Predictions are a central part of water resources research. Historically, physically-based models have been preferred; however, they have largely failed at modeling hydrological processes at a catchment scale and there are some important prediction problems that cannot be modeled physically. As such, machine learning (ML) models have been seen as a valid alternative in recent years. In spite of their availability, well-optimized state-of-the-art ML strategies are not being widely used in water resources research. This is because using state-of-the-art ML models and optimizing hyperparameters requires expert mathematical and statistical knowledge. Further, some analyses require many model trainings, so sometimes even expert statisticians cannot properly optimize hyperparameters. To leverage data and use it effectively to drive scientific advances in the field, it is essential to make ML models accessible to subject matter experts by improving automated machine learning resources. ML models such as XGBoost have been recently shown to outperform random forest (RF) models which are traditionally used in water resources research. In this study, based on over 150 water-related datasets, we extensively compare XGBoost and RF. This study provides water scientists with access to quick user-friendly RF and XGBoost model optimization.
Several recent studies have reported negative results when using heteroskedastic neural regression models to model real-world data. In particular, for overparameterized models, the mean and variance networks are powerful enough to either fit every single data point (while shrinking the predicted variances to zero), or to learn a constant prediction with an output variance exactly matching every predicted residual (i.e., explaining the targets as pure noise). This paper studies these difficulties from the perspective of statistical physics. We show that the observed instabilities are not specific to any neural network architecture but are already present in a field theory of an overparameterized conditional Gaussian likelihood model. Under light assumptions, we derive a nonparametric free energy that can be solved numerically. The resulting solutions show excellent qualitative agreement with empirical model fits on real-world data and, in particular, prove the existence of phase transitions, i.e., abrupt, qualitative differences in the behaviors of the regressors upon varying the regularization strengths on the two networks. Our work thus provides a theoretical explanation for the necessity to carefully regularize heteroskedastic regression models. Moreover, the insights from our theory suggest a scheme for optimizing this regularization which is quadratically more efficient than the naive approach.
In the present work, we introduce a novel approach to enhance the precision of reduced order models by exploiting a multi-fidelity perspective and DeepONets. Reduced models provide a real-time numerical approximation by simplifying the original model. The error introduced by the such operation is usually neglected and sacrificed in order to reach a fast computation. We propose to couple the model reduction to a machine learning residual learning, such that the above-mentioned error can be learned by a neural network and inferred for new predictions. We emphasize that the framework maximizes the exploitation of high-fidelity information, using it for building the reduced order model and for learning the residual. In this work, we explore the integration of proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), and gappy POD for sensors data, with the recent DeepONet architecture. Numerical investigations for a parametric benchmark function and a nonlinear parametric Navier-Stokes problem are presented.
There are a prohibitively large number of floating-point time series data generated at an unprecedentedly high rate. An efficient, compact and lossless compression for time series data is of great importance for a wide range of scenarios. Most existing lossless floating-point compression methods are based on the XOR operation, but they do not fully exploit the trailing zeros, which usually results in an unsatisfactory compression ratio. This paper proposes an Erasing-based Lossless Floating-point compression algorithm, i.e., Elf. The main idea of Elf is to erase the last few bits (i.e., set them to zero) of floating-point values, so the XORed values are supposed to contain many trailing zeros. The challenges of the erasing-based method are three-fold. First, how to quickly determine the erased bits? Second, how to losslessly recover the original data from the erased ones? Third, how to compactly encode the erased data? Through rigorous mathematical analysis, Elf can directly determine the erased bits and restore the original values without losing any precision. To further improve the compression ratio, we propose a novel encoding strategy for the XORed values with many trailing zeros. Furthermore, observing the values in a time series usually have similar significand counts, we propose an upgraded version of Elf named Elf+ by optimizing the significand count encoding strategy, which improves the compression ratio and reduces the running time further. Both Elf and Elf+ work in a streaming fashion. They take only O(N) (where N is the length of a time series) in time and O(1) in space, and achieve a notable compression ratio with a theoretical guarantee. Extensive experiments using 22 datasets show the powerful performance of Elf and Elf+ compared with 9 advanced competitors for both double-precision and single-precision floating-point values.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly used in high-stakes domains of our life, increasing the need to explain these decisions and to make sure that they are aligned with how we want the decision to be made. The field of Explainable AI (XAI) has emerged in response. However, it faces a significant challenge known as the disagreement problem, where multiple explanations are possible for the same AI decision or prediction. While the existence of the disagreement problem is acknowledged, the potential implications associated with this problem have not yet been widely studied. First, we provide an overview of the different strategies explanation providers could deploy to adapt the returned explanation to their benefit. We make a distinction between strategies that attack the machine learning model or underlying data to influence the explanations, and strategies that leverage the explanation phase directly. Next, we analyse several objectives and concrete scenarios the providers could have to engage in this behavior, and the potential dangerous consequences this manipulative behavior could have on society. We emphasize that it is crucial to investigate this issue now, before these methods are widely implemented, and propose some mitigation strategies.
Medical image segmentation of gadolinium enhancement magnetic resonance imaging (GE MRI) is an important task in clinical applications. However, manual annotation is time-consuming and requires specialized expertise. Semi-supervised segmentation methods that leverage both labeled and unlabeled data have shown promise, with contrastive learning emerging as a particularly effective approach. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning strategy of foreground and background representations for semi-supervised 3D medical image segmentation (FBA-Net). Specifically, we leverage the contrastive loss to learn representations of both the foreground and background regions in the images. By training the network to distinguish between foreground-background pairs, we aim to learn a representation that can effectively capture the anatomical structures of interest. Experiments on three medical segmentation datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Notably, our method achieves a Dice score of 91.31% with only 20% labeled data, which is remarkably close to the 91.62% score of the fully supervised method that uses 100% labeled data on the left atrium dataset. Our framework has the potential to advance the field of semi-supervised 3D medical image segmentation and enable more efficient and accurate analysis of medical images with a limited amount of annotated labels.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successfully used in many problems involving graph-structured data, achieving state-of-the-art performance. GNNs typically employ a message-passing scheme, in which every node aggregates information from its neighbors using a permutation-invariant aggregation function. Standard well-examined choices such as the mean or sum aggregation functions have limited capabilities, as they are not able to capture interactions among neighbors. In this work, we formalize these interactions using an information-theoretic framework that notably includes synergistic information. Driven by this definition, we introduce the Graph Ordering Attention (GOAT) layer, a novel GNN component that captures interactions between nodes in a neighborhood. This is achieved by learning local node orderings via an attention mechanism and processing the ordered representations using a recurrent neural network aggregator. This design allows us to make use of a permutation-sensitive aggregator while maintaining the permutation-equivariance of the proposed GOAT layer. The GOAT model demonstrates its increased performance in modeling graph metrics that capture complex information, such as the betweenness centrality and the effective size of a node. In practical use-cases, its superior modeling capability is confirmed through its success in several real-world node classification benchmarks.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a hot research topic recently. GANs have been widely studied since 2014, and a large number of algorithms have been proposed. However, there is few comprehensive study explaining the connections among different GANs variants, and how they have evolved. In this paper, we attempt to provide a review on various GANs methods from the perspectives of algorithms, theory, and applications. Firstly, the motivations, mathematical representations, and structure of most GANs algorithms are introduced in details. Furthermore, GANs have been combined with other machine learning algorithms for specific applications, such as semi-supervised learning, transfer learning, and reinforcement learning. This paper compares the commonalities and differences of these GANs methods. Secondly, theoretical issues related to GANs are investigated. Thirdly, typical applications of GANs in image processing and computer vision, natural language processing, music, speech and audio, medical field, and data science are illustrated. Finally, the future open research problems for GANs are pointed out.
Transfer learning aims at improving the performance of target learners on target domains by transferring the knowledge contained in different but related source domains. In this way, the dependence on a large number of target domain data can be reduced for constructing target learners. Due to the wide application prospects, transfer learning has become a popular and promising area in machine learning. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on transfer learning, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in transfer learning. As the rapid expansion of the transfer learning area, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing transfer learning researches, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. Different from previous surveys, this survey paper reviews over forty representative transfer learning approaches from the perspectives of data and model. The applications of transfer learning are also briefly introduced. In order to show the performance of different transfer learning models, twenty representative transfer learning models are used for experiments. The models are performed on three different datasets, i.e., Amazon Reviews, Reuters-21578, and Office-31. And the experimental results demonstrate the importance of selecting appropriate transfer learning models for different applications in practice.
Lots of learning tasks require dealing with graph data which contains rich relation information among elements. Modeling physics system, learning molecular fingerprints, predicting protein interface, and classifying diseases require that a model to learn from graph inputs. In other domains such as learning from non-structural data like texts and images, reasoning on extracted structures, like the dependency tree of sentences and the scene graph of images, is an important research topic which also needs graph reasoning models. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are connectionist models that capture the dependence of graphs via message passing between the nodes of graphs. Unlike standard neural networks, graph neural networks retain a state that can represent information from its neighborhood with an arbitrary depth. Although the primitive graph neural networks have been found difficult to train for a fixed point, recent advances in network architectures, optimization techniques, and parallel computation have enabled successful learning with them. In recent years, systems based on graph convolutional network (GCN) and gated graph neural network (GGNN) have demonstrated ground-breaking performance on many tasks mentioned above. In this survey, we provide a detailed review over existing graph neural network models, systematically categorize the applications, and propose four open problems for future research.