Bayesian coresets approximate a posterior distribution by building a small weighted subset of the data points. Any inference procedure that is too computationally expensive to be run on the full posterior can instead be run inexpensively on the coreset, with results that approximate those on the full data. However, current approaches are limited by either a significant run-time or the need for the user to specify a low-cost approximation to the full posterior. We propose a Bayesian coreset construction algorithm that first selects a uniformly random subset of data, and then optimizes the weights using a novel quasi-Newton method. Our algorithm is a simple to implement, black-box method, that does not require the user to specify a low-cost posterior approximation. It is the first to come with a general high-probability bound on the KL divergence of the output coreset posterior. Experiments demonstrate that our method provides significant improvements in coreset quality against alternatives with comparable construction times, with far less storage cost and user input required.
We consider the problem of finding a maximal independent set (MIS) in the shared blackboard communication model with vertex-partitioned inputs. There are $n$ players corresponding to vertices of an undirected graph, and each player sees the edges incident on its vertex -- this way, each edge is known by both its endpoints and is thus shared by two players. The players communicate in simultaneous rounds by posting their messages on a shared blackboard visible to all players, with the goal of computing an MIS of the graph. While the MIS problem is well studied in other distributed models, and while shared blackboard is, perhaps, the simplest broadcast model, lower bounds for our problem were only known against one-round protocols. We present a lower bound on the round-communication tradeoff for computing an MIS in this model. Specifically, we show that when $r$ rounds of interaction are allowed, at least one player needs to communicate $\Omega(n^{1/20^{r+1}})$ bits. In particular, with logarithmic bandwidth, finding an MIS requires $\Omega(\log\log{n})$ rounds. This lower bound can be compared with the algorithm of Ghaffari, Gouleakis, Konrad, Mitrovi\'c, and Rubinfeld [PODC 2018] that solves MIS in $O(\log\log{n})$ rounds but with a logarithmic bandwidth for an average player. Additionally, our lower bound further extends to the closely related problem of maximal bipartite matching. To prove our results, we devise a new round elimination framework, which we call partial-input embedding, that may also be useful in future work for proving round-sensitive lower bounds in the presence of edge-sharing between players. Finally, we discuss several implications of our results to multi-round (adaptive) distributed sketching algorithms, broadcast congested clique, and to the welfare maximization problem in two-sided matching markets.
Hypercomplex neural networks have proven to reduce the overall number of parameters while ensuring valuable performance by leveraging the properties of Clifford algebras. Recently, hypercomplex linear layers have been further improved by involving efficient parameterized Kronecker products. In this paper, we define the parameterization of hypercomplex convolutional layers and introduce the family of parameterized hypercomplex neural networks (PHNNs) that are lightweight and efficient large-scale models. Our method grasps the convolution rules and the filter organization directly from data without requiring a rigidly predefined domain structure to follow. PHNNs are flexible to operate in any user-defined or tuned domain, from 1D to $n$D regardless of whether the algebra rules are preset. Such a malleability allows processing multidimensional inputs in their natural domain without annexing further dimensions, as done, instead, in quaternion neural networks for 3D inputs like color images. As a result, the proposed family of PHNNs operates with $1/n$ free parameters as regards its analog in the real domain. We demonstrate the versatility of this approach to multiple domains of application by performing experiments on various image datasets as well as audio datasets in which our method outperforms real and quaternion-valued counterparts. Full code is available at: //github.com/eleGAN23/HyperNets.
The use of neural networks has been very successful in a wide variety of applications. However, it has recently been observed that it is difficult to generalize the performance of neural networks under the condition of distributional shift. Several efforts have been made to identify potential out-of-distribution inputs. Although existing literature has made significant progress with regard to images and textual data, finance has been overlooked. The aim of this paper is to investigate the distribution shift in the credit scoring problem, one of the most important applications of finance. For the potential distribution shift problem, we propose a novel two-stage model. Using the out-of-distribution detection method, data is first separated into confident and unconfident sets. As a second step, we utilize the domain knowledge with a mean-variance optimization in order to provide reliable bounds for unconfident samples. Using empirical results, we demonstrate that our model offers reliable predictions for the vast majority of datasets. It is only a small portion of the dataset that is inherently difficult to judge, and we leave them to the judgment of human beings. Based on the two-stage model, highly confident predictions have been made and potential risks associated with the model have been significantly reduced.
The significant presence of demand charges in electric bills motivates large-load customers to utilize energy storage to reduce the peak procurement from the grid. We herein study the problem of energy storage allocation for peak minimization, under the online setting where irrevocable decisions are sequentially made without knowing future demands. The problem is uniquely challenging due to (i) the coupling of online decisions across time imposed by the inventory constraints and (ii) the noncumulative nature of the peak procurement. We apply the CR-Pursuit framework and address the challenges unique to our minimization problem to design an online algorithm achieving the optimal competitive ratio (CR) among all online algorithms. We show that the optimal CR can be computed in polynomial time by solving a linear number of linear-fractional problems. More importantly, we generalize our approach to develop an \emph{anytime-optimal} online algorithm that achieves the best possible CR at any epoch, given the inputs and online decisions so far. The algorithm retains the optimal worst-case performance and attains adaptive average-case performance. Trace-driven simulations show that our algorithm can decrease the peak demand by an extra 19% compared to baseline alternatives under typical settings.
We consider the problem of estimating the topology of multiple networks from nodal observations, where these networks are assumed to be drawn from the same (unknown) random graph model. We adopt a graphon as our random graph model, which is a nonparametric model from which graphs of potentially different sizes can be drawn. The versatility of graphons allows us to tackle the joint inference problem even for the cases where the graphs to be recovered contain different number of nodes and lack precise alignment across the graphs. Our solution is based on combining a maximum likelihood penalty with graphon estimation schemes and can be used to augment existing network inference methods. The proposed joint network and graphon estimation is further enhanced with the introduction of a robust method for noisy graph sampling information. We validate our proposed approach by comparing its performance against competing methods in synthetic and real-world datasets.
Bayesian Neural Networks with Latent Variables (BNN+LVs) capture predictive uncertainty by explicitly modeling model uncertainty (via priors on network weights) and environmental stochasticity (via a latent input noise variable). In this work, we first show that BNN+LV suffers from a serious form of non-identifiability: explanatory power can be transferred between the model parameters and latent variables while fitting the data equally well. We demonstrate that as a result, in the limit of infinite data, the posterior mode over the network weights and latent variables is asymptotically biased away from the ground-truth. Due to this asymptotic bias, traditional inference methods may in practice yield parameters that generalize poorly and misestimate uncertainty. Next, we develop a novel inference procedure that explicitly mitigates the effects of likelihood non-identifiability during training and yields high-quality predictions as well as uncertainty estimates. We demonstrate that our inference method improves upon benchmark methods across a range of synthetic and real data-sets.
The increasing size of recently proposed Neural Networks makes it hard to implement them on embedded devices, where memory, battery and computational power are a non-trivial bottleneck. For this reason during the last years network compression literature has been thriving and a large number of solutions has been been published to reduce both the number of operations and the parameters involved with the models. Unfortunately, most of these reducing techniques are actually heuristic methods and usually require at least one re-training step to recover the accuracy. The need of procedures for model reduction is well-known also in the fields of Verification and Performances Evaluation, where large efforts have been devoted to the definition of quotients that preserve the observable underlying behaviour. In this paper we try to bridge the gap between the most popular and very effective network reduction strategies and formal notions, such as lumpability, introduced for verification and evaluation of Markov Chains. Elaborating on lumpability we propose a pruning approach that reduces the number of neurons in a network without using any data or fine-tuning, while completely preserving the exact behaviour. Relaxing the constraints on the exact definition of the quotienting method we can give a formal explanation of some of the most common reduction techniques.
The Bayesian paradigm has the potential to solve core issues of deep neural networks such as poor calibration and data inefficiency. Alas, scaling Bayesian inference to large weight spaces often requires restrictive approximations. In this work, we show that it suffices to perform inference over a small subset of model weights in order to obtain accurate predictive posteriors. The other weights are kept as point estimates. This subnetwork inference framework enables us to use expressive, otherwise intractable, posterior approximations over such subsets. In particular, we implement subnetwork linearized Laplace: We first obtain a MAP estimate of all weights and then infer a full-covariance Gaussian posterior over a subnetwork. We propose a subnetwork selection strategy that aims to maximally preserve the model's predictive uncertainty. Empirically, our approach is effective compared to ensembles and less expressive posterior approximations over full networks.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are information processing architectures for signals supported on graphs. They are presented here as generalizations of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in which individual layers contain banks of graph convolutional filters instead of banks of classical convolutional filters. Otherwise, GNNs operate as CNNs. Filters are composed with pointwise nonlinearities and stacked in layers. It is shown that GNN architectures exhibit equivariance to permutation and stability to graph deformations. These properties provide a measure of explanation respecting the good performance of GNNs that can be observed empirically. It is also shown that if graphs converge to a limit object, a graphon, GNNs converge to a corresponding limit object, a graphon neural network. This convergence justifies the transferability of GNNs across networks with different number of nodes.
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.