pPython seeks to provide a parallel capability that provides good speed-up without sacrificing the ease of programming in Python by implementing partitioned global array semantics (PGAS) on top of a simple file-based messaging library (PythonMPI) in pure Python. pPython follows a SPMD (single program multiple data) model of computation. pPython runs on a single-node (e.g., a laptop) running Windows, Linux, or MacOS operating systems or on any combination of heterogeneous systems that support Python, including on a cluster through a Slurm scheduler interface so that pPython can be executed in a massively parallel computing environment. It is interesting to see what performance pPython can achieve compared to the traditional socket-based MPI communication because of its unique file-based messaging implementation. In this paper, we present the point-to-point and collective communication performances of pPython and compare them with those obtained by using mpi4py with OpenMPI. For large messages, pPython demonstrates comparable performance as compared to mpi4py.
Machine learning tasks are vulnerable to the quality of data used as input. Yet, it is often challenging for firms to obtain adequate datasets, with them being naturally distributed amongst owners, that in practice, may be competitors in a downstream market and reluctant to share information. Focusing on supervised learning for regression tasks, we develop a \textit{regression market} to provide a monetary incentive for data sharing. Our proposed mechanism adopts a Bayesian framework, allowing us to consider a more general class of regression tasks. We present a thorough exploration of the market properties, and show that similar proposals in current literature expose the market agents to sizeable financial risks, which can be mitigated in our probabilistic setting.
Estimating weights in the synthetic control method, typically resulting in sparse weights where only a few control units have non-zero weights, involves an optimization procedure that simultaneously selects and aligns control units to closely match the treated unit. However, this simultaneous selection and alignment of control units may lead to a loss of efficiency. Another concern arising from the aforementioned procedure is its susceptibility to under-fitting due to imperfect pre-treatment fit. It is not uncommon for the linear combination, using nonnegative weights, of pre-treatment period outcomes for the control units to inadequately approximate the pre-treatment outcomes for the treated unit. To address both of these issues, this paper proposes a simple and effective method called Synthetic Regressing Control (SRC). The SRC method begins by performing the univariate linear regression to appropriately align the pre-treatment periods of the control units with the treated unit. Subsequently, a SRC estimator is obtained by synthesizing (taking a weighted average) the fitted controls. To determine the weights in the synthesis procedure, we propose an approach that utilizes a criterion of unbiased risk estimator. Theoretically, we show that the synthesis way is asymptotically optimal in the sense of achieving the lowest possible squared error. Extensive numerical experiments highlight the advantages of the SRC method.
We examine in detail the provisioning process used by many common, consumer-grade Internet of Things (IoT) devices. We find that this provisioning process involves the IoT device, the vendor's cloud-based server, and a vendor-provided mobile app. In order to better understand this process, we develop two toolkits. IoT-Dissect I enables us to decrypt and examine the messages exchanged between the IoT device and the vendor's server, and between the vendor's server and a vendor-provided mobile app. IoT-Dissect II permits us to reverse engineer the vendor's mobile app and observe its operation in detail. We find several potential security issues with the provisioning process and recommend ways to mitigate these potential problems. Further, based on these observations, we conclude that it is likely feasible to construct a vendor-agnostic IoT home gateway that will automate this largely manual provisioning process, isolate IoT devices on their own network, and perhaps open the tight association between an IoT device and the vendor's server.
Empirical risk minimization can lead to poor generalization behavior on unseen environments if the learned model does not capture invariant feature representations. Invariant risk minimization (IRM) is a recent proposal for discovering environment-invariant representations. IRM was introduced by Arjovsky et al. (2019) and extended by Ahuja et al. (2020). IRM assumes that all environments are available to the learning system at the same time. With this work, we generalize the concept of IRM to scenarios where environments are observed sequentially. We show that existing approaches, including those designed for continual learning, fail to identify the invariant features and models across sequentially presented environments. We extend IRM under a variational Bayesian and bilevel framework, creating a general approach to continual invariant risk minimization. We also describe a strategy to solve the optimization problems using a variant of the alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM). We show empirically using multiple datasets and with multiple sequential environments that the proposed methods outperform or is competitive with prior approaches.
We show how the basic Combinatory Homomorphic Automatic Differentiation (CHAD) algorithm can be optimised, using well-known methods, to yield a simple, composable, and generally applicable reverse-mode automatic differentiation (AD) technique that has the correct computational complexity that we would expect of reverse-mode AD. Specifically, we show that the standard optimisations of sparse vectors and state-passing style code (as well as defunctionalisation/closure conversion, for higher-order languages) give us a purely functional algorithm that is most of the way to the correct complexity, with (functional) mutable updates taking care of the final log-factors. We provide an Agda formalisation of our complexity proof. Finally, we discuss how the techniques apply to differentiating parallel functional array programs: the key observations are 1) that all required mutability is (commutative, associative) accumulation, which lets us preserve task-parallelism and 2) that we can write down data-parallel derivatives for most data-parallel array primitives.
Accurately measuring discrimination in machine learning-based automated decision systems is required to address the vital issue of fairness between subpopulations and/or individuals. Any bias in measuring discrimination can lead to either amplification or underestimation of the true value of discrimination. This paper focuses on a class of bias originating in the way training data is generated and/or collected. We call such class causal biases and use tools from the field of causality to formally define and analyze such biases. Four sources of bias are considered, namely, confounding, selection, measurement, and interaction. The main contribution of this paper is to provide, for each source of bias, a closed-form expression in terms of the model parameters. This makes it possible to analyze the behavior of each source of bias, in particular, in which cases they are absent and in which other cases they are maximized. We hope that the provided characterizations help the community better understand the sources of bias in machine learning applications.
Adversarial attack is a technique for deceiving Machine Learning (ML) models, which provides a way to evaluate the adversarial robustness. In practice, attack algorithms are artificially selected and tuned by human experts to break a ML system. However, manual selection of attackers tends to be sub-optimal, leading to a mistakenly assessment of model security. In this paper, a new procedure called Composite Adversarial Attack (CAA) is proposed for automatically searching the best combination of attack algorithms and their hyper-parameters from a candidate pool of \textbf{32 base attackers}. We design a search space where attack policy is represented as an attacking sequence, i.e., the output of the previous attacker is used as the initialization input for successors. Multi-objective NSGA-II genetic algorithm is adopted for finding the strongest attack policy with minimum complexity. The experimental result shows CAA beats 10 top attackers on 11 diverse defenses with less elapsed time (\textbf{6 $\times$ faster than AutoAttack}), and achieves the new state-of-the-art on $l_{\infty}$, $l_{2}$ and unrestricted adversarial attacks.
Embedding models for deterministic Knowledge Graphs (KG) have been extensively studied, with the purpose of capturing latent semantic relations between entities and incorporating the structured knowledge into machine learning. However, there are many KGs that model uncertain knowledge, which typically model the inherent uncertainty of relations facts with a confidence score, and embedding such uncertain knowledge represents an unresolved challenge. The capturing of uncertain knowledge will benefit many knowledge-driven applications such as question answering and semantic search by providing more natural characterization of the knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertain KG embedding model UKGE, which aims to preserve both structural and uncertainty information of relation facts in the embedding space. Unlike previous models that characterize relation facts with binary classification techniques, UKGE learns embeddings according to the confidence scores of uncertain relation facts. To further enhance the precision of UKGE, we also introduce probabilistic soft logic to infer confidence scores for unseen relation facts during training. We propose and evaluate two variants of UKGE based on different learning objectives. Experiments are conducted on three real-world uncertain KGs via three tasks, i.e. confidence prediction, relation fact ranking, and relation fact classification. UKGE shows effectiveness in capturing uncertain knowledge by achieving promising results on these tasks, and consistently outperforms baselines on these tasks.
Link prediction for knowledge graphs is the task of predicting missing relationships between entities. Previous work on link prediction has focused on shallow, fast models which can scale to large knowledge graphs. However, these models learn less expressive features than deep, multi-layer models -- which potentially limits performance. In this work, we introduce ConvE, a multi-layer convolutional network model for link prediction, and report state-of-the-art results for several established datasets. We also show that the model is highly parameter efficient, yielding the same performance as DistMult and R-GCN with 8x and 17x fewer parameters. Analysis of our model suggests that it is particularly effective at modelling nodes with high indegree -- which are common in highly-connected, complex knowledge graphs such as Freebase and YAGO3. In addition, it has been noted that the WN18 and FB15k datasets suffer from test set leakage, due to inverse relations from the training set being present in the test set -- however, the extent of this issue has so far not been quantified. We find this problem to be severe: a simple rule-based model can achieve state-of-the-art results on both WN18 and FB15k. To ensure that models are evaluated on datasets where simply exploiting inverse relations cannot yield competitive results, we investigate and validate several commonly used datasets -- deriving robust variants where necessary. We then perform experiments on these robust datasets for our own and several previously proposed models, and find that ConvE achieves state-of-the-art Mean Reciprocal Rank across all datasets.
We introduce an effective model to overcome the problem of mode collapse when training Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Firstly, we propose a new generator objective that finds it better to tackle mode collapse. And, we apply an independent Autoencoders (AE) to constrain the generator and consider its reconstructed samples as "real" samples to slow down the convergence of discriminator that enables to reduce the gradient vanishing problem and stabilize the model. Secondly, from mappings between latent and data spaces provided by AE, we further regularize AE by the relative distance between the latent and data samples to explicitly prevent the generator falling into mode collapse setting. This idea comes when we find a new way to visualize the mode collapse on MNIST dataset. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to propose and apply successfully the relative distance of latent and data samples for stabilizing GAN. Thirdly, our proposed model, namely Generative Adversarial Autoencoder Networks (GAAN), is stable and has suffered from neither gradient vanishing nor mode collapse issues, as empirically demonstrated on synthetic, MNIST, MNIST-1K, CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets. Experimental results show that our method can approximate well multi-modal distribution and achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods on these benchmark datasets. Our model implementation is published here: //github.com/tntrung/gaan