Modern deep learning tools are remarkably effective in addressing intricate problems. However, their operation as black-box models introduces increased uncertainty in predictions. Additionally, they contend with various challenges, including the need for substantial storage space in large networks, issues of overfitting, underfitting, vanishing gradients, and more. This study explores the concept of Bayesian Neural Networks, presenting a novel architecture designed to significantly alleviate the storage space complexity of a network. Furthermore, we introduce an algorithm adept at efficiently handling uncertainties, ensuring robust convergence values without becoming trapped in local optima, particularly when the objective function lacks perfect convexity.
Graph learning architectures based on the k-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman (k-WL) hierarchy offer a theoretically well-understood expressive power. However, such architectures often fail to deliver solid predictive performance on real-world tasks, limiting their practical impact. In contrast, global attention-based models such as graph transformers demonstrate strong performance in practice, but comparing their expressive power with the k-WL hierarchy remains challenging, particularly since these architectures rely on positional or structural encodings for their expressivity and predictive performance. To address this, we show that the recently proposed Edge Transformer, a global attention model operating on node pairs instead of nodes, has at least 3-WL expressive power. Empirically, we demonstrate that the Edge Transformer surpasses other theoretically aligned architectures regarding predictive performance while not relying on positional or structural encodings. Our code is available at //github.com/luis-mueller/towards-principled-gts
Contextual Bayesian Optimization (CBO) efficiently optimizes black-box functions with respect to design variables, while simultaneously integrating contextual information regarding the environment, such as experimental conditions. However, the relevance of contextual variables is not necessarily known beforehand. Moreover, contextual variables can sometimes be optimized themselves at an additional cost, a setting overlooked by current CBO algorithms. Cost-sensitive CBO would simply include optimizable contextual variables as part of the design variables based on their cost. Instead, we adaptively select a subset of contextual variables to include in the optimization, based on the trade-off between their relevance and the additional cost incurred by optimizing them compared to leaving them to be determined by the environment. We learn the relevance of contextual variables by sensitivity analysis of the posterior surrogate model while minimizing the cost of optimization by leveraging recent developments on early stopping for BO. We empirically evaluate our proposed Sensitivity-Analysis-Driven Contextual BO (SADCBO) method against alternatives on both synthetic and real-world experiments, together with extensive ablation studies, and demonstrate a consistent improvement across examples.
Bagging is a popular ensemble technique to improve the accuracy of machine learning models. It hinges on the well-established rationale that, by repeatedly retraining on resampled data, the aggregated model exhibits lower variance and hence higher stability, especially for discontinuous base learners. In this paper, we provide a new perspective on bagging: By suitably aggregating the base learners at the parametrization instead of the output level, bagging improves generalization performances exponentially, a strength that is significantly more powerful than variance reduction. More precisely, we show that for general stochastic optimization problems that suffer from slowly (i.e., polynomially) decaying generalization errors, bagging can effectively reduce these errors to an exponential decay. Moreover, this power of bagging is agnostic to the solution schemes, including common empirical risk minimization, distributionally robust optimization, and various regularizations. We demonstrate how bagging can substantially improve generalization performances in a range of examples involving heavy-tailed data that suffer from intrinsically slow rates.
We develop a fast and scalable numerical approach to solve Wasserstein gradient flows (WGFs), particularly suitable for high-dimensional cases. Our approach is to use general reduced-order models, like deep neural networks, to parameterize the push-forward maps such that they can push a simple reference density to the one solving the given WGF. The new dynamical system is called parameterized WGF (PWGF), and it is defined on the finite-dimensional parameter space equipped with a pullback Wasserstein metric. Our numerical scheme can approximate the solutions of WGFs for general energy functionals effectively, without requiring spatial discretization or nonconvex optimization procedures, thus avoiding some limitations of classical numerical methods and more recent deep-learning-based approaches. A comprehensive analysis of the approximation errors measured by Wasserstein distance is also provided in this work. Numerical experiments show promising computational efficiency and verified accuracy on various WGF examples using our approach.
Hypergraphs are crucial for modeling higher-order interactions in real-world data. Hypergraph neural networks (HNNs) effectively utilise these structures by message passing to generate informative node features for various downstream tasks like node classification. However, the message passing block in existing HNNs typically requires a computationally intensive training process, which limits their practical use. To tackle this challenge, we propose an alternative approach by decoupling the usage of the hypergraph structural information from the model training stage. The proposed model, simplified hypergraph neural network (SHNN), contains a training-free message-passing block that can be precomputed before the training of SHNN, thereby reducing the computational burden. We theoretically support the efficiency and effectiveness of SHNN by showing that: 1) It is more training-efficient compared to existing HNNs; 2) It utilises as much information as existing HNNs for node feature generation; and 3) It is robust against the oversmoothing issue while using long-range interactions. Experiments based on six real-world hypergraph benchmarks in node classification and hyperlink prediction present that, compared to state-of-the-art HNNs, SHNN shows both competitive performance and superior training efficiency. Specifically, on Cora-CA, SHNN achieves the highest node classification accuracy with just 2% training time of the best baseline.
Interactive Natural Language Processing (iNLP) has emerged as a novel paradigm within the field of NLP, aimed at addressing limitations in existing frameworks while aligning with the ultimate goals of artificial intelligence. This paradigm considers language models as agents capable of observing, acting, and receiving feedback iteratively from external entities. Specifically, language models in this context can: (1) interact with humans for better understanding and addressing user needs, personalizing responses, aligning with human values, and improving the overall user experience; (2) interact with knowledge bases for enriching language representations with factual knowledge, enhancing the contextual relevance of responses, and dynamically leveraging external information to generate more accurate and informed responses; (3) interact with models and tools for effectively decomposing and addressing complex tasks, leveraging specialized expertise for specific subtasks, and fostering the simulation of social behaviors; and (4) interact with environments for learning grounded representations of language, and effectively tackling embodied tasks such as reasoning, planning, and decision-making in response to environmental observations. This paper offers a comprehensive survey of iNLP, starting by proposing a unified definition and framework of the concept. We then provide a systematic classification of iNLP, dissecting its various components, including interactive objects, interaction interfaces, and interaction methods. We proceed to delve into the evaluation methodologies used in the field, explore its diverse applications, scrutinize its ethical and safety issues, and discuss prospective research directions. This survey serves as an entry point for researchers who are interested in this rapidly evolving area and offers a broad view of the current landscape and future trajectory of iNLP.
Minimizing cross-entropy over the softmax scores of a linear map composed with a high-capacity encoder is arguably the most popular choice for training neural networks on supervised learning tasks. However, recent works show that one can directly optimize the encoder instead, to obtain equally (or even more) discriminative representations via a supervised variant of a contrastive objective. In this work, we address the question whether there are fundamental differences in the sought-for representation geometry in the output space of the encoder at minimal loss. Specifically, we prove, under mild assumptions, that both losses attain their minimum once the representations of each class collapse to the vertices of a regular simplex, inscribed in a hypersphere. We provide empirical evidence that this configuration is attained in practice and that reaching a close-to-optimal state typically indicates good generalization performance. Yet, the two losses show remarkably different optimization behavior. The number of iterations required to perfectly fit to data scales superlinearly with the amount of randomly flipped labels for the supervised contrastive loss. This is in contrast to the approximately linear scaling previously reported for networks trained with cross-entropy.
Data augmentation has been widely used to improve generalizability of machine learning models. However, comparatively little work studies data augmentation for graphs. This is largely due to the complex, non-Euclidean structure of graphs, which limits possible manipulation operations. Augmentation operations commonly used in vision and language have no analogs for graphs. Our work studies graph data augmentation for graph neural networks (GNNs) in the context of improving semi-supervised node-classification. We discuss practical and theoretical motivations, considerations and strategies for graph data augmentation. Our work shows that neural edge predictors can effectively encode class-homophilic structure to promote intra-class edges and demote inter-class edges in given graph structure, and our main contribution introduces the GAug graph data augmentation framework, which leverages these insights to improve performance in GNN-based node classification via edge prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that augmentation via GAug improves performance across GNN architectures and datasets.
Attention networks in multimodal learning provide an efficient way to utilize given visual information selectively. However, the computational cost to learn attention distributions for every pair of multimodal input channels is prohibitively expensive. To solve this problem, co-attention builds two separate attention distributions for each modality neglecting the interaction between multimodal inputs. In this paper, we propose bilinear attention networks (BAN) that find bilinear attention distributions to utilize given vision-language information seamlessly. BAN considers bilinear interactions among two groups of input channels, while low-rank bilinear pooling extracts the joint representations for each pair of channels. Furthermore, we propose a variant of multimodal residual networks to exploit eight-attention maps of the BAN efficiently. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate our model on visual question answering (VQA 2.0) and Flickr30k Entities datasets, showing that BAN significantly outperforms previous methods and achieves new state-of-the-arts on both datasets.
We investigate a lattice-structured LSTM model for Chinese NER, which encodes a sequence of input characters as well as all potential words that match a lexicon. Compared with character-based methods, our model explicitly leverages word and word sequence information. Compared with word-based methods, lattice LSTM does not suffer from segmentation errors. Gated recurrent cells allow our model to choose the most relevant characters and words from a sentence for better NER results. Experiments on various datasets show that lattice LSTM outperforms both word-based and character-based LSTM baselines, achieving the best results.