Anderson acceleration (AA) is a well-known method for accelerating the convergence of iterative algorithms, with applications in various fields including deep learning and optimization. Despite its popularity in these areas, the effectiveness of AA in classical machine learning classifiers has not been thoroughly studied. Tabular data, in particular, presents a unique challenge for deep learning models, and classical machine learning models are known to perform better in these scenarios. However, the convergence analysis of these models has received limited attention. To address this gap in research, we implement a support vector machine (SVM) classifier variant that incorporates AA to speed up convergence. We evaluate the performance of our SVM with and without Anderson acceleration on several datasets from the biology domain and demonstrate that the use of AA significantly improves convergence and reduces the training loss as the number of iterations increases. Our findings provide a promising perspective on the potential of Anderson acceleration in the training of simple machine learning classifiers and underscore the importance of further research in this area. By showing the effectiveness of AA in this setting, we aim to inspire more studies that explore the applications of AA in classical machine learning.
Federated Learning (FL) has surged in prominence due to its capability of collaborative model training without direct data sharing. However, the vast disparity in local data distributions among clients, often termed the non-Independent Identically Distributed (non-IID) challenge, poses a significant hurdle to FL's generalization efficacy. The scenario becomes even more complex when not all clients participate in the training process, a common occurrence due to unstable network connections or limited computational capacities. This can greatly complicate the assessment of the trained models' generalization abilities. While a plethora of recent studies has centered on the generalization gap pertaining to unseen data from participating clients with diverse distributions, the divergence between the training distributions of participating clients and the testing distributions of non-participating ones has been largely overlooked. In response, our paper unveils an information-theoretic generalization framework for FL. Specifically, it quantifies generalization errors by evaluating the information entropy of local distributions and discerning discrepancies across these distributions. Inspired by our deduced generalization bounds, we introduce a weighted aggregation approach and a duo of client selection strategies. These innovations aim to bolster FL's generalization prowess by encompassing a more varied set of client data distributions. Our extensive empirical evaluations reaffirm the potency of our proposed methods, aligning seamlessly with our theoretical construct.
Deep generative models have been widely used for their ability to generate realistic data samples in various areas, such as images, molecules, text, and speech. One major goal of data generation is controllability, namely to generate new data with desired properties. Despite growing interest in the area of controllable generation, significant challenges still remain, including 1) disentangling desired properties with unrelated latent variables, 2) out-of-distribution property control, and 3) objective optimization for out-of-distribution property control. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a general framework to enhance VAE-based data generators with property controllability and ensure disentanglement. Our proposed objective can be optimized on both data seen and unseen in the training set. We propose a training procedure to train the objective in a semi-supervised manner by iteratively conducting mutual mappings between the data and properties. The proposed framework is implemented on four VAE-based controllable generators to evaluate its performance on property error, disentanglement, generation quality, and training time. The results indicate that our proposed framework enables more precise control over the properties of generated samples in a short training time, ensuring the disentanglement and keeping the validity of the generated samples.
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have shown much promise across a variety of applications. However, issues such as scalability, explainability, and Markovian assumptions limit its applicability in certain domains. We observe that many of these shortcomings emanate from the simulator as opposed to the RL training algorithms themselves. As such, we propose a semantic proxy for simulation based on a temporal extension to annotated logic. In comparison with two high-fidelity simulators, we show up to three orders of magnitude speed-up while preserving the quality of policy learned in addition to showing the ability to model and leverage non-Markovian dynamics and instantaneous actions while providing an explainable trace describing the outcomes of the agent actions.
Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to solve the problem of catastrophic forgetting when learning a sequence of newly emerging relations. Recent CRE studies have found that catastrophic forgetting arises from the model's lack of robustness against future analogous relations. To address the issue, we introduce rationale, i.e., the explanations of relation classification results generated by large language models (LLM), into CRE task. Specifically, we design the multi-task rationale tuning strategy to help the model learn current relations robustly. We also conduct contrastive rationale replay to further distinguish analogous relations. Experimental results on two standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art CRE models.
Opinion dynamics is a central subject of computational social science, and various models have been developed to understand the evolution and formulation of opinions. Existing models mainly focus on opinion dynamics on graphs that only capture pairwise interactions between agents. In this paper, we extend the popular Friedkin-Johnsen model for opinion dynamics on graphs to hypergraphs, which describe higher-order interactions occurring frequently on real networks, especially social networks. To achieve this, based on the fact that for linear dynamics the multi-way interactions can be reduced to effective pairwise node interactions, we propose a method to decode the group interactions encoded in hyperedges by undirected edges or directed edges in graphs. We then show that higher-order interactions play an important role in the opinion dynamics, since the overall steady-state expressed opinion and polarization differ greatly from those without group interactions. We also provide an interpretation of the equilibrium expressed opinion from the perspective of the spanning converging forest, based on which we design a fast sampling algorithm to approximately evaluate the overall opinion and opinion polarization on directed weighted graphs. Finally, we conduct experiments on real-world hypergraph datasets, demonstrating the performance of our algorithm.
Causal representation learning has emerged as the center of action in causal machine learning research. In particular, multi-domain datasets present a natural opportunity for showcasing the advantages of causal representation learning over standard unsupervised representation learning. While recent works have taken crucial steps towards learning causal representations, they often lack applicability to multi-domain datasets due to over-simplifying assumptions about the data; e.g. each domain comes from a different single-node perfect intervention. In this work, we relax these assumptions and capitalize on the following observation: there often exists a subset of latents whose certain distributional properties (e.g., support, variance) remain stable across domains; this property holds when, for example, each domain comes from a multi-node imperfect intervention. Leveraging this observation, we show that autoencoders that incorporate such invariances can provably identify the stable set of latents from the rest across different settings.
Classic machine learning methods are built on the $i.i.d.$ assumption that training and testing data are independent and identically distributed. However, in real scenarios, the $i.i.d.$ assumption can hardly be satisfied, rendering the sharp drop of classic machine learning algorithms' performances under distributional shifts, which indicates the significance of investigating the Out-of-Distribution generalization problem. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization problem addresses the challenging setting where the testing distribution is unknown and different from the training. This paper serves as the first effort to systematically and comprehensively discuss the OOD generalization problem, from the definition, methodology, evaluation to the implications and future directions. Firstly, we provide the formal definition of the OOD generalization problem. Secondly, existing methods are categorized into three parts based on their positions in the whole learning pipeline, namely unsupervised representation learning, supervised model learning and optimization, and typical methods for each category are discussed in detail. We then demonstrate the theoretical connections of different categories, and introduce the commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize the whole literature and raise some future directions for OOD generalization problem. The summary of OOD generalization methods reviewed in this survey can be found at //out-of-distribution-generalization.com.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
It is important to detect anomalous inputs when deploying machine learning systems. The use of larger and more complex inputs in deep learning magnifies the difficulty of distinguishing between anomalous and in-distribution examples. At the same time, diverse image and text data are available in enormous quantities. We propose leveraging these data to improve deep anomaly detection by training anomaly detectors against an auxiliary dataset of outliers, an approach we call Outlier Exposure (OE). This enables anomaly detectors to generalize and detect unseen anomalies. In extensive experiments on natural language processing and small- and large-scale vision tasks, we find that Outlier Exposure significantly improves detection performance. We also observe that cutting-edge generative models trained on CIFAR-10 may assign higher likelihoods to SVHN images than to CIFAR-10 images; we use OE to mitigate this issue. We also analyze the flexibility and robustness of Outlier Exposure, and identify characteristics of the auxiliary dataset that improve performance.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis.