Feature selection in clustering is a hard task which involves simultaneously the discovery of relevant clusters as well as relevant variables with respect to these clusters. While feature selection algorithms are often model-based through optimised model selection or strong assumptions on $p(\pmb{x})$, we introduce a discriminative clustering model trying to maximise a geometry-aware generalisation of the mutual information called GEMINI with a simple $\ell_1$ penalty: the Sparse GEMINI. This algorithm avoids the burden of combinatorial feature subset exploration and is easily scalable to high-dimensional data and large amounts of samples while only designing a clustering model $p_\theta(y|\pmb{x})$. We demonstrate the performances of Sparse GEMINI on synthetic datasets as well as large-scale datasets. Our results show that Sparse GEMINI is a competitive algorithm and has the ability to select relevant subsets of variables with respect to the clustering without using relevance criteria or prior hypotheses.
When estimating a regression model, we might have data where some labels are missing, or our data might be biased by a selection mechanism. When the response or selection mechanism is ignorable (i.e., independent of the response variable given the features) one can use off-the-shelf regression methods; in the nonignorable case one typically has to adjust for bias. We observe that privileged data (i.e. data that is only available during training) might render a nonignorable selection mechanism ignorable, and we refer to this scenario as Privilegedly Missing at Random (PMAR). We propose a novel imputation-based regression method, named repeated regression, that is suitable for PMAR. We also consider an importance weighted regression method, and a doubly robust combination of the two. The proposed methods are easy to implement with most popular out-of-the-box regression algorithms. We empirically assess the performance of the proposed methods with extensive simulated experiments and on a synthetically augmented real-world dataset. We conclude that repeated regression can appropriately correct for bias, and can have considerable advantage over weighted regression, especially when extrapolating to regions of the feature space where response is never observed.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used as aerial base stations to provide ad hoc communications infrastructure. Building upon prior research efforts which consider either static nodes, 2D trajectories or single UAV systems, this paper focuses on the use of multiple UAVs for providing wireless communication to mobile users in the absence of terrestrial communications infrastructure. In particular, we jointly optimize UAV 3D trajectory and NOMA power allocation to maximize system throughput. Firstly, a weighted K-means-based clustering algorithm establishes UAV-user associations at regular intervals. The efficacy of training a novel Shared Deep Q-Network (SDQN) with action masking is then explored. Unlike training each UAV separately using DQN, the SDQN reduces training time by using the experiences of multiple UAVs instead of a single agent. We also show that SDQN can be used to train a multi-agent system with differing action spaces. Simulation results confirm that: 1) training a shared DQN outperforms a conventional DQN in terms of maximum system throughput (+20%) and training time (-10%); 2) it can converge for agents with different action spaces, yielding a 9% increase in throughput compared to mutual learning algorithms; and 3) combining NOMA with an SDQN architecture enables the network to achieve a better sum rate compared with existing baseline schemes.
Obtaining large-scale labeled object detection dataset can be costly and time-consuming, as it involves annotating images with bounding boxes and class labels. Thus, some specialized active learning methods have been proposed to reduce the cost by selecting either coarse-grained samples or fine-grained instances from unlabeled data for labeling. However, the former approaches suffer from redundant labeling, while the latter methods generally lead to training instability and sampling bias. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach called Multi-scale Region-based Active Learning (MuRAL) for object detection. MuRAL identifies informative regions of various scales to reduce annotation costs for well-learned objects and improve training performance. The informative region score is designed to consider both the predicted confidence of instances and the distribution of each object category, enabling our method to focus more on difficult-to-detect classes. Moreover, MuRAL employs a scale-aware selection strategy that ensures diverse regions are selected from different scales for labeling and downstream finetuning, which enhances training stability. Our proposed method surpasses all existing coarse-grained and fine-grained baselines on Cityscapes and MS COCO datasets, and demonstrates significant improvement in difficult category performance.
There is a growing trend of cyberattacks against Internet of Things (IoT) devices; moreover, the sophistication and motivation of those attacks is increasing. The vast scale of IoT, diverse hardware and software, and being typically placed in uncontrolled environments make traditional IT security mechanisms such as signature-based intrusion detection and prevention systems challenging to integrate. They also struggle to cope with the rapidly evolving IoT threat landscape due to long delays between the analysis and publication of the detection rules. Machine learning methods have shown faster response to emerging threats; however, model training architectures like cloud or edge computing face multiple drawbacks in IoT settings, including network overhead and data isolation arising from the large scale and heterogeneity that characterizes these networks. This work presents an architecture for training unsupervised models for network intrusion detection in large, distributed IoT and Industrial IoT (IIoT) deployments. We leverage Federated Learning (FL) to collaboratively train between peers and reduce isolation and network overhead problems. We build upon it to include an unsupervised device clustering algorithm fully integrated into the FL pipeline to address the heterogeneity issues that arise in FL settings. The architecture is implemented and evaluated using a testbed that includes various emulated IoT/IIoT devices and attackers interacting in a complex network topology comprising 100 emulated devices, 30 switches and 10 routers. The anomaly detection models are evaluated on real attacks performed by the testbed's threat actors, including the entire Mirai malware lifecycle, an additional botnet based on the Merlin command and control server and other red-teaming tools performing scanning activities and multiple attacks targeting the emulated devices.
The estimation of the generalization error of classifiers often relies on a validation set. Such a set is hardly available in few-shot learning scenarios, a highly disregarded shortcoming in the field. In these scenarios, it is common to rely on features extracted from pre-trained neural networks combined with distance-based classifiers such as nearest class mean. In this work, we introduce a Gaussian model of the feature distribution. By estimating the parameters of this model, we are able to predict the generalization error on new classification tasks with few samples. We observe that accurate distance estimates between class-conditional densities are the key to accurate estimates of the generalization performance. Therefore, we propose an unbiased estimator for these distances and integrate it in our numerical analysis. We empirically show that our approach outperforms alternatives such as the leave-one-out cross-validation strategy.
Clustering is a fundamental machine learning task which has been widely studied in the literature. Classic clustering methods follow the assumption that data are represented as features in a vectorized form through various representation learning techniques. As the data become increasingly complicated and complex, the shallow (traditional) clustering methods can no longer handle the high-dimensional data type. With the huge success of deep learning, especially the deep unsupervised learning, many representation learning techniques with deep architectures have been proposed in the past decade. Recently, the concept of Deep Clustering, i.e., jointly optimizing the representation learning and clustering, has been proposed and hence attracted growing attention in the community. Motivated by the tremendous success of deep learning in clustering, one of the most fundamental machine learning tasks, and the large number of recent advances in this direction, in this paper we conduct a comprehensive survey on deep clustering by proposing a new taxonomy of different state-of-the-art approaches. We summarize the essential components of deep clustering and categorize existing methods by the ways they design interactions between deep representation learning and clustering. Moreover, this survey also provides the popular benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics and open-source implementations to clearly illustrate various experimental settings. Last but not least, we discuss the practical applications of deep clustering and suggest challenging topics deserving further investigations as future directions.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used for document classification. However, most existing methods are based on static word co-occurrence graphs without sentence-level information, which poses three challenges:(1) word ambiguity, (2) word synonymity, and (3) dynamic contextual dependency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel GNN-based sparse structure learning model for inductive document classification. Specifically, a document-level graph is initially generated by a disjoint union of sentence-level word co-occurrence graphs. Our model collects a set of trainable edges connecting disjoint words between sentences and employs structure learning to sparsely select edges with dynamic contextual dependencies. Graphs with sparse structures can jointly exploit local and global contextual information in documents through GNNs. For inductive learning, the refined document graph is further fed into a general readout function for graph-level classification and optimization in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms most state-of-the-art results, and reveal the necessity to learn sparse structures for each document.
Modern neural network training relies heavily on data augmentation for improved generalization. After the initial success of label-preserving augmentations, there has been a recent surge of interest in label-perturbing approaches, which combine features and labels across training samples to smooth the learned decision surface. In this paper, we propose a new augmentation method that leverages the first and second moments extracted and re-injected by feature normalization. We replace the moments of the learned features of one training image by those of another, and also interpolate the target labels. As our approach is fast, operates entirely in feature space, and mixes different signals than prior methods, one can effectively combine it with existing augmentation methods. We demonstrate its efficacy across benchmark data sets in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing, where it consistently improves the generalization performance of highly competitive baseline networks.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
State-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) benefits a lot from multi-task learning (MTL), which learns multiple related tasks simultaneously to obtain shared or mutually related representations for different tasks. The most widely-used MTL CNN structure is based on an empirical or heuristic split on a specific layer (e.g., the last convolutional layer) to minimize different task-specific losses. However, this heuristic sharing/splitting strategy may be harmful to the final performance of one or multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN structure for MTL, which enables automatic feature fusing at every layer. Specifically, we first concatenate features from different tasks according to their channel dimension, and then formulate the feature fusing problem as discriminative dimensionality reduction. We show that this discriminative dimensionality reduction can be done by 1x1 Convolution, Batch Normalization, and Weight Decay in one CNN, which we refer to as Neural Discriminative Dimensionality Reduction (NDDR). We perform ablation analysis in details for different configurations in training the network. The experiments carried out on different network structures and different task sets demonstrate the promising performance and desirable generalizability of our proposed method.