It is now well known that neural networks can be wrong with high confidence in their predictions, leading to poor calibration. The most common post-hoc approach to compensate for this is to perform temperature scaling, which adjusts the confidences of the predictions on any input by scaling the logits by a fixed value. Whilst this approach typically improves the average calibration across the whole test dataset, this improvement typically reduces the individual confidences of the predictions irrespective of whether the classification of a given input is correct or incorrect. With this insight, we base our method on the observation that different samples contribute to the calibration error by varying amounts, with some needing to increase their confidence and others needing to decrease it. Therefore, for each input, we propose to predict a different temperature value, allowing us to adjust the mismatch between confidence and accuracy at a finer granularity. Furthermore, we observe improved results on OOD detection and can also extract a notion of hardness for the data-points. Our method is applied post-hoc, consequently using very little computation time and with a negligible memory footprint and is applied to off-the-shelf pre-trained classifiers. We test our method on the ResNet50 and WideResNet28-10 architectures using the CIFAR10/100 and Tiny-ImageNet datasets, showing that producing per-data-point temperatures is beneficial also for the expected calibration error across the whole test set. Code is available at: //github.com/thwjoy/adats.
Large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have offered an exciting opportunity to discover putative causal genes or risk factors associated with diseases by using SNPs as instrumental variables (IVs). However, conventional approaches assume linear causal relations partly for simplicity and partly for the only availability of GWAS summary data. In this work, we propose a novel model {for transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS)} to incorporate nonlinear relationships across IVs, an exposure, and an outcome, which is robust against violations of the valid IV assumptions and permits the use of GWAS summary data. We decouple the estimation of a marginal causal effect and a nonlinear transformation, where the former is estimated via sliced inverse regression and a sparse instrumental variable regression, and the latter is estimated by a ratio-adjusted inverse regression. On this ground, we propose an inferential procedure. An application of the proposed method to the ADNI gene expression data and the IGAP GWAS summary data identifies 18 causal genes associated with Alzheimer's disease, including APOE and TOMM40, in addition to 7 other genes missed by two-stage least squares considering only linear relationships. Our findings suggest that nonlinear modeling is required to unleash the power of IV regression for identifying potentially nonlinear gene-trait associations. Accompanying this paper is our Python library nl-causal(//github.com/nl-causal/nonlinear-causal) that implements the proposed method.
Semantic segmentation is a challenging computer vision task demanding a significant amount of pixel-level annotated data. Producing such data is a time-consuming and costly process, especially for domains with a scarcity of experts, such as medicine or forensic anthropology. While numerous semi-supervised approaches have been developed to make the most from the limited labeled data and ample amount of unlabeled data, domain-specific real-world datasets often have characteristics that both reduce the effectiveness of off-the-shelf state-of-the-art methods and also provide opportunities to create new methods that exploit these characteristics. We propose and evaluate a semi-supervised method that reuses available labels for unlabeled images of a dataset by exploiting existing similarities, while dynamically weighting the impact of these reused labels in the training process. We evaluate our method on a large dataset of human decomposition images and find that our method, while conceptually simple, outperforms state-of-the-art consistency and pseudo-labeling-based methods for the segmentation of this dataset. This paper includes graphic content of human decomposition.
Privacy has become a major concern in machine learning. In fact, the federated learning is motivated by the privacy concern as it does not allow to transmit the private data but only intermediate updates. However, federated learning does not always guarantee privacy-preservation as the intermediate updates may also reveal sensitive information. In this paper, we give an explicit information-theoretical analysis of a federated expectation maximization algorithm for Gaussian mixture model and prove that the intermediate updates can cause severe privacy leakage. To address the privacy issue, we propose a fully decentralized privacy-preserving solution, which is able to securely compute the updates in each maximization step. Additionally, we consider two different types of security attacks: the honest-but-curious and eavesdropping adversary models. Numerical validation shows that the proposed approach has superior performance compared to the existing approach in terms of both the accuracy and privacy level.
Machine learning regression methods allow estimation of functions without unrealistic parametric assumptions. Although they can perform exceptionally in prediction error, most lack theoretical convergence rates necessary for semi-parametric efficient estimation (e.g. TMLE, AIPW) of parameters like average treatment effects. The Highly Adaptive Lasso (HAL) is the only regression method proven to converge quickly enough for a meaningfully large class of functions, independent of the dimensionality of the predictors. Unfortunately, HAL is not computationally scalable. In this paper we build upon the theory of HAL to construct the Selectively Adaptive Lasso (SAL), a new algorithm which retains HAL's dimension-free, nonparametric convergence rate but which also scales computationally to massive datasets. To accomplish this, we prove some general theoretical results pertaining to empirical loss minimization in nested Donsker classes. Our resulting algorithm is a form of gradient tree boosting with an adaptive learning rate, which makes it fast and trivial to implement with off-the-shelf software. Finally, we show that our algorithm retains the performance of standard gradient boosting on a diverse group of real-world datasets. SAL makes semi-parametric efficient estimators practically possible and theoretically justifiable in many big data settings.
The increasing use of deep neural networks in safety-critical applications requires the trained models to be well-calibrated. Most current calibration techniques address classification problems while focusing on improving calibration on in-domain predictions. Little to no attention is paid towards addressing calibration of visual object detectors which occupy similar space and importance in many decision making systems. In this paper, we study the calibration of current object detection models, particularly under domain shift. To this end, we first introduce a plug-and-play train-time calibration loss for object detection. It can be used as an auxiliary loss function to improve detector's calibration. Second, we devise a new uncertainty quantification mechanism for object detection which can implicitly calibrate the commonly used self-training based domain adaptive detectors. We include in our study both single-stage and two-stage object detectors. We demonstrate that our loss improves calibration for both in-domain and out-of-domain detections with notable margins. Finally, we show the utility of our techniques in calibrating the domain adaptive object detectors in diverse domain shift scenarios.
Background: Instrumental variables (IVs) can be used to provide evidence as to whether a treatment X has a causal effect on an outcome Y. Even if the instrument Z satisfies the three core IV assumptions of relevance, independence and the exclusion restriction, further assumptions are required to identify the average causal effect (ACE) of X on Y. Sufficient assumptions for this include: homogeneity in the causal effect of X on Y; homogeneity in the association of Z with X; and no effect modification (NEM). Methods: We describe the NO Simultaneous Heterogeneity (NOSH) assumption, which requires the heterogeneity in the X-Y causal effect to be mean independent of (i.e., uncorrelated with) both Z and heterogeneity in the Z-X association. This happens, for example, if there are no common modifiers of the X-Y effect and the Z-X association, and the X-Y effect is additive linear. We illustrate NOSH using simulations and by re-examining selected published studies. Results: When NOSH holds, the Wald estimand equals the ACE even if both homogeneity assumptions and NEM (which we demonstrate to be special cases of - and therefore stronger than - NOSH) are violated. Conclusions: NOSH is sufficient for identifying the ACE using IVs. Since NOSH is weaker than existing assumptions for ACE identification, doing so may be more plausible than previously anticipated.
Probability calibration for deep models is highly desirable in safety-critical applications such as medical imaging. It makes output probabilities of deep networks interpretable, by aligning prediction probability with the actual accuracy in test data. In image segmentation, well-calibrated probabilities allow radiologists to identify regions where model-predicted segmentations are unreliable. These unreliable predictions often occur to out-of-domain (OOD) images that are caused by imaging artifacts or unseen imaging protocols. Unfortunately, most previous calibration methods for image segmentation perform sub-optimally on OOD images. To reduce the calibration error when confronted with OOD images, we propose a novel post-hoc calibration model. Our model leverages the pixel susceptibility against perturbations at the local level, and the shape prior information at the global level. The model is tested on cardiac MRI segmentation datasets that contain unseen imaging artifacts and images from an unseen imaging protocol. We demonstrate reduced calibration errors compared with the state-of-the-art calibration algorithm.
Current deep learning research is dominated by benchmark evaluation. A method is regarded as favorable if it empirically performs well on the dedicated test set. This mentality is seamlessly reflected in the resurfacing area of continual learning, where consecutively arriving sets of benchmark data are investigated. The core challenge is framed as protecting previously acquired representations from being catastrophically forgotten due to the iterative parameter updates. However, comparison of individual methods is nevertheless treated in isolation from real world application and typically judged by monitoring accumulated test set performance. The closed world assumption remains predominant. It is assumed that during deployment a model is guaranteed to encounter data that stems from the same distribution as used for training. This poses a massive challenge as neural networks are well known to provide overconfident false predictions on unknown instances and break down in the face of corrupted data. In this work we argue that notable lessons from open set recognition, the identification of statistically deviating data outside of the observed dataset, and the adjacent field of active learning, where data is incrementally queried such that the expected performance gain is maximized, are frequently overlooked in the deep learning era. Based on these forgotten lessons, we propose a consolidated view to bridge continual learning, active learning and open set recognition in deep neural networks. Our results show that this not only benefits each individual paradigm, but highlights the natural synergies in a common framework. We empirically demonstrate improvements when alleviating catastrophic forgetting, querying data in active learning, selecting task orders, while exhibiting robust open world application where previously proposed methods fail.
Meta-learning extracts the common knowledge acquired from learning different tasks and uses it for unseen tasks. It demonstrates a clear advantage on tasks that have insufficient training data, e.g., few-shot learning. In most meta-learning methods, tasks are implicitly related via the shared model or optimizer. In this paper, we show that a meta-learner that explicitly relates tasks on a graph describing the relations of their output dimensions (e.g., classes) can significantly improve the performance of few-shot learning. This type of graph is usually free or cheap to obtain but has rarely been explored in previous works. We study the prototype based few-shot classification, in which a prototype is generated for each class, such that the nearest neighbor search between the prototypes produces an accurate classification. We introduce "Gated Propagation Network (GPN)", which learns to propagate messages between prototypes of different classes on the graph, so that learning the prototype of each class benefits from the data of other related classes. In GPN, an attention mechanism is used for the aggregation of messages from neighboring classes, and a gate is deployed to choose between the aggregated messages and the message from the class itself. GPN is trained on a sequence of tasks from many-shot to few-shot generated by subgraph sampling. During training, it is able to reuse and update previously achieved prototypes from the memory in a life-long learning cycle. In experiments, we change the training-test discrepancy and test task generation settings for thorough evaluations. GPN outperforms recent meta-learning methods on two benchmark datasets in all studied cases.
With the rapid increase of large-scale, real-world datasets, it becomes critical to address the problem of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes account for most of the data, while most classes are under-represented). Existing solutions typically adopt class re-balancing strategies such as re-sampling and re-weighting based on the number of observations for each class. In this work, we argue that as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula $(1-\beta^{n})/(1-\beta)$, where $n$ is the number of samples and $\beta \in [0,1)$ is a hyperparameter. We design a re-weighting scheme that uses the effective number of samples for each class to re-balance the loss, thereby yielding a class-balanced loss. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on artificially induced long-tailed CIFAR datasets and large-scale datasets including ImageNet and iNaturalist. Our results show that when trained with the proposed class-balanced loss, the network is able to achieve significant performance gains on long-tailed datasets.