We present a novel approach for differentially private data synthesis of protected tabular datasets, a relevant task in highly sensitive domains such as healthcare and government. Current state-of-the-art methods predominantly use marginal-based approaches, where a dataset is generated from private estimates of the marginals. In this paper, we introduce PrivPGD, a new generation method for marginal-based private data synthesis, leveraging tools from optimal transport and particle gradient descent. Our algorithm outperforms existing methods on a large range of datasets while being highly scalable and offering the flexibility to incorporate additional domain-specific constraints.
We propose a new approach to the autoregressive spatial functional model, based on the notion of signature, which represents a function as an infinite series of its iterated integrals. It presents the advantage of being applicable to a wide range of processes. After having provided theoretical guarantees to the proposed model, we have shown in a simulation study and on a real data set that this new approach presents competitive performances compared to the traditional model.
There has been a growing interest in recent years in modelling multiple modalities (or views) of data to for example, understand the relationship between modalities or to generate missing data. Multi-view autoencoders have gained significant traction for their adaptability and versatility in modelling multi-modal data, demonstrating an ability to tailor their approach to suit the characteristics of the data at hand. However, most multi-view autoencoders have inconsistent notation and are often implemented using different coding frameworks. To address this, we present a unified mathematical framework for multi-view autoencoders, consolidating their formulations. Moreover, we offer insights into the motivation and theoretical advantages of each model. To facilitate accessibility and practical use, we extend the documentation and functionality of the previously introduced \texttt{multi-view-AE} library. This library offers Python implementations of numerous multi-view autoencoder models, presented within a user-friendly framework. Through benchmarking experiments, we evaluate our implementations against previous ones, demonstrating comparable or superior performance. This work aims to establish a cohesive foundation for multi-modal modelling, serving as a valuable educational resource in the field.
We present HiRA-Pro, a novel procedure to align, at high spatio-temporal resolutions, multimodal signals from real-world processes and systems that exhibit diverse transient, nonlinear stochastic dynamics, such as manufacturing machines. It is based on discerning and synchronizing the process signatures of salient kinematic and dynamic events in these disparate signals. HiRA-Pro addresses the challenge of aligning data with sub-millisecond phenomena, where traditional timestamp, external trigger, or clock-based alignment methods fall short. The effectiveness of HiRA-Pro is demonstrated in a smart manufacturing context, where it aligns data from 13+ channels acquired during 3D-printing and milling operations on an Optomec-LENS MTS 500 hybrid machine. The aligned data is then voxelized to generate 0.25 second aligned data chunks that correspond to physical voxels on the produced part. The superiority of HiRA-Pro is further showcased through case studies in additive manufacturing, demonstrating improved machine learning-based predictive performance due to precise multimodal data alignment. Specifically, testing classification accuracies improved by almost 35% with the application of HiRA-Pro, even with limited data, allowing for precise localization of artifacts. The paper also provides a comprehensive discussion on the proposed method, its applications, and comparative qualitative analysis with a few other alignment methods. HiRA-Pro achieves temporal-spatial resolutions of 10-1000 us and 100 um in order to generate datasets that register with physical voxels on the 3D-printed and milled part. These resolutions are at least an order of magnitude finer than the existing alignment methods that employ individual timestamps, statistical correlations, or common clocks, which achieve precision of hundreds of milliseconds.
High-performing out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, both anomaly and novel class, is an important prerequisite for the practical use of classification models. In this paper, we focus on the species recognition task in images concerned with large databases, a large number of fine-grained hierarchical classes, severe class imbalance, and varying image quality. We propose a framework for combining individual OOD measures into one combined OOD (COOD) measure using a supervised model. The individual measures are several existing state-of-the-art measures and several novel OOD measures developed with novel class detection and hierarchical class structure in mind. COOD was extensively evaluated on three large-scale (500k+ images) biodiversity datasets in the context of anomaly and novel class detection. We show that COOD outperforms individual, including state-of-the-art, OOD measures by a large margin in terms of TPR@1% FPR in the majority of experiments, e.g., improving detecting ImageNet images (OOD) from 54.3% to 85.4% for the iNaturalist 2018 dataset. SHAP (feature contribution) analysis shows that different individual OOD measures are essential for various tasks, indicating that multiple OOD measures and combinations are needed to generalize. Additionally, we show that explicitly considering ID images that are incorrectly classified for the original (species) recognition task is important for constructing high-performing OOD detection methods and for practical applicability. The framework can easily be extended or adapted to other tasks and media modalities.
Charts, figures, and text derived from data play an important role in decision making, from data-driven policy development to day-to-day choices informed by online articles. Making sense of, or fact-checking, outputs means understanding how they relate to the underlying data. Even for domain experts with access to the source code and data sets, this poses a significant challenge. In this paper we introduce a new program analysis framework which supports interactive exploration of fine-grained I/O relationships directly through computed outputs, making use of dynamic dependence graphs. Our main contribution is a novel notion in data provenance which we call related inputs, a relation of mutual relevance or "cognacy" which arises between inputs when they contribute to common features of the output. Queries of this form allow readers to ask questions like "What outputs use this data element, and what other data elements are used along with it?". We show how Jonsson and Tarski's concept of conjugate operators on Boolean algebras appropriately characterises the notion of cognacy in a dependence graph, and give a procedure for computing related inputs over such a graph.
A preference-based subjective evaluation is a key method for evaluating generative media reliably. However, its huge combinations of pairs prohibit it from being applied to large-scale evaluation using crowdsourcing. To address this issue, we propose an automatic optimization method for preference-based subjective evaluation in terms of pair combination selections and allocation of evaluation volumes with online learning in a crowdsourcing environment. We use a preference-based online learning method based on a sorting algorithm to identify the total order of evaluation targets with minimum sample volumes. Our online learning algorithm supports parallel and asynchronous execution under fixed-budget conditions required for crowdsourcing. Our experiment on preference-based subjective evaluation of synthetic speech shows that our method successfully optimizes the test by reducing pair combinations from 351 to 83 and allocating optimal evaluation volumes for each pair ranging from 30 to 663 without compromising evaluation accuracies and wasting budget allocations.
Change-point detection, detecting an abrupt change in the data distribution from sequential data, is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning. CUSUM is a popular statistical method for online change-point detection due to its efficiency from recursive computation and constant memory requirement, and it enjoys statistical optimality. CUSUM requires knowing the precise pre- and post-change distribution. However, post-change distribution is usually unknown a priori since it represents anomaly and novelty. Classic CUSUM can perform poorly when there is a model mismatch with actual data. While likelihood ratio-based methods encounter challenges facing high dimensional data, neural networks have become an emerging tool for change-point detection with computational efficiency and scalability. In this paper, we introduce a neural network CUSUM (NN-CUSUM) for online change-point detection. We also present a general theoretical condition when the trained neural networks can perform change-point detection and what losses can achieve our goal. We further extend our analysis by combining it with the Neural Tangent Kernel theory to establish learning guarantees for the standard performance metrics, including the average run length (ARL) and expected detection delay (EDD). The strong performance of NN-CUSUM is demonstrated in detecting change-point in high-dimensional data using both synthetic and real-world data.
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the problem of estimating the value of a target policy using historical data collected under a different logging policy. OPE methods typically assume overlap between the target and logging policy, enabling solutions based on importance weighting and/or imputation. In this work, we approach OPE without assuming either overlap or a well-specified model by considering a strategy based on partial identification under non-parametric assumptions on the conditional mean function, focusing especially on Lipschitz smoothness. Under such smoothness assumptions, we formulate a pair of linear programs whose optimal values upper and lower bound the contributions of the no-overlap region to the off-policy value. We show that these linear programs have a concise closed form solution that can be computed efficiently and that their solutions converge, under the Lipschitz assumption, to the sharp partial identification bounds on the off-policy value. Furthermore, we show that the rate of convergence is minimax optimal, up to log factors. We deploy our methods on two semi-synthetic examples, and obtain informative and valid bounds that are tighter than those possible without smoothness assumptions.
Multi-contrast (MC) Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) reconstruction aims to incorporate a reference image of auxiliary modality to guide the reconstruction process of the target modality. Known MC reconstruction methods perform well with a fully sampled reference image, but usually exhibit inferior performance, compared to single-contrast (SC) methods, when the reference image is missing or of low quality. To address this issue, we propose DuDoUniNeXt, a unified dual-domain MRI reconstruction network that can accommodate to scenarios involving absent, low-quality, and high-quality reference images. DuDoUniNeXt adopts a hybrid backbone that combines CNN and ViT, enabling specific adjustment of image domain and k-space reconstruction. Specifically, an adaptive coarse-to-fine feature fusion module (AdaC2F) is devised to dynamically process the information from reference images of varying qualities. Besides, a partially shared shallow feature extractor (PaSS) is proposed, which uses shared and distinct parameters to handle consistent and discrepancy information among contrasts. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model surpasses state-of-the-art SC and MC models significantly. Ablation studies show the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid backbone, AdaC2F, PaSS, and the dual-domain unified learning scheme.
Hashing has been widely used in approximate nearest search for large-scale database retrieval for its computation and storage efficiency. Deep hashing, which devises convolutional neural network architecture to exploit and extract the semantic information or feature of images, has received increasing attention recently. In this survey, several deep supervised hashing methods for image retrieval are evaluated and I conclude three main different directions for deep supervised hashing methods. Several comments are made at the end. Moreover, to break through the bottleneck of the existing hashing methods, I propose a Shadow Recurrent Hashing(SRH) method as a try. Specifically, I devise a CNN architecture to extract the semantic features of images and design a loss function to encourage similar images projected close. To this end, I propose a concept: shadow of the CNN output. During optimization process, the CNN output and its shadow are guiding each other so as to achieve the optimal solution as much as possible. Several experiments on dataset CIFAR-10 show the satisfying performance of SRH.