We formulate a unifying framework for unsupervised continual learning (UCL), which disentangles learning objectives that are specific to the present and the past data, encompassing stability, plasticity, and cross-task consolidation. The framework reveals that many existing UCL approaches overlook cross-task consolidation and try to balance plasticity and stability in a shared embedding space. This results in worse performance due to a lack of within-task data diversity and reduced effectiveness in learning the current task. Our method, Osiris, which explicitly optimizes all three objectives on separate embedding spaces, achieves state-of-the-art performance on all benchmarks, including two novel benchmarks proposed in this paper featuring semantically structured task sequences. Compared to standard benchmarks, these two structured benchmarks more closely resemble visual signals received by humans and animals when navigating real-world environments. Finally, we show some preliminary evidence that continual models can benefit from such realistic learning scenarios.
Knowledge tracing (KT) is a popular approach for modeling students' learning progress over time, which can enable more personalized and adaptive learning. However, existing KT approaches face two major limitations: (1) they rely heavily on expert-defined knowledge concepts (KCs) in questions, which is time-consuming and prone to errors; and (2) KT methods tend to overlook the semantics of both questions and the given KCs. In this work, we address these challenges and present KCQRL, a framework for automated knowledge concept annotation and question representation learning that can improve the effectiveness of any existing KT model. First, we propose an automated KC annotation process using large language models (LLMs), which generates question solutions and then annotates KCs in each solution step of the questions. Second, we introduce a contrastive learning approach to generate semantically rich embeddings for questions and solution steps, aligning them with their associated KCs via a tailored false negative elimination approach. These embeddings can be readily integrated into existing KT models, replacing their randomly initialized embeddings. We demonstrate the effectiveness of KCQRL across 15 KT algorithms on two large real-world Math learning datasets, where we achieve consistent performance improvements.
Federated learning (FL) is a distributed learning paradigm that allows multiple decentralized clients to collaboratively learn a common model without sharing local data. Although local data is not exposed directly, privacy concerns nonetheless exist as clients' sensitive information can be inferred from intermediate computations. Moreover, such information leakage accumulates substantially over time as the same data is repeatedly used during the iterative learning process. As a result, it can be particularly difficult to balance the privacy-accuracy trade-off when designing privacy-preserving FL algorithms. This paper introduces Upcycled-FL, a simple yet effective strategy that applies first-order approximation at every even round of model update. Under this strategy, half of the FL updates incur no information leakage and require much less computational and transmission costs. We first conduct the theoretical analysis on the convergence (rate) of Upcycled-FL and then apply two perturbation mechanisms to preserve privacy. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show that the Upcycled-FL strategy can be adapted to many existing FL frameworks and consistently improve the privacy-accuracy trade-off.
Accelerated training algorithms, such as adaptive learning rates and various normalization methods, are widely used but not fully understood. When regularization is introduced, standard optimizers like adaptive learning rates may not perform effectively. This raises the need for alternative regularization approaches and the question of how to properly combine regularization with preconditioning. In this paper, we address these challenges using the theory of preconditioning as follows: (1) We explain how preconditioning with AdaGrad, RMSProp, and Adam accelerates training; (2) We explore the interaction between regularization and preconditioning, outlining different options for selecting the variables for regularization, and in particular we discuss how to implement that for the gradient regularization; and (3) We demonstrate how normalization methods accelerate training by improving Hessian conditioning, and discuss how this perspective can lead to new preconditioning training algorithms. Our findings offer a unified mathematical framework for understanding various acceleration techniques and deriving appropriate regularization schemes.
We consider a class of conditional forward-backward diffusion models for conditional generative modeling, that is, generating new data given a covariate (or control variable). To formally study the theoretical properties of these conditional generative models, we adopt a statistical framework of distribution regression to characterize the large sample properties of the conditional distribution estimators induced by these conditional forward-backward diffusion models. Here, the conditional distribution of data is assumed to smoothly change over the covariate. In particular, our derived convergence rate is minimax-optimal under the total variation metric within the regimes covered by the existing literature. Additionally, we extend our theory by allowing both the data and the covariate variable to potentially admit a low-dimensional manifold structure. In this scenario, we demonstrate that the conditional forward-backward diffusion model can adapt to both manifold structures, meaning that the derived estimation error bound (under the Wasserstein metric) depends only on the intrinsic dimensionalities of the data and the covariate.
In this work, we provide data stream algorithms that compute optimal splits in decision tree learning. In particular, given a data stream of observations $x_i$ and their labels $y_i$, the goal is to find the optimal split $j$ that divides the data into two sets such that the mean squared error (for regression) or misclassification rate and Gini impurity (for classification) is minimized. We provide several fast streaming algorithms that use sublinear space and a small number of passes for these problems. These algorithms can also be extended to the massively parallel computation model. Our work, while not directly comparable, complements the seminal work of Domingos-Hulten (KDD 2000) and Hulten-Spencer-Domingos (KDD 2001).
We introduce a generic, compositional and interpretable class of generative world models that supports open-ended learning agents. This is a sparse class of Bayesian networks capable of approximating a broad range of stochastic processes, which provide agents with the ability to learn world models in a manner that may be both interpretable and computationally scalable. This approach integrating Bayesian structure learning and intrinsically motivated (model-based) planning enables agents to actively develop and refine their world models, which may lead to open-ended learning and more robust, adaptive behavior.
Contrastive learning models have achieved great success in unsupervised visual representation learning, which maximize the similarities between feature representations of different views of the same image, while minimize the similarities between feature representations of views of different images. In text summarization, the output summary is a shorter form of the input document and they have similar meanings. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning model for supervised abstractive text summarization, where we view a document, its gold summary and its model generated summaries as different views of the same mean representation and maximize the similarities between them during training. We improve over a strong sequence-to-sequence text generation model (i.e., BART) on three different summarization datasets. Human evaluation also shows that our model achieves better faithfulness ratings compared to its counterpart without contrastive objectives.
Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning setting where many clients (e.g. mobile devices or whole organizations) collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server (e.g. service provider), while keeping the training data decentralized. FL embodies the principles of focused data collection and minimization, and can mitigate many of the systemic privacy risks and costs resulting from traditional, centralized machine learning and data science approaches. Motivated by the explosive growth in FL research, this paper discusses recent advances and presents an extensive collection of open problems and challenges.
Dynamic programming (DP) solves a variety of structured combinatorial problems by iteratively breaking them down into smaller subproblems. In spite of their versatility, DP algorithms are usually non-differentiable, which hampers their use as a layer in neural networks trained by backpropagation. To address this issue, we propose to smooth the max operator in the dynamic programming recursion, using a strongly convex regularizer. This allows to relax both the optimal value and solution of the original combinatorial problem, and turns a broad class of DP algorithms into differentiable operators. Theoretically, we provide a new probabilistic perspective on backpropagating through these DP operators, and relate them to inference in graphical models. We derive two particular instantiations of our framework, a smoothed Viterbi algorithm for sequence prediction and a smoothed DTW algorithm for time-series alignment. We showcase these instantiations on two structured prediction tasks and on structured and sparse attention for neural machine translation.
While existing machine learning models have achieved great success for sentiment classification, they typically do not explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction, which can lead to poor results for fine-grained analysis at the snippet level (a phrase or sentence). Factorization Machine provides a possible approach to learning element-wise interaction for recommender systems, but they are not directly applicable to our task due to the inability to model contexts and word sequences. In this work, we develop two Position-aware Factorization Machines which consider word interaction, context and position information. Such information is jointly encoded in a set of sentiment-oriented word interaction vectors. Compared to traditional word embeddings, SWI vectors explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction and simplify the parameter learning. Experimental results show that while they have comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods for document-level classification, they benefit the snippet/sentence-level sentiment analysis.