Data collected from the real world typically exhibit long-tailed distributions, where frequent classes contain abundant data while rare ones have only a limited number of samples. While existing supervised learning approaches have been proposed to tackle such data imbalance, the requirement of label supervision would limit their applicability to real-world scenarios in which label annotation might not be available. Without the access to class labels nor the associated class frequencies, we propose Frequency-Aware Self-Supervised Learning (FASSL) in this paper. Targeting at learning from unlabeled data with inherent long-tailed distributions, the goal of FASSL is to produce discriminative feature representations for downstream classification tasks. In FASSL, we first learn frequency-aware prototypes, reflecting the associated long-tailed distribution. Particularly focusing on rare-class samples, the relationships between image data and the derived prototypes are further exploited with the introduced self-supervised learning scheme. Experiments on long-tailed image datasets quantitatively and qualitatively verify the effectiveness of our learning scheme.
Real-world data is extremely imbalanced and presents a long-tailed distribution, resulting in models that are biased towards classes with sufficient samples and perform poorly on rare classes. Recent methods propose to rebalance classes but they undertake the seesaw dilemma (what is increasing performance on tail classes may decrease that of head classes, and vice versa). In this paper, we argue that the seesaw dilemma is derived from gradient imbalance of different classes, in which gradients of inappropriate classes are set to important for updating, thus are prone to overcompensation or undercompensation on tail classes. To achieve ideal compensation, we formulate the long-tailed recognition as an multi-objective optimization problem, which fairly respects the contributions of head and tail classes simultaneously. For efficiency, we propose a Gradient-Balancing Grouping (GBG) strategy to gather the classes with similar gradient directions, thus approximately make every update under a Pareto descent direction. Our GBG method drives classes with similar gradient directions to form more representative gradient and provide ideal compensation to the tail classes. Moreover, We conduct extensive experiments on commonly used benchmarks in long-tailed learning and demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing SOTA methods.
We address in this paper a particular instance of the multi-agent linear stochastic bandit problem, called clustered multi-agent linear bandits. In this setting, we propose a novel algorithm leveraging an efficient collaboration between the agents in order to accelerate the overall optimization problem. In this contribution, a network controller is responsible for estimating the underlying cluster structure of the network and optimizing the experiences sharing among agents within the same groups. We provide a theoretical analysis for both the regret minimization problem and the clustering quality. Through empirical evaluation against state-of-the-art algorithms on both synthetic and real data, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: our algorithm significantly improves regret minimization while managing to recover the true underlying cluster partitioning.
Target speech extraction aims to extract, based on a given conditioning cue, a target speech signal that is corrupted by interfering sources, such as noise or competing speakers. Building upon the achievements of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) time-frequency speaker separation model TF-GridNet, we propose AV-GridNet, a visual-grounded variant that incorporates the face recording of a target speaker as a conditioning factor during the extraction process. Recognizing the inherent dissimilarities between speech and noise signals as interfering sources, we also propose SAV-GridNet, a scenario-aware model that identifies the type of interfering scenario first and then applies a dedicated expert model trained specifically for that scenario. Our proposed model achieves SOTA results on the second COG-MHEAR Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement Challenge, outperforming other models by a significant margin, objectively and in a listening test. We also perform an extensive analysis of the results under the two scenarios.
Hypothesis testing is a central problem in statistical analysis, and there is currently a lack of differentially private tests which are both statistically valid and powerful. In this paper, we develop several new differentially private (DP) nonparametric hypothesis tests. Our tests are based on Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Kuiper, Cram\'er-von Mises, and Wasserstein test statistics, which can all be expressed as a pseudo-metric on empirical cumulative distribution functions (ecdfs), and can be used to test hypotheses on goodness-of-fit, two samples, and paired data. We show that these test statistics have low sensitivity, requiring minimal noise to satisfy DP. In particular, we show that the sensitivity of these test statistics can be expressed in terms of the base sensitivity, which is the pseudo-metric distance between the ecdfs of adjacent databases and is easily calculated. The sampling distribution of our test statistics are distribution-free under the null hypothesis, enabling easy computation of $p$-values by Monte Carlo methods. We show that in several settings, especially with small privacy budgets or heavy-tailed data, our new DP tests outperform alternative nonparametric DP tests.
In a typical formulation of the private information retrieval (PIR) problem, a single user wishes to retrieve one out of $ K$ files from $N$ servers without revealing the demanded file index to any server. This paper formulates an extended model of PIR, referred to as multi-message private computation (MM-PC), where instead of retrieving a single file, the user wishes to retrieve $P>1$ linear combinations of files while preserving the privacy of the demand information. The MM-PC problem is a generalization of the private computation (PC) problem (where the user requests one linear combination of the files), and the multi-message private information retrieval (MM-PIR) problem (where the user requests $P>1$ files). A baseline achievable scheme repeats the optimal PC scheme by Sun and Jafar $P$ times, or treats each possible demanded linear combination as an independent file and then uses the near optimal MM-PIR scheme by Banawan and Ulukus. In this paper, we propose an achievable MM-PC scheme that significantly improves upon the baseline scheme. Doing so, we design the queries inspiring from the structure in the cache-aided scalar linear function retrieval scheme by Wan et al., where they leverage the dependency between messages to reduce the amount of communication. To ensure the decodability of our scheme, we propose a new method to benefit from the existing dependency, referred to as the sign assignment step. In the end, we use Maximum Distance Separable matrices to code the queries, which allows the reduction of download from the servers, while preserving privacy.
We consider the performance of a least-squares regression model, as judged by out-of-sample $R^2$. Shapley values give a fair attribution of the performance of a model to its input features, taking into account interdependencies between features. Evaluating the Shapley values exactly requires solving a number of regression problems that is exponential in the number of features, so a Monte Carlo-type approximation is typically used. We focus on the special case of least-squares regression models, where several tricks can be used to compute and evaluate regression models efficiently. These tricks give a substantial speed up, allowing many more Monte Carlo samples to be evaluated, achieving better accuracy. We refer to our method as least-squares Shapley performance attribution (LS-SPA), and describe our open-source implementation.
Multi-objective optimization is a type of decision making problems where multiple conflicting objectives are optimized. We study offline optimization of multi-objective policies from data collected by an existing policy. We propose a pessimistic estimator for the multi-objective policy values that can be easily plugged into existing formulas for hypervolume computation and optimized. The estimator is based on inverse propensity scores (IPS), and improves upon a naive IPS estimator in both theory and experiments. Our analysis is general, and applies beyond our IPS estimators and methods for optimizing them. The pessimistic estimator can be optimized by policy gradients and performs well in all of our experiments.
Although the number of gaze estimation datasets is growing, the application of appearance-based gaze estimation methods is mostly limited to estimating the point of gaze on a screen. This is in part because most datasets are generated in a similar fashion, where the gaze target is on a screen close to camera's origin. In other applications such as assistive robotics or marketing research, the 3D point of gaze might not be close to the camera's origin, meaning models trained on current datasets do not generalize well to these tasks. We therefore suggest generating a textured tridimensional mesh of the face and rendering the training images from a virtual camera at a specific position and orientation related to the application as a mean of augmenting the existing datasets. In our tests, this lead to an average 47% decrease in gaze estimation angular error.
We give improved algorithms for maintaining edge-orientations of a fully-dynamic graph, such that the maximum out-degree is bounded. On one hand, we show how to orient the edges such that maximum out-degree is proportional to the arboricity $\alpha$ of the graph, in, either, an amortised update time of $O(\log^2 n \log \alpha)$, or a worst-case update time of $O(\log^3 n \log \alpha)$. On the other hand, motivated by applications including dynamic maximal matching, we obtain a different trade-off. Namely, the improved update time of either $O(\log n \log \alpha)$, amortised, or $O(\log ^2 n \log \alpha)$, worst-case, for the problem of maintaining an edge-orientation with at most $O(\alpha + \log n)$ out-edges per vertex. Finally, all of our algorithms naturally limit the recourse to be polylogarithmic in $n$ and $\alpha$. Our algorithms adapt to the current arboricity of the graph. Moreover, further analysis shows that they can yield a $(1 + \varepsilon)$-approximation of the arboricity or the subgraph density at the cost of increased update time.
We study the problem of few-shot graph classification across domains with nonequivalent feature spaces by introducing three new cross-domain benchmarks constructed from publicly available datasets. We also propose an attention-based graph encoder that uses three congruent views of graphs, one contextual and two topological views, to learn representations of task-specific information for fast adaptation, and task-agnostic information for knowledge transfer. We run exhaustive experiments to evaluate the performance of contrastive and meta-learning strategies. We show that when coupled with metric-based meta-learning frameworks, the proposed encoder achieves the best average meta-test classification accuracy across all benchmarks. The source code and data will be released here: //github.com/kavehhassani/metagrl