In many applications, the labeled data at the learner's disposal is subject to privacy constraints and is relatively limited. To derive a more accurate predictor for the target domain, it is often beneficial to leverage publicly available labeled data from an alternative domain, somewhat close to the target domain. This is the modern problem of supervised domain adaptation from a public source to a private target domain. We present two $(\epsilon, \delta)$-differentially private adaptation algorithms for supervised adaptation, for which we make use of a general optimization problem, recently shown to benefit from favorable theoretical learning guarantees. Our first algorithm is designed for regression with linear predictors and shown to solve a convex optimization problem. Our second algorithm is a more general solution for loss functions that may be non-convex but Lipschitz and smooth. While our main objective is a theoretical analysis, we also report the results of several experiments first demonstrating that the non-private versions of our algorithms outperform adaptation baselines and next showing that, for larger values of the target sample size or $\epsilon$, the performance of our private algorithms remains close to that of the non-private formulation.
The concept of programmable matter envisions a very large number of tiny and simple robot particles forming a smart material. Even though the particles are restricted to local communication, local movement, and simple computation, their actions can nevertheless result in the global change of the material's physical properties and geometry. A fundamental algorithmic task for programmable matter is to achieve global shape reconfiguration by specifying local behavior of the particles. In this paper we describe a new approach for shape reconfiguration in the amoebot model. The amoebot model is a distributed model which significantly restricts memory, computing, and communication capacity of the individual particles. Thus the challenge lies in coordinating the actions of particles to produce the desired behavior of the global system. Our reconfiguration algorithm is the first algorithm that does not use a canonical intermediate configuration when transforming between arbitrary shapes. We introduce new geometric primitives for amoebots and show how to reconfigure particle systems, using these primitives, in a linear number of activation rounds in the worst case. In practice, our method exploits the geometry of the symmetric difference between input and output shape: it minimizes unnecessary disassembly and reassembly of the particle system when the symmetric difference between the initial and the target shapes is small. Furthermore, our reconfiguration algorithm moves the particles over as many parallel shortest paths as the problem instance allows.
With the increasing presence of robots in our every-day environments, improving their social skills is of utmost importance. Nonetheless, social robotics still faces many challenges. One bottleneck is that robotic behaviors need to be often adapted as social norms depend strongly on the environment. For example, a robot should navigate more carefully around patients in a hospital compared to workers in an office. In this work, we investigate meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) as a potential solution. Here, robot behaviors are learned via reinforcement learning where a reward function needs to be chosen so that the robot learns an appropriate behavior for a given environment. We propose to use a variational meta-RL procedure that quickly adapts the robots' behavior to new reward functions. As a result, given a new environment different reward functions can be quickly evaluated and an appropriate one selected. The procedure learns a vectorized representation for reward functions and a meta-policy that can be conditioned on such a representation. Given observations from a new reward function, the procedure identifies its representation and conditions the meta-policy to it. While investigating the procedures' capabilities, we realized that it suffers from posterior collapse where only a subset of the dimensions in the representation encode useful information resulting in a reduced performance. Our second contribution, a radial basis function (RBF) layer, partially mitigates this negative effect. The RBF layer lifts the representation to a higher dimensional space, which is more easily exploitable for the meta-policy. We demonstrate the interest of the RBF layer and the usage of meta-RL for social robotics on four robotic simulation tasks.
Threshold signatures are a fundamental cryptographic primitive used in many practical applications. As proposed by Boneh and Komlo (CRYPTO'22), TAPS is a threshold signature that is a hybrid of privacy and accountability. It enables a combiner to combine t signature shares while revealing nothing about the threshold t or signing quorum to the public and asks a tracer to track a signature to the quorum that generates it. However, TAPS has three disadvantages: it 1) structures upon a centralized model, 2) assumes that both combiner and tracer are honest, and 3) leaves the tracing unnotarized and static. In this work, we introduce Decentralized, Threshold, dynamically Accountable and Private Signature (DeTAPS) that provides decentralized combining and tracing, enhanced privacy against untrusted combiners (tracers), and notarized and dynamic tracing. Specifically, we adopt Dynamic Threshold Public-Key Encryption (DTPKE) to dynamically notarize the tracing process, design non-interactive zero knowledge proofs to achieve public verifiability of notaries, and utilize the Key-Aggregate Searchable Encryption to bridge TAPS and DTPKE so as to awaken the notaries securely and efficiently. In addition, we formalize the definitions and security requirements for DeTAPS. Then we present a generic construction and formally prove its security and privacy. To evaluate the performance, we build a prototype based on SGX2 and Ethereum.
The presence of label noise in the training data has a profound impact on the generalization of deep neural networks (DNNs). In this study, we introduce and theoretically demonstrate a simple feature noise method, which directly adds noise to the features of training data, can enhance the generalization of DNNs under label noise. Specifically, we conduct theoretical analyses to reveal that label noise leads to weakened DNN generalization by loosening the PAC-Bayes generalization bound, and feature noise results in better DNN generalization by imposing an upper bound on the mutual information between the model weights and the features, which constrains the PAC-Bayes generalization bound. Furthermore, to ensure effective generalization of DNNs in the presence of label noise, we conduct application analyses to identify the optimal types and levels of feature noise to add for obtaining desirable label noise generalization. Finally, extensive experimental results on several popular datasets demonstrate the feature noise method can significantly enhance the label noise generalization of the state-of-the-art label noise method.
The utilization of model checking has been suggested as a formal verification technique for analyzing critical systems. However, the primary challenge in applying to complex systems is state space explosion problem. To address this issue, bisimulation minimization has emerged as a prominent method for reducing the number of states in a labeled transition system, aiming to overcome the difficulties associated with the state space explosion problem. In the case of systems exhibiting stochastic behaviors, probabilistic bisimulation is employed to minimize a given model, obtaining its equivalent form with fewer states. Recently, various techniques have been introduced to decrease the time complexity of the iterative methods used to compute probabilistic bisimulation for stochastic systems that display nondeterministic behaviors. In this paper, we propose a new technique to partition the state space of a given probabilistic model to its bisimulation classes. This technique uses the PRISM program of a given model and constructs some small versions of the model to train a classifier. It then applies machine learning classification techniques to approximate the related partition. The resulting partition is used as an initial one for the standard bisimulation technique in order to reduce the running time of the method. The experimental results show that the approach can decrease significantly the running time compared to state-of-the-art tools.
Recent artificial intelligence (AI) systems have reached milestones in "grand challenges" ranging from Go to protein-folding. The capability to retrieve medical knowledge, reason over it, and answer medical questions comparably to physicians has long been viewed as one such grand challenge. Large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant progress in medical question answering; Med-PaLM was the first model to exceed a "passing" score in US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) style questions with a score of 67.2% on the MedQA dataset. However, this and other prior work suggested significant room for improvement, especially when models' answers were compared to clinicians' answers. Here we present Med-PaLM 2, which bridges these gaps by leveraging a combination of base LLM improvements (PaLM 2), medical domain finetuning, and prompting strategies including a novel ensemble refinement approach. Med-PaLM 2 scored up to 86.5% on the MedQA dataset, improving upon Med-PaLM by over 19% and setting a new state-of-the-art. We also observed performance approaching or exceeding state-of-the-art across MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and MMLU clinical topics datasets. We performed detailed human evaluations on long-form questions along multiple axes relevant to clinical applications. In pairwise comparative ranking of 1066 consumer medical questions, physicians preferred Med-PaLM 2 answers to those produced by physicians on eight of nine axes pertaining to clinical utility (p < 0.001). We also observed significant improvements compared to Med-PaLM on every evaluation axis (p < 0.001) on newly introduced datasets of 240 long-form "adversarial" questions to probe LLM limitations. While further studies are necessary to validate the efficacy of these models in real-world settings, these results highlight rapid progress towards physician-level performance in medical question answering.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising results on a broad spectrum of applications. Most empirical studies of GNNs directly take the observed graph as input, assuming the observed structure perfectly depicts the accurate and complete relations between nodes. However, graphs in the real world are inevitably noisy or incomplete, which could even exacerbate the quality of graph representations. In this work, we propose a novel Variational Information Bottleneck guided Graph Structure Learning framework, namely VIB-GSL, in the perspective of information theory. VIB-GSL advances the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle for graph structure learning, providing a more elegant and universal framework for mining underlying task-relevant relations. VIB-GSL learns an informative and compressive graph structure to distill the actionable information for specific downstream tasks. VIB-GSL deduces a variational approximation for irregular graph data to form a tractable IB objective function, which facilitates training stability. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the superior effectiveness and robustness of VIB-GSL.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have proven to be useful for many different practical applications. However, many existing GNN models have implicitly assumed homophily among the nodes connected in the graph, and therefore have largely overlooked the important setting of heterophily, where most connected nodes are from different classes. In this work, we propose a novel framework called CPGNN that generalizes GNNs for graphs with either homophily or heterophily. The proposed framework incorporates an interpretable compatibility matrix for modeling the heterophily or homophily level in the graph, which can be learned in an end-to-end fashion, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of strong homophily. Theoretically, we show that replacing the compatibility matrix in our framework with the identity (which represents pure homophily) reduces to GCN. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in more realistic and challenging experimental settings with significantly less training data compared to previous works: CPGNN variants achieve state-of-the-art results in heterophily settings with or without contextual node features, while maintaining comparable performance in homophily settings.
Recommender systems play a fundamental role in web applications in filtering massive information and matching user interests. While many efforts have been devoted to developing more effective models in various scenarios, the exploration on the explainability of recommender systems is running behind. Explanations could help improve user experience and discover system defects. In this paper, after formally introducing the elements that are related to model explainability, we propose a novel explainable recommendation model through improving the transparency of the representation learning process. Specifically, to overcome the representation entangling problem in traditional models, we revise traditional graph convolution to discriminate information from different layers. Also, each representation vector is factorized into several segments, where each segment relates to one semantic aspect in data. Different from previous work, in our model, factor discovery and representation learning are simultaneously conducted, and we are able to handle extra attribute information and knowledge. In this way, the proposed model can learn interpretable and meaningful representations for users and items. Unlike traditional methods that need to make a trade-off between explainability and effectiveness, the performance of our proposed explainable model is not negatively affected after considering explainability. Finally, comprehensive experiments are conducted to validate the performance of our model as well as explanation faithfulness.
Translational distance-based knowledge graph embedding has shown progressive improvements on the link prediction task, from TransE to the latest state-of-the-art RotatE. However, N-1, 1-N and N-N predictions still remain challenging. In this work, we propose a novel translational distance-based approach for knowledge graph link prediction. The proposed method includes two-folds, first we extend the RotatE from 2D complex domain to high dimension space with orthogonal transforms to model relations for better modeling capacity. Second, the graph context is explicitly modeled via two directed context representations. These context representations are used as part of the distance scoring function to measure the plausibility of the triples during training and inference. The proposed approach effectively improves prediction accuracy on the difficult N-1, 1-N and N-N cases for knowledge graph link prediction task. The experimental results show that it achieves better performance on two benchmark data sets compared to the baseline RotatE, especially on data set (FB15k-237) with many high in-degree connection nodes.