After a neural sequence model encounters an unexpected token, can its behavior be predicted? We show that RNN and transformer language models exhibit structured, consistent generalization in out-of-distribution contexts. We begin by introducing two idealized models of generalization in next-word prediction: a local context model in which generalization is consistent with the last word observed, and a global context model in which generalization is consistent with the global structure of the input. In experiments in English, Finnish, Mandarin, and random regular languages, we demonstrate that neural language models interpolate between these two forms of generalization: their predictions are well-approximated by a log-linear combination of local and global predictive distributions. We then show that, in some languages, noise mediates the two forms of generalization: noise applied to input tokens encourages global generalization, while noise in history representations encourages local generalization. Finally, we offer a preliminary theoretical explanation of these results by proving that the observed interpolation behavior is expected in log-linear models with a particular feature correlation structure. These results help explain the effectiveness of two popular regularization schemes and show that aspects of sequence model generalization can be understood and controlled.
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Fairness aware data mining (FADM) aims to prevent algorithms from discriminating against protected groups. The literature has come to an impasse as to what constitutes explainable variability as opposed to discrimination. This distinction hinges on a rigorous understanding of the role of proxy variables; i.e., those variables which are associated both the protected feature and the outcome of interest. We demonstrate that fairness is achieved by ensuring impartiality with respect to sensitive characteristics and provide a framework for impartiality by accounting for different perspectives on the data generating process. In particular, fairness can only be precisely defined in a full-data scenario in which all covariates are observed. We then analyze how these models may be conservatively estimated via regression in partial-data settings. Decomposing the regression estimates provides insights into previously unexplored distinctions between explainable variability and discrimination that illuminate the use of proxy variables in fairness aware data mining.
Estimating value functions is a core component of reinforcement learning algorithms. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms use bootstrapping, i.e. they update the value function toward a learning target using value estimates at subsequent time-steps. Alternatively, the value function can be updated toward a learning target constructed by separately predicting successor features (SF)--a policy-dependent model--and linearly combining them with instantaneous rewards. We focus on bootstrapping targets used when estimating value functions, and propose a new backup target, the $\eta$-return mixture, which implicitly combines value-predictive knowledge (used by TD methods) with (successor) feature-predictive knowledge--with a parameter $\eta$ capturing how much to rely on each. We illustrate that incorporating predictive knowledge through an $\eta\gamma$-discounted SF model makes more efficient use of sampled experience, compared to either extreme, i.e. bootstrapping entirely on the value function estimate, or bootstrapping on the product of separately estimated successor features and instantaneous reward models. We empirically show this approach leads to faster policy evaluation and better control performance, for tabular and nonlinear function approximations, indicating scalability and generality.
We deal with Bayesian generative and discriminative classifiers. Given a model distribution $p(x, y)$, with the observation $y$ and the target $x$, one computes generative classifiers by firstly considering $p(x, y)$ and then using the Bayes rule to calculate $p(x | y)$. A discriminative model is directly given by $p(x | y)$, which is used to compute discriminative classifiers. However, recent works showed that the Bayesian Maximum Posterior classifier defined from the Naive Bayes (NB) or Hidden Markov Chain (HMC), both generative models, can also match the discriminative classifier definition. Thus, there are situations in which dividing classifiers into "generative" and "discriminative" is somewhat misleading. Indeed, such a distinction is rather related to the way of computing classifiers, not to the classifiers themselves. We present a general theoretical result specifying how a generative classifier induced from a generative model can also be computed in a discriminative way from the same model. Examples of NB and HMC are found again as particular cases, and we apply the general result to two original extensions of NB, and two extensions of HMC, one of which being original. Finally, we shortly illustrate the interest of the new discriminative way of computing classifiers in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) framework.
Conventional supervised learning methods, especially deep ones, are found to be sensitive to out-of-distribution (OOD) examples, largely because the learned representation mixes the semantic factor with the variation factor due to their domain-specific correlation, while only the semantic factor causes the output. To address the problem, we propose a Causal Semantic Generative model (CSG) based on a causal reasoning so that the two factors are modeled separately, and develop methods for OOD prediction from a single training domain, which is common and challenging. The methods are based on the causal invariance principle, with a novel design for both efficient learning and easy prediction. Theoretically, we prove that under certain conditions, CSG can identify the semantic factor by fitting training data, and this semantic-identification guarantees the boundedness of OOD generalization error and the success of adaptation. Empirical study shows improved OOD performance over prevailing baselines.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a powerful tool for machine learning on graphs.GNNs combine node feature information with the graph structure by recursively passing neural messages along edges of the input graph. However, incorporating both graph structure and feature information leads to complex models, and explaining predictions made by GNNs remains unsolved. Here we propose GNNExplainer, the first general, model-agnostic approach for providing interpretable explanations for predictions of any GNN-based model on any graph-based machine learning task. Given an instance, GNNExplainer identifies a compact subgraph structure and a small subset of node features that have a crucial role in GNN's prediction. Further, GNNExplainer can generate consistent and concise explanations for an entire class of instances. We formulate GNNExplainer as an optimization task that maximizes the mutual information between a GNN's prediction and distribution of possible subgraph structures. Experiments on synthetic and real-world graphs show that our approach can identify important graph structures as well as node features, and outperforms baselines by 17.1% on average. GNNExplainer provides a variety of benefits, from the ability to visualize semantically relevant structures to interpretability, to giving insights into errors of faulty GNNs.
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is an essential task in web applications such as online advertising and recommender systems, whose features are usually in multi-field form. The key of this task is to model feature interactions among different feature fields. Recently proposed deep learning based models follow a general paradigm: raw sparse input multi-filed features are first mapped into dense field embedding vectors, and then simply concatenated together to feed into deep neural networks (DNN) or other specifically designed networks to learn high-order feature interactions. However, the simple \emph{unstructured combination} of feature fields will inevitably limit the capability to model sophisticated interactions among different fields in a sufficiently flexible and explicit fashion. In this work, we propose to represent the multi-field features in a graph structure intuitively, where each node corresponds to a feature field and different fields can interact through edges. The task of modeling feature interactions can be thus converted to modeling node interactions on the corresponding graph. To this end, we design a novel model Feature Interaction Graph Neural Networks (Fi-GNN). Taking advantage of the strong representative power of graphs, our proposed model can not only model sophisticated feature interactions in a flexible and explicit fashion, but also provide good model explanations for CTR prediction. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show its superiority over the state-of-the-arts.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
RNN models have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of text mining tasks. However, these models are often regarded as black-boxes and are criticized due to the lack of interpretability. In this paper, we enhance the interpretability of RNNs by providing interpretable rationales for RNN predictions. Nevertheless, interpreting RNNs is a challenging problem. Firstly, unlike existing methods that rely on local approximation, we aim to provide rationales that are more faithful to the decision making process of RNN models. Secondly, a flexible interpretation method should be able to assign contribution scores to text segments of varying lengths, instead of only to individual words. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel attribution method, called REAT, to provide interpretations to RNN predictions. REAT decomposes the final prediction of a RNN into additive contribution of each word in the input text. This additive decomposition enables REAT to further obtain phrase-level attribution scores. In addition, REAT is generally applicable to various RNN architectures, including GRU, LSTM and their bidirectional versions. Experimental results demonstrate the faithfulness and interpretability of the proposed attribution method. Comprehensive analysis shows that our attribution method could unveil the useful linguistic knowledge captured by RNNs. Some analysis further demonstrates our method could be utilized as a debugging tool to examine the vulnerability and failure reasons of RNNs, which may lead to several promising future directions to promote generalization ability of RNNs.
Recurrent models for sequences have been recently successful at many tasks, especially for language modeling and machine translation. Nevertheless, it remains challenging to extract good representations from these models. For instance, even though language has a clear hierarchical structure going from characters through words to sentences, it is not apparent in current language models. We propose to improve the representation in sequence models by augmenting current approaches with an autoencoder that is forced to compress the sequence through an intermediate discrete latent space. In order to propagate gradients though this discrete representation we introduce an improved semantic hashing technique. We show that this technique performs well on a newly proposed quantitative efficiency measure. We also analyze latent codes produced by the model showing how they correspond to words and phrases. Finally, we present an application of the autoencoder-augmented model to generating diverse translations.
Neural machine translation is a recently proposed approach to machine translation. Unlike the traditional statistical machine translation, the neural machine translation aims at building a single neural network that can be jointly tuned to maximize the translation performance. The models proposed recently for neural machine translation often belong to a family of encoder-decoders and consists of an encoder that encodes a source sentence into a fixed-length vector from which a decoder generates a translation. In this paper, we conjecture that the use of a fixed-length vector is a bottleneck in improving the performance of this basic encoder-decoder architecture, and propose to extend this by allowing a model to automatically (soft-)search for parts of a source sentence that are relevant to predicting a target word, without having to form these parts as a hard segment explicitly. With this new approach, we achieve a translation performance comparable to the existing state-of-the-art phrase-based system on the task of English-to-French translation. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals that the (soft-)alignments found by the model agree well with our intuition.
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