Local differential privacy is a powerful method for privacy-preserving data collection. In this paper, we develop a framework for training Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) on differentially privatized data. We show that entropic regularization of optimal transport - a popular regularization method in the literature that has often been leveraged for its computational benefits - enables the generator to learn the raw (unprivatized) data distribution even though it only has access to privatized samples. We prove that at the same time this leads to fast statistical convergence at the parametric rate. This shows that entropic regularization of optimal transport uniquely enables the mitigation of both the effects of privatization noise and the curse of dimensionality in statistical convergence. We provide experimental evidence to support the efficacy of our framework in practice.
Recommender systems, a pivotal tool to alleviate the information overload problem, aim to predict user's preferred items from millions of candidates by analyzing observed user-item relations. As for tackling the sparsity and cold start problems encountered by recommender systems, uncovering hidden (indirect) user-item relations by employing side information and knowledge to enrich observed information for the recommendation has been proven promising recently; and its performance is largely determined by the scalability of recommendation models in the face of the high complexity and large scale of side information and knowledge. Making great strides towards efficiently utilizing complex and large-scale data, research into graph embedding techniques is a major topic. Equipping recommender systems with graph embedding techniques contributes to outperforming the conventional recommendation implementing directly based on graph topology analysis and has been widely studied these years. This article systematically retrospects graph embedding-based recommendation from embedding techniques for bipartite graphs, general graphs, and knowledge graphs, and proposes a general design pipeline of that. In addition, comparing several representative graph embedding-based recommendation models with the most common-used conventional recommendation models, on simulations, manifests that the conventional models overall outperform the graph embedding-based ones in predicting implicit user-item interactions, revealing the relative weakness of graph embedding-based recommendation in these tasks. To foster future research, this article proposes constructive suggestions on making a trade-off between graph embedding-based recommendation and the conventional recommendation in different tasks as well as some open questions.
In this paper we develop a novel neural network model for predicting implied volatility surface. Prior financial domain knowledge is taken into account. A new activation function that incorporates volatility smile is proposed, which is used for the hidden nodes that process the underlying asset price. In addition, financial conditions, such as the absence of arbitrage, the boundaries and the asymptotic slope, are embedded into the loss function. This is one of the very first studies which discuss a methodological framework that incorporates prior financial domain knowledge into neural network architecture design and model training. The proposed model outperforms the benchmarked models with the option data on the S&P 500 index over 20 years. More importantly, the domain knowledge is satisfied empirically, showing the model is consistent with the existing financial theories and conditions related to implied volatility surface.
We present ResMLP, an architecture built entirely upon multi-layer perceptrons for image classification. It is a simple residual network that alternates (i) a linear layer in which image patches interact, independently and identically across channels, and (ii) a two-layer feed-forward network in which channels interact independently per patch. When trained with a modern training strategy using heavy data-augmentation and optionally distillation, it attains surprisingly good accuracy/complexity trade-offs on ImageNet. We will share our code based on the Timm library and pre-trained models.
This paper does not describe a working system. Instead, it presents a single idea about representation which allows advances made by several different groups to be combined into an imaginary system called GLOM. The advances include transformers, neural fields, contrastive representation learning, distillation and capsules. GLOM answers the question: How can a neural network with a fixed architecture parse an image into a part-whole hierarchy which has a different structure for each image? The idea is simply to use islands of identical vectors to represent the nodes in the parse tree. If GLOM can be made to work, it should significantly improve the interpretability of the representations produced by transformer-like systems when applied to vision or language
To retrieve more relevant, appropriate and useful documents given a query, finding clues about that query through the text is crucial. Recent deep learning models regard the task as a term-level matching problem, which seeks exact or similar query patterns in the document. However, we argue that they are inherently based on local interactions and do not generalise to ubiquitous, non-consecutive contextual relationships.In this work, we propose a novel relevance matching model based on graph neural networks to leverage the document-level word relationships for ad-hoc retrieval. In addition to the local interactions, we explicitly incorporate all contexts of a term through the graph-of-word text format. Matching patterns can be revealed accordingly to provide a more accurate relevance score. Our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines on two ad-hoc benchmarks. We also experimentally compare our model with BERT and show our ad-vantages on long documents.
Hashing has been widely used in approximate nearest search for large-scale database retrieval for its computation and storage efficiency. Deep hashing, which devises convolutional neural network architecture to exploit and extract the semantic information or feature of images, has received increasing attention recently. In this survey, several deep supervised hashing methods for image retrieval are evaluated and I conclude three main different directions for deep supervised hashing methods. Several comments are made at the end. Moreover, to break through the bottleneck of the existing hashing methods, I propose a Shadow Recurrent Hashing(SRH) method as a try. Specifically, I devise a CNN architecture to extract the semantic features of images and design a loss function to encourage similar images projected close. To this end, I propose a concept: shadow of the CNN output. During optimization process, the CNN output and its shadow are guiding each other so as to achieve the optimal solution as much as possible. Several experiments on dataset CIFAR-10 show the satisfying performance of SRH.
Although measuring held-out accuracy has been the primary approach to evaluate generalization, it often overestimates the performance of NLP models, while alternative approaches for evaluating models either focus on individual tasks or on specific behaviors. Inspired by principles of behavioral testing in software engineering, we introduce CheckList, a task-agnostic methodology for testing NLP models. CheckList includes a matrix of general linguistic capabilities and test types that facilitate comprehensive test ideation, as well as a software tool to generate a large and diverse number of test cases quickly. We illustrate the utility of CheckList with tests for three tasks, identifying critical failures in both commercial and state-of-art models. In a user study, a team responsible for a commercial sentiment analysis model found new and actionable bugs in an extensively tested model. In another user study, NLP practitioners with CheckList created twice as many tests, and found almost three times as many bugs as users without it.
Knowledge graphs capture structured information and relations between a set of entities or items. As such they represent an attractive source of information that could help improve recommender systems. However existing approaches in this domain rely on manual feature engineering and do not allow for end-to-end training. Here we propose knowledge-aware graph neural networks with label smoothness regularization to provide better recommendations. Conceptually, our approach computes user-specific item embeddings by first applying a trainable function that identifies important knowledge graph relationships for a given user. This way we transform the knowledge graph into a user-specific weighted graph and then applies a graph neural network to compute personalized item embeddings. To provide better inductive bias, we use label smoothness, which assumes that adjacent items in the knowledge graph are likely to have similar user relevance labels/scores. Label smoothness provides regularization over edge weights and we prove that it is equivalent to a label propagation scheme on a graph. Finally, we combine knowledge-aware graph neural networks and label smoothness and present the unified model. Experiment results show that our method outperforms strong baselines in four datasets. It also achieves strong performance in the scenario where user-item interactions are sparse.
Many real-world problems can be represented as graph-based learning problems. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for learning spatial and attentional convolution neural networks on arbitrary graphs. Different from previous convolutional neural networks on graphs, we first design a motif-matching guided subgraph normalization method to capture neighborhood information. Then we implement subgraph-level self-attentional layers to learn different importances from different subgraphs to solve graph classification problems. Analogous to image-based attentional convolution networks that operate on locally connected and weighted regions of the input, we also extend graph normalization from one-dimensional node sequence to two-dimensional node grid by leveraging motif-matching, and design self-attentional layers without requiring any kinds of cost depending on prior knowledge of the graph structure. Our results on both bioinformatics and social network datasets show that we can significantly improve graph classification benchmarks over traditional graph kernel and existing deep models.
In recent years, object detection has experienced impressive progress. Despite these improvements, there is still a significant gap in the performance between the detection of small and large objects. We analyze the current state-of-the-art model, Mask-RCNN, on a challenging dataset, MS COCO. We show that the overlap between small ground-truth objects and the predicted anchors is much lower than the expected IoU threshold. We conjecture this is due to two factors; (1) only a few images are containing small objects, and (2) small objects do not appear enough even within each image containing them. We thus propose to oversample those images with small objects and augment each of those images by copy-pasting small objects many times. It allows us to trade off the quality of the detector on large objects with that on small objects. We evaluate different pasting augmentation strategies, and ultimately, we achieve 9.7\% relative improvement on the instance segmentation and 7.1\% on the object detection of small objects, compared to the current state of the art method on MS COCO.