Dealing with distribution shifts is one of the central challenges for modern machine learning. One fundamental situation is the covariate shift, where the input distributions of data change from training to testing stages while the input-conditional output distribution remains unchanged. In this paper, we initiate the study of a more challenging scenario -- continuous covariate shift -- in which the test data appear sequentially, and their distributions can shift continuously. Our goal is to adaptively train the predictor such that its prediction risk accumulated over time can be minimized. Starting with the importance-weighted learning, we show the method works effectively if the time-varying density ratios of test and train inputs can be accurately estimated. However, existing density ratio estimation methods would fail due to data scarcity at each time step. To this end, we propose an online method that can appropriately reuse historical information. Our density ratio estimation method is proven to perform well by enjoying a dynamic regret bound, which finally leads to an excess risk guarantee for the predictor. Empirical results also validate the effectiveness.
Multimodal learning robust to missing modality has attracted increasing attention due to its practicality. Existing methods tend to address it by learning a common subspace representation for different modality combinations. However, we reveal that they are sub-optimal due to their implicit constraint on intra-class representation. Specifically, the sample with different modalities within the same class will be forced to learn representations in the same direction. This hinders the model from capturing modality-specific information, resulting in insufficient learning. To this end, we propose a novel Decoupled Multimodal Representation Network (DMRNet) to assist robust multimodal learning. Specifically, DMRNet models the input from different modality combinations as a probabilistic distribution instead of a fixed point in the latent space, and samples embeddings from the distribution for the prediction module to calculate the task loss. As a result, the direction constraint from the loss minimization is blocked by the sampled representation. This relaxes the constraint on the inference representation and enables the model to capture the specific information for different modality combinations. Furthermore, we introduce a hard combination regularizer to prevent DMRNet from unbalanced training by guiding it to pay more attention to hard modality combinations. Finally, extensive experiments on multimodal classification and segmentation tasks demonstrate that the proposed DMRNet outperforms the state-of-the-art significantly.
Despite deep learning's transformative impact on various domains, the reliability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is still a pressing concern due to their complexity and data dependency. Traditional software fault localization techniques, such as Spectrum-based Fault Localization (SBFL), have been adapted to DNNs with limited success. Existing methods like DeepFault utilize SBFL measures but fail to account for fault propagation across neural pathways, leading to suboptimal fault detection. Addressing this gap, we propose the NP-SBFL method, leveraging Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) to identify and verify critical neural pathways. Our innovative multi-stage gradient ascent (MGA) technique, an extension of gradient ascent (GA), activates neurons sequentially, enhancing fault detection efficacy. We evaluated the effectiveness of our method, i.e. NP-SBFL-MGA, on two commonly used datasets, MNIST and CIFAR-10, two baselines DeepFault and NP- SBFL-GA, and three suspicious neuron measures, Tarantula, Ochiai, and Barinel. The empirical results showed that NP-SBFL-MGA is statistically more effective than the baselines at identifying suspicious paths and synthesizing adversarial inputs. Particularly, Tarantula on NP-SBFL-MGA had the highest fault detection rate at 96.75%, surpassing DeepFault on Ochiai (89.90%) and NP-SBFL-GA on Ochiai (60.61%). Our approach also yielded results comparable to those of the baselines in synthesizing naturalness inputs, and we found a positive correlation between the coverage of critical paths and the number of failed tests in DNN fault localization.
For performance and verification in machine learning, new methods have recently been proposed that optimise learning systems to satisfy formally expressed logical properties. Among these methods, differentiable logics (DLs) are used to translate propositional or first-order formulae into loss functions deployed for optimisation in machine learning. At the same time, recent attempts to give programming language support for verification of neural networks showed that DLs can be used to compile verification properties to machine-learning backends. This situation is calling for stronger guarantees about the soundness of such compilers, the soundness and compositionality of DLs, and the differentiability and performance of the resulting loss functions. In this paper, we propose an approach to formalise existing DLs using the Mathematical Components library in the Coq proof assistant. Thanks to this formalisation, we are able to give uniform semantics to otherwise disparate DLs, give formal proofs to existing informal arguments, find errors in previous work, and provide formal proofs to missing conjectured properties. This work is meant as a stepping stone for the development of programming language support for verification of machine learning.
Extensive research on formal verification of machine learning systems indicates that learning from data alone often fails to capture underlying background knowledge such as specifications implicitly available in the data. Various neural network verifiers have been developed to ensure that a machine-learnt model satisfies correctness and safety properties, however, they typically assume a trained network with fixed weights. A promising approach for creating machine learning models that inherently satisfy constraints after training is to encode background knowledge as explicit logical constraints that guide the learning process via so-called differentiable logics. In this paper, we experimentally compare and evaluate various logics from the literature, presenting our findings and highlighting open problems for future work.
Recent work has shown that object-centric representations can greatly help improve the accuracy of learning dynamics while also bringing interpretability. In this work, we take this idea one step further, ask the following question: "can learning disentangled representation further improve the accuracy of visual dynamics prediction in object-centric models?" While there has been some attempt to learn such disentangled representations for the case of static images \citep{nsb}, to the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work which tries to do this in a general setting for video, without making any specific assumptions about the kind of attributes that an object might have. The key building block of our architecture is the notion of a {\em block}, where several blocks together constitute an object. Each block is represented as a linear combination of a given number of learnable concept vectors, which is iteratively refined during the learning process. The blocks in our model are discovered in an unsupervised manner, by attending over object masks, in a style similar to discovery of slots \citep{slot_attention}, for learning a dense object-centric representation. We employ self-attention via transformers over the discovered blocks to predict the next state resulting in discovery of visual dynamics. We perform a series of experiments on several benchmark 2-D, and 3-D datasets demonstrating that our architecture (1) can discover semantically meaningful blocks (2) help improve accuracy of dynamics prediction compared to SOTA object-centric models (3) perform significantly better in OOD setting where the specific attribute combinations are not seen earlier during training. Our experiments highlight the importance discovery of disentangled representation for visual dynamics prediction.
We consider the problem of parameter estimation in a high-dimensional generalized linear model. Spectral methods obtained via the principal eigenvector of a suitable data-dependent matrix provide a simple yet surprisingly effective solution. However, despite their wide use, a rigorous performance characterization, as well as a principled way to preprocess the data, are available only for unstructured (i.i.d.\ Gaussian and Haar orthogonal) designs. In contrast, real-world data matrices are highly structured and exhibit non-trivial correlations. To address the problem, we consider correlated Gaussian designs capturing the anisotropic nature of the features via a covariance matrix $\Sigma$. Our main result is a precise asymptotic characterization of the performance of spectral estimators. This allows us to identify the optimal preprocessing that minimizes the number of samples needed for parameter estimation. Surprisingly, such preprocessing is universal across a broad set of designs, which partly addresses a conjecture on optimal spectral estimators for rotationally invariant models. Our principled approach vastly improves upon previous heuristic methods, including for designs common in computational imaging and genetics. The proposed methodology, based on approximate message passing, is broadly applicable and opens the way to the precise characterization of spiked matrices and of the corresponding spectral methods in a variety of settings.
Given a graph $G = (V, E)$ and a model of information flow on that network, a fundamental question is to understand if all the nodes have sufficient access to information generated at other nodes in the graph. If not, we can ask if a small set of edge additions improve information access. Formally, the broadcast value of a network is defined to be the minimum over pairs $u,v \in V$ of the probability that an information cascade starting at $u$ reaches $v$. Recent work in the algorithmic fairness literature has focused on heuristics for adding a few edges to a graph to improve its broadcast. Our goal is to formally study the approximability of the Broadcast Improvement problem: given $G$ and a parameter $k$, find the best set of $k$ edges to add to $G$ in order to maximize the broadcast value of the resulting graph. We develop efficient bicriteria approximation algorithms. If the optimal solution adds $k$ edges and achieves a broadcast of $\beta^*$, we develop algorithms that can (a) add $2k-1$ edges and achieve a broadcast value roughly $(\beta^*)^4$, or (b) add $O(k\log n)$ edges and achieve a broadcast roughly $\beta^*$. We also provide other trade-offs, that can be better depending on $k$ and the parameter associated with propagation in the cascade model. We complement our results by proving that unless P = NP, any algorithm that adds $O(k)$ edges must lose significantly in the approximation of $\beta^*$, resolving an open question. Our techniques are inspired by connections between Broadcast Improvement and problems such as Metric $k$-Center and Diameter Reduction. However, since the objective involves information cascades, we need to develop novel probabilistic tools to reason about the existence of paths in edge-sampled graphs. Finally, we show that our techniques extend to a single-source variant, for which we show both bicriteria algorithms and inapproximability results.
Recently, contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a successful method for unsupervised graph representation learning. Most graph CL methods first perform stochastic augmentation on the input graph to obtain two graph views and maximize the agreement of representations in the two views. Despite the prosperous development of graph CL methods, the design of graph augmentation schemes -- a crucial component in CL -- remains rarely explored. We argue that the data augmentation schemes should preserve intrinsic structures and attributes of graphs, which will force the model to learn representations that are insensitive to perturbation on unimportant nodes and edges. However, most existing methods adopt uniform data augmentation schemes, like uniformly dropping edges and uniformly shuffling features, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel graph contrastive representation learning method with adaptive augmentation that incorporates various priors for topological and semantic aspects of the graph. Specifically, on the topology level, we design augmentation schemes based on node centrality measures to highlight important connective structures. On the node attribute level, we corrupt node features by adding more noise to unimportant node features, to enforce the model to recognize underlying semantic information. We perform extensive experiments of node classification on a variety of real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines and even surpasses some supervised counterparts, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive framework with adaptive augmentation.
Data augmentation has been widely used to improve generalizability of machine learning models. However, comparatively little work studies data augmentation for graphs. This is largely due to the complex, non-Euclidean structure of graphs, which limits possible manipulation operations. Augmentation operations commonly used in vision and language have no analogs for graphs. Our work studies graph data augmentation for graph neural networks (GNNs) in the context of improving semi-supervised node-classification. We discuss practical and theoretical motivations, considerations and strategies for graph data augmentation. Our work shows that neural edge predictors can effectively encode class-homophilic structure to promote intra-class edges and demote inter-class edges in given graph structure, and our main contribution introduces the GAug graph data augmentation framework, which leverages these insights to improve performance in GNN-based node classification via edge prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that augmentation via GAug improves performance across GNN architectures and datasets.
It is important to detect anomalous inputs when deploying machine learning systems. The use of larger and more complex inputs in deep learning magnifies the difficulty of distinguishing between anomalous and in-distribution examples. At the same time, diverse image and text data are available in enormous quantities. We propose leveraging these data to improve deep anomaly detection by training anomaly detectors against an auxiliary dataset of outliers, an approach we call Outlier Exposure (OE). This enables anomaly detectors to generalize and detect unseen anomalies. In extensive experiments on natural language processing and small- and large-scale vision tasks, we find that Outlier Exposure significantly improves detection performance. We also observe that cutting-edge generative models trained on CIFAR-10 may assign higher likelihoods to SVHN images than to CIFAR-10 images; we use OE to mitigate this issue. We also analyze the flexibility and robustness of Outlier Exposure, and identify characteristics of the auxiliary dataset that improve performance.