Bayesian Generalized Linear Models (GLMs) define a flexible probabilistic framework to model categorical, ordinal and continuous data, and are widely used in practice. However, exact inference in GLMs is prohibitively expensive for large datasets, thus requiring approximations in practice. The resulting approximation error adversely impacts the reliability of the model and is not accounted for in the uncertainty of the prediction. In this work, we introduce a family of iterative methods that explicitly model this error. They are uniquely suited to parallel modern computing hardware, efficiently recycle computations, and compress information to reduce both the time and memory requirements for GLMs. As we demonstrate on a realistically large classification problem, our method significantly accelerates training compared to competitive baselines by trading off reduced computation for increased uncertainty.
Keyphrase extraction (KPE) is an important task in Natural Language Processing for many scenarios, which aims to extract keyphrases that are present in a given document. Many existing supervised methods treat KPE as sequential labeling, span-level classification, or generative tasks. However, these methods lack the ability to utilize keyphrase information, which may result in biased results. In this study, we propose Diff-KPE, which leverages the supervised Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) to guide the text diffusion process for generating enhanced keyphrase representations. Diff-KPE first generates the desired keyphrase embeddings conditioned on the entire document and then injects the generated keyphrase embeddings into each phrase representation. A ranking network and VIB are then optimized together with rank loss and classification loss, respectively. This design of Diff-KPE allows us to rank each candidate phrase by utilizing both the information of keyphrases and the document. Experiments show that Diff-KPE outperforms existing KPE methods on a large open domain keyphrase extraction benchmark, OpenKP, and a scientific domain dataset, KP20K.
The Audio Description (AD) task aims to generate descriptions of visual elements for visually impaired individuals to help them access long-form video contents, like movie. With video feature, text, character bank and context information as inputs, the generated ADs are able to correspond to the characters by name and provide reasonable, contextual descriptions to help audience understand the storyline of movie. To achieve this goal, we propose to leverage pre-trained foundation models through a simple and unified framework to generate ADs with interleaved multimodal sequence as input, termed as Uni-AD. To enhance the alignment of features across various modalities with finer granularity, we introduce a simple and lightweight module that maps video features into the textual feature space. Moreover, we also propose a character-refinement module to provide more precise information by identifying the main characters who play more significant role in the video context. With these unique designs, we further incorporate contextual information and a contrastive loss into our architecture to generate more smooth and contextual ADs. Experiments on the MAD-eval dataset show that Uni-AD can achieve state-of-the-art performance on AD generation, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach. Code will be available at //github.com/MCG-NJU/Uni-AD.
Generating calibrated and sharp neural network predictive distributions for regression problems is essential for optimal decision-making in many real-world applications. To address the miscalibration issue of neural networks, various methods have been proposed to improve calibration, including post-hoc methods that adjust predictions after training and regularization methods that act during training. While post-hoc methods have shown better improvement in calibration compared to regularization methods, the post-hoc step is completely independent of model training. We introduce a novel end-to-end model training procedure called Quantile Recalibration Training, integrating post-hoc calibration directly into the training process without additional parameters. We also present a unified algorithm that includes our method and other post-hoc and regularization methods, as particular cases. We demonstrate the performance of our method in a large-scale experiment involving 57 tabular regression datasets, showcasing improved predictive accuracy while maintaining calibration. We also conduct an ablation study to evaluate the significance of different components within our proposed method, as well as an in-depth analysis of the impact of the base model and different hyperparameters on predictive accuracy.
We propose a novel Model Order Reduction framework that is able to handle solutions of hyperbolic problems characterized by multiple travelling discontinuities. By means of an optimization based approach, we introduce suitable calibration maps that allow us to transform the original solution manifold into a lower dimensional one. The optimization process does not require the knowledge of the discontinuities location. In the online phase, the coefficients of the projection of the reduced order solution onto the reduced space are recovered by means of an Artificial Neural Network. To validate the methodology, we present numerical results for the 1D Sod shock tube problem and for the 2D double Mach reflection problem, also in the parametric case.
We present LeJit, a template-based framework for testing Java just-in-time (JIT) compilers. Like recent template-based frameworks, LeJit executes a template -- a program with holes to be filled -- to generate concrete programs given as inputs to Java JIT compilers. LeJit automatically generates template programs from existing Java code by converting expressions to holes, as well as generating necessary glue code (i.e., code that generates instances of non-primitive types) to make generated templates executable. We have successfully used LeJit to test a range of popular Java JIT compilers, revealing five bugs in HotSpot, nine bugs in OpenJ9, and one bug in GraalVM. All of these bugs have been confirmed by Oracle and IBM developers, and 11 of these bugs were previously unknown, including two CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures). Our comparison with several existing approaches shows that LeJit is complementary to them and is a powerful technique for ensuring Java JIT compiler correctness.
In offline reinforcement learning (RL), an RL agent learns to solve a task using only a fixed dataset of previously collected data. While offline RL has been successful in learning real-world robot control policies, it typically requires large amounts of expert-quality data to learn effective policies that generalize to out-of-distribution states. Unfortunately, such data is often difficult and expensive to acquire in real-world tasks. Several recent works have leveraged data augmentation (DA) to inexpensively generate additional data, but most DA works apply augmentations in a random fashion and ultimately produce highly suboptimal augmented experience. In this work, we propose Guided Data Augmentation (GuDA), a human-guided DA framework that generates expert-quality augmented data. The key insight behind GuDA is that while it may be difficult to demonstrate the sequence of actions required to produce expert data, a user can often easily characterize when an augmented trajectory segment represents progress toward task completion. Thus, a user can restrict the space of possible augmentations to automatically reject suboptimal augmented data. To extract a policy from GuDA, we use off-the-shelf offline reinforcement learning and behavior cloning algorithms. We evaluate GuDA on a physical robot soccer task as well as simulated D4RL navigation tasks, a simulated autonomous driving task, and a simulated soccer task. Empirically, GuDA enables learning given a small initial dataset of potentially suboptimal experience and outperforms a random DA strategy as well as a model-based DA strategy.
A growing trend involves integrating human knowledge into learning frameworks, leveraging subtle human feedback to refine AI models. Despite these advances, no comprehensive theoretical framework describing the specific conditions under which human comparisons improve the traditional supervised fine-tuning process has been developed. To bridge this gap, this paper studies the effective use of human comparisons to address limitations arising from noisy data and high-dimensional models. We propose a two-stage "Supervised Fine Tuning+Human Comparison" (SFT+HC) framework connecting machine learning with human feedback through a probabilistic bisection approach. The two-stage framework first learns low-dimensional representations from noisy-labeled data via an SFT procedure, and then uses human comparisons to improve the model alignment. To examine the efficacy of the alignment phase, we introduce a novel concept termed the "label-noise-to-comparison-accuracy" (LNCA) ratio. This paper theoretically identifies the conditions under which the "SFT+HC" framework outperforms pure SFT approach, leveraging this ratio to highlight the advantage of incorporating human evaluators in reducing sample complexity. We validate that the proposed conditions for the LNCA ratio are met in a case study conducted via an Amazon Mechanical Turk experiment.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received considerable attention on graph-structured data learning for a wide variety of tasks. The well-designed propagation mechanism which has been demonstrated effective is the most fundamental part of GNNs. Although most of GNNs basically follow a message passing manner, litter effort has been made to discover and analyze their essential relations. In this paper, we establish a surprising connection between different propagation mechanisms with a unified optimization problem, showing that despite the proliferation of various GNNs, in fact, their proposed propagation mechanisms are the optimal solution optimizing a feature fitting function over a wide class of graph kernels with a graph regularization term. Our proposed unified optimization framework, summarizing the commonalities between several of the most representative GNNs, not only provides a macroscopic view on surveying the relations between different GNNs, but also further opens up new opportunities for flexibly designing new GNNs. With the proposed framework, we discover that existing works usually utilize naive graph convolutional kernels for feature fitting function, and we further develop two novel objective functions considering adjustable graph kernels showing low-pass or high-pass filtering capabilities respectively. Moreover, we provide the convergence proofs and expressive power comparisons for the proposed models. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets clearly show that the proposed GNNs not only outperform the state-of-the-art methods but also have good ability to alleviate over-smoothing, and further verify the feasibility for designing GNNs with our unified optimization framework.
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.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.