Data augmentation methods are commonly integrated into the training of anomaly detection models. Previous approaches have primarily focused on replicating real-world anomalies or enhancing diversity, without considering that the standard of anomaly varies across different classes, potentially leading to a biased training distribution.This paper analyzes crucial traits of simulated anomalies that contribute to the training of reconstructive networks and condenses them into several methods, thus creating a comprehensive framework by selectively utilizing appropriate combinations.Furthermore, we integrate this framework with a reconstruction-based approach and concurrently propose a split training strategy that alleviates the issue of overfitting while avoiding introducing interference to the reconstruction process. The evaluations conducted on the MVTec anomaly detection dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art approach, particularly in terms of object classes. To evaluate generalizability, we generate a simulated dataset comprising anomalies with diverse characteristics since the original test samples only include specific types of anomalies and may lead to biased evaluations. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach exhibits promising potential for generalizing effectively to various unforeseen anomalies encountered in real-world scenarios.
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) or stochastic approximation has been widely used in model training and stochastic optimization. While there is a huge literature on analyzing its convergence, inference on the obtained solutions from SGD has only been recently studied, yet is important due to the growing need for uncertainty quantification. We investigate two computationally cheap resampling-based methods to construct confidence intervals for SGD solutions. One uses multiple, but few, SGDs in parallel via resampling with replacement from the data, and another operates this in an online fashion. Our methods can be regarded as enhancements of established bootstrap schemes to substantially reduce the computation effort in terms of resampling requirements, while at the same time bypassing the intricate mixing conditions in existing batching methods. We achieve these via a recent so-called cheap bootstrap idea and Berry-Esseen-type bound for SGD.
Diffusion models (DMs) have demonstrated advantageous potential on generative tasks. Widespread interest exists in incorporating DMs into downstream applications, such as producing or editing photorealistic images. However, practical deployment and unprecedented power of DMs raise legal issues, including copyright protection and monitoring of generated content. In this regard, watermarking has been a proven solution for copyright protection and content monitoring, but it is underexplored in the DMs literature. Specifically, DMs generate samples from longer tracks and may have newly designed multimodal structures, necessitating the modification of conventional watermarking pipelines. To this end, we conduct comprehensive analyses and derive a recipe for efficiently watermarking state-of-the-art DMs (e.g., Stable Diffusion), via training from scratch or finetuning. Our recipe is straightforward but involves empirically ablated implementation details, providing a foundation for future research on watermarking DMs. The code is available at //github.com/yunqing-me/WatermarkDM.
Machine learning models need to be continually updated or corrected to ensure that the prediction accuracy remains consistently high. In this study, we consider scenarios where developers should be careful to change the prediction results by the model correction, such as when the model is part of a complex system or software. In such scenarios, the developers want to control the specification of the corrections. To achieve this, the developers need to understand which subpopulations of the inputs get inaccurate predictions by the model. Therefore, we propose correction rule mining to acquire a comprehensive list of rules that describe inaccurate subpopulations and how to correct them. We also develop an efficient correction rule mining algorithm that is a combination of frequent itemset mining and a unique pruning technique for correction rules. We observed that the proposed algorithm found various rules which help to collect data insufficiently learned, directly correct model outputs, and analyze concept drift.
In this work, a local Fourier analysis is presented to study the convergence of multigrid methods based on additive Schwarz smoothers. This analysis is presented as a general framework which allows us to study these smoothers for any type of discretization and problem. The presented framework is crucial in practice since it allows one to know a priori the answer to questions such as what is the size of the patch to use within these relaxations, the size of the overlapping, or even the optimal values for the weights involved in the smoother. Results are shown for a class of additive and restricted additive Schwarz relaxations used within a multigrid framework applied to high-order finite-element discretizations and saddle point problems, which are two of the contexts in which these type of relaxations are widely used.
Distributed ensemble learning (DEL) involves training multiple models at distributed learners, and then combining their predictions to improve performance. Existing related studies focus on DEL algorithm design and optimization but ignore the important issue of incentives, without which self-interested learners may be unwilling to participate in DEL. We aim to fill this gap by presenting a first study on the incentive mechanism design for DEL. Our proposed mechanism specifies both the amount of training data and reward for learners with heterogeneous computation and communication costs. One design challenge is to have an accurate understanding regarding how learners' diversity (in terms of training data) affects the ensemble accuracy. To this end, we decompose the ensemble accuracy into a diversity-precision tradeoff to guide the mechanism design. Another challenge is that the mechanism design involves solving a mixed-integer program with a large search space. To this end, we propose an alternating algorithm that iteratively updates each learner's training data size and reward. We prove that under mild conditions, the algorithm converges. Numerical results using MNIST dataset show an interesting result: our proposed mechanism may prefer a lower level of learner diversity to achieve a higher ensemble accuracy.
Contrastive learning models have achieved great success in unsupervised visual representation learning, which maximize the similarities between feature representations of different views of the same image, while minimize the similarities between feature representations of views of different images. In text summarization, the output summary is a shorter form of the input document and they have similar meanings. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning model for supervised abstractive text summarization, where we view a document, its gold summary and its model generated summaries as different views of the same mean representation and maximize the similarities between them during training. We improve over a strong sequence-to-sequence text generation model (i.e., BART) on three different summarization datasets. Human evaluation also shows that our model achieves better faithfulness ratings compared to its counterpart without contrastive objectives.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
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.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
We advocate the use of implicit fields for learning generative models of shapes and introduce an implicit field decoder for shape generation, aimed at improving the visual quality of the generated shapes. An implicit field assigns a value to each point in 3D space, so that a shape can be extracted as an iso-surface. Our implicit field decoder is trained to perform this assignment by means of a binary classifier. Specifically, it takes a point coordinate, along with a feature vector encoding a shape, and outputs a value which indicates whether the point is outside the shape or not. By replacing conventional decoders by our decoder for representation learning and generative modeling of shapes, we demonstrate superior results for tasks such as shape autoencoding, generation, interpolation, and single-view 3D reconstruction, particularly in terms of visual quality.