustering algorithm ensures optimal results, researchers have increasingly explored the effectiveness of ensemble approaches. Ensemble clustering has attracted much attention due to increased diversity, better generalization, and overall improved clustering performance. While ensemble clustering may yield promising results on simple datasets, it has not been fully explored on complex multivariate spatiotemporal data. For our contribution to this field, we propose a novel hybrid ensemble deep graph temporal clustering (HEDGTC) method for multivariate spatiotemporal data. HEDGTC integrates homogeneous and heterogeneous ensemble methods and adopts a dual consensus approach to address noise and misclassification from traditional clustering. It further applies a graph attention autoencoder network to improve clustering performance and stability. When evaluated on three real-world multivariate spatiotemporal data, HEDGTC outperforms state-of-the-art ensemble clustering models by showing improved performance and stability with consistent results. This indicates that HEDGTC can effectively capture implicit temporal patterns in complex spatiotemporal data.
Optimizing VarLiNGAM for Scalable and Efficient Time Series Causal Discovery
Jiao, Ziyang, Guo, Ce, Luk, Wayne
Causal discovery identifies causal relationships in data, but the task is more complex for multivariate time series due to the computational demands of methods like VarLiNGAM, which combines a Vector Autoregressive Model with a Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Model. This study optimizes causal discovery specifically for time series data, which are common in practical applications. Time series causal discovery is particularly challenging because of temporal dependencies and potential time lag effects. By developing a specialized dataset generator and reducing the computational complexity of the VarLiNGAM model from \( O(m^3 \cdot n) \) to \( O(m^3 + m^2 \cdot n) \), this study enhances the feasibility of processing large datasets. The proposed methods were validated on advanced computational platforms and tested on simulated, real-world, and large-scale datasets, demonstrating improved efficiency and performance. The optimized algorithm achieved 7 to 13 times speedup compared to the original and about 4.5 times speedup compared to the GPU-accelerated version on large-scale datasets with feature sizes from 200 to 400. Our methods extend current causal discovery capabilities, making them more robust, scalable, and applicable to real-world scenarios, facilitating advancements in fields like healthcare and finance.
SeqRisk: Transformer-augmented latent variable model for improved survival prediction with longitudinal data
Öğretir, Mine, Koskinen, Miika, Sinisalo, Juha, Renkonen, Risto, Lähdesmäki, Harri
In healthcare, risk assessment of different patient outcomes has for long time been based on survival analysis, i.e.\ modeling time-to-event associations. However, conventional approaches rely on data from a single time-point, making them suboptimal for fully leveraging longitudinal patient history and capturing temporal regularities. Focusing on clinical real-world data and acknowledging its challenges, we utilize latent variable models to effectively handle irregular, noisy, and sparsely observed longitudinal data. We propose SeqRisk, a method that combines variational autoencoder (VAE) or longitudinal VAE (LVAE) with a transformer encoder and Cox proportional hazards module for risk prediction. SeqRisk captures long-range interactions, improves patient trajectory representations, enhances predictive accuracy and generalizability, as well as provides partial explainability for sample population characteristics in attempts to identify high-risk patients. We demonstrate that SeqRisk performs competitively compared to existing approaches on both simulated and real-world datasets.
A Margin-Maximizing Fine-Grained Ensemble Method
Yuan, Jinghui, Chen, Hao, Luo, Renwei, Nie, Feiping
Ensemble learning has achieved remarkable success in machine learning, but its reliance on numerous base learners limits its application in resource-constrained environments. This paper introduces an innovative "Margin-Maximizing Fine-Grained Ensemble Method" that achieves performance surpassing large-scale ensembles by meticulously optimizing a small number of learners and enhancing generalization capability. We propose a novel learnable confidence matrix, quantifying each classifier's confidence for each category, precisely capturing category-specific advantages of individual learners. Furthermore, we design a margin-based loss function, constructing a smooth and partially convex objective using the logsumexp technique. This approach improves optimization, eases convergence, and enables adaptive confidence allocation. Finally, we prove that the loss function is Lipschitz continuous, based on which we develop an efficient gradient optimization algorithm that simultaneously maximizes margins and dynamically adjusts learner weights. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms traditional random forests using only one-tenth of the base learners and other state-of-the-art ensemble methods.
Green Federated Learning: A new era of Green Aware AI
Thakur, Dipanwita, Guzzo, Antonella, Fortino, Giancarlo
The development of AI applications, especially in large-scale wireless networks, is growing exponentially, alongside the size and complexity of the architectures used. Particularly, machine learning is acknowledged as one of today's most energy-intensive computational applications, posing a significant challenge to the environmental sustainability of next-generation intelligent systems. Achieving environmental sustainability entails ensuring that every AI algorithm is designed with sustainability in mind, integrating green considerations from the architectural phase onwards. Recently, Federated Learning (FL), with its distributed nature, presents new opportunities to address this need. Hence, it's imperative to elucidate the potential and challenges stemming from recent FL advancements and their implications for sustainability. Moreover, it's crucial to furnish researchers, stakeholders, and interested parties with a roadmap to navigate and understand existing efforts and gaps in green-aware AI algorithms. This survey primarily aims to achieve this objective by identifying and analyzing over a hundred FL works, assessing their contributions to green-aware artificial intelligence for sustainable environments, with a specific focus on IoT research. It delves into current issues in green federated learning from an energy-efficient standpoint, discussing potential challenges and future prospects for green IoT application research.
Robust estimation of the intrinsic dimension of data sets with quantum cognition machine learning
Candelori, Luca, Abanov, Alexander G., Berger, Jeffrey, Hogan, Cameron J., Kirakosyan, Vahagn, Musaelian, Kharen, Samson, Ryan, Smith, James E. T., Villani, Dario, Wells, Martin T., Xu, Mengjia
We propose a new data representation method based on Quantum Cognition Machine Learning and apply it to manifold learning, specifically to the estimation of intrinsic dimension of data sets. The idea is to learn a representation of each data point as a quantum state, encoding both local properties of the point as well as its relation with the entire data. Inspired by ideas from quantum geometry, we then construct from the quantum states a point cloud equipped with a quantum metric. The metric exhibits a spectral gap whose location corresponds to the intrinsic dimension of the data. The proposed estimator is based on the detection of this spectral gap. When tested on synthetic manifold benchmarks, our estimates are shown to be robust with respect to the introduction of point-wise Gaussian noise. This is in contrast to current state-of-the-art estimators, which tend to attribute artificial ``shadow dimensions'' to noise artifacts, leading to overestimates. This is a significant advantage when dealing with real data sets, which are inevitably affected by unknown levels of noise. We show the applicability and robustness of our method on real data, by testing it on the ISOMAP face database, MNIST, and the Wisconsin Breast Cancer Dataset.
Test-Time Augmentation Meets Variational Bayes
Kimura, Masanari, Bondell, Howard
Data augmentation is known to contribute significantly to the robustness of machine learning models. In most instances, data augmentation is utilized during the training phase. Test-Time Augmentation (TTA) is a technique that instead leverages these data augmentations during the testing phase to achieve robust predictions. More precisely, TTA averages the predictions of multiple data augmentations of an instance to produce a final prediction. Although the effectiveness of TTA has been empirically reported, it can be expected that the predictive performance achieved will depend on the set of data augmentation methods used during testing. In particular, the data augmentation methods applied should make different contributions to performance. That is, it is anticipated that there may be differing degrees of contribution in the set of data augmentation methods used for TTA, and these could have a negative impact on prediction performance. In this study, we consider a weighted version of the TTA based on the contribution of each data augmentation. Some variants of TTA can be regarded as considering the problem of determining the appropriate weighting. We demonstrate that the determination of the coefficients of this weighted TTA can be formalized in a variational Bayesian framework. We also show that optimizing the weights to maximize the marginal log-likelihood suppresses candidates of unwanted data augmentations at the test phase.