Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) provide a tool to estimate the uncertainty of a neural network by considering a distribution over weights and sampling different models for each input. In this paper, we propose a method for uncertainty estimation in neural networks called Variational Neural Network that, instead of considering a distribution over weights, generates parameters for the output distribution of a layer by transforming its inputs with learnable sub-layers. In uncertainty quality estimation experiments, we show that VNNs achieve better uncertainty quality than Monte Carlo Dropout or Bayes By Backpropagation methods.
The abundance of data has given machine learning considerable momentum in natural sciences and engineering, though modeling of physical processes is often difficult. A particularly tough problem is the efficient representation of geometric boundaries. Triangularized geometric boundaries are well understood and ubiquitous in engineering applications. However, it is notoriously difficult to integrate them into machine learning approaches due to their heterogeneity with respect to size and orientation. In this work, we introduce an effective theory to model particle-boundary interactions, which leads to our new Boundary Graph Neural Networks (BGNNs) that dynamically modify graph structures to obey boundary conditions. The new BGNNs are tested on complex 3D granular flow processes of hoppers, rotating drums and mixers, which are all standard components of modern industrial machinery but still have complicated geometry. BGNNs are evaluated in terms of computational efficiency as well as prediction accuracy of particle flows and mixing entropies. BGNNs are able to accurately reproduce 3D granular flows within simulation uncertainties over hundreds of thousands of simulation timesteps. Most notably, in our experiments, particles stay within the geometric objects without using handcrafted conditions or restrictions.
Many sectors nowadays require accurate and coherent predictions across their organization to effectively operate. Otherwise, decision-makers would be planning using disparate views of the future, resulting in inconsistent decisions across their sectors. To secure coherency across hierarchies, recent research has put forward hierarchical learning, a coherency-informed hierarchical regressor leveraging the power of machine learning thanks to a custom loss function founded on optimal reconciliation methods. While promising potentials were outlined, results exhibited discordant performances in which coherency information only improved hierarchical forecasts in one setting. This work proposes to tackle these obstacles by investigating custom neural network designs inspired by the topological structures of hierarchies. Results unveil that, in a data-limited setting, structural models with fewer connections perform overall best and demonstrate the coherency information value for both accuracy and coherency forecasting performances, provided individual forecasts were generated within reasonable accuracy limits. Overall, this work expands and improves hierarchical learning methods thanks to a structurally-scaled learning mechanism extension coupled with tailored network designs, producing a resourceful, data-efficient, and information-rich learning process.
Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) offer a probabilistic interpretation for deep learning models by imposing a prior distribution over model parameters and inferencing a posterior distribution based on observed data. The model sampled from the posterior distribution can be used for providing ensemble predictions and quantifying prediction uncertainty. It is well-known that deep learning models with a lower sharpness have a better generalization ability. Nonetheless, existing posterior inferences are not aware of sharpness/flatness, hence possibly leading to high sharpness for the models sampled from it. In this paper, we develop theories, the Bayesian setting, and the variational inference approach for the sharpness-aware posterior. Specifically, the models sampled from our sharpness-aware posterior and the optimal approximate posterior estimating this sharpness-aware posterior have a better flatness, hence possibly possessing a higher generalization ability. We conduct experiments by leveraging the sharpness-aware posterior with the state-of-the-art Bayesian Neural Networks, showing that the flat-seeking counterparts outperform their baselines in all metrics of interest.
Recent studies indicate that kernel machines can often perform similarly or better than deep neural networks (DNNs) on small datasets. The interest in kernel machines has been additionally bolstered by the discovery of their equivalence to wide neural networks in certain regimes. However, a key feature of DNNs is their ability to scale the model size and training data size independently, whereas in traditional kernel machines model size is tied to data size. Because of this coupling, scaling kernel machines to large data has been computationally challenging. In this paper, we provide a way forward for constructing large-scale general kernel models, which are a generalization of kernel machines that decouples the model and data, allowing training on large datasets. Specifically, we introduce EigenPro 3.0, an algorithm based on projected dual preconditioned SGD and show scaling to model and data sizes which have not been possible with existing kernel methods.
Uncertainty quantification of machine learning and deep learning methods plays an important role in enhancing trust to the obtained result. In recent years, a numerous number of uncertainty quantification methods have been introduced. Monte Carlo dropout (MC-Dropout) is one of the most well-known techniques to quantify uncertainty in deep learning methods. In this study, we propose two new loss functions by combining cross entropy with Expected Calibration Error (ECE) and Predictive Entropy (PE). The obtained results clearly show that the new proposed loss functions lead to having a calibrated MC-Dropout method. Our results confirmed the great impact of the new hybrid loss functions for minimising the overlap between the distributions of uncertainty estimates for correct and incorrect predictions without sacrificing the model's overall performance.
Many real-world systems can be described by mathematical formulas that are human-comprehensible, easy to analyze and can be helpful in explaining the system's behaviour. Symbolic regression is a method that generates nonlinear models from data in the form of analytic expressions. Historically, symbolic regression has been predominantly realized using genetic programming, a method that iteratively evolves a population of candidate solutions that are sampled by genetic operators crossover and mutation. This gradient-free evolutionary approach suffers from several deficiencies: it does not scale well with the number of variables and samples in the training data, models tend to grow in size and complexity without an adequate accuracy gain, and it is hard to fine-tune the inner model coefficients using just genetic operators. Recently, neural networks have been applied to learn the whole analytic formula, i.e., its structure as well as the coefficients, by means of gradient-based optimization algorithms. We propose a novel neural network-based symbolic regression method that constructs physically plausible models based on limited training data and prior knowledge about the system. The method employs an adaptive weighting scheme to effectively deal with multiple loss function terms and an epoch-wise learning process to reduce the chance of getting stuck in poor local optima. Furthermore, we propose a parameter-free method for choosing the model with the best interpolation and extrapolation performance out of all models generated through the whole learning process. We experimentally evaluate the approach on the TurtleBot 2 mobile robot, the magnetic manipulation system, the equivalent resistance of two resistors in parallel, and the anti-lock braking system. The results clearly show the potential of the method to find sparse and accurate models that comply with the prior knowledge provided.
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.
Message passing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) provide a powerful modeling framework for relational data. However, the expressive power of existing GNNs is upper-bounded by the 1-Weisfeiler-Lehman (1-WL) graph isomorphism test, which means GNNs that are not able to predict node clustering coefficients and shortest path distances, and cannot differentiate between different d-regular graphs. Here we develop a class of message passing GNNs, named Identity-aware Graph Neural Networks (ID-GNNs), with greater expressive power than the 1-WL test. ID-GNN offers a minimal but powerful solution to limitations of existing GNNs. ID-GNN extends existing GNN architectures by inductively considering nodes' identities during message passing. To embed a given node, ID-GNN first extracts the ego network centered at the node, then conducts rounds of heterogeneous message passing, where different sets of parameters are applied to the center node than to other surrounding nodes in the ego network. We further propose a simplified but faster version of ID-GNN that injects node identity information as augmented node features. Altogether, both versions of ID-GNN represent general extensions of message passing GNNs, where experiments show that transforming existing GNNs to ID-GNNs yields on average 40% accuracy improvement on challenging node, edge, and graph property prediction tasks; 3% accuracy improvement on node and graph classification benchmarks; and 15% ROC AUC improvement on real-world link prediction tasks. Additionally, ID-GNNs demonstrate improved or comparable performance over other task-specific graph 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.
We introduce an effective model to overcome the problem of mode collapse when training Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Firstly, we propose a new generator objective that finds it better to tackle mode collapse. And, we apply an independent Autoencoders (AE) to constrain the generator and consider its reconstructed samples as "real" samples to slow down the convergence of discriminator that enables to reduce the gradient vanishing problem and stabilize the model. Secondly, from mappings between latent and data spaces provided by AE, we further regularize AE by the relative distance between the latent and data samples to explicitly prevent the generator falling into mode collapse setting. This idea comes when we find a new way to visualize the mode collapse on MNIST dataset. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to propose and apply successfully the relative distance of latent and data samples for stabilizing GAN. Thirdly, our proposed model, namely Generative Adversarial Autoencoder Networks (GAAN), is stable and has suffered from neither gradient vanishing nor mode collapse issues, as empirically demonstrated on synthetic, MNIST, MNIST-1K, CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets. Experimental results show that our method can approximate well multi-modal distribution and achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods on these benchmark datasets. Our model implementation is published here: //github.com/tntrung/gaan