Generative image models have emerged as a promising technology to produce realistic images. Despite potential benefits, concerns grow about its misuse, particularly in generating deceptive images that could raise significant ethical, legal, and societal issues. Consequently, there is growing demand to empower users to effectively discern and comprehend patterns of AI-generated images. To this end, we developed ASAP, an interactive visualization system that automatically extracts distinct patterns of AI-generated images and allows users to interactively explore them via various views. To uncover fake patterns, ASAP introduces a novel image encoder, adapted from CLIP, which transforms images into compact "distilled" representations, enriched with information for differentiating authentic and fake images. These representations generate gradients that propagate back to the attention maps of CLIP's transformer block. This process quantifies the relative importance of each pixel to image authenticity or fakeness, exposing key deceptive patterns. ASAP enables the at scale interactive analysis of these patterns through multiple, coordinated visualizations. This includes a representation overview with innovative cell glyphs to aid in the exploration and qualitative evaluation of fake patterns across a vast array of images, as well as a pattern view that displays authenticity-indicating patterns in images and quantifies their impact. ASAP supports the analysis of cutting-edge generative models with the latest architectures, including GAN-based models like proGAN and diffusion models like the latent diffusion model. We demonstrate ASAP's usefulness through two usage scenarios using multiple fake image detection benchmark datasets, revealing its ability to identify and understand hidden patterns in AI-generated images, especially in detecting fake human faces produced by diffusion-based techniques.

Teacher-Student Curriculum Learning (TSCL) is a curriculum learning framework that draws inspiration from human cultural transmission and learning. It involves a teacher algorithm shaping the learning process of a learner algorithm by exposing it to controlled experiences. Despite its success, understanding the conditions under which TSCL is effective remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a data-centric perspective to analyze the underlying mechanics of the teacher-student interactions in TSCL. We leverage cooperative game theory to describe how the composition of the set of experiences presented by the teacher to the learner, as well as their order, influences the performance of the curriculum that are found by TSCL approaches. To do so, we demonstrate that for every TSCL problem, there exists an equivalent cooperative game, and several key components of the TSCL framework can be reinterpreted using game-theoretic principles. Through experiments covering supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and classical games, we estimate the cooperative values of experiences and use value-proportional curriculum mechanisms to construct curricula, even in cases where TSCL struggles. The framework and experimental setup we present in this work represent a novel foundation for a deeper exploration of TSCL, shedding light on its underlying mechanisms and providing insights into its broader applicability in machine learning.

Recent advances in stochastic optimization have yielded the interactive particle Langevin algorithm (IPLA), which leverages the notion of interacting particle systems (IPS) to efficiently sample from approximate posterior densities. This becomes particularly crucial within the framework of Expectation-Maximization (EM), where the E-step is computationally challenging or even intractable. Although prior research has focused on scenarios involving convex cases with gradients of log densities that grow at most linearly, our work extends this framework to include polynomial growth. Taming techniques are employed to produce an explicit discretization scheme that yields a new class of stable, under such non-linearities, algorithms which are called tamed interactive particle Langevin algorithms (tIPLA). We obtain non-asymptotic convergence error estimates in Wasserstein-2 distance for the new class under an optimal rate.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a long-term impact on industries worldwide, with the hospitality and food industry facing significant challenges, leading to the permanent closure of many restaurants and the loss of jobs. In this study, we developed an innovative analytical framework using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for predictive modeling with Bayesian regression, aiming to estimate the change point in consumer behavior towards different types of restaurants due to COVID-19. Our approach emphasizes a novel method in computational analysis, providing insights into customer behavior changes before and after the pandemic. This research contributes to understanding the effects of COVID-19 on the restaurant industry and is valuable for restaurant owners and policymakers.

We explore the application of machine learning algorithms to predict the suitability of Russet potato clones for advancement in breeding trials. Leveraging data from manually collected trials in the state of Oregon, we investigate the potential of a wide variety of state-of-the-art binary classification models. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of the dataset that includes preprocessing, feature engineering, and imputation to address missing values. We focus on several key metrics such as accuracy, F1-score, and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) for model evaluation. The top-performing models, namely the multi-layer perceptron (MLPC), histogram-based gradient boosting classifier (HGBC), and a support vector machine (SVC), demonstrate consistent and significant results. Variable selection further enhances model performance and identifies influential features in predicting trial outcomes. The findings emphasize the potential of machine learning in streamlining the selection process for potato varieties, offering benefits such as increased efficiency, substantial cost savings, and judicious resource utilization. Our study contributes insights into precision agriculture and showcases the relevance of advanced technologies for informed decision-making in breeding programs.

Language Models (LMs) have shown promising performance in natural language generation. However, as LMs often generate incorrect or hallucinated responses, it is crucial to correctly quantify their uncertainty in responding to given inputs. In addition to verbalized confidence elicited via prompting, many uncertainty measures ($e.g.$, semantic entropy and affinity-graph-based measures) have been proposed. However, these measures can differ greatly, and it is unclear how to compare them, partly because they take values over different ranges ($e.g.$, $[0,\infty)$ or $[0,1]$). In this work, we address this issue by developing a novel and practical framework, termed $Rank$-$Calibration$, to assess uncertainty and confidence measures for LMs. Our key tenet is that higher uncertainty (or lower confidence) should imply lower generation quality, on average. Rank-calibration quantifies deviations from this ideal relationship in a principled manner, without requiring ad hoc binary thresholding of the correctness score ($e.g.$, ROUGE or METEOR). The broad applicability and the granular interpretability of our methods are demonstrated empirically.

High-dimensional problems are prominent across all corners of science and industrial applications. Within this realm, optimizing black-box functions and operators can be computationally expensive and require large amounts of hardto-obtain data for training surrogate models. Uncertainty quantification becomes a key element in this setting, as the ability to quantify what a surrogate model does not know offers a guiding principle for new data acquisition. However, existing methods for surrogate modeling with built-in uncertainty quantification, such as Gaussian Processes (GPs) [1], have demonstrated difficulty in modeling problems that exist in high dimensions. While other methods such as Bayesian neural networks [2] (BNNs) and deep ensembles [3] are able to mitigate this issue, their computational cost can still be prohibitive for some applications. This problem becomes more prominent in Operator Learning, where either inputs or outputs of a model are functions residing in infinite-dimensional function spaces. The field of Operator Learning has had many advances in recent years[4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9], with applications across many domains in the natural sciences and engineering, but so far its integration with uncertainty quantification is limited [10, 11]. In addition to safety-critical problems using deep learning such as ones in medicine [12, 13] and autonomous driving [14], the generation of uncertainty measures can also be important for decision making when collecting new data in the physical sciences. Total uncertainty is often made up of two distinct parts: epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty.

We propose two algorithms for boosting random Fourier feature models for approximating high-dimensional functions. These methods utilize the classical and generalized analysis of variance (ANOVA) decomposition to learn low-order functions, where there are few interactions between the variables. Our algorithms are able to find an index set of important input variables and variable interactions reliably. Furthermore, we generalize already existing random Fourier feature models to an ANOVA setting, where terms of different order can be used. Our algorithms have the advantage of interpretability, meaning that the influence of every input variable is known in the learned model, even for dependent input variables. We give theoretical as well as numerical results that our algorithms perform well for sensitivity analysis. The ANOVA-boosting step reduces the approximation error of existing methods significantly.

We use a pre-trained autoencoder network to map high-dimensional original inputs to a low-dimensional latent space, where a transformer network is trained to predict the velocity field of the transformation from a standard normal distribution to the target latent distribution. Our error analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach, showing that the distribution of samples generated via estimated ODE flow converges to the target distribution in the Wasserstein-2 distance under mild and practical assumptions. Furthermore, we show that arbitrary smooth functions can be effectively approximated by transformer networks with Lipschitz continuity, which may be of independent interest.

This paper provides the first tight convergence analyses for RMSProp and Adam in non-convex optimization under the most relaxed assumptions of coordinate-wise generalized smoothness and affine noise variance. We first analyze RMSProp, which is a special case of Adam with adaptive learning rates but without first-order momentum. Specifically, to solve the challenges due to dependence among adaptive update, unbounded gradient estimate and Lipschitz constant, we demonstrate that the first-order term in the descent lemma converges and its denominator is upper bounded by a function of gradient norm. Based on this result, we show that RMSProp with proper hyperparameters converges to an $\epsilon$-stationary point with an iteration complexity of $\mathcal O(\epsilon^{-4})$. We then generalize our analysis to Adam, where the additional challenge is due to a mismatch between the gradient and first-order momentum. We develop a new upper bound on the first-order term in the descent lemma, which is also a function of the gradient norm. We show that Adam with proper hyperparameters converges to an $\epsilon$-stationary point with an iteration complexity of $\mathcal O(\epsilon^{-4})$. Our complexity results for both RMSProp and Adam match with the complexity lower bound established in \cite{arjevani2023lower}.