Statistical Learning
Are we making much progress? Revisiting chemical reaction yield prediction from an imbalanced regression perspective
Ma, Yihong, Huang, Xiaobao, Nan, Bozhao, Moniz, Nuno, Zhang, Xiangliang, Wiest, Olaf, Chawla, Nitesh V.
The yield of a chemical reaction quantifies the percentage of the target product formed in relation to the reactants consumed during the chemical reaction. Accurate yield prediction can guide chemists toward selecting high-yield reactions during synthesis planning, offering valuable insights before dedicating time and resources to wet lab experiments. While recent advancements in yield prediction have led to overall performance improvement across the entire yield range, an open challenge remains in enhancing predictions for high-yield reactions, which are of greater concern to chemists. In this paper, we argue that the performance gap in high-yield predictions results from the imbalanced distribution of real-world data skewed towards low-yield reactions, often due to unreacted starting materials and inherent ambiguities in the reaction processes. Despite this data imbalance, existing yield prediction methods continue to treat different yield ranges equally, assuming a balanced training distribution. Through extensive experiments on three real-world yield prediction datasets, we emphasize the urgent need to reframe reaction yield prediction as an imbalanced regression problem. Finally, we demonstrate that incorporating simple cost-sensitive re-weighting methods can significantly enhance the performance of yield prediction models on underrepresented high-yield regions.
Tensor Completion via Integer Optimization
Chen, Xin, Kudva, Sukanya, Dai, Yongzheng, Aswani, Anil, Chen, Chen
The main challenge with the tensor completion problem is a fundamental tension between computation power and the information-theoretic sample complexity rate. Past approaches either achieve the information-theoretic rate but lack practical algorithms to compute the corresponding solution, or have polynomial-time algorithms that require an exponentially-larger number of samples for low estimation error. This paper develops a novel tensor completion algorithm that resolves this tension by achieving both provable convergence (in numerical tolerance) in a linear number of oracle steps and the information-theoretic rate. Our approach formulates tensor completion as a convex optimization problem constrained using a gauge-based tensor norm, which is defined in a way that allows the use of integer linear optimization to solve linear separation problems over the unit-ball in this new norm. Adaptations based on this insight are incorporated into a Frank-Wolfe variant to build our algorithm. We show our algorithm scales-well using numerical experiments on tensors with up to ten million entries.
LtU-ILI: An All-in-One Framework for Implicit Inference in Astrophysics and Cosmology
Ho, Matthew, Bartlett, Deaglan J., Chartier, Nicolas, Cuesta-Lazaro, Carolina, Ding, Simon, Lapel, Axel, Lemos, Pablo, Lovell, Christopher C., Makinen, T. Lucas, Modi, Chirag, Pandya, Viraj, Pandey, Shivam, Perez, Lucia A., Wandelt, Benjamin, Bryan, Greg L.
This paper presents the Learning the Universe Implicit Likelihood Inference (LtU-ILI) pipeline, a codebase for rapid, user-friendly, and cutting-edge machine learning (ML) inference in astrophysics and cosmology. The pipeline includes software for implementing various neural architectures, training schema, priors, and density estimators in a manner easily adaptable to any research workflow. It includes comprehensive validation metrics to assess posterior estimate coverage, enhancing the reliability of inferred results. Additionally, the pipeline is easily parallelizable, designed for efficient exploration of modeling hyperparameters. To demonstrate its capabilities, we present real applications across a range of astrophysics and cosmology problems, such as: estimating galaxy cluster masses from X-ray photometry; inferring cosmology from matter power spectra and halo point clouds; characterising progenitors in gravitational wave signals; capturing physical dust parameters from galaxy colors and luminosities; and establishing properties of semi-analytic models of galaxy formation. We also include exhaustive benchmarking and comparisons of all implemented methods as well as discussions about the challenges and pitfalls of ML inference in astronomical sciences. All code and examples are made publicly available at https://github.com/maho3/ltu-ili.
Attention Guided CAM: Visual Explanations of Vision Transformer Guided by Self-Attention
Vision Transformer(ViT) is one of the most widely used models in the computer vision field with its great performance on various tasks. In order to fully utilize the ViT-based architecture in various applications, proper visualization methods with a decent localization performance are necessary, but these methods employed in CNN-based models are still not available in ViT due to its unique structure. In this work, we propose an attention-guided visualization method applied to ViT that provides a high-level semantic explanation for its decision. Our method selectively aggregates the gradients directly propagated from the classification output to each self-attention, collecting the contribution of image features extracted from each location of the input image. These gradients are additionally guided by the normalized self-attention scores, which are the pairwise patch correlation scores. They are used to supplement the gradients on the patch-level context information efficiently detected by the self-attention mechanism. This approach of our method provides elaborate high-level semantic explanations with great localization performance only with the class labels. As a result, our method outperforms the previous leading explainability methods of ViT in the weakly-supervised localization task and presents great capability in capturing the full instances of the target class object. Meanwhile, our method provides a visualization that faithfully explains the model, which is demonstrated in the perturbation comparison test.
Curvature-Informed SGD via General Purpose Lie-Group Preconditioners
Pooladzandi, Omead, Li, Xi-Lin
We present a novel approach to accelerate stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by utilizing curvature information obtained from Hessian-vector products or finite differences of parameters and gradients, similar to the BFGS algorithm. Our approach involves two preconditioners: a matrix-free preconditioner and a low-rank approximation preconditioner. We update both preconditioners online using a criterion that is robust to stochastic gradient noise and does not require line search or damping. To preserve the corresponding symmetry or invariance, our preconditioners are constrained to certain connected Lie groups. The Lie group's equivariance property simplifies the preconditioner fitting process, while its invariance property eliminates the need for damping, which is commonly required in second-order optimizers. As a result, the learning rate for parameter updating and the step size for preconditioner fitting are naturally normalized, and their default values work well in most scenarios. Our proposed approach offers a promising direction for improving the convergence of SGD with low computational overhead. We demonstrate that Preconditioned SGD (PSGD) outperforms SoTA on Vision, NLP, and RL tasks across multiple modern deep-learning architectures. We have provided code for reproducing toy and large scale experiments in this paper.
Riemann-Lebesgue Forest for Regression
We propose a novel ensemble method called Riemann-Lebesgue Forest (RLF) for regression. The core idea of RLF is to mimic the way how a measurable function can be approximated by partitioning its range into a few intervals. With this idea in mind, we develop a new tree learner named Riemann-Lebesgue Tree which has a chance to split the node from response $Y$ or a direction in feature space $\mathbf{X}$ at each non-terminal node. We generalize the asymptotic performance of RLF under different parameter settings mainly through Hoeffding decomposition \cite{Vaart} and Stein's method \cite{Chen2010NormalAB}. When the underlying function $Y=f(\mathbf{X})$ follows an additive regression model, RLF is consistent with the argument from \cite{Scornet2014ConsistencyOR}. The competitive performance of RLF against original random forest \cite{Breiman2001RandomF} is demonstrated by experiments in simulation data and real world datasets.
Triplet Interaction Improves Graph Transformers: Accurate Molecular Graph Learning with Triplet Graph Transformers
Hussain, Md Shamim, Zaki, Mohammed J., Subramanian, Dharmashankar
Graph transformers typically lack direct pair-to-pair communication, instead forcing neighboring pairs to exchange information via a common node. We propose the Triplet Graph Transformer (TGT) that enables direct communication between two neighboring pairs in a graph via novel triplet attention and aggregation mechanisms. TGT is applied to molecular property prediction by first predicting interatomic distances from 2D graphs and then using these distances for downstream tasks. A novel three-stage training procedure and stochastic inference further improve training efficiency and model performance. Our model achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on open challenge benchmarks PCQM4Mv2 and OC20 IS2RE. We also obtain SOTA results on QM9, MOLPCBA, and LIT-PCBA molecular property prediction benchmarks via transfer learning. We also demonstrate the generality of TGT with SOTA results on the traveling salesman problem (TSP).
Generalized Sobolev Transport for Probability Measures on a Graph
Le, Tam, Nguyen, Truyen, Fukumizu, Kenji
We study the optimal transport (OT) problem for measures supported on a graph metric space. Recently, Le et al. (2022) leverage the graph structure and propose a variant of OT, namely Sobolev transport (ST), which yields a closed-form expression for a fast computation. However, ST is essentially coupled with the $L^p$ geometric structure within its definition which makes it nontrivial to utilize ST for other prior structures. In contrast, the classic OT has the flexibility to adapt to various geometric structures by modifying the underlying cost function. An important instance is the Orlicz-Wasserstein (OW) which moves beyond the $L^p$ structure by leveraging the \emph{Orlicz geometric structure}. Comparing to the usage of standard $p$-order Wasserstein, OW remarkably helps to advance certain machine learning approaches. Nevertheless, OW brings up a new challenge on its computation due to its two-level optimization formulation. In this work, we leverage a specific class of convex functions for Orlicz structure to propose the generalized Sobolev transport (GST). GST encompasses the ST as its special case, and can be utilized for prior structures beyond the $L^p$ geometry. In connection with the OW, we show that one only needs to simply solve a univariate optimization problem to compute the GST, unlike the complex two-level optimization problem in OW. We empirically illustrate that GST is several-order faster than the OW. Moreover, we provide preliminary evidences on the advantages of GST for document classification and for several tasks in topological data analysis.
Pathspace Kalman Filters with Dynamic Process Uncertainty for Analyzing Time-course Data
Agrahar, Chaitra, Poole, William, Bianco, Simone, El-Samad, Hana
Kalman Filter (KF) is an optimal linear state prediction algorithm, with applications in fields as diverse as engineering, economics, robotics, and space exploration. Here, we develop an extension of the KF, called a Pathspace Kalman Filter (PKF) which allows us to a) dynamically track the uncertainties associated with the underlying data and prior knowledge, and b) take as input an entire trajectory and an underlying mechanistic model, and using a Bayesian methodology quantify the different sources of uncertainty. An application of this algorithm is to automatically detect temporal windows where the internal mechanistic model deviates from the data in a time-dependent manner. First, we provide theorems characterizing the convergence of the PKF algorithm. Then, we numerically demonstrate that the PKF outperforms conventional KF methods on a synthetic dataset lowering the mean-squared-error by several orders of magnitude. Finally, we apply this method to biological time-course dataset involving over 1.8 million gene expression measurements.
DySLIM: Dynamics Stable Learning by Invariant Measure for Chaotic Systems
Schiff, Yair, Wan, Zhong Yi, Parker, Jeffrey B., Hoyer, Stephan, Kuleshov, Volodymyr, Sha, Fei, Zepeda-Núñez, Leonardo
Learning dynamics from dissipative chaotic systems is notoriously difficult due to their inherent instability, as formalized by their positive Lyapunov exponents, which exponentially amplify errors in the learned dynamics. However, many of these systems exhibit ergodicity and an attractor: a compact and highly complex manifold, to which trajectories converge in finite-time, that supports an invariant measure, i.e., a probability distribution that is invariant under the action of the dynamics, which dictates the long-term statistical behavior of the system. In this work, we leverage this structure to propose a new framework that targets learning the invariant measure as well as the dynamics, in contrast with typical methods that only target the misfit between trajectories, which often leads to divergence as the trajectories' length increases. We use our framework to propose a tractable and sample efficient objective that can be used with any existing learning objectives. Our Dynamics Stable Learning by Invariant Measures (DySLIM) objective enables model training that achieves better point-wise tracking and long-term statistical accuracy relative to other learning objectives. By targeting the distribution with a scalable regularization term, we hope that this approach can be extended to more complex systems exhibiting slowly-variant distributions, such as weather and climate models.