Statistical Learning
Lazy OCO: Online Convex Optimization on a Switching Budget
We study a variant of online convex optimization where the player is permitted to switch decisions at most $S$ times in expectation throughout $T$ rounds. Similar problems have been addressed in prior work for the discrete decision set setting, and more recently in the continuous setting but only with an adaptive adversary. In this work, we aim to fill the gap and present computationally efficient algorithms in the more prevalent oblivious setting, establishing a regret bound of $O(T/S)$ for general convex losses and $\widetilde O(T/S^2)$ for strongly convex losses. In addition, for stochastic i.i.d.~losses, we present a simple algorithm that performs $\log T$ switches with only a multiplicative $\log T$ factor overhead in its regret in both the general and strongly convex settings. Finally, we complement our algorithms with lower bounds that match our upper bounds in some of the cases we consider.
Dimension Free Generalization Bounds for Non Linear Metric Learning
In this work we study generalization guarantees for the metric learning problem, where the metric is induced by a neural network type embedding of the data. Specifically, we provide uniform generalization bounds for two regimes -- the sparse regime, and a non-sparse regime which we term \emph{bounded amplification}. The sparse regime bounds correspond to situations where $\ell_1$-type norms of the parameters are small. Similarly to the situation in classification, solutions satisfying such bounds can be obtained by an appropriate regularization of the problem. On the other hand, unregularized SGD optimization of a metric learning loss typically does not produce sparse solutions. We show that despite this lack of sparsity, by relying on a different, new property of the solutions, it is still possible to provide dimension free generalization guarantees. Consequently, these bounds can explain generalization in non sparse real experimental situations. We illustrate the studied phenomena on the MNIST and 20newsgroups datasets.
A self-adaptive and robust fission clustering algorithm via heat diffusion and maximal turning angle
Han, Yu, Lu, Shizhan, Xu, Haiyan
Cluster analysis, which focuses on the grouping and categorization of similar elements, is widely used in various fields of research. A novel and fast clustering algorithm, fission clustering algorithm, is proposed in recent year. In this article, we propose a robust fission clustering (RFC) algorithm and a self-adaptive noise identification method. The RFC and the self-adaptive noise identification method are combine to propose a self-adaptive robust fission clustering (SARFC) algorithm. Several frequently-used datasets were applied to test the performance of the proposed clustering approach and to compare the results with those of other algorithms. The comprehensive comparisons indicate that the proposed method has advantages over other common methods.
PAC-Bayes Bounds for Meta-learning with Data-Dependent Prior
Liu, Tianyu, Lu, Jie, Yan, Zheng, Zhang, Guangquan
By leveraging experience from previous tasks, meta-learning algorithms can achieve effective fast adaptation ability when encountering new tasks. However it is unclear how the generalization property applies to new tasks. Probably approximately correct (PAC) Bayes bound theory provides a theoretical framework to analyze the generalization performance for meta-learning. We derive three novel generalisation error bounds for meta-learning based on PAC-Bayes relative entropy bound. Furthermore, using the empirical risk minimization (ERM) method, a PAC-Bayes bound for meta-learning with data-dependent prior is developed. Experiments illustrate that the proposed three PAC-Bayes bounds for meta-learning guarantee a competitive generalization performance guarantee, and the extended PAC-Bayes bound with data-dependent prior can achieve rapid convergence ability.
Ising Model Selection Using $\ell_{1}$-Regularized Linear Regression
Meng, Xiangming, Obuchi, Tomoyuki, Kabashima, Yoshiyuki
We theoretically investigate the performance of $\ell_{1}$-regularized linear regression ($\ell_1$-LinR) for the problem of Ising model selection using the replica method from statistical mechanics. The regular random graph is considered under paramagnetic assumption. Our results show that despite model misspecification, the $\ell_1$-LinR estimator can successfully recover the graph structure of the Ising model with $N$ variables using $M=\mathcal{O}\left(\log N\right)$ samples, which is of the same order as that of $\ell_{1}$-regularized logistic regression. Moreover, we provide a computationally efficient method to accurately predict the non-asymptotic performance of the $\ell_1$-LinR estimator with moderate $M$ and $N$. Simulations show an excellent agreement between theoretical predictions and experimental results, which supports our findings.
Learning to Generate Fair Clusters from Demonstrations
Galhotra, Sainyam, Saisubramanian, Sandhya, Zilberstein, Shlomo
Fair clustering is the process of grouping similar entities together, while satisfying a mathematically well-defined fairness metric as a constraint. Due to the practical challenges in precise model specification, the prescribed fairness constraints are often incomplete and act as proxies to the intended fairness requirement, leading to biased outcomes when the system is deployed. We examine how to identify the intended fairness constraint for a problem based on limited demonstrations from an expert. Each demonstration is a clustering over a subset of the data. We present an algorithm to identify the fairness metric from demonstrations and generate clusters using existing off-the-shelf clustering techniques, and analyze its theoretical properties. To extend our approach to novel fairness metrics for which clustering algorithms do not currently exist, we present a greedy method for clustering. Additionally, we investigate how to generate interpretable solutions using our approach. Empirical evaluation on three real-world datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in quickly identifying the underlying fairness and interpretability constraints, which are then used to generate fair and interpretable clusters.
Mitigating belief projection in explainable artificial intelligence via Bayesian Teaching
Yang, Scott Cheng-Hsin, Vong, Wai Keen, Sojitra, Ravi B., Folke, Tomas, Shafto, Patrick
State-of-the-art deep-learning systems use decision rules that are challenging for humans to model. Explainable AI (XAI) attempts to improve human understanding but rarely accounts for how people typically reason about unfamiliar agents. We propose explicitly modeling the human explainee via Bayesian Teaching, which evaluates explanations by how much they shift explainees' inferences toward a desired goal. We assess Bayesian Teaching in a binary image classification task across a variety of contexts. Absent intervention, participants predict that the AI's classifications will match their own, but explanations generated by Bayesian Teaching improve their ability to predict the AI's judgements by moving them away from this prior belief. Bayesian Teaching further allows each case to be broken down into sub-examples (here saliency maps). These sub-examples complement whole examples by improving error detection for familiar categories, whereas whole examples help predict correct AI judgements of unfamiliar cases.
U-vectors: Generating clusterable speaker embedding from unlabeled data
Mridha, M. F., Ohi, Abu Quwsar, Ali, M. Ameer, Monowar, Muhammad Mostafa, Hamid, Md. Abdul
Speaker recognition deals with recognizing speakers by their speech. Strategies related to speaker recognition may explore speech timbre properties, accent, speech patterns and so on. Supervised speaker recognition has been dramatically investigated. However, through rigorous excavation, we have found that unsupervised speaker recognition systems mostly depend on domain adaptation policy. This paper introduces a speaker recognition strategy dealing with unlabeled data, which generates clusterable embedding vectors from small fixed-size speech frames. The unsupervised training strategy involves an assumption that a small speech segment should include a single speaker. Depending on such a belief, we construct pairwise constraints to train twin deep learning architectures with noise augmentation policies, that generate speaker embeddings. Without relying on domain adaption policy, the process unsupervisely produces clusterable speaker embeddings, and we name it unsupervised vectors (u-vectors). The evaluation is concluded in two popular speaker recognition datasets for English language, TIMIT, and LibriSpeech. Also, we include a Bengali dataset, Bengali ASR, to illustrate the diversity of the domain shifts for speaker recognition systems. Finally, we conclude that the proposed approach achieves remarkable performance using pairwise architectures.
MIN2Net: End-to-End Multi-Task Learning for Subject-Independent Motor Imagery EEG Classification
Autthasan, Phairot, Chaisaen, Rattanaphon, Sudhawiyangkul, Thapanun, Rangpong, Phurin, Kiatthaveephong, Suktipol, Dilokthanakul, Nat, Bhakdisongkhram, Gun, Phan, Huy, Guan, Cuntai, Wilaiprasitporn, Theerawit
Advances in the motor imagery (MI)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) allow control of several applications by decoding neurophysiological phenomena, which are usually recorded by electroencephalography (EEG) using a non-invasive technique. Despite great advances in MI-based BCI, EEG rhythms are specific to a subject and various changes over time. These issues point to significant challenges to enhance the classification performance, especially in a subject-independent manner. To overcome these challenges, we propose MIN2Net, a novel end-to-end multi-task learning to tackle this task. We integrate deep metric learning into a multi-task autoencoder to learn a compact and discriminative latent representation from EEG and perform classification simultaneously. This approach reduces the complexity in pre-processing, results in significant performance improvement on EEG classification. Experimental results in a subject-independent manner show that MIN2Net outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques, achieving an accuracy improvement of 11.65%, 1.03%, and 10.53% on the BCI competition IV 2a, SMR-BCI, and OpenBMI datasets, respectively. We demonstrate that MIN2Net improves discriminative information in the latent representation. This study indicates the possibility and practicality of using this model to develop MI-based BCI applications for new users without the need for calibration.
Online Limited Memory Neural-Linear Bandits with Likelihood Matching
Nabati, Ofir, Zahavy, Tom, Mannor, Shie
We study neural-linear bandits for solving problems where both exploration and representation learning play an important role. Neural-linear bandits leverage the representation power of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and combine it with efficient exploration mechanisms designed for linear contextual bandits on top of the last hidden layer. A recent analysis of DNNs in the "infinite-width" regime suggests that when these models are trained with gradient descent the optimal solution is close to the initialization point and the DNN can be viewed as a kernel machine. As a result, it is possible to exploit linear exploration algorithms on top of a DNN via the kernel construction. The problem is that in practice the kernel changes during the learning process and the agent's performance degrades. This can be resolved by recomputing new uncertainty estimations with stored data. Nevertheless, when the buffer's size is limited, a phenomenon called catastrophic forgetting emerges. Instead, we propose a likelihood matching algorithm that is resilient to catastrophic forgetting and is completely online. We perform simulations on a variety of datasets and observe that our algorithm achieves comparable performance to the unlimited memory approach while exhibits resilience to catastrophic forgetting.