Gaussian processes (GPs) are typically criticised for their unfavourable scaling in both computational and memory requirements. For large datasets, sparse GPs reduce these demands by conditioning on a small set of inducing variables designed to summarise the data. In practice however, for large datasets requiring many inducing variables, such as low-lengthscale spatial data, even sparse GPs can become computationally expensive, limited by the number of inducing variables one can use. In this work, we propose a new class of inter-domain variational GP, constructed by projecting a GP onto a set of compactly supported B-spline basis functions. The key benefit of our approach is that the compact support of the B-spline basis functions admits the use of sparse linear algebra to significantly speed up matrix operations and drastically reduce the memory footprint. This allows us to very efficiently model fast-varying spatial phenomena with tens of thousands of inducing variables, where previous approaches failed.
Datasets with sheer volume have been generated from fields including computer vision, medical imageology, and astronomy whose large-scale and high-dimensional properties hamper the implementation of classical statistical models. To tackle the computational challenges, one of the efficient approaches is subsampling which draws subsamples from the original large datasets according to a carefully-design task-specific probability distribution to form an informative sketch. The computation cost is reduced by applying the original algorithm to the substantially smaller sketch. Previous studies associated with subsampling focused on non-regularized regression from the computational efficiency and theoretical guarantee perspectives, such as ordinary least square regression and logistic regression. In this article, we introduce a randomized algorithm under the subsampling scheme for the Elastic-net regression which gives novel insights into L1-norm regularized regression problem. To effectively conduct consistency analysis, a smooth approximation technique based on alpha absolute function is firstly employed and theoretically verified. The concentration bounds and asymptotic normality for the proposed randomized algorithm are then established under mild conditions. Moreover, an optimal subsampling probability is constructed according to A-optimality. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated upon synthetic and real data datasets.
To achieve scalable and accurate inference for latent Gaussian processes, we propose a variational approximation based on a family of Gaussian distributions whose covariance matrices have sparse inverse Cholesky (SIC) factors. We combine this variational approximation of the posterior with a similar and efficient SIC-restricted Kullback-Leibler-optimal approximation of the prior. We then focus on a particular SIC ordering and nearest-neighbor-based sparsity pattern resulting in highly accurate prior and posterior approximations. For this setting, our variational approximation can be computed via stochastic gradient descent in polylogarithmic time per iteration. We provide numerical comparisons showing that the proposed double-Kullback-Leibler-optimal Gaussian-process approximation (DKLGP) can sometimes be vastly more accurate for stationary kernels than alternative approaches such as inducing-point and mean-field approximations at similar computational complexity.
Adversarial attacks represent a security threat to machine learning based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. To prevent such attacks we propose an adversarial example detection strategy applicable to any ASR system that predicts a probability distribution over output tokens in each time step. We measure a set of characteristics of this distribution: the median, maximum, and minimum over the output probabilities, the entropy, and the Jensen-Shannon divergence of the distributions of subsequent time steps. Then, we fit a Gaussian distribution to the characteristics observed for benign data. By computing the likelihood of incoming new audio we can distinguish malicious inputs from samples from clean data with an area under the receiving operator characteristic (AUROC) higher than 0.99, which drops to 0.98 for less-quality audio. To assess the robustness of our method we build adaptive attacks. This reduces the AUROC to 0.96 but results in more noisy adversarial clips.
We study a family of adversarial multiclass classification problems and provide equivalent reformulations in terms of: 1) a family of generalized barycenter problems introduced in the paper and 2) a family of multimarginal optimal transport problems where the number of marginals is equal to the number of classes in the original classification problem. These new theoretical results reveal a rich geometric structure of adversarial learning problems in multiclass classification and extend recent results restricted to the binary classification setting. A direct computational implication of our results is that by solving either the barycenter problem and its dual, or the MOT problem and its dual, we can recover the optimal robust classification rule and the optimal adversarial strategy for the original adversarial problem. Examples with synthetic and real data illustrate our results.
Sparse linear regression is a central problem in high-dimensional statistics. We study the correlated random design setting, where the covariates are drawn from a multivariate Gaussian $N(0,\Sigma)$, and we seek an estimator with small excess risk. If the true signal is $t$-sparse, information-theoretically, it is possible to achieve strong recovery guarantees with only $O(t\log n)$ samples. However, computationally efficient algorithms have sample complexity linear in (some variant of) the condition number of $\Sigma$. Classical algorithms such as the Lasso can require significantly more samples than necessary even if there is only a single sparse approximate dependency among the covariates. We provide a polynomial-time algorithm that, given $\Sigma$, automatically adapts the Lasso to tolerate a small number of approximate dependencies. In particular, we achieve near-optimal sample complexity for constant sparsity and if $\Sigma$ has few ``outlier'' eigenvalues. Our algorithm fits into a broader framework of feature adaptation for sparse linear regression with ill-conditioned covariates. With this framework, we additionally provide the first polynomial-factor improvement over brute-force search for constant sparsity $t$ and arbitrary covariance $\Sigma$.
Logic synthesis is the first and most vital step in chip design. This steps converts a chip specification written in a hardware description language (such as Verilog) into an optimized implementation using Boolean logic gates. State-of-the-art logic synthesis algorithms have a large number of logic minimization heuristics, typically applied sequentially based on human experience and intuition. The choice of the order greatly impacts the quality (e.g., area and delay) of the synthesized circuit. In this paper, we propose INVICTUS, a model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) solution that automatically generates a sequence of logic minimization heuristics ("synthesis recipe") based on a training dataset of previously seen designs. A key challenge is that new designs can range from being very similar to past designs (e.g., adders and multipliers) to being completely novel (e.g., new processor instructions). %Compared to prior work, INVICTUS is the first solution that uses a mix of RL and search methods joint with an online out-of-distribution detector to generate synthesis recipes over a wide range of benchmarks. Our results demonstrate significant improvement in area-delay product (ADP) of synthesized circuits with up to 30\% improvement over state-of-the-art techniques. Moreover, INVICTUS achieves up to $6.3\times$ runtime reduction (iso-ADP) compared to the state-of-the-art.
Double-descent curves in neural networks describe the phenomenon that the generalisation error initially descends with increasing parameters, then grows after reaching an optimal number of parameters which is less than the number of data points, but then descends again in the overparameterized regime. In this paper, we use techniques from random matrix theory to characterize the spectral distribution of the empirical feature covariance matrix as a width-dependent perturbation of the spectrum of the neural network Gaussian process (NNGP) kernel, thus establishing a novel connection between the NNGP literature and the random matrix theory literature in the context of neural networks. Our analytical expression allows us to study the generalisation behavior of the corresponding kernel and GP regression, and provides a new interpretation of the double-descent phenomenon, namely as governed by the discrepancy between the width-dependent empirical kernel and the width-independent NNGP kernel.
Probabilistic models such as logistic regression, Bayesian classification, neural networks, and models for natural language processing, are increasingly more present in both undergraduate and graduate statistics and data science curricula due to their wide range of applications. In this paper, we present a one-week course module for studnets in advanced undergraduate and applied graduate courses on variational inference, a popular optimization-based approach for approximate inference with probabilistic models. Our proposed module is guided by active learning principles: In addition to lecture materials on variational inference, we provide an accompanying class activity, an \texttt{R shiny} app, and guided labs based on real data applications of logistic regression and clustering documents using Latent Dirichlet Allocation with \texttt{R} code. The main goal of our module is to expose students to a method that facilitates statistical modeling and inference with large datasets. Using our proposed module as a foundation, instructors can adopt and adapt it to introduce more realistic case studies and applications in data science, Bayesian statistics, multivariate analysis, and statistical machine learning courses.
There is increasing interest in modeling high-dimensional longitudinal outcomes in applications such as developmental neuroimaging research. Growth curve model offers a useful tool to capture both the mean growth pattern across individuals, as well as the dynamic changes of outcomes over time within each individual. However, when the number of outcomes is large, it becomes challenging and often infeasible to tackle the large covariance matrix of the random effects involved in the model. In this article, we propose a high-dimensional response growth curve model, with three novel components: a low-rank factor model structure that substantially reduces the number of parameters in the large covariance matrix, a re-parameterization formulation coupled with a sparsity penalty that selects important fixed and random effect terms, and a computational trick that turns the inversion of a large matrix into the inversion of a stack of small matrices and thus considerably speeds up the computation. We develop an efficient expectation-maximization type estimation algorithm, and demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed method through both simulations and a longitudinal study of brain structural connectivity in association with human immunodeficiency virus.
Reasoning over knowledge graphs (KGs) is a challenging task that requires a deep understanding of the complex relationships between entities and the underlying logic of their relations. Current approaches rely on learning geometries to embed entities in vector space for logical query operations, but they suffer from subpar performance on complex queries and dataset-specific representations. In this paper, we propose a novel decoupled approach, Language-guided Abstract Reasoning over Knowledge graphs (LARK), that formulates complex KG reasoning as a combination of contextual KG search and logical query reasoning, to leverage the strengths of graph extraction algorithms and large language models (LLM), respectively. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art KG reasoning methods on standard benchmark datasets across several logical query constructs, with significant performance gain for queries of higher complexity. Furthermore, we show that the performance of our approach improves proportionally to the increase in size of the underlying LLM, enabling the integration of the latest advancements in LLMs for logical reasoning over KGs. Our work presents a new direction for addressing the challenges of complex KG reasoning and paves the way for future research in this area.