We propose a new sampler for robust estimators that always selects the sample with the highest probability of consisting only of inliers. After every unsuccessful iteration, the inlier probabilities are updated in a principled way via a Bayesian approach. The probabilities obtained by the deep network are used as prior (so-called neural guidance) inside the sampler. Moreover, we introduce a new loss that exploits, in a geometrically justifiable manner, the orientation and scale that can be estimated for any type of feature, e.g., SIFT or SuperPoint, to estimate two-view geometry. The new loss helps to learn higher-order information about the underlying scene geometry. Benefiting from the new sampler and the proposed loss, we combine the neural guidance with the state-of-the-art MAGSAC++. Adaptive Reordering Sampler with Neurally Guided MAGSAC (ARS-MAGSAC) is superior to the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and run-time on the PhotoTourism and KITTI datasets for essential and fundamental matrix estimation. The code and trained models are available at //github.com/weitong8591/ars_magsac.
Sparse high-dimensional functions have arisen as a rich framework to study the behavior of gradient-descent methods using shallow neural networks, showcasing their ability to perform feature learning beyond linear models. Amongst those functions, the simplest are single-index models $f(x) = \phi( x \cdot \theta^*)$, where the labels are generated by an arbitrary non-linear scalar link function $\phi$ applied to an unknown one-dimensional projection $\theta^*$ of the input data. By focusing on Gaussian data, several recent works have built a remarkable picture, where the so-called information exponent (related to the regularity of the link function) controls the required sample complexity. In essence, these tools exploit the stability and spherical symmetry of Gaussian distributions. In this work, building from the framework of \cite{arous2020online}, we explore extensions of this picture beyond the Gaussian setting, where both stability or symmetry might be violated. Focusing on the planted setting where $\phi$ is known, our main results establish that Stochastic Gradient Descent can efficiently recover the unknown direction $\theta^*$ in the high-dimensional regime, under assumptions that extend previous works \cite{yehudai2020learning,wu2022learning}.
Path reasoning methods over knowledge graphs have gained popularity for their potential to improve transparency in recommender systems. However, the resulting models still rely on pre-trained knowledge graph embeddings, fail to fully exploit the interdependence between entities and relations in the KG for recommendation, and may generate inaccurate explanations. In this paper, we introduce PEARLM, a novel approach that efficiently captures user behaviour and product-side knowledge through language modelling. With our approach, knowledge graph embeddings are directly learned from paths over the KG by the language model, which also unifies entities and relations in the same optimisation space. Constraints on the sequence decoding additionally guarantee path faithfulness with respect to the KG. Experiments on two datasets show the effectiveness of our approach compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Source code and datasets: AVAILABLE AFTER GETTING ACCEPTED.
Quality estimation models have been developed to assess the corrections made by grammatical error correction (GEC) models when the reference or gold-standard corrections are not available. An ideal quality estimator can be utilized to combine the outputs of multiple GEC systems by choosing the best subset of edits from the union of all edits proposed by the GEC base systems. However, we found that existing GEC quality estimation models are not good enough in differentiating good corrections from bad ones, resulting in a low F0.5 score when used for system combination. In this paper, we propose GRECO, a new state-of-the-art quality estimation model that gives a better estimate of the quality of a corrected sentence, as indicated by having a higher correlation to the F0.5 score of a corrected sentence. It results in a combined GEC system with a higher F0.5 score. We also propose three methods for utilizing GEC quality estimation models for system combination with varying generality: model-agnostic, model-agnostic with voting bias, and model-dependent method. The combined GEC system outperforms the state of the art on the CoNLL-2014 test set and the BEA-2019 test set, achieving the highest F0.5 scores published to date.
Bilingual Lexicon Induction (BLI) is a core task in multilingual NLP that still, to a large extent, relies on calculating cross-lingual word representations. Inspired by the global paradigm shift in NLP towards Large Language Models (LLMs), we examine the potential of the latest generation of LLMs for the development of bilingual lexicons. We ask the following research question: Is it possible to prompt and fine-tune multilingual LLMs (mLLMs) for BLI, and how does this approach compare against and complement current BLI approaches? To this end, we systematically study 1) zero-shot prompting for unsupervised BLI and 2) few-shot in-context prompting with a set of seed translation pairs, both without any LLM fine-tuning, as well as 3) standard BLI-oriented fine-tuning of smaller LLMs. We experiment with 18 open-source text-to-text mLLMs of different sizes (from 0.3B to 13B parameters) on two standard BLI benchmarks covering a range of typologically diverse languages. Our work is the first to demonstrate strong BLI capabilities of text-to-text mLLMs. The results reveal that few-shot prompting with in-context examples from nearest neighbours achieves the best performance, establishing new state-of-the-art BLI scores for many language pairs. We also conduct a series of in-depth analyses and ablation studies, providing more insights on BLI with (m)LLMs, also along with their limitations.
To promote the generalization ability of breast tumor segmentation models, as well as to improve the segmentation performance for breast tumors with smaller size, low-contrast amd irregular shape, we propose a progressive dual priori network (PDPNet) to segment breast tumors from dynamic enhanced magnetic resonance images (DCE-MRI) acquired at different sites. The PDPNet first cropped tumor regions with a coarse-segmentation based localization module, then the breast tumor mask was progressively refined by using the weak semantic priori and cross-scale correlation prior knowledge. To validate the effectiveness of PDPNet, we compared it with several state-of-the-art methods on multi-center datasets. The results showed that, comparing against the suboptimal method, the DSC, SEN, KAPPA and HD95 of PDPNet were improved 3.63\%, 8.19\%, 5.52\%, and 3.66\% respectively. In addition, through ablations, we demonstrated that the proposed localization module can decrease the influence of normal tissues and therefore improve the generalization ability of the model. The weak semantic priors allow focusing on tumor regions to avoid missing small tumors and low-contrast tumors. The cross-scale correlation priors are beneficial for promoting the shape-aware ability for irregual tumors. Thus integrating them in a unified framework improved the multi-center breast tumor segmentation performance.
Fitting generative models to sequential data typically involves two recursive computations through time, one forward and one backward. The latter could be a computation of the loss gradient (as in backpropagation through time), or an inference algorithm (as in the RTS/Kalman smoother). The backward pass in particular is computationally expensive (since it is inherently serial and cannot exploit GPUs), and difficult to map onto biological processes. Work-arounds have been proposed; here we explore a very different one: requiring the generative model to learn the joint distribution over current and previous states, rather than merely the transition probabilities. We show on toy datasets that different architectures employing this principle can learn aspects of the data typically requiring the backward pass.
Although the Bayesian paradigm offers a formal framework for estimating the entire probability distribution over uncertain parameters, its online implementation can be challenging due to high computational costs. We suggest the Adaptive Recursive Markov Chain Monte Carlo (ARMCMC) method, which eliminates the shortcomings of conventional online techniques while computing the entire probability density function of model parameters. The limitations to Gaussian noise, the application to only linear in the parameters (LIP) systems, and the persistent excitation (PE) needs are some of these drawbacks. In ARMCMC, a temporal forgetting factor (TFF)-based variable jump distribution is proposed. The forgetting factor can be presented adaptively using the TFF in many dynamical systems as an alternative to a constant hyperparameter. By offering a trade-off between exploitation and exploration, the specific jump distribution has been optimised towards hybrid/multi-modal systems that permit inferences among modes. These trade-off are adjusted based on parameter evolution rate. We demonstrate that ARMCMC requires fewer samples than conventional MCMC methods to achieve the same precision and reliability. We demonstrate our approach using parameter estimation in a soft bending actuator and the Hunt-Crossley dynamic model, two challenging hybrid/multi-modal benchmarks. Additionally, we compare our method with recursive least squares and the particle filter, and show that our technique has significantly more accurate point estimates as well as a decrease in tracking error of the value of interest.
Incompleteness is a common problem for existing knowledge graphs (KGs), and the completion of KG which aims to predict links between entities is challenging. Most existing KG completion methods only consider the direct relation between nodes and ignore the relation paths which contain useful information for link prediction. Recently, a few methods take relation paths into consideration but pay less attention to the order of relations in paths which is important for reasoning. In addition, these path-based models always ignore nonlinear contributions of path features for link prediction. To solve these problems, we propose a novel KG completion method named OPTransE. Instead of embedding both entities of a relation into the same latent space as in previous methods, we project the head entity and the tail entity of each relation into different spaces to guarantee the order of relations in the path. Meanwhile, we adopt a pooling strategy to extract nonlinear and complex features of different paths to further improve the performance of link prediction. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed model OPTransE performs better than state-of-the-art methods.
It is important to detect anomalous inputs when deploying machine learning systems. The use of larger and more complex inputs in deep learning magnifies the difficulty of distinguishing between anomalous and in-distribution examples. At the same time, diverse image and text data are available in enormous quantities. We propose leveraging these data to improve deep anomaly detection by training anomaly detectors against an auxiliary dataset of outliers, an approach we call Outlier Exposure (OE). This enables anomaly detectors to generalize and detect unseen anomalies. In extensive experiments on natural language processing and small- and large-scale vision tasks, we find that Outlier Exposure significantly improves detection performance. We also observe that cutting-edge generative models trained on CIFAR-10 may assign higher likelihoods to SVHN images than to CIFAR-10 images; we use OE to mitigate this issue. We also analyze the flexibility and robustness of Outlier Exposure, and identify characteristics of the auxiliary dataset that improve performance.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples resulting from adding small-magnitude perturbations to inputs. Such adversarial examples can mislead DNNs to produce adversary-selected results. Different attack strategies have been proposed to generate adversarial examples, but how to produce them with high perceptual quality and more efficiently requires more research efforts. In this paper, we propose AdvGAN to generate adversarial examples with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances. For AdvGAN, once the generator is trained, it can generate adversarial perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to potentially accelerate adversarial training as defenses. We apply AdvGAN in both semi-whitebox and black-box attack settings. In semi-whitebox attacks, there is no need to access the original target model after the generator is trained, in contrast to traditional white-box attacks. In black-box attacks, we dynamically train a distilled model for the black-box model and optimize the generator accordingly. Adversarial examples generated by AdvGAN on different target models have high attack success rate under state-of-the-art defenses compared to other attacks. Our attack has placed the first with 92.76% accuracy on a public MNIST black-box attack challenge.