Neural networks employ spurious correlations in their predictions, resulting in decreased performance when these correlations do not hold. Recent works suggest fixing pretrained representations and training a classification head that does not use spurious features. We investigate how spurious features are represented in pretrained representations and explore strategies for removing information about spurious features. Considering the Waterbirds dataset and a few pretrained representations, we find that even with full knowledge of spurious features, their removal is not straightforward due to entangled representation. To address this, we propose a linear autoencoder training method to separate the representation into core, spurious, and other features. We propose two effective spurious feature removal approaches that are applied to the encoding and significantly improve classification performance measured by worst group accuracy.
With the widespread use of the internet, it has become increasingly crucial to extract specific information from vast amounts of academic articles efficiently. Data mining techniques are generally employed to solve this issue. However, data mining for academic articles is challenging since it requires automatically extracting specific patterns in complex and unstructured layout documents. Current data mining methods for academic articles employ rule-based(RB) or machine learning(ML) approaches. However, using rule-based methods incurs a high coding cost for complex typesetting articles. On the other hand, simply using machine learning methods requires annotation work for complex content types within the paper, which can be costly. Furthermore, only using machine learning can lead to cases where patterns easily recognized by rule-based methods are mistakenly extracted. To overcome these issues, from the perspective of analyzing the standard layout and typesetting used in the specified publication, we emphasize implementing specific methods for specific characteristics in academic articles. We have developed a novel Text Block Refinement Framework (TBRF), a machine learning and rule-based scheme hybrid. We used the well-known ACL proceeding articles as experimental data for the validation experiment. The experiment shows that our approach achieved over 95% classification accuracy and 90% detection accuracy for tables and figures.
We investigate the impact of pre-defined keypoints for pose estimation, and found that accuracy and efficiency can be improved by training a graph network to select a set of disperse keypoints with similarly distributed votes. These votes, learned by a regression network to accumulate evidence for the keypoint locations, can be regressed more accurately compared to previous heuristic keypoint algorithms. The proposed KeyGNet, supervised by a combined loss measuring both Wassserstein distance and dispersion, learns the color and geometry features of the target objects to estimate optimal keypoint locations. Experiments demonstrate the keypoints selected by KeyGNet improved the accuracy for all evaluation metrics of all seven datasets tested, for three keypoint voting methods. The challenging Occlusion LINEMOD dataset notably improved ADD(S) by +16.4% on PVN3D, and all core BOP datasets showed an AR improvement for all objects, of between +1% and +21.5%. There was also a notable increase in performance when transitioning from single object to multiple object training using KeyGNet keypoints, essentially eliminating the SISO-MIMO gap for Occlusion LINEMOD.
Data uncertainties, such as sensor noise or occlusions, can introduce irreducible ambiguities in images, which result in varying, yet plausible, semantic hypotheses. In Machine Learning, this ambiguity is commonly referred to as aleatoric uncertainty. Latent density models can be utilized to address this problem in image segmentation. The most popular approach is the Probabilistic U-Net (PU-Net), which uses latent Normal densities to optimize the conditional data log-likelihood Evidence Lower Bound. In this work, we demonstrate that the PU- Net latent space is severely inhomogenous. As a result, the effectiveness of gradient descent is inhibited and the model becomes extremely sensitive to the localization of the latent space samples, resulting in defective predictions. To address this, we present the Sinkhorn PU-Net (SPU-Net), which uses the Sinkhorn Divergence to promote homogeneity across all latent dimensions, effectively improving gradient-descent updates and model robustness. Our results show that by applying this on public datasets of various clinical segmentation problems, the SPU-Net receives up to 11% performance gains compared against preceding latent variable models for probabilistic segmentation on the Hungarian-Matched metric. The results indicate that by encouraging a homogeneous latent space, one can significantly improve latent density modeling for medical image segmentation.
We present a simple yet novel parameterized form of linear mapping to achieves remarkable network compression performance: a pseudo SVD called Ternary SVD (TSVD). Unlike vanilla SVD, TSVD limits the $U$ and $V$ matrices in SVD to ternary matrices form in $\{\pm 1, 0\}$. This means that instead of using the expensive multiplication instructions, TSVD only requires addition instructions when computing $U(\cdot)$ and $V(\cdot)$. We provide direct and training transition algorithms for TSVD like Post Training Quantization and Quantization Aware Training respectively. Additionally, we analyze the convergence of the direct transition algorithms in theory. In experiments, we demonstrate that TSVD can achieve state-of-the-art network compression performance in various types of networks and tasks, including current baseline models such as ConvNext, Swim, BERT, and large language model like OPT.
Graphs are commonly used to represent and visualize causal relations. For a small number of variables, this approach provides a succinct and clear view of the scenario at hand. As the number of variables under study increases, the graphical approach may become impractical, and the clarity of the representation is lost. Clustering of variables is a natural way to reduce the size of the causal diagram, but it may erroneously change the essential properties of the causal relations if implemented arbitrarily. We define a specific type of cluster, called transit cluster, that is guaranteed to preserve the identifiability properties of causal effects under certain conditions. We provide a sound and complete algorithm for finding all transit clusters in a given graph and demonstrate how clustering can simplify the identification of causal effects. We also study the inverse problem, where one starts with a clustered graph and looks for extended graphs where the identifiability properties of causal effects remain unchanged. We show that this kind of structural robustness is closely related to transit clusters.
By incorporating additional contextual information, deep biasing methods have emerged as a promising solution for speech recognition of personalized words. However, for real-world voice assistants, always biasing on such personalized words with high prediction scores can significantly degrade the performance of recognizing common words. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive contextual biasing method based on Context-Aware Transformer Transducer (CATT) that utilizes the biased encoder and predictor embeddings to perform streaming prediction of contextual phrase occurrences. Such prediction is then used to dynamically switch the bias list on and off, enabling the model to adapt to both personalized and common scenarios. Experiments on Librispeech and internal voice assistant datasets show that our approach can achieve up to 6.7% and 20.7% relative reduction in WER and CER compared to the baseline respectively, mitigating up to 96.7% and 84.9% of the relative WER and CER increase for common cases. Furthermore, our approach has a minimal performance impact in personalized scenarios while maintaining a streaming inference pipeline with negligible RTF increase.
It has been a hot research topic to enable machines to understand human emotions in multimodal contexts under dialogue scenarios, which is tasked with multimodal emotion analysis in conversation (MM-ERC). MM-ERC has received consistent attention in recent years, where a diverse range of methods has been proposed for securing better task performance. Most existing works treat MM-ERC as a standard multimodal classification problem and perform multimodal feature disentanglement and fusion for maximizing feature utility. Yet after revisiting the characteristic of MM-ERC, we argue that both the feature multimodality and conversational contextualization should be properly modeled simultaneously during the feature disentanglement and fusion steps. In this work, we target further pushing the task performance by taking full consideration of the above insights. On the one hand, during feature disentanglement, based on the contrastive learning technique, we devise a Dual-level Disentanglement Mechanism (DDM) to decouple the features into both the modality space and utterance space. On the other hand, during the feature fusion stage, we propose a Contribution-aware Fusion Mechanism (CFM) and a Context Refusion Mechanism (CRM) for multimodal and context integration, respectively. They together schedule the proper integrations of multimodal and context features. Specifically, CFM explicitly manages the multimodal feature contributions dynamically, while CRM flexibly coordinates the introduction of dialogue contexts. On two public MM-ERC datasets, our system achieves new state-of-the-art performance consistently. Further analyses demonstrate that all our proposed mechanisms greatly facilitate the MM-ERC task by making full use of the multimodal and context features adaptively. Note that our proposed methods have the great potential to facilitate a broader range of other conversational multimodal tasks.
Weakly hard real-time systems can, to some degree, tolerate deadline misses, but their schedulability still needs to be analyzed to ensure their quality of service. Such analysis usually occurs at early design stages to provide implementation guidelines to engineers so that they can make better design decisions. Estimating worst-case execution times (WCET) is a key input to schedulability analysis. However, early on during system design, estimating WCET values is challenging and engineers usually determine them as plausible ranges based on their domain knowledge. Our approach aims at finding restricted, safe WCET sub-ranges given a set of ranges initially estimated by experts in the context of weakly hard real-time systems. To this end, we leverage (1) multi-objective search aiming at maximizing the violation of weakly hard constraints in order to find worst-case scheduling scenarios and (2) polynomial logistic regression to infer safe WCET ranges with a probabilistic interpretation. We evaluated our approach by applying it to an industrial system in the satellite domain and several realistic synthetic systems. The results indicate that our approach significantly outperforms a baseline relying on random search without learning, and estimates safe WCET ranges with a high degree of confidence in practical time (< 23h).
We consider the problem of explaining the predictions of graph neural networks (GNNs), which otherwise are considered as black boxes. Existing methods invariably focus on explaining the importance of graph nodes or edges but ignore the substructures of graphs, which are more intuitive and human-intelligible. In this work, we propose a novel method, known as SubgraphX, to explain GNNs by identifying important subgraphs. Given a trained GNN model and an input graph, our SubgraphX explains its predictions by efficiently exploring different subgraphs with Monte Carlo tree search. To make the tree search more effective, we propose to use Shapley values as a measure of subgraph importance, which can also capture the interactions among different subgraphs. To expedite computations, we propose efficient approximation schemes to compute Shapley values for graph data. Our work represents the first attempt to explain GNNs via identifying subgraphs explicitly and directly. Experimental results show that our SubgraphX achieves significantly improved explanations, while keeping computations at a reasonable level.
Residual networks (ResNets) have displayed impressive results in pattern recognition and, recently, have garnered considerable theoretical interest due to a perceived link with neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs). This link relies on the convergence of network weights to a smooth function as the number of layers increases. We investigate the properties of weights trained by stochastic gradient descent and their scaling with network depth through detailed numerical experiments. We observe the existence of scaling regimes markedly different from those assumed in neural ODE literature. Depending on certain features of the network architecture, such as the smoothness of the activation function, one may obtain an alternative ODE limit, a stochastic differential equation or neither of these. These findings cast doubts on the validity of the neural ODE model as an adequate asymptotic description of deep ResNets and point to an alternative class of differential equations as a better description of the deep network limit.