model consistency
SCORPION: Addressing Scanner-Induced Variability in Histopathology
Ryu, Jeongun, Song, Heon, Lee, Seungeun, Cho, Soo Ick, Shin, Jiwon, Paeng, Kyunghyun, Pereira, Sérgio
Ensuring reliable model performance across diverse domains is a critical challenge in computational pathology. A particular source of variability in Whole-Slide Images is introduced by differences in digital scanners, thus calling for better scanner generalization. This is critical for the real-world adoption of computational pathology, where the scanning devices may differ per institution or hospital, and the model should not be dependent on scanner-induced details, which can ultimately affect the patient's diagnosis and treatment planning. However, past efforts have primarily focused on standard domain generalization settings, evaluating on unseen scanners during training, without directly evaluating consistency across scanners for the same tissue. To overcome this limitation, we introduce SCORPION, a new dataset explicitly designed to evaluate model reliability under scanner variability. SCORPION includes 480 tissue samples, each scanned with 5 scanners, yielding 2,400 spatially aligned patches. This scanner-paired design allows for the isolation of scanner-induced variability, enabling a rigorous evaluation of model consistency while controlling for differences in tissue composition. Furthermore, we propose SimCons, a flexible framework that combines augmentation-based domain generalization techniques with a consistency loss to explicitly address scanner generalization. We empirically show that SimCons improves model consistency on varying scanners without compromising task-specific performance. By releasing the SCORPION dataset and proposing SimCons, we provide the research community with a crucial resource for evaluating and improving model consistency across diverse scanners, setting a new standard for reliability testing.
Nonlinear Performative Prediction
Zhong, Guangzheng, Liu, Yang, Liu, Jiming
Performative prediction is an emerging paradigm in machine learning that addresses scenarios where the model's prediction may induce a shift in the distribution of the data it aims to predict. Current works in this field often rely on uncontrollable assumptions, such as bounded gradients of performative loss, and primarily focus on linear cases in their examples and evaluations to maintain consistency between theoretical guarantees and empirical validations. However, such linearity rarely holds in real-world applications, where the data usually exhibit complex nonlinear characteristics. In this paper, we relax these out-of-control assumptions and present a novel design that generalizes performative prediction to nonlinear cases while preserving essential theoretical properties. Specifically, we formulate the loss function of performative prediction using a maximum margin approach and extend it to nonlinear spaces through kernel methods. To quantify the data distribution shift, we employ the discrepancy between prediction errors on these two distributions as an indicator, which characterizes the impact of the performative effect on specific learning tasks. By doing so, we can derive, for both linear and nonlinear cases, the conditions for performative stability, a critical and desirable property in performative contexts. Building on these theoretical insights, we develop an algorithm that guarantees the performative stability of the predictive model. We validate the effectiveness of our method through experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets with both linear and nonlinear data distributions, demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
0266e33d3f546cb5436a10798e657d97-Reviews.html
The paper provides a unified framework analysis on the model selection consistency with geometrically decomposable penalties. As special cases of this framework, it also derives the consistency results of some machine learning examples. This paper deals with very interesting topic in the sense that; while the model consistencies have been already derived'individually' by several works, there has been a recent trend to provide a unified framework on statistical guarantee for more different types of M-estimator for the future. Nevertheless, my major concern on this paper is its clarity; it is not clearly written, and explanation is somehow terse. They are briefly described only in Introduction, not in Section 2 where authors introduce a geometrically decomposability.
Understanding Best Subset Selection: A Tale of Two C(omplex)ities
Roy, Saptarshi, Tewari, Ambuj, Zhu, Ziwei
For decades, best subset selection (BSS) has eluded statisticians mainly due to its computational bottleneck. However, until recently, modern computational breakthroughs have rekindled theoretical interest in BSS and have led to new findings. Recently, \cite{guo2020best} showed that the model selection performance of BSS is governed by a margin quantity that is robust to the design dependence, unlike modern methods such as LASSO, SCAD, MCP, etc. Motivated by their theoretical results, in this paper, we also study the variable selection properties of best subset selection for high-dimensional sparse linear regression setup. We show that apart from the identifiability margin, the following two complexity measures play a fundamental role in characterizing the margin condition for model consistency: (a) complexity of \emph{residualized features}, (b) complexity of \emph{spurious projections}. In particular, we establish a simple margin condition that depends only on the identifiability margin and the dominating one of the two complexity measures. Furthermore, we show that a margin condition depending on similar margin quantity and complexity measures is also necessary for model consistency of BSS. For a broader understanding, we also consider some simple illustrative examples to demonstrate the variation in the complexity measures that refines our theoretical understanding of the model selection performance of BSS under different correlation structures.
Improving the Model Consistency of Decentralized Federated Learning
Shi, Yifan, Shen, Li, Wei, Kang, Sun, Yan, Yuan, Bo, Wang, Xueqian, Tao, Dacheng
To mitigate the privacy leakages and communication burdens of Federated Learning (FL), decentralized FL (DFL) discards the central server and each client only communicates with its neighbors in a decentralized communication network. However, existing DFL suffers from high inconsistency among local clients, which results in severe distribution shift and inferior performance compared with centralized FL (CFL), especially on heterogeneous data or sparse communication topology. To alleviate this issue, we propose two DFL algorithms named DFedSAM and DFedSAM-MGS to improve the performance of DFL. Specifically, DFedSAM leverages gradient perturbation to generate local flat models via Sharpness Aware Minimization (SAM), which searches for models with uniformly low loss values. DFedSAM-MGS further boosts DFedSAM by adopting Multiple Gossip Steps (MGS) for better model consistency, which accelerates the aggregation of local flat models and better balances communication complexity and generalization. Theoretically, we present improved convergence rates $\small \mathcal{O}\big(\frac{1}{\sqrt{KT}}+\frac{1}{T}+\frac{1}{K^{1/2}T^{3/2}(1-\lambda)^2}\big)$ and $\small \mathcal{O}\big(\frac{1}{\sqrt{KT}}+\frac{1}{T}+\frac{\lambda^Q+1}{K^{1/2}T^{3/2}(1-\lambda^Q)^2}\big)$ in non-convex setting for DFedSAM and DFedSAM-MGS, respectively, where $1-\lambda$ is the spectral gap of gossip matrix and $Q$ is the number of MGS. Empirically, our methods can achieve competitive performance compared with CFL methods and outperform existing DFL methods.
Metric Learning Driven Multi-Task Structured Output Optimization for Robust Keypoint Tracking
Zhao, Liming (Zhejiang University) | Li, Xi (Zhejiang University) | Xiao, Jun (Zhejiang University) | Wu, Fei (Zhejiang University) | Zhuang, Yueting (Zhejiang University)
As an important and challenging problem in computer vision and graphics, keypoint-based object tracking is typically formulated in a spatio-temporal statistical learning framework. However, most existing keypoint trackers are incapable of effectively modeling and balancing the following three aspects in a simultaneous manner: temporal model coherence across frames, spatial model consistency within frames, and discriminative feature construction. To address this issue, we propose a robust keypoint tracker based on spatio-temporal multi-task structured output optimization driven by discriminative metric learning. Consequently, temporal model coherence is characterized by multi-task structured keypoint model learning over several adjacent frames, while spatial model consistency is modeled by solving a geometric verification based structured learning problem. Discriminative feature construction is enabled by metric learning to ensure the intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. Finally, the above three modules are simultaneously optimized in a joint learning scheme. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our tracker.
Model Consistency of Partly Smooth Regularizers
Vaiter, Samuel, Peyré, Gabriel, Fadili, Jalal M.
This paper studies least-square regression penalized with partly smooth convex regularizers. This class of functions is very large and versatile allowing to promote solutions conforming to some notion of low-complexity. Indeed, they force solutions of variational problems to belong to a low-dimensional manifold (the so-called model) which is stable under small perturbations of the function. This property is crucial to make the underlying low-complexity model robust to small noise. We show that a generalized "irrepresentable condition" implies stable model selection under small noise perturbations in the observations and the design matrix, when the regularization parameter is tuned proportionally to the noise level. This condition is shown to be almost a necessary condition. We then show that this condition implies model consistency of the regularized estimator. That is, with a probability tending to one as the number of measurements increases, the regularized estimator belongs to the correct low-dimensional model manifold. This work unifies and generalizes several previous ones, where model consistency is known to hold for sparse, group sparse, total variation and low-rank regularizations.