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 Uncertainty


Convergence of the Inexact Langevin Algorithm and Score-based Generative Models in KL Divergence

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We study the Inexact Langevin Dynamics (ILD), Inexact Langevin Algorithm (ILA), and Score-based Generative Modeling (SGM) when utilizing estimated score functions for sampling. Our focus lies in establishing stable biased convergence guarantees in terms of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. To achieve these guarantees, we impose two key assumptions: 1) the target distribution satisfies the log-Sobolev inequality (LSI), and 2) the score estimator exhibits a bounded Moment Generating Function (MGF) error. Notably, the MGF error assumption we adopt is more lenient compared to the $L^\infty$ error assumption used in existing literature. However, it is stronger than the $L^2$ error assumption utilized in recent works, which often leads to unstable bounds. We explore the question of how to obtain a provably accurate score estimator that satisfies the MGF error assumption. Specifically, we demonstrate that a simple estimator based on kernel density estimation fulfills the MGF error assumption for sub-Gaussian target distribution, at the population level.


Robust Bayesian Inference for Measurement Error Models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Measurement error occurs when a set of covariates influencing a response variable are corrupted by noise. This can lead to misleading inference outcomes, particularly in problems where accurately estimating the relationship between covariates and response variables is crucial, such as causal effect estimation. Existing methods for dealing with measurement error often rely on strong assumptions such as knowledge of the error distribution or its variance and availability of replicated measurements of the covariates. We propose a Bayesian Nonparametric Learning framework which is robust to mismeasured covariates, does not require the preceding assumptions, and is able to incorporate prior beliefs about the true error distribution. Our approach gives rise to two methods that are robust to measurement error via different loss functions: one based on the Total Least Squares objective and the other based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). The latter allows for generalisation to non-Gaussian distributed errors and non-linear covariate-response relationships. We provide bounds on the generalisation error using the MMD-loss and showcase the effectiveness of the proposed framework versus prior art in real-world mental health and dietary datasets that contain significant measurement errors.


Provable benefits of score matching

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Score matching is an alternative to maximum likelihood (ML) for estimating a probability distribution parametrized up to a constant of proportionality. By fitting the ''score'' of the distribution, it sidesteps the need to compute this constant of proportionality (which is often intractable). While score matching and variants thereof are popular in practice, precise theoretical understanding of the benefits and tradeoffs with maximum likelihood -- both computational and statistical -- are not well understood. In this work, we give the first example of a natural exponential family of distributions such that the score matching loss is computationally efficient to optimize, and has a comparable statistical efficiency to ML, while the ML loss is intractable to optimize using a gradient-based method. The family consists of exponentials of polynomials of fixed degree, and our result can be viewed as a continuous analogue of recent developments in the discrete setting. Precisely, we show: (1) Designing a zeroth-order or first-order oracle for optimizing the maximum likelihood loss is NP-hard. (2) Maximum likelihood has a statistical efficiency polynomial in the ambient dimension and the radius of the parameters of the family. (3) Minimizing the score matching loss is both computationally and statistically efficient, with complexity polynomial in the ambient dimension.


Context-Aware Bayesian Network Actor-Critic Methods for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods equip a group of autonomous agents with the capability Executing actions in a correlated manner is a common of planning and learning to maximize their joint strategy for human coordination that often utility, or reward signals in the reinforcement learning (RL) leads to better cooperation, which is also potentially literature, which provides a promising paradigm for a range beneficial for cooperative multi-agent reinforcement of real-world applications, such as traffic control (Chu et al., learning (MARL). However, the recent 2019), coordination of multi-robot systems (Corke et al., success of MARL relies heavily on the convenient 2005), and power grid management (Callaway & Hiskens, paradigm of purely decentralized execution, 2010). As a key distinction from the single-agent setting, where there is no action correlation among agents multi-agent joint action spaces grow exponentially with for scalability considerations. In this work, we the number of agents, which imposes significant scalability introduce a Bayesian network to inaugurate correlations issues. As a convenient and commonly adopted solution, between agents' action selections in their most existing cooperative MARL methods only consider joint policy. Theoretically, we establish a theoretical product policies, i.e., each agent selects its local action independently justification for why action dependencies given the state or its observations. Restricting are beneficial by deriving the multi-agent policy to product policies, however, does come at a cost for cooperative gradient formula under such a Bayesian network tasks: consider an example where cars wait at a joint policy and proving its global convergence crossroads, it would be hard for the cars to coordinate their to Nash equilibria under tabular softmax policy movements without knowing others' intentions, potentially parameterization in cooperative Markov games.


Beta Thalassemia Carriers detection empowered federated Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Thalassemia is a group of inherited blood disorders that happen when hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen, is not made enough. It is found all over the body and is needed for survival. If both parents have thalassemia, a child's chance of getting it increases. Genetic counselling and early diagnosis are essential for treating thalassemia and stopping it from being passed on to future generations. It may be hard for healthcare professionals to differentiate between people with thalassemia carriers and those without. The current blood tests for beta thalassemia carriers are too expensive, take too long, and require too much screening equipment. The World Health Organization says there is a high death rate for people with thalassemia. Therefore, it is essential to find thalassemia carriers to act quickly. High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), the standard test method, has problems such as cost, time, and equipment needs. So, there must be a quick and cheap way to find people carrying the thalassemia gene. Using federated learning (FL) techniques, this study shows a new way to find people with the beta-thalassemia gene. FL allows data to be collected and processed on-site while following privacy rules, making it an excellent choice for sensitive health data. Researchers used FL to train a model for beta-thalassemia carriers by looking at the complete blood count results and red blood cell indices. The model was 92.38 % accurate at telling the difference between beta-thalassemia carriers and people who did not have the disease. The proposed FL model is better than other published methods in terms of how well it works, how reliable it is, and how private it is. This research shows a promising, quick, accurate, and low-cost way to find thalassemia carriers and opens the door for screening them on a large scale.


An Adaptive Method for Weak Supervision with Drifting Data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce an adaptive method with formal quality guarantees for weak supervision in a non-stationary setting. Our goal is to infer the unknown labels of a sequence of data by using weak supervision sources that provide independent noisy signals of the correct classification for each data point. This setting includes crowdsourcing and programmatic weak supervision. We focus on the non-stationary case, where the accuracy of the weak supervision sources can drift over time, e.g., because of changes in the underlying data distribution. Due to the drift, older data could provide misleading information to infer the label of the current data point. Previous work relied on a priori assumptions on the magnitude of the drift to decide how much data to use from the past. Comparatively, our algorithm does not require any assumptions on the drift, and it adapts based on the input. In particular, at each step, our algorithm guarantees an estimation of the current accuracies of the weak supervision sources over a window of past observations that minimizes a trade-off between the error due to the variance of the estimation and the error due to the drift. Experiments on synthetic and real-world labelers show that our approach indeed adapts to the drift. Unlike fixed-window-size strategies, it dynamically chooses a window size that allows it to consistently maintain good performance.


Poisoning Network Flow Classifiers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As machine learning (ML) classifiers increasingly oversee the automated monitoring of network traffic, studying their resilience against adversarial attacks becomes critical. This paper focuses on poisoning attacks, specifically backdoor attacks, against network traffic flow classifiers. We investigate the challenging scenario of clean-label poisoning where the adversary's capabilities are constrained to tampering only with the training data - without the ability to arbitrarily modify the training labels or any other component of the training process. We describe a trigger crafting strategy that leverages model interpretability techniques to generate trigger patterns that are effective even at very low poisoning rates. Finally, we design novel strategies to generate stealthy triggers, including an approach based on generative Bayesian network models, with the goal of minimizing the conspicuousness of the trigger, and thus making detection of an ongoing poisoning campaign more challenging. Our findings provide significant insights into the feasibility of poisoning attacks on network traffic classifiers used in multiple scenarios, including detecting malicious communication and application classification.


Accelerating science with human-aware artificial intelligence

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) models trained on published scientific findings have been used to invent valuable materials and targeted therapies, but they typically ignore the human scientists who continually alter the landscape of discovery. Here we show that incorporating the distribution of human expertise by training unsupervised models on simulated inferences cognitively accessible to experts dramatically improves (up to 400%) AI prediction of future discoveries beyond those focused on research content alone, especially when relevant literature is sparse. These models succeed by predicting human predictions and the scientists who will make them. By tuning human-aware AI to avoid the crowd, we can generate scientifically promising "alien" hypotheses unlikely to be imagined or pursued without intervention until the distant future, which hold promise to punctuate scientific advance beyond questions currently pursued. Accelerating human discovery or probing its blind spots, human-aware AI enables us to move toward and beyond the contemporary scientific frontier.


Theoretical Behavior of XAI Methods in the Presence of Suppressor Variables

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, the community of 'explainable artificial intelligence' (XAI) has created a vast body of methods to bridge a perceived gap between model 'complexity' and 'interpretability'. However, a concrete problem to be solved by XAI methods has not yet been formally stated. As a result, XAI methods are lacking theoretical and empirical evidence for the 'correctness' of their explanations, limiting their potential use for quality-control and transparency purposes. At the same time, Haufe et al. (2014) showed, using simple toy examples, that even standard interpretations of linear models can be highly misleading. Specifically, high importance may be attributed to so-called suppressor variables lacking any statistical relation to the prediction target. This behavior has been confirmed empirically for a large array of XAI methods in Wilming et al. (2022). Here, we go one step further by deriving analytical expressions for the behavior of a variety of popular XAI methods on a simple two-dimensional binary classification problem involving Gaussian class-conditional distributions. We show that the majority of the studied approaches will attribute non-zero importance to a non-class-related suppressor feature in the presence of correlated noise. This poses important limitations on the interpretations and conclusions that the outputs of these XAI methods can afford.


Priors for symbolic regression

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

When choosing between competing symbolic models for a data set, a human will naturally prefer the "simpler" expression or the one which more closely resembles equations previously seen in a similar context. This suggests a non-uniform prior on functions, which is, however, rarely considered within a symbolic regression (SR) framework. In this paper we develop methods to incorporate detailed prior information on both functions and their parameters into SR. Our prior on the structure of a function is based on a $n$-gram language model, which is sensitive to the arrangement of operators relative to one another in addition to the frequency of occurrence of each operator. We also develop a formalism based on the Fractional Bayes Factor to treat numerical parameter priors in such a way that models may be fairly compared though the Bayesian evidence, and explicitly compare Bayesian, Minimum Description Length and heuristic methods for model selection. We demonstrate the performance of our priors relative to literature standards on benchmarks and a real-world dataset from the field of cosmology.