Nonparametric item response models provide a flexible framework in psychological and educational measurements. Douglas (2001) established asymptotic identifiability for a class of models with nonparametric response functions for long assessments. Nevertheless, the model class examined in Douglas (2001) excludes several popular parametric item response models. This limitation can hinder the applications in which nonparametric and parametric models are compared, such as evaluating model goodness-of-fit. To address this issue, We consider an extended nonparametric model class that encompasses most parametric models and establish asymptotic identifiability. The results bridge the parametric and nonparametric item response models and provide a solid theoretical foundation for the applications of nonparametric item response models for assessments with many items.
We propose a framework for applying reinforcement learning to contextual two-stage stochastic optimization and apply this framework to the problem of energy market bidding of an off-shore wind farm. Reinforcement learning could potentially be used to learn close to optimal solutions for first stage variables of a two-stage stochastic program under different contexts. Under the proposed framework, these solutions would be learned without having to solve the full two-stage stochastic program. We present initial results of training using the DDPG algorithm and present intended future steps to improve performance.
We present a new approach for estimating parameters in rational ODE models from given (measured) time series data. In typical existing approaches, an initial guess for the parameter values is made from a given search interval. Then, in a loop, the corresponding outputs are computed by solving the ODE numerically, followed by computing the error from the given time series data. If the error is small, the loop terminates and the parameter values are returned. Otherwise, heuristics/theories are used to possibly improve the guess and continue the loop. These approaches tend to be non-robust in the sense that their accuracy depend on the search interval and the true parameter values; furthermore, they cannot handle the case where the parameters are locally identifiable. In this paper, we propose a new approach, which does not suffer from the above non-robustness. In particular, it does not require making good initial guesses for the parameter values or specifying search intervals. Instead, it uses differential algebra, interpolation of the data using rational functions, and multivariate polynomial system solving. We also compare the performance of the resulting software with several other estimation software packages.
Despite commendable achievements made by existing work, prevailing multimodal sarcasm detection studies rely more on textual content over visual information. It unavoidably induces spurious correlations between textual words and labels, thereby significantly hindering the models' generalization capability. To address this problem, we define the task of out-of-distribution (OOD) multimodal sarcasm detection, which aims to evaluate models' generalizability when the word distribution is different in training and testing settings. Moreover, we propose a novel debiasing multimodal sarcasm detection framework with contrastive learning, which aims to mitigate the harmful effect of biased textual factors for robust OOD generalization. In particular, we first design counterfactual data augmentation to construct the positive samples with dissimilar word biases and negative samples with similar word biases. Subsequently, we devise an adapted debiasing contrastive learning mechanism to empower the model to learn robust task-relevant features and alleviate the adverse effect of biased words. Extensive experiments show the superiority of the proposed framework.
Distinguishing the cause and effect from bivariate observational data is the foundational problem that finds applications in many scientific disciplines. One solution to this problem is assuming that cause and effect are generated from a structural causal model, enabling identification of the causal direction after estimating the model in each direction. The heteroscedastic noise model is a type of structural causal model where the cause can contribute to both the mean and variance of the noise. Current methods for estimating heteroscedastic noise models choose the Gaussian likelihood as the optimization objective which can be suboptimal and unstable when the data has a non-Gaussian distribution. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach to estimating this model with Student's $t$-distribution, which is known for its robustness in accounting for sampling variability with smaller sample sizes and extreme values without significantly altering the overall distribution shape. This adaptability is beneficial for capturing the parameters of the noise distribution in heteroscedastic noise models. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that our estimators are more robust and achieve better overall performance across synthetic and real benchmarks.
We study the problem of designing hard negative sampling distributions for unsupervised contrastive representation learning. We propose and analyze a novel min-max framework that seeks a representation which minimizes the maximum (worst-case) generalized contrastive learning loss over all couplings (joint distributions between positive and negative samples subject to marginal constraints) and prove that the resulting min-max optimum representation will be degenerate. This provides the first theoretical justification for incorporating additional regularization constraints on the couplings. We re-interpret the min-max problem through the lens of Optimal Transport (OT) theory and utilize regularized transport couplings to control the degree of hardness of negative examples. Through experiments we demonstrate that the negative samples generated from our designed negative distribution are more similar to the anchor than those generated from the baseline negative distribution. We also demonstrate that entropic regularization yields negative sampling distributions with parametric form similar to that in a recent state-of-the-art negative sampling design and has similar performance in multiple datasets. Utilizing the uncovered connection with OT, we propose a new ground cost for designing the negative distribution and show improved performance of the learned representation on downstream tasks compared to the representation learned when using squared Euclidean cost.
This paper presents a motion planning algorithm for quadruped locomotion based on density functions. We decompose the locomotion problem into a high-level density planner and a model predictive controller (MPC). Due to density functions having a physical interpretation through the notion of occupancy, it is intuitive to represent the environment with safety constraints. Hence, there is an ease of use to constructing the planning problem with density. The proposed method uses a simplified model of the robot into an integrator system, where the high-level plan is in a feedback form formulated through an analytically constructed density function. We then use the MPC to optimize the reference trajectory, in which a low-level PID controller is used to obtain the torque level control. The overall framework is implemented in simulation, demonstrating our feedback density planner for legged locomotion. The implementation of work is available at \url{//github.com/AndrewZheng-1011/legged_planner}
We introduce Lagrangian Flow Networks (LFlows) for modeling fluid densities and velocities continuously in space and time. By construction, the proposed LFlows satisfy the continuity equation, a PDE describing mass conservation in its differentiable form. Our model is based on the insight that solutions to the continuity equation can be expressed as time-dependent density transformations via differentiable and invertible maps. This follows from classical theory of the existence and uniqueness of Lagrangian flows for smooth vector fields. Hence, we model fluid densities by transforming a base density with parameterized diffeomorphisms conditioned on time. The key benefit compared to methods relying on numerical ODE solvers or PINNs is that the analytic expression of the velocity is always consistent with changes in density. Furthermore, we require neither expensive numerical solvers, nor additional penalties to enforce the PDE. LFlows show higher predictive accuracy in density modeling tasks compared to competing models in 2D and 3D, while being computationally efficient. As a real-world application, we model bird migration based on sparse weather radar measurements.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
This book develops an effective theory approach to understanding deep neural networks of practical relevance. Beginning from a first-principles component-level picture of networks, we explain how to determine an accurate description of the output of trained networks by solving layer-to-layer iteration equations and nonlinear learning dynamics. A main result is that the predictions of networks are described by nearly-Gaussian distributions, with the depth-to-width aspect ratio of the network controlling the deviations from the infinite-width Gaussian description. We explain how these effectively-deep networks learn nontrivial representations from training and more broadly analyze the mechanism of representation learning for nonlinear models. From a nearly-kernel-methods perspective, we find that the dependence of such models' predictions on the underlying learning algorithm can be expressed in a simple and universal way. To obtain these results, we develop the notion of representation group flow (RG flow) to characterize the propagation of signals through the network. By tuning networks to criticality, we give a practical solution to the exploding and vanishing gradient problem. We further explain how RG flow leads to near-universal behavior and lets us categorize networks built from different activation functions into universality classes. Altogether, we show that the depth-to-width ratio governs the effective model complexity of the ensemble of trained networks. By using information-theoretic techniques, we estimate the optimal aspect ratio at which we expect the network to be practically most useful and show how residual connections can be used to push this scale to arbitrary depths. With these tools, we can learn in detail about the inductive bias of architectures, hyperparameters, and optimizers.
The dominant paradigm for relation prediction in knowledge graphs involves learning and operating on latent representations (i.e., embeddings) of entities and relations. However, these embedding-based methods do not explicitly capture the compositional logical rules underlying the knowledge graph, and they are limited to the transductive setting, where the full set of entities must be known during training. Here, we propose a graph neural network based relation prediction framework, GraIL, that reasons over local subgraph structures and has a strong inductive bias to learn entity-independent relational semantics. Unlike embedding-based models, GraIL is naturally inductive and can generalize to unseen entities and graphs after training. We provide theoretical proof and strong empirical evidence that GraIL can represent a useful subset of first-order logic and show that GraIL outperforms existing rule-induction baselines in the inductive setting. We also demonstrate significant gains obtained by ensembling GraIL with various knowledge graph embedding methods in the transductive setting, highlighting the complementary inductive bias of our method.