Weight sharing is a fundamental concept in neural architecture search (NAS), enabling gradient-based methods to explore cell-based architecture spaces significantly faster than traditional blackbox approaches. In parallel, weight entanglement has emerged as a technique for intricate parameter sharing among architectures within macro-level search spaces. Since weight-entanglement poses compatibility challenges for gradient-based NAS methods, these two paradigms have largely developed independently in parallel sub-communities. This paper aims to bridge the gap between these sub-communities by proposing a novel scheme to adapt gradient-based methods for weight-entangled spaces. This enables us to conduct an in-depth comparative assessment and analysis of the performance of gradient-based NAS in weight-entangled search spaces. Our findings reveal that this integration of weight-entanglement and gradient-based NAS brings forth the various benefits of gradient-based methods (enhanced performance, improved supernet training properties and superior any-time performance), while preserving the memory efficiency of weight-entangled spaces. The code for our work is openly accessible here. The concept of weight-sharing in Neural Architecture Search (NAS) arose from the need to improve the efficiency of conventional blackbox NAS algorithms, which demand significant computational resources to evaluate individual architectures. Here, weight-sharing (WS) refers to the paradigm by which we represent the search space with a single large supernet, also known as the one-shot model, that subsumes all the candidate architectures in that space. Every edge of this supernet holds all the possible operations that can be assigned to that edge. Gradient-based NAS algorithms (or optimizers), such as DARTS (Liu et al., 2019), GDAS (Dong and Yang, 2019) and DrNAS (Chen et al., 2021b), assign an architectural parameter to every choice of operation on a given edge of the supernet.

Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects across individuals has attracted growing attention as a statistical tool for performing critical decision-making. We propose a Bayesian inference framework that quantifies the uncertainty in treatment effect estimation to support decision-making in a relatively small sample size setting. Our proposed model places Gaussian process priors on the nonparametric components of a semiparametric model called a partially linear model. This model formulation has three advantages. First, we can analytically compute the posterior distribution of a treatment effect without relying on the computationally demanding posterior approximation. Second, we can guarantee that the posterior distribution concentrates around the true one as the sample size goes to infinity. Third, we can incorporate prior knowledge about a treatment effect into the prior distribution, improving the estimation efficiency. Our experimental results show that even in the small sample size setting, our method can accurately estimate the heterogeneous treatment effects and effectively quantify its estimation uncertainty.

Multimodal learning is susceptible to modality missing, which poses a major obstacle for its practical applications and, thus, invigorates increasing research interest. In this paper, we investigate two challenging problems: 1) when modality missing exists in the training data, how to exploit the incomplete samples while guaranteeing that they are properly supervised? 2) when the missing rates of different modalities vary, causing or exacerbating the imbalance among modalities, how to address the imbalance and ensure all modalities are well-trained? To tackle these two challenges, we first introduce the variational information bottleneck (VIB) method for the cross-modal representation learning of missing modalities, which capitalizes on the available modalities and the labels as supervision. Then, accounting for the imbalanced missing rates, we define relative advantage to quantify the advantage of each modality over others. Accordingly, a bi-level optimization problem is formulated to adaptively regulate the supervision of all modalities during training. As a whole, the proposed approach features \textbf{Re}lative a\textbf{d}vantage aware \textbf{C}ross-m\textbf{o}dal \textbf{r}epresentation l\textbf{e}arning (abbreviated as \textbf{RedCore}) for missing modalities with imbalanced missing rates. Extensive empirical results demonstrate that RedCore outperforms competing models in that it exhibits superior robustness against either large or imbalanced missing rates.

We study the problem of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-certified machine unlearning for minimax models. Most of the existing works focus on unlearning from standard statistical learning models that have a single variable and their unlearning steps hinge on the direct Hessian-based conventional Newton update. We develop a new $(\epsilon,\delta)$-certified machine unlearning algorithm for minimax models. It proposes a minimax unlearning step consisting of a total-Hessian-based complete Newton update and the Gaussian mechanism borrowed from differential privacy. To obtain the unlearning certification, our method injects calibrated Gaussian noises by carefully analyzing the "sensitivity" of the minimax unlearning step (i.e., the closeness between the minimax unlearning variables and the retraining-from-scratch variables). We derive the generalization rates in terms of population strong and weak primal-dual risk for three different cases of loss functions, i.e., (strongly-)convex-(strongly-)concave losses. We also provide the deletion capacity to guarantee that a desired population risk can be maintained as long as the number of deleted samples does not exceed the derived amount. With training samples $n$ and model dimension $d$, it yields the order $\mathcal O(n/d^{1/4})$, which shows a strict gap over the baseline method of differentially private minimax learning that has $\mathcal O(n/d^{1/2})$. In addition, our rates of generalization and deletion capacity match the state-of-the-art rates derived previously for standard statistical learning models.

In the hydrology field, time series forecasting is crucial for efficient water resource management, improving flood and drought control and increasing the safety and quality of life for the general population. However, predicting long-term streamflow is a complex task due to the presence of extreme events. It requires the capture of long-range dependencies and the modeling of rare but important extreme values. Existing approaches often struggle to tackle these dual challenges simultaneously. In this paper, we specifically delve into these issues and propose Distance-weighted Auto-regularized Neural network (DAN), a novel extreme-adaptive model for long-range forecasting of stremflow enhanced by polar representation learning. DAN utilizes a distance-weighted multi-loss mechanism and stackable blocks to dynamically refine indicator sequences from exogenous data, while also being able to handle uni-variate time-series by employing Gaussian Mixture probability modeling to improve robustness to severe events. We also introduce Kruskal-Wallis sampling and gate control vectors to handle imbalanced extreme data. On four real-life hydrologic streamflow datasets, we demonstrate that DAN significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art hydrologic time series prediction methods and general methods designed for long-term time series prediction.

Profile-based intent detection and slot filling are important tasks aimed at reducing the ambiguity in user utterances by leveraging user-specific supporting profile information. However, research in these two tasks has not been extensively explored. To fill this gap, we propose a joint model, namely JPIS, designed to enhance profile-based intent detection and slot filling. JPIS incorporates the supporting profile information into its encoder and introduces a slot-to-intent attention mechanism to transfer slot information representations to intent detection. Experimental results show that our JPIS substantially outperforms previous profile-based models, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance in overall accuracy on the Chinese benchmark dataset ProSLU.

State estimation poses substantial challenges in robotics, often involving encounters with multimodality in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, it is essential to calculate Maximum a posteriori (MAP) sequences from joint probability distributions of latent states and observations over time. However, it generally involves a trade-off between approximation errors and computational complexity. In this article, we propose a new method for MAP sequence estimation called Stein-MAP, which effectively manages multimodality with fewer approximation errors while significantly reducing computational and memory burdens. Our key contribution lies in the introduction of a sequential variational inference framework designed to handle temporal dependencies among transition states within dynamical system models. The framework integrates Stein's identity from probability theory and reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) theory, enabling computationally efficient MAP sequence estimation. As a MAP sequence estimator, Stein-MAP boasts a computational complexity of O(N), where N is the number of particles, in contrast to the O(N^2) complexity of the Viterbi algorithm. The proposed method is empirically validated through real-world experiments focused on range-only (wireless) localization. The results demonstrate a substantial enhancement in state estimation compared to existing methods. A remarkable feature of Stein-MAP is that it can attain improved state estimation with only 40 to 50 particles, as opposed to the 1000 particles that the particle filter or its variants require.

Over the past 40 years, the discovery and development of therapeutic antibodies to treat disease has become common practice. However, as therapeutic antibody constructs are becoming more sophisticated (e.g., multi-specifics), conventional approaches to optimisation are increasingly inefficient. Machine learning (ML) promises to open up an in silico route to antibody discovery and help accelerate the development of drug products using a reduced number of experiments and hence cost. Over the past few years, we have observed rapid developments in the field of ML-guided antibody discovery and development (D&D). However, many of the results are difficult to compare or hard to assess for utility by other experts in the field due to the high diversity in the datasets and evaluation techniques and metrics that are across industry and academia. This limitation of the literature curtails the broad adoption of ML across the industry and slows down overall progress in the field, highlighting the need to develop standards and guidelines that may help improve the reproducibility of ML models across different research groups. To address these challenges, we set out in this perspective to critically review current practices, explain common pitfalls, and clearly define a set of method development and evaluation guidelines that can be applied to different types of ML-based techniques for therapeutic antibody D&D. Specifically, we address in an end-to-end analysis, challenges associated with all aspects of the ML process and recommend a set of best practices for each stage.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution to perform deep learning on different data owners without exchanging raw data. However, non-IID data has been a key challenge in FL, which could significantly degrade the accuracy of the final model. Among different non-IID types, label skews have been challenging and common in image classification and other tasks. Instead of averaging the local models in most previous studies, we propose FedConcat, a simple and effective approach that concatenates these local models as the base of the global model to effectively aggregate the local knowledge. To reduce the size of the global model, we adopt the clustering technique to group the clients by their label distributions and collaboratively train a model inside each cluster. We theoretically analyze the advantage of concatenation over averaging by analyzing the information bottleneck of deep neural networks. Experimental results demonstrate that FedConcat achieves significantly higher accuracy than previous state-of-the-art FL methods in various heterogeneous label skew distribution settings and meanwhile has lower communication costs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/sjtudyq/FedConcat.

Existing multi-stage clustering methods independently learn the salient features from multiple views and then perform the clustering task. Particularly, multi-view clustering (MVC) has attracted a lot of attention in multi-view or multi-modal scenarios. MVC aims at exploring common semantics and pseudo-labels from multiple views and clustering in a self-supervised manner. However, limited by noisy data and inadequate feature learning, such a clustering paradigm generates overconfident pseudo-labels that mis-guide the model to produce inaccurate predictions. Therefore, it is desirable to have a method that can correct this pseudo-label mistraction in multi-stage clustering to avoid the bias accumulation. To alleviate the effect of overconfident pseudo-labels and improve the generalization ability of the model, this paper proposes a novel multi-stage deep MVC framework where multi-view self-distillation (DistilMVC) is introduced to distill dark knowledge of label distribution. Specifically, in the feature subspace at different hierarchies, we explore the common semantics of multiple views through contrastive learning and obtain pseudo-labels by maximizing the mutual information between views. Additionally, a teacher network is responsible for distilling pseudo-labels into dark knowledge, supervising the student network and improving its predictive capabilities to enhance the robustness. Extensive experiments on real-world multi-view datasets show that our method has better clustering performance than state-of-the-art methods.