Formal reasoning about hashing-based probabilistic data structures often requires reasoning about random variables where when one variable gets larger (such as the number of elements hashed into one bucket), the others tend to be smaller (like the number of elements hashed into the other buckets). This is an example of negative dependence, a generalization of probabilistic independence that has recently found interesting applications in algorithm design and machine learning. Despite the usefulness of negative dependence for the analyses of probabilistic data structures, existing verification methods cannot establish this property for randomized programs. To fill this gap, we design LINA, a probabilistic separation logic for reasoning about negative dependence. Following recent works on probabilistic separation logic using separating conjunction to reason about the probabilistic independence of random variables, we use separating conjunction to reason about negative dependence. Our assertion logic features two separating conjunctions, one for independence and one for negative dependence. We generalize the logic of bunched implications (BI) to support multiple separating conjunctions, and provide a sound and complete proof system. Notably, the semantics for separating conjunction relies on a non-deterministic, rather than partial, operation for combining resources. By drawing on closure properties for negative dependence, our program logic supports a Frame-like rule for negative dependence and monotone operations. We demonstrate how LINA can verify probabilistic properties of hash-based data structures and balls-into-bins processes.
A long line of research on fixed parameter tractability of integer programming culminated with showing that integer programs with n variables and a constraint matrix with dual tree-depth d and largest entry D are solvable in time g(d,D)poly(n) for some function g. However, the dual tree-depth of a constraint matrix is not preserved by row operations, i.e., a given integer program can be equivalent to another with a smaller dual tree-depth, and thus does not reflect its geometric structure. We prove that the minimum dual tree-depth of a row-equivalent matrix is equal to the branch-depth of the matroid defined by the columns of the matrix. We design a fixed parameter algorithm for computing branch-depth of matroids represented over a finite field and a fixed parameter algorithm for computing a row-equivalent matrix with minimum dual tree-depth. Finally, we use these results to obtain an algorithm for integer programming running in time g(d*,D)poly(n) where d* is the branch-depth of the constraint matrix; the branch-depth cannot be replaced by the more permissive notion of branch-width.
The usual resource interpretation of linear logic says that variables have to be used exactly once. However, there are models of linear logic where this interpretation is too restrictive. In this work we show how in probabilistic models of linear logic the correct resource interpretation should be sampling, i.e. the linear arrow should be read as "the output may only sample once from its input". We accommodate this new interpretation by defining a multilanguage syntax and its categorical semantics that bridges the Markov kernel and linear logic interpretations of probabilistic programs.
A proof procedure, in the spirit of the sequent calculus, is proposed to check the validity of entailments between Separation Logic formulas combining inductively defined predicates denoted structures of bounded tree width and theory reasoning. The calculus is sound and complete, in the sense that a sequent is valid iff it admits a (possibly infinite) proof tree. We show that the procedure terminates in the two following cases: (i) When the inductive rules that define the predicates occurring on the left-hand side of the entailment terminate, in which case the proof tree is always finite. (ii) When the theory is empty, in which case every valid sequent admits a rational proof tree, where the total number of pairwise distinct sequents occurring in the proof tree is doubly exponential w.r.t.\ the size of the end-sequent. We also show that the validity problem is undecidable for a wide class of theories, even with a very low expressive power.
Any reasonable machine learning (ML) model should not only interpolate efficiently in between the training samples provided (in-distribution region), but also approach the extrapolative or out-of-distribution (OOD) region without being overconfident. Our experiment on human subjects justifies the aforementioned properties for human intelligence as well. Many state-of-the-art algorithms have tried to fix the overconfidence problem of ML models in the OOD region. However, in doing so, they have often impaired the in-distribution performance of the model. Our key insight is that ML models partition the feature space into polytopes and learn constant (random forests) or affine (ReLU networks) functions over those polytopes. This leads to the OOD overconfidence problem for the polytopes which lie in the training data boundary and extend to infinity. To resolve this issue, we propose kernel density methods that fit Gaussian kernel over the polytopes, which are learned using ML models. Specifically, we introduce two variants of kernel density polytopes: Kernel Density Forest (KDF) and Kernel Density Network (KDN) based on random forests and deep networks, respectively. Studies on various simulation settings show that both KDF and KDN achieve uniform confidence over the classes in the OOD region while maintaining good in-distribution accuracy compared to that of their respective parent models.
We study Bayesian approaches to causal inference via propensity score regression. Much of the Bayesian literature on propensity score methods have relied on approaches that cannot be viewed as fully Bayesian in the context of conventional `likelihood times prior' posterior inference; in addition, most methods rely on parametric and distributional assumptions, and presumed correct specification. We emphasize that causal inference is typically carried out in settings of mis-specification, and develop strategies for fully Bayesian inference that reflect this. We focus on methods based on decision-theoretic arguments, and show how inference based on loss-minimization can give valid and fully Bayesian inference. We propose a computational approach to inference based on the Bayesian bootstrap which has good Bayesian and frequentist properties.
Optimum parameter estimation methods require knowledge of a parametric probability density that statistically describes the available observations. In this work we examine Bayesian and non-Bayesian parameter estimation problems under a data-driven formulation where the necessary parametric probability density is replaced by available data. We present various data-driven versions that either result in neural network approximations of the optimum estimators or in well defined optimization problems that can be solved numerically. In particular, for the data-driven equivalent of non-Bayesian estimation we end up with optimization problems similar to the ones encountered for the design of generative networks.
Posterior contractions rates (PCRs) strengthen the notion of Bayesian consistency, quantifying the speed at which the posterior distribution concentrates on arbitrarily small neighborhoods of the true model, with probability tending to 1 or almost surely, as the sample size goes to infinity. Under the Bayesian nonparametric framework, a common assumption in the study of PCRs is that the model is dominated for the observations; that is, it is assumed that the posterior can be written through the Bayes formula. In this paper, we consider the problem of establishing PCRs in Bayesian nonparametric models where the posterior distribution is not available through the Bayes formula, and hence models that are non-dominated for the observations. By means of the Wasserstein distance and a suitable sieve construction, our main result establishes PCRs in Bayesian nonparametric models where the posterior is available through a more general disintegration than the Bayes formula. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first general approach to provide PCRs in non-dominated Bayesian nonparametric models, and it relies on minimal modeling assumptions and on a suitable continuity assumption for the posterior distribution. Some refinements of our result are presented under additional assumptions on the prior distribution, and applications are given with respect to the Dirichlet process prior and the normalized extended Gamma process prior.
One of the fundamental problems in Artificial Intelligence is to perform complex multi-hop logical reasoning over the facts captured by a knowledge graph (KG). This problem is challenging, because KGs can be massive and incomplete. Recent approaches embed KG entities in a low dimensional space and then use these embeddings to find the answer entities. However, it has been an outstanding challenge of how to handle arbitrary first-order logic (FOL) queries as present methods are limited to only a subset of FOL operators. In particular, the negation operator is not supported. An additional limitation of present methods is also that they cannot naturally model uncertainty. Here, we present BetaE, a probabilistic embedding framework for answering arbitrary FOL queries over KGs. BetaE is the first method that can handle a complete set of first-order logical operations: conjunction ($\wedge$), disjunction ($\vee$), and negation ($\neg$). A key insight of BetaE is to use probabilistic distributions with bounded support, specifically the Beta distribution, and embed queries/entities as distributions, which as a consequence allows us to also faithfully model uncertainty. Logical operations are performed in the embedding space by neural operators over the probabilistic embeddings. We demonstrate the performance of BetaE on answering arbitrary FOL queries on three large, incomplete KGs. While being more general, BetaE also increases relative performance by up to 25.4% over the current state-of-the-art KG reasoning methods that can only handle conjunctive queries without negation.
Outlier detection is an important topic in machine learning and has been used in a wide range of applications. In this paper, we approach outlier detection as a binary-classification issue by sampling potential outliers from a uniform reference distribution. However, due to the sparsity of data in high-dimensional space, a limited number of potential outliers may fail to provide sufficient information to assist the classifier in describing a boundary that can separate outliers from normal data effectively. To address this, we propose a novel Single-Objective Generative Adversarial Active Learning (SO-GAAL) method for outlier detection, which can directly generate informative potential outliers based on the mini-max game between a generator and a discriminator. Moreover, to prevent the generator from falling into the mode collapsing problem, the stop node of training should be determined when SO-GAAL is able to provide sufficient information. But without any prior information, it is extremely difficult for SO-GAAL. Therefore, we expand the network structure of SO-GAAL from a single generator to multiple generators with different objectives (MO-GAAL), which can generate a reasonable reference distribution for the whole dataset. We empirically compare the proposed approach with several state-of-the-art outlier detection methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets. The results show that MO-GAAL outperforms its competitors in the majority of cases, especially for datasets with various cluster types or high irrelevant variable ratio.
We propose a new method of estimation in topic models, that is not a variation on the existing simplex finding algorithms, and that estimates the number of topics K from the observed data. We derive new finite sample minimax lower bounds for the estimation of A, as well as new upper bounds for our proposed estimator. We describe the scenarios where our estimator is minimax adaptive. Our finite sample analysis is valid for any number of documents (n), individual document length (N_i), dictionary size (p) and number of topics (K), and both p and K are allowed to increase with n, a situation not handled well by previous analyses. We complement our theoretical results with a detailed simulation study. We illustrate that the new algorithm is faster and more accurate than the current ones, although we start out with a computational and theoretical disadvantage of not knowing the correct number of topics K, while we provide the competing methods with the correct value in our simulations.