Multi-fidelity surrogate learning is important for physical simulation related applications in that it avoids running numerical solvers from scratch, which is known to be costly, and it uses multi-fidelity examples for training and greatly reduces the cost of data collection. Despite the variety of existing methods, they all build a model to map the input parameters outright to the solution output. Inspired by the recent breakthrough in generative models, we take an alternative view and consider the solution output as generated from random noises. We develop a diffusion-generative multi-fidelity (DGMF) learning method based on stochastic differential equations (SDE), where the generation is a continuous denoising process. We propose a conditional score model to control the solution generation by the input parameters and the fidelity. By conditioning on additional inputs (temporal or spacial variables), our model can efficiently learn and predict multi-dimensional solution arrays. Our method naturally unifies discrete and continuous fidelity modeling. The advantage of our method in several typical applications shows a promising new direction for multi-fidelity learning.
This report is concerned with the efficiency of numerical methods for simulating quantum spin systems, with the aim to implement an improved method for simulation of a time-dependent Hamiltonian that displays chirped pulses at a high frequency. Working in the density matrix formulation of quantum systems, we study evolution under the Liouville-von Neumann equation, presenting analysis of and benchmarking current numerical methods. The accuracy of existing techniques is assessed in the presence of chirped pulses. We also discuss the Magnus expansion and detail how a truncation of it is used to solve differential equations. The results of this work are implemented in the Python package MagPy to provide a better error-to-cost ratio than current approaches allow for time-dependent Hamiltonians.
A mainstream type of current self-supervised learning methods pursues a general-purpose representation that can be well transferred to downstream tasks, typically by optimizing on a given pretext task such as instance discrimination. In this work, we argue that existing pretext tasks inevitably introduce biases into the learned representation, which in turn leads to biased transfer performance on various downstream tasks. To cope with this issue, we propose Maximum Entropy Coding (MEC), a more principled objective that explicitly optimizes on the structure of the representation, so that the learned representation is less biased and thus generalizes better to unseen downstream tasks. Inspired by the principle of maximum entropy in information theory, we hypothesize that a generalizable representation should be the one that admits the maximum entropy among all plausible representations. To make the objective end-to-end trainable, we propose to leverage the minimal coding length in lossy data coding as a computationally tractable surrogate for the entropy, and further derive a scalable reformulation of the objective that allows fast computation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MEC learns a more generalizable representation than previous methods based on specific pretext tasks. It achieves state-of-the-art performance consistently on various downstream tasks, including not only ImageNet linear probe, but also semi-supervised classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and object tracking. Interestingly, we show that existing batch-wise and feature-wise self-supervised objectives could be seen equivalent to low-order approximations of MEC. Code and pre-trained models are available at //github.com/xinliu20/MEC.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
Standard contrastive learning approaches usually require a large number of negatives for effective unsupervised learning and often exhibit slow convergence. We suspect this behavior is due to the suboptimal selection of negatives used for offering contrast to the positives. We counter this difficulty by taking inspiration from support vector machines (SVMs) to present max-margin contrastive learning (MMCL). Our approach selects negatives as the sparse support vectors obtained via a quadratic optimization problem, and contrastiveness is enforced by maximizing the decision margin. As SVM optimization can be computationally demanding, especially in an end-to-end setting, we present simplifications that alleviate the computational burden. We validate our approach on standard vision benchmark datasets, demonstrating better performance in unsupervised representation learning over state-of-the-art, while having better empirical convergence properties.
Recent advances in representation learning have demonstrated an ability to represent information from different modalities such as video, text, and audio in a single high-level embedding vector. In this work we present a self-supervised learning framework that is able to learn a representation that captures finer levels of granularity across different modalities such as concepts or events represented by visual objects or spoken words. Our framework relies on a discretized embedding space created via vector quantization that is shared across different modalities. Beyond the shared embedding space, we propose a Cross-Modal Code Matching objective that forces the representations from different views (modalities) to have a similar distribution over the discrete embedding space such that cross-modal objects/actions localization can be performed without direct supervision. In our experiments we show that the proposed discretized multi-modal fine-grained representation (e.g., pixel/word/frame) can complement high-level summary representations (e.g., video/sentence/waveform) for improved performance on cross-modal retrieval tasks. We also observe that the discretized representation uses individual clusters to represent the same semantic concept across modalities.
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.
Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is a learning paradigm in machine learning and its aim is to leverage useful information contained in multiple related tasks to help improve the generalization performance of all the tasks. In this paper, we give a survey for MTL from the perspective of algorithmic modeling, applications and theoretical analyses. For algorithmic modeling, we give a definition of MTL and then classify different MTL algorithms into five categories, including feature learning approach, low-rank approach, task clustering approach, task relation learning approach and decomposition approach as well as discussing the characteristics of each approach. In order to improve the performance of learning tasks further, MTL can be combined with other learning paradigms including semi-supervised learning, active learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, multi-view learning and graphical models. When the number of tasks is large or the data dimensionality is high, we review online, parallel and distributed MTL models as well as dimensionality reduction and feature hashing to reveal their computational and storage advantages. Many real-world applications use MTL to boost their performance and we review representative works in this paper. Finally, we present theoretical analyses and discuss several future directions for MTL.
The essence of multivariate sequential learning is all about how to extract dependencies in data. These data sets, such as hourly medical records in intensive care units and multi-frequency phonetic time series, often time exhibit not only strong serial dependencies in the individual components (the "marginal" memory) but also non-negligible memories in the cross-sectional dependencies (the "joint" memory). Because of the multivariate complexity in the evolution of the joint distribution that underlies the data generating process, we take a data-driven approach and construct a novel recurrent network architecture, termed Memory-Gated Recurrent Networks (mGRN), with gates explicitly regulating two distinct types of memories: the marginal memory and the joint memory. Through a combination of comprehensive simulation studies and empirical experiments on a range of public datasets, we show that our proposed mGRN architecture consistently outperforms state-of-the-art architectures targeting multivariate time series.
Exploration-exploitation is a powerful and practical tool in multi-agent learning (MAL), however, its effects are far from understood. To make progress in this direction, we study a smooth analogue of Q-learning. We start by showing that our learning model has strong theoretical justification as an optimal model for studying exploration-exploitation. Specifically, we prove that smooth Q-learning has bounded regret in arbitrary games for a cost model that explicitly captures the balance between game and exploration costs and that it always converges to the set of quantal-response equilibria (QRE), the standard solution concept for games under bounded rationality, in weighted potential games with heterogeneous learning agents. In our main task, we then turn to measure the effect of exploration in collective system performance. We characterize the geometry of the QRE surface in low-dimensional MAL systems and link our findings with catastrophe (bifurcation) theory. In particular, as the exploration hyperparameter evolves over-time, the system undergoes phase transitions where the number and stability of equilibria can change radically given an infinitesimal change to the exploration parameter. Based on this, we provide a formal theoretical treatment of how tuning the exploration parameter can provably lead to equilibrium selection with both positive as well as negative (and potentially unbounded) effects to system performance.
Rehearsal, seeking to remind the model by storing old knowledge in lifelong learning, is one of the most effective ways to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, i.e., biased forgetting of previous knowledge when moving to new tasks. However, the old tasks of the most previous rehearsal-based methods suffer from the unpredictable domain shift when training the new task. This is because these methods always ignore two significant factors. First, the Data Imbalance between the new task and old tasks that makes the domain of old tasks prone to shift. Second, the Task Isolation among all tasks will make the domain shift toward unpredictable directions; To address the unpredictable domain shift, in this paper, we propose Multi-Domain Multi-Task (MDMT) rehearsal to train the old tasks and new task parallelly and equally to break the isolation among tasks. Specifically, a two-level angular margin loss is proposed to encourage the intra-class/task compactness and inter-class/task discrepancy, which keeps the model from domain chaos. In addition, to further address domain shift of the old tasks, we propose an optional episodic distillation loss on the memory to anchor the knowledge for each old task. Experiments on benchmark datasets validate the proposed approach can effectively mitigate the unpredictable domain shift.