Statistical Learning
A Self-Attention Network based Node Embedding Model
Nguyen, Dai Quoc, Nguyen, Tu Dinh, Phung, Dinh
Despite several signs of progress have been made recently, limited research has been conducted for an inductive setting where embeddings are required for newly unseen nodes -- a setting encountered commonly in practical applications of deep learning for graph networks. This significantly affects the performances of downstream tasks such as node classification, link prediction or community extraction. To this end, we propose SANNE -- a novel unsupervised embedding model -- whose central idea is to employ a transformer self-attention network to iteratively aggregate vector representations of nodes in random walks. Our SANNE aims to produce plausible embeddings not only for present nodes, but also for newly unseen nodes. Experimental results show that the proposed SANNE obtains state-of-the-art results for the node classification task on well-known benchmark datasets.
Machine learning discrimination of Parkinson's Disease stages from walker-mounted sensors data
Seedat, Nabeel, Aharonson, Vered
Clinical methods that assess gait in Parkinson's Disease (PD) are mostly qualitative. Quantitative methods necessitate costly instrumentation or cumbersome wearable devices, which limits their usability. Only few of these methods can discriminate different stages in PD progression. This study applies machine learning methods to discriminate six stages of PD. The data was acquired by low cost walker-mounted sensors in an experiment at a movement disorders clinic and the PD stages were clinically labeled. A large set of features, some unique to this study are extracted and three feature selection methods are compared using a multi-class Random Forest (RF) classifier. The feature subset selected by the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) method provided performance similar to the full feature set: 93% accuracy and had significantly shorter computation time. Compared to PCA, this method also enabled clinical interpretability of the selected features, an essential attribute to healthcare applications. All selected-feature sets are dominated by information theoretic features and statistical features and offer insights into the characteristics of gait deterioration in PD. The results indicate a feasibility of machine learning to accurately classify PD severity stages from kinematic signals acquired by low-cost, walker-mounted sensors and implies a potential to aid medical practitioners in the quantitative assessment of PD progression. The study presents a solution to the small and noisy data problem, which is common in most sensor-based healthcare assessments.
MUMBO: MUlti-task Max-value Bayesian Optimization
Moss, Henry B., Leslie, David S., Rayson, Paul
We propose MUMBO, the first high-performing yet computationally efficient acquisition function for multi-task Bayesian optimization. Here, the challenge is to perform efficient optimization by evaluating low-cost functions somehow related to our true target function. This is a broad class of problems including the popular task of multi-fidelity optimization. However, while information-theoretic acquisition functions are known to provide state-of-the-art Bayesian optimization, existing implementations for multi-task scenarios have prohibitive computational requirements. Previous acquisition functions have therefore been suitable only for problems with both low-dimensional parameter spaces and function query costs sufficiently large to overshadow very significant optimization overheads. In this work, we derive a novel multi-task version of entropy search, delivering robust performance with low computational overheads across classic optimization challenges and multi-task hyper-parameter tuning. MUMBO is scalable and efficient, allowing multi-task Bayesian optimization to be deployed in problems with rich parameter and fidelity spaces.
Deep Residual Mixture Models
Hรคmรคlรคinen, Perttu, Solin, Arno
We propose Deep Residual Mixture Models (DRMMs) which share the many desirable properties of Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), but with a crucial benefit: The modeling capacity of a DRMM can grow exponentially with depth, while the number of model parameters only grows quadratically. DRMMs allow for extremely flexible conditional sampling, as the conditioning variables can be freely selected without re-training the model, and it is easy to combine the sampling with priors and (in)equality constraints. DRMMs should be applicable where GMMs are traditionally used, but as demonstrated in our experiments, DRMMs scale better to complex, high-dimensional data. We demonstrate the approach in constrained multi-limb inverse kinematics and image completion.
MultiImport: Inferring Node Importance in a Knowledge Graph from Multiple Input Signals
Park, Namyong, Kan, Andrey, Dong, Xin Luna, Zhao, Tong, Faloutsos, Christos
Given multiple input signals, how can we infer node importance in a knowledge graph (KG)? Node importance estimation is a crucial and challenging task that can benefit a lot of applications including recommendation, search, and query disambiguation. A key challenge towards this goal is how to effectively use input from different sources. On the one hand, a KG is a rich source of information, with multiple types of nodes and edges. On the other hand, there are external input signals, such as the number of votes or pageviews, which can directly tell us about the importance of entities in a KG. While several methods have been developed to tackle this problem, their use of these external signals has been limited as they are not designed to consider multiple signals simultaneously. In this paper, we develop an end-to-end model MultiImport, which infers latent node importance from multiple, potentially overlapping, input signals. MultiImport is a latent variable model that captures the relation between node importance and input signals, and effectively learns from multiple signals with potential conflicts. Also, MultiImport provides an effective estimator based on attentive graph neural networks. We ran experiments on real-world KGs to show that MultiImport handles several challenges involved with inferring node importance from multiple input signals, and consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving up to 23.7% higher NDCG@100 than the state-of-the-art method.
Fast Mixing of Multi-Scale Langevin Dynamics under the Manifold Hypothesis
Block, Adam, Mroueh, Youssef, Rakhlin, Alexander, Ross, Jerret
Recently, the task of image generation has attracted much attention. In particular, the recent empirical successes of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique of Langevin Dynamics have prompted a number of theoretical advances; despite this, several outstanding problems remain. First, the Langevin Dynamics is run in very high dimension on a nonconvex landscape; in the worst case, due to the NP-hardness of nonconvex optimization, it is thought that Langevin Dynamics mixes only in time exponential in the dimension. In this work, we demonstrate how the manifold hypothesis allows for the considerable reduction of mixing time, from exponential in the ambient dimension to depending only on the (much smaller) intrinsic dimension of the data. Second, the high dimension of the sampling space significantly hurts the performance of Langevin Dynamics; we leverage a multi-scale approach to help ameliorate this issue and observe that this multi-resolution algorithm allows for a trade-off between image quality and computational expense in generation.
Differentially-private Federated Neural Architecture Search
Singh, Ishika, Zhou, Haoyi, Yang, Kunlin, Ding, Meng, Lin, Bill, Xie, Pengtao
Neural architecture search, which aims to automatically search for architectures (e.g., convolution, max pooling) of neural networks that maximize validation performance, has achieved remarkable progress recently. In many application scenarios, several parties would like to collaboratively search for a shared neural architecture by leveraging data from all parties. However, due to privacy concerns, no party wants its data to be seen by other parties. To address this problem, we propose federated neural architecture search (FNAS), where different parties collectively search for a differentiable architecture by exchanging gradients of architecture variables without exposing their data to other parties. To further preserve privacy, we study differentially-private FNAS (DP-FNAS), which adds random noise to the gradients of architecture variables. We provide theoretical guarantees of DP-FNAS in achieving differential privacy. Experiments show that DP-FNAS can search highly-performant neural architectures while protecting the privacy of individual parties.
Density of States Estimation for Out-of-Distribution Detection
Morningstar, Warren R., Ham, Cusuh, Gallagher, Andrew G., Lakshminarayanan, Balaji, Alemi, Alexander A., Dillon, Joshua V.
Perhaps surprisingly, recent studies have shown probabilistic model likelihoods have poor specificity for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and often assign higher likelihoods to OOD data than in-distribution data. To ameliorate this issue we propose DoSE, the density of states estimator. Drawing on the statistical physics notion of ``density of states,'' the DoSE decision rule avoids direct comparison of model probabilities, and instead utilizes the ``probability of the model probability,'' or indeed the frequency of any reasonable statistic. The frequency is calculated using nonparametric density estimators (e.g., KDE and one-class SVM) which measure the typicality of various model statistics given the training data and from which we can flag test points with low typicality as anomalous. Unlike many other methods, DoSE requires neither labeled data nor OOD examples. DoSE is modular and can be trivially applied to any existing, trained model. We demonstrate DoSE's state-of-the-art performance against other unsupervised OOD detectors on previously established ``hard'' benchmarks.
Information Mandala: Statistical Distance Matrix with Clustering
In machine learning, observation features are measured in a metric space to obtain their distance function for optimization. Given similar features that are statistically sufficient as a population, a statistical distance between two probability distributions can be calculated for more precise learning. Provided the observed features are multi-valued, the statistical distance function is still efficient. However, due to its scalar output, it cannot be applied to represent detailed distances between feature elements. To resolve this problem, this paper extends the traditional statistical distance to a matrix form, called a statistical distance matrix. In experiments, the proposed approach performs well in object recognition tasks and clearly and intuitively represents the dissimilarities between cat and dog images in the CIFAR dataset, even when directly calculated using the image pixels. By using the hierarchical clustering of the statistical distance matrix, the image pixels can be separated into several clusters that are geometrically arranged around a center like a Mandala pattern. The statistical distance matrix with clustering, called the Information Mandala, is beyond ordinary saliency maps and can help to understand the basic principles of the convolution neural network.
Principled learning method for Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization with local perturbations
Kwon, Yongchan, Kim, Wonyoung, Won, Joong-Ho, Paik, Myunghee Cho
Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization (WDRO) attempts to learn a model that minimizes the local worst-case risk in the vicinity of the empirical data distribution defined by Wasserstein ball. While WDRO has received attention as a promising tool for inference since its introduction, its theoretical understanding has not been fully matured. Gao et al. (2017) proposed a minimizer based on a tractable approximation of the local worst-case risk, but without showing risk consistency. In this paper, we propose a minimizer based on a novel approximation theorem and provide the corresponding risk consistency results. Furthermore, we develop WDRO inference for locally perturbed data that include the Mixup (Zhang et al., 2017) as a special case. We show that our approximation and risk consistency results naturally extend to the cases when data are locally perturbed. Numerical experiments demonstrate robustness of the proposed method using image classification datasets. Our results show that the proposed method achieves significantly higher accuracy than baseline models on noisy datasets.