datapoint
How to Allocate Your Tokens? Scaling Laws with Training Steps and Batch Size
We propose a scaling law that takes into account model size and training data while explicitly splitting the latter into training steps and batch size (called three-term law). Fitting the proposed law on a large set of training runs, we find that it correctly recovers the scaling of the optimal batch size. Moreover, because it makes use of training runs with suboptimal batch size, our proposed law can be robustly fit with a significantly smaller amount of training runs. We further show that the three-term law can be used to derive scaling laws for suboptimal batch sizes, and that it matches previous empirical findings related to the critical batch size.
Right for the Right Reasons: Avoiding Reasoning Shortcuts via Prototypical Neurosymbolic AI
Neurosymbolic AI is growing in popularity thanks to its ability to combine neural perception and symbolic reasoning in end-to-end trainable models. However, recent findings reveal these are prone to shortcut reasoning, i.e., to learning unindented concepts-or neural predicates-which exploit spurious correlations to satisfy the symbolic constraints. In this paper, we address reasoning shortcuts at their root cause and we introduce Prototypical Neurosymbolic architectures. These models are able to satisfy the symbolic constraints (be right) because they have learnt the correct basic concepts (for the right reasons) and not because of spurious correlations, even in extremely low data regimes. Leveraging the theory of prototypical learning, we demonstrate that we can effectively avoid reasoning shortcuts by training the models to satisfy the background knowledge while taking into account the similarity of the input with respect to the handful of labelled datapoints. We extensively validate our approach on the recently proposed rsbenchbenchmark suite in a variety of settings and tasks with very scarce supervision: we show significant improvements in learning the right concepts both in synthetic tasks (MNIST-EvenOdd and Kand-Logic) and real-world, high-stake ones (BDD-OIA). Our findings pave the way to prototype grounding as an effective, annotation-efficient strategy for safe and reliable neurosymbolic learning.
Sample-efficient Learning of Concepts with Theoretical Guarantees: from Data to Concepts without Interventions
Machine learning is a vital part of many real-world systems, but concerns remain about the lack of interpretability, explainability and robustness of black-box AI systems. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBM) address some of these challenges by learning interpretable concepts from high-dimensional data, e.g.
Robustness of classifiers: from adversarial to random noise
Alhussein Fawzi, Seyed-Mohsen Moosavi-Dezfooli, Pascal Frossard
Several recent works have shown that state-of-the-art classifiers are vulnerable to worst-case (i.e., adversarial) perturbations of the datapoints. On the other hand, it has been empirically observed that these same classifiers are relatively robust to random noise. In this paper, we propose to study a semi-random noise regime that generalizes both the random and worst-case noise regimes. We propose the first quantitative analysis of the robustness of nonlinear classifiers in this general noise regime. We establish precise theoretical bounds on the robustness of classifiers in this general regime, which depend on the curvature of the classifier's decision boundary. Our bounds confirm and quantify the empirical observations that classifiers satisfying curvature constraints are robust to random noise. Moreover, we quantify the robustness of classifiers in terms of the subspace dimension in the semi-random noise regime, and show that our bounds remarkably interpolate between the worst-case and random noise regimes. We perform experiments and show that the derived bounds provide very accurate estimates when applied to various state-of-the-art deep neural networks and datasets. This result suggests bounds on the curvature of the classifiers' decision boundaries that we support experimentally, and more generally offers important insights onto the geometry of high dimensional classification problems.
BanditPAM++: Faster k-medoids Clustering
Clustering is a fundamental task in data science with wide-ranging applications. In k-medoids clustering, cluster centers must be actual datapoints and arbitrary distance metrics may be used; these features allow for greater interpretability of the cluster centers and the clustering of exotic objects in k-medoids clustering, respectively.
Turtle shell clustering: A mixture approach to discriminative clustering with applications to flow cytometry and other data
Neal, Mackenzie R., McNicholas, Paul D., White, Arthur
Generative approaches to clustering provide information on geometric properties of clusters, whereas discriminative approaches provide boundaries between clusters. Ideas from both approaches are incorporated to present a fully unsupervised, probabilistic, and discriminative clustering method via a regularized mutual information objective function, wherein a mixture of mixtures of Gaussian and uniform distributions is used for formulation of the conditional model. Automatic selection of the number of components is established with the introduction of the regularizing term and a merge step, similar to those applied in reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo methods used in Bayesian clustering. Consequently, the turtle shell method -- a fully unsupervised clustering method capable of estimating non-linear boundary lines, automatically selecting the number of components, and capturing intuitive clusters in the presence of data abnormalities such as noise and/or irregular cluster shapes -- is introduced. We test this method on various simulated and real datasets commonly explored in clustering research, and extend the analysis to datasets arising from flow cytometry experiments.
Appendix Conditional Independence Dependence in 10H and
We investigate the degree to which our conditional independence assumption is satisfied empirically in the datasets used in the paper. Specifically, of interest is the assumption of conditional independence of m(x) and h(x), given y. Assessing conditional independence is not straightforward given that m(x) is a K-dimensional real-valued vector and h(x) and yeach take one of K categorical values, with K = 10 for CIFAR-10H and K = 16 for ImageNet-16H. While there exist statistical tests for assessing conditional independence for categorical random variables, with real-valued variables the situation is less straightforward and there are multiple options such as different non-parametric tests involving different tradeoffs [Runge, 2018, Marx and Vreeken, 2019, Mukherjee et al., 2020, Berrett et al., 2020]. Given these issues we investigate the degree of conditional dependence using two relatively simple approaches. The first approach looks at the conditional mutual information (CMI) between the predicted label from the model and the predicted label from the human, conditioned on the true label.