Queueing systems are widely applicable stochastic models with use cases in communication networks, healthcare, service systems, etc. Although their optimal control has been extensively studied, most existing approaches assume perfect knowledge of system parameters. Of course, this assumption rarely holds in practice where there is parameter uncertainty, thus motivating a recent line of work on bandit learning for queueing systems. This nascent stream of research focuses on the asymptotic performance of the proposed algorithms. In this paper, we argue that an asymptotic metric, which focuses on late-stage performance, is insufficient to capture the intrinsic statistical complexity of learning in queueing systems which typically occurs in the early stage. Instead, we propose the Cost of Learning in Queueing (CLQ), a new metric that quantifies the maximum increase in time-averaged queue length caused by parameter uncertainty. We characterize the CLQ of a single-queue multi-server system, and then extend these results to multi-queue multi-server systems and networks of queues. In establishing our results, we propose a unified analysis framework for CLQ that bridges Lyapunov and bandit analysis, which could be of independent interest.
Modern data sets, such as those in healthcare and e-commerce, are often derived from many individuals or systems but have insufficient data from each source alone to separately estimate individual, often high-dimensional, model parameters. If there is shared structure among systems however, it may be possible to leverage data from other systems to help estimate individual parameters, which could otherwise be non-identifiable. In this paper, we assume systems share a latent low-dimensional parameter space and propose a method for recovering $d$-dimensional parameters for $N$ different linear systems, even when there are only $T<d$ observations per system. To do so, we develop a three-step algorithm which estimates the low-dimensional subspace spanned by the systems' parameters and produces refined parameter estimates within the subspace. We provide finite sample subspace estimation error guarantees for our proposed method. Finally, we experimentally validate our method on simulations with i.i.d. regression data and as well as correlated time series data.
Multivariate networks are commonly found in real-world data-driven applications. Uncovering and understanding the relations of interest in multivariate networks is not a trivial task. This paper presents a visual analytics workflow for studying multivariate networks to extract associations between different structural and semantic characteristics of the networks (e.g., what are the combinations of attributes largely relating to the density of a social network?). The workflow consists of a neural-network-based learning phase to classify the data based on the chosen input and output attributes, a dimensionality reduction and optimization phase to produce a simplified set of results for examination, and finally an interpreting phase conducted by the user through an interactive visualization interface. A key part of our design is a composite variable construction step that remodels nonlinear features obtained by neural networks into linear features that are intuitive to interpret. We demonstrate the capabilities of this workflow with multiple case studies on networks derived from social media usage and also evaluate the workflow through an expert interview.
We propose a simple generalization of standard and empirically successful decision tree learning algorithms such as ID3, C4.5, and CART. These algorithms, which have been central to machine learning for decades, are greedy in nature: they grow a decision tree by iteratively splitting on the best attribute. Our algorithm, Top-$k$, considers the $k$ best attributes as possible splits instead of just the single best attribute. We demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, the power of this simple generalization. We first prove a {\sl greediness hierarchy theorem} showing that for every $k \in \mathbb{N}$, Top-$(k+1)$ can be dramatically more powerful than Top-$k$: there are data distributions for which the former achieves accuracy $1-\varepsilon$, whereas the latter only achieves accuracy $\frac1{2}+\varepsilon$. We then show, through extensive experiments, that Top-$k$ outperforms the two main approaches to decision tree learning: classic greedy algorithms and more recent "optimal decision tree" algorithms. On one hand, Top-$k$ consistently enjoys significant accuracy gains over greedy algorithms across a wide range of benchmarks. On the other hand, Top-$k$ is markedly more scalable than optimal decision tree algorithms and is able to handle dataset and feature set sizes that remain far beyond the reach of these algorithms.
Several task and motion planning algorithms have been proposed recently to design paths for mobile robot teams with collaborative high-level missions specified using formal languages, such as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). However, the designed paths often lack reactivity to failures of robot capabilities (e.g., sensing, mobility, or manipulation) that can occur due to unanticipated events (e.g., human intervention or system malfunctioning) which in turn may compromise mission performance. To address this novel challenge, in this paper, we propose a new resilient mission planning algorithm for teams of heterogeneous robots with collaborative LTL missions. The robots are heterogeneous with respect to their capabilities while the mission requires applications of these skills at certain areas in the environment in a temporal/logical order. The proposed method designs paths that can adapt to unexpected failures of robot capabilities. This is accomplished by re-allocating sub-tasks to the robots based on their currently functioning skills while minimally disrupting the existing team motion plans. We provide experiments and theoretical guarantees demonstrating the efficiency and resiliency of the proposed algorithm.
Establishing whether language models can use contextual information in a human-plausible way is important to ensure their safe adoption in real-world settings. However, the questions of when and which parts of the context affect model generations are typically tackled separately, and current plausibility evaluations are practically limited to a handful of artificial benchmarks. To address this, we introduce Plausibility Evaluation of Context Reliance (PECoRe), an end-to-end interpretability framework designed to quantify context usage in language models' generations. Our approach leverages model internals to (i) contrastively identify context-sensitive target tokens in generated texts and (ii) link them to contextual cues justifying their prediction. We use PECoRe to quantify the plausibility of context-aware machine translation models, comparing model rationales with human annotations across several discourse-level phenomena. Finally, we apply our method to unannotated generations to identify context-mediated predictions and highlight instances of (im)plausible context usage in model translations.
Distributed deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to reduce the computational burden of mobile devices and decrease the end-to-end inference latency in edge computing scenarios. While distributed DNNs have been studied, to the best of our knowledge the resilience of distributed DNNs to adversarial action still remains an open problem. In this paper, we fill the existing research gap by rigorously analyzing the robustness of distributed DNNs against adversarial action. We cast this problem in the context of information theory and introduce two new measurements for distortion and robustness. Our theoretical findings indicate that (i) assuming the same level of information distortion, latent features are always more robust than input representations; (ii) the adversarial robustness is jointly determined by the feature dimension and the generalization capability of the DNN. To test our theoretical findings, we perform extensive experimental analysis by considering 6 different DNN architectures, 6 different approaches for distributed DNN and 10 different adversarial attacks to the ImageNet-1K dataset. Our experimental results support our theoretical findings by showing that the compressed latent representations can reduce the success rate of adversarial attacks by 88% in the best case and by 57% on the average compared to attacks to the input space.
Despite the impressive generalization capabilities of deep neural networks, they have been repeatedly shown to be overconfident when they are wrong. Fixing this issue is known as model calibration, and has consequently received much attention in the form of modified training schemes and post-training calibration procedures such as temperature scaling. While temperature scaling is frequently used because of its simplicity, it is often outperformed by modified training schemes. In this work, we identify a specific bottleneck for the performance of temperature scaling. We show that for empirical risk minimizers for a general set of distributions in which the supports of classes have overlaps, the performance of temperature scaling degrades with the amount of overlap between classes, and asymptotically becomes no better than random when there are a large number of classes. On the other hand, we prove that optimizing a modified form of the empirical risk induced by the Mixup data augmentation technique can in fact lead to reasonably good calibration performance, showing that training-time calibration may be necessary in some situations. We also verify that our theoretical results reflect practice by showing that Mixup significantly outperforms empirical risk minimization (with respect to multiple calibration metrics) on image classification benchmarks with class overlaps introduced in the form of label noise.
Due to data privacy constraints, data sharing among multiple clinical centers is restricted, which impedes the development of high performance deep learning models from multicenter collaboration. Naive weight transfer methods share intermediate model weights without raw data and hence can bypass data privacy restrictions. However, performance drops are typically observed when the model is transferred from one center to the next because of the forgetting problem. Incremental transfer learning, which combines peer-to-peer federated learning and domain incremental learning, can overcome the data privacy issue and meanwhile preserve model performance by using continual learning techniques. In this work, a conventional domain/task incremental learning framework is adapted for incremental transfer learning. A comprehensive survey on the efficacy of different regularization-based continual learning methods for multicenter collaboration is performed. The influences of data heterogeneity, classifier head setting, network optimizer, model initialization, center order, and weight transfer type have been investigated thoroughly. Our framework is publicly accessible to the research community for further development.
Due to their increasing spread, confidence in neural network predictions became more and more important. However, basic neural networks do not deliver certainty estimates or suffer from over or under confidence. Many researchers have been working on understanding and quantifying uncertainty in a neural network's prediction. As a result, different types and sources of uncertainty have been identified and a variety of approaches to measure and quantify uncertainty in neural networks have been proposed. This work gives a comprehensive overview of uncertainty estimation in neural networks, reviews recent advances in the field, highlights current challenges, and identifies potential research opportunities. It is intended to give anyone interested in uncertainty estimation in neural networks a broad overview and introduction, without presupposing prior knowledge in this field. A comprehensive introduction to the most crucial sources of uncertainty is given and their separation into reducible model uncertainty and not reducible data uncertainty is presented. The modeling of these uncertainties based on deterministic neural networks, Bayesian neural networks, ensemble of neural networks, and test-time data augmentation approaches is introduced and different branches of these fields as well as the latest developments are discussed. For a practical application, we discuss different measures of uncertainty, approaches for the calibration of neural networks and give an overview of existing baselines and implementations. Different examples from the wide spectrum of challenges in different fields give an idea of the needs and challenges regarding uncertainties in practical applications. Additionally, the practical limitations of current methods for mission- and safety-critical real world applications are discussed and an outlook on the next steps towards a broader usage of such methods is given.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in power systems, ranging from pattern recognition to signal processing. The data in these tasks is typically represented in Euclidean domains. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of applications in power systems, where data are collected from non-Euclidean domains and represented as the graph-structured data with high dimensional features and interdependency among nodes. The complexity of graph-structured data has brought significant challenges to the existing deep neural networks defined in Euclidean domains. Recently, many studies on extending deep neural networks for graph-structured data in power systems have emerged. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in power systems is proposed. Specifically, several classical paradigms of GNNs structures (e.g., graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent neural networks, graph attention networks, graph generative networks, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks, and hybrid forms of GNNs) are summarized, and key applications in power systems such as fault diagnosis, power prediction, power flow calculation, and data generation are reviewed in detail. Furthermore, main issues and some research trends about the applications of GNNs in power systems are discussed.