Statistical Learning
Learning to Advise Humans in High-Stakes Settings
Wolczynski, Nicholas, Saar-Tsechansky, Maytal, Wang, Tong
Expert decision-makers (DMs) in high-stakes AI-assisted decision-making (AIaDM) settings receive and reconcile recommendations from AI systems before making their final decisions. We identify distinct properties of these settings which are key to developing AIaDM models that effectively benefit team performance. First, DMs incur reconciliation costs from exerting decision-making resources (e.g., time and effort) when reconciling AI recommendations that contradict their own judgment. Second, DMs in AIaDM settings exhibit algorithm discretion behavior (ADB), i.e., an idiosyncratic tendency to imperfectly accept or reject algorithmic recommendations for any given decision task. The human's reconciliation costs and imperfect discretion behavior introduce the need to develop AI systems which (1) provide recommendations selectively, (2) leverage the human partner's ADB to maximize the team's decision accuracy while regularizing for reconciliation costs, and (3) are inherently interpretable. We refer to the task of developing AI to advise humans in AIaDM settings as learning to advise and we address this task by first introducing the AI-assisted Team (AIaT)-Learning Framework. We instantiate our framework to develop TeamRules (TR): an algorithm that produces rule-based models and recommendations for AIaDM settings. TR is optimized to selectively advise a human and to trade-off reconciliation costs and team accuracy for a given environment by leveraging the human partner's ADB. Evaluations on synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets with a variety of simulated human accuracy and discretion behaviors show that TR robustly improves the team's objective across settings over interpretable, rule-based alternatives.
Forget Unlearning: Towards True Data-Deletion in Machine Learning
Unlearning algorithms aim to remove deleted data's influence from trained models at a cost lower than full retraining. However, prior guarantees of unlearning in literature are flawed and don't protect the privacy of deleted records. We show that when users delete their data as a function of published models, records in a database become interdependent. So, even retraining a fresh model after deletion of a record doesn't ensure its privacy. Secondly, unlearning algorithms that cache partial computations to speed up the processing can leak deleted information over a series of releases, violating the privacy of deleted records in the long run. To address these, we propose a sound deletion guarantee and show that the privacy of existing records is necessary for the privacy of deleted records. Under this notion, we propose an accurate, computationally efficient, and secure machine unlearning algorithm based on noisy gradient descent.
Event Detection on Dynamic Graphs
Kosan, Mert, Silva, Arlei, Medya, Sourav, Uzzi, Brian, Singh, Ambuj
Event detection is a critical task for timely decision-making in graph analytics applications. Despite the recent progress towards deep learning on graphs, event detection on dynamic graphs presents particular challenges to existing architectures. Real-life events are often associated with sudden deviations of the normal behavior of the graph. However, existing approaches for dynamic node embedding are unable to capture the graph-level dynamics related to events. In this paper, we propose DyGED, a simple yet novel deep learning model for event detection on dynamic graphs. DyGED learns correlations between the graph macro dynamics -- i.e. a sequence of graph-level representations -- and labeled events. Moreover, our approach combines structural and temporal self-attention mechanisms to account for application-specific node and time importances effectively. Our experimental evaluation, using a representative set of datasets, demonstrates that DyGED outperforms competing solutions in terms of event detection accuracy by up to 8.5% while being more scalable than the top alternatives. We also present case studies illustrating key features of our model.
Jointly Contrastive Representation Learning on Road Network and Trajectory
Mao, Zhenyu, Li, Ziyue, Li, Dedong, Bai, Lei, Zhao, Rui
Road network and trajectory representation learning are essential for traffic systems since the learned representation can be directly used in various downstream tasks (e.g., traffic speed inference, and travel time estimation). However, most existing methods only contrast within the same scale, i.e., treating road network and trajectory separately, which ignores valuable inter-relations. In this paper, we aim to propose a unified framework that jointly learns the road network and trajectory representations end-to-end. We design domain-specific augmentations for road-road contrast and trajectory-trajectory contrast separately, i.e., road segment with its contextual neighbors and trajectory with its detour replaced and dropped alternatives, respectively. On top of that, we further introduce the road-trajectory cross-scale contrast to bridge the two scales by maximizing the total mutual information. Unlike the existing cross-scale contrastive learning methods on graphs that only contrast a graph and its belonging nodes, the contrast between road segment and trajectory is elaborately tailored via novel positive sampling and adaptive weighting strategies. We conduct prudent experiments based on two real-world datasets with four downstream tasks, demonstrating improved performance and effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/mzy94/JCLRNT.
A Survey on Multi-modal Summarization
Jangra, Anubhav, Mukherjee, Sourajit, Jatowt, Adam, Saha, Sriparna, Hasanuzzaman, Mohammad
The new era of technology has brought us to the point where it is convenient for people to share their opinions over an abundance of platforms. These platforms have a provision for the users to express themselves in multiple forms of representations, including text, images, videos, and audio. This, however, makes it difficult for users to obtain all the key information about a topic, making the task of automatic multi-modal summarization (MMS) essential. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the existing research in the area of MMS, covering various modalities like text, image, audio, and video. Apart from highlighting the different evaluation metrics and datasets used for the MMS task, our work also discusses the current challenges and future directions in this field.
Algorithmic Stability of Heavy-Tailed Stochastic Gradient Descent on Least Squares
Raj, Anant, Barsbey, Melih, Gรผrbรผzbalaban, Mert, Zhu, Lingjiong, ลimลekli, Umut
Recent studies have shown that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic optimization and that the heaviness of the tails have links to the generalization error. While these studies have shed light on interesting aspects of the generalization behavior in modern settings, they relied on strong topological and statistical regularity assumptions, which are hard to verify in practice. Furthermore, it has been empirically illustrated that the relation between heavy tails and generalization might not always be monotonic in practice, contrary to the conclusions of existing theory. In this study, we establish novel links between the tail behavior and generalization properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD), through the lens of algorithmic stability. We consider a quadratic optimization problem and use a heavy-tailed stochastic differential equation (and its Euler discretization) as a proxy for modeling the heavy-tailed behavior emerging in SGD. We then prove uniform stability bounds, which reveal the following outcomes: (i) Without making any exotic assumptions, we show that SGD will not be stable if the stability is measured with the squared-loss $x\mapsto x^2$, whereas it in turn becomes stable if the stability is instead measured with a surrogate loss $x\mapsto |x|^p$ with some $p<2$. (ii) Depending on the variance of the data, there exists a \emph{`threshold of heavy-tailedness'} such that the generalization error decreases as the tails become heavier, as long as the tails are lighter than this threshold. This suggests that the relation between heavy tails and generalization is not globally monotonic. (iii) We prove matching lower-bounds on uniform stability, implying that our bounds are tight in terms of the heaviness of the tails. We support our theory with synthetic and real neural network experiments.
Online SuBmodular + SuPermodular (BP) Maximization with Bandit Feedback
Narang, Adhyyan, Sadeghi, Omid, Ratliff, Lillian J, Fazel, Maryam, Bilmes, Jeff
We investigate non-modular function maximization in an online setting with $m$ users. The optimizer maintains a set $S_q$ for each user $q \in \{1, \ldots, m\}$. At round $i$, a user with unknown utility $h_q$ arrives; the optimizer selects a new item to add to $S_q$, and receives a noisy marginal gain. The goal is to minimize regret compared to an $\alpha$-approximation to the optimal full-knowledge selection (i.e., $\alpha$-regret). Prior works study this problem under a submodularity assumption for all $h_q$. However, this is not ideally amenable to applications, e.g., movie recommendations, that involve complementarity between items, where e.g., watching the first movie in a series enhances the impression of watching the sequels. Hence, we consider objectives $h_q$, called \textit{BP functions}, that decompose into the sum of monotone submodular $f_q$ and supermodular $g_q$; here, $g_q$ naturally models complementarity. Under different feedback assumptions, we develop UCB-style algorithms that use Nystrom sampling for computational efficiency. For these, we provide sublinear $\alpha$-regret guarantees for $\alpha = 1/\kappa_{f} [1 - e^{-(1 - \kappa^g) \kappa_{f}} ]$, and $\alpha = \min\{1 - \kappa_f/e, 1 - \kappa^g\}$; here, $\kappa_f, \kappa^g$ are submodular and supermodular curvatures. Furthermore, we provide similar $\alpha$-regret guarantees for functions that are almost submodular where $\alpha$ is parameterized by the submodularity ratio of the objective functions. We numerically validate our algorithms for movie recommendation on the MovieLens dataset and selection of training subsets for classification tasks.
A Framework for Overparameterized Learning
Terjรฉk, Dรกvid, Gonzรกlez-Sรกnchez, Diego
A candidate explanation of the good empirical performance of deep neural networks is the implicit regularization effect of first order optimization methods. Inspired by this, we prove a convergence theorem for nonconvex composite optimization, and apply it to a general learning problem covering many machine learning applications, including supervised learning. We then present a deep multilayer perceptron model and prove that, when sufficiently wide, it $(i)$ leads to the convergence of gradient descent to a global optimum with a linear rate, $(ii)$ benefits from the implicit regularization effect of gradient descent, $(iii)$ is subject to novel bounds on the generalization error, $(iv)$ exhibits the lazy training phenomenon and $(v)$ enjoys learning rate transfer across different widths. The corresponding coefficients, such as the convergence rate, improve as width is further increased, and depend on the even order moments of the data generating distribution up to an order depending on the number of layers. The only non-mild assumption we make is the concentration of the smallest eigenvalue of the neural tangent kernel at initialization away from zero, which has been shown to hold for a number of less general models in contemporary works. We present empirical evidence supporting this assumption as well as our theoretical claims.
Do Language Models Plagiarize?
Lee, Jooyoung, Le, Thai, Chen, Jinghui, Lee, Dongwon
In this work, therefore, we study three types of plagiarism (i.e., verbatim, paraphrase, and idea) among GPT-2 generated texts, Language Models (LMs) have become core elements of Natural in comparison to its training data, and further analyze the plagiarism Language Processing (NLP) solutions, excelling in a wide range of patterns of fine-tuned LMs with domain-specific corpora which are tasks such as natural language generation (NLG), speech recognition, extensively used in practice. Our results suggest that (1) three types machine translation, and question answering. The development of plagiarism widely exist in LMs beyond memorization, (2) both of large-scale text corpora (generally scraped from the Web) has size and decoding methods of LMs are strongly associated with the enabled researchers to train increasingly large-scale LMs. Especially, degrees of plagiarism they exhibit, and (3) fine-tuned LMs' plagiarism large-scale LMs have demonstrated unprecedented performance on patterns vary based on their corpus similarity and homogeneity. NLG such that LM-generated texts routinely show more novel and Given that a majority of LMs' training data is scraped from the Web interesting stories than human writings do [35], and the distinction without informing content owners, their reiteration of words, phrases, between machine-authored and human-written texts has become and even core ideas from training sets into generated texts has ethical non-trivial [52, 53]. As a result, there has been a significant increase implications. Their patterns are likely to exacerbate as both in the use of LMs in user-facing products and critical applications.
Discriminative Radial Domain Adaptation
Huang, Zenan, Wen, Jun, Chen, Siheng, Zhu, Linchao, Zheng, Nenggan
Domain adaptation methods reduce domain shift typically by learning domain-invariant features. Most existing methods are built on distribution matching, e.g., adversarial domain adaptation, which tends to corrupt feature discriminability. In this paper, we propose Discriminative Radial Domain Adaptation (DRDA) which bridges source and target domains via a shared radial structure. It's motivated by the observation that as the model is trained to be progressively discriminative, features of different categories expand outwards in different directions, forming a radial structure. We show that transferring such an inherently discriminative structure would enable to enhance feature transferability and discriminability simultaneously. Specifically, we represent each domain with a global anchor and each category a local anchor to form a radial structure and reduce domain shift via structure matching. It consists of two parts, namely isometric transformation to align the structure globally and local refinement to match each category. To enhance the discriminability of the structure, we further encourage samples to cluster close to the corresponding local anchors based on optimal-transport assignment. Extensively experimenting on multiple benchmarks, our method is shown to consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on varied tasks, including the typical unsupervised domain adaptation, multi-source domain adaptation, domain-agnostic learning, and domain generalization.