One of the challenges for neural networks in real-life applications is the overconfident errors these models make when the data is not from the original training distribution. Addressing this issue is known as Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection. Many state-of-the-art OOD methods employ an auxiliary dataset as a surrogate for OOD data during training to achieve improved performance. However, these methods fail to fully exploit the local information embedded in the auxiliary dataset. In this work, we propose the idea of leveraging the information embedded in the gradient of the loss function during training to enable the network to not only learn a desired OOD score for each sample but also to exhibit similar behavior in a local neighborhood around each sample. We also develop a novel energy-based sampling method to allow the network to be exposed to more informative OOD samples during the training phase. This is especially important when the auxiliary dataset is large. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments on several OOD benchmarks, improving the existing state-of-the-art FPR95 by 4% on our ImageNet experiment. We further provide a theoretical analysis through the lens of certified robustness and Lipschitz analysis to showcase the theoretical foundation of our work. We will publicly release our code after the review process.
Among various aspects of ensuring the responsible design of AI tools for healthcare applications, addressing fairness concerns has been a key focus area. Specifically, given the wide spread of electronic health record (EHR) data and their huge potential to inform a wide range of clinical decision support tasks, improving fairness in this category of health AI tools is of key importance. While such a broad problem (that is, mitigating fairness in EHR-based AI models) has been tackled using various methods, task- and model-agnostic methods are noticeably rare. In this study, we aimed to target this gap by presenting a new pipeline that generates synthetic EHR data, which is not only consistent with (faithful to) the real EHR data but also can reduce the fairness concerns (defined by the end-user) in the downstream tasks, when combined with the real data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed pipeline across various downstream tasks and two different EHR datasets. Our proposed pipeline can add a widely applicable and complementary tool to the existing toolbox of methods to address fairness in health AI applications such as those modifying the design of a downstream model. The codebase for our project is available at //github.com/healthylaife/FairSynth
Deep learning models excel when the data distribution during training aligns with testing data. Yet, their performance diminishes when faced with out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, leading to great interest in the field of OOD detection. Current approaches typically assume that OOD samples originate from an unconcentrated distribution complementary to the training distribution. While this assumption is appropriate in the traditional unsupervised OOD (U-OOD) setting, it proves inadequate when considering the place of deployment of the underlying deep learning model. To better reflect this real-world scenario, we introduce the novel setting of continual U-OOD detection. To tackle this new setting, we propose a method that starts from a U-OOD detector, which is agnostic to the OOD distribution, and slowly updates during deployment to account for the actual OOD distribution. Our method uses a new U-OOD scoring function that combines the Mahalanobis distance with a nearest-neighbor approach. Furthermore, we design a confidence-scaled few-shot OOD detector that outperforms previous methods. We show our method greatly improves upon strong baselines from related fields.
With the development of edge networks and mobile computing, the need to serve heterogeneous data sources at the network edge requires the design of new distributed machine learning mechanisms. As a prevalent approach, Federated Learning (FL) employs parameter-sharing and gradient-averaging between clients and a server. Despite its many favorable qualities, such as convergence and data-privacy guarantees, it is well-known that classic FL fails to address the challenge of data heterogeneity and computation heterogeneity across clients. Most existing works that aim to accommodate such sources of heterogeneity stay within the FL operation paradigm, with modifications to overcome the negative effect of heterogeneous data. In this work, as an alternative paradigm, we propose a Multi-Task Split Learning (MTSL) framework, which combines the advantages of Split Learning (SL) with the flexibility of distributed network architectures. In contrast to the FL counterpart, in this paradigm, heterogeneity is not an obstacle to overcome, but a useful property to take advantage of. As such, this work aims to introduce a new architecture and methodology to perform multi-task learning for heterogeneous data sources efficiently, with the hope of encouraging the community to further explore the potential advantages we reveal. To support this promise, we first show through theoretical analysis that MTSL can achieve fast convergence by tuning the learning rate of the server and clients. Then, we compare the performance of MTSL with existing multi-task FL methods numerically on several image classification datasets to show that MTSL has advantages over FL in training speed, communication cost, and robustness to heterogeneous data.
A mainstream type of current self-supervised learning methods pursues a general-purpose representation that can be well transferred to downstream tasks, typically by optimizing on a given pretext task such as instance discrimination. In this work, we argue that existing pretext tasks inevitably introduce biases into the learned representation, which in turn leads to biased transfer performance on various downstream tasks. To cope with this issue, we propose Maximum Entropy Coding (MEC), a more principled objective that explicitly optimizes on the structure of the representation, so that the learned representation is less biased and thus generalizes better to unseen downstream tasks. Inspired by the principle of maximum entropy in information theory, we hypothesize that a generalizable representation should be the one that admits the maximum entropy among all plausible representations. To make the objective end-to-end trainable, we propose to leverage the minimal coding length in lossy data coding as a computationally tractable surrogate for the entropy, and further derive a scalable reformulation of the objective that allows fast computation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MEC learns a more generalizable representation than previous methods based on specific pretext tasks. It achieves state-of-the-art performance consistently on various downstream tasks, including not only ImageNet linear probe, but also semi-supervised classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and object tracking. Interestingly, we show that existing batch-wise and feature-wise self-supervised objectives could be seen equivalent to low-order approximations of MEC. Code and pre-trained models are available at //github.com/xinliu20/MEC.
The development of autonomous agents which can interact with other agents to accomplish a given task is a core area of research in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Towards this goal, the Autonomous Agents Research Group develops novel machine learning algorithms for autonomous systems control, with a specific focus on deep reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Research problems include scalable learning of coordinated agent policies and inter-agent communication; reasoning about the behaviours, goals, and composition of other agents from limited observations; and sample-efficient learning based on intrinsic motivation, curriculum learning, causal inference, and representation learning. This article provides a broad overview of the ongoing research portfolio of the group and discusses open problems for future directions.
With the rise of powerful pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, it becomes essential to investigate ways to adapt these models to downstream datasets. A recently proposed method named Context Optimization (CoOp) introduces the concept of prompt learning -- a recent trend in NLP -- to the vision domain for adapting pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, CoOp turns context words in a prompt into a set of learnable vectors and, with only a few labeled images for learning, can achieve huge improvements over intensively-tuned manual prompts. In our study we identify a critical problem of CoOp: the learned context is not generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset, suggesting that CoOp overfits base classes observed during training. To address the problem, we propose Conditional Context Optimization (CoCoOp), which extends CoOp by further learning a lightweight neural network to generate for each image an input-conditional token (vector). Compared to CoOp's static prompts, our dynamic prompts adapt to each instance and are thus less sensitive to class shift. Extensive experiments show that CoCoOp generalizes much better than CoOp to unseen classes, even showing promising transferability beyond a single dataset; and yields stronger domain generalization performance as well. Code is available at //github.com/KaiyangZhou/CoOp.
Vast amount of data generated from networks of sensors, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices underscores the need for advanced modeling techniques that leverage the spatio-temporal structure of decentralized data due to the need for edge computation and licensing (data access) issues. While federated learning (FL) has emerged as a framework for model training without requiring direct data sharing and exchange, effectively modeling the complex spatio-temporal dependencies to improve forecasting capabilities still remains an open problem. On the other hand, state-of-the-art spatio-temporal forecasting models assume unfettered access to the data, neglecting constraints on data sharing. To bridge this gap, we propose a federated spatio-temporal model -- Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network (CNFGNN) -- which explicitly encodes the underlying graph structure using graph neural network (GNN)-based architecture under the constraint of cross-node federated learning, which requires that data in a network of nodes is generated locally on each node and remains decentralized. CNFGNN operates by disentangling the temporal dynamics modeling on devices and spatial dynamics on the server, utilizing alternating optimization to reduce the communication cost, facilitating computations on the edge devices. Experiments on the traffic flow forecasting task show that CNFGNN achieves the best forecasting performance in both transductive and inductive learning settings with no extra computation cost on edge devices, while incurring modest communication cost.
Approaches based on deep neural networks have achieved striking performance when testing data and training data share similar distribution, but can significantly fail otherwise. Therefore, eliminating the impact of distribution shifts between training and testing data is crucial for building performance-promising deep models. Conventional methods assume either the known heterogeneity of training data (e.g. domain labels) or the approximately equal capacities of different domains. In this paper, we consider a more challenging case where neither of the above assumptions holds. We propose to address this problem by removing the dependencies between features via learning weights for training samples, which helps deep models get rid of spurious correlations and, in turn, concentrate more on the true connection between discriminative features and labels. Extensive experiments clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on multiple distribution generalization benchmarks compared with state-of-the-art counterparts. Through extensive experiments on distribution generalization benchmarks including PACS, VLCS, MNIST-M, and NICO, we show the effectiveness of our method compared with state-of-the-art counterparts.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items from users' feedbacks. In particular, we introduce an online user-agent interacting environment simulator, which can pre-train and evaluate model parameters offline before applying the model online. Moreover, we validate the importance of list-wise recommendations during the interactions between users and agent, and develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed framework LIRD for list-wide recommendations. The experimental results based on a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.