Causal disentanglement aims to uncover a representation of data using latent variables that are interrelated through a causal model. Such a representation is identifiable if the latent model that explains the data is unique. In this paper, we focus on the scenario where unpaired observational and interventional data are available, with each intervention changing the mechanism of a latent variable. When the causal variables are fully observed, statistically consistent algorithms have been developed to identify the causal model under faithfulness assumptions. We here show that identifiability can still be achieved with unobserved causal variables, given a generalized notion of faithfulness. Our results guarantee that we can recover the latent causal model up to an equivalence class and predict the effect of unseen combinations of interventions, in the limit of infinite data. We implement our causal disentanglement framework by developing an autoencoding variational Bayes algorithm and apply it to the problem of predicting combinatorial perturbation effects in genomics.
One of the fundamental challenges in drawing causal inferences from observational studies is that the assumption of no unmeasured confounding is not testable from observed data. Therefore, assessing sensitivity to this assumption's violation is important to obtain valid causal conclusions in observational studies. Although several sensitivity analysis frameworks are available in the casual inference literature, very few of them are applicable to observational studies with multivalued treatments. To address this issue, we propose a sensitivity analysis framework for performing sensitivity analysis in multivalued treatment settings. Within this framework, a general class of additive causal estimands has been proposed. We demonstrate that the estimation of the causal estimands under the proposed sensitivity model can be performed very efficiently. Simulation results show that the proposed framework performs well in terms of bias of the point estimates and coverage of the confidence intervals when there is sufficient overlap in the covariate distributions. We illustrate the application of our proposed method by conducting an observational study that estimates the causal effect of fish consumption on blood mercury levels.
We present an elementary yet general proof of duality for Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization. The duality holds for any arbitrary Kantorovich transport cost, measurable loss function, and nominal probability distribution, provided that an interchangeability principle holds, which is equivalent to certain measurability conditions. To illustrate the broader applicability of our approach, we provide a rigorous treatment of duality results in distributionally robust Markov decision processes and distributionally robust multistage stochastic programming. Furthermore, we extend the result to other problems including infinity-Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization, risk-averse optimization, and globalized distributionally robust counterpart.
We consider the problem of evaluating dynamic consistency in discrete time probabilistic filters that approximate stochastic system state densities with Gaussian mixtures. Dynamic consistency means that the estimated probability distributions correctly describe the actual uncertainties. As such, the problem of consistency testing naturally arises in applications with regards to estimator tuning and validation. However, due to the general complexity of the density functions involved, straightforward approaches for consistency testing of mixture-based estimators have remained challenging to define and implement. This paper derives a new exact result for Gaussian mixture consistency testing within the framework of normalized deviation squared (NDS) statistics. It is shown that NDS test statistics for generic multivariate Gaussian mixture models exactly follow mixtures of generalized chi-square distributions, for which efficient computational tools are available. The accuracy and utility of the resulting consistency tests are numerically demonstrated on static and dynamic mixture estimation examples.
Humans can effortlessly modify various prosodic attributes, such as the placement of stress and the intensity of sentiment, to convey a specific emotion while maintaining consistent linguistic content. Motivated by this capability, we propose EmoAug, a novel style transfer model designed to enhance emotional expression and tackle the data scarcity issue in speech emotion recognition tasks. EmoAug consists of a semantic encoder and a paralinguistic encoder that represent verbal and non-verbal information respectively. Additionally, a decoder reconstructs speech signals by conditioning on the aforementioned two information flows in an unsupervised fashion. Once training is completed, EmoAug enriches expressions of emotional speech with different prosodic attributes, such as stress, rhythm and intensity, by feeding different styles into the paralinguistic encoder. EmoAug enables us to generate similar numbers of samples for each class to tackle the data imbalance issue as well. Experimental results on the IEMOCAP dataset demonstrate that EmoAug can successfully transfer different speaking styles while retaining the speaker identity and semantic content. Furthermore, we train a SER model with data augmented by EmoAug and show that the augmented model not only surpasses the state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised methods but also overcomes overfitting problems caused by data imbalance. Some audio samples can be found on our demo website.
We take the testing perspective to understand what the minimal discrimination time between two stimuli is for different types of rate coding neurons. Our main goal is to describe the testing abilities of two different encoding systems: place cells and grid cells. In particular, we show, through the notion of adaptation, that a fixed place cell system can have a minimum discrimination time that decreases when the stimuli are further away. This could be a considerable advantage for the place cell system that could complement the grid cell system, which is able to discriminate stimuli that are much closer than place cells.
The impression is crucial for the referring physicians to grasp key information since it is concluded from the findings and reasoning of radiologists. To alleviate the workload of radiologists and reduce repetitive human labor in impression writing, many researchers have focused on automatic impression generation. However, recent works on this task mainly summarize the corresponding findings and pay less attention to the radiology images. In clinical, radiographs can provide more detailed valuable observations to enhance radiologists' impression writing, especially for complicated cases. Besides, each sentence in findings usually focuses on single anatomy, so they only need to be matched to corresponding anatomical regions instead of the whole image, which is beneficial for textual and visual features alignment. Therefore, we propose a novel anatomy-enhanced multimodal model to promote impression generation. In detail, we first construct a set of rules to extract anatomies and put these prompts into each sentence to highlight anatomy characteristics. Then, two separate encoders are applied to extract features from the radiograph and findings. Afterward, we utilize a contrastive learning module to align these two representations at the overall level and use a co-attention to fuse them at the sentence level with the help of anatomy-enhanced sentence representation. Finally, the decoder takes the fused information as the input to generate impressions. The experimental results on two benchmark datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, which achieves state-of-the-art results.
Graphs are important data representations for describing objects and their relationships, which appear in a wide diversity of real-world scenarios. As one of a critical problem in this area, graph generation considers learning the distributions of given graphs and generating more novel graphs. Owing to their wide range of applications, generative models for graphs, which have a rich history, however, are traditionally hand-crafted and only capable of modeling a few statistical properties of graphs. Recent advances in deep generative models for graph generation is an important step towards improving the fidelity of generated graphs and paves the way for new kinds of applications. This article provides an extensive overview of the literature in the field of deep generative models for graph generation. Firstly, the formal definition of deep generative models for the graph generation and the preliminary knowledge are provided. Secondly, taxonomies of deep generative models for both unconditional and conditional graph generation are proposed respectively; the existing works of each are compared and analyzed. After that, an overview of the evaluation metrics in this specific domain is provided. Finally, the applications that deep graph generation enables are summarized and five promising future research directions are highlighted.
Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to identify text spans that mention named entities, and to classify them into predefined categories such as person, location, organization etc. NER serves as the basis for a variety of natural language applications such as question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Although early NER systems are successful in producing decent recognition accuracy, they often require much human effort in carefully designing rules or features. In recent years, deep learning, empowered by continuous real-valued vector representations and semantic composition through nonlinear processing, has been employed in NER systems, yielding stat-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing deep learning techniques for NER. We first introduce NER resources, including tagged NER corpora and off-the-shelf NER tools. Then, we systematically categorize existing works based on a taxonomy along three axes: distributed representations for input, context encoder, and tag decoder. Next, we survey the most representative methods for recent applied techniques of deep learning in new NER problem settings and applications. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by NER systems and outline future directions in this area.
Incompleteness is a common problem for existing knowledge graphs (KGs), and the completion of KG which aims to predict links between entities is challenging. Most existing KG completion methods only consider the direct relation between nodes and ignore the relation paths which contain useful information for link prediction. Recently, a few methods take relation paths into consideration but pay less attention to the order of relations in paths which is important for reasoning. In addition, these path-based models always ignore nonlinear contributions of path features for link prediction. To solve these problems, we propose a novel KG completion method named OPTransE. Instead of embedding both entities of a relation into the same latent space as in previous methods, we project the head entity and the tail entity of each relation into different spaces to guarantee the order of relations in the path. Meanwhile, we adopt a pooling strategy to extract nonlinear and complex features of different paths to further improve the performance of link prediction. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed model OPTransE performs better than state-of-the-art methods.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.