We study inference on the long-term causal effect of a continual exposure to a novel intervention, which we term a long-term treatment, based on an experiment involving only short-term observations. Key examples include the long-term health effects of regularly-taken medicine or of environmental hazards and the long-term effects on users of changes to an online platform. This stands in contrast to short-term treatments or "shocks," whose long-term effect can reasonably be mediated by short-term observations, enabling the use of surrogate methods. Long-term treatments by definition have direct effects on long-term outcomes via continual exposure so surrogacy cannot reasonably hold. Our approach instead learns long-term temporal dynamics directly from short-term experimental data, assuming that the initial dynamics observed persist but avoiding the need for both surrogacy assumptions and auxiliary data with long-term observations. We connect the problem with offline reinforcement learning, leveraging doubly-robust estimators to estimate long-term causal effects for long-term treatments and construct confidence intervals. Finally, we demonstrate the method in simulated experiments.
Current state-of-the-art analyses on the convergence of gradient descent for training neural networks focus on characterizing properties of the loss landscape, such as the Polyak-Lojaciewicz (PL) condition and the restricted strong convexity. While gradient descent converges linearly under such conditions, it remains an open question whether Nesterov's momentum enjoys accelerated convergence under similar settings and assumptions. In this work, we consider a new class of objective functions, where only a subset of the parameters satisfies strong convexity, and show Nesterov's momentum achieves acceleration in theory for this objective class. We provide two realizations of the problem class, one of which is deep ReLU networks, which --to the best of our knowledge--constitutes this work the first that proves accelerated convergence rate for non-trivial neural network architectures.
We propose a data-driven approach for propagating uncertainty in stochastic power grid simulations and apply it to the estimation of transmission line failure probabilities. A reduced-order equation governing the evolution of the observed line energy probability density function is derived from the Fokker--Planck equation of the full-order continuous Markov process. Our method consists of estimates produced by numerically integrating this reduced equation. Numerical experiments for scalar- and vector-valued energy functions are conducted using the classical multimachine model under spatiotemporally correlated noise perturbation. The method demonstrates a more sample-efficient approach for computing probabilities of tail events when compared with kernel density estimation. Moreover, it produces vastly more accurate estimates of joint event occurrence when compared with independent models.
In the realm of artificial intelligence, the emergence of foundation models, backed by high computing capabilities and extensive data, has been revolutionary. Segment Anything Model (SAM), built on the Vision Transformer (ViT) model with millions of parameters and vast training dataset SA-1B, excels in various segmentation scenarios relying on its significance of semantic information and generalization ability. Such achievement of visual foundation model stimulates continuous researches on specific downstream tasks in computer vision. The ClassWise-SAM-Adapter (CWSAM) is designed to adapt the high-performing SAM for landcover classification on space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. The proposed CWSAM freezes most of SAM's parameters and incorporates lightweight adapters for parameter efficient fine-tuning, and a classwise mask decoder is designed to achieve semantic segmentation task. This adapt-tuning method allows for efficient landcover classification of SAR images, balancing the accuracy with computational demand. In addition, the task specific input module injects low frequency information of SAR images by MLP-based layers to improve the model performance. Compared to conventional state-of-the-art semantic segmentation algorithms by extensive experiments, CWSAM showcases enhanced performance with fewer computing resources, highlighting the potential of leveraging foundational models like SAM for specific downstream tasks in the SAR domain. The source code is available at: //github.com/xypu98/CWSAM.
This work examines the effects of variations in machine learning training regimes and learning paradigms on the corresponding energy consumption. While increasing data availability and innovation in high-performance hardware fuels the training of sophisticated models, it also supports the fading perception of energy consumption and carbon emission. Therefore, the goal of this work is to create awareness about the energy impact of general training parameters and processes, from learning rate over batch size to knowledge transfer. Multiple setups with different hyperparameter initializations are evaluated on two different hardware configurations to obtain meaningful results. Experiments on pretraining and multitask training are conducted on top of the baseline results to determine their potential towards sustainable machine learning.
We present a new method that includes three key components of distributed optimization and federated learning: variance reduction of stochastic gradients, partial participation, and compressed communication. We prove that the new method has optimal oracle complexity and state-of-the-art communication complexity in the partial participation setting. Regardless of the communication compression feature, our method successfully combines variance reduction and partial participation: we get the optimal oracle complexity, never need the participation of all nodes, and do not require the bounded gradients (dissimilarity) assumption.
We study the efficiency of fair allocations using the well-studied price of fairness concept, which quantitatively measures the worst-case efficiency loss when imposing fairness constraints. Previous works provided partial results on the price of fairness with well-known fairness notions such as envy-freeness up to one good (EF1) and envy-freeness up to any good (EFX). In this paper, we give a complete characterization for the price of envy-freeness in various settings. In particular, we first consider the two-agent case under the indivisible-goods setting and present tight ratios for the price of EF1 (for scaled utility) and EFX (for unscaled utility), which resolve questions left open in the literature. Next, we consider the mixed goods setting which concerns a mixture of both divisible and indivisible goods. We focus on envy-freeness for mixed goods (EFM), which generalizes both envy-freeness and EF1, as well as its strengthening called envy-freeness up to any good for mixed goods (EFXM), which generalizes envy-freeness and EFX. To this end, we settle the price of EFM and EFXM by providing a complete picture of tight bounds for two agents and asymptotically tight bounds for $n$ agents, for both scaled and unscaled utilities.
Human intelligence thrives on the concept of cognitive synergy, where collaboration and information integration among different cognitive processes yield superior outcomes compared to individual cognitive processes in isolation. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising performance as general task-solving agents, they still struggle with tasks that require intensive domain knowledge and complex reasoning. In this work, we propose Solo Performance Prompting (SPP), which transforms a single LLM into a cognitive synergist by engaging in multi-turn self-collaboration with multiple personas. A cognitive synergist refers to an intelligent agent that collaborates with multiple minds, combining their individual strengths and knowledge, to enhance problem-solving and overall performance in complex tasks. By dynamically identifying and simulating different personas based on task inputs, SPP unleashes the potential of cognitive synergy in LLMs. We have discovered that assigning multiple, fine-grained personas in LLMs elicits better problem-solving abilities compared to using a single or fixed number of personas. We evaluate SPP on three challenging tasks: Trivia Creative Writing, Codenames Collaborative, and Logic Grid Puzzle, encompassing both knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive types. Unlike previous works, such as Chain-of-Thought, that solely enhance the reasoning abilities in LLMs, SPP effectively elicits internal knowledge acquisition abilities, reduces hallucination, and maintains strong reasoning capabilities. Code, data, and prompts can be found at: //github.com/MikeWangWZHL/Solo-Performance-Prompting.git.
As soon as abstract mathematical computations were adapted to computation on digital computers, the problem of efficient representation, manipulation, and communication of the numerical values in those computations arose. Strongly related to the problem of numerical representation is the problem of quantization: in what manner should a set of continuous real-valued numbers be distributed over a fixed discrete set of numbers to minimize the number of bits required and also to maximize the accuracy of the attendant computations? This perennial problem of quantization is particularly relevant whenever memory and/or computational resources are severely restricted, and it has come to the forefront in recent years due to the remarkable performance of Neural Network models in computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed integer values represented in four bits or less holds the potential to reduce the memory footprint and latency by a factor of 16x; and, in fact, reductions of 4x to 8x are often realized in practice in these applications. Thus, it is not surprising that quantization has emerged recently as an important and very active sub-area of research in the efficient implementation of computations associated with Neural Networks. In this article, we survey approaches to the problem of quantizing the numerical values in deep Neural Network computations, covering the advantages/disadvantages of current methods. With this survey and its organization, we hope to have presented a useful snapshot of the current research in quantization for Neural Networks and to have given an intelligent organization to ease the evaluation of future research in this area.
We introduce a multi-task setup of identifying and classifying entities, relations, and coreference clusters in scientific articles. We create SciERC, a dataset that includes annotations for all three tasks and develop a unified framework called Scientific Information Extractor (SciIE) for with shared span representations. The multi-task setup reduces cascading errors between tasks and leverages cross-sentence relations through coreference links. Experiments show that our multi-task model outperforms previous models in scientific information extraction without using any domain-specific features. We further show that the framework supports construction of a scientific knowledge graph, which we use to analyze information in scientific literature.
We propose a novel approach to multimodal sentiment analysis using deep neural networks combining visual analysis and natural language processing. Our goal is different than the standard sentiment analysis goal of predicting whether a sentence expresses positive or negative sentiment; instead, we aim to infer the latent emotional state of the user. Thus, we focus on predicting the emotion word tags attached by users to their Tumblr posts, treating these as "self-reported emotions." We demonstrate that our multimodal model combining both text and image features outperforms separate models based solely on either images or text. Our model's results are interpretable, automatically yielding sensible word lists associated with emotions. We explore the structure of emotions implied by our model and compare it to what has been posited in the psychology literature, and validate our model on a set of images that have been used in psychology studies. Finally, our work also provides a useful tool for the growing academic study of images - both photographs and memes - on social networks.