Statistical Learning
Machine Learning Can Help Diagnose Alcohol-Associated Hepatitis from Other Conditions
Acute cholangitis is a potentially life-threatening bacterial infection that often is associated with gallstones. Symptoms include fever, jaundice, right upper quadrant pain, and elevated liver enzymes. While these may seem like distinctive, telltale symptoms, they are similar to those of a much different condition: alcohol-associated hepatitis. This challenges emergency department staff and other health care professionals who need to diagnose and treat patients with liver enzyme abnormalities and systemic inflammatory responses. New Mayo Clinic research finds that machine-learning algorithms can help health care staff distinguish the two conditions.
Have we been Naive to Select Machine Learning Models? Noisy Data are here to Stay!
Farias, Felipe Costa, Ludermir, Teresa Bernarda, Bastos-Filho, Carmelo Josรฉ Albanez
The model selection procedure is usually a single-criterion decision making in which we select the model that maximizes a specific metric in a specific set, such as the Validation set performance. We claim this is very naive and can perform poor selections of over-fitted models due to the over-searching phenomenon, which over-estimates the performance on that specific set. Futhermore, real world data contains noise that should not be ignored by the model selection procedure and must be taken into account when performing model selection. Also, we have defined four theoretical optimality conditions that we can pursue to better select the models and analyze them by using a multi-criteria decision-making algorithm (TOPSIS) that considers proxies to the optimality conditions to select reasonable models.
Work In Progress: Safety and Robustness Verification of Autoencoder-Based Regression Models using the NNV Tool
Pal, Neelanjana, Johnson, Taylor T
State-of-the-art and well-trained neural networks (NN) can easily be attacked by small perturbations in inputs, leading to significant aberrations in their outputs [14, 23, 33]. These input perturbations are not only limited to image-based networks but also apply to other input types as well, e.g., time-series data or input signals. Such lack of robustness poses serious risks to information integrity, privacy and security, and can be catastrophic in safety-critical applications [11, 29]. While verification of NNs with image inputs is a vastly growing research area; specifically, with recent ongoing works on safety and robustness checking of feedforward (FFNN), convolutional (CNN), and semantic segmentation networks (SSN); less has been done in the domain of autoencoder verification. Classification models using autoencoders work almost similar to usual classifiers, but there is a need for new research to develop verification techniques for regression models. The regression-based autoencoders regenerate the input in its output and thus can be checked using verification techniques whether the recreated output comes within a certain accepted range of the unperturbed input, in case there is a certain fault/attack on its input side. In a prior work, the authors of [36] introduced a novel framework for NN verification named Neural Network Verification (NNV) [38] tool, capable of evaluating the robustness of several DNN architectures, e.g., FFNN, CNN, SSN, etc. Later, a new set-based approach, Imagestar [34, 36] is also incorporated into this tool. In this work in progress work, we explore similar methods in the context of autoencoder verification via experimenting on a sampled dataset and checking if the output lies within a pre-determined safe threshold around the corresponding uninterrupted input values, given a specific type of fault in the input.
Ranking and Tuning Pre-trained Models: A New Paradigm for Exploiting Model Hubs
You, Kaichao, Liu, Yong, Zhang, Ziyang, Wang, Jianmin, Jordan, Michael I., Long, Mingsheng
Model hubs with many pre-trained models (PTMs) have become a cornerstone of deep learning. Although built at a high cost, they remain \emph{under-exploited} -- practitioners usually pick one PTM from the provided model hub by popularity and then fine-tune the PTM to solve the target task. This na\"ive but common practice poses two obstacles to full exploitation of pre-trained model hubs: first, the PTM selection by popularity has no optimality guarantee, and second, only one PTM is used while the remaining PTMs are ignored. An alternative might be to consider all possible combinations of PTMs and extensively fine-tune each combination, but this would not only be prohibitive computationally but may also lead to statistical over-fitting. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for exploiting model hubs that is intermediate between these extremes. The paradigm is characterized by two aspects: (1) We use an evidence maximization procedure to estimate the maximum value of label evidence given features extracted by pre-trained models. This procedure can rank all the PTMs in a model hub for various types of PTMs and tasks \emph{before fine-tuning}. (2) The best ranked PTM can either be fine-tuned and deployed if we have no preference for the model's architecture or the target PTM can be tuned by the top $K$ ranked PTMs via a Bayesian procedure that we propose. This procedure, which we refer to as \emph{B-Tuning}, not only improves upon specialized methods designed for tuning homogeneous PTMs, but also applies to the challenging problem of tuning heterogeneous PTMs where it yields a new level of benchmark performance.
Low-Precision Arithmetic for Fast Gaussian Processes
Maddox, Wesley J., Potapczynski, Andres, Wilson, Andrew Gordon
Low-precision arithmetic has had a transformative effect on the training of neural networks, reducing computation, memory and energy requirements. However, despite its promise, low-precision arithmetic has received little attention for Gaussian processes (GPs), largely because GPs require sophisticated linear algebra routines that are unstable in low-precision. We study the different failure modes that can occur when training GPs in half precision. To circumvent these failure modes, we propose a multi-faceted approach involving conjugate gradients with re-orthogonalization, mixed precision, and preconditioning. Our approach significantly improves the numerical stability and practical performance of conjugate gradients in low-precision over a wide range of settings, enabling GPs to train on $1.8$ million data points in $10$ hours on a single GPU, without any sparse approximations.
Instance Selection Mechanisms for Human-in-the-Loop Systems in Few-Shot Learning
Jakubik, Johannes, Blumenstiel, Benedikt, Vรถssing, Michael, Hemmer, Patrick
Business analytics and machine learning have become essential success factors for various industries - with the downside of cost-intensive gathering and labeling of data. Few-shot learning addresses this challenge and reduces data gathering and labeling costs by learning novel classes with very few labeled data. In this paper, we design a human-in-the-loop (HITL) system for few-shot learning and analyze an extensive range of mechanisms that can be used to acquire human expert knowledge for instances that have an uncertain prediction outcome. We show that the acquisition of human expert knowledge significantly accelerates the few-shot model performance given a negligible labeling effort. We validate our findings in various experiments on a benchmark dataset in computer vision and real-world datasets. We further demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of HITL systems for few-shot learning. Overall, our work aims at supporting researchers and practitioners in effectively adapting machine learning models to novel classes at reduced costs.
Session-based Cyberbullying Detection in Social Media: A Survey
Cyberbullying is a pervasive problem in online social media, where a bully abuses a victim through a social media session. By investigating cyberbullying perpetrated through social media sessions, recent research has looked into mining patterns and features for modeling and understanding the two defining characteristics of cyberbullying: repetitive behavior and power imbalance. In this survey paper, we define the Session-based Cyberbullying Detection framework that encapsulates the different steps and challenges of the problem. Based on this framework, we provide a comprehensive overview of session-based cyberbullying detection in social media, delving into existing efforts from a data and methodological perspective. Our review leads us to propose evidence-based criteria for a set of best practices to create session-based cyberbullying datasets. In addition, we perform benchmark experiments comparing the performance of state-of-the-art session-based cyberbullying detection models as well as large pre-trained language models across two different datasets. Through our review, we also put forth a set of open challenges as future research directions.
Explainable Sparse Knowledge Graph Completion via High-order Graph Reasoning Network
Chen, Weijian, Cao, Yixin, Feng, Fuli, He, Xiangnan, Zhang, Yongdong
Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are becoming increasingly essential infrastructures in many applications while suffering from incompleteness issues. The KG completion task (KGC) automatically predicts missing facts based on an incomplete KG. However, existing methods perform unsatisfactorily in real-world scenarios. On the one hand, their performance will dramatically degrade along with the increasing sparsity of KGs. On the other hand, the inference procedure for prediction is an untrustworthy black box. This paper proposes a novel explainable model for sparse KGC, compositing high-order reasoning into a graph convolutional network, namely HoGRN. It can not only improve the generalization ability to mitigate the information insufficiency issue but also provide interpretability while maintaining the model's effectiveness and efficiency. There are two main components that are seamlessly integrated for joint optimization. First, the high-order reasoning component learns high-quality relation representations by capturing endogenous correlation among relations. This can reflect logical rules to justify a broader of missing facts. Second, the entity updating component leverages a weight-free Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to efficiently model KG structures with interpretability. Unlike conventional methods, we conduct entity aggregation and design composition-based attention in the relational space without additional parameters. The lightweight design makes HoGRN better suitable for sparse settings. For evaluation, we have conducted extensive experiments-the results of HoGRN on several sparse KGs present impressive improvements (9% MRR gain on average). Further ablation and case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the main components. Our codes will be released upon acceptance.
RILI: Robustly Influencing Latent Intent
Parekh, Sagar, Habibian, Soheil, Losey, Dylan P.
When robots interact with human partners, often these partners change their behavior in response to the robot. On the one hand this is challenging because the robot must learn to coordinate with a dynamic partner. But on the other hand -- if the robot understands these dynamics -- it can harness its own behavior, influence the human, and guide the team towards effective collaboration. Prior research enables robots to learn to influence other robots or simulated agents. In this paper we extend these learning approaches to now influence humans. What makes humans especially hard to influence is that -- not only do humans react to the robot -- but the way a single user reacts to the robot may change over time, and different humans will respond to the same robot behavior in different ways. We therefore propose a robust approach that learns to influence changing partner dynamics. Our method first trains with a set of partners across repeated interactions, and learns to predict the current partner's behavior based on the previous states, actions, and rewards. Next, we rapidly adapt to new partners by sampling trajectories the robot learned with the original partners, and then leveraging those existing behaviors to influence the new partner dynamics. We compare our resulting algorithm to state-of-the-art baselines across simulated environments and a user study where the robot and participants collaborate to build towers. We find that our approach outperforms the alternatives, even when the partner follows new or unexpected dynamics. Videos of the user study are available here: https://youtu.be/lYsWM8An18g
In Defense of Core-set: A Density-aware Core-set Selection for Active Learning
Active learning enables the efficient construction of a labeled dataset by labeling informative samples from an unlabeled dataset. In a real-world active learning scenario, considering the diversity of the selected samples is crucial because many redundant or highly similar samples exist. Core-set approach is the promising diversity-based method selecting diverse samples based on the distance between samples. However, the approach poorly performs compared to the uncertainty-based approaches that select the most difficult samples where neural models reveal low confidence. In this work, we analyze the feature space through the lens of the density and, interestingly, observe that locally sparse regions tend to have more informative samples than dense regions. Motivated by our analysis, we empower the core-set approach with the density-awareness and propose a density-aware core-set (DACS). The strategy is to estimate the density of the unlabeled samples and select diverse samples mainly from sparse regions. To reduce the computational bottlenecks in estimating the density, we also introduce a new density approximation based on locality-sensitive hashing. Experimental results clearly demonstrate the efficacy of DACS in both classification and regression tasks and specifically show that DACS can produce state-of-the-art performance in a practical scenario. Since DACS is weakly dependent on neural architectures, we present a simple yet effective combination method to show that the existing methods can be beneficially combined with DACS.