Uncertainty estimation is a key factor that makes deep learning reliable in practical applications. Recently proposed evidential neural networks explicitly account for different uncertainties by treating the network's outputs as evidence to parameterize the Dirichlet distribution, and achieve impressive performance in uncertainty estimation. However, for high data uncertainty samples but annotated with the one-hot label, the evidence-learning process for those mislabeled classes is over-penalized and remains hindered. To address this problem, we propose a novel method, Fisher Information-based Evidential Deep Learning ($\mathcal{I}$-EDL). In particular, we introduce Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) to measure the informativeness of evidence carried by each sample, according to which we can dynamically reweight the objective loss terms to make the network more focused on the representation learning of uncertain classes. The generalization ability of our network is further improved by optimizing the PAC-Bayesian bound. As demonstrated empirically, our proposed method consistently outperforms traditional EDL-related algorithms in multiple uncertainty estimation tasks, especially in the more challenging few-shot classification settings.
We propose the use of the hypothetical retrospection argumentation procedure, developed by Sven Hansson, to improve existing approaches to machine ethical reasoning by accounting for probability and uncertainty from a position of Philosophy that resonates with humans. Actions are represented with a branching set of potential outcomes, each with a state, utility, and either a numeric or poetic probability estimate. Actions are chosen based on comparisons between sets of arguments favouring actions from the perspective of their branches, even those branches that led to an undesirable outcome. This use of arguments allows a variety of philosophical theories for ethical reasoning to be used, potentially in flexible combination with each other. We implement the procedure, applying consequentialist and deontological ethical theories, independently and concurrently, to an autonomous library system use case. We introduce a a preliminary framework that seems to meet the varied requirements of a machine ethics system: versatility under multiple theories and a resonance with humans that enables transparency and explainability.
Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have recently regained a significant amount of attention in the deep learning community due to the development of scalable approximate Bayesian inference techniques. There are several advantages of using a Bayesian approach: Parameter and prediction uncertainties become easily available, facilitating rigorous statistical analysis. Furthermore, prior knowledge can be incorporated. However, so far, there have been no scalable techniques capable of combining both structural and parameter uncertainty. In this paper, we apply the concept of model uncertainty as a framework for structural learning in BNNs and hence make inference in the joint space of structures/models and parameters. Moreover, we suggest an adaptation of a scalable variational inference approach with reparametrization of marginal inclusion probabilities to incorporate the model space constraints. Experimental results on a range of benchmark datasets show that we obtain comparable accuracy results with the competing models, but based on methods that are much more sparse than ordinary BNNs.
The great potentials of massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) in Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) mode can be fully exploited when the downlink Channel State Information (CSI) is available at base stations. However, the accurate CSI is difficult to obtain due to the large amount of feedback overhead caused by massive antennas. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based joint channel estimation and feedback framework, which comprehensively realizes the estimation, compression, and reconstruction of downlink channels in FDD massive MIMO systems. Two networks are constructed to perform estimation and feedback explicitly and implicitly. The explicit network adopts a multi-Signal-to-Noise-Ratios (SNRs) technique to obtain a single trained channel estimation subnet that works well with different SNRs and employs a deep residual network to reconstruct the channels, while the implicit network directly compresses pilots and sends them back to reduce network parameters. Quantization module is also designed to generate data-bearing bitstreams. Simulation results show that the two proposed networks exhibit excellent performance of reconstruction and are robust to different environments and quantization errors.
The electron density is a key parameter to characterize any plasma. Most of the plasma applications and research in the area of low-temperature plasmas (LTPs) is based on plasma density and plasma temperature. The conventional methods for electron density measurements offer axial and radial profiles for any given linear LTP device. These methods have major disadvantages of operational range (not very wide), cumbersome instrumentation, and complicated data analysis procedures. To address such practical concerns, the article proposes a novel machine learning (ML) assisted microwave-plasma interaction based strategy which is capable enough to determine the electron density profile within the plasma. The electric field pattern due to microwave scattering is measured to estimate the density profile. The proof of concept is tested for a simulated training data set comprising a low-temperature, unmagnetized, collisional plasma. Different types of Gaussian-shaped density profiles, in the range $10^{16}-10^{19}m^{-3}$, addressing a range of experimental configurations have been considered in our study. The results obtained show promising performance in estimating the 2D radial profile of the density for the given linear plasma device. The performance of the proposed deep learning based approach has been evaluated using three metrics- SSIM, RMSLE and MAPE. The favourable performance affirms the potential of the proposed ML based approach in plasma diagnostics.
Data valuation is a powerful framework for providing statistical insights into which data are beneficial or detrimental to model training. Many Shapley-based data valuation methods have shown promising results in various downstream tasks, however, they are well known to be computationally challenging as it requires training a large number of models. As a result, it has been recognized as infeasible to apply to large datasets. To address this issue, we propose Data-OOB, a new data valuation method for a bagging model that utilizes the out-of-bag estimate. The proposed method is computationally efficient and can scale to millions of data by reusing trained weak learners. Specifically, Data-OOB takes less than 2.25 hours on a single CPU processor when there are $10^6$ samples to evaluate and the input dimension is 100. Furthermore, Data-OOB has solid theoretical interpretations in that it identifies the same important data point as the infinitesimal jackknife influence function when two different points are compared. We conduct comprehensive experiments using 12 classification datasets, each with thousands of sample sizes. We demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art data valuation methods in identifying mislabeled data and finding a set of helpful (or harmful) data points, highlighting the potential for applying data values in real-world applications.
The Evidential regression network (ENet) estimates a continuous target and its predictive uncertainty without costly Bayesian model averaging. However, it is possible that the target is inaccurately predicted due to the gradient shrinkage problem of the original loss function of the ENet, the negative log marginal likelihood (NLL) loss. In this paper, the objective is to improve the prediction accuracy of the ENet while maintaining its efficient uncertainty estimation by resolving the gradient shrinkage problem. A multi-task learning (MTL) framework, referred to as MT-ENet, is proposed to accomplish this aim. In the MTL, we define the Lipschitz modified mean squared error (MSE) loss function as another loss and add it to the existing NLL loss. The Lipschitz modified MSE loss is designed to mitigate the gradient conflict with the NLL loss by dynamically adjusting its Lipschitz constant. By doing so, the Lipschitz MSE loss does not disturb the uncertainty estimation of the NLL loss. The MT-ENet enhances the predictive accuracy of the ENet without losing uncertainty estimation capability on the synthetic dataset and real-world benchmarks, including drug-target affinity (DTA) regression. Furthermore, the MT-ENet shows remarkable calibration and out-of-distribution detection capability on the DTA benchmarks.
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.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
Human pose estimation aims to locate the human body parts and build human body representation (e.g., body skeleton) from input data such as images and videos. It has drawn increasing attention during the past decade and has been utilized in a wide range of applications including human-computer interaction, motion analysis, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Although the recently developed deep learning-based solutions have achieved high performance in human pose estimation, there still remain challenges due to insufficient training data, depth ambiguities, and occlusions. The goal of this survey paper is to provide a comprehensive review of recent deep learning-based solutions for both 2D and 3D pose estimation via a systematic analysis and comparison of these solutions based on their input data and inference procedures. More than 240 research papers since 2014 are covered in this survey. Furthermore, 2D and 3D human pose estimation datasets and evaluation metrics are included. Quantitative performance comparisons of the reviewed methods on popular datasets are summarized and discussed. Finally, the challenges involved, applications, and future research directions are concluded. We also provide a regularly updated project page on: \url{//github.com/zczcwh/DL-HPE}
This paper focuses on the expected difference in borrower's repayment when there is a change in the lender's credit decisions. Classical estimators overlook the confounding effects and hence the estimation error can be magnificent. As such, we propose another approach to construct the estimators such that the error can be greatly reduced. The proposed estimators are shown to be unbiased, consistent, and robust through a combination of theoretical analysis and numerical testing. Moreover, we compare the power of estimating the causal quantities between the classical estimators and the proposed estimators. The comparison is tested across a wide range of models, including linear regression models, tree-based models, and neural network-based models, under different simulated datasets that exhibit different levels of causality, different degrees of nonlinearity, and different distributional properties. Most importantly, we apply our approaches to a large observational dataset provided by a global technology firm that operates in both the e-commerce and the lending business. We find that the relative reduction of estimation error is strikingly substantial if the causal effects are accounted for correctly.