Purpose: Previous quantitative MR imaging studies using self-supervised deep learning have reported biased parameter estimates at low SNR. Such systematic errors arise from the choice of Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss function for network training, which is incompatible with Rician-distributed MR magnitude signals. To address this issue, we introduce the negative log Rician likelihood (NLR) loss. Methods: A numerically stable and accurate implementation of the NLR loss was developed to estimate quantitative parameters of the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) model and intra-voxel incoherent motion (IVIM) model. Parameter estimation accuracy, precision and overall error were evaluated in terms of bias, variance and root mean squared error and compared against the MSE loss over a range of SNRs (5 - 30). Results: Networks trained with NLR loss show higher estimation accuracy than MSE for the ADC and IVIM diffusion coefficients as SNR decreases, with minimal loss of precision or total error. At high effective SNR (high SNR and small diffusion coefficients), both losses show comparable accuracy and precision for all parameters of both models. Conclusion: The proposed NLR loss is numerically stable and accurate across the full range of tested SNRs and improves parameter estimation accuracy of diffusion coefficients using self-supervised deep learning. We expect the development to benefit quantitative MR imaging techniques broadly, enabling more accurate parameter estimation from noisy data.
Causal machine learning (ML) algorithms recover graphical structures that tell us something about cause-and-effect relationships. The causal representation praovided by these algorithms enables transparency and explainability, which is necessary for decision making in critical real-world problems. Yet, causal ML has had limited impact in practice compared to associational ML. This paper investigates the challenges of causal ML with application to COVID-19 UK pandemic data. We collate data from various public sources and investigate what the various structure learning algorithms learn from these data. We explore the impact of different data formats on algorithms spanning different classes of learning, and assess the results produced by each algorithm, and groups of algorithms, in terms of graphical structure, model dimensionality, sensitivity analysis, confounding variables, predictive and interventional inference. We use these results to highlight open problems in causal structure learning and directions for future research. To facilitate future work, we make all graphs, models, data sets, and source code publicly available online.
Previous researchers conducting Just-In-Time (JIT) defect prediction tasks have primarily focused on the performance of individual pre-trained models, without exploring the relationship between different pre-trained models as backbones. In this study, we build six models: RoBERTaJIT, CodeBERTJIT, BARTJIT, PLBARTJIT, GPT2JIT, and CodeGPTJIT, each with a distinct pre-trained model as its backbone. We systematically explore the differences and connections between these models. Specifically, we investigate the performance of the models when using Commit code and Commit message as inputs, as well as the relationship between training efficiency and model distribution among these six models. Additionally, we conduct an ablation experiment to explore the sensitivity of each model to inputs. Furthermore, we investigate how the models perform in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Our findings indicate that each model based on different backbones shows improvements, and when the backbone's pre-training model is similar, the training resources that need to be consumed are much more closer. We also observe that Commit code plays a significant role in defect detection, and different pre-trained models demonstrate better defect detection ability with a balanced dataset under few-shot scenarios. These results provide new insights for optimizing JIT defect prediction tasks using pre-trained models and highlight the factors that require more attention when constructing such models. Additionally, CodeGPTJIT and GPT2JIT achieved better performance than DeepJIT and CC2Vec on the two datasets respectively under 2000 training samples. These findings emphasize the effectiveness of transformer-based pre-trained models in JIT defect prediction tasks, especially in scenarios with limited training data.
We propose a novel algorithm for solving the composite Federated Learning (FL) problem. This algorithm manages non-smooth regularization by strategically decoupling the proximal operator and communication, and addresses client drift without any assumptions about data similarity. Moreover, each worker uses local updates to reduce the communication frequency with the server and transmits only a $d$-dimensional vector per communication round. We prove that our algorithm converges linearly to a neighborhood of the optimal solution and demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm over state-of-the-art methods in numerical experiments.
Residual neural networks are state-of-the-art deep learning models. Their continuous-depth analog, neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs), are also widely used. Despite their success, the link between the discrete and continuous models still lacks a solid mathematical foundation. In this article, we take a step in this direction by establishing an implicit regularization of deep residual networks towards neural ODEs, for nonlinear networks trained with gradient flow. We prove that if the network is initialized as a discretization of a neural ODE, then such a discretization holds throughout training. Our results are valid for a finite training time, and also as the training time tends to infinity provided that the network satisfies a Polyak-Lojasiewicz condition. Importantly, this condition holds for a family of residual networks where the residuals are two-layer perceptrons with an overparameterization in width that is only linear, and implies the convergence of gradient flow to a global minimum. Numerical experiments illustrate our results.
Deep neural networks have shown remarkable performance when trained on independent and identically distributed data from a fixed set of classes. However, in real-world scenarios, it can be desirable to train models on a continuous stream of data where multiple classification tasks are presented sequentially. This scenario, known as Continual Learning (CL) poses challenges to standard learning algorithms which struggle to maintain knowledge of old tasks while learning new ones. This stability-plasticity dilemma remains central to CL and multiple metrics have been proposed to adequately measure stability and plasticity separately. However, none considers the increasing difficulty of the classification task, which inherently results in performance loss for any model. In that sense, we analyze some limitations of current metrics and identify the presence of setup-induced forgetting. Therefore, we propose new metrics that account for the task's increasing difficulty. Through experiments on benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed metrics can provide new insights into the stability-plasticity trade-off achieved by models in the continual learning environment.
In this work, we propose a fast adaptive federated meta-learning (FAM) framework for collaboratively learning a single global model, which can then be personalized locally on individual clients. Federated learning enables multiple clients to collaborate to train a model without sharing data. Clients with insufficient data or data diversity participate in federated learning to learn a model with superior performance. Nonetheless, learning suffers when data distributions diverge. There is a need to learn a global model that can be adapted using client's specific information to create personalized models on clients is required. MRI data suffers from this problem, wherein, one, due to data acquisition challenges, local data at a site is sufficient for training an accurate model and two, there is a restriction of data sharing due to privacy concerns and three, there is a need for personalization of a learnt shared global model on account of domain shift across client sites. The global model is sparse and captures the common features in the MRI. This skeleton network is grown on each client to train a personalized model by learning additional client-specific parameters from local data. Experimental results show that the personalization process at each client quickly converges using a limited number of epochs. The personalized client models outperformed the locally trained models, demonstrating the efficacy of the FAM mechanism. Additionally, the sparse parameter set to be communicated during federated learning drastically reduced communication overhead, which makes the scheme viable for networks with limited resources.
Smooth and curved microstructural topologies found in nature - from soap films to trabecular bone - have inspired several mimetic design spaces for architected metamaterials and bio-scaffolds. However, the design approaches so far have been ad hoc, raising the challenge: how to systematically and efficiently inverse design such artificial microstructures with targeted topological features? Here, we explore surface curvature as a design modality and present a deep learning framework to produce topologies with as-desired curvature profiles. The inverse design framework can generalize to diverse topological features such as tubular, membranous, and particulate features. Moreover, we demonstrate successful generalization beyond both the design and data space by inverse designing topologies that mimic the curvature profile of trabecular bone, spinodoid topologies, and periodic nodal surfaces for application in bio-scaffolds and implants. Lastly, we bridge curvature and mechanics by showing how topological curvature can be designed to promote mechanically beneficial stretching-dominated deformation over bending-dominated deformation.
Graph-centric artificial intelligence (graph AI) has achieved remarkable success in modeling interacting systems prevalent in nature, from dynamical systems in biology to particle physics. The increasing heterogeneity of data calls for graph neural architectures that can combine multiple inductive biases. However, combining data from various sources is challenging because appropriate inductive bias may vary by data modality. Multimodal learning methods fuse multiple data modalities while leveraging cross-modal dependencies to address this challenge. Here, we survey 140 studies in graph-centric AI and realize that diverse data types are increasingly brought together using graphs and fed into sophisticated multimodal models. These models stratify into image-, language-, and knowledge-grounded multimodal learning. We put forward an algorithmic blueprint for multimodal graph learning based on this categorization. The blueprint serves as a way to group state-of-the-art architectures that treat multimodal data by choosing appropriately four different components. This effort can pave the way for standardizing the design of sophisticated multimodal architectures for highly complex real-world problems.
The remarkable practical success of deep learning has revealed some major surprises from a theoretical perspective. In particular, simple gradient methods easily find near-optimal solutions to non-convex optimization problems, and despite giving a near-perfect fit to training data without any explicit effort to control model complexity, these methods exhibit excellent predictive accuracy. We conjecture that specific principles underlie these phenomena: that overparametrization allows gradient methods to find interpolating solutions, that these methods implicitly impose regularization, and that overparametrization leads to benign overfitting. We survey recent theoretical progress that provides examples illustrating these principles in simpler settings. We first review classical uniform convergence results and why they fall short of explaining aspects of the behavior of deep learning methods. We give examples of implicit regularization in simple settings, where gradient methods lead to minimal norm functions that perfectly fit the training data. Then we review prediction methods that exhibit benign overfitting, focusing on regression problems with quadratic loss. For these methods, we can decompose the prediction rule into a simple component that is useful for prediction and a spiky component that is useful for overfitting but, in a favorable setting, does not harm prediction accuracy. We focus specifically on the linear regime for neural networks, where the network can be approximated by a linear model. In this regime, we demonstrate the success of gradient flow, and we consider benign overfitting with two-layer networks, giving an exact asymptotic analysis that precisely demonstrates the impact of overparametrization. We conclude by highlighting the key challenges that arise in extending these insights to realistic deep learning settings.
Deep learning is usually described as an experiment-driven field under continuous criticizes of lacking theoretical foundations. This problem has been partially fixed by a large volume of literature which has so far not been well organized. This paper reviews and organizes the recent advances in deep learning theory. The literature is categorized in six groups: (1) complexity and capacity-based approaches for analyzing the generalizability of deep learning; (2) stochastic differential equations and their dynamic systems for modelling stochastic gradient descent and its variants, which characterize the optimization and generalization of deep learning, partially inspired by Bayesian inference; (3) the geometrical structures of the loss landscape that drives the trajectories of the dynamic systems; (4) the roles of over-parameterization of deep neural networks from both positive and negative perspectives; (5) theoretical foundations of several special structures in network architectures; and (6) the increasingly intensive concerns in ethics and security and their relationships with generalizability.