Machine unlearning is the task of updating machine learning (ML) models after a subset of the training data they were trained on is deleted. Methods for the task are desired to combine effectiveness and efficiency, i.e., they should effectively "unlearn" deleted data, but in a way that does not require excessive computation effort (e.g., a full retraining) for a small amount of deletions. Such a combination is typically achieved by tolerating some amount of approximation in the unlearning. In addition, laws and regulations in the spirit of "the right to be forgotten" have given rise to requirements for certifiability, i.e., the ability to demonstrate that the deleted data has indeed been unlearned by the ML model. In this paper, we present an experimental study of the three state-of-the-art approximate unlearning methods for linear models and demonstrate the trade-offs between efficiency, effectiveness and certifiability offered by each method. In implementing the study, we extend some of the existing works and describe a common ML pipeline to compare and evaluate the unlearning methods on six real-world datasets and a variety of settings. We provide insights into the effect of the quantity and distribution of the deleted data on ML models and the performance of each unlearning method in different settings. We also propose a practical online strategy to determine when the accumulated error from approximate unlearning is large enough to warrant a full retrain of the ML model.
The increasing complexity of today's software requires the contribution of thousands of developers. This complex collaboration structure makes developers more likely to introduce defect-prone changes that lead to software faults. Determining when these defect-prone changes are introduced has proven challenging, and using traditional machine learning (ML) methods to make these determinations seems to have reached a plateau. In this work, we build contribution graphs consisting of developers and source files to capture the nuanced complexity of changes required to build software. By leveraging these contribution graphs, our research shows the potential of using graph-based ML to improve Just-In-Time (JIT) defect prediction. We hypothesize that features extracted from the contribution graphs may be better predictors of defect-prone changes than intrinsic features derived from software characteristics. We corroborate our hypothesis using graph-based ML for classifying edges that represent defect-prone changes. This new framing of the JIT defect prediction problem leads to remarkably better results. We test our approach on 14 open-source projects and show that our best model can predict whether or not a code change will lead to a defect with an F1 score as high as 86.25$\%$. This represents an increase of as much as 55.4$\%$ over the state-of-the-art in JIT defect prediction. We describe limitations, open challenges, and how this method can be used for operational JIT defect prediction.
Variable importance, interaction measures, and partial dependence plots are important summaries in the interpretation of statistical and machine learning models. In this paper we describe new visualization techniques for exploring these model summaries. We construct heatmap and graph-based displays showing variable importance and interaction jointly, which are carefully designed to highlight important aspects of the fit. We describe a new matrix-type layout showing all single and bivariate partial dependence plots, and an alternative layout based on graph Eulerians focusing on key subsets. Our new visualizations are model-agnostic and are applicable to regression and classification supervised learning settings. They enhance interpretation even in situations where the number of variables is large. Our R package vivid (variable importance and variable interaction displays) provides an implementation.
For effective planning and management of water resources and implementation of the related strategies, it is important to ensure proper estimation of evaporation losses, especially in regions that are prone to drought. Changes in climatic factors, such as changes in temperature, wind speed, sunshine hours, humidity, and solar radiation can have a significant impact on the evaporation process. As such, evaporation is a highly non-linear, non-stationary process, and can be difficult to be modeled based on climatic factors, especially in different agro-climatic conditions. The aim of this study, therefore, is to investigate the feasibility of several machines learning (ML) models (conditional random forest regression, Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines, Bagged Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines, Model Tree M5, K- nearest neighbor, and the weighted K- nearest neighbor) for modeling the monthly pan evaporation estimation. This study proposes the development of newly explored ML models for modeling evaporation losses in three different locations over the Iraq region based on the available climatic data in such areas. The evaluation of the performance of the proposed model based on various evaluation criteria showed the capability of the proposed weighted K- nearest neighbor model in modeling the monthly evaporation losses in the studies areas with better accuracy when compared with the other existing models used as a benchmark in this study.
We propose a minimax formulation for removing backdoors from a given poisoned model based on a small set of clean data. This formulation encompasses much of prior work on backdoor removal. We propose the Implicit Bacdoor Adversarial Unlearning (I-BAU) algorithm to solve the minimax. Unlike previous work, which breaks down the minimax into separate inner and outer problems, our algorithm utilizes the implicit hypergradient to account for the interdependence between inner and outer optimization. We theoretically analyze its convergence and the generalizability of the robustness gained by solving minimax on clean data to unseen test data. In our evaluation, we compare I-BAU with six state-of-art backdoor defenses on seven backdoor attacks over two datasets and various attack settings, including the common setting where the attacker targets one class as well as important but underexplored settings where multiple classes are targeted. I-BAU's performance is comparable to and most often significantly better than the best baseline. Particularly, its performance is more robust to the variation on triggers, attack settings, poison ratio, and clean data size. Moreover, I-BAU requires less computation to take effect; particularly, it is more than $13\times$ faster than the most efficient baseline in the single-target attack setting. Furthermore, it can remain effective in the extreme case where the defender can only access 100 clean samples -- a setting where all the baselines fail to produce acceptable results.
Human-in-the-loop aims to train an accurate prediction model with minimum cost by integrating human knowledge and experience. Humans can provide training data for machine learning applications and directly accomplish some tasks that are hard for computers in the pipeline with the help of machine-based approaches. In this paper, we survey existing works on human-in-the-loop from a data perspective and classify them into three categories with a progressive relationship: (1) the work of improving model performance from data processing, (2) the work of improving model performance through interventional model training, and (3) the design of the system independent human-in-the-loop. Using the above categorization, we summarize major approaches in the field, along with their technical strengths/ weaknesses, we have simple classification and discussion in natural language processing, computer vision, and others. Besides, we provide some open challenges and opportunities. This survey intends to provide a high-level summarization for human-in-the-loop and motivates interested readers to consider approaches for designing effective human-in-the-loop solutions.
Transformer is the state-of-the-art model in recent machine translation evaluations. Two strands of research are promising to improve models of this kind: the first uses wide networks (a.k.a. Transformer-Big) and has been the de facto standard for the development of the Transformer system, and the other uses deeper language representation but faces the difficulty arising from learning deep networks. Here, we continue the line of research on the latter. We claim that a truly deep Transformer model can surpass the Transformer-Big counterpart by 1) proper use of layer normalization and 2) a novel way of passing the combination of previous layers to the next. On WMT'16 English- German, NIST OpenMT'12 Chinese-English and larger WMT'18 Chinese-English tasks, our deep system (30/25-layer encoder) outperforms the shallow Transformer-Big/Base baseline (6-layer encoder) by 0.4-2.4 BLEU points. As another bonus, the deep model is 1.6X smaller in size and 3X faster in training than Transformer-Big.
This paper surveys the machine learning literature and presents machine learning as optimization models. Such models can benefit from the advancement of numerical optimization techniques which have already played a distinctive role in several machine learning settings. Particularly, mathematical optimization models are presented for commonly used machine learning approaches for regression, classification, clustering, and deep neural networks as well new emerging applications in machine teaching and empirical model learning. The strengths and the shortcomings of these models are discussed and potential research directions are highlighted.
Machine-learning models have demonstrated great success in learning complex patterns that enable them to make predictions about unobserved data. In addition to using models for prediction, the ability to interpret what a model has learned is receiving an increasing amount of attention. However, this increased focus has led to considerable confusion about the notion of interpretability. In particular, it is unclear how the wide array of proposed interpretation methods are related, and what common concepts can be used to evaluate them. We aim to address these concerns by defining interpretability in the context of machine learning and introducing the Predictive, Descriptive, Relevant (PDR) framework for discussing interpretations. The PDR framework provides three overarching desiderata for evaluation: predictive accuracy, descriptive accuracy and relevancy, with relevancy judged relative to a human audience. Moreover, to help manage the deluge of interpretation methods, we introduce a categorization of existing techniques into model-based and post-hoc categories, with sub-groups including sparsity, modularity and simulatability. To demonstrate how practitioners can use the PDR framework to evaluate and understand interpretations, we provide numerous real-world examples. These examples highlight the often under-appreciated role played by human audiences in discussions of interpretability. Finally, based on our framework, we discuss limitations of existing methods and directions for future work. We hope that this work will provide a common vocabulary that will make it easier for both practitioners and researchers to discuss and choose from the full range of interpretation methods.
Machine learning techniques have deeply rooted in our everyday life. However, since it is knowledge- and labor-intensive to pursuit good learning performance, human experts are heavily engaged in every aspect of machine learning. In order to make machine learning techniques easier to apply and reduce the demand for experienced human experts, automatic machine learning~(AutoML) has emerged as a hot topic of both in industry and academy. In this paper, we provide a survey on existing AutoML works. First, we introduce and define the AutoML problem, with inspiration from both realms of automation and machine learning. Then, we propose a general AutoML framework that not only covers almost all existing approaches but also guides the design for new methods. Afterward, we categorize and review the existing works from two aspects, i.e., the problem setup and the employed techniques. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of AutoML approaches and explain the reasons underneath their successful applications. We hope this survey can serve as not only an insightful guideline for AutoML beginners but also an inspiration for future researches.
The key issue of few-shot learning is learning to generalize. In this paper, we propose a large margin principle to improve the generalization capacity of metric based methods for few-shot learning. To realize it, we develop a unified framework to learn a more discriminative metric space by augmenting the softmax classification loss function with a large margin distance loss function for training. Extensive experiments on two state-of-the-art few-shot learning models, graph neural networks and prototypical networks, show that our method can improve the performance of existing models substantially with very little computational overhead, demonstrating the effectiveness of the large margin principle and the potential of our method.