We present ExpIris, a separation logic framework for the (amortized) expected cost analysis of probabilistic programs. ExpIris is based on Iris, parametric in the language and the cost model, and supports both imperative and functional languages, concurrency, higher-order functions and higher-order state. ExpIris also offers strong support for correctness reasoning, which greatly eases the analysis of programs whose expected cost depends on their high-level behavior. To enable expected cost reasoning in Iris, we build on the expected potential method. The method provides a kind of "currency" that can be used for paying for later operations, and can be distributed over the probabilistic cases whenever there is a probabilistic choice, preserving the expected value due to the linearity of expectations. We demonstrate ExpIris by verifying the expected runtime of a quicksort implementation and the amortized expected runtime of a probabilistic binary counter.
We present a unified theory for Mahalanobis-type anomaly detection on Banach spaces, using ideas from Cameron-Martin theory applied to non-Gaussian measures. This approach leads to a basis-free, data-driven notion of anomaly distance through the so-called variance norm of a probability measure, which can be consistently estimated using empirical measures. Our framework generalizes the classical $\mathbb{R}^d$, functional $(L^2[0,1])^d$, and kernelized settings, including the general case of non-injective covariance operator. We prove that the variance norm depends solely on the inner product in a given Hilbert space, and hence that the kernelized Mahalanobis distance can naturally be recovered by working on reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. Using the variance norm, we introduce the notion of a kernelized nearest-neighbour Mahalanobis distance for semi-supervised anomaly detection. In an empirical study on 12 real-world datasets, we demonstrate that the kernelized nearest-neighbour Mahalanobis distance outperforms the traditional kernelized Mahalanobis distance for multivariate time series anomaly detection, using state-of-the-art time series kernels such as the signature, global alignment, and Volterra reservoir kernels. Moreover, we provide an initial theoretical justification of nearest-neighbour Mahalanobis distances by developing concentration inequalities in the finite-dimensional Gaussian case.
We propose the characteristic generator, a novel one-step generative model that combines the efficiency of sampling in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with the stable performance of flow-based models. Our model is driven by characteristics, along which the probability density transport can be described by ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Specifically, We estimate the velocity field through nonparametric regression and utilize Euler method to solve the probability flow ODE, generating a series of discrete approximations to the characteristics. We then use a deep neural network to fit these characteristics, ensuring a one-step mapping that effectively pushes the prior distribution towards the target distribution. In the theoretical aspect, we analyze the errors in velocity matching, Euler discretization, and characteristic fitting to establish a non-asymptotic convergence rate for the characteristic generator in 2-Wasserstein distance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first thorough analysis for simulation-free one step generative models. Additionally, our analysis refines the error analysis of flow-based generative models in prior works. We apply our method on both synthetic and real datasets, and the results demonstrate that the characteristic generator achieves high generation quality with just a single evaluation of neural network.
Recent advancements in large-scale models have showcased remarkable generalization capabilities in various tasks. However, integrating multimodal processing into these models presents a significant challenge, as it often comes with a high computational burden. To address this challenge, we introduce a new parameter-efficient multimodal tuning strategy for large models in this paper, referred to as Multimodal Infusion Tuning (MiT). MiT leverages decoupled self-attention mechanisms within large language models to effectively integrate information from diverse modalities such as images and acoustics. In MiT, we also design a novel adaptive rescaling strategy at the attention head level, which optimizes the representation of infused multimodal features. Notably, all foundation models are kept frozen during the tuning process to reduce the computational burden and only 2.5\% parameters are tunable. We conduct experiments across a range of multimodal tasks, including image-related tasks like referring segmentation and non-image tasks such as sentiment analysis. Our results showcase that MiT achieves state-of-the-art performance in multimodal understanding while significantly reducing computational overhead(10\% of previous methods). Moreover, our tuned model exhibits robust reasoning abilities even in complex scenarios.
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction that allows RL agents to pre-train on large datasets, avoiding the recurrence of expensive data collection. To advance the field, it is crucial to generate large-scale datasets. Compositional RL is particularly appealing for generating such large datasets, since 1)~it permits creating many tasks from few components, 2)~the task structure may enable trained agents to solve new tasks by combining relevant learned components, and 3)~the compositional dimensions provide a notion of task relatedness. This paper provides four offline RL datasets for simulated robotic manipulation created using the $256$ tasks from CompoSuite [Mendez at al., 2022a]. Each dataset is collected from an agent with a different degree of performance, and consists of $256$ million transitions. We provide training and evaluation settings for assessing an agent's ability to learn compositional task policies. Our benchmarking experiments show that current offline RL methods can learn the training tasks to some extent and that compositional methods outperform non-compositional methods. Yet current methods are unable to extract the compositional structure to generalize to unseen tasks, highlighting a need for future research in offline compositional RL.
Modern data science applications often involve complex relational data with dynamic structures. An abrupt change in such dynamic relational data is typically observed in systems that undergo regime changes due to interventions. In such a case, we consider a factorized fusion shrinkage model in which all decomposed factors are dynamically shrunk towards group-wise fusion structures, where the shrinkage is obtained by applying global-local shrinkage priors to the successive differences of the row vectors of the factorized matrices. The proposed priors enjoy many favorable properties in comparison and clustering of the estimated dynamic latent factors. Comparing estimated latent factors involves both adjacent and long-term comparisons, with the time range of comparison considered as a variable. Under certain conditions, we demonstrate that the posterior distribution attains the minimax optimal rate up to logarithmic factors. In terms of computation, we present a structured mean-field variational inference framework that balances optimal posterior inference with computational scalability, exploiting both the dependence among components and across time. The framework can accommodate a wide variety of models, including dynamic matrix factorization, latent space models for networks and low-rank tensors. The effectiveness of our methodology is demonstrated through extensive simulations and real-world data analysis.
Large language models in the past have typically relied on some form of reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to better align model responses with human preferences. However, because of oft-observed instabilities when implementing these RLHF pipelines, various reparameterization techniques have recently been introduced to sidestep the need for separately learning an RL reward model. Instead, directly fine-tuning for human preferences is achieved via the minimization of a single closed-form training objective, a process originally referred to as direct preference optimization (DPO) and followed by several notable descendants. Although effective in certain real-world settings, we introduce new evaluation criteria that serve to highlight unresolved shortcomings in the ability of existing DPO methods to interpolate between a pre-trained reference model and empirical measures of human preferences, as well as unavoidable trade-offs in how low- and high-quality responses are regularized and constraints are handled. Our insights then motivate an alternative DPO-like loss that provably mitigates these limitations. Empirical results serve to corroborate notable aspects of our analyses.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
Data augmentation has been widely used to improve generalizability of machine learning models. However, comparatively little work studies data augmentation for graphs. This is largely due to the complex, non-Euclidean structure of graphs, which limits possible manipulation operations. Augmentation operations commonly used in vision and language have no analogs for graphs. Our work studies graph data augmentation for graph neural networks (GNNs) in the context of improving semi-supervised node-classification. We discuss practical and theoretical motivations, considerations and strategies for graph data augmentation. Our work shows that neural edge predictors can effectively encode class-homophilic structure to promote intra-class edges and demote inter-class edges in given graph structure, and our main contribution introduces the GAug graph data augmentation framework, which leverages these insights to improve performance in GNN-based node classification via edge prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that augmentation via GAug improves performance across GNN architectures and datasets.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to be effective models for different predictive tasks on graph-structured data. Recent work on their expressive power has focused on isomorphism tasks and countable feature spaces. We extend this theoretical framework to include continuous features - which occur regularly in real-world input domains and within the hidden layers of GNNs - and we demonstrate the requirement for multiple aggregation functions in this context. Accordingly, we propose Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation (PNA), a novel architecture combining multiple aggregators with degree-scalers (which generalize the sum aggregator). Finally, we compare the capacity of different models to capture and exploit the graph structure via a novel benchmark containing multiple tasks taken from classical graph theory, alongside existing benchmarks from real-world domains, all of which demonstrate the strength of our model. With this work, we hope to steer some of the GNN research towards new aggregation methods which we believe are essential in the search for powerful and robust models.
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).