Deep transfer learning has been widely used for knowledge transmission in recent years. The standard approach of pre-training and subsequently fine-tuning, or linear probing, has shown itself to be effective in many down-stream tasks. Therefore, a challenging and ongoing question arises: how to quantify cross-task transferability that is compatible with transferred results while keeping self-consistency? Existing transferability metrics are estimated on the particular model by conversing source and target tasks. They must be recalculated with all existing source tasks whenever a novel unknown target task is encountered, which is extremely computationally expensive. In this work, we highlight what properties should be satisfied and evaluate existing metrics in light of these characteristics. Building upon this, we propose Principal Gradient Expectation (PGE), a simple yet effective method for assessing transferability across tasks. Specifically, we use a restart scheme to calculate every batch gradient over each weight unit more than once, and then we take the average of all the gradients to get the expectation. Thus, the transferability between the source and target task is estimated by computing the distance of normalized principal gradients. Extensive experiments show that the proposed transferability metric is more stable, reliable and efficient than SOTA methods.
We investigate unbiased high-dimensional mean estimators in differential privacy. We consider differentially private mechanisms whose expected output equals the mean of the input dataset, for every dataset drawn from a fixed convex domain $K$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$. In the setting of concentrated differential privacy, we show that, for every input such an unbiased mean estimator introduces approximately at least as much error as a mechanism that adds Gaussian noise with a carefully chosen covariance. This is true when the error is measured with respect to $\ell_p$ error for any $p \ge 2$. We extend this result to local differential privacy, and to approximate differential privacy, but for the latter the error lower bound holds either for a dataset or for a neighboring dataset. We also extend our results to mechanisms that take i.i.d.~samples from a distribution over $K$ and are unbiased with respect to the mean of the distribution.
Given a dataset on actions and resulting long-term rewards, a direct estimation approach fits value functions that minimize prediction error on the training data. Temporal difference learning (TD) methods instead fit value functions by minimizing the degree of temporal inconsistency between estimates made at successive time-steps. Focusing on finite state Markov chains, we provide a crisp asymptotic theory of the statistical advantages of this approach. First, we show that an intuitive inverse trajectory pooling coefficient completely characterizes the percent reduction in mean-squared error of value estimates. Depending on problem structure, the reduction could be enormous or nonexistent. Next, we prove that there can be dramatic improvements in estimates of the difference in value-to-go for two states: TD's errors are bounded in terms of a novel measure - the problem's trajectory crossing time - which can be much smaller than the problem's time horizon.
A compression function is a map that slims down an observational set into a subset of reduced size, while preserving its informational content. In multiple applications, the condition that one new observation makes the compressed set change is interpreted that this observation brings in extra information and, in learning theory, this corresponds to misclassification, or misprediction. In this paper, we lay the foundations of a new theory that allows one to keep control on the probability of change of compression (called the "risk"). We identify conditions under which the cardinality of the compressed set is a consistent estimator for the risk (without any upper limit on the size of the compressed set) and prove unprecedentedly tight bounds to evaluate the risk under a generally applicable condition of preference. All results are usable in a fully agnostic setup, without requiring any a priori knowledge on the probability distribution of the observations. Not only these results offer a valid support to develop trust in observation-driven methodologies, they also play a fundamental role in learning techniques as a tool for hyper-parameter tuning.
Identifying causal treatment (or exposure) effects in observational studies requires the data to satisfy the unconfoundedness assumption which is not testable using the observed data. With sensitivity analysis, one can determine how the conclusions might change if assumptions are violated to a certain degree. In this paper, we propose a new technique for sensitivity analysis applicable to clusters observational data with a normally distributed or binary outcome. The proposed methods aim to assess the robustness of estimated treatment effects in a single study as well as in multiple studies, i.e., meta-analysis, against unmeasured confounders. Simulations with various underlying scenarios were conducted to assess the performance of our methods. Unlike other existing sensitivity analysis methods, our methods have no restrictive assumptions on the number of unmeasured confounders or on the relationship between measured and unmeasured confounders, and do not exclude possible interactions between measured confounders and the treatment. Our methods are easy to implement using standard statistical software packages.
As a framework for sequential decision-making, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been regarded as an essential component leading to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). However, RL is often criticized for having the same training environment as the test one, which also hinders its application in the real world. To mitigate this problem, Distributionally Robust RL (DRRL) is proposed to improve the worst performance in a set of environments that may contain the unknown test environment. Due to the nonlinearity of the robustness goal, most of the previous work resort to the model-based approach, learning with either an empirical distribution learned from the data or a simulator that can be sampled infinitely, which limits their applications in simple dynamics environments. In contrast, we attempt to design a DRRL algorithm that can be trained along a single trajectory, i.e., no repeated sampling from a state. Based on the standard Q-learning, we propose distributionally robust Q-learning with the single trajectory (DRQ) and its average-reward variant named differential DRQ. We provide asymptotic convergence guarantees and experiments for both settings, demonstrating their superiority in the perturbed environments against the non-robust ones.
Classic algorithms and machine learning systems like neural networks are both abundant in everyday life. While classic computer science algorithms are suitable for precise execution of exactly defined tasks such as finding the shortest path in a large graph, neural networks allow learning from data to predict the most likely answer in more complex tasks such as image classification, which cannot be reduced to an exact algorithm. To get the best of both worlds, this thesis explores combining both concepts leading to more robust, better performing, more interpretable, more computationally efficient, and more data efficient architectures. The thesis formalizes the idea of algorithmic supervision, which allows a neural network to learn from or in conjunction with an algorithm. When integrating an algorithm into a neural architecture, it is important that the algorithm is differentiable such that the architecture can be trained end-to-end and gradients can be propagated back through the algorithm in a meaningful way. To make algorithms differentiable, this thesis proposes a general method for continuously relaxing algorithms by perturbing variables and approximating the expectation value in closed form, i.e., without sampling. In addition, this thesis proposes differentiable algorithms, such as differentiable sorting networks, differentiable renderers, and differentiable logic gate networks. Finally, this thesis presents alternative training strategies for learning with algorithms.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Deep learning models on graphs have achieved remarkable performance in various graph analysis tasks, e.g., node classification, link prediction and graph clustering. However, they expose uncertainty and unreliability against the well-designed inputs, i.e., adversarial examples. Accordingly, various studies have emerged for both attack and defense addressed in different graph analysis tasks, leading to the arms race in graph adversarial learning. For instance, the attacker has poisoning and evasion attack, and the defense group correspondingly has preprocessing- and adversarial- based methods. Despite the booming works, there still lacks a unified problem definition and a comprehensive review. To bridge this gap, we investigate and summarize the existing works on graph adversarial learning tasks systemically. Specifically, we survey and unify the existing works w.r.t. attack and defense in graph analysis tasks, and give proper definitions and taxonomies at the same time. Besides, we emphasize the importance of related evaluation metrics, and investigate and summarize them comprehensively. Hopefully, our works can serve as a reference for the relevant researchers, thus providing assistance for their studies. More details of our works are available at //github.com/gitgiter/Graph-Adversarial-Learning.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.
The potential of graph convolutional neural networks for the task of zero-shot learning has been demonstrated recently. These models are highly sample efficient as related concepts in the graph structure share statistical strength allowing generalization to new classes when faced with a lack of data. However, knowledge from distant nodes can get diluted when propagating through intermediate nodes, because current approaches to zero-shot learning use graph propagation schemes that perform Laplacian smoothing at each layer. We show that extensive smoothing does not help the task of regressing classifier weights in zero-shot learning. In order to still incorporate information from distant nodes and utilize the graph structure, we propose an Attentive Dense Graph Propagation Module (ADGPM). ADGPM allows us to exploit the hierarchical graph structure of the knowledge graph through additional connections. These connections are added based on a node's relationship to its ancestors and descendants and an attention scheme is further used to weigh their contribution depending on the distance to the node. Finally, we illustrate that finetuning of the feature representation after training the ADGPM leads to considerable improvements. Our method achieves competitive results, outperforming previous zero-shot learning approaches.