Censored Quantile Regression Neural Networks for Distribution-Free Survival Analysis Tim Pearce
This paper considers doing quantile regression on censored data using neural networks (NNs). This adds to the survival analysis toolkit by allowing direct prediction of the target variable, along with a distribution-free characterisation of uncertainty, using a flexible function approximator. We begin by showing how an algorithm popular in linear models can be applied to NNs. However, the resulting procedure is inefficient, requiring sequential optimisation of an individual NN at each desired quantile. Our major contribution is a novel algorithm that simultaneously optimises a grid of quantiles output by a single NN. To offer theoretical insight into our algorithm, we show firstly that it can be interpreted as a form of expectation-maximisation, and secondly that it exhibits a desirable'self-correcting' property. Experimentally, the algorithm produces quantiles that are better calibrated than existing methods on 10 out of 12 real datasets.
Supplementary Material: Benchmarking Deep Learning Interpretability in Time Series Predictions
We compare popular backpropagation-based and perturbation based post-hoc saliency methods; each method provides feature importance, or "relevance", at a given time step to each input feature in a network.The relevance R The Shapley value is the expected value of the gradients multiplied by the difference between input and reference point. Perturbation-based: - Feature Occlusion (FO) [6] computes attribution as the difference in output after replacing each contiguous region with a given baseline. For time series we considered continuous regions as features with in same time step or multiple continuous time steps. Input features can also be grouped and ablated together rather than individually. Similarly, to feature ablation input features can also be grouped and ablated together rather than individually. Others: - Shapley Value Sampling (SVS) [9] Shapley value measure the contribution of each input features by taking each permutation of the feature and adding them one-by-one to a given baseline and measuring the difference in the output after adding the features.
Staggered Rollout Designs Enable Causal Inference Under Interference Without Network Knowledge
Randomized experiments are widely used to estimate causal effects across many domains. However, classical causal inference approaches rely on independence assumptions that are violated by network interference, when the treatment of one individual influences the outcomes of others. All existing approaches require at least approximate knowledge of the network, which may be unavailable or costly to collect. We consider the task of estimating the total treatment effect (TTE), the average difference between the outcomes when the whole population is treated versus when the whole population is untreated. By leveraging a staggered rollout design, in which treatment is incrementally given to random subsets of individuals, we derive unbiased estimators for TTE that do not rely on any prior structural knowledge of the network, as long as the network interference effects are constrained to low-degree interactions among neighbors of an individual. We derive bounds on the variance of the estimators, and we show in experiments that our estimator performs well against baselines on simulated data. Central to our theoretical contribution is a connection between staggered rollout observations and polynomial extrapolation.
Task-Agnostic Online Reinforcement Learning with an Infinite Mixture of Gaussian Processes
Continuously learning to solve unseen tasks with limited experience has been extensively pursued in meta-learning and continual learning, but with restricted assumptions such as accessible task distributions, independently and identically distributed tasks, and clear task delineations. However, real-world physical tasks frequently violate these assumptions, resulting in performance degradation. This paper proposes a continual online model-based reinforcement learning approach that does not require pre-training to solve task-agnostic problems with unknown task boundaries. We maintain a mixture of experts to handle nonstationarity, and represent each different type of dynamics with a Gaussian Process to efficiently leverage collected data and expressively model uncertainty. We propose a transition prior to account for the temporal dependencies in streaming data and update the mixture online via sequential variational inference. Our approach reliably handles the task distribution shift by generating new models for never-before-seen dynamics and reusing old models for previously seen dynamics. In experiments, our approach outperforms alternative methods in non-stationary tasks, including classic control with changing dynamics and decision making in different driving scenarios.
LLM-Check: Investigating Detection of Hallucinations in Large Language Models
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have become immensely popular due to their outstanding performance on a broad range of tasks, these models are prone to producing hallucinations-- outputs that are fallacious or fabricated yet often appear plausible or tenable at a glance. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive investigation into the nature of hallucinations within LLMs and furthermore explore effective techniques for detecting such inaccuracies in various real-world settings. Prior approaches to detect hallucinations in LLM outputs, such as consistency checks or retrieval-based methods, typically assume access to multiple model responses or large databases. These techniques, however, tend to be computationally expensive in practice, thereby limiting their applicability to real-time analysis. In contrast, in this work, we seek to identify hallucinations within a single response in both white-box and black-box settings by analyzing the internal hidden states, attention maps, and output prediction probabilities of an auxiliary LLM. In addition, we also study hallucination detection in scenarios where ground-truth references are also available, such as in the setting of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). We demonstrate that the proposed detection methods are extremely compute-efficient, with speedups of up to 45x and 450x over other baselines, while achieving significant improvements in detection performance over diverse datasets.