Gene regulatory network inference (GRNI) is a challenging problem, particularly owing to the presence of zeros in single-cell RNA sequencing data: some are biological zeros representing no gene expression, while some others are technical zeros arising from the sequencing procedure (aka dropouts), which may bias GRNI by distorting the joint distribution of the measured gene expressions. Existing approaches typically handle dropout error via imputation, which may introduce spurious relations as the true joint distribution is generally unidentifiable. To tackle this issue, we introduce a causal graphical model to characterize the dropout mechanism, namely, Causal Dropout Model. We provide a simple yet effective theoretical result: interestingly, the conditional independence (CI) relations in the data with dropouts, after deleting the samples with zero values (regardless if technical or not) for the conditioned variables, are asymptotically identical to the CI relations in the original data without dropouts. This particular test-wise deletion procedure, in which we perform CI tests on the samples without zeros for the conditioned variables, can be seamlessly integrated with existing structure learning approaches including constraint-based and greedy score-based methods, thus giving rise to a principled framework for GRNI in the presence of dropouts. We further show that the causal dropout model can be validated from data, and many existing statistical models to handle dropouts fit into our model as specific parametric instances. Empirical evaluation on synthetic, curated, and real-world experimental transcriptomic data comprehensively demonstrate the efficacy of our method.

Recently, continual learning (CL) has gained significant interest because it enables deep learning models to acquire new knowledge without forgetting previously learnt information. However, most existing works require knowing the task identities and boundaries, which is not realistic in a real context. In this paper, we address a more challenging and realistic setting in CL, namely the Task-Free Continual Learning (TFCL) in which a model is trained on non-stationary data streams with no explicit task information. To address TFCL, we introduce an evolved mixture model whose network architecture is dynamically expanded to adapt to the data distribution shift. We implement this expansion mechanism by evaluating the probability distance between the knowledge stored in each mixture model component and the current memory buffer using the Hilbert Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC). We further introduce two simple dropout mechanisms to selectively remove stored examples in order to avoid memory overload while preserving memory diversity. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves excellent performance.

The failure of landing a job for college students could cause serious social consequences such as drunkenness and suicide. In addition to academic performance, unconscious biases can become one key obstacle for hunting jobs for graduating students. Thus, it is necessary to understand these unconscious biases so that we can help these students at an early stage with more personalized intervention. In this paper, we develop a framework, i.e., MAYA (Multi-mAjor emploYment stAtus) to predict students' employment status while considering biases. The framework consists of four major components. Firstly, we solve the heterogeneity of student courses by embedding academic performance into a unified space. Then, we apply a generative adversarial network (GAN) to overcome the class imbalance problem. Thirdly, we adopt Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with a novel dropout mechanism to comprehensively capture sequential information among semesters. Finally, we design a bias-based regularization to capture the job market biases. We conduct extensive experiments on a large-scale educational dataset and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our prediction framework.

In this paper, we explore various approaches for semi-supervised learning in an end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) framework. The first step in our approach involves training a seed model on the limited amount of labelled data. Additional unlabelled speech data is employed through a data-selection mechanism to obtain the best hypothesized output, further used to retrain the seed model. However, uncertainties of the model may not be well captured with a single hypothesis. As opposed to this technique, we apply a dropout mechanism to capture the uncertainty by obtaining multiple hypothesized text transcripts of an speech recording. We assume that the diversity of automatically generated transcripts for an utterance will implicitly increase the reliability of the model. Finally, the data-selection process is also applied on these hypothesized transcripts to reduce the uncertainty. Experiments on freely-available TEDLIUM corpus and proprietary Adobe's internal dataset show that the proposed approach significantly reduces ASR errors, compared to the baseline model.