Online changepoint detection algorithms that are based on likelihood-ratio tests have been shown to have excellent statistical properties. However, a simple online implementation is computationally infeasible as, at time $T$, it involves considering $O(T)$ possible locations for the change. Recently, the FOCuS algorithm has been introduced for detecting changes in mean in Gaussian data that decreases the per-iteration cost to $O(\log T)$. This is possible by using pruning ideas, which reduce the set of changepoint locations that need to be considered at time $T$ to approximately $\log T$. We show that if one wishes to perform the likelihood ratio test for a different one-parameter exponential family model, then exactly the same pruning rule can be used, and again one need only consider approximately $\log T$ locations at iteration $T$. Furthermore, we show how we can adaptively perform the maximisation step of the algorithm so that we need only maximise the test statistic over a small subset of these possible locations. Empirical results show that the resulting online algorithm, which can detect changes under a wide range of models, has a constant-per-iteration cost on average.
Without writing a single line of code by a human, an example Monte Carlo simulation based application for stochastic dependence modeling with copulas is developed using a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) fine-tuned for conversations. This includes interaction with ChatGPT in natural language and using mathematical formalism, which, under careful supervision by a human-expert, led to producing a working code in MATLAB, Python and R for sampling from a given copula model, evaluation of the model's density, performing maximum likelihood estimation, optimizing the code for parallel computing for CPUs as well as for GPUs, and visualization of the computed results. In contrast to other emerging studies that assess the accuracy of LLMs like ChatGPT on tasks from a selected area, this work rather investigates ways how to achieve a successful solution of a standard statistical task in a collaboration of a human-expert and artificial intelligence (AI). Particularly, through careful prompt engineering, we separate successful solutions generated by ChatGPT from unsuccessful ones, resulting in a comprehensive list of related pros and cons. It is demonstrated that if the typical pitfalls are avoided, we can substantially benefit from collaborating with an AI partner. For example, we show that if ChatGPT is not able to provide a correct solution due to a lack of or incorrect knowledge, the human-expert can feed it with the correct knowledge, e.g., in the form of mathematical theorems and formulas, and make it to apply the gained knowledge in order to provide a solution that is correct. Such ability presents an attractive opportunity to achieve a programmed solution even for users with rather limited knowledge of programming techniques.
Computer vision for detecting building pathologies has interested researchers for quite some time. Vision-based crack detection is a non-destructive assessment technique, which can be useful especially for Cultural Heritage (CH) where strict regulations apply and, even simple, interventions are not permitted. Recently, shallow and deep machine learning architectures applied on various types of imagery are gaining ground. In this article a crack detection methodology for stone masonry walls is presented. In the proposed approach, crack detection is approached as an unsupervised anomaly detection problem on RGB (Red Green Blue) image patches. Towards this direction, some of the most popular state of the art CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) architectures are deployed and modified to binary classify the images or image patches by predicting a specific class for the tested imagery; 'Crack' or 'No crack', and detect and localize those cracks on the RGB imagery with high accuracy. Testing of the model was performed on various test sites and random images retrieved from the internet and collected by the authors and results suggested the high performance of specific networks compared to the rest, considering also the small numbers of epochs required for training. Those results met the accuracy delivered by more complex and computationally heavy approaches, requiring a large amount of data for training. Source code is available on GitHub //github.com/pagraf/Crack-detection while datasets are available on Zenodo //doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6516913 .
Large language models have demonstrated surprising ability to perform in-context learning, i.e., these models can be directly applied to solve numerous downstream tasks by conditioning on a prompt constructed by a few input-output examples. However, prior research has shown that in-context learning can suffer from high instability due to variations in training examples, example order, and prompt formats. Therefore, the construction of an appropriate prompt is essential for improving the performance of in-context learning. In this paper, we revisit this problem from the view of predictive bias. Specifically, we introduce a metric to evaluate the predictive bias of a fixed prompt against labels or a given attributes. Then we empirically show that prompts with higher bias always lead to unsatisfactory predictive quality. Based on this observation, we propose a novel search strategy based on the greedy search to identify the near-optimal prompt for improving the performance of in-context learning. We perform comprehensive experiments with state-of-the-art mainstream models such as GPT-3 on various downstream tasks. Our results indicate that our method can enhance the model's in-context learning performance in an effective and interpretable manner.
This paper studies the change point detection problem in time series of networks, with the Separable Temporal Exponential-family Random Graph Model (STERGM). We consider a sequence of networks generated from a piecewise constant distribution that is altered at unknown change points in time. Detection of the change points can identify the discrepancies in the underlying data generating processes and facilitate downstream dynamic network analysis tasks. Moreover, the STERGM that focuses on network statistics is a flexible model to fit dynamic networks with both dyadic and temporal dependence. We propose a new estimator derived from the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and the Group Fused Lasso to simultaneously detect multiple time points, where the parameters of STERGM have changed. We also provide Bayesian information criterion for model selection to assist the detection. Our experiments show good performance of the proposed method on both simulated and real data. Lastly, we develop an R package CPDstergm to implement our method.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely applied in various fields due to their significant power on processing graph-structured data. Typical GCN and its variants work under a homophily assumption (i.e., nodes with same class are prone to connect to each other), while ignoring the heterophily which exists in many real-world networks (i.e., nodes with different classes tend to form edges). Existing methods deal with heterophily by mainly aggregating higher-order neighborhoods or combing the immediate representations, which leads to noise and irrelevant information in the result. But these methods did not change the propagation mechanism which works under homophily assumption (that is a fundamental part of GCNs). This makes it difficult to distinguish the representation of nodes from different classes. To address this problem, in this paper we design a novel propagation mechanism, which can automatically change the propagation and aggregation process according to homophily or heterophily between node pairs. To adaptively learn the propagation process, we introduce two measurements of homophily degree between node pairs, which is learned based on topological and attribute information, respectively. Then we incorporate the learnable homophily degree into the graph convolution framework, which is trained in an end-to-end schema, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of homophily. More importantly, we theoretically prove that our model can constrain the similarity of representations between nodes according to their homophily degree. Experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that this new approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under heterophily or low homophily, and gains competitive performance under homophily.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
Emotion plays an important role in detecting fake news online. When leveraging emotional signals, the existing methods focus on exploiting the emotions of news contents that conveyed by the publishers (i.e., publisher emotion). However, fake news is always fabricated to evoke high-arousal or activating emotions of people to spread like a virus, so the emotions of news comments that aroused by the crowd (i.e., social emotion) can not be ignored. Furthermore, it needs to be explored whether there exists a relationship between publisher emotion and social emotion (i.e., dual emotion), and how the dual emotion appears in fake news. In the paper, we propose Dual Emotion Features to mine dual emotion and the relationship between them for fake news detection. And we design a universal paradigm to plug it into any existing detectors as an enhancement. Experimental results on three real-world datasets indicate the effectiveness of the proposed features.
A core capability of intelligent systems is the ability to quickly learn new tasks by drawing on prior experience. Gradient (or optimization) based meta-learning has recently emerged as an effective approach for few-shot learning. In this formulation, meta-parameters are learned in the outer loop, while task-specific models are learned in the inner-loop, by using only a small amount of data from the current task. A key challenge in scaling these approaches is the need to differentiate through the inner loop learning process, which can impose considerable computational and memory burdens. By drawing upon implicit differentiation, we develop the implicit MAML algorithm, which depends only on the solution to the inner level optimization and not the path taken by the inner loop optimizer. This effectively decouples the meta-gradient computation from the choice of inner loop optimizer. As a result, our approach is agnostic to the choice of inner loop optimizer and can gracefully handle many gradient steps without vanishing gradients or memory constraints. Theoretically, we prove that implicit MAML can compute accurate meta-gradients with a memory footprint that is, up to small constant factors, no more than that which is required to compute a single inner loop gradient and at no overall increase in the total computational cost. Experimentally, we show that these benefits of implicit MAML translate into empirical gains on few-shot image recognition benchmarks.
Object detection is considered as one of the most challenging problems in computer vision, since it requires correct prediction of both classes and locations of objects in images. In this study, we define a more difficult scenario, namely zero-shot object detection (ZSD) where no visual training data is available for some of the target object classes. We present a novel approach to tackle this ZSD problem, where a convex combination of embeddings are used in conjunction with a detection framework. For evaluation of ZSD methods, we propose a simple dataset constructed from Fashion-MNIST images and also a custom zero-shot split for the Pascal VOC detection challenge. The experimental results suggest that our method yields promising results for ZSD.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.