Clustering is at the very core of machine learning, and its applications proliferate with the increasing availability of data. However, as datasets grow, comparing clusterings with an adjustment for chance becomes computationally difficult, preventing unbiased ground-truth comparisons and solution selection. We propose FastAMI, a Monte Carlo-based method to efficiently approximate the Adjusted Mutual Information (AMI) and extend it to the Standardized Mutual Information (SMI). The approach is compared with the exact calculation and a recently developed variant of the AMI based on pairwise permutations, using both synthetic and real data. In contrast to the exact calculation our method is fast enough to enable these adjusted information-theoretic comparisons for large datasets while maintaining considerably more accurate results than the pairwise approach.
Generating accurate extremes from an observational data set is crucial when seeking to estimate risks associated with the occurrence of future extremes which could be larger than those already observed. Applications range from the occurrence of natural disasters to financial crashes. Generative approaches from the machine learning community do not apply to extreme samples without careful adaptation. Besides, asymptotic results from extreme value theory (EVT) give a theoretical framework to model multivariate extreme events, especially through the notion of multivariate regular variation. Bridging these two fields, this paper details a variational autoencoder (VAE) approach for sampling multivariate heavy-tailed distributions, i.e., distributions likely to have extremes of particularly large intensities. We illustrate the relevance of our approach on a synthetic data set and on a real data set of discharge measurements along the Danube river network. The latter shows the potential of our approach for flood risks' assessment. In addition to outperforming the standard VAE for the tested data sets, we also provide a comparison with a competing EVT-based generative approach. On the tested cases, our approach improves the learning of the dependency structure between extremes.
Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have shown some human-like cognitive abilities. For comparing these abilities of different models, several benchmarks (i.e. sets of standard test questions) from different fields (e.g., Literature, Biology and Psychology) are often adopted and the test results under traditional metrics such as accuracy, recall and F1, are reported. However, such way for evaluating LLMs can be inefficient and inaccurate from the cognitive science perspective. Inspired by Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) used in psychometrics, we propose an adaptive testing framework for LLM evaluation. Rather than using a standard test set and simply reporting accuracy, this approach dynamically adjusts the characteristics of the test questions, such as difficulty, based on the model's performance. This allows for a more accurate estimation of the model's abilities, using fewer questions. More importantly, it allows LLMs to be compared with humans easily, which is essential for NLP models that aim for human-level ability. Our diagnostic reports have found that ChatGPT often behaves like a ``careless student'', prone to slip and occasionally guessing the questions. We conduct a fine-grained diagnosis and rank the latest 6 instruction-tuned LLMs from three aspects of Subject Knowledge, Mathematical Reasoning, and Programming, where GPT4 can outperform other models significantly and reach the cognitive ability of middle-level students. Different tests for different models using efficient adaptive testing -- we believe this has the potential to become a new norm in evaluating large language models.
As a subjective metric to evaluate the quality of synthesized speech, Mean opinion score~(MOS) usually requires multiple annotators to score the same speech. Such an annotation approach requires a lot of manpower and is also time-consuming. MOS prediction model for automatic evaluation can significantly reduce labor cost. In previous works, it is difficult to accurately rank the quality of speech when the MOS scores are close. However, in practical applications, it is more important to correctly rank the quality of synthesis systems or sentences than simply predicting MOS scores. Meanwhile, as each annotator scores multiple audios during annotation, the score is probably a relative value based on the first or the first few speech scores given by the annotator. Motivated by the above two points, we propose a general framework for MOS prediction based on pair comparison (MOSPC), and we utilize C-Mixup algorithm to enhance the generalization performance of MOSPC. The experiments on BVCC and VCC2018 show that our framework outperforms the baselines on most of the correlation coefficient metrics, especially on the metric KTAU related to quality ranking. And our framework also surpasses the strong baseline in ranking accuracy on each fine-grained segment. These results indicate that our framework contributes to improving the ranking accuracy of speech quality.
The topology-aware Massively Parallel Computation (MPC) model is proposed and studied recently, which enhances the classical MPC model by the awareness of network topology. The work of Hu et al. on topology-aware MPC model considers only the tree topology. In this paper a more general case is considered, where the underlying network is a weighted complete graph. We then call this model as Weighted Massively Parallel Computation (WMPC) model, and study the problem of minimizing communication cost under it. Two communication cost minimization problems are defined based on different pattern of communication, which are the Data Redistribution Problem and Data Allocation Problem. We also define four kinds of objective functions for communication cost, which consider the total cost, bottleneck cost, maximum of send and receive cost, and summation of send and receive cost, respectively. Combining the two problems in different communication pattern with the four kinds of objective cost functions, 8 problems are obtained. The hardness results of the 8 problems make up the content of this paper. With rigorous proof, we prove that some of the 8 problems are in P, some FPT, some NP-complete, and some W[1]-complete.
Evaluating human exposure to environmental hazards is crucial for identifying susceptible communities and devising targeted health policies. Standard environmental hazard exposure assessment methods have been primarily based on place of residence, an approach which neglect individuals hazard exposures due to the daily life activities and mobility outside home neighborhood. To address this limitation, this study proposes a novel mobility-based index for hazard exposure evaluation. Using large-scale and fine-grained human mobility data, we quantify the extent of population dwell time in high-environmental-hazard places in 239 U.S. counties for three major environmental hazards: air pollution, heat, and toxic sites. Subsequently we explore the extent to which human mobility extends the reach of environmental hazards and also lead to the emergence of latent exposure for populations living outside high hazard areas with relatively considerable dwell time in high hazard areas. The findings help quantify environmental hazard exposure more reliably, considering the role of human mobility and activities. The interplay of spatial clustering in high-hazard regions and human movement trends creates environmental hazard traps intensifying exposure. Poor and ethnic minority residents disproportionately face multiple types of environmental hazards, aggravating potential health impacts. This data-driven evidence supports the severity of these injustices. We also studied latent exposure arising from visits outside residents' home areas, revealing millions population having 5% to10% of daily activities occur in high-exposure zones. Despite living in perceived safe areas, human mobility could expose millions of residents to different hazards. These findings provide crucial insights for targeted policies to mitigate these severe environmental injustices
How can we tell whether two neural networks are utilizing the same internal processes for a particular computation? This question is pertinent for multiple subfields of both neuroscience and machine learning, including neuroAI, mechanistic interpretability, and brain-machine interfaces. Standard approaches for comparing neural networks focus on the spatial geometry of latent states. Yet in recurrent networks, computations are implemented at the level of neural dynamics, which do not have a simple one-to-one mapping with geometry. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel similarity metric that compares two systems at the level of their dynamics. Our method incorporates two components: Using recent advances in data-driven dynamical systems theory, we learn a high-dimensional linear system that accurately captures core features of the original nonlinear dynamics. Next, we compare these linear approximations via a novel extension of Procrustes Analysis that accounts for how vector fields change under orthogonal transformation. Via four case studies, we demonstrate that our method effectively identifies and distinguishes dynamic structure in recurrent neural networks (RNNs), whereas geometric methods fall short. We additionally show that our method can distinguish learning rules in an unsupervised manner. Our method therefore opens the door to novel data-driven analyses of the temporal structure of neural computation, and to more rigorous testing of RNNs as models of the brain.
Traditional techniques for calculating outstanding claim liabilities such as the chain ladder are notoriously at risk of being distorted by outliers in past claims data. Unfortunately, the literature in robust methods of reserving is scant, with notable exceptions such as Verdonck and Debruyne (2011) and Verdonck and Van Wouwe (2011). In this paper, we put forward two alternative robust bivariate chain-ladder techniques to extend the approach of Verdonck and Van Wouwe (2011). The first technique is based on Adjusted Outlyingness (Hubert and Van der Veeken, 2008) and explicitly incorporates skewness into the analysis whilst providing a unique measure of outlyingness for each observation. The second technique is based on bagdistance (Hubert et al., 2016) which is derived from the bagplot however is able to provide a unique measure of outlyingness and a means to adjust outlying observations based on this measure. Furthermore, we extend our robust bivariate chain-ladder approach to an N-dimensional framework. The implementation of the methods, especially beyond bivariate, is not trivial. This is illustrated on a trivariate data set from Australian general insurers, and results under the different outlier detection and treatment mechanisms are compared.
To mitigate the ever-worsening Power Wall problem, more and more applications need to expand their power supply to the wide-voltage range including the near-threshold region. However, the read delay distribution of the SRAM cells under the near-threshold voltage shows a more serious long-tail characteristic than that under the nominal voltage due to the process fluctuation. Such degradation of SRAM delay makes the SRAM-based cache a performance bottleneck of systems as well. To avoid the unreliable data reading, circuit-level studies use larger/more transistors in a bitcell by scarifying chip area and the static power of cache arrays. Architectural studies propose the auxiliary error correction or block disabling/remapping methods in fault-tolerant caches, which worsen both the hit latency and energy efficiency due to the complex accessing logic. This paper proposes the Timing-Speculation (TS) cache to boost the cache frequency and improve energy efficiency under low supply voltages. In the TS cache, the voltage differences of bitlines are continuously evaluated twice by a sense amplifier (SA), and the access timing error can be detected much earlier than that in prior methods. According to the measurement results from the fabricated chips, the TS L1 cache aggressively increases its frequency to 1.62X and 1.92X compared with the conventional scheme at 0.5V and 0.6V supply voltages, respectively.
In this paper, we propose a one-stage online clustering method called Contrastive Clustering (CC) which explicitly performs the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning. To be specific, for a given dataset, the positive and negative instance pairs are constructed through data augmentations and then projected into a feature space. Therein, the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning are respectively conducted in the row and column space by maximizing the similarities of positive pairs while minimizing those of negative ones. Our key observation is that the rows of the feature matrix could be regarded as soft labels of instances, and accordingly the columns could be further regarded as cluster representations. By simultaneously optimizing the instance- and cluster-level contrastive loss, the model jointly learns representations and cluster assignments in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experimental results show that CC remarkably outperforms 17 competitive clustering methods on six challenging image benchmarks. In particular, CC achieves an NMI of 0.705 (0.431) on the CIFAR-10 (CIFAR-100) dataset, which is an up to 19\% (39\%) performance improvement compared with the best baseline.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.