Post-selection inference has recently been proposed as a way of quantifying uncertainty about detected changepoints. The idea is to run a changepoint detection algorithm, and then re-use the same data to perform a test for a change near each of the detected changes. By defining the p-value for the test appropriately, so that it is conditional on the information used to choose the test, this approach will produce valid p-values. We show how to improve the power of these procedures by conditioning on less information. This gives rise to an ideal selective p-value that is intractable but can be approximated by Monte Carlo. We show that for any Monte Carlo sample size, this procedure produces valid p-values, and empirically that noticeable increase in power is possible with only very modest Monte Carlo sample sizes. Our procedure is easy to implement given existing post-selection inference methods, as we just need to generate perturbations of the data set and re-apply the post-selection method to each of these. On genomic data consisting of human GC content, our procedure increases the number of significant changepoints that are detected from e.g. 17 to 27, when compared to existing methods.
Text generation with beam search has proven successful in a wide range of applications. We point out that, though largely overlooked in the literature, the commonly-used implementation of beam decoding (e.g., Hugging Face Transformers and fairseq) uses a first come, first served heuristic: it keeps a set of already completed sequences over time steps and stops when the size of this set reaches the beam size. Based on this finding, we introduce a patience factor, a simple modification to this beam decoding implementation, that generalizes the stopping criterion and provides flexibility to the depth of search. Empirical results demonstrate that adjusting this patience factor improves decoding performance of strong pretrained models on news text summarization and machine translation over diverse language pairs, with a negligible inference slowdown. Our approach only modifies one line of code and can be thus readily incorporated in any implementation. Further, we find that different versions of beam decoding result in large performance differences in summarization, demonstrating the need for clarity in specifying the beam search implementation in research work. Our code will be available upon publication.
Financial networks are characterized by complex structures of mutual obligations. These obligations are fulfilled entirely or in part (when defaults occur) via a mechanism called clearing, which determines a set of payments that settle the claims by respecting rules such as limited liability, absolute priority, and proportionality (pro-rated payments). In the presence of shocks on the financial system, however, the clearing mechanism may lead to cascaded defaults and eventually to financial disaster. In this paper, we first study the clearing model under pro-rated payments of Eisenberg and Noe, and we derive novel necessary and sufficient conditions for the uniqueness of the clearing payments, valid for an arbitrary topology of the financial network. Then, we argue that the proportionality rule is one of the factors responsible for cascaded defaults, and that the overall system loss can be reduced if this rule is lifted. The proposed approach thus shifts the focus from the individual interest to the overall system's interest to control and contain adverse effects of cascaded failures, and we show that clearing payments in this setting can be computed by solving suitable convex optimization problems.
One key challenge in Artificial Life is designing systems that display an emergence of complex behaviors. Many such systems depend on a high-dimensional parameter space, only a small subset of which displays interesting dynamics. Focusing on the case of continuous systems, we introduce the 'Phase Transition Finder'(PTF) algorithm, which can be used to efficiently generate parameters lying at the border between two phases. We argue that such points are more likely to display complex behaviors, and confirm this by applying PTF to Lenia showing it can increase the frequency of interesting behaviors more than two-fold, while remaining efficient enough for large-scale searches.
Interior point methods are widely used for different types of mathematical optimization problems. Many implementations of interior point methods in use today rely on direct linear solvers to solve systems of equations in each iteration. The need to solve ever larger optimization problems more efficiently and the rise of hardware accelerators for general purpose computing has led to a large interest in using iterative linear solvers instead, with the major issue being inevitable ill-conditioning of the linear systems arising as the optimization progresses. We investigate the use of Krylov solvers for interior point methods in solving optimization problems from radiation therapy and support vector machines. We implement a prototype interior point method using a so called doubly augmented formulation of the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker linear system of equations, originally proposed by Forsgren and Gill, and evaluate its performance on real optimization problems from radiation therapy and support vector machines. Crucially, our implementation uses a preconditioned conjugate gradient method with Jacobi preconditioning internally. Our measurements of the conditioning of the linear systems indicate that the Jacobi preconditioner improves the conditioning of the systems to a degree that they can be solved iteratively, but there is room for further improvement in that regard. Furthermore, profiling of our prototype code shows that it is suitable for GPU acceleration, which may further improve its performance in practice. Overall, our results indicate that our method can find solutions of acceptable accuracy in reasonable time, even with a simple Jacobi preconditioner.
Causal graph recovery is essential in the field of causal inference. Traditional methods are typically knowledge-based or statistical estimation-based, which are limited by data collection biases and individuals' knowledge about factors affecting the relations between variables of interests. The advance of large language models (LLMs) provides opportunities to address these problems. We propose a novel method that utilizes the extensive knowledge contained within a large corpus of scientific literature to deduce causal relationships in general causal graph recovery tasks. This method leverages Retrieval Augmented-Generation (RAG) based LLMs to systematically analyze and extract pertinent information from a comprehensive collection of research papers. Our method first retrieves relevant text chunks from the aggregated literature. Then, the LLM is tasked with identifying and labelling potential associations between factors. Finally, we give a method to aggregate the associational relationships to build a causal graph. We demonstrate our method is able to construct high quality causal graphs on the well-known SACHS dataset solely from literature.
Most recent semantic segmentation methods adopt a fully-convolutional network (FCN) with an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder progressively reduces the spatial resolution and learns more abstract/semantic visual concepts with larger receptive fields. Since context modeling is critical for segmentation, the latest efforts have been focused on increasing the receptive field, through either dilated/atrous convolutions or inserting attention modules. However, the encoder-decoder based FCN architecture remains unchanged. In this paper, we aim to provide an alternative perspective by treating semantic segmentation as a sequence-to-sequence prediction task. Specifically, we deploy a pure transformer (ie, without convolution and resolution reduction) to encode an image as a sequence of patches. With the global context modeled in every layer of the transformer, this encoder can be combined with a simple decoder to provide a powerful segmentation model, termed SEgmentation TRansformer (SETR). Extensive experiments show that SETR achieves new state of the art on ADE20K (50.28% mIoU), Pascal Context (55.83% mIoU) and competitive results on Cityscapes. Particularly, we achieve the first (44.42% mIoU) position in the highly competitive ADE20K test server leaderboard.
We propose a novel method for automatic reasoning on knowledge graphs based on debate dynamics. The main idea is to frame the task of triple classification as a debate game between two reinforcement learning agents which extract arguments -- paths in the knowledge graph -- with the goal to promote the fact being true (thesis) or the fact being false (antithesis), respectively. Based on these arguments, a binary classifier, called the judge, decides whether the fact is true or false. The two agents can be considered as sparse, adversarial feature generators that present interpretable evidence for either the thesis or the antithesis. In contrast to other black-box methods, the arguments allow users to get an understanding of the decision of the judge. Since the focus of this work is to create an explainable method that maintains a competitive predictive accuracy, we benchmark our method on the triple classification and link prediction task. Thereby, we find that our method outperforms several baselines on the benchmark datasets FB15k-237, WN18RR, and Hetionet. We also conduct a survey and find that the extracted arguments are informative for users.
Incompleteness is a common problem for existing knowledge graphs (KGs), and the completion of KG which aims to predict links between entities is challenging. Most existing KG completion methods only consider the direct relation between nodes and ignore the relation paths which contain useful information for link prediction. Recently, a few methods take relation paths into consideration but pay less attention to the order of relations in paths which is important for reasoning. In addition, these path-based models always ignore nonlinear contributions of path features for link prediction. To solve these problems, we propose a novel KG completion method named OPTransE. Instead of embedding both entities of a relation into the same latent space as in previous methods, we project the head entity and the tail entity of each relation into different spaces to guarantee the order of relations in the path. Meanwhile, we adopt a pooling strategy to extract nonlinear and complex features of different paths to further improve the performance of link prediction. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed model OPTransE performs better than state-of-the-art methods.
With the rapid growth of knowledge bases (KBs), question answering over knowledge base, a.k.a. KBQA has drawn huge attention in recent years. Most of the existing KBQA methods follow so called encoder-compare framework. They map the question and the KB facts to a common embedding space, in which the similarity between the question vector and the fact vectors can be conveniently computed. This, however, inevitably loses original words interaction information. To preserve more original information, we propose an attentive recurrent neural network with similarity matrix based convolutional neural network (AR-SMCNN) model, which is able to capture comprehensive hierarchical information utilizing the advantages of both RNN and CNN. We use RNN to capture semantic-level correlation by its sequential modeling nature, and use an attention mechanism to keep track of the entities and relations simultaneously. Meanwhile, we use a similarity matrix based CNN with two-directions pooling to extract literal-level words interaction matching utilizing CNNs strength of modeling spatial correlation among data. Moreover, we have developed a new heuristic extension method for entity detection, which significantly decreases the effect of noise. Our method has outperformed the state-of-the-arts on SimpleQuestion benchmark in both accuracy and efficiency.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.