When multiple models are considered in regression problems, the model averaging method can be used to weigh and integrate the models. In the present study, we examined how the goodness-of-prediction of the estimator depends on the dimensionality of explanatory variables when using a generalization of the model averaging method in a linear model. We specifically considered the case of high-dimensional explanatory variables, with multiple linear models deployed for subsets of these variables. Consequently, we derived the optimal weights that yield the best predictions. we also observe that the double-descent phenomenon occurs in the model averaging estimator. Furthermore, we obtained theoretical results by adapting methods such as the random forest to linear regression models. Finally, we conducted a practical verification through numerical experiments.
Optimization models used to make discrete decisions often contain uncertain parameters that are context-dependent and are estimated through prediction. To account for the quality of the decision made based on the prediction, decision-focused learning (end-to-end predict-then-optimize) aims at training the predictive model to minimize regret, i.e., the loss incurred by making a suboptimal decision. Despite the challenge of this loss function being possibly non-convex and in general non-differentiable, effective gradient-based learning approaches have been proposed to minimize the expected loss, using the empirical loss as a surrogate. However, empirical regret can be an ineffective surrogate because the uncertainty in the optimization model makes the empirical regret unequal to the expected regret in expectation. To illustrate the impact of this inequality, we evaluate the effect of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty on the accuracy of empirical regret as a surrogate. Next, we propose three robust loss functions that more closely approximate expected regret. Experimental results show that training two state-of-the-art decision-focused learning approaches using robust regret losses improves test-sample empirical regret in general while keeping computational time equivalent relative to the number of training epochs.
Quantization has emerged as a promising direction for model compression. Recently, data-free quantization has been widely studied as a promising method to avoid privacy concerns, which synthesizes images as an alternative to real training data. Existing methods use classification loss to ensure the reliability of the synthesized images. Unfortunately, even if these images are well-classified by the pre-trained model, they still suffer from low semantics and homogenization issues. Intuitively, these low-semantic images are sensitive to perturbations, and the pre-trained model tends to have inconsistent output when the generator synthesizes an image with poor semantics. To this end, we propose Robustness-Guided Image Synthesis (RIS), a simple but effective method to enrich the semantics of synthetic images and improve image diversity, further boosting the performance of downstream data-free compression tasks. Concretely, we first introduce perturbations on input and model weight, then define the inconsistency metrics at feature and prediction levels before and after perturbations. On the basis of inconsistency on two levels, we design a robustness optimization objective to enhance the semantics of synthetic images. Moreover, we also make our approach diversity-aware by forcing the generator to synthesize images with small correlations in the label space. With RIS, we achieve state-of-the-art performance for various settings on data-free quantization and can be extended to other data-free compression tasks.
We propose a graphical structure for structural equation models that is stable under marginalization under linearity and Gaussianity assumptions. We show that computing the maximum likelihood estimation of this model is equivalent to training a neural network. We implement a GPU-based algorithm that computes the maximum likelihood estimation of these models.
We discuss the problem of bounding partially identifiable queries, such as counterfactuals, in Pearlian structural causal models. A recently proposed iterated EM scheme yields an inner approximation of those bounds by sampling the initialisation parameters. Such a method requires multiple (Bayesian network) queries over models sharing the same structural equations and topology, but different exogenous probabilities. This setup makes a compilation of the underlying model to an arithmetic circuit advantageous, thus inducing a sizeable inferential speed-up. We show how a single symbolic knowledge compilation allows us to obtain the circuit structure with symbolic parameters to be replaced by their actual values when computing the different queries. We also discuss parallelisation techniques to further speed up the bound computation. Experiments against standard Bayesian network inference show clear computational advantages with up to an order of magnitude of speed-up.
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a formal framework for modeling and solving sequential decision-making problems. In finite-time horizons such problems are relevant for instance for optimal stopping or specific supply chain problems, but also in the training of large language models. In contrast to infinite horizon MDPs optimal policies are not stationary, policies must be learned for every single epoch. In practice all parameters are often trained simultaneously, ignoring the inherent structure suggested by dynamic programming. This paper introduces a combination of dynamic programming and policy gradient called dynamic policy gradient, where the parameters are trained backwards in time. For the tabular softmax parametrisation we carry out the convergence analysis for simultaneous and dynamic policy gradient towards global optima, both in the exact and sampled gradient settings without regularisation. It turns out that the use of dynamic policy gradient training much better exploits the structure of finite-time problems which is reflected in improved convergence bounds.
Adversarial examples in machine learning has emerged as a focal point of research due to their remarkable ability to deceive models with seemingly inconspicuous input perturbations, potentially resulting in severe consequences. In this study, we embark on a comprehensive exploration of adversarial machine learning models, shedding light on their intrinsic complexity and interpretability. Our investigation reveals intriguing links between machine learning model complexity and Einstein's theory of special relativity, through the concept of entanglement. More specific, we define entanglement computationally and demonstrate that distant feature samples can exhibit strong correlations, akin to entanglement in quantum realm. This revelation challenges conventional perspectives in describing the phenomenon of adversarial transferability observed in contemporary machine learning models. By drawing parallels with the relativistic effects of time dilation and length contraction during computation, we gain deeper insights into adversarial machine learning, paving the way for more robust and interpretable models in this rapidly evolving field.
Psychological research often focuses on examining group differences in a set of numeric variables for which normality is doubtful. Longitudinal studies enable the investigation of developmental trends. For instance, a recent study (Voormolen et al (2020), https: //doi.org/10.3390/jcm9051525) examined the relation of complicated and uncomplicated mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) with multidimensional outcomes measured at three- and six-months after mTBI. The data were analyzed using robust repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), resulting in significant differences between groups and across time points, then followed up by univariate ANOVAs per variable as is typically done. However, this approach ignores the multivariate aspect of the original analyses. We propose descriptive discriminant analysis (DDA) as an alternative, which is a robust multivariate technique recommended for examining significant MANOVA results and has not yet been applied to multivariate repeated measures data. We provide a tutorial with annotated R code demonstrating its application to these empirical data.
We study the problem of estimating survival causal effects, where the aim is to characterize the impact of an intervention on survival times, i.e., how long it takes for an event to occur. Applications include determining if a drug reduces the time to ICU discharge or if an advertising campaign increases customer dwell time. Historically, the most popular estimates have been based on parametric or semiparametric (e.g. proportional hazards) models; however, these methods suffer from problematic levels of bias. Recently debiased machine learning approaches are becoming increasingly popular, especially in applications to large datasets. However, despite their appealing theoretical properties, these estimators tend to be unstable because the debiasing step involves the use of the inverses of small estimated probabilities -- small errors in the estimated probabilities can result in huge changes in their inverses and therefore the resulting estimator. This problem is exacerbated in survival settings where probabilities are a product of treatment assignment and censoring probabilities. We propose a covariate balancing approach to estimating these inverses directly, sidestepping this problem. The result is an estimator that is stable in practice and enjoys many of the same theoretical properties. In particular, under overlap and asymptotic equicontinuity conditions, our estimator is asymptotically normal with negligible bias and optimal variance. Our experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic data demonstrate that our method has competitive bias and smaller variance than debiased machine learning approaches.
As artificial intelligence (AI) models continue to scale up, they are becoming more capable and integrated into various forms of decision-making systems. For models involved in moral decision-making, also known as artificial moral agents (AMA), interpretability provides a way to trust and understand the agent's internal reasoning mechanisms for effective use and error correction. In this paper, we provide an overview of this rapidly-evolving sub-field of AI interpretability, introduce the concept of the Minimum Level of Interpretability (MLI) and recommend an MLI for various types of agents, to aid their safe deployment in real-world settings.
While existing machine learning models have achieved great success for sentiment classification, they typically do not explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction, which can lead to poor results for fine-grained analysis at the snippet level (a phrase or sentence). Factorization Machine provides a possible approach to learning element-wise interaction for recommender systems, but they are not directly applicable to our task due to the inability to model contexts and word sequences. In this work, we develop two Position-aware Factorization Machines which consider word interaction, context and position information. Such information is jointly encoded in a set of sentiment-oriented word interaction vectors. Compared to traditional word embeddings, SWI vectors explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction and simplify the parameter learning. Experimental results show that while they have comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods for document-level classification, they benefit the snippet/sentence-level sentiment analysis.