Understanding how the adult human brain learns novel categories is an important problem in neuroscience. Drift-diffusion models are popular in such contexts for their ability to mimic the underlying neural mechanisms. One such model for gradual longitudinal learning was recently developed in Paulon, et al. (2020). Fitting drift-diffusion models however require data on both category responses and associated response times. Category response accuracies are, however, often the only reliable measure recorded by behavioral scientists to describe human learning. To our knowledge, however, drift-diffusion models for such scenarios have never been considered in the literature before. To address this gap, in this article we build carefully on Paulon, et al. (2020), but now with latent response times integrated out, to derive a novel biologically interpretable class of `inverse-probit' categorical probability models for observed categories. This marginal model, however, presents significant identifiability and inferential challenges not encountered originally for the joint model in Paulon, et al. (2020). We address these new challenges via a novel projection-based approach with a symmetry-preserving identifiability constraint that allows us to work with conjugate priors in an unconstrained space. We adapt the model for group and individual-level inference in longitudinal settings. Building again on the model's latent variable representation, we design an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for posterior computation. We evaluate the method's empirical performances through simulation experiments. The method's practical efficacy is illustrated in applications to longitudinal tone learning studies.
Recent work has shown potential in using Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) solvers to optimize certain aspects of neural networks (NNs). However the intriguing approach of training NNs with MIP solvers is under-explored. State-of-the-art-methods to train NNs are typically gradient-based and require significant data, computation on GPUs, and extensive hyper-parameter tuning. In contrast, training with MIP solvers does not require GPUs or heavy hyper-parameter tuning, but currently cannot handle anything but small amounts of data. This article builds on recent advances that train binarized NNs using MIP solvers. We go beyond current work by formulating new MIP models which improve training efficiency and which can train the important class of integer-valued neural networks (INNs). We provide two novel methods to further the potential significance of using MIP to train NNs. The first method optimizes the number of neurons in the NN while training. This reduces the need for deciding on network architecture before training. The second method addresses the amount of training data which MIP can feasibly handle: we provide a batch training method that dramatically increases the amount of data that MIP solvers can use to train. We thus provide a promising step towards using much more data than before when training NNs using MIP models. Experimental results on two real-world data-limited datasets demonstrate that our approach strongly outperforms the previous state of the art in training NN with MIP, in terms of accuracy, training time and amount of data. Our methodology is proficient at training NNs when minimal training data is available, and at training with minimal memory requirements -- which is potentially valuable for deploying to low-memory devices.
In this paper, we consider inference in the context of a factor model for tensor-valued time series. We study the consistency of the estimated common factors and loadings space when using estimators based on minimising quadratic loss functions. Building on the observation that such loss functions are adequate only if sufficiently many moments exist, we extend our results to the case of heavy-tailed distributions by considering estimators based on minimising the Huber loss function, which uses an $L_{1}$-norm weight on outliers. We show that such class of estimators is robust to the presence of heavy tails, even when only the second moment of the data exists.
Without writing a single line of code by a human, an example Monte Carlo simulation based application for stochastic dependence modeling with copulas is developed using a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) fine-tuned for conversations. This includes interaction with ChatGPT in natural language and using mathematical formalism, which, under careful supervision by a human-expert, led to producing a working code in MATLAB, Python and R for sampling from a given copula model, evaluation of the model's density, performing maximum likelihood estimation, optimizing the code for parallel computing for CPUs as well as for GPUs, and visualization of the computed results. In contrast to other emerging studies that assess the accuracy of LLMs like ChatGPT on tasks from a selected area, this work rather investigates ways how to achieve a successful solution of a standard statistical task in a collaboration of a human-expert and artificial intelligence (AI). Particularly, through careful prompt engineering, we separate successful solutions generated by ChatGPT from unsuccessful ones, resulting in a comprehensive list of related pros and cons. It is demonstrated that if the typical pitfalls are avoided, we can substantially benefit from collaborating with an AI partner. For example, we show that if ChatGPT is not able to provide a correct solution due to a lack of or incorrect knowledge, the human-expert can feed it with the correct knowledge, e.g., in the form of mathematical theorems and formulas, and make it to apply the gained knowledge in order to provide a solution that is correct. Such ability presents an attractive opportunity to achieve a programmed solution even for users with rather limited knowledge of programming techniques.
Medical image segmentation is considered as the basic step for medical image analysis and surgical intervention. And many previous works attempted to incorporate shape priors for designing segmentation models, which is beneficial to attain finer masks with anatomical shape information. Here in our work, we detailedly discuss three types of segmentation models with shape priors, which consist of atlas-based models, statistical-based models and UNet-based models. On the ground that the former two kinds of methods show a poor generalization ability, UNet-based models have dominated the field of medical image segmentation in recent years. However, existing UNet-based models tend to employ implicit shape priors, which do not have a good interpretability and generalization ability on different organs with distinctive shapes. Thus, we proposed a novel shape prior module (SPM), which could explicitly introduce shape priors to promote the segmentation performance of UNet-based models. To evaluate the effectiveness of SPM, we conduct experiments on three challenging public datasets. And our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, SPM shows an outstanding generalization ability on different classic convolution-neural-networks (CNNs) and recent Transformer-based backbones, which can serve as a plug-and-play structure for the segmentation task of different datasets.
Recently, the idea of using FP8 as a number format for neural network training has been floating around the deep learning world. Given that most training is currently conducted with entire networks in FP32, or sometimes FP16 with mixed-precision, the step to having some parts of a network run in FP8 with 8-bit weights is an appealing potential speed-up for the generally costly and time-intensive training procedures in deep learning. A natural question arises regarding what this development means for efficient inference on edge devices. In the efficient inference device world, workloads are frequently executed in INT8. Sometimes going even as low as INT4 when efficiency calls for it. In this whitepaper, we compare the performance for both the FP8 and INT formats for efficient on-device inference. We theoretically show the difference between the INT and FP formats for neural networks and present a plethora of post-training quantization and quantization-aware-training results to show how this theory translates to practice. We also provide a hardware analysis showing that the FP formats are somewhere between 50-180% less efficient in terms of compute in dedicated hardware than the INT format. Based on our research and a read of the research field, we conclude that although the proposed FP8 format could be good for training, the results for inference do not warrant a dedicated implementation of FP8 in favor of INT8 for efficient inference. We show that our results are mostly consistent with previous findings but that important comparisons between the formats have thus far been lacking. Finally, we discuss what happens when FP8-trained networks are converted to INT8 and conclude with a brief discussion on the most efficient way for on-device deployment and an extensive suite of INT8 results for many models.
Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.
The cyber-threat landscape has evolved tremendously in recent years, with new threat variants emerging daily, and large-scale coordinated campaigns becoming more prevalent. In this study, we propose CELEST (CollaborativE LEarning for Scalable Threat detection), a federated machine learning framework for global threat detection over HTTP, which is one of the most commonly used protocols for malware dissemination and communication. CELEST leverages federated learning in order to collaboratively train a global model across multiple clients who keep their data locally, thus providing increased privacy and confidentiality assurances. Through a novel active learning component integrated with the federated learning technique, our system continuously discovers and learns the behavior of new, evolving, and globally-coordinated cyber threats. We show that CELEST is able to expose attacks that are largely invisible to individual organizations. For instance, in one challenging attack scenario with data exfiltration malware, the global model achieves a three-fold increase in Precision-Recall AUC compared to the local model. We deploy CELEST on two university networks and show that it is able to detect the malicious HTTP communication with high precision and low false positive rates. Furthermore, during its deployment, CELEST detected a set of previously unknown 42 malicious URLs and 20 malicious domains in one day, which were confirmed to be malicious by VirusTotal.
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to detect the emotion label for each utterance. Motivated by recent studies which have proven that feeding training examples in a meaningful order rather than considering them randomly can boost the performance of models, we propose an ERC-oriented hybrid curriculum learning framework. Our framework consists of two curricula: (1) conversation-level curriculum (CC); and (2) utterance-level curriculum (UC). In CC, we construct a difficulty measurer based on "emotion shift" frequency within a conversation, then the conversations are scheduled in an "easy to hard" schema according to the difficulty score returned by the difficulty measurer. For UC, it is implemented from an emotion-similarity perspective, which progressively strengthens the model's ability in identifying the confusing emotions. With the proposed model-agnostic hybrid curriculum learning strategy, we observe significant performance boosts over a wide range of existing ERC models and we are able to achieve new state-of-the-art results on four public ERC datasets.
Federated Learning aims to learn machine learning models from multiple decentralized edge devices (e.g. mobiles) or servers without sacrificing local data privacy. Recent Natural Language Processing techniques rely on deep learning and large pre-trained language models. However, both big deep neural and language models are trained with huge amounts of data which often lies on the server side. Since text data is widely originated from end users, in this work, we look into recent NLP models and techniques which use federated learning as the learning framework. Our survey discusses major challenges in federated natural language processing, including the algorithm challenges, system challenges as well as the privacy issues. We also provide a critical review of the existing Federated NLP evaluation methods and tools. Finally, we highlight the current research gaps and future directions.
Attention Model has now become an important concept in neural networks that has been researched within diverse application domains. This survey provides a structured and comprehensive overview of the developments in modeling attention. In particular, we propose a taxonomy which groups existing techniques into coherent categories. We review the different neural architectures in which attention has been incorporated, and also show how attention improves interpretability of neural models. Finally, we discuss some applications in which modeling attention has a significant impact. We hope this survey will provide a succinct introduction to attention models and guide practitioners while developing approaches for their applications.