The human brain distinguishes speech sound categories by representing acoustic signals in a latent multidimensional auditory-perceptual space. This space can be statistically constructed using multidimensional scaling, a technique that can compute lower-dimensional latent features representing the speech signals in such a way that their pairwise distances in the latent space closely resemble the corresponding distances in the observation space. The inter-individual and inter-population (e.g., native versus non-native listeners) heterogeneity in such representations is however not well understood. These questions have often been examined using joint analyses that ignore individual heterogeneity or using separate analyses that cannot characterize human similarities. Neither extreme, therefore, allows for principled comparisons between populations and individuals. The focus of the current literature has also often been on inference on latent distances between the categories and not on the latent features themselves, which are crucial for our applications, that make up these distances. Motivated by these problems, we develop a novel Bayesian mixed multidimensional scaling method, taking into account the heterogeneity across populations and subjects. We design a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for posterior computation. We then recover the latent features using a post-processing scheme applied to the posterior samples. We evaluate the method's empirical performances through synthetic experiments. Applied to a motivating auditory neuroscience study, the method provides novel insights into how biologically interpretable lower-dimensional latent features reconstruct the observed distances between the stimuli and vary between individuals and their native language experiences.
This paper presents a unique solution to challenges in medical image processing by incorporating an adaptive curve grey wolf optimization (ACGWO) algorithm into neural network backpropagation. Neural networks show potential in medical data but suffer from issues like overfitting and lack of interpretability due to imbalanced and scarce data. Traditional Gray Wolf Optimization (GWO) also has its drawbacks, such as a lack of population diversity and premature convergence. This paper addresses these problems by introducing an adaptive algorithm, enhancing the standard GWO with a sigmoid function. This algorithm was extensively compared to four leading algorithms using six well-known test functions, outperforming them effectively. Moreover, by utilizing the ACGWO, we increase the robustness and generalization of the neural network, resulting in more interpretable predictions. Applied to the publicly accessible Cleveland Heart Disease dataset, our technique surpasses ten other methods, achieving 86.8% accuracy, indicating its potential for efficient heart disease prediction in the clinical setting.
This paper explicitly models a coarse and noisy quantization in a communication system empowered by orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) for cost and power efficiency. We first point out, with coarse quantization, the effective channel is imbalanced and thus no longer able to circularly shift the transmitted symbols along the delay-Doppler domain. Meanwhile, the effective channel is non-isotropic, which imposes a significant loss to symbol detection algorithms like the original approximate message passing (AMP). Although the algorithm of generalized expectation consistent for signal recovery (GEC-SR) can mitigate this loss, the complexity in computation is prohibitively high, mainly due to an dramatic increase in the matrix size of OTFS. In this context, we propose a low-complexity algorithm that incorporates into the GEC-SR a quick inversion of quasi-banded matrices, reducing the complexity from a cubic order to a linear order while keeping the performance at the same level.
Particle flow filters solve Bayesian inference problems by smoothly transforming a set of particles into samples from the posterior distribution. Particles move in state space under the flow of an McKean-Vlasov-Ito process. This work introduces the Variational Fokker-Planck (VFP) framework for data assimilation, a general approach that includes previously known particle flow filters as special cases. The McKean-Vlasov-Ito process that transforms particles is defined via an optimal drift that depends on the selected diffusion term. It is established that the underlying probability density - sampled by the ensemble of particles - converges to the Bayesian posterior probability density. For a finite number of particles the optimal drift contains a regularization term that nudges particles toward becoming independent random variables. Based on this analysis, we derive computationally-feasible approximate regularization approaches that penalize the mutual information between pairs of particles, and avoid particle collapse. Moreover, the diffusion plays a role akin to a particle rejuvenation approach that aims to alleviate particle collapse. The VFP framework is very flexible. Different assumptions on prior and intermediate probability distributions can be used to implement the optimal drift, and localization and covariance shrinkage can be applied to alleviate the curse of dimensionality. A robust implicit-explicit method is discussed for the efficient integration of stiff McKean-Vlasov-Ito processes. The effectiveness of the VFP framework is demonstrated on three progressively more challenging test problems, namely the Lorenz '63, Lorenz '96 and the quasi-geostrophic equations.
Online model selection involves selecting a model from a set of candidate models 'on the fly' to perform prediction on a stream of data. The choice of candidate models henceforth has a crucial impact on the performance. Although employing a larger set of candidate models naturally leads to more flexibility in model selection, this may be infeasible in cases where prediction tasks are performed on edge devices with limited memory. Faced with this challenge, the present paper proposes an online federated model selection framework where a group of learners (clients) interacts with a server with sufficient memory such that the server stores all candidate models. However, each client only chooses to store a subset of models that can be fit into its memory and performs its own prediction task using one of the stored models. Furthermore, employing the proposed algorithm, clients and the server collaborate to fine-tune models to adapt them to a non-stationary environment. Theoretical analysis proves that the proposed algorithm enjoys sub-linear regret with respect to the best model in hindsight. Experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
With the rapid development of deep learning, training Big Models (BMs) for multiple downstream tasks becomes a popular paradigm. Researchers have achieved various outcomes in the construction of BMs and the BM application in many fields. At present, there is a lack of research work that sorts out the overall progress of BMs and guides the follow-up research. In this paper, we cover not only the BM technologies themselves but also the prerequisites for BM training and applications with BMs, dividing the BM review into four parts: Resource, Models, Key Technologies and Application. We introduce 16 specific BM-related topics in those four parts, they are Data, Knowledge, Computing System, Parallel Training System, Language Model, Vision Model, Multi-modal Model, Theory&Interpretability, Commonsense Reasoning, Reliability&Security, Governance, Evaluation, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Dialogue and Protein Research. In each topic, we summarize clearly the current studies and propose some future research directions. At the end of this paper, we conclude the further development of BMs in a more general view.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Relation prediction for knowledge graphs aims at predicting missing relationships between entities. Despite the importance of inductive relation prediction, most previous works are limited to a transductive setting and cannot process previously unseen entities. The recent proposed subgraph-based relation reasoning models provided alternatives to predict links from the subgraph structure surrounding a candidate triplet inductively. However, we observe that these methods often neglect the directed nature of the extracted subgraph and weaken the role of relation information in the subgraph modeling. As a result, they fail to effectively handle the asymmetric/anti-symmetric triplets and produce insufficient embeddings for the target triplets. To this end, we introduce a \textbf{C}\textbf{o}mmunicative \textbf{M}essage \textbf{P}assing neural network for \textbf{I}nductive re\textbf{L}ation r\textbf{E}asoning, \textbf{CoMPILE}, that reasons over local directed subgraph structures and has a vigorous inductive bias to process entity-independent semantic relations. In contrast to existing models, CoMPILE strengthens the message interactions between edges and entitles through a communicative kernel and enables a sufficient flow of relation information. Moreover, we demonstrate that CoMPILE can naturally handle asymmetric/anti-symmetric relations without the need for explosively increasing the number of model parameters by extracting the directed enclosing subgraphs. Extensive experiments show substantial performance gains in comparison to state-of-the-art methods on commonly used benchmark datasets with variant inductive settings.
Contextual embeddings, such as ELMo and BERT, move beyond global word representations like Word2Vec and achieve ground-breaking performance on a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Contextual embeddings assign each word a representation based on its context, thereby capturing uses of words across varied contexts and encoding knowledge that transfers across languages. In this survey, we review existing contextual embedding models, cross-lingual polyglot pre-training, the application of contextual embeddings in downstream tasks, model compression, and model analyses.
This paper proposes a generic method to learn interpretable convolutional filters in a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for object classification, where each interpretable filter encodes features of a specific object part. Our method does not require additional annotations of object parts or textures for supervision. Instead, we use the same training data as traditional CNNs. Our method automatically assigns each interpretable filter in a high conv-layer with an object part of a certain category during the learning process. Such explicit knowledge representations in conv-layers of CNN help people clarify the logic encoded in the CNN, i.e., answering what patterns the CNN extracts from an input image and uses for prediction. We have tested our method using different benchmark CNNs with various structures to demonstrate the broad applicability of our method. Experiments have shown that our interpretable filters are much more semantically meaningful than traditional filters.
Adversarial attacks to image classification systems present challenges to convolutional networks and opportunities for understanding them. This study suggests that adversarial perturbations on images lead to noise in the features constructed by these networks. Motivated by this observation, we develop new network architectures that increase adversarial robustness by performing feature denoising. Specifically, our networks contain blocks that denoise the features using non-local means or other filters; the entire networks are trained end-to-end. When combined with adversarial training, our feature denoising networks substantially improve the state-of-the-art in adversarial robustness in both white-box and black-box attack settings. On ImageNet, under 10-iteration PGD white-box attacks where prior art has 27.9% accuracy, our method achieves 55.7%; even under extreme 2000-iteration PGD white-box attacks, our method secures 42.6% accuracy. A network based on our method was ranked first in Competition on Adversarial Attacks and Defenses (CAAD) 2018 --- it achieved 50.6% classification accuracy on a secret, ImageNet-like test dataset against 48 unknown attackers, surpassing the runner-up approach by ~10%. Code and models will be made publicly available.