We leverage state-of-the-art machine learning methods and a decade's worth of archival data from CFHT to predict observatory image quality (IQ) from environmental conditions and observatory operating parameters. Specifically, we develop accurate and interpretable models of the complex dependence between data features and observed IQ for CFHT's wide-field camera, MegaCam. Our contributions are several-fold. First, we collect, collate and reprocess several disparate data sets gathered by CFHT scientists. Second, we predict probability distribution functions (PDFs) of IQ and achieve a mean absolute error of $\sim0.07''$ for the predicted medians. Third, we explore the data-driven actuation of the 12 dome "vents" installed in 2013-14 to accelerate the flushing of hot air from the dome. We leverage epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties in conjunction with probabilistic generative modeling to identify candidate vent adjustments that are in-distribution (ID); for the optimal configuration for each ID sample, we predict the reduction in required observing time to achieve a fixed SNR. On average, the reduction is $\sim12\%$. Finally, we rank input features by their Shapley values to identify the most predictive variables for each observation. Our long-term goal is to construct reliable and real-time models that can forecast optimal observatory operating parameters to optimize IQ. We can then feed such forecasts into scheduling protocols and predictive maintenance routines. We anticipate that such approaches will become standard in automating observatory operations and maintenance by the time CFHT's successor, the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer, is installed in the next decade.
In image denoising problems, the increasing density of available images makes an exhaustive visual inspection impossible and therefore automated methods based on machine-learning must be deployed for this purpose. This is particulary the case in seismic signal processing. Engineers/geophysicists have to deal with millions of seismic time series. Finding the sub-surface properties useful for the oil industry may take up to a year and is very costly in terms of computing/human resources. In particular, the data must go through different steps of noise attenuation. Each denoise step is then ideally followed by a quality control (QC) stage performed by means of human expertise. To learn a quality control classifier in a supervised manner, labeled training data must be available, but collecting the labels from human experts is extremely time-consuming. We therefore propose a novel active learning methodology to sequentially select the most relevant data, which are then given back to a human expert for labeling. Beyond the application in geophysics, the technique we promote in this paper, based on estimates of the local error and its uncertainty, is generic. Its performance is supported by strong empirical evidence, as illustrated by the numerical experiments presented in this article, where it is compared to alternative active learning strategies both on synthetic and real seismic datasets.
Probabilistic models often use neural networks to control their predictive uncertainty. However, when making out-of-distribution (OOD)} predictions, the often-uncontrollable extrapolation properties of neural networks yield poor uncertainty predictions. Such models then don't know what they don't know, which directly limits their robustness w.r.t unexpected inputs. To counter this, we propose to explicitly train the uncertainty predictor where we are not given data to make it reliable. As one cannot train without data, we provide mechanisms for generating pseudo-inputs in informative low-density regions of the input space, and show how to leverage these in a practical Bayesian framework that casts a prior distribution over the model uncertainty. With a holistic evaluation, we demonstrate that this yields robust and interpretable predictions of uncertainty while retaining state-of-the-art performance on diverse tasks such as regression and generative modelling
ML is being deployed in complex, real-world scenarios where errors have impactful consequences. In these systems, thorough testing of the ML pipelines is critical. A key component in ML deployment pipelines is the curation of labeled training data. Common practice in the ML literature assumes that labels are the ground truth. However, in our experience in a large autonomous vehicle development center, we have found that vendors can often provide erroneous labels, which can lead to downstream safety risks in trained models. To address these issues, we propose a new abstraction, learned observation assertions, and implement it in a system called Fixy. Fixy leverages existing organizational resources, such as existing (possibly noisy) labeled datasets or previously trained ML models, to learn a probabilistic model for finding errors in human- or model-generated labels. Given user-provided features and these existing resources, Fixy learns feature distributions that specify likely and unlikely values (e.g., that a speed of 30mph is likely but 300mph is unlikely). It then uses these feature distributions to score labels for potential errors. We show that FIxy can automatically rank potential errors in real datasets with up to 2$\times$ higher precision compared to recent work on model assertions and standard techniques such as uncertainty sampling.
Deep neural networks have significantly contributed to the success in predictive accuracy for classification tasks. However, they tend to make over-confident predictions in real-world settings, where domain shifting and out-of-distribution (OOD) examples exist. Most research on uncertainty estimation focuses on computer vision because it provides visual validation on uncertainty quality. However, few have been presented in the natural language process domain. Unlike Bayesian methods that indirectly infer uncertainty through weight uncertainties, current evidential uncertainty-based methods explicitly model the uncertainty of class probabilities through subjective opinions. They further consider inherent uncertainty in data with different root causes, vacuity (i.e., uncertainty due to a lack of evidence) and dissonance (i.e., uncertainty due to conflicting evidence). In our paper, we firstly apply evidential uncertainty in OOD detection for text classification tasks. We propose an inexpensive framework that adopts both auxiliary outliers and pseudo off-manifold samples to train the model with prior knowledge of a certain class, which has high vacuity for OOD samples. Extensive empirical experiments demonstrate that our model based on evidential uncertainty outperforms other counterparts for detecting OOD examples. Our approach can be easily deployed to traditional recurrent neural networks and fine-tuned pre-trained transformers.
Modern online advertising systems inevitably rely on personalization methods, such as click-through rate (CTR) prediction. Recent progress in CTR prediction enjoys the rich representation capabilities of deep learning and achieves great success in large-scale industrial applications. However, these methods can suffer from lack of exploration. Another line of prior work addresses the exploration-exploitation trade-off problem with contextual bandit methods, which are less studied in the industry recently due to the difficulty in extending their flexibility with deep models. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Uncertainty-Aware Learning (DUAL) method to learn deep CTR models based on Gaussian processes, which can provide efficient uncertainty estimations along with the CTR predictions while maintaining the flexibility of deep neural networks. By linking the ability to estimate predictive uncertainties of DUAL to well-known bandit algorithms, we further present DUAL-based Ad-ranking strategies to boost up long-term utilities such as the social welfare in advertising systems. Experimental results on several public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. Remarkably, an online A/B test deployed in the Alibaba display advertising platform shows an $8.2\%$ social welfare improvement and an $8.0\%$ revenue lift.
Sufficient supervised information is crucial for any machine learning models to boost performance. However, labeling data is expensive and sometimes difficult to obtain. Active learning is an approach to acquire annotations for data from a human oracle by selecting informative samples with a high probability to enhance performance. In recent emerging studies, a generative adversarial network (GAN) has been integrated with active learning to generate good candidates to be presented to the oracle. In this paper, we propose a novel model that is able to obtain labels for data in a cheaper manner without the need to query an oracle. In the model, a novel reward for each sample is devised to measure the degree of uncertainty, which is obtained from a classifier trained with existing labeled data. This reward is used to guide a conditional GAN to generate informative samples with a higher probability for a certain label. With extensive evaluations, we have confirmed the effectiveness of the model, showing that the generated samples are capable of improving the classification performance in popular image classification tasks.
Importance sampling is one of the most widely used variance reduction strategies in Monte Carlo rendering. In this paper, we propose a novel importance sampling technique that uses a neural network to learn how to sample from a desired density represented by a set of samples. Our approach considers an existing Monte Carlo rendering algorithm as a black box. During a scene-dependent training phase, we learn to generate samples with a desired density in the primary sample space of the rendering algorithm using maximum likelihood estimation. We leverage a recent neural network architecture that was designed to represent real-valued non-volume preserving ('Real NVP') transformations in high dimensional spaces. We use Real NVP to non-linearly warp primary sample space and obtain desired densities. In addition, Real NVP efficiently computes the determinant of the Jacobian of the warp, which is required to implement the change of integration variables implied by the warp. A main advantage of our approach is that it is agnostic of underlying light transport effects, and can be combined with many existing rendering techniques by treating them as a black box. We show that our approach leads to effective variance reduction in several practical scenarios.
Despite the state-of-the-art performance for medical image segmentation, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have rarely provided uncertainty estimations regarding their segmentation outputs, e.g., model (epistemic) and image-based (aleatoric) uncertainties. In this work, we analyze these different types of uncertainties for CNN-based 2D and 3D medical image segmentation tasks. We additionally propose a test-time augmentation-based aleatoric uncertainty to analyze the effect of different transformations of the input image on the segmentation output. Test-time augmentation has been previously used to improve segmentation accuracy, yet not been formulated in a consistent mathematical framework. Hence, we also propose a theoretical formulation of test-time augmentation, where a distribution of the prediction is estimated by Monte Carlo simulation with prior distributions of parameters in an image acquisition model that involves image transformations and noise. We compare and combine our proposed aleatoric uncertainty with model uncertainty. Experiments with segmentation of fetal brains and brain tumors from 2D and 3D Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) showed that 1) the test-time augmentation-based aleatoric uncertainty provides a better uncertainty estimation than calculating the test-time dropout-based model uncertainty alone and helps to reduce overconfident incorrect predictions, and 2) our test-time augmentation outperforms a single-prediction baseline and dropout-based multiple predictions.
Data augmentation has been widely used for training deep learning systems for medical image segmentation and plays an important role in obtaining robust and transformation-invariant predictions. However, it has seldom been used at test time for segmentation and not been formulated in a consistent mathematical framework. In this paper, we first propose a theoretical formulation of test-time augmentation for deep learning in image recognition, where the prediction is obtained through estimating its expectation by Monte Carlo simulation with prior distributions of parameters in an image acquisition model that involves image transformations and noise. We then propose a novel uncertainty estimation method based on the formulated test-time augmentation. Experiments with segmentation of fetal brains and brain tumors from 2D and 3D Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) showed that 1) our test-time augmentation outperforms a single-prediction baseline and dropout-based multiple predictions, and 2) it provides a better uncertainty estimation than calculating the model-based uncertainty alone and helps to reduce overconfident incorrect predictions.
Several machine learning models, including neural networks, consistently misclassify adversarial examples---inputs formed by applying small but intentionally worst-case perturbations to examples from the dataset, such that the perturbed input results in the model outputting an incorrect answer with high confidence. Early attempts at explaining this phenomenon focused on nonlinearity and overfitting. We argue instead that the primary cause of neural networks' vulnerability to adversarial perturbation is their linear nature. This explanation is supported by new quantitative results while giving the first explanation of the most intriguing fact about them: their generalization across architectures and training sets. Moreover, this view yields a simple and fast method of generating adversarial examples. Using this approach to provide examples for adversarial training, we reduce the test set error of a maxout network on the MNIST dataset.