Motivated by the growing interest in correlation-robust stochastic optimization, we investigate stochastic selection problems beyond independence. Specifically, we consider the instructive case of pairwise-independent priors and matroid constraints. We obtain essentially-optimal bounds for offline contention resolution and prophet inequalities against the almighty online adversary. The impetus for our work comes from the recent work of \cite{pi-uniform-prophet}, who derived a constant-approximation for the single-choice prophet inequality with pairwise-independent priors. For general matroids, our results are tight and largely negative. For both contention resolution and prophet inequalities, our impossibility results hold for the full linear matroid over a finite field. We explicitly construct pairwise-independent distributions which rule out an $\omega\left(\frac{1}{\rank}\right)$-balanced offline CRS and an $\omega\left(\frac{1}{\log \rank}\right)$-competitive prophet inequality. For both results, we employ a generic approach for constructing pairwise-independent random vectors -- one which unifies and generalizes existing pairwise-independence constructions from the literature on universal hash functions and pseudorandomness. Specifically, our approach is based on our observation that random linear maps turn linear independence into stochastic independence. We then examine the class of matroids which satisfy the so-called partition property -- these include most common matroids encountered in optimization. We obtain positive results for both contention resolution and prophet inequalities with pairwise-independent priors on such matroids, approximately matching the corresponding guarantees for fully independent priors.
Many machine learning tasks can be formulated as a stochastic compositional optimization (SCO) problem such as reinforcement learning, AUC maximization, and meta-learning, where the objective function involves a nested composition associated with an expectation. While a significant amount of studies has been devoted to studying the convergence behavior of SCO algorithms, there is little work on understanding their generalization, i.e., how these learning algorithms built from training examples would behave on future test examples. In this paper, we provide the stability and generalization analysis of stochastic compositional gradient descent algorithms through the lens of algorithmic stability in the framework of statistical learning theory. Firstly, we introduce a stability concept called compositional uniform stability and establish its quantitative relation with generalization for SCO problems. Then, we establish the compositional uniform stability results for two popular stochastic compositional gradient descent algorithms, namely SCGD and SCSC. Finally, we derive dimension-independent excess risk bounds for SCGD and SCSC by trade-offing their stability results and optimization errors. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first-ever-known results on stability and generalization analysis of stochastic compositional gradient descent algorithms.
In this preliminary study, we investigate changes in handover behaviour when transferring hazardous objects with the help of a high-resolution touch sensor. Participants were asked to hand over a safe and hazardous object (a full cup and an empty cup) while instrumented with a modified STS sensor. Our data shows a clear distinction in the length of handover for the full cup vs the empty one, with the former being slower. Sensor data further suggests a change in tactile behaviour dependent on the object's risk factor. The results of this paper motivate a deeper study of tactile factors which could characterize a risky handover, allowing for safer human-robot interactions in the future.
As artificial intelligence (AI) models continue to scale up, they are becoming more capable and integrated into various forms of decision-making systems. For models involved in moral decision-making, also known as artificial moral agents (AMA), interpretability provides a way to trust and understand the agent's internal reasoning mechanisms for effective use and error correction. In this paper, we provide an overview of this rapidly-evolving sub-field of AI interpretability, introduce the concept of the Minimum Level of Interpretability (MLI) and recommend an MLI for various types of agents, to aid their safe deployment in real-world settings.
In this paper, we tackle two challenges in multimodal learning for visual recognition: 1) when missing-modality occurs either during training or testing in real-world situations; and 2) when the computation resources are not available to finetune on heavy transformer models. To this end, we propose to utilize prompt learning and mitigate the above two challenges together. Specifically, our modality-missing-aware prompts can be plugged into multimodal transformers to handle general missing-modality cases, while only requiring less than 1% learnable parameters compared to training the entire model. We further explore the effect of different prompt configurations and analyze the robustness to missing modality. Extensive experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of our prompt learning framework that improves the performance under various missing-modality cases, while alleviating the requirement of heavy model re-training. Code is available.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
As soon as abstract mathematical computations were adapted to computation on digital computers, the problem of efficient representation, manipulation, and communication of the numerical values in those computations arose. Strongly related to the problem of numerical representation is the problem of quantization: in what manner should a set of continuous real-valued numbers be distributed over a fixed discrete set of numbers to minimize the number of bits required and also to maximize the accuracy of the attendant computations? This perennial problem of quantization is particularly relevant whenever memory and/or computational resources are severely restricted, and it has come to the forefront in recent years due to the remarkable performance of Neural Network models in computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed integer values represented in four bits or less holds the potential to reduce the memory footprint and latency by a factor of 16x; and, in fact, reductions of 4x to 8x are often realized in practice in these applications. Thus, it is not surprising that quantization has emerged recently as an important and very active sub-area of research in the efficient implementation of computations associated with Neural Networks. In this article, we survey approaches to the problem of quantizing the numerical values in deep Neural Network computations, covering the advantages/disadvantages of current methods. With this survey and its organization, we hope to have presented a useful snapshot of the current research in quantization for Neural Networks and to have given an intelligent organization to ease the evaluation of future research in this area.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in power systems, ranging from pattern recognition to signal processing. The data in these tasks is typically represented in Euclidean domains. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of applications in power systems, where data are collected from non-Euclidean domains and represented as the graph-structured data with high dimensional features and interdependency among nodes. The complexity of graph-structured data has brought significant challenges to the existing deep neural networks defined in Euclidean domains. Recently, many studies on extending deep neural networks for graph-structured data in power systems have emerged. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in power systems is proposed. Specifically, several classical paradigms of GNNs structures (e.g., graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent neural networks, graph attention networks, graph generative networks, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks, and hybrid forms of GNNs) are summarized, and key applications in power systems such as fault diagnosis, power prediction, power flow calculation, and data generation are reviewed in detail. Furthermore, main issues and some research trends about the applications of GNNs in power systems are discussed.
This work considers the question of how convenient access to copious data impacts our ability to learn causal effects and relations. In what ways is learning causality in the era of big data different from -- or the same as -- the traditional one? To answer this question, this survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of both traditional and frontier methods in learning causality and relations along with the connections between causality and machine learning. This work points out on a case-by-case basis how big data facilitates, complicates, or motivates each approach.
Over the past few years, we have seen fundamental breakthroughs in core problems in machine learning, largely driven by advances in deep neural networks. At the same time, the amount of data collected in a wide array of scientific domains is dramatically increasing in both size and complexity. Taken together, this suggests many exciting opportunities for deep learning applications in scientific settings. But a significant challenge to this is simply knowing where to start. The sheer breadth and diversity of different deep learning techniques makes it difficult to determine what scientific problems might be most amenable to these methods, or which specific combination of methods might offer the most promising first approach. In this survey, we focus on addressing this central issue, providing an overview of many widely used deep learning models, spanning visual, sequential and graph structured data, associated tasks and different training methods, along with techniques to use deep learning with less data and better interpret these complex models --- two central considerations for many scientific use cases. We also include overviews of the full design process, implementation tips, and links to a plethora of tutorials, research summaries and open-sourced deep learning pipelines and pretrained models, developed by the community. We hope that this survey will help accelerate the use of deep learning across different scientific domains.
Detecting carried objects is one of the requirements for developing systems to reason about activities involving people and objects. We present an approach to detect carried objects from a single video frame with a novel method that incorporates features from multiple scales. Initially, a foreground mask in a video frame is segmented into multi-scale superpixels. Then the human-like regions in the segmented area are identified by matching a set of extracted features from superpixels against learned features in a codebook. A carried object probability map is generated using the complement of the matching probabilities of superpixels to human-like regions and background information. A group of superpixels with high carried object probability and strong edge support is then merged to obtain the shape of the carried object. We applied our method to two challenging datasets, and results show that our method is competitive with or better than the state-of-the-art.