Deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated superior performance over classical machine learning to support many features in safety-critical systems. Although DNNs are now widely used in such systems (e.g., self driving cars), there is limited progress regarding automated support for functional safety analysis in DNN-based systems. For example, the identification of root causes of errors, to enable both risk analysis and DNN retraining, remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose SAFE, a black-box approach to automatically characterize the root causes of DNN errors. SAFE relies on a transfer learning model pre-trained on ImageNet to extract the features from error-inducing images. It then applies a density-based clustering algorithm to detect arbitrary shaped clusters of images modeling plausible causes of error. Last, clusters are used to effectively retrain and improve the DNN. The black-box nature of SAFE is motivated by our objective not to require changes or even access to the DNN internals to facilitate adoption. Experimental results show the superior ability of SAFE in identifying different root causes of DNN errors based on case studies in the automotive domain. It also yields significant improvements in DNN accuracy after retraining, while saving significant execution time and memory when compared to alternatives.
Establishing dense correspondences across semantically similar images is one of the challenging tasks due to the significant intra-class variations and background clutters. To solve these problems, numerous methods have been proposed, focused on learning feature extractor or cost aggregation independently, which yields sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for jointly learning feature extraction and cost aggregation for semantic correspondence. By exploiting the pseudo labels from each module, the networks consisting of feature extraction and cost aggregation modules are simultaneously learned in a boosting fashion. Moreover, to ignore unreliable pseudo labels, we present a confidence-aware contrastive loss function for learning the networks in a weakly-supervised manner. We demonstrate our competitive results on standard benchmarks for semantic correspondence.
Despite the recent progress, the existing multi-view unsupervised feature selection methods mostly suffer from two limitations. First, they generally utilize either cluster structure or similarity structure to guide the feature selection, neglecting the possibility of a joint formulation with mutual benefits. Second, they often learn the similarity structure by either global structure learning or local structure learning, lacking the capability of graph learning with both global and local structural awareness. In light of this, this paper presents a joint multi-view unsupervised feature selection and graph learning (JMVFG) approach. Particularly, we formulate the multi-view feature selection with orthogonal decomposition, where each target matrix is decomposed into a view-specific basis matrix and a view-consistent cluster indicator. Cross-space locality preservation is incorporated to bridge the cluster structure learning in the projected space and the similarity learning (i.e., graph learning) in the original space. Further, a unified objective function is presented to enable the simultaneous learning of the cluster structure, the global and local similarity structures, and the multi-view consistency and inconsistency, upon which an alternating optimization algorithm is developed with theoretically proved convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach for both multi-view feature selection and graph learning tasks.
Contrastive learning has led to substantial improvements in the quality of learned embedding representations for tasks such as image classification. However, a key drawback of existing contrastive augmentation methods is that they may lead to the modification of the image content which can yield undesired alterations of its semantics. This can affect the performance of the model on downstream tasks. Hence, in this paper, we ask whether we can augment image data in contrastive learning such that the task-relevant semantic content of an image is preserved. For this purpose, we propose to leverage saliency-based explanation methods to create content-preserving masked augmentations for contrastive learning. Our novel explanation-driven supervised contrastive learning (ExCon) methodology critically serves the dual goals of encouraging nearby image embeddings to have similar content and explanation. To quantify the impact of ExCon, we conduct experiments on the CIFAR-100 and the Tiny ImageNet datasets. We demonstrate that ExCon outperforms vanilla supervised contrastive learning in terms of classification, explanation quality, adversarial robustness as well as probabilistic calibration in the context of distributional shift.
The dynamic response of the legged robot locomotion is non-Lipschitz and can be stochastic due to environmental uncertainties. To test, validate, and characterize the safety performance of legged robots, existing solutions on observed and inferred risk can be incomplete and sampling inefficient. Some formal verification methods suffer from the model precision and other surrogate assumptions. In this paper, we propose a scenario sampling based testing framework that characterizes the overall safety performance of a legged robot by specifying (i) where (in terms of a set of states) the robot is potentially safe, and (ii) how safe the robot is within the specified set. The framework can also help certify the commercial deployment of the legged robot in real-world environment along with human and compare safety performance among legged robots with different mechanical structures and dynamic properties. The proposed framework is further deployed to evaluate a group of state-of-the-art legged robot locomotion controllers from various model-based, deep neural network involved, and reinforcement learning based methods in the literature. Among a series of intended work domains of the studied legged robots (e.g. tracking speed on sloped surface, with abrupt changes on demanded velocity, and against adversarial push-over disturbances), we show that the method can adequately capture the overall safety characterization and the subtle performance insights. Many of the observed safety outcomes, to the best of our knowledge, have never been reported by the existing work in the legged robot literature.
Recently, the enactment of privacy regulations has promoted the rise of the machine unlearning paradigm. Existing studies of machine unlearning mainly focus on sample-wise unlearning, such that a learnt model will not expose user's privacy at the sample level. Yet we argue that such ability of selective removal should also be presented at the attribute level, especially for the attributes irrelevant to the main task, e.g., whether a person recognized in a face recognition system wears glasses or the age range of that person. Through a comprehensive literature review, it is found that existing studies on attribute-related problems like fairness and de-biasing learning cannot address the above concerns properly. To bridge this gap, we propose a paradigm of selectively removing input attributes from feature representations which we name `attribute unlearning'. In this paradigm, certain attributes will be accurately captured and detached from the learned feature representations at the stage of training, according to their mutual information. The particular attributes will be progressively eliminated along with the training procedure towards convergence, while the rest of attributes related to the main task are preserved for achieving competitive model performance. Considering the computational complexity during the training process, we not only give a theoretically approximate training method, but also propose an acceleration scheme to speed up the training process. We validate our method by spanning several datasets and models and demonstrate that our design can preserve model fidelity and reach prevailing unlearning efficacy with high efficiency. The proposed unlearning paradigm builds a foundation for future machine unlearning system and will become an essential component of the latest privacy-related legislation.
We demonstrate that merely analog transmissions and match filtering can realize the function of an edge server in federated learning (FL). Therefore, a network with massively distributed user equipments (UEs) can achieve large-scale FL without an edge server. We also develop a training algorithm that allows UEs to continuously perform local computing without being interrupted by the global parameter uploading, which exploits the full potential of UEs' processing power. We derive convergence rates for the proposed schemes to quantify their training efficiency. The analyses reveal that when the interference obeys a Gaussian distribution, the proposed algorithm retrieves the convergence rate of a server-based FL. But if the interference distribution is heavy-tailed, then the heavier the tail, the slower the algorithm converges. Nonetheless, the system run time can be largely reduced by enabling computation in parallel with communication, whereas the gain is particularly pronounced when communication latency is high. These findings are corroborated via excessive simulations.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
This manuscript portrays optimization as a process. In many practical applications the environment is so complex that it is infeasible to lay out a comprehensive theoretical model and use classical algorithmic theory and mathematical optimization. It is necessary as well as beneficial to take a robust approach, by applying an optimization method that learns as one goes along, learning from experience as more aspects of the problem are observed. This view of optimization as a process has become prominent in varied fields and has led to some spectacular success in modeling and systems that are now part of our daily lives.
Large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) such as BERT and GPT have recently achieved great success and become a milestone in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Owing to sophisticated pre-training objectives and huge model parameters, large-scale PTMs can effectively capture knowledge from massive labeled and unlabeled data. By storing knowledge into huge parameters and fine-tuning on specific tasks, the rich knowledge implicitly encoded in huge parameters can benefit a variety of downstream tasks, which has been extensively demonstrated via experimental verification and empirical analysis. It is now the consensus of the AI community to adopt PTMs as backbone for downstream tasks rather than learning models from scratch. In this paper, we take a deep look into the history of pre-training, especially its special relation with transfer learning and self-supervised learning, to reveal the crucial position of PTMs in the AI development spectrum. Further, we comprehensively review the latest breakthroughs of PTMs. These breakthroughs are driven by the surge of computational power and the increasing availability of data, towards four important directions: designing effective architectures, utilizing rich contexts, improving computational efficiency, and conducting interpretation and theoretical analysis. Finally, we discuss a series of open problems and research directions of PTMs, and hope our view can inspire and advance the future study of PTMs.
Since deep neural networks were developed, they have made huge contributions to everyday lives. Machine learning provides more rational advice than humans are capable of in almost every aspect of daily life. However, despite this achievement, the design and training of neural networks are still challenging and unpredictable procedures. To lower the technical thresholds for common users, automated hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) has become a popular topic in both academic and industrial areas. This paper provides a review of the most essential topics on HPO. The first section introduces the key hyper-parameters related to model training and structure, and discusses their importance and methods to define the value range. Then, the research focuses on major optimization algorithms and their applicability, covering their efficiency and accuracy especially for deep learning networks. This study next reviews major services and toolkits for HPO, comparing their support for state-of-the-art searching algorithms, feasibility with major deep learning frameworks, and extensibility for new modules designed by users. The paper concludes with problems that exist when HPO is applied to deep learning, a comparison between optimization algorithms, and prominent approaches for model evaluation with limited computational resources.