Tabular classification has traditionally relied on supervised algorithms, which estimate the parameters of a prediction model using its training data. Recently, Prior-Data Fitted Networks (PFNs) such as TabPFN have successfully learned to classify tabular data in-context: the model parameters are designed to classify new samples based on labelled training samples given after the model training. While such models show great promise, their applicability to real-world data remains limited due to the computational scale needed. Here we study the following question: given a pre-trained PFN for tabular data, what is the best way to summarize the labelled training samples before feeding them to the model? We conduct an initial investigation of sketching and feature-selection methods for TabPFN, and note certain key differences between it and conventionally fitted tabular models.
Diffusion models have found valuable applications in anomaly detection by capturing the nominal data distribution and identifying anomalies via reconstruction. Despite their merits, they struggle to localize anomalies of varying scales, especially larger anomalies like entire missing components. Addressing this, we present a novel framework that enhances the capability of diffusion models, by extending the previous introduced implicit conditioning approach Meng et al. (2022) in three significant ways. First, we incorporate a dynamic step size computation that allows for variable noising steps in the forward process guided by an initial anomaly prediction. Second, we demonstrate that denoising an only scaled input, without any added noise, outperforms conventional denoising process. Third, we project images in a latent space to abstract away from fine details that interfere with reconstruction of large missing components. Additionally, we propose a fine-tuning mechanism that facilitates the model to effectively grasp the nuances of the target domain. Our method undergoes rigorous evaluation on two prominent anomaly detection datasets VISA and BTAD, yielding state-of-the-art performance. Importantly, our framework effectively localizes anomalies regardless of their scale, marking a pivotal advancement in diffusion-based anomaly detection.
Machine learning models are being used in an increasing number of critical applications; thus, securing their integrity and ownership is critical. Recent studies observed that adversarial training and watermarking have a conflicting interaction. This work introduces a novel framework to integrate adversarial training with watermarking techniques to fortify against evasion attacks and provide confident model verification in case of intellectual property theft. We use adversarial training together with adversarial watermarks to train a robust watermarked model. The key intuition is to use a higher perturbation budget to generate adversarial watermarks compared to the budget used for adversarial training, thus avoiding conflict. We use the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets to evaluate our proposed technique on various model stealing attacks. The results obtained consistently outperform the existing baseline in terms of robustness performance and further prove the resilience of this defense against pruning and fine-tuning removal attacks.
sEMG pattern recognition algorithms have been explored extensively in decoding movement intent, yet are known to be vulnerable to changing recording conditions, exhibiting significant drops in performance across subjects, and even across sessions. Multi-channel surface EMG, also referred to as high-density sEMG (HD-sEMG) systems, have been used to improve performance with the information collected through the use of additional electrodes. However, a lack of robustness is ever present due to limited datasets and the difficulties in addressing sources of variability, such as electrode placement. In this study, we propose training on a collection of input channel subsets and augmenting our training distribution with data from different electrode locations, simultaneously targeting electrode shift and reducing input dimensionality. Our method increases robustness against electrode shift and results in significantly higher intersession performance across subjects and classification algorithms.
Causal inference is a crucial goal of science, enabling researchers to arrive at meaningful conclusions regarding the predictions of hypothetical interventions using observational data. Path models, Structural Equation Models (SEMs), and, more generally, Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), provide a means to unambiguously specify assumptions regarding the causal structure underlying a phenomenon. Unlike DAGs, which make very few assumptions about the functional and parametric form, SEM assumes linearity. This can result in functional misspecification which prevents researchers from undertaking reliable effect size estimation. In contrast, we propose Super Learner Equation Modeling, a path modeling technique integrating machine learning Super Learner ensembles. We empirically demonstrate its ability to provide consistent and unbiased estimates of causal effects, its competitive performance for linear models when compared with SEM, and highlight its superiority over SEM when dealing with non-linear relationships. We provide open-source code, and a tutorial notebook with example usage, accentuating the easy-to-use nature of the method.
Image matching and object detection are two fundamental and challenging tasks, while many related applications consider them two individual tasks (i.e. task-individual). In this paper, a collaborative framework called MatchDet (i.e. task-collaborative) is proposed for image matching and object detection to obtain mutual improvements. To achieve the collaborative learning of the two tasks, we propose three novel modules, including a Weighted Spatial Attention Module (WSAM) for Detector, and Weighted Attention Module (WAM) and Box Filter for Matcher. Specifically, the WSAM highlights the foreground regions of target image to benefit the subsequent detector, the WAM enhances the connection between the foreground regions of pair images to ensure high-quality matches, and Box Filter mitigates the impact of false matches. We evaluate the approaches on a new benchmark with two datasets called Warp-COCO and miniScanNet. Experimental results show our approaches are effective and achieve competitive improvements.
With the continuous growth in the number of parameters of transformer-based pretrained language models (PLMs), particularly the emergence of large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters, many natural language processing (NLP) tasks have demonstrated remarkable success. However, the enormous size and computational demands of these models pose significant challenges for adapting them to specific downstream tasks, especially in environments with limited computational resources. Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) offers an effective solution by reducing the number of fine-tuning parameters and memory usage while achieving comparable performance to full fine-tuning. The demands for fine-tuning PLMs, especially LLMs, have led to a surge in the development of PEFT methods, as depicted in Fig. 1. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and systematic review of PEFT methods for PLMs. We summarize these PEFT methods, discuss their applications, and outline future directions. Furthermore, we conduct experiments using several representative PEFT methods to better understand their effectiveness in parameter efficiency and memory efficiency. By offering insights into the latest advancements and practical applications, this survey serves as an invaluable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by PEFT in the context of PLMs.
Time series anomaly detection has applications in a wide range of research fields and applications, including manufacturing and healthcare. The presence of anomalies can indicate novel or unexpected events, such as production faults, system defects, or heart fluttering, and is therefore of particular interest. The large size and complex patterns of time series have led researchers to develop specialised deep learning models for detecting anomalous patterns. This survey focuses on providing structured and comprehensive state-of-the-art time series anomaly detection models through the use of deep learning. It providing a taxonomy based on the factors that divide anomaly detection models into different categories. Aside from describing the basic anomaly detection technique for each category, the advantages and limitations are also discussed. Furthermore, this study includes examples of deep anomaly detection in time series across various application domains in recent years. It finally summarises open issues in research and challenges faced while adopting deep anomaly detection models.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Deep neural models in recent years have been successful in almost every field, including extremely complex problem statements. However, these models are huge in size, with millions (and even billions) of parameters, thus demanding more heavy computation power and failing to be deployed on edge devices. Besides, the performance boost is highly dependent on redundant labeled data. To achieve faster speeds and to handle the problems caused by the lack of data, knowledge distillation (KD) has been proposed to transfer information learned from one model to another. KD is often characterized by the so-called `Student-Teacher' (S-T) learning framework and has been broadly applied in model compression and knowledge transfer. This paper is about KD and S-T learning, which are being actively studied in recent years. First, we aim to provide explanations of what KD is and how/why it works. Then, we provide a comprehensive survey on the recent progress of KD methods together with S-T frameworks typically for vision tasks. In general, we consider some fundamental questions that have been driving this research area and thoroughly generalize the research progress and technical details. Additionally, we systematically analyze the research status of KD in vision applications. Finally, we discuss the potentials and open challenges of existing methods and prospect the future directions of KD and S-T learning.
Generative commonsense reasoning which aims to empower machines to generate sentences with the capacity of reasoning over a set of concepts is a critical bottleneck for text generation. Even the state-of-the-art pre-trained language generation models struggle at this task and often produce implausible and anomalous sentences. One reason is that they rarely consider incorporating the knowledge graph which can provide rich relational information among the commonsense concepts. To promote the ability of commonsense reasoning for text generation, we propose a novel knowledge graph augmented pre-trained language generation model KG-BART, which encompasses the complex relations of concepts through the knowledge graph and produces more logical and natural sentences as output. Moreover, KG-BART can leverage the graph attention to aggregate the rich concept semantics that enhances the model generalization on unseen concept sets. Experiments on benchmark CommonGen dataset verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach by comparing with several strong pre-trained language generation models, particularly KG-BART outperforms BART by 5.80, 4.60, in terms of BLEU-3, 4. Moreover, we also show that the generated context by our model can work as background scenarios to benefit downstream commonsense QA tasks.