Neural Ordinary Differential Equations model dynamical systems with \textit{ODE}s learned by neural networks. However, ODEs are fundamentally inadequate to model systems with long-range dependencies or discontinuities, which are common in engineering and biological systems. Broader classes of differential equations (DE) have been proposed as remedies, including delay differential equations and integro-differential equations. Furthermore, Neural ODE suffers from numerical instability when modelling stiff ODEs and ODEs with piecewise forcing functions. In this work, we propose \textit{Neural Laplace}, a unified framework for learning diverse classes of DEs including all the aforementioned ones. Instead of modelling the dynamics in the time domain, we model it in the Laplace domain, where the history-dependencies and discontinuities in time can be represented as summations of complex exponentials. To make learning more efficient, we use the geometrical stereographic map of a Riemann sphere to induce more smoothness in the Laplace domain. In the experiments, Neural Laplace shows superior performance in modelling and extrapolating the trajectories of diverse classes of DEs, including the ones with complex history dependency and abrupt changes.
It is perhaps no longer surprising that machine learning models, especially deep neural networks, are particularly vulnerable to attacks. One such vulnerability that has been well studied is model extraction: a phenomenon in which the attacker attempts to steal a victim's model by training a surrogate model to mimic the decision boundaries of the victim model. Previous works have demonstrated the effectiveness of such an attack and its devastating consequences, but much of this work has been done primarily for image and text processing tasks. Our work is the first attempt to perform model extraction on {\em audio classification models}. We are motivated by an attacker whose goal is to mimic the behavior of the victim's model trained to identify a speaker. This is particularly problematic in security-sensitive domains such as biometric authentication. We find that prior model extraction techniques, where the attacker \textit{naively} uses a proxy dataset to attack a potential victim's model, fail. We therefore propose the use of a generative model to create a sufficiently large and diverse pool of synthetic attack queries. We find that our approach is able to extract a victim's model trained on \texttt{LibriSpeech} using queries synthesized with a proxy dataset based off of \texttt{VoxCeleb}; we achieve a test accuracy of 84.41\% with a budget of 3 million queries.
We establish optimal convergence rates up to a log-factor for a class of deep neural networks in a classification setting under a restraint sometimes referred to as the Tsybakov noise condition. We construct classifiers in a general setting where the boundary of the bayes-rule can be approximated well by neural networks. Corresponding rates of convergence are proven with respect to the misclassification error. It is then shown that these rates are optimal in the minimax sense if the boundary satisfies a smoothness condition. Non-optimal convergence rates already exist for this setting. Our main contribution lies in improving existing rates and showing optimality, which was an open problem. Furthermore, we show almost optimal rates under some additional restraints which circumvent the curse of dimensionality. For our analysis we require a condition which gives new insight on the restraint used. In a sense it acts as a requirement for the "correct noise exponent" for a class of functions.
Context: Differential testing is a useful approach that uses different implementations of the same algorithms and compares the results for software testing. In recent years, this approach was successfully used for test campaigns of deep learning frameworks. Objective: There is little knowledge on the application of differential testing beyond deep learning. Within this article, we want to close this gap for classification algorithms. Method: We conduct a case study using Scikit-learn, Weka, Spark MLlib, and Caret in which we identify the potential of differential testing by considering which algorithms are available in multiple frameworks, the feasibility by identifying pairs of algorithms that should exhibit the same behavior, and the effectiveness by executing tests for the identified pairs and analyzing the deviations. Results: While we found a large potential for popular algorithms, the feasibility seems limited because often it is not possible to determine configurations that are the same in other frameworks. The execution of the feasible tests revealed that there is a large amount of deviations for the scores and classes. Only a lenient approach based on statistical significance of classes does not lead to a huge amount of test failures. Conclusions: The potential of differential testing beyond deep learning seems limited for research into the quality of machine learning libraries. Practitioners may still use the approach if they have deep knowledge about implementations, especially if a coarse oracle that only considers significant differences of classes is sufficient.
In the pursuit of explaining implicit regularization in deep learning, prominent focus was given to matrix and tensor factorizations, which correspond to simplified neural networks. It was shown that these models exhibit an implicit tendency towards low matrix and tensor ranks, respectively. Drawing closer to practical deep learning, the current paper theoretically analyzes the implicit regularization in hierarchical tensor factorization, a model equivalent to certain deep convolutional neural networks. Through a dynamical systems lens, we overcome challenges associated with hierarchy, and establish implicit regularization towards low hierarchical tensor rank. This translates to an implicit regularization towards locality for the associated convolutional networks. Inspired by our theory, we design explicit regularization discouraging locality, and demonstrate its ability to improve the performance of modern convolutional networks on non-local tasks, in defiance of conventional wisdom by which architectural changes are needed. Our work highlights the potential of enhancing neural networks via theoretical analysis of their implicit regularization.
Deep learning plays a more and more important role in our daily life due to its competitive performance in multiple industrial application domains. As the core of DL-enabled systems, deep neural networks automatically learn knowledge from carefully collected and organized training data to gain the ability to predict the label of unseen data. Similar to the traditional software systems that need to be comprehensively tested, DNNs also need to be carefully evaluated to make sure the quality of the trained model meets the demand. In practice, the de facto standard to assess the quality of DNNs in industry is to check their performance (accuracy) on a collected set of labeled test data. However, preparing such labeled data is often not easy partly because of the huge labeling effort, i.e., data labeling is labor-intensive, especially with the massive new incoming unlabeled data every day. Recent studies show that test selection for DNN is a promising direction that tackles this issue by selecting minimal representative data to label and using these data to assess the model. However, it still requires human effort and cannot be automatic. In this paper, we propose a novel technique, named Aries, that can estimate the performance of DNNs on new unlabeled data using only the information obtained from the original test data. The key insight behind our technique is that the model should have similar prediction accuracy on the data which have similar distances to the decision boundary. We performed a large-scale evaluation of our technique on 13 types of data transformation methods. The results demonstrate the usefulness of our technique that the estimated accuracy by Aries is only 0.03% -- 2.60% (on average 0.61%) off the true accuracy. Besides, Aries also outperforms the state-of-the-art selection-labeling-based methods in most (96 out of 128) cases.
The conjoining of dynamical systems and deep learning has become a topic of great interest. In particular, neural differential equations (NDEs) demonstrate that neural networks and differential equation are two sides of the same coin. Traditional parameterised differential equations are a special case. Many popular neural network architectures, such as residual networks and recurrent networks, are discretisations. NDEs are suitable for tackling generative problems, dynamical systems, and time series (particularly in physics, finance, ...) and are thus of interest to both modern machine learning and traditional mathematical modelling. NDEs offer high-capacity function approximation, strong priors on model space, the ability to handle irregular data, memory efficiency, and a wealth of available theory on both sides. This doctoral thesis provides an in-depth survey of the field. Topics include: neural ordinary differential equations (e.g. for hybrid neural/mechanistic modelling of physical systems); neural controlled differential equations (e.g. for learning functions of irregular time series); and neural stochastic differential equations (e.g. to produce generative models capable of representing complex stochastic dynamics, or sampling from complex high-dimensional distributions). Further topics include: numerical methods for NDEs (e.g. reversible differential equations solvers, backpropagation through differential equations, Brownian reconstruction); symbolic regression for dynamical systems (e.g. via regularised evolution); and deep implicit models (e.g. deep equilibrium models, differentiable optimisation). We anticipate this thesis will be of interest to anyone interested in the marriage of deep learning with dynamical systems, and hope it will provide a useful reference for the current state of the art.
We describe ACE0, a lightweight platform for evaluating the suitability and viability of AI methods for behaviour discovery in multiagent simulations. Specifically, ACE0 was designed to explore AI methods for multi-agent simulations used in operations research studies related to new technologies such as autonomous aircraft. Simulation environments used in production are often high-fidelity, complex, require significant domain knowledge and as a result have high R&D costs. Minimal and lightweight simulation environments can help researchers and engineers evaluate the viability of new AI technologies for behaviour discovery in a more agile and potentially cost effective manner. In this paper we describe the motivation for the development of ACE0.We provide a technical overview of the system architecture, describe a case study of behaviour discovery in the aerospace domain, and provide a qualitative evaluation of the system. The evaluation includes a brief description of collaborative research projects with academic partners, exploring different AI behaviour discovery methods.
Due to their increasing spread, confidence in neural network predictions became more and more important. However, basic neural networks do not deliver certainty estimates or suffer from over or under confidence. Many researchers have been working on understanding and quantifying uncertainty in a neural network's prediction. As a result, different types and sources of uncertainty have been identified and a variety of approaches to measure and quantify uncertainty in neural networks have been proposed. This work gives a comprehensive overview of uncertainty estimation in neural networks, reviews recent advances in the field, highlights current challenges, and identifies potential research opportunities. It is intended to give anyone interested in uncertainty estimation in neural networks a broad overview and introduction, without presupposing prior knowledge in this field. A comprehensive introduction to the most crucial sources of uncertainty is given and their separation into reducible model uncertainty and not reducible data uncertainty is presented. The modeling of these uncertainties based on deterministic neural networks, Bayesian neural networks, ensemble of neural networks, and test-time data augmentation approaches is introduced and different branches of these fields as well as the latest developments are discussed. For a practical application, we discuss different measures of uncertainty, approaches for the calibration of neural networks and give an overview of existing baselines and implementations. Different examples from the wide spectrum of challenges in different fields give an idea of the needs and challenges regarding uncertainties in practical applications. Additionally, the practical limitations of current methods for mission- and safety-critical real world applications are discussed and an outlook on the next steps towards a broader usage of such methods is given.
This paper focuses on the expected difference in borrower's repayment when there is a change in the lender's credit decisions. Classical estimators overlook the confounding effects and hence the estimation error can be magnificent. As such, we propose another approach to construct the estimators such that the error can be greatly reduced. The proposed estimators are shown to be unbiased, consistent, and robust through a combination of theoretical analysis and numerical testing. Moreover, we compare the power of estimating the causal quantities between the classical estimators and the proposed estimators. The comparison is tested across a wide range of models, including linear regression models, tree-based models, and neural network-based models, under different simulated datasets that exhibit different levels of causality, different degrees of nonlinearity, and different distributional properties. Most importantly, we apply our approaches to a large observational dataset provided by a global technology firm that operates in both the e-commerce and the lending business. We find that the relative reduction of estimation error is strikingly substantial if the causal effects are accounted for correctly.
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in computer vision tasks. Existing neural networks mainly operate in the spatial domain with fixed input sizes. For practical applications, images are usually large and have to be downsampled to the predetermined input size of neural networks. Even though the downsampling operations reduce computation and the required communication bandwidth, it removes both redundant and salient information obliviously, which results in accuracy degradation. Inspired by digital signal processing theories, we analyze the spectral bias from the frequency perspective and propose a learning-based frequency selection method to identify the trivial frequency components which can be removed without accuracy loss. The proposed method of learning in the frequency domain leverages identical structures of the well-known neural networks, such as ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, and Mask R-CNN, while accepting the frequency-domain information as the input. Experiment results show that learning in the frequency domain with static channel selection can achieve higher accuracy than the conventional spatial downsampling approach and meanwhile further reduce the input data size. Specifically for ImageNet classification with the same input size, the proposed method achieves 1.41% and 0.66% top-1 accuracy improvements on ResNet-50 and MobileNetV2, respectively. Even with half input size, the proposed method still improves the top-1 accuracy on ResNet-50 by 1%. In addition, we observe a 0.8% average precision improvement on Mask R-CNN for instance segmentation on the COCO dataset.