The accelerated failure time (AFT) model is widely used to analyze relationships between variables in the presence of censored observations. However, this model relies on some assumptions such as the error distribution, which can lead to biased or inefficient estimates if these assumptions are violated. In order to overcome this challenge, we propose a novel approach that incorporates a semiparametric skew-normal scale mixture distribution for the error term in the AFT model. By allowing for more flexibility and robustness, this approach reduces the risk of misspecification and improves the accuracy of parameter estimation. We investigate the identifiability and consistency of the proposed model and develop a practical estimation algorithm. To evaluate the performance of our approach, we conduct extensive simulation studies and real data analyses. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in providing robust and accurate estimates in various scenarios.
In offline reinforcement learning (RL), an RL agent learns to solve a task using only a fixed dataset of previously collected data. While offline RL has been successful in learning real-world robot control policies, it typically requires large amounts of expert-quality data to learn effective policies that generalize to out-of-distribution states. Unfortunately, such data is often difficult and expensive to acquire in real-world tasks. Several recent works have leveraged data augmentation (DA) to inexpensively generate additional data, but most DA works apply augmentations in a random fashion and ultimately produce highly suboptimal augmented experience. In this work, we propose Guided Data Augmentation (GuDA), a human-guided DA framework that generates expert-quality augmented data. The key insight behind GuDA is that while it may be difficult to demonstrate the sequence of actions required to produce expert data, a user can often easily characterize when an augmented trajectory segment represents progress toward task completion. Thus, a user can restrict the space of possible augmentations to automatically reject suboptimal augmented data. To extract a policy from GuDA, we use off-the-shelf offline reinforcement learning and behavior cloning algorithms. We evaluate GuDA on a physical robot soccer task as well as simulated D4RL navigation tasks, a simulated autonomous driving task, and a simulated soccer task. Empirically, GuDA enables learning given a small initial dataset of potentially suboptimal experience and outperforms a random DA strategy as well as a model-based DA strategy.
There is an emerging interest in generating robust counterfactual explanations that would remain valid if the model is updated or changed even slightly. Towards finding robust counterfactuals, existing literature often assumes that the original model $m$ and the new model $M$ are bounded in the parameter space, i.e., $\|\text{Params}(M){-}\text{Params}(m)\|{<}\Delta$. However, models can often change significantly in the parameter space with little to no change in their predictions or accuracy on the given dataset. In this work, we introduce a mathematical abstraction termed $\textit{naturally-occurring}$ model change, which allows for arbitrary changes in the parameter space such that the change in predictions on points that lie on the data manifold is limited. Next, we propose a measure -- that we call $\textit{Stability}$ -- to quantify the robustness of counterfactuals to potential model changes for differentiable models, e.g., neural networks. Our main contribution is to show that counterfactuals with sufficiently high value of $\textit{Stability}$ as defined by our measure will remain valid after potential $\textit{naturally-occurring}$ model changes with high probability (leveraging concentration bounds for Lipschitz function of independent Gaussians). Since our quantification depends on the local Lipschitz constant around a data point which is not always available, we also examine practical relaxations of our proposed measure and demonstrate experimentally how they can be incorporated to find robust counterfactuals for neural networks that are close, realistic, and remain valid after potential model changes. This work also has interesting connections with model multiplicity, also known as, the Rashomon effect.
The capability to generate simulation-ready garment models from 3D shapes of clothed humans will significantly enhance the interpretability of captured geometry of real garments, as well as their faithful reproduction in the virtual world. This will have notable impact on fields like shape capture in social VR, and virtual try-on in the fashion industry. To align with the garment modeling process standardized by the fashion industry as well as cloth simulation softwares, it is required to recover 2D patterns. This involves an inverse garment design problem, which is the focus of our work here: Starting with an arbitrary target garment geometry, our system estimates an animatable garment model by automatically adjusting its corresponding 2D template pattern, along with the material parameters of the physics-based simulation (PBS). Built upon a differentiable cloth simulator, the optimization process is directed towards minimizing the deviation of the simulated garment shape from the target geometry. Moreover, our produced patterns meet manufacturing requirements such as left-to-right-symmetry, making them suited for reverse garment fabrication. We validate our approach on examples of different garment types, and show that our method faithfully reproduces both the draped garment shape and the sewing pattern.
Recently, many mesh-based graph neural network (GNN) models have been proposed for modeling complex high-dimensional physical systems. Remarkable achievements have been made in significantly reducing the solving time compared to traditional numerical solvers. These methods are typically designed to i) reduce the computational cost in solving physical dynamics and/or ii) propose techniques to enhance the solution accuracy in fluid and rigid body dynamics. However, it remains under-explored whether they are effective in addressing the challenges of flexible body dynamics, where instantaneous collisions occur within a very short timeframe. In this paper, we present Hierarchical Contact Mesh Transformer (HCMT), which uses hierarchical mesh structures and can learn long-range dependencies (occurred by collisions) among spatially distant positions of a body -- two close positions in a higher-level mesh corresponds to two distant positions in a lower-level mesh. HCMT enables long-range interactions, and the hierarchical mesh structure quickly propagates collision effects to faraway positions. To this end, it consists of a contact mesh Transformer and a hierarchical mesh Transformer (CMT and HMT, respectively). Lastly, we propose a flexible body dynamics dataset, consisting of trajectories that reflect experimental settings frequently used in the display industry for product designs. We also compare the performance of several baselines using well-known benchmark datasets. Our results show that HCMT provides significant performance improvements over existing methods. Our code is available at \url{//github.com/yuyudeep/hcmt}.
Annotators exhibit disagreement during data labeling, which can be termed as annotator label uncertainty. Annotator label uncertainty manifests in variations of labeling quality. Training with a single low-quality annotation per sample induces model reliability degradations. In this work, we first examine the effects of annotator label uncertainty in terms of the model's generalizability and prediction uncertainty. We observe that the model's generalizability and prediction uncertainty degrade with the presence of low-quality noisy labels. Meanwhile, our evaluation of existing uncertainty estimation algorithms indicates their incapability in response to annotator label uncertainty. To mitigate performance degradation, prior methods show that training models with labels collected from multiple independent annotators can enhance generalizability. However, they require massive annotations. Hence, we introduce a novel perceptual quality-based model training framework to objectively generate multiple labels for model training to enhance reliability, while avoiding massive annotations. Specifically, we first select a subset of samples with low perceptual quality scores ranked by statistical regularities of visual signals. We then assign de-aggregated labels to each sample in this subset to obtain a training set with multiple labels. Our experiments and analysis demonstrate that training with the proposed framework alleviates the degradation of generalizability and prediction uncertainty caused by annotator label uncertainty.
We consider the problem of evaluating dynamic consistency in discrete time probabilistic filters that approximate stochastic system state densities with Gaussian mixtures. Dynamic consistency means that the estimated probability distributions correctly describe the actual uncertainties. As such, the problem of consistency testing naturally arises in applications with regards to estimator tuning and validation. However, due to the general complexity of the density functions involved, straightforward approaches for consistency testing of mixture-based estimators have remained challenging to define and implement. This paper derives a new exact result for Gaussian mixture consistency testing within the framework of normalized deviation squared (NDS) statistics. It is shown that NDS test statistics for generic multivariate Gaussian mixture models exactly follow mixtures of generalized chi-square distributions, for which efficient computational tools are available. The accuracy and utility of the resulting consistency tests are numerically demonstrated on static and dynamic mixture estimation examples.
The Bayes factor, the data-based updating factor of the prior to posterior odds of two hypotheses, is a natural measure of statistical evidence for one hypothesis over the other. We show how Bayes factors can also be used for parameter estimation. The key idea is to consider the Bayes factor as a function of the parameter value under the null hypothesis. This 'Bayes factor function' is inverted to obtain point estimates ('maximum evidence estimates') and interval estimates ('support intervals'), similar to how P-value functions are inverted to obtain point estimates and confidence intervals. This provides data analysts with a unified inference framework as Bayes factors (for any tested parameter value), support intervals (at any level), and point estimates can be easily read off from a plot of the Bayes factor function. This approach shares similarities but is also distinct from conventional Bayesian and frequentist approaches: It uses the Bayesian evidence calculus, but without synthesizing data and prior, and it defines statistical evidence in terms of (integrated) likelihood ratios, but also includes a natural way for dealing with nuisance parameters. Applications to real-world examples illustrate how our framework is of practical value for making make quantitative inferences.
With the rapid increase of observational, experimental and simulated data for stochastic systems, tremendous efforts have been devoted to identifying governing laws underlying the evolution of these systems. Despite the broad applications of non-Gaussian fluctuations in numerous physical phenomena, the data-driven approaches to extracting stochastic dynamics with L\'{e}vy noise are relatively few. In this work, we propose a Weak Collocation Regression (WCR) to explicitly reveal unknown stochastic dynamical systems, i.e., the Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) with both $\alpha$-stable L\'{e}vy noise and Gaussian noise, from discrete aggregate data. This method utilizes the evolution equation of the probability distribution function, i.e., the Fokker-Planck (FP) equation. With the weak form of the FP equation, the WCR constructs a linear system of unknown parameters where all integrals are evaluated by Monte Carlo method with the observations. Then, the unknown parameters are obtained by a sparse linear regression. For a SDE with L\'{e}vy noise, the corresponding FP equation is a partial integro-differential equation (PIDE), which contains nonlocal terms, and is difficult to deal with. The weak form can avoid complicated multiple integrals. Our approach can simultaneously distinguish mixed noise types, even in multi-dimensional problems. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our method is accurate and computationally efficient.
Cross-device federated learning (FL) is a technique that trains a model on data distributed across typically millions of edge devices without data leaving the devices. SGD is the standard client optimizer for on device training in cross-device FL, favored for its memory and computational efficiency. However, in centralized training of neural language models, adaptive optimizers are preferred as they offer improved stability and performance. In light of this, we ask if language models can be modified such that they can be efficiently trained with SGD client optimizers and answer this affirmatively. We propose a scale-invariant Coupled Input Forget Gate (SI CIFG) recurrent network by modifying the sigmoid and tanh activations in the recurrent cell and show that this new model converges faster and achieves better utility than the standard CIFG recurrent model in cross-device FL in large scale experiments. We further show that the proposed scale invariant modification also helps in federated learning of larger transformer models. Finally, we demonstrate the scale invariant modification is also compatible with other non-adaptive algorithms. Particularly, our results suggest an improved privacy utility trade-off in federated learning with differential privacy.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples resulting from adding small-magnitude perturbations to inputs. Such adversarial examples can mislead DNNs to produce adversary-selected results. Different attack strategies have been proposed to generate adversarial examples, but how to produce them with high perceptual quality and more efficiently requires more research efforts. In this paper, we propose AdvGAN to generate adversarial examples with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances. For AdvGAN, once the generator is trained, it can generate adversarial perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to potentially accelerate adversarial training as defenses. We apply AdvGAN in both semi-whitebox and black-box attack settings. In semi-whitebox attacks, there is no need to access the original target model after the generator is trained, in contrast to traditional white-box attacks. In black-box attacks, we dynamically train a distilled model for the black-box model and optimize the generator accordingly. Adversarial examples generated by AdvGAN on different target models have high attack success rate under state-of-the-art defenses compared to other attacks. Our attack has placed the first with 92.76% accuracy on a public MNIST black-box attack challenge.