set transformer
From Mice to Trains: Amortized Bayesian Inference on Graph Data
Jedhoff, Svenja, Semenova, Elizaveta, Raulo, Aura, Meyer, Anne, Bürkner, Paul-Christian
Graphs arise across diverse domains, from biology and chemistry to social and information networks, as well as in transportation and logistics. Inference on graph-structured data requires methods that are permutation-invariant, scalable across varying sizes and sparsities, and capable of capturing complex long-range dependencies, making posterior estimation on graph parameters particularly challenging. Amortized Bayesian Inference (ABI) is a simulation-based framework that employs generative neural networks to enable fast, likelihood-free posterior inference. We adapt ABI to graph data to address these challenges to perform inference on node-, edge-, and graph-level parameters. Our approach couples permutation-invariant graph encoders with flexible neural posterior estimators in a two-module pipeline: a summary network maps attributed graphs to fixed-length representations, and an inference network approximates the posterior over parameters. In this setting, several neural architectures can serve as the summary network. In this work we evaluate multiple architectures and assess their performance on controlled synthetic settings and two real-world domains -- biology and logistics -- in terms of recovery and calibration.
- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Oxfordshire > Oxford (0.28)
- North America > United States > New York > New York County > New York City (0.14)
- Europe > Italy > Tuscany > Florence (0.04)
- (3 more...)
Relational Reasoning via Set Transformers: Provable Efficiency and Applications to MARL
The cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) with permutation invariant agents framework has achieved tremendous empirical successes in real-world applications. Unfortunately, the theoretical understanding of this MARL problem is lacking due to the curse of many agents and the limited exploration of the relational reasoning in existing works. In this paper, we verify that the transformer implements complex relational reasoning, and we propose and analyze model-free and model-based offline MARL algorithms with the transformer approximators. We prove that the suboptimality gaps of the model-free and model-based algorithms are independent of and logarithmic in the number of agents respectively, which mitigates the curse of many agents. These results are consequences of a novel generalization error bound of the transformer and a novel analysis of the Maximum Likelihood Estimate (MLE) of the system dynamics with the transformer. Our model-based algorithm is the first provably efficient MARL algorithm that explicitly exploits the permutation invariance of the agents. Our improved generalization bound may be of independent interest and is applicable to other regression problems related to the transformer beyond MARL.
- North America > Dominican Republic (0.04)
- North America > Canada > Ontario > Toronto (0.04)
- Europe > Germany > Bavaria > Upper Bavaria > Munich (0.04)
- Asia > Singapore (0.04)
Convolutional Set Transformer
Chinello, Federico, Boracchi, Giacomo
We introduce the Convolutional Set Transformer (CST), a novel neural architecture designed to process image sets of arbitrary cardinality that are visually heterogeneous yet share high-level semantics - such as a common category, scene, or concept. Existing set-input networks, e.g., Deep Sets and Set Transformer, are limited to vector inputs and cannot directly handle 3D image tensors. As a result, they must be cascaded with a feature extractor, typically a CNN, which encodes images into embeddings before the set-input network can model inter-image relationships. In contrast, CST operates directly on 3D image tensors, performing feature extraction and contextual modeling simultaneously, thereby enabling synergies between the two processes. This design yields superior performance in tasks such as Set Classification and Set Anomaly Detection and further provides native compatibility with CNN explainability methods such as Grad-CAM, unlike competing approaches that remain opaque. Finally, we show that CSTs can be pre-trained on large-scale datasets and subsequently adapted to new domains and tasks through standard Transfer Learning schemes. To support further research, we release CST-15, a CST backbone pre-trained on ImageNet (https://github.com/chinefed/convolutional-set-transformer).
- South America > Peru > Loreto Department (0.04)
- North America > Canada > Ontario > Toronto (0.04)
- Europe > Italy > Lombardy > Milan (0.04)
- Europe > France > Grand Est > Bas-Rhin > Strasbourg (0.04)
Abundance-Aware Set Transformer for Microbiome Sample Embedding
Microbiome sample representation to input into LLMs is essential for downstream tasks such as phenotype prediction and environmental classification. While prior studies have explored embedding-based representations of each microbiome sample, most rely on simple averaging over sequence embeddings, often overlooking the biological importance of taxa abundance. In this work, we propose an abundance-aware variant of the Set Transformer to construct fixed-size sample-level embeddings by weighting sequence embeddings according to their relative abundance. Without modifying the model architecture, we replicate embedding vectors proportional to their abundance and apply self-attention-based aggregation. Our method outperforms average pooling and unweighted Set Transformers on real-world microbiome classification tasks, achieving perfect performance in some cases. These results demonstrate the utility of abundance-aware aggregation for robust and biologically informed microbiome representation. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first approaches to integrate sequence-level abundance into Transformer-based sample embeddings.
- North America > United States > Pennsylvania > Philadelphia County > Philadelphia (0.04)
- South America > Suriname > Marowijne District > Albina (0.04)
- North America > United States > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Waltham (0.04)
- (4 more...)
- Health & Medicine > Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology (0.94)
- Health & Medicine > Therapeutic Area > Oncology (0.46)
encouraged that reviewers find our paper clear and well written (R1, R2, R3) and our method to be theoretically sound
We would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments and their thorough evaluation of our work. Reversible layers is a technique introduced by Gomez et al. (2017) and is orthogonal and In contrast, clustered attention places no such restriction. We will also add Set Transformers to the related work section. Is speech favorable to clustering? We would like to mention that our NLP approximation experiment for GLUE and SQuAD tasks in 4.3 shows that NLP/vision tasks in the long context setting, as suggested.