The scores of distance-based outlier detection methods are difficult to interpret, making it challenging to determine a cut-off threshold between normal and outlier data points without additional context. We describe a generic transformation of distance-based outlier scores into interpretable, probabilistic estimates. The transformation is ranking-stable and increases the contrast between normal and outlier data points. Determining distance relationships between data points is necessary to identify the nearest-neighbor relationships in the data, yet, most of the computed distances are typically discarded. We show that the distances to other data points can be used to model distance probability distributions and, subsequently, use the distributions to turn distance-based outlier scores into outlier probabilities. Our experiments show that the probabilistic transformation does not impact detection performance over numerous tabular and image benchmark datasets but results in interpretable outlier scores with increased contrast between normal and outlier samples. Our work generalizes to a wide range of distance-based outlier detection methods, and because existing distance computations are used, it adds no significant computational overhead.
Automatic related work generation must ground their outputs to the content of the cited papers to avoid non-factual hallucinations, but due to the length of scientific documents, existing abstractive approaches have conditioned only on the cited paper \textit{abstracts}. We demonstrate that the abstract is not always the most appropriate input for citation generation and that models trained in this way learn to hallucinate. We propose to condition instead on the \textit{cited text span} (CTS) as an alternative to the abstract. Because manual CTS annotation is extremely time- and labor-intensive, we experiment with automatic, ROUGE-based labeling of candidate CTS sentences, achieving sufficiently strong performance to substitute for expensive human annotations, and we propose a human-in-the-loop, keyword-based CTS retrieval approach that makes generating citation texts grounded in the full text of cited papers both promising and practical.
We consider the problem of independence testing for two univariate random variables in a sequential setting. By leveraging recent developments on safe, anytime-valid inference, we propose a test with time-uniform type I error control and derive explicit bounds on the finite sample performance of the test and the expected stopping time. We demonstrate the empirical performance of the procedure in comparison to existing sequential and non-sequential independence tests. Furthermore, since the proposed test is distribution free under the null hypothesis, we empirically simulate the gap due to Ville's inequality, the supermartingale analogue of Markov's inequality, that is commonly applied to control type I error in anytime-valid inference, and apply this to construct a truncated sequential test.
In the realm of expressive Text-to-Speech (TTS), explicit prosodic boundaries significantly advance the naturalness and controllability of synthesized speech. While human prosody annotation contributes a lot to the performance, it is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process, often resulting in inconsistent outcomes. Despite the availability of extensive supervised data, the current benchmark model still faces performance setbacks. To address this issue, a two-stage automatic annotation pipeline is novelly proposed in this paper. Specifically, in the first stage, we propose contrastive text-speech pretraining of Speech-Silence and Word-Punctuation (SSWP) pairs. The pretraining procedure hammers at enhancing the prosodic space extracted from joint text-speech space. In the second stage, we build a multi-modal prosody annotator, which consists of pretrained encoders, a straightforward yet effective text-speech feature fusion scheme, and a sequence classifier. Extensive experiments conclusively demonstrate that our proposed method excels at automatically generating prosody annotation and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Furthermore, our novel model has exhibited remarkable resilience when tested with varying amounts of data.
A robot providing mealtime assistance must perform specialized maneuvers with various utensils in order to pick up and feed a range of food items. Beyond these dexterous low-level skills, an assistive robot must also plan these strategies in sequence over a long horizon to clear a plate and complete a meal. Previous methods in robot-assisted feeding introduce highly specialized primitives for food handling without a means to compose them together. Meanwhile, existing approaches to long-horizon manipulation lack the flexibility to embed highly specialized primitives into their frameworks. We propose Visual Action Planning OveR Sequences (VAPORS), a framework for long-horizon food acquisition. VAPORS learns a policy for high-level action selection by leveraging learned latent plate dynamics in simulation. To carry out sequential plans in the real world, VAPORS delegates action execution to visually parameterized primitives. We validate our approach on complex real-world acquisition trials involving noodle acquisition and bimanual scooping of jelly beans. Across 38 plates, VAPORS acquires much more efficiently than baselines, generalizes across realistic plate variations such as toppings and sauces, and qualitatively appeals to user feeding preferences in a survey conducted across 49 individuals. Code, datasets, videos, and supplementary materials can be found on our website: //sites.google.com/view/vaporsbot.
Until high-fidelity quantum computers with a large number of qubits become widely available, classical simulation remains a vital tool for algorithm design, tuning, and validation. We present a simulator for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). Our simulator is designed with the goal of reducing the computational cost of QAOA parameter optimization and supports both CPU and GPU execution. Our central observation is that the computational cost of both simulating the QAOA state and computing the QAOA objective to be optimized can be reduced by precomputing the diagonal Hamiltonian encoding the problem. We reduce the time for a typical QAOA parameter optimization by eleven times for $n = 26$ qubits compared to a state-of-the-art GPU quantum circuit simulator based on cuQuantum. Our simulator is available on GitHub: //github.com/jpmorganchase/QOKit
The SOTA in transcription of disfluent and conversational speech has in recent years favored two-stage models, with separate transcription and cleaning stages. We believe that previous attempts at end-to-end disfluency removal have fallen short because of the representational advantage that large-scale language model pretraining has given to lexical models. Until recently, the high dimensionality and limited availability of large audio datasets inhibited the development of large-scale self-supervised pretraining objectives for learning effective audio representations, giving a relative advantage to the two-stage approach, which utilises pretrained representations for lexical tokens. In light of recent successes in large scale audio pretraining, we revisit the performance comparison between two-stage and end-to-end model and find that audio based language models pretrained using weak self-supervised objectives match or exceed the performance of similarly trained two-stage models, and further, that the choice of pretraining objective substantially effects a model's ability to be adapted to the disfluency removal task.
How do sequence models represent their decision-making process? Prior work suggests that Othello-playing neural network learned nonlinear models of the board state (Li et al., 2023). In this work, we provide evidence of a closely related linear representation of the board. In particular, we show that probing for "my colour" vs. "opponent's colour" may be a simple yet powerful way to interpret the model's internal state. This precise understanding of the internal representations allows us to control the model's behaviour with simple vector arithmetic. Linear representations enable significant interpretability progress, which we demonstrate with further exploration of how the world model is computed.
The concept of causality plays an important role in human cognition . In the past few decades, causal inference has been well developed in many fields, such as computer science, medicine, economics, and education. With the advancement of deep learning techniques, it has been increasingly used in causal inference against counterfactual data. Typically, deep causal models map the characteristics of covariates to a representation space and then design various objective optimization functions to estimate counterfactual data unbiasedly based on the different optimization methods. This paper focuses on the survey of the deep causal models, and its core contributions are as follows: 1) we provide relevant metrics under multiple treatments and continuous-dose treatment; 2) we incorporate a comprehensive overview of deep causal models from both temporal development and method classification perspectives; 3) we assist a detailed and comprehensive classification and analysis of relevant datasets and source code.
Machine learning plays a role in many deployed decision systems, often in ways that are difficult or impossible to understand by human stakeholders. Explaining, in a human-understandable way, the relationship between the input and output of machine learning models is essential to the development of trustworthy machine-learning-based systems. A burgeoning body of research seeks to define the goals and methods of explainability in machine learning. In this paper, we seek to review and categorize research on counterfactual explanations, a specific class of explanation that provides a link between what could have happened had input to a model been changed in a particular way. Modern approaches to counterfactual explainability in machine learning draw connections to the established legal doctrine in many countries, making them appealing to fielded systems in high-impact areas such as finance and healthcare. Thus, we design a rubric with desirable properties of counterfactual explanation algorithms and comprehensively evaluate all currently-proposed algorithms against that rubric. Our rubric provides easy comparison and comprehension of the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches and serves as an introduction to major research themes in this field. We also identify gaps and discuss promising research directions in the space of counterfactual explainability.
The demand for artificial intelligence has grown significantly over the last decade and this growth has been fueled by advances in machine learning techniques and the ability to leverage hardware acceleration. However, in order to increase the quality of predictions and render machine learning solutions feasible for more complex applications, a substantial amount of training data is required. Although small machine learning models can be trained with modest amounts of data, the input for training larger models such as neural networks grows exponentially with the number of parameters. Since the demand for processing training data has outpaced the increase in computation power of computing machinery, there is a need for distributing the machine learning workload across multiple machines, and turning the centralized into a distributed system. These distributed systems present new challenges, first and foremost the efficient parallelization of the training process and the creation of a coherent model. This article provides an extensive overview of the current state-of-the-art in the field by outlining the challenges and opportunities of distributed machine learning over conventional (centralized) machine learning, discussing the techniques used for distributed machine learning, and providing an overview of the systems that are available.