This tutorial aims to provide an intuitive understanding of the Gaussian processes regression. Gaussian processes regression (GPR) models have been widely used in machine learning applications because of their representation flexibility and inherent uncertainty measures over predictions. The basic concepts that a Gaussian process is built on, including multivariate normal distribution, kernels, non-parametric models, and joint and conditional probability were explained first. Next, the GPR was described concisely together with an implementation of a standard GPR algorithm. Beyond the standard GPR, packages to implement state-of-the-art Gaussian processes algorithms were reviewed. This tutorial was written in an accessible way to make sure readers without a machine learning background can obtain a good understanding of the GPR basics.
The optimal moment to start renal replacement therapy in a patient with acute kidney injury (AKI) remains a challenging problem in intensive care nephrology. Multiple randomised controlled trials have tried to answer this question, but these can, by definition, only analyse a limited number of treatment initiation strategies. In view of this, we use routinely collected observational data from the Ghent University Hospital intensive care units (ICUs) to investigate different pre-specified timing strategies for renal replacement therapy initiation based on time-updated levels of serum potassium, pH and fluid balance in critically ill patients with AKI with the aim to minimize 30-day ICU mortality. For this purpose, we apply statistical techniques for evaluating the impact of specific dynamic treatment regimes in the presence of ICU discharge as a competing event. We discuss two approaches, a non-parametric one - using an inverse probability weighted Aalen-Johansen estimator - and a semiparametric one - using dynamic-regime marginal structural models. Furthermore, we suggest an easy to implement cross-validation technique that can be used for the out-of-sample performance assessment of the optimal dynamic treatment regime. Our work illustrates the potential of data-driven medical decision support based on routinely collected observational data.
Adversarial examples represent a serious threat for deep neural networks in several application domains and a huge amount of work has been produced to investigate them and mitigate their effects. Nevertheless, no much work has been devoted to the generation of datasets specifically designed to evaluate the adversarial robustness of neural models. This paper presents CARLA-GeAR, a tool for the automatic generation of photo-realistic synthetic datasets that can be used for a systematic evaluation of the adversarial robustness of neural models against physical adversarial patches, as well as for comparing the performance of different adversarial defense/detection methods. The tool is built on the CARLA simulator, using its Python API, and allows the generation of datasets for several vision tasks in the context of autonomous driving. The adversarial patches included in the generated datasets are attached to billboards or the back of a truck and are crafted by using state-of-the-art white-box attack strategies to maximize the prediction error of the model under test. Finally, the paper presents an experimental study to evaluate the performance of some defense methods against such attacks, showing how the datasets generated with CARLA-GeAR might be used in future work as a benchmark for adversarial defense in the real world. All the code and datasets used in this paper are available at //carlagear.retis.santannapisa.it.
Gradient Descent (GD) is a powerful workhorse of modern machine learning thanks to its scalability and efficiency in high-dimensional spaces. Its ability to find local minimisers is only guaranteed for losses with Lipschitz gradients, where it can be seen as a 'bona-fide' discretisation of an underlying gradient flow. Yet, many ML setups involving overparametrised models do not fall into this problem class, which has motivated research beyond the so-called "Edge of Stability", where the step-size crosses the admissibility threshold inversely proportional to the Lipschitz constant above. Perhaps surprisingly, GD has been empirically observed to still converge regardless of local instability. In this work, we study a local condition for such an unstable convergence around a local minima in a low dimensional setting. We then leverage these insights to establish global convergence of a two-layer single-neuron ReLU student network aligning with the teacher neuron in a large learning rate beyond the Edge of Stability under population loss. Meanwhile, while the difference of norms of the two layers is preserved by gradient flow, we show that GD above the edge of stability induces a balancing effect, leading to the same norms across the layers.
Models of electrical excitation and recovery in the heart have become increasingly detailed, but have yet to be used routinely in the clinical setting to guide intervention in patients. One of the main challenges is calibrating models from the limited measurements that can be made in a patient during a standard clinical procedure. In this work, we propose a novel framework for the probabilistic calibration of electrophysiology parameters on the left atrium of the heart using local measurements of cardiac excitability. Parameter fields are represented as Gaussian processes on manifolds and are linked to measurements via surrogate functions that map from local parameter values to measurements. The posterior distribution of parameter fields is then obtained.We show that our method can recover parameter fields used to generate localised synthetic measurements of effective refractory period. Our methodology is applicable to other measurement types collected with clinical protocols, and more generally for calibration where model parameters vary over a manifold.
Modern web services routinely provide REST APIs for clients to access their functionality. These APIs present unique challenges and opportunities for automated testing, driving the recent development of many techniques and tools that generate test cases for API endpoints using various strategies. Understanding how these techniques compare to one another is difficult, as they have been evaluated on different benchmarks and using different metrics. To fill this gap, we performed an empirical study aimed to understand the landscape in automated testing of REST APIs and guide future research in this area. We first identified, through a systematic selection process, a set of 10 state-of-the-art REST API testing tools that included tools developed by both researchers and practitioners. We then applied these tools to a benchmark of 20 real-world open-source RESTful services and analyzed their performance in terms of code coverage achieved and unique failures triggered. This analysis allowed us to identify strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of the tools considered and of their underlying strategies, as well as implications of our findings for future research in this area.
In linear regression we wish to estimate the optimum linear least squares predictor for a distribution over $d$-dimensional input points and real-valued responses, based on a small sample. Under standard random design analysis, where the sample is drawn i.i.d. from the input distribution, the least squares solution for that sample can be viewed as the natural estimator of the optimum. Unfortunately, this estimator almost always incurs an undesirable bias coming from the randomness of the input points, which is a significant bottleneck in model averaging. In this paper we show that it is possible to draw a non-i.i.d. sample of input points such that, regardless of the response model, the least squares solution is an unbiased estimator of the optimum. Moreover, this sample can be produced efficiently by augmenting a previously drawn i.i.d. sample with an additional set of $d$ points, drawn jointly according to a certain determinantal point process constructed from the input distribution rescaled by the squared volume spanned by the points. Motivated by this, we develop a theoretical framework for studying volume-rescaled sampling, and in the process prove a number of new matrix expectation identities. We use them to show that for any input distribution and $\epsilon>0$ there is a random design consisting of $O(d\log d+ d/\epsilon)$ points from which an unbiased estimator can be constructed whose expected square loss over the entire distribution is bounded by $1+\epsilon$ times the loss of the optimum. We provide efficient algorithms for generating such unbiased estimators in a number of practical settings and support our claims experimentally.
Diffusion models have recently shown great promise for generative modeling, outperforming GANs on perceptual quality and autoregressive models at density estimation. A remaining downside is their slow sampling time: generating high quality samples takes many hundreds or thousands of model evaluations. Here we make two contributions to help eliminate this downside: First, we present new parameterizations of diffusion models that provide increased stability when using few sampling steps. Second, we present a method to distill a trained deterministic diffusion sampler, using many steps, into a new diffusion model that takes half as many sampling steps. We then keep progressively applying this distillation procedure to our model, halving the number of required sampling steps each time. On standard image generation benchmarks like CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and LSUN, we start out with state-of-the-art samplers taking as many as 8192 steps, and are able to distill down to models taking as few as 4 steps without losing much perceptual quality; achieving, for example, a FID of 3.0 on CIFAR-10 in 4 steps. Finally, we show that the full progressive distillation procedure does not take more time than it takes to train the original model, thus representing an efficient solution for generative modeling using diffusion at both train and test time.
Estimation of a conditional mean (linking a set of features to an outcome of interest) is a fundamental statistical task. While there is an appeal to flexible nonparametric procedures, effective estimation in many classical nonparametric function spaces (e.g., multivariate Sobolev spaces) can be prohibitively difficult -- both statistically and computationally -- especially when the number of features is large. In this paper, we present (penalized) sieve estimators for regression in nonparametric tensor product spaces: These spaces are more amenable to multivariate regression, and allow us to, in-part, avoid the curse of dimensionality. Our estimators can be easily applied to multivariate nonparametric problems and have appealing statistical and computational properties. Moreover, they can effectively leverage additional structures such as feature sparsity. In this manuscript, we give theoretical guarantees, indicating that the predictive performance of our estimators scale favorably in dimension. In addition, we also present numerical examples to compare the finite-sample performance of the proposed estimators with several popular machine learning methods.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.
Image segmentation is still an open problem especially when intensities of the interested objects are overlapped due to the presence of intensity inhomogeneity (also known as bias field). To segment images with intensity inhomogeneities, a bias correction embedded level set model is proposed where Inhomogeneities are Estimated by Orthogonal Primary Functions (IEOPF). In the proposed model, the smoothly varying bias is estimated by a linear combination of a given set of orthogonal primary functions. An inhomogeneous intensity clustering energy is then defined and membership functions of the clusters described by the level set function are introduced to rewrite the energy as a data term of the proposed model. Similar to popular level set methods, a regularization term and an arc length term are also included to regularize and smooth the level set function, respectively. The proposed model is then extended to multichannel and multiphase patterns to segment colourful images and images with multiple objects, respectively. It has been extensively tested on both synthetic and real images that are widely used in the literature and public BrainWeb and IBSR datasets. Experimental results and comparison with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that advantages of the proposed model in terms of bias correction and segmentation accuracy.