Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular approach for sample-efficient optimization of black-box objective functions. While BO has been successfully applied to a wide range of scientific applications, traditional approaches to single-objective BO only seek to find a single best solution. This can be a significant limitation in situations where solutions may later turn out to be intractable. For example, a designed molecule may turn out to violate constraints that can only be reasonably evaluated after the optimization process has concluded. To address this issue, we propose Rank-Ordered Bayesian Optimization with Trust-regions (ROBOT) which aims to find a portfolio of high-performing solutions that are diverse according to a user-specified diversity metric. We evaluate ROBOT on several real-world applications and show that it can discover large sets of high-performing diverse solutions while requiring few additional function evaluations compared to finding a single best solution.
We focus on the continual learning problem where the tasks arrive sequentially and the aim is to perform well on the newly arrived task without performance degradation on the previously seen tasks. In contrast to the continual learning literature focusing on the centralized setting, we investigate the distributed estimation framework. We consider the well-established distributed learning algorithm CoCoA. We derive closed form expressions for the iterations for the overparametrized case. We illustrate the convergence and the error performance of the algorithm based on the over/under-parametrization of the problem. Our results show that depending on the problem dimensions and data generation assumptions, CoCoA can perform continual learning over a sequence of tasks, i.e., it can learn a new task without forgetting previously learned tasks, with access only to one task at a time.
Models trained via empirical risk minimization (ERM) are known to rely on spurious correlations between labels and task-independent input features, resulting in poor generalization to distributional shifts. Group distributionally robust optimization (G-DRO) can alleviate this problem by minimizing the worst-case loss over a set of pre-defined groups over training data. G-DRO successfully improves performance of the worst-group, where the correlation does not hold. However, G-DRO assumes that the spurious correlations and associated worst groups are known in advance, making it challenging to apply it to new tasks with potentially multiple unknown spurious correlations. We propose AGRO -- Adversarial Group discovery for Distributionally Robust Optimization -- an end-to-end approach that jointly identifies error-prone groups and improves accuracy on them. AGRO equips G-DRO with an adversarial slicing model to find a group assignment for training examples which maximizes worst-case loss over the discovered groups. On the WILDS benchmark, AGRO results in 8% higher model performance on average on known worst-groups, compared to prior group discovery approaches used with G-DRO. AGRO also improves out-of-distribution performance on SST2, QQP, and MS-COCO -- datasets where potential spurious correlations are as yet uncharacterized. Human evaluation of ARGO groups shows that they contain well-defined, yet previously unstudied spurious correlations that lead to model errors.
This article develops a new algorithm named TTRISK to solve high-dimensional risk-averse optimization problems governed by differential equations (ODEs and/or PDEs) under uncertainty. As an example, we focus on the so-called Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR), but the approach is equally applicable to other coherent risk measures. Both the full and reduced space formulations are considered. The algorithm is based on low rank tensor approximations of random fields discretized using stochastic collocation. To avoid non-smoothness of the objective function underpinning the CVaR, we propose an adaptive strategy to select the width parameter of the smoothed CVaR to balance the smoothing and tensor approximation errors. Moreover, unbiased Monte Carlo CVaR estimate can be computed by using the smoothed CVaR as a control variate. To accelerate the computations, we introduce an efficient preconditioner for the KKT system in the full space formulation.The numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method enables accurate CVaR optimization constrained by large-scale discretized systems. In particular, the first example consists of an elliptic PDE with random coefficients as constraints. The second example is motivated by a realistic application to devise a lockdown plan for United Kingdom under COVID-19. The results indicate that the risk-averse framework is feasible with the tensor approximations under tens of random variables.
Auto-regressive moving-average (ARMA) models are ubiquitous forecasting tools. Parsimony in such models is highly valued for their interpretability and computational tractability, and as such the identification of model orders remains a fundamental task. We propose a novel method of ARMA order identification through projection predictive inference, which is grounded in Bayesian decision theory and naturally allows for uncertainty communication. It benefits from improved stability through the use of a reference model. The procedure consists of two steps: in the first, the practitioner incorporates their understanding of underlying data-generating process into a reference model, which we latterly project onto possibly parsimonious submodels. These submodels are optimally inferred to best replicate the predictive performance of the reference model. We further propose a search heuristic amenable to the ARMA framework. We show that the submodels selected by our procedure exhibit predictive performance at least as good as those produced by auto.arima over simulated and real-data experiments, and in some cases out-perform the latter. Finally we show that our procedure is robust to noise, and scales well to larger data.
Classic algorithms and machine learning systems like neural networks are both abundant in everyday life. While classic computer science algorithms are suitable for precise execution of exactly defined tasks such as finding the shortest path in a large graph, neural networks allow learning from data to predict the most likely answer in more complex tasks such as image classification, which cannot be reduced to an exact algorithm. To get the best of both worlds, this thesis explores combining both concepts leading to more robust, better performing, more interpretable, more computationally efficient, and more data efficient architectures. The thesis formalizes the idea of algorithmic supervision, which allows a neural network to learn from or in conjunction with an algorithm. When integrating an algorithm into a neural architecture, it is important that the algorithm is differentiable such that the architecture can be trained end-to-end and gradients can be propagated back through the algorithm in a meaningful way. To make algorithms differentiable, this thesis proposes a general method for continuously relaxing algorithms by perturbing variables and approximating the expectation value in closed form, i.e., without sampling. In addition, this thesis proposes differentiable algorithms, such as differentiable sorting networks, differentiable renderers, and differentiable logic gate networks. Finally, this thesis presents alternative training strategies for learning with algorithms.
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.
We hypothesize that due to the greedy nature of learning in multi-modal deep neural networks, these models tend to rely on just one modality while under-fitting the other modalities. Such behavior is counter-intuitive and hurts the models' generalization, as we observe empirically. To estimate the model's dependence on each modality, we compute the gain on the accuracy when the model has access to it in addition to another modality. We refer to this gain as the conditional utilization rate. In the experiments, we consistently observe an imbalance in conditional utilization rates between modalities, across multiple tasks and architectures. Since conditional utilization rate cannot be computed efficiently during training, we introduce a proxy for it based on the pace at which the model learns from each modality, which we refer to as the conditional learning speed. We propose an algorithm to balance the conditional learning speeds between modalities during training and demonstrate that it indeed addresses the issue of greedy learning. The proposed algorithm improves the model's generalization on three datasets: Colored MNIST, Princeton ModelNet40, and NVIDIA Dynamic Hand Gesture.
Deep Learning has implemented a wide range of applications and has become increasingly popular in recent years. The goal of multimodal deep learning is to create models that can process and link information using various modalities. Despite the extensive development made for unimodal learning, it still cannot cover all the aspects of human learning. Multimodal learning helps to understand and analyze better when various senses are engaged in the processing of information. This paper focuses on multiple types of modalities, i.e., image, video, text, audio, body gestures, facial expressions, and physiological signals. Detailed analysis of past and current baseline approaches and an in-depth study of recent advancements in multimodal deep learning applications has been provided. A fine-grained taxonomy of various multimodal deep learning applications is proposed, elaborating on different applications in more depth. Architectures and datasets used in these applications are also discussed, along with their evaluation metrics. Last, main issues are highlighted separately for each domain along with their possible future research directions.
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.
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.