Modern computational models in supervised machine learning are often highly parameterized universal approximators. As such, the value of the parameters is unimportant, and only the out of sample performance is considered. On the other hand much of the literature on model estimation assumes that the parameters themselves have intrinsic value, and thus is concerned with bias and variance of parameter estimates, which may not have any simple relationship to out of sample model performance. Therefore, within supervised machine learning, heavy use is made of ridge regression (i.e., L2 regularization), which requires the the estimation of hyperparameters and can be rendered ineffective by certain model parameterizations. We introduce an objective function which we refer to as Information-Corrected Estimation (ICE) that reduces KL divergence based generalization error for supervised machine learning. ICE attempts to directly maximize a corrected likelihood function as an estimator of the KL divergence. Such an approach is proven, theoretically, to be effective for a wide class of models, with only mild regularity restrictions. Under finite sample sizes, this corrected estimation procedure is shown experimentally to lead to significant reduction in generalization error compared to maximum likelihood estimation and L2 regularization.
Transformers are state-of-the-art in a wide range of NLP tasks and have also been applied to many real-world products. Understanding the reliability and certainty of transformer model predictions is crucial for building trustable machine learning applications, e.g., medical diagnosis. Although many recent transformer extensions have been proposed, the study of the uncertainty estimation of transformer models is under-explored. In this work, we propose a novel way to enable transformers to have the capability of uncertainty estimation and, meanwhile, retain the original predictive performance. This is achieved by learning a hierarchical stochastic self-attention that attends to values and a set of learnable centroids, respectively. Then new attention heads are formed with a mixture of sampled centroids using the Gumbel-Softmax trick. We theoretically show that the self-attention approximation by sampling from a Gumbel distribution is upper bounded. We empirically evaluate our model on two text classification tasks with both in-domain (ID) and out-of-domain (OOD) datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach: (1) achieves the best predictive performance and uncertainty trade-off among compared methods; (2) exhibits very competitive (in most cases, improved) predictive performance on ID datasets; (3) is on par with Monte Carlo dropout and ensemble methods in uncertainty estimation on OOD datasets.
Optimal transport distances have found many applications in machine learning for their capacity to compare non-parametric probability distributions. Yet their algorithmic complexity generally prevents their direct use on large scale datasets. Among the possible strategies to alleviate this issue, practitioners can rely on computing estimates of these distances over subsets of data, {\em i.e.} minibatches. While computationally appealing, we highlight in this paper some limits of this strategy, arguing it can lead to undesirable smoothing effects. As an alternative, we suggest that the same minibatch strategy coupled with unbalanced optimal transport can yield more robust behavior. We discuss the associated theoretical properties, such as unbiased estimators, existence of gradients and concentration bounds. Our experimental study shows that in challenging problems associated to domain adaptation, the use of unbalanced optimal transport leads to significantly better results, competing with or surpassing recent baselines.
Federated learning has been showing as a promising approach in paving the last mile of artificial intelligence, due to its great potential of solving the data isolation problem in large scale machine learning. Particularly, with consideration of the heterogeneity in practical edge computing systems, asynchronous edge-cloud collaboration based federated learning can further improve the learning efficiency by significantly reducing the straggler effect. Despite no raw data sharing, the open architecture and extensive collaborations of asynchronous federated learning (AFL) still give some malicious participants great opportunities to infer other parties' training data, thus leading to serious concerns of privacy. To achieve a rigorous privacy guarantee with high utility, we investigate to secure asynchronous edge-cloud collaborative federated learning with differential privacy, focusing on the impacts of differential privacy on model convergence of AFL. Formally, we give the first analysis on the model convergence of AFL under DP and propose a multi-stage adjustable private algorithm (MAPA) to improve the trade-off between model utility and privacy by dynamically adjusting both the noise scale and the learning rate. Through extensive simulations and real-world experiments with an edge-could testbed, we demonstrate that MAPA significantly improves both the model accuracy and convergence speed with sufficient privacy guarantee.
UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) is a novel manifold learning technique for dimension reduction. UMAP is constructed from a theoretical framework based in Riemannian geometry and algebraic topology. The result is a practical scalable algorithm that applies to real world data. The UMAP algorithm is competitive with t-SNE for visualization quality, and arguably preserves more of the global structure with superior run time performance. Furthermore, UMAP has no computational restrictions on embedding dimension, making it viable as a general purpose dimension reduction technique for machine learning.
Implicit probabilistic models are models defined naturally in terms of a sampling procedure and often induces a likelihood function that cannot be expressed explicitly. We develop a simple method for estimating parameters in implicit models that does not require knowledge of the form of the likelihood function or any derived quantities, but can be shown to be equivalent to maximizing likelihood under some conditions. Our result holds in the non-asymptotic parametric setting, where both the capacity of the model and the number of data examples are finite. We also demonstrate encouraging experimental results.
We propose a new method of estimation in topic models, that is not a variation on the existing simplex finding algorithms, and that estimates the number of topics K from the observed data. We derive new finite sample minimax lower bounds for the estimation of A, as well as new upper bounds for our proposed estimator. We describe the scenarios where our estimator is minimax adaptive. Our finite sample analysis is valid for any number of documents (n), individual document length (N_i), dictionary size (p) and number of topics (K), and both p and K are allowed to increase with n, a situation not handled well by previous analyses. We complement our theoretical results with a detailed simulation study. We illustrate that the new algorithm is faster and more accurate than the current ones, although we start out with a computational and theoretical disadvantage of not knowing the correct number of topics K, while we provide the competing methods with the correct value in our simulations.
In this work, we consider the distributed optimization of non-smooth convex functions using a network of computing units. We investigate this problem under two regularity assumptions: (1) the Lipschitz continuity of the global objective function, and (2) the Lipschitz continuity of local individual functions. Under the local regularity assumption, we provide the first optimal first-order decentralized algorithm called multi-step primal-dual (MSPD) and its corresponding optimal convergence rate. A notable aspect of this result is that, for non-smooth functions, while the dominant term of the error is in $O(1/\sqrt{t})$, the structure of the communication network only impacts a second-order term in $O(1/t)$, where $t$ is time. In other words, the error due to limits in communication resources decreases at a fast rate even in the case of non-strongly-convex objective functions. Under the global regularity assumption, we provide a simple yet efficient algorithm called distributed randomized smoothing (DRS) based on a local smoothing of the objective function, and show that DRS is within a $d^{1/4}$ multiplicative factor of the optimal convergence rate, where $d$ is the underlying dimension.
Many problems on signal processing reduce to nonparametric function estimation. We propose a new methodology, piecewise convex fitting (PCF), and give a two-stage adaptive estimate. In the first stage, the number and location of the change points is estimated using strong smoothing. In the second stage, a constrained smoothing spline fit is performed with the smoothing level chosen to minimize the MSE. The imposed constraint is that a single change point occurs in a region about each empirical change point of the first-stage estimate. This constraint is equivalent to requiring that the third derivative of the second-stage estimate has a single sign in a small neighborhood about each first-stage change point. We sketch how PCF may be applied to signal recovery, instantaneous frequency estimation, surface reconstruction, image segmentation, spectral estimation and multivariate adaptive regression.
Detecting objects and estimating their pose remains as one of the major challenges of the computer vision research community. There exists a compromise between localizing the objects and estimating their viewpoints. The detector ideally needs to be view-invariant, while the pose estimation process should be able to generalize towards the category-level. This work is an exploration of using deep learning models for solving both problems simultaneously. For doing so, we propose three novel deep learning architectures, which are able to perform a joint detection and pose estimation, where we gradually decouple the two tasks. We also investigate whether the pose estimation problem should be solved as a classification or regression problem, being this still an open question in the computer vision community. We detail a comparative analysis of all our solutions and the methods that currently define the state of the art for this problem. We use PASCAL3D+ and ObjectNet3D datasets to present the thorough experimental evaluation and main results. With the proposed models we achieve the state-of-the-art performance in both datasets.
In this paper, we study the optimal convergence rate for distributed convex optimization problems in networks. We model the communication restrictions imposed by the network as a set of affine constraints and provide optimal complexity bounds for four different setups, namely: the function $F(\xb) \triangleq \sum_{i=1}^{m}f_i(\xb)$ is strongly convex and smooth, either strongly convex or smooth or just convex. Our results show that Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent on the dual problem can be executed in a distributed manner and obtains the same optimal rates as in the centralized version of the problem (up to constant or logarithmic factors) with an additional cost related to the spectral gap of the interaction matrix. Finally, we discuss some extensions to the proposed setup such as proximal friendly functions, time-varying graphs, improvement of the condition numbers.