When applying multi-instance learning (MIL) to make predictions for bags of instances, the prediction accuracy of an instance often depends on not only the instance itself but also its context in the corresponding bag. From the viewpoint of causal inference, such bag contextual prior works as a confounder and may result in model robustness and interpretability issues. Focusing on this problem, we propose a novel interventional multi-instance learning (IMIL) framework to achieve deconfounded instance-level prediction. Unlike traditional likelihood-based strategies, we design an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm based on causal intervention, providing a robust instance selection in the training phase and suppressing the bias caused by the bag contextual prior. Experiments on pathological image analysis demonstrate that our IMIL method substantially reduces false positives and outperforms state-of-the-art MIL methods.
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One of the key challenges in decentralized and federated learning is to design algorithms that efficiently deal with highly heterogeneous data distributions across agents. In this paper, we revisit the analysis of Decentralized Stochastic Gradient Descent algorithm (D-SGD) under data heterogeneity. We exhibit the key role played by a new quantity, called \emph{neighborhood heterogeneity}, on the convergence rate of D-SGD. By coupling the communication topology and the heterogeneity, our analysis sheds light on the poorly understood interplay between these two concepts in decentralized learning. We then argue that neighborhood heterogeneity provides a natural criterion to learn data-dependent topologies that reduce (and can even eliminate) the otherwise detrimental effect of data heterogeneity on the convergence time of D-SGD. For the important case of classification with label skew, we formulate the problem of learning such a good topology as a tractable optimization problem that we solve with a Frank-Wolfe algorithm. As illustrated over a set of simulated and real-world experiments, our approach provides a principled way to design a sparse topology that balances the convergence speed and the per-iteration communication costs of D-SGD under data heterogeneity.
We design simple and optimal policies that ensure safety against heavy-tailed risk in the classical multi-armed bandit problem. Recently, \cite{fan2021fragility} showed that information-theoretically optimized bandit algorithms suffer from serious heavy-tailed risk; that is, the worst-case probability of incurring a linear regret slowly decays at a rate of $1/T$, where $T$ is the time horizon. Inspired by their results, we further show that widely used policies such as the standard Upper Confidence Bound policy and the Thompson Sampling policy also incur heavy-tailed risk; and this heavy-tailed risk actually exists for all "instance-dependent consistent" policies. To ensure safety against such heavy-tailed risk, for the two-armed bandit setting, we provide a simple policy design that (i) has the worst-case optimality for the expected regret at order $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ and (ii) has the worst-case tail probability of incurring a linear regret decay at an exponential rate $\exp(-\Omega(\sqrt{T}))$. We further prove that this exponential decaying rate of the tail probability is optimal across all policies that have worst-case optimality for the expected regret. Finally, we improve the policy design and analysis to the general setting with an arbitrary $K$ number of arms. We provide detailed characterization of the tail probability bound for any regret threshold under our policy design. Namely, the worst-case probability of incurring a regret larger than $x$ is upper bounded by $\exp(-\Omega(x/\sqrt{KT}))$. Numerical experiments are conducted to illustrate the theoretical findings. Our results reveal insights on the incompatibility between consistency and light-tailed risk, whereas indicate that worst-case optimality on expected regret and light-tailed risk are compatible.
An important goal of self-supervised learning is to enable model pre-training to benefit from almost unlimited data. However, one method that has recently become popular, namely masked image modeling (MIM), is suspected to be unable to benefit from larger data. In this work, we break this misconception through extensive experiments, with data scales ranging from 10\% of ImageNet-1K to full ImageNet-22K, model sizes ranging from 49 million to 1 billion, and training lengths ranging from 125K iterations to 500K iterations. Our study reveals that: (i) Masked image modeling is also demanding on larger data. We observed that very large models got over-fitted with relatively small data; (ii) The length of training matters. Large models trained with masked image modeling can benefit from more data with longer training; (iii) The validation loss in pre-training is a good indicator to measure how well the model performs for fine-tuning on multiple tasks. This observation allows us to pre-evaluate pre-trained models in advance without having to make costly trial-and-error assessments of downstream tasks. We hope that our findings will advance the understanding of masked image modeling in terms of scaling ability.
Recent work has demonstrated the successful extraction of training data from generative language models. However, it is not evident whether such extraction is feasible in text classification models since the training objective is to predict the class label as opposed to next-word prediction. This poses an interesting challenge and raises an important question regarding the privacy of training data in text classification settings. Therefore, we study the potential privacy leakage in the text classification domain by investigating the problem of unintended memorization of training data that is not pertinent to the learning task. We propose an algorithm to extract missing tokens of a partial text by exploiting the likelihood of the class label provided by the model. We test the effectiveness of our algorithm by inserting canaries into the training set and attempting to extract tokens in these canaries post-training. In our experiments, we demonstrate that successful extraction is possible to some extent. This can also be used as an auditing strategy to assess any potential unauthorized use of personal data without consent.
This paper introduces a Reinforcement Learning approach to better generalize heuristic dispatching rules on the Job-shop Scheduling Problem (JSP). Current models on the JSP do not focus on generalization, although, as we show in this work, this is key to learning better heuristics on the problem. A well-known technique to improve generalization is to learn on increasingly complex instances using Curriculum Learning (CL). However, as many works in the literature indicate, this technique might suffer from catastrophic forgetting when transferring the learned skills between different problem sizes. To address this issue, we introduce a novel Adversarial Curriculum Learning (ACL) strategy, which dynamically adjusts the difficulty level during the learning process to revisit the worst-performing instances. This work also presents a deep learning model to solve the JSP, which is equivariant w.r.t. the job definition and size-agnostic. Conducted experiments on Taillard's and Demirkol's instances show that the presented approach significantly improves the current state-of-the-art models on the JSP. It reduces the average optimality gap from 19.35\% to 10.46\% on Taillard's instances and from 38.43\% to 18.85\% on Demirkol's instances. Our implementation is available online.
Decision-guided perspectives on model uncertainty expand traditional statistical thinking about managing, comparing and combining inferences from sets of models. Bayesian predictive decision synthesis (BPDS) advances conceptual and theoretical foundations, and defines new methodology that explicitly integrates decision-analytic outcomes into the evaluation, comparison and potential combination of candidate models. BPDS extends recent theoretical and practical advances based on both Bayesian predictive synthesis and empirical goal-focused model uncertainty analysis. This is enabled by development of a novel subjective Bayesian perspective on model weighting in predictive decision settings. Illustrations come from applied contexts including optimal design for regression prediction and sequential time series forecasting for financial portfolio decisions.
Neural networks often make predictions relying on the spurious correlations from the datasets rather than the intrinsic properties of the task of interest, facing sharp degradation on out-of-distribution (OOD) test data. Existing de-bias learning frameworks try to capture specific dataset bias by annotations but they fail to handle complicated OOD scenarios. Others implicitly identify the dataset bias by special design low capability biased models or losses, but they degrade when the training and testing data are from the same distribution. In this paper, we propose a General Greedy De-bias learning framework (GGD), which greedily trains the biased models and the base model. The base model is encouraged to focus on examples that are hard to solve with biased models, thus remaining robust against spurious correlations in the test stage. GGD largely improves models' OOD generalization ability on various tasks, but sometimes over-estimates the bias level and degrades on the in-distribution test. We further re-analyze the ensemble process of GGD and introduce the Curriculum Regularization inspired by curriculum learning, which achieves a good trade-off between in-distribution and out-of-distribution performance. Extensive experiments on image classification, adversarial question answering, and visual question answering demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. GGD can learn a more robust base model under the settings of both task-specific biased models with prior knowledge and self-ensemble biased model without prior knowledge.
Deep neural networks achieve remarkable performances on a wide range of tasks with the aid of large-scale labeled datasets. Yet these datasets are time-consuming and labor-exhaustive to obtain on realistic tasks. To mitigate the requirement for labeled data, self-training is widely used in semi-supervised learning by iteratively assigning pseudo labels to unlabeled samples. Despite its popularity, self-training is well-believed to be unreliable and often leads to training instability. Our experimental studies further reveal that the bias in semi-supervised learning arises from both the problem itself and the inappropriate training with potentially incorrect pseudo labels, which accumulates the error in the iterative self-training process. To reduce the above bias, we propose Debiased Self-Training (DST). First, the generation and utilization of pseudo labels are decoupled by two parameter-independent classifier heads to avoid direct error accumulation. Second, we estimate the worst case of self-training bias, where the pseudo labeling function is accurate on labeled samples, yet makes as many mistakes as possible on unlabeled samples. We then adversarially optimize the representations to improve the quality of pseudo labels by avoiding the worst case. Extensive experiments justify that DST achieves an average improvement of 6.3% against state-of-the-art methods on standard semi-supervised learning benchmark datasets and 18.9%$ against FixMatch on 13 diverse tasks. Furthermore, DST can be seamlessly adapted to other self-training methods and help stabilize their training and balance performance across classes in both cases of training from scratch and finetuning from pre-trained models.
Images can convey rich semantics and induce various emotions in viewers. Recently, with the rapid advancement of emotional intelligence and the explosive growth of visual data, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to affective image content analysis (AICA). In this survey, we will comprehensively review the development of AICA in the recent two decades, especially focusing on the state-of-the-art methods with respect to three main challenges -- the affective gap, perception subjectivity, and label noise and absence. We begin with an introduction to the key emotion representation models that have been widely employed in AICA and description of available datasets for performing evaluation with quantitative comparison of label noise and dataset bias. We then summarize and compare the representative approaches on (1) emotion feature extraction, including both handcrafted and deep features, (2) learning methods on dominant emotion recognition, personalized emotion prediction, emotion distribution learning, and learning from noisy data or few labels, and (3) AICA based applications. Finally, we discuss some challenges and promising research directions in the future, such as image content and context understanding, group emotion clustering, and viewer-image interaction.
This paper focuses on the expected difference in borrower's repayment when there is a change in the lender's credit decisions. Classical estimators overlook the confounding effects and hence the estimation error can be magnificent. As such, we propose another approach to construct the estimators such that the error can be greatly reduced. The proposed estimators are shown to be unbiased, consistent, and robust through a combination of theoretical analysis and numerical testing. Moreover, we compare the power of estimating the causal quantities between the classical estimators and the proposed estimators. The comparison is tested across a wide range of models, including linear regression models, tree-based models, and neural network-based models, under different simulated datasets that exhibit different levels of causality, different degrees of nonlinearity, and different distributional properties. Most importantly, we apply our approaches to a large observational dataset provided by a global technology firm that operates in both the e-commerce and the lending business. We find that the relative reduction of estimation error is strikingly substantial if the causal effects are accounted for correctly.
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