Real-world datasets often have missing values associated with complex generative processes, where the cause of the missingness may not be fully observed. This is known as missing not at random (MNAR) data. However, many imputation methods do not take into account the missingness mechanism, resulting in biased imputation values when MNAR data is present. Although there are a few methods that have considered the MNAR scenario, their model's identifiability under MNAR is generally not guaranteed. That is, model parameters can not be uniquely determined even with infinite data samples, hence the imputation results given by such models can still be biased. This issue is especially overlooked by many modern deep generative models. In this work, we fill in this gap by systematically analyzing the identifiability of generative models under MNAR. Furthermore, we propose a practical deep generative model which can provide identifiability guarantees under mild assumptions, for a wide range of MNAR mechanisms. Our method demonstrates a clear advantage for tasks on both synthetic data and multiple real-world scenarios with MNAR data.
Iterative hard thresholding (IHT) has gained in popularity over the past decades in large-scale optimization. However, convergence properties of this method have only been explored recently in non-convex settings. In matrix completion, existing works often focus on the guarantee of global convergence of IHT via standard assumptions such as incoherence property and uniform sampling. While such analysis provides a global upper bound on the linear convergence rate, it does not describe the actual performance of IHT in practice. In this paper, we provide a novel insight into the local convergence of a specific variant of IHT for matrix completion. We uncover the exact linear rate of IHT in a closed-form expression and identify the region of convergence in which the algorithm is guaranteed to converge. Furthermore, we utilize random matrix theory to study the linear rate of convergence of IHTSVD for large-scale matrix completion. We find that asymptotically, the rate can be expressed in closed form in terms of the relative rank and the sampling rate. Finally, we present various numerical results to verify the aforementioned theoretical analysis.
Training a machine learning model with federated edge learning (FEEL) is typically time-consuming due to the constrained computation power of edge devices and limited wireless resources in edge networks. In this paper, the training time minimization problem is investigated in a quantized FEEL system, where the heterogeneous edge devices send quantized gradients to the edge server via orthogonal channels. In particular, a stochastic quantization scheme is adopted for compression of uploaded gradients, which can reduce the burden of per-round communication but may come at the cost of increasing number of communication rounds. The training time is modeled by taking into account the communication time, computation time and the number of communication rounds. Based on the proposed training time model, the intrinsic trade-off between the number of communication rounds and per-round latency is characterized. Specifically, we analyze the convergence behavior of the quantized FEEL in terms of the optimality gap. Further, a joint data-and-model-driven fitting method is proposed to obtain the exact optimality gap, based on which the closed-form expressions for the number of communication rounds and the total training time are obtained. Constrained by total bandwidth, the training time minimization problem is formulated as a joint quantization level and bandwidth allocation optimization problem. To this end, an algorithm based on alternating optimization is proposed, which alternatively solves the subproblem of quantization optimization via successive convex approximation and the subproblem of bandwidth allocation via bisection search. With different learning tasks and models, the validation of our analysis and the near-optimal performance of the proposed optimization algorithm are demonstrated by the experimental results.
Self-training algorithms, which train a model to fit pseudolabels predicted by another previously-learned model, have been very successful for learning with unlabeled data using neural networks. However, the current theoretical understanding of self-training only applies to linear models. This work provides a unified theoretical analysis of self-training with deep networks for semi-supervised learning, unsupervised domain adaptation, and unsupervised learning. At the core of our analysis is a simple but realistic ``expansion'' assumption, which states that a low-probability subset of the data must expand to a neighborhood with large probability relative to the subset. We also assume that neighborhoods of examples in different classes have minimal overlap. We prove that under these assumptions, the minimizers of population objectives based on self-training and input-consistency regularization will achieve high accuracy with respect to ground-truth labels. By using off-the-shelf generalization bounds, we immediately convert this result to sample complexity guarantees for neural nets that are polynomial in the margin and Lipschitzness. Our results help explain the empirical successes of recently proposed self-training algorithms which use input consistency regularization.
The recent GPT-3 model (Brown et al., 2020) achieves remarkable few-shot performance solely by leveraging a natural-language prompt and a few task demonstrations as input context. Inspired by their findings, we study few-shot learning in a more practical scenario, where we use smaller language models for which fine-tuning is computationally efficient. We present LM-BFF--better few-shot fine-tuning of language models--a suite of simple and complementary techniques for fine-tuning language models on a small number of annotated examples. Our approach includes (1) prompt-based fine-tuning together with a novel pipeline for automating prompt generation; and (2) a refined strategy for dynamically and selectively incorporating demonstrations into each context. Finally, we present a systematic evaluation for analyzing few-shot performance on a range of NLP tasks, including classification and regression. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods combine to dramatically outperform standard fine-tuning procedures in this low resource setting, achieving up to 30% absolute improvement, and 11% on average across all tasks. Our approach makes minimal assumptions on task resources and domain expertise, and hence constitutes a strong task-agnostic method for few-shot learning.
While existing work in robust deep learning has focused on small pixel-level $\ell_p$ norm-based perturbations, this may not account for perturbations encountered in several real world settings. In many such cases although test data might not be available, broad specifications about the types of perturbations (such as an unknown degree of rotation) may be known. We consider a setup where robustness is expected over an unseen test domain that is not i.i.d. but deviates from the training domain. While this deviation may not be exactly known, its broad characterization is specified a priori, in terms of attributes. We propose an adversarial training approach which learns to generate new samples so as to maximize exposure of the classifier to the attributes-space, without having access to the data from the test domain. Our adversarial training solves a min-max optimization problem, with the inner maximization generating adversarial perturbations, and the outer minimization finding model parameters by optimizing the loss on adversarial perturbations generated from the inner maximization. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on three types of naturally occurring perturbations -- object-related shifts, geometric transformations, and common image corruptions. Our approach enables deep neural networks to be robust against a wide range of naturally occurring perturbations. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach by showing the robustness gains of deep neural networks trained using our adversarial training on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and a new variant of the CLEVR dataset.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.
Semantic segmentation is one of the basic topics in computer vision, it aims to assign semantic labels to every pixel of an image. Unbalanced semantic label distribution could have a negative influence on segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we investigate using data augmentation approach to balance the semantic label distribution in order to improve segmentation performance. We propose using generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate realistic images for improving the performance of semantic segmentation networks. Experimental results show that the proposed method can not only improve segmentation performance on those classes with low accuracy, but also obtain 1.3% to 2.1% increase in average segmentation accuracy. It shows that this augmentation method can boost accuracy and be easily applicable to any other segmentation models.
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) has become a popular method for scalable Bayesian inference. These methods are based on sampling a discrete-time approximation to a continuous time process, such as the Langevin diffusion. When applied to distributions defined on a constrained space, such as the simplex, the time-discretisation error can dominate when we are near the boundary of the space. We demonstrate that while current SGMCMC methods for the simplex perform well in certain cases, they struggle with sparse simplex spaces; when many of the components are close to zero. However, most popular large-scale applications of Bayesian inference on simplex spaces, such as network or topic models, are sparse. We argue that this poor performance is due to the biases of SGMCMC caused by the discretization error. To get around this, we propose the stochastic CIR process, which removes all discretization error and we prove that samples from the stochastic CIR process are asymptotically unbiased. Use of the stochastic CIR process within a SGMCMC algorithm is shown to give substantially better performance for a topic model and a Dirichlet process mixture model than existing SGMCMC approaches.
We study the problem of stock related question answering (StockQA): automatically generating answers to stock related questions, just like professional stock analysts providing action recommendations to stocks upon user's requests. StockQA is quite different from previous QA tasks since (1) the answers in StockQA are natural language sentences (rather than entities or values) and due to the dynamic nature of StockQA, it is scarcely possible to get reasonable answers in an extractive way from the training data; and (2) StockQA requires properly analyzing the relationship between keywords in QA pair and the numerical features of a stock. We propose to address the problem with a memory-augmented encoder-decoder architecture, and integrate different mechanisms of number understanding and generation, which is a critical component of StockQA. We build a large-scale Chinese dataset containing over 180K StockQA instances, based on which various technique combinations are extensively studied and compared. Experimental results show that a hybrid word-character model with separate character components for number processing, achieves the best performance.\footnote{The data is publicly available at \url{//ai.tencent.com/ailab/nlp/dataset/}.}
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.