Estimating uncertainty in image-to-image networks is an important task, particularly as such networks are being increasingly deployed in the biological and medical imaging realms. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to this problem based on masking. Given an existing image-to-image network, our approach computes a mask such that the distance between the masked reconstructed image and the masked true image is guaranteed to be less than a specified threshold, with high probability. The mask thus identifies the more certain regions of the reconstructed image. Our approach is agnostic to the underlying image-to-image network, and only requires triples of the input (degraded), reconstructed and true images for training. Furthermore, our method is agnostic to the distance metric used. As a result, one can use $L_p$-style distances or perceptual distances like LPIPS, which contrasts with interval-based approaches to uncertainty. Our theoretical guarantees derive from a conformal calibration procedure. We evaluate our mask-based approach to uncertainty on image colorization, image completion, and super-resolution tasks, demonstrating high quality performance on each.
With model trustworthiness being crucial for sensitive real-world applications, practitioners are putting more and more focus on improving the uncertainty calibration of deep neural networks. Calibration errors are designed to quantify the reliability of probabilistic predictions but their estimators are usually biased and inconsistent. In this work, we introduce the framework of proper calibration errors, which relates every calibration error to a proper score and provides a respective upper bound with optimal estimation properties. This relationship can be used to reliably quantify the model calibration improvement. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate the shortcomings of commonly used estimators compared to our approach. Due to the wide applicability of proper scores, this gives a natural extension of recalibration beyond classification.
Prophet inequalities consist of many beautiful statements that establish tight performance ratios between online and offline allocation algorithms. Typically, tightness is established by constructing an algorithmic guarantee and a worst-case instance separately, whose bounds match as a result of some "ingenuity". In this paper, we instead formulate the construction of the worst-case instance as an optimization problem, which directly finds the tight ratio without needing to construct two bounds separately. Our analysis of this complex optimization problem involves identifying the structure in a new "Type Coverage" dual problem. It can be seen as akin to the celebrated Magician and OCRS problems, except more general in that it can also provide tight ratios relative to the optimal offline allocation, whereas the earlier problems only concerns the ex-ante relaxation of the offline problem. Through this analysis, our paper provides a unified framework that derives new prophet inequalities and recovers existing ones, including two important new results. First, we show that the "oblivious" method of setting a static threshold due to Chawla et al. (2020), surprisingly, is best-possible among all static threshold algorithms, under any number $k$ of units. We emphasize that this result is derived without needing to explicitly find any counterexample instances. Our result implies that the asymptotic convergence rate of $1-O(\sqrt{\log k/k})$ for static threshold algorithms, first established in Hajiaghayi et al. (2007), is tight; this confirms for the first time a separation with the convergence rate of adaptive algorithms, which is $1-\Theta(\sqrt{1/k})$ due to Alaei (2014). Second, turning to the IID setting, our framework allows us to numerically illustrate the tight guarantee (of adaptive algorithms) under any number $k$ of starting units. Our guarantees for $k>1$ exceed the state-of-the-art.
With the growing importance of preventing the COVID-19 virus, face images obtained in most video surveillance scenarios are low resolution with mask simultaneously. However, most of the previous face super-resolution solutions can not handle both tasks in one model. In this work, we treat the mask occlusion as image noise and construct a joint and collaborative learning network, called JDSR-GAN, for the masked face super-resolution task. Given a low-quality face image with the mask as input, the role of the generator composed of a denoising module and super-resolution module is to acquire a high-quality high-resolution face image. The discriminator utilizes some carefully designed loss functions to ensure the quality of the recovered face images. Moreover, we incorporate the identity information and attention mechanism into our network for feasible correlated feature expression and informative feature learning. By jointly performing denoising and face super-resolution, the two tasks can complement each other and attain promising performance. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results show the superiority of our proposed JDSR-GAN over some comparable methods which perform the previous two tasks separately.
We study the implicit regularization of gradient descent towards structured sparsity via a novel neural reparameterization, which we call a diagonally grouped linear neural network. We show the following intriguing property of our reparameterization: gradient descent over the squared regression loss, without any explicit regularization, biases towards solutions with a group sparsity structure. In contrast to many existing works in understanding implicit regularization, we prove that our training trajectory cannot be simulated by mirror descent. We analyze the gradient dynamics of the corresponding regression problem in the general noise setting and obtain minimax-optimal error rates. Compared to existing bounds for implicit sparse regularization using diagonal linear networks, our analysis with the new reparameterization shows improved sample complexity. In the degenerate case of size-one groups, our approach gives rise to a new algorithm for sparse linear regression. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with several numerical experiments.
Image reconstruction based on indirect, noisy, or incomplete data remains an important yet challenging task. While methods such as compressive sensing have demonstrated high-resolution image recovery in various settings, there remain issues of robustness due to parameter tuning. Moreover, since the recovery is limited to a point estimate, it is impossible to quantify the uncertainty, which is often desirable. Due to these inherent limitations, a sparse Bayesian learning approach is sometimes adopted to recover a posterior distribution of the unknown. Sparse Bayesian learning assumes that some linear transformation of the unknown is sparse. However, most of the methods developed are tailored to specific problems, with particular forward models and priors. Here, we present a generalized approach to sparse Bayesian learning. It has the advantage that it can be used for various types of data acquisitions and prior information. Some preliminary results on image reconstruction/recovery indicate its potential use for denoising, deblurring, and magnetic resonance imaging.
Learning in neural networks is often framed as a problem in which targeted error signals are directly propagated to parameters and used to produce updates that induce more optimal network behaviour. Backpropagation of error (BP) is an example of such an approach and has proven to be a highly successful application of stochastic gradient descent to deep neural networks. We propose constrained parameter inference (COPI) as a new principle for learning. The COPI approach assumes that learning can be set up in a manner where parameters infer their own values based upon observations of their local neuron activities. We find that this estimation of network parameters is possible under the constraints of decorrelated neural inputs and top-down perturbations of neural states for credit assignment. We show that the decorrelation required for COPI allows learning at extremely high learning rates, competitive with that of adaptive optimizers, as used by BP. We further demonstrate that COPI affords a new approach to feature analysis and network compression. Finally, we argue that COPI may shed new light on learning in biological networks given the evidence for decorrelation in the brain.
To perform dynamic cable manipulation to realize the configuration specified by a target image, we formulate dynamic cable manipulation as a stochastic forward model. Then, we propose a method to handle uncertainty by maximizing the expectation, which also considers estimation errors of the trained model. To avoid issues like multiple local minima and requirement of differentiability by gradient-based methods, we propose using a black-box optimization (BBO) to optimize joint angles to realize a goal image. Among BBO, we use the Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE), a type of Bayesian optimization. By incorporating constraints into the TPE, the optimized joint angles are constrained within the range of motion. Since TPE is population-based, it is better able to detect multiple feasible configurations using the estimated inverse model. We evaluated image similarity between the target and cable images captured by executing the robot using optimal transport distance. The results show that the proposed method improves accuracy compared to conventional gradient-based approaches and methods that use deterministic models that do not consider uncertainty.
Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit free energy biases when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of targe data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at //github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.
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 notion of uncertainty is of major importance in machine learning and constitutes a key element of machine learning methodology. In line with the statistical tradition, uncertainty has long been perceived as almost synonymous with standard probability and probabilistic predictions. Yet, due to the steadily increasing relevance of machine learning for practical applications and related issues such as safety requirements, new problems and challenges have recently been identified by machine learning scholars, and these problems may call for new methodological developments. In particular, this includes the importance of distinguishing between (at least) two different types of uncertainty, often refereed to as aleatoric and epistemic. In this paper, we provide an introduction to the topic of uncertainty in machine learning as well as an overview of hitherto attempts at handling uncertainty in general and formalizing this distinction in particular.