Measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC) offers a fundamentally unique paradigm to design quantum algorithms. Indeed, due to the inherent randomness of quantum measurements, the natural operations in MBQC are not deterministic and unitary, but are rather augmented with probabilistic byproducts. Yet, the main algorithmic use of MBQC so far has been to completely counteract this probabilistic nature in order to simulate unitary computations expressed in the circuit model. In this work, we propose designing MBQC algorithms that embrace this inherent randomness and treat the random byproducts in MBQC as a resource for computation. As a natural application where randomness can be beneficial, we consider generative modeling, a task in machine learning centered around generating complex probability distributions. To address this task, we propose a variational MBQC algorithm equipped with control parameters that allow one to directly adjust the degree of randomness to be admitted in the computation. Our algebraic and numerical findings indicate that this additional randomness can lead to significant gains in expressivity and learning performance for certain generative modeling tasks, respectively. These results highlight the potential advantages in exploiting the inherent randomness of MBQC and motivate further research into MBQC-based algorithms.
Most state-of-the-art machine learning techniques revolve around the optimisation of loss functions. Defining appropriate loss functions is therefore critical to successfully solving problems in this field. We present a survey of the most commonly used loss functions for a wide range of different applications, divided into classification, regression, ranking, sample generation and energy based modelling. Overall, we introduce 33 different loss functions and we organise them into an intuitive taxonomy. Each loss function is given a theoretical backing and we describe where it is best used. This survey aims to provide a reference of the most essential loss functions for both beginner and advanced machine learning practitioners.
Graph-centric artificial intelligence (graph AI) has achieved remarkable success in modeling interacting systems prevalent in nature, from dynamical systems in biology to particle physics. The increasing heterogeneity of data calls for graph neural architectures that can combine multiple inductive biases. However, combining data from various sources is challenging because appropriate inductive bias may vary by data modality. Multimodal learning methods fuse multiple data modalities while leveraging cross-modal dependencies to address this challenge. Here, we survey 140 studies in graph-centric AI and realize that diverse data types are increasingly brought together using graphs and fed into sophisticated multimodal models. These models stratify into image-, language-, and knowledge-grounded multimodal learning. We put forward an algorithmic blueprint for multimodal graph learning based on this categorization. The blueprint serves as a way to group state-of-the-art architectures that treat multimodal data by choosing appropriately four different components. This effort can pave the way for standardizing the design of sophisticated multimodal architectures for highly complex real-world problems.
The goal of explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is to generate human-interpretable explanations, but there are no computationally precise theories of how humans interpret AI generated explanations. The lack of theory means that validation of XAI must be done empirically, on a case-by-case basis, which prevents systematic theory-building in XAI. We propose a psychological theory of how humans draw conclusions from saliency maps, the most common form of XAI explanation, which for the first time allows for precise prediction of explainee inference conditioned on explanation. Our theory posits that absent explanation humans expect the AI to make similar decisions to themselves, and that they interpret an explanation by comparison to the explanations they themselves would give. Comparison is formalized via Shepard's universal law of generalization in a similarity space, a classic theory from cognitive science. A pre-registered user study on AI image classifications with saliency map explanations demonstrate that our theory quantitatively matches participants' predictions of the AI.
In large-scale systems there are fundamental challenges when centralised techniques are used for task allocation. The number of interactions is limited by resource constraints such as on computation, storage, and network communication. We can increase scalability by implementing the system as a distributed task-allocation system, sharing tasks across many agents. However, this also increases the resource cost of communications and synchronisation, and is difficult to scale. In this paper we present four algorithms to solve these problems. The combination of these algorithms enable each agent to improve their task allocation strategy through reinforcement learning, while changing how much they explore the system in response to how optimal they believe their current strategy is, given their past experience. We focus on distributed agent systems where the agents' behaviours are constrained by resource usage limits, limiting agents to local rather than system-wide knowledge. We evaluate these algorithms in a simulated environment where agents are given a task composed of multiple subtasks that must be allocated to other agents with differing capabilities, to then carry out those tasks. We also simulate real-life system effects such as networking instability. Our solution is shown to solve the task allocation problem to 6.7% of the theoretical optimal within the system configurations considered. It provides 5x better performance recovery over no-knowledge retention approaches when system connectivity is impacted, and is tested against systems up to 100 agents with less than a 9% impact on the algorithms' performance.
The Evidential regression network (ENet) estimates a continuous target and its predictive uncertainty without costly Bayesian model averaging. However, it is possible that the target is inaccurately predicted due to the gradient shrinkage problem of the original loss function of the ENet, the negative log marginal likelihood (NLL) loss. In this paper, the objective is to improve the prediction accuracy of the ENet while maintaining its efficient uncertainty estimation by resolving the gradient shrinkage problem. A multi-task learning (MTL) framework, referred to as MT-ENet, is proposed to accomplish this aim. In the MTL, we define the Lipschitz modified mean squared error (MSE) loss function as another loss and add it to the existing NLL loss. The Lipschitz modified MSE loss is designed to mitigate the gradient conflict with the NLL loss by dynamically adjusting its Lipschitz constant. By doing so, the Lipschitz MSE loss does not disturb the uncertainty estimation of the NLL loss. The MT-ENet enhances the predictive accuracy of the ENet without losing uncertainty estimation capability on the synthetic dataset and real-world benchmarks, including drug-target affinity (DTA) regression. Furthermore, the MT-ENet shows remarkable calibration and out-of-distribution detection capability on the DTA benchmarks.
This dissertation studies a fundamental open challenge in deep learning theory: why do deep networks generalize well even while being overparameterized, unregularized and fitting the training data to zero error? In the first part of the thesis, we will empirically study how training deep networks via stochastic gradient descent implicitly controls the networks' capacity. Subsequently, to show how this leads to better generalization, we will derive {\em data-dependent} {\em uniform-convergence-based} generalization bounds with improved dependencies on the parameter count. Uniform convergence has in fact been the most widely used tool in deep learning literature, thanks to its simplicity and generality. Given its popularity, in this thesis, we will also take a step back to identify the fundamental limits of uniform convergence as a tool to explain generalization. In particular, we will show that in some example overparameterized settings, {\em any} uniform convergence bound will provide only a vacuous generalization bound. With this realization in mind, in the last part of the thesis, we will change course and introduce an {\em empirical} technique to estimate generalization using unlabeled data. Our technique does not rely on any notion of uniform-convergece-based complexity and is remarkably precise. We will theoretically show why our technique enjoys such precision. We will conclude by discussing how future work could explore novel ways to incorporate distributional assumptions in generalization bounds (such as in the form of unlabeled data) and explore other tools to derive bounds, perhaps by modifying uniform convergence or by developing completely new tools altogether.
We derive information-theoretic generalization bounds for supervised learning algorithms based on the information contained in predictions rather than in the output of the training algorithm. These bounds improve over the existing information-theoretic bounds, are applicable to a wider range of algorithms, and solve two key challenges: (a) they give meaningful results for deterministic algorithms and (b) they are significantly easier to estimate. We show experimentally that the proposed bounds closely follow the generalization gap in practical scenarios for deep learning.
The remarkable practical success of deep learning has revealed some major surprises from a theoretical perspective. In particular, simple gradient methods easily find near-optimal solutions to non-convex optimization problems, and despite giving a near-perfect fit to training data without any explicit effort to control model complexity, these methods exhibit excellent predictive accuracy. We conjecture that specific principles underlie these phenomena: that overparametrization allows gradient methods to find interpolating solutions, that these methods implicitly impose regularization, and that overparametrization leads to benign overfitting. We survey recent theoretical progress that provides examples illustrating these principles in simpler settings. We first review classical uniform convergence results and why they fall short of explaining aspects of the behavior of deep learning methods. We give examples of implicit regularization in simple settings, where gradient methods lead to minimal norm functions that perfectly fit the training data. Then we review prediction methods that exhibit benign overfitting, focusing on regression problems with quadratic loss. For these methods, we can decompose the prediction rule into a simple component that is useful for prediction and a spiky component that is useful for overfitting but, in a favorable setting, does not harm prediction accuracy. We focus specifically on the linear regime for neural networks, where the network can be approximated by a linear model. In this regime, we demonstrate the success of gradient flow, and we consider benign overfitting with two-layer networks, giving an exact asymptotic analysis that precisely demonstrates the impact of overparametrization. We conclude by highlighting the key challenges that arise in extending these insights to realistic deep learning settings.
Most algorithms for representation learning and link prediction in relational data have been designed for static data. However, the data they are applied to usually evolves with time, such as friend graphs in social networks or user interactions with items in recommender systems. This is also the case for knowledge bases, which contain facts such as (US, has president, B. Obama, [2009-2017]) that are valid only at certain points in time. For the problem of link prediction under temporal constraints, i.e., answering queries such as (US, has president, ?, 2012), we propose a solution inspired by the canonical decomposition of tensors of order 4. We introduce new regularization schemes and present an extension of ComplEx (Trouillon et al., 2016) that achieves state-of-the-art performance. Additionally, we propose a new dataset for knowledge base completion constructed from Wikidata, larger than previous benchmarks by an order of magnitude, as a new reference for evaluating temporal and non-temporal link prediction methods.
In recent years, object detection has experienced impressive progress. Despite these improvements, there is still a significant gap in the performance between the detection of small and large objects. We analyze the current state-of-the-art model, Mask-RCNN, on a challenging dataset, MS COCO. We show that the overlap between small ground-truth objects and the predicted anchors is much lower than the expected IoU threshold. We conjecture this is due to two factors; (1) only a few images are containing small objects, and (2) small objects do not appear enough even within each image containing them. We thus propose to oversample those images with small objects and augment each of those images by copy-pasting small objects many times. It allows us to trade off the quality of the detector on large objects with that on small objects. We evaluate different pasting augmentation strategies, and ultimately, we achieve 9.7\% relative improvement on the instance segmentation and 7.1\% on the object detection of small objects, compared to the current state of the art method on MS COCO.