With increasing scale in model and dataset size, the training of deep neural networks becomes a massive computational burden. One approach to speed up the training process is Selective Backprop. For this approach, we perform a forward pass to obtain a loss value for each data point in a minibatch. The backward pass is then restricted to a subset of that minibatch, prioritizing high-loss examples. We build on this approach, but seek to improve the subset selection mechanism by choosing the (weighted) subset which best matches the mean gradient over the entire minibatch. We use the gradients w.r.t. the model's last layer as a cheap proxy, resulting in virtually no overhead in addition to the forward pass. At the same time, for our experiments we add a simple random selection baseline which has been absent from prior work. Surprisingly, we find that both the loss-based as well as the gradient-matching strategy fail to consistently outperform the random baseline.
Diffusion models, as a kind of powerful generative model, have given impressive results on image super-resolution (SR) tasks. However, due to the randomness introduced in the reverse process of diffusion models, the performances of diffusion-based SR models are fluctuating at every time of sampling, especially for samplers with few resampled steps. This inherent randomness of diffusion models results in ineffectiveness and instability, making it challenging for users to guarantee the quality of SR results. However, our work takes this randomness as an opportunity: fully analyzing and leveraging it leads to the construction of an effective plug-and-play sampling method that owns the potential to benefit a series of diffusion-based SR methods. More in detail, we propose to steadily sample high-quality SR images from pre-trained diffusion-based SR models by solving diffusion ordinary differential equations (diffusion ODEs) with optimal boundary conditions (BCs) and analyze the characteristics between the choices of BCs and their corresponding SR results. Our analysis shows the route to obtain an approximately optimal BC via an efficient exploration in the whole space. The quality of SR results sampled by the proposed method with fewer steps outperforms the quality of results sampled by current methods with randomness from the same pre-trained diffusion-based SR model, which means that our sampling method "boosts" current diffusion-based SR models without any additional training.
Symmetry detection and morphological classification of anatomical structures play pivotal roles in medical image analysis. The application of kinematic surface fitting, a method for characterizing shapes through parametric stationary velocity fields, has shown promising results in computer vision and computer-aided design. However, existing research has predominantly focused on first order rotational velocity fields, which may not adequately capture the intricate curved and twisted nature of anatomical structures. To address this limitation, we propose an innovative approach utilizing a second order velocity field for kinematic surface fitting. This advancement accommodates higher rotational shape complexity and improves the accuracy of symmetry detection in anatomical structures. We introduce a robust fitting technique and validate its performance through testing on synthetic shapes and real anatomical structures. Our method not only enables the detection of curved rotational symmetries (core lines) but also facilitates morphological classification by deriving intrinsic shape parameters related to curvature and torsion. We illustrate the usefulness of our technique by categorizing the shape of human cochleae in terms of the intrinsic velocity field parameters. The results showcase the potential of our method as a valuable tool for medical image analysis, contributing to the assessment of complex anatomical shapes.
Temporal graphs are a popular modelling mechanism for dynamic complex systems that extend ordinary graphs with discrete time. Simply put, time progresses one unit per step and the availability of edges can change with time. We consider the complexity of solving $\omega$-regular games played on temporal graphs where the edge availability is ultimately periodic and fixed a priori. We show that solving parity games on temporal graphs is decidable in PSPACE, only assuming the edge predicate itself is in PSPACE. A matching lower bound already holds for what we call punctual reachability games on static graphs, where one player wants to reach the target at a given, binary encoded, point in time. We further study syntactic restrictions that imply more efficient procedures. In particular, if the edge predicate is in $P$ and is monotonically increasing for one player and decreasing for the other, then the complexity of solving games is only polynomially increased compared to static graphs.
Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial samples. Adversarial fine-tuning methods aim to enhance adversarial robustness through fine-tuning the naturally pre-trained model in an adversarial training manner. However, we identify that some latent features of adversarial samples are confused by adversarial perturbation and lead to an unexpectedly increasing gap between features in the last hidden layer of natural and adversarial samples. To address this issue, we propose a disentanglement-based approach to explicitly model and further remove the latent features that cause the feature gap. Specifically, we introduce a feature disentangler to separate out the latent features from the features of the adversarial samples, thereby boosting robustness by eliminating the latent features. Besides, we align features in the pre-trained model with features of adversarial samples in the fine-tuned model, to further benefit from the features from natural samples without confusion. Empirical evaluations on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach surpasses existing adversarial fine-tuning methods and adversarial training baselines.
Additive spatial statistical models with weakly stationary process assumptions have become standard in spatial statistics. However, one disadvantage of such models is the computation time, which rapidly increases with the number of data points. The goal of this article is to apply an existing subsampling strategy to standard spatial additive models and to derive the spatial statistical properties. We call this strategy the "spatial data subset model" (SDSM) approach, which can be applied to big datasets in a computationally feasible way. Our approach has the advantage that one does not require any additional restrictive model assumptions. That is, computational gains increase as model assumptions are removed when using our model framework. This provides one solution to the computational bottlenecks that occur when applying methods such as Kriging to "big data". We provide several properties of this new spatial data subset model approach in terms of moments, sill, nugget, and range under several sampling designs. An advantage of our approach is that it subsamples without throwing away data, and can be implemented using datasets of any size that can be stored. We present the results of the spatial data subset model approach on simulated datasets, and on a large dataset consists of 150,000 observations of daytime land surface temperatures measured by the MODIS instrument onboard the Terra satellite.
Deep neural networks have been able to outperform humans in some cases like image recognition and image classification. However, with the emergence of various novel categories, the ability to continuously widen the learning capability of such networks from limited samples, still remains a challenge. Techniques like Meta-Learning and/or few-shot learning showed promising results, where they can learn or generalize to a novel category/task based on prior knowledge. In this paper, we perform a study of the existing few-shot meta-learning techniques in the computer vision domain based on their method and evaluation metrics. We provide a taxonomy for the techniques and categorize them as data-augmentation, embedding, optimization and semantics based learning for few-shot, one-shot and zero-shot settings. We then describe the seminal work done in each category and discuss their approach towards solving the predicament of learning from few samples. Lastly we provide a comparison of these techniques on the commonly used benchmark datasets: Omniglot, and MiniImagenet, along with a discussion towards the future direction of improving the performance of these techniques towards the final goal of outperforming humans.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to be effective models for different predictive tasks on graph-structured data. Recent work on their expressive power has focused on isomorphism tasks and countable feature spaces. We extend this theoretical framework to include continuous features - which occur regularly in real-world input domains and within the hidden layers of GNNs - and we demonstrate the requirement for multiple aggregation functions in this context. Accordingly, we propose Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation (PNA), a novel architecture combining multiple aggregators with degree-scalers (which generalize the sum aggregator). Finally, we compare the capacity of different models to capture and exploit the graph structure via a novel benchmark containing multiple tasks taken from classical graph theory, alongside existing benchmarks from real-world domains, all of which demonstrate the strength of our model. With this work, we hope to steer some of the GNN research towards new aggregation methods which we believe are essential in the search for powerful and robust models.
Translational distance-based knowledge graph embedding has shown progressive improvements on the link prediction task, from TransE to the latest state-of-the-art RotatE. However, N-1, 1-N and N-N predictions still remain challenging. In this work, we propose a novel translational distance-based approach for knowledge graph link prediction. The proposed method includes two-folds, first we extend the RotatE from 2D complex domain to high dimension space with orthogonal transforms to model relations for better modeling capacity. Second, the graph context is explicitly modeled via two directed context representations. These context representations are used as part of the distance scoring function to measure the plausibility of the triples during training and inference. The proposed approach effectively improves prediction accuracy on the difficult N-1, 1-N and N-N cases for knowledge graph link prediction task. The experimental results show that it achieves better performance on two benchmark data sets compared to the baseline RotatE, especially on data set (FB15k-237) with many high in-degree connection nodes.
Knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing relations between entities in a knowledge graph. While many different methods have been proposed, there is a lack of a unifying framework that would lead to state-of-the-art results. Here we develop PathCon, a knowledge graph completion method that harnesses four novel insights to outperform existing methods. PathCon predicts relations between a pair of entities by: (1) Considering the Relational Context of each entity by capturing the relation types adjacent to the entity and modeled through a novel edge-based message passing scheme; (2) Considering the Relational Paths capturing all paths between the two entities; And, (3) adaptively integrating the Relational Context and Relational Path through a learnable attention mechanism. Importantly, (4) in contrast to conventional node-based representations, PathCon represents context and path only using the relation types, which makes it applicable in an inductive setting. Experimental results on knowledge graph benchmarks as well as our newly proposed dataset show that PathCon outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods by a large margin. Finally, PathCon is able to provide interpretable explanations by identifying relations that provide the context and paths that are important for a given predicted relation.
The potential of graph convolutional neural networks for the task of zero-shot learning has been demonstrated recently. These models are highly sample efficient as related concepts in the graph structure share statistical strength allowing generalization to new classes when faced with a lack of data. However, knowledge from distant nodes can get diluted when propagating through intermediate nodes, because current approaches to zero-shot learning use graph propagation schemes that perform Laplacian smoothing at each layer. We show that extensive smoothing does not help the task of regressing classifier weights in zero-shot learning. In order to still incorporate information from distant nodes and utilize the graph structure, we propose an Attentive Dense Graph Propagation Module (ADGPM). ADGPM allows us to exploit the hierarchical graph structure of the knowledge graph through additional connections. These connections are added based on a node's relationship to its ancestors and descendants and an attention scheme is further used to weigh their contribution depending on the distance to the node. Finally, we illustrate that finetuning of the feature representation after training the ADGPM leads to considerable improvements. Our method achieves competitive results, outperforming previous zero-shot learning approaches.