Active learning provides a framework to adaptively query the most informative experiments towards learning an unknown black-box function. Various approaches of active learning have been proposed in the literature, however, they either focus on exploration or exploitation in the design space. Methods that do consider exploration-exploitation simultaneously employ fixed or ad-hoc measures to control the trade-off that may not be optimal. In this paper, we develop a Bayesian hierarchical approach, referred as BHEEM, to dynamically balance the exploration-exploitation trade-off as more data points are queried. To sample from the posterior distribution of the trade-off parameter, We subsequently formulate an approximate Bayesian computation approach based on the linear dependence of queried data in the feature space. Simulated and real-world examples show the proposed approach achieves at least 21% and 11% average improvement when compared to pure exploration and exploitation strategies respectively. More importantly, we note that by optimally balancing the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, BHEEM performs better or at least as well as either pure exploration or pure exploitation.
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主動學習是機器學習（更普遍的說是人工智能）的一個子領域，在統計學領域也叫查詢學習、最優實驗設計。“學習模塊”和“選擇策略”是主動學習算法的2個基本且重要的模塊。
主動學習是“一種學習方法，在這種方法中，學生會主動或體驗性地參與學習過程，并且根據學生的參與程度，有不同程度的主動學習。” （Bonwell＆Eison 1991）Bonwell＆Eison（1991） 指出：“學生除了被動地聽課以外，還從事其他活動。” 在高等教育研究協會（ASHE）的一份報告中，作者討論了各種促進主動學習的方法。他們引用了一些文獻，這些文獻表明學生不僅要做聽，還必須做更多的事情才能學習。他們必須閱讀，寫作，討論并參與解決問題。此過程涉及三個學習領域，即知識，技能和態度（KSA）。這種學習行為分類法可以被認為是“學習過程的目標”。特別是，學生必須從事諸如分析，綜合和評估之類的高級思維任務。
Exploring the application of powerful large language models (LLMs) on the fundamental named entity recognition (NER) task has drawn much attention recently. This work aims to investigate the possibilities of pushing the boundary of zero-shot NER with LLM via a training-free self-improving strategy. We propose a self-improving framework, which utilize an unlabeled corpus to stimulate the self-learning ability of LLMs on NER. First, we use LLM to make predictions on the unlabeled corpus and obtain the self-annotated data. Second, we explore various strategies to select reliable samples from the self-annotated dataset as demonstrations, considering the similarity, diversity and reliability of demonstrations. Finally, we conduct inference for the test query via in-context learning with the selected self-annotated demonstrations. Through comprehensive experimental analysis, our study yielded the following findings: (1) The self-improving framework further pushes the boundary of zero-shot NER with LLMs, and achieves an obvious performance improvement; (2) Iterative self-improving or naively increasing the size of unlabeled corpus does not guarantee improvements; (3) There might still be space for improvement via more advanced strategy for reliable entity selection.
Transformer neural networks can exhibit a surprising capacity for in-context learning (ICL) despite not being explicitly trained for it. Prior work has provided a deeper understanding of how ICL emerges in transformers, e.g. through the lens of mechanistic interpretability, Bayesian inference, or by examining the distributional properties of training data. However, in each of these cases, ICL is treated largely as a persistent phenomenon; namely, once ICL emerges, it is assumed to persist asymptotically. Here, we show that the emergence of ICL during transformer training is, in fact, often transient. We train transformers on synthetic data designed so that both ICL and in-weights learning (IWL) strategies can lead to correct predictions. We find that ICL first emerges, then disappears and gives way to IWL, all while the training loss decreases, indicating an asymptotic preference for IWL. The transient nature of ICL is observed in transformers across a range of model sizes and datasets, raising the question of how much to "overtrain" transformers when seeking compact, cheaper-to-run models. We find that L2 regularization may offer a path to more persistent ICL that removes the need for early stopping based on ICL-style validation tasks. Finally, we present initial evidence that ICL transience may be caused by competition between ICL and IWL circuits.
This paper provides a comprehensive error analysis of learning with vector-valued random features (RF). The theory is developed for RF ridge regression in a fully general infinite-dimensional input-output setting, but nonetheless applies to and improves existing finite-dimensional analyses. In contrast to comparable work in the literature, the approach proposed here relies on a direct analysis of the underlying risk functional and completely avoids the explicit RF ridge regression solution formula in terms of random matrices. This removes the need for concentration results in random matrix theory or their generalizations to random operators. The main results established in this paper include strong consistency of vector-valued RF estimators under model misspecification and minimax optimal convergence rates in the well-specified setting. The parameter complexity (number of random features) and sample complexity (number of labeled data) required to achieve such rates are comparable with Monte Carlo intuition and free from logarithmic factors.
Compositional generalisation (CG), in NLP and in machine learning more generally, has been assessed mostly using artificial datasets. It is important to develop benchmarks to assess CG also in real-world natural language tasks in order to understand the abilities and limitations of systems deployed in the wild. To this end, our GenBench Collaborative Benchmarking Task submission utilises the distribution-based compositionality assessment (DBCA) framework to split the Europarl translation corpus into a training and a test set in such a way that the test set requires compositional generalisation capacity. Specifically, the training and test sets have divergent distributions of dependency relations, testing NMT systems' capability of translating dependencies that they have not been trained on. This is a fully-automated procedure to create natural language compositionality benchmarks, making it simple and inexpensive to apply it further to other datasets and languages. The code and data for the experiments is available at //github.com/aalto-speech/dbca.
Deep learning models often suffer from forgetting previously learned information when trained on new data. This problem is exacerbated in federated learning (FL), where the data is distributed and can change independently for each user. Many solutions are proposed to resolve this catastrophic forgetting in a centralized setting. However, they do not apply directly to FL because of its unique complexities, such as privacy concerns and resource limitations. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents a framework for \textbf{federated class incremental learning} that utilizes a generative model to synthesize samples from past distributions. This data can be later exploited alongside the training data to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. To preserve privacy, the generative model is trained on the server using data-free methods at the end of each task without requesting data from clients. Moreover, our solution does not demand the users to store old data or models, which gives them the freedom to join/leave the training at any time. Additionally, we introduce SuperImageNet, a new regrouping of the ImageNet dataset specifically tailored for federated continual learning. We demonstrate significant improvements compared to existing baselines through extensive experiments on multiple datasets.
This paper introduces a new approach to address the issue of class imbalance in graph neural networks (GNNs) for learning on graph-structured data. Our approach integrates imbalanced node classification and Bias-Variance Decomposition, establishing a theoretical framework that closely relates data imbalance to model variance. We also leverage graph augmentation technique to estimate the variance, and design a regularization term to alleviate the impact of imbalance. Exhaustive tests are conducted on multiple benchmarks, including naturally imbalanced datasets and public-split class-imbalanced datasets, demonstrating that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various imbalanced scenarios. This work provides a novel theoretical perspective for addressing the problem of imbalanced node classification in GNNs.
To facilitate efficient learning, policy gradient approaches to deep reinforcement learning (RL) are typically paired with variance reduction measures and strategies for making large but safe policy changes based on a batch of experiences. Natural policy gradient methods, including Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO), seek to produce monotonic improvement through bounded changes in policy outputs. Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a commonly used, first-order algorithm that instead uses loss clipping to take multiple safe optimization steps per batch of data, replacing the bound on the single step of TRPO with regularization on multiple steps. In this work, we find that the performance of PPO, when applied to continuous action spaces, may be consistently improved through a simple change in objective. Instead of the importance sampling objective of PPO, we instead recommend a basic policy gradient, clipped in an equivalent fashion. While both objectives produce biased gradient estimates with respect to the RL objective, they also both display significantly reduced variance compared to the unbiased off-policy policy gradient. Additionally, we show that (1) the clipped-objective policy gradient (COPG) objective is on average "pessimistic" compared to both the PPO objective and (2) this pessimism promotes enhanced exploration. As a result, we empirically observe that COPG produces improved learning compared to PPO in single-task, constrained, and multi-task learning, without adding significant computational cost or complexity. Compared to TRPO, the COPG approach is seen to offer comparable or superior performance, while retaining the simplicity of a first-order method.
Federated learning is a new distributed machine learning framework, where a bunch of heterogeneous clients collaboratively train a model without sharing training data. In this work, we consider a practical and ubiquitous issue in federated learning: intermittent client availability, where the set of eligible clients may change during the training process. Such an intermittent client availability model would significantly deteriorate the performance of the classical Federated Averaging algorithm (FedAvg for short). We propose a simple distributed non-convex optimization algorithm, called Federated Latest Averaging (FedLaAvg for short), which leverages the latest gradients of all clients, even when the clients are not available, to jointly update the global model in each iteration. Our theoretical analysis shows that FedLaAvg attains the convergence rate of $O(1/(N^{1/4} T^{1/2}))$, achieving a sublinear speedup with respect to the total number of clients. We implement and evaluate FedLaAvg with the CIFAR-10 dataset. The evaluation results demonstrate that FedLaAvg indeed reaches a sublinear speedup and achieves 4.23% higher test accuracy than FedAvg.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.
In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.
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