Knowledge distillation, a widely used model compression technique, works on the basis of transferring knowledge from a cumbersome teacher model to a lightweight student model. The technique involves jointly optimizing the task specific and knowledge distillation losses with a weight assigned to them. Despite these weights playing a crucial role in the performance of the distillation process, current methods provide equal weight to both losses, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Knowledge Distillation, a novel technique inspired by curriculum learning to adaptively weigh the losses at instance level. This technique goes by the notion that sample difficulty increases with teacher loss. Our method follows a plug-and-play paradigm that can be applied on top of any task-specific and distillation objectives. Experiments show that our method performs better than conventional knowledge distillation method and existing instance-level loss functions.

Cancer, a leading cause of death globally, occurs due to genomic changes and manifests heterogeneously across patients. To advance research on personalized treatment strategies, the effectiveness of various drugs on cells derived from cancers (`cell lines') is experimentally determined in laboratory settings. Nevertheless, variations in the distribution of genomic data and drug responses between cell lines and humans arise due to biological and environmental differences. Moreover, while genomic profiles of many cancer patients are readily available, the scarcity of corresponding drug response data limits the ability to train machine learning models that can predict drug response in patients effectively. Recent cancer drug response prediction methods have largely followed the paradigm of unsupervised domain-invariant representation learning followed by a downstream drug response classification step. Introducing supervision in both stages is challenging due to heterogeneous patient response to drugs and limited drug response data. This paper addresses these challenges through a novel representation learning method in the first phase and weak supervision in the second. Experimental results on real patient data demonstrate the efficacy of our method (WISER) over state-of-the-art alternatives on predicting personalized drug response.

Recent developments in the field of diffusion models have demonstrated an exceptional capacity to generate high-quality prompt-conditioned image edits. Nevertheless, previous approaches have primarily relied on textual prompts for image editing, which tend to be less effective when making precise edits to specific objects or fine-grained regions within a scene containing single/multiple objects. We introduce a novel framework for zero-shot localized multi-object editing through a multi-diffusion process to overcome this challenge. This framework empowers users to perform various operations on objects within an image, such as adding, replacing, or editing $\textbf{many}$ objects in a complex scene $\textbf{in one pass}$. Our approach leverages foreground masks and corresponding simple text prompts that exert localized influences on the target regions resulting in high-fidelity image editing. A combination of cross-attention and background preservation losses within the latent space ensures that the characteristics of the object being edited are preserved while simultaneously achieving a high-quality, seamless reconstruction of the background with fewer artifacts compared to the current methods. We also curate and release a dataset dedicated to multi-object editing, named $\texttt{LoMOE}$-Bench. Our experiments against existing state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the improved effectiveness of our approach in terms of both image editing quality and inference speed.

The heightened emphasis on the regulation of deep generative models, propelled by escalating concerns pertaining to privacy and compliance with regulatory frameworks, underscores the imperative need for precise control mechanisms over these models. This urgency is particularly underscored by instances in which generative models generate outputs that encompass objectionable, offensive, or potentially injurious content. In response, machine unlearning has emerged to selectively forget specific knowledge or remove the influence of undesirable data subsets from pre-trained models. However, modern machine unlearning approaches typically assume access to model parameters and architectural details during unlearning, which is not always feasible. In multitude of downstream tasks, these models function as black-box systems, with inaccessible pre-trained parameters, architectures, and training data. In such scenarios, the possibility of filtering undesired outputs becomes a practical alternative. The primary goal of this study is twofold: first, to elucidate the relationship between filtering and unlearning processes, and second, to formulate a methodology aimed at mitigating the display of undesirable outputs generated from models characterized as black-box systems. Theoretical analysis in this study demonstrates that, in the context of black-box models, filtering can be seen as a form of weak unlearning. Our proposed \textbf{\textit{Feature Aware Similarity Thresholding(FAST)}} method effectively suppresses undesired outputs by systematically encoding the representation of unwanted features in the latent space.

Collective motion is an ubiquitous phenomenon in nature, inspiring engineers, physicists and mathematicians to develop mathematical models and bio-inspired designs. Collective motion at small to medium group sizes ($\sim$10-1000 individuals, also called the `mesoscale'), can show nontrivial features due to stochasticity. Therefore, characterizing both the deterministic and stochastic aspects of the dynamics is crucial in the study of mesoscale collective phenomena. Here, we use a physics-inspired, neural-network based approach to characterize the stochastic group dynamics of interacting individuals, through a stochastic differential equation (SDE) that governs the collective dynamics of the group. We apply this technique on both synthetic and real-world datasets, and identify the deterministic and stochastic aspects of the dynamics using drift and diffusion fields, enabling us to make novel inferences about the nature of order in these systems.

In several supervised learning scenarios, auxiliary losses are used in order to introduce additional information or constraints into the supervised learning objective. For instance, knowledge distillation aims to mimic outputs of a powerful teacher model; similarly, in rule-based approaches, weak labeling information is provided by labeling functions which may be noisy rule-based approximations to true labels. We tackle the problem of learning to combine these losses in a principled manner. Our proposal, AMAL, uses a bi-level optimization criterion on validation data to learn optimal mixing weights, at an instance level, over the training data. We describe a meta-learning approach towards solving this bi-level objective and show how it can be applied to different scenarios in supervised learning. Experiments in a number of knowledge distillation and rule-denoising domains show that AMAL provides noticeable gains over competitive baselines in those domains. We empirically analyze our method and share insights into the mechanisms through which it provides performance gains.

Regularized Auto-Encoders (RAEs) form a rich class of neural generative models. They effectively model the joint-distribution between the data and the latent space using an Encoder-Decoder combination, with regularization imposed in terms of a prior over the latent space. Despite their advantages, such as stability in training, the performance of AE based models has not reached the superior standards as that of the other generative models such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Motivated by this, we examine the effect of the latent prior on the generation quality of deterministic AE models in this paper. Specifically, we consider the class of RAEs with deterministic Encoder-Decoder pairs, Wasserstein Auto-Encoders (WAE), and show that having a fixed prior distribution, \textit{a priori}, oblivious to the dimensionality of the `true' latent space, will lead to the infeasibility of the optimization problem considered. Further, we show that, in the finite data regime, despite knowing the correct latent dimensionality, there exists a bias-variance trade-off with any arbitrary prior imposition. As a remedy to both the issues mentioned above, we introduce an additional state space in the form of flexibly learnable latent priors, in the optimization objective of the WAEs. We implicitly learn the distribution of the latent prior jointly with the AE training, which not only makes the learning objective feasible but also facilitates operation on different points of the bias-variance curve. We show the efficacy of our model, called FlexAE, through several experiments on multiple datasets, and demonstrate that it is the new state-of-the-art for the AE based generative models.

Two noteworthy quantities of widespread interest are the mutual information (MI) and conditional mutual information (CMI). Estimation of information theoretic quantities such as mutual information and its conditional In this work, we focus on estimating CMI, a quantity variant has drawn interest in recent times owing which provides the degree of dependence between to their multifaceted applications. Newly two random variables X and Y given a third variable proposed neural estimators for these quantities Z. CMI provides a strong theoretical guarantee that have overcome severe drawbacks of classical I(X; Y Z) 0 X Y Z. So, one motivation kNN-based estimators in high dimensions. In for estimating CMI is its use in conditional independence this work, we focus on conditional mutual information (CI) testing and detecting causal associations. CI (CMI) estimation by utilizing its formulation tester built using kNN based CMI estimator coupled with as a minmax optimization problem.