We study the scaling limits of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with constant step-size in the high-dimensional regime. We prove limit theorems for the trajectories of summary statistics (i.e., finite-dimensional functions) of SGD as the dimension goes to infinity. Our approach allows one to choose the summary statistics that are tracked, the initialization, and the step-size. It yields both ballistic (ODE) and diffusive (SDE) limits, with the limit depending dramatically on the former choices. We show a critical scaling regime for the step-size, below which the effective ballistic dynamics matches gradient flow for the population loss, but at which, a new correction term appears which changes the phase diagram. About the fixed points of this effective dynamics, the corresponding diffusive limits can be quite complex and even degenerate. We demonstrate our approach on popular examples including estimation for spiked matrix and tensor models and classification via two-layer networks for binary and XOR-type Gaussian mixture models. These examples exhibit surprising phenomena including multimodal timescales to convergence as well as convergence to sub-optimal solutions with probability bounded away from zero from random (e.g., Gaussian) initializations. At the same time, we demonstrate the benefit of overparametrization by showing that the latter probability goes to zero as the second layer width grows.
Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) is a increasingly popular technique that aims to represent entities and relations of knowledge graphs into low-dimensional semantic spaces for a wide spectrum of applications such as link prediction, knowledge reasoning and knowledge completion. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of existing KGE techniques based on representation spaces. Particularly, we build a fine-grained classification to categorise the models based on three mathematical perspectives of the representation spaces: (1) Algebraic perspective, (2) Geometric perspective, and (3) Analytical perspective. We introduce the rigorous definitions of fundamental mathematical spaces before diving into KGE models and their mathematical properties. We further discuss different KGE methods over the three categories, as well as summarise how spatial advantages work over different embedding needs. By collating the experimental results from downstream tasks, we also explore the advantages of mathematical space in different scenarios and the reasons behind them. We further state some promising research directions from a representation space perspective, with which we hope to inspire researchers to design their KGE models as well as their related applications with more consideration of their mathematical space properties.
Causal discovery and causal reasoning are classically treated as separate and consecutive tasks: one first infers the causal graph, and then uses it to estimate causal effects of interventions. However, such a two-stage approach is uneconomical, especially in terms of actively collected interventional data, since the causal query of interest may not require a fully-specified causal model. From a Bayesian perspective, it is also unnatural, since a causal query (e.g., the causal graph or some causal effect) can be viewed as a latent quantity subject to posterior inference -- other unobserved quantities that are not of direct interest (e.g., the full causal model) ought to be marginalized out in this process and contribute to our epistemic uncertainty. In this work, we propose Active Bayesian Causal Inference (ABCI), a fully-Bayesian active learning framework for integrated causal discovery and reasoning, which jointly infers a posterior over causal models and queries of interest. In our approach to ABCI, we focus on the class of causally-sufficient, nonlinear additive noise models, which we model using Gaussian processes. We sequentially design experiments that are maximally informative about our target causal query, collect the corresponding interventional data, and update our beliefs to choose the next experiment. Through simulations, we demonstrate that our approach is more data-efficient than several baselines that only focus on learning the full causal graph. This allows us to accurately learn downstream causal queries from fewer samples while providing well-calibrated uncertainty estimates for the quantities of interest.
Over the past few years, the rapid development of deep learning technologies for computer vision has greatly promoted the performance of medical image segmentation (MedISeg). However, the recent MedISeg publications usually focus on presentations of the major contributions (e.g., network architectures, training strategies, and loss functions) while unwittingly ignoring some marginal implementation details (also known as "tricks"), leading to a potential problem of the unfair experimental result comparisons. In this paper, we collect a series of MedISeg tricks for different model implementation phases (i.e., pre-training model, data pre-processing, data augmentation, model implementation, model inference, and result post-processing), and experimentally explore the effectiveness of these tricks on the consistent baseline models. Compared to paper-driven surveys that only blandly focus on the advantages and limitation analyses of segmentation models, our work provides a large number of solid experiments and is more technically operable. With the extensive experimental results on both the representative 2D and 3D medical image datasets, we explicitly clarify the effect of these tricks. Moreover, based on the surveyed tricks, we also open-sourced a strong MedISeg repository, where each of its components has the advantage of plug-and-play. We believe that this milestone work not only completes a comprehensive and complementary survey of the state-of-the-art MedISeg approaches, but also offers a practical guide for addressing the future medical image processing challenges including but not limited to small dataset learning, class imbalance learning, multi-modality learning, and domain adaptation. The code has been released at: //github.com/hust-linyi/MedISeg
Bid optimization for online advertising from single advertiser's perspective has been thoroughly investigated in both academic research and industrial practice. However, existing work typically assume competitors do not change their bids, i.e., the wining price is fixed, leading to poor performance of the derived solution. Although a few studies use multi-agent reinforcement learning to set up a cooperative game, they still suffer the following drawbacks: (1) They fail to avoid collusion solutions where all the advertisers involved in an auction collude to bid an extremely low price on purpose. (2) Previous works cannot well handle the underlying complex bidding environment, leading to poor model convergence. This problem could be amplified when handling multiple objectives of advertisers which are practical demands but not considered by previous work. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-objective cooperative bid optimization formulation called Multi-Agent Cooperative bidding Games (MACG). MACG sets up a carefully designed multi-objective optimization framework where different objectives of advertisers are incorporated. A global objective to maximize the overall profit of all advertisements is added in order to encourage better cooperation and also to protect self-bidding advertisers. To avoid collusion, we also introduce an extra platform revenue constraint. We analyze the optimal functional form of the bidding formula theoretically and design a policy network accordingly to generate auction-level bids. Then we design an efficient multi-agent evolutionary strategy for model optimization. Offline experiments and online A/B tests conducted on the Taobao platform indicate both single advertiser's objective and global profit have been significantly improved compared to state-of-art methods.
The growing energy and performance costs of deep learning have driven the community to reduce the size of neural networks by selectively pruning components. Similarly to their biological counterparts, sparse networks generalize just as well, if not better than, the original dense networks. Sparsity can reduce the memory footprint of regular networks to fit mobile devices, as well as shorten training time for ever growing networks. In this paper, we survey prior work on sparsity in deep learning and provide an extensive tutorial of sparsification for both inference and training. We describe approaches to remove and add elements of neural networks, different training strategies to achieve model sparsity, and mechanisms to exploit sparsity in practice. Our work distills ideas from more than 300 research papers and provides guidance to practitioners who wish to utilize sparsity today, as well as to researchers whose goal is to push the frontier forward. We include the necessary background on mathematical methods in sparsification, describe phenomena such as early structure adaptation, the intricate relations between sparsity and the training process, and show techniques for achieving acceleration on real hardware. We also define a metric of pruned parameter efficiency that could serve as a baseline for comparison of different sparse networks. We close by speculating on how sparsity can improve future workloads and outline major open problems in the field.
In order to overcome the expressive limitations of graph neural networks (GNNs), we propose the first method that exploits vector flows over graphs to develop globally consistent directional and asymmetric aggregation functions. We show that our directional graph networks (DGNs) generalize convolutional neural networks (CNNs) when applied on a grid. Whereas recent theoretical works focus on understanding local neighbourhoods, local structures and local isomorphism with no global information flow, our novel theoretical framework allows directional convolutional kernels in any graph. First, by defining a vector field in the graph, we develop a method of applying directional derivatives and smoothing by projecting node-specific messages into the field. Then we propose the use of the Laplacian eigenvectors as such vector field, and we show that the method generalizes CNNs on an n-dimensional grid, and is provably more discriminative than standard GNNs regarding the Weisfeiler-Lehman 1-WL test. Finally, we bring the power of CNN data augmentation to graphs by providing a means of doing reflection, rotation and distortion on the underlying directional field. We evaluate our method on different standard benchmarks and see a relative error reduction of 8\% on the CIFAR10 graph dataset and 11% to 32% on the molecular ZINC dataset. An important outcome of this work is that it enables to translate any physical or biological problems with intrinsic directional axes into a graph network formalism with an embedded directional field.
Current deep learning research is dominated by benchmark evaluation. A method is regarded as favorable if it empirically performs well on the dedicated test set. This mentality is seamlessly reflected in the resurfacing area of continual learning, where consecutively arriving sets of benchmark data are investigated. The core challenge is framed as protecting previously acquired representations from being catastrophically forgotten due to the iterative parameter updates. However, comparison of individual methods is nevertheless treated in isolation from real world application and typically judged by monitoring accumulated test set performance. The closed world assumption remains predominant. It is assumed that during deployment a model is guaranteed to encounter data that stems from the same distribution as used for training. This poses a massive challenge as neural networks are well known to provide overconfident false predictions on unknown instances and break down in the face of corrupted data. In this work we argue that notable lessons from open set recognition, the identification of statistically deviating data outside of the observed dataset, and the adjacent field of active learning, where data is incrementally queried such that the expected performance gain is maximized, are frequently overlooked in the deep learning era. Based on these forgotten lessons, we propose a consolidated view to bridge continual learning, active learning and open set recognition in deep neural networks. Our results show that this not only benefits each individual paradigm, but highlights the natural synergies in a common framework. We empirically demonstrate improvements when alleviating catastrophic forgetting, querying data in active learning, selecting task orders, while exhibiting robust open world application where previously proposed methods fail.
We present a new method to learn video representations from large-scale unlabeled video data. Ideally, this representation will be generic and transferable, directly usable for new tasks such as action recognition and zero or few-shot learning. We formulate unsupervised representation learning as a multi-modal, multi-task learning problem, where the representations are shared across different modalities via distillation. Further, we introduce the concept of loss function evolution by using an evolutionary search algorithm to automatically find optimal combination of loss functions capturing many (self-supervised) tasks and modalities. Thirdly, we propose an unsupervised representation evaluation metric using distribution matching to a large unlabeled dataset as a prior constraint, based on Zipf's law. This unsupervised constraint, which is not guided by any labeling, produces similar results to weakly-supervised, task-specific ones. The proposed unsupervised representation learning results in a single RGB network and outperforms previous methods. Notably, it is also more effective than several label-based methods (e.g., ImageNet), with the exception of large, fully labeled video datasets.
With the rapid increase of large-scale, real-world datasets, it becomes critical to address the problem of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes account for most of the data, while most classes are under-represented). Existing solutions typically adopt class re-balancing strategies such as re-sampling and re-weighting based on the number of observations for each class. In this work, we argue that as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula $(1-\beta^{n})/(1-\beta)$, where $n$ is the number of samples and $\beta \in [0,1)$ is a hyperparameter. We design a re-weighting scheme that uses the effective number of samples for each class to re-balance the loss, thereby yielding a class-balanced loss. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on artificially induced long-tailed CIFAR datasets and large-scale datasets including ImageNet and iNaturalist. Our results show that when trained with the proposed class-balanced loss, the network is able to achieve significant performance gains on long-tailed datasets.
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.