Recent studies indicate that kernel machines can often perform similarly or better than deep neural networks (DNNs) on small datasets. The interest in kernel machines has been additionally bolstered by the discovery of their equivalence to wide neural networks in certain regimes. However, a key feature of DNNs is their ability to scale the model size and training data size independently, whereas in traditional kernel machines model size is tied to data size. Because of this coupling, scaling kernel machines to large data has been computationally challenging. In this paper, we provide a way forward for constructing large-scale general kernel models, which are a generalization of kernel machines that decouples the model and data, allowing training on large datasets. Specifically, we introduce EigenPro 3.0, an algorithm based on projected dual preconditioned SGD and show scaling to model and data sizes which have not been possible with existing kernel methods.
Kernel methods have been proven to be a powerful tool for the integration and analysis of highthroughput technologies generated data. Kernels offer a nonlinear version of any linear algorithm solely based on dot products. The kernelized version of Principal Component Analysis is a valid nonlinear alternative to tackle the nonlinearity of biological sample spaces. This paper proposes a novel methodology to obtain a data-driven feature importance based on the KPCA representation of the data. The proposed method, kernel PCA Interpretable Gradient (KPCA-IG), provides a datadriven feature importance that is computationally fast and based solely on linear algebra calculations. It has been compared with existing methods on three benchmark datasets. The accuracy obtained using KPCA-IG selected features is equal to or greater than the other methods' average. Also, the computational complexity required demonstrates the high efficiency of the method. An exhaustive literature search has been conducted on the selected genes from a publicly available Hepatocellular carcinoma dataset to validate the retained features from a biological point of view. The results once again remark on the appropriateness of the computed ranking. The black-box nature of kernel PCA needs new methods to interpret the original features. Our proposed methodology KPCA-IG proved to be a valid alternative to select influential variables in high-dimensional high-throughput datasets, potentially unravelling new biological and medical biomarkers.
In this paper, we improve the kernel alignment regret bound for online kernel learning in the regime of the Hinge loss function. Previous algorithm achieves a regret of $O((\mathcal{A}_TT\ln{T})^{\frac{1}{4}})$ at a computational complexity (space and per-round time) of $O(\sqrt{\mathcal{A}_TT\ln{T}})$, where $\mathcal{A}_T$ is called \textit{kernel alignment}. We propose an algorithm whose regret bound and computational complexity are better than previous results. Our results depend on the decay rate of eigenvalues of the kernel matrix. If the eigenvalues of the kernel matrix decay exponentially, then our algorithm enjoys a regret of $O(\sqrt{\mathcal{A}_T})$ at a computational complexity of $O(\ln^2{T})$. Otherwise, our algorithm enjoys a regret of $O((\mathcal{A}_TT)^{\frac{1}{4}})$ at a computational complexity of $O(\sqrt{\mathcal{A}_TT})$. We extend our algorithm to batch learning and obtain a $O(\frac{1}{T}\sqrt{\mathbb{E}[\mathcal{A}_T]})$ excess risk bound which improves the previous $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ bound.
Factor models have been widely used in economics and finance. However, the heavy-tailed nature of macroeconomic and financial data is often neglected in the existing literature. To address this issue and achieve robustness, we propose an approach to estimate factor loadings and scores by minimizing the Huber loss function, which is motivated by the equivalence of conventional Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and the constrained least squares method in the factor model. We provide two algorithms that use different penalty forms. The first algorithm, which we refer to as Huber PCA, minimizes the $\ell_2$-norm-type Huber loss and performs PCA on the weighted sample covariance matrix. The second algorithm involves an element-wise type Huber loss minimization, which can be solved by an iterative Huber regression algorithm. Our study examines the theoretical minimizer of the element-wise Huber loss function and demonstrates that it has the same convergence rate as conventional PCA when the idiosyncratic errors have bounded second moments. We also derive their asymptotic distributions under mild conditions. Moreover, we suggest a consistent model selection criterion that relies on rank minimization to estimate the number of factors robustly. We showcase the benefits of Huber PCA through extensive numerical experiments and a real financial portfolio selection example. An R package named ``HDRFA" has been developed to implement the proposed robust factor analysis.
While decades of theoretical research have led to the invention of several classes of error-correction codes, the design of such codes is an extremely challenging task, mostly driven by human ingenuity. Recent studies demonstrate that such designs can be effectively automated and accelerated via tools from machine learning (ML), thus enabling ML-driven classes of error-correction codes with promising performance gains compared to classical designs. A fundamental challenge, however, is that it is prohibitively complex, if not impossible, to design and train fully ML-driven encoder and decoder pairs for large code dimensions. In this paper, we propose Product Autoencoder (ProductAE) -- a computationally-efficient family of deep learning driven (encoder, decoder) pairs -- aimed at enabling the training of relatively large codes (both encoder and decoder) with a manageable training complexity. We build upon ideas from classical product codes and propose constructing large neural codes using smaller code components. ProductAE boils down the complex problem of training the encoder and decoder for a large code dimension $k$ and blocklength $n$ to less-complex sub-problems of training encoders and decoders for smaller dimensions and blocklengths. Our training results show successful training of ProductAEs of dimensions as large as $k = 300$ bits with meaningful performance gains compared to state-of-the-art classical and neural designs. Moreover, we demonstrate excellent robustness and adaptivity of ProductAEs to channel models different than the ones used for training.
Motivated by the discrete dipole approximation (DDA) for the scattering of electromagnetic waves by a dielectric obstacle that can be considered as a simple discretization of a Lippmann-Schwinger style volume integral equation for time-harmonic Maxwell equations, we analyze an analogous discretization of convolution operators with strongly singular kernels. For a class of kernel functions that includes the finite Hilbert transformation in 1D and the principal part of the Maxwell volume integral operator used for DDA in dimensions 2 and 3, we show that the method, which does not fit into known frameworks of projection methods, can nevertheless be considered as a finite section method for an infinite block Toeplitz matrix. The symbol of this matrix is given by a Fourier series that does not converge absolutely. We use Ewald's method to obtain an exponentially fast convergent series representation of this symbol and show that it is a bounded function, thereby allowing to describe the spectrum and the numerical range of the matrix. It turns out that this numerical range includes the numerical range of the integral operator, but that it is in some cases strictly larger. In these cases the discretization method does not provide a spectrally correct approximation, and while it is stable for a large range of the spectral parameter $\lambda$, there are values of $\lambda$ for which the singular integral equation is well posed, but the discretization method is unstable.
We present a study of a kernel-based two-sample test statistic related to the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) in the manifold data setting, assuming that high-dimensional observations are close to a low-dimensional manifold. We characterize the test level and power in relation to the kernel bandwidth, the number of samples, and the intrinsic dimensionality of the manifold. Specifically, we show that when data densities are supported on a $d$-dimensional sub-manifold $\mathcal{M}$ embedded in an $m$-dimensional space, the kernel two-sample test for data sampled from a pair of distributions $p$ and $q$ that are H\"older with order $\beta$ (up to 2) is powerful when the number of samples $n$ is large such that $\Delta_2 \gtrsim n^{- { 2 \beta/( d + 4 \beta ) }}$, where $\Delta_2$ is the squared $L^2$-divergence between $p$ and $q$ on manifold. We establish a lower bound on the test power for finite $n$ that is sufficiently large, where the kernel bandwidth parameter $\gamma$ scales as $n^{-1/(d+4\beta)}$. The analysis extends to cases where the manifold has a boundary, and the data samples contain high-dimensional additive noise. Our results indicate that the kernel two-sample test does not have a curse-of-dimensionality when the data lie on or near a low-dimensional manifold. We validate our theory and the properties of the kernel test for manifold data through a series of numerical experiments.
Probabilistic models based on continuous latent spaces, such as variational autoencoders, can be understood as uncountable mixture models where components depend continuously on the latent code. They have proven to be expressive tools for generative and probabilistic modelling, but are at odds with tractable probabilistic inference, that is, computing marginals and conditionals of the represented probability distribution. Meanwhile, tractable probabilistic models such as probabilistic circuits (PCs) can be understood as hierarchical discrete mixture models, and thus are capable of performing exact inference efficiently but often show subpar performance in comparison to continuous latent-space models. In this paper, we investigate a hybrid approach, namely continuous mixtures of tractable models with a small latent dimension. While these models are analytically intractable, they are well amenable to numerical integration schemes based on a finite set of integration points. With a large enough number of integration points the approximation becomes de-facto exact. Moreover, for a finite set of integration points, the integration method effectively compiles the continuous mixture into a standard PC. In experiments, we show that this simple scheme proves remarkably effective, as PCs learnt this way set new state of the art for tractable models on many standard density estimation benchmarks.
Reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence that plays a crucial role in activities such as problem solving, decision making, and critical thinking. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing, and there is observation that these models may exhibit reasoning abilities when they are sufficiently large. However, it is not yet clear to what extent LLMs are capable of reasoning. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge on reasoning in LLMs, including techniques for improving and eliciting reasoning in these models, methods and benchmarks for evaluating reasoning abilities, findings and implications of previous research in this field, and suggestions on future directions. Our aim is to provide a detailed and up-to-date review of this topic and stimulate meaningful discussion and future work.
Despite the recent progress in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), it remains challenging to explain the predictions made by GNNs. Existing explanation methods mainly focus on post-hoc explanations where another explanatory model is employed to provide explanations for a trained GNN. The fact that post-hoc methods fail to reveal the original reasoning process of GNNs raises the need of building GNNs with built-in interpretability. In this work, we propose Prototype Graph Neural Network (ProtGNN), which combines prototype learning with GNNs and provides a new perspective on the explanations of GNNs. In ProtGNN, the explanations are naturally derived from the case-based reasoning process and are actually used during classification. The prediction of ProtGNN is obtained by comparing the inputs to a few learned prototypes in the latent space. Furthermore, for better interpretability and higher efficiency, a novel conditional subgraph sampling module is incorporated to indicate which part of the input graph is most similar to each prototype in ProtGNN+. Finally, we evaluate our method on a wide range of datasets and perform concrete case studies. Extensive results show that ProtGNN and ProtGNN+ can provide inherent interpretability while achieving accuracy on par with the non-interpretable counterparts.
This paper serves as a survey of recent advances in large margin training and its theoretical foundations, mostly for (nonlinear) deep neural networks (DNNs) that are probably the most prominent machine learning models for large-scale data in the community over the past decade. We generalize the formulation of classification margins from classical research to latest DNNs, summarize theoretical connections between the margin, network generalization, and robustness, and introduce recent efforts in enlarging the margins for DNNs comprehensively. Since the viewpoint of different methods is discrepant, we categorize them into groups for ease of comparison and discussion in the paper. Hopefully, our discussions and overview inspire new research work in the community that aim to improve the performance of DNNs, and we also point to directions where the large margin principle can be verified to provide theoretical evidence why certain regularizations for DNNs function well in practice. We managed to shorten the paper such that the crucial spirit of large margin learning and related methods are better emphasized.