We introduce two algorithms for computing tight guarantees on the probabilistic robustness of Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs). Computing robustness guarantees for BNNs is a significantly more challenging task than verifying the robustness of standard Neural Networks (NNs) because it requires searching the parameters' space for safe weights. Moreover, tight and complete approaches for the verification of standard NNs, such as those based on Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP), cannot be directly used for the verification of BNNs because of the polynomial terms resulting from the consecutive multiplication of variables encoding the weights. Our algorithms efficiently and effectively search the parameters' space for safe weights by using iterative expansion and the network's gradient and can be used with any verification algorithm of choice for BNNs. In addition to proving that our algorithms compute tighter bounds than the SoA, we also evaluate our algorithms against the SoA on standard benchmarks, such as MNIST and CIFAR10, showing that our algorithms compute bounds up to 40% tighter than the SoA.
Face morphing is a problem in computer graphics with numerous artistic and forensic applications. It is challenging due to variations in pose, lighting, gender, and ethnicity. This task consists of a warping for feature alignment and a blending for a seamless transition between the warped images. We propose to leverage coord-based neural networks to represent such warpings and blendings of face images. During training, we exploit the smoothness and flexibility of such networks by combining energy functionals employed in classical approaches without discretizations. Additionally, our method is time-dependent, allowing a continuous warping/blending of the images. During morphing inference, we need both direct and inverse transformations of the time-dependent warping. The first (second) is responsible for warping the target (source) image into the source (target) image. Our neural warping stores those maps in a single network dismissing the need for inverting them. The results of our experiments indicate that our method is competitive with both classical and generative models under the lens of image quality and face-morphing detectors. Aesthetically, the resulting images present a seamless blending of diverse faces not yet usual in the literature.
We propose GNNInfer, the first automatic property inference technique for GNNs. To tackle the challenge of varying input structures in GNNs, GNNInfer first identifies a set of representative influential structures that contribute significantly towards the prediction of a GNN. Using these structures, GNNInfer converts each pair of an influential structure and the GNN to their equivalent FNN and then leverages existing property inference techniques to effectively capture properties of the GNN that are specific to the influential structures. GNNINfer then generalizes the captured properties to any input graphs that contain the influential structures. Finally, GNNInfer improves the correctness of the inferred properties by building a model (either a decision tree or linear regression) that estimates the deviation of GNN output from the inferred properties given full input graphs. The learned model helps GNNInfer extend the inferred properties with constraints to the input and output of the GNN, obtaining stronger properties that hold on full input graphs. Our experiments show that GNNInfer is effective in inferring likely properties of popular real-world GNNs, and more importantly, these inferred properties help effectively defend against GNNs' backdoor attacks. In particular, out of the 13 ground truth properties, GNNInfer re-discovered 8 correct properties and discovered likely correct properties that approximate the remaining 5 ground truth properties. Using properties inferred by GNNInfer to defend against the state-of-the-art backdoor attack technique on GNNs, namely UGBA, experiments show that GNNInfer's defense success rate is up to 30 times better than existing baselines.
Growth in computational materials science and initiatives such as the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) and the European Materials Modelling Council (EMMC) has motivated the development and application of ontologies. A key factor has been increased adoption of the FAIR principles, making research data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (Wilkinson et al. 2016). This paper characterizes semantic interoperability among a subset of materials science ontologies in the MatPortal repository. Background context covers semantic interoperability, ontological commitment, and the materials science ontology landscape. The research focused on MatPortal's two interoperability protocols: LOOM term matching and URI matching. Results report the degree of overlap and demonstrate the different types of ambiguity among ontologies. The discussion considers implications for FAIR and AI, and the conclusion highlight key findings and next steps.
The solution of a sparse system of linear equations is ubiquitous in scientific applications. Iterative methods, such as the Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient method (PCG), are normally chosen over direct methods due to memory and computational complexity constraints. However, the efficiency of these methods depends on the preconditioner utilized. The development of the preconditioner normally requires some insight into the sparse linear system and the desired trade-off of generating the preconditioner and the reduction in the number of iterations. Incomplete factorization methods tend to be black box methods to generate these preconditioners but may fail for a number of reasons. These reasons include numerical issues that require searching for adequate scaling, shifting, and fill-in while utilizing a difficult to parallelize algorithm. With a move towards heterogeneous computing, many sparse applications find GPUs that are optimized for dense tensor applications like training neural networks being underutilized. In this work, we demonstrate that a simple artificial neural network trained either at compile time or in parallel to the running application on a GPU can provide an incomplete sparse Cholesky factorization that can be used as a preconditioner. This generated preconditioner is as good or better in terms of reduction of iterations than the one found using multiple preconditioning techniques such as scaling and shifting. Moreover, the generated method also works and never fails to produce a preconditioner that does not reduce the iteration count.
We show how to construct in an elementary way the invariant of the KHK discretisation of a cubic Hamiltonian system in two dimensions. That is, we show that this invariant is expressible as the product of the ratios of affine polynomials defining the prolongation of the three parallel sides of a hexagon. On the vertices of such a hexagon lie the indeterminacy points of the KHK map. This result is obtained analysing the structure of the singular fibres of the known invariant. We apply this construction to several examples, and we prove that a similar result holds true for a case outside the hypotheses of the main theorem, leading us to conjecture that further extensions are possible.
Entity abstract summarization aims to generate a coherent description of a given entity based on a set of relevant Internet documents. Pretrained language models (PLMs) have achieved significant success in this task, but they may suffer from hallucinations, i.e. generating non-factual information about the entity. To address this issue, we decompose the summary into two components: Facts that represent the factual information about the given entity, which PLMs are prone to fabricate; and Template that comprises generic content with designated slots for facts, which PLMs can generate competently. Based on the facts-template decomposition, we propose SlotSum, an explainable framework for entity abstract summarization. SlotSum first creates the template and then predicts the fact for each template slot based on the input documents. Benefiting from our facts-template decomposition, SlotSum can easily locate errors and further rectify hallucinated predictions with external knowledge. We construct a new dataset WikiFactSum to evaluate the performance of SlotSum. Experimental results demonstrate that SlotSum could generate summaries that are significantly more factual with credible external knowledge.
We derive and study time-uniform confidence spheres -- confidence sphere sequences (CSSs) -- which contain the mean of random vectors with high probability simultaneously across all sample sizes. Inspired by the original work of Catoni and Giulini, we unify and extend their analysis to cover both the sequential setting and to handle a variety of distributional assumptions. Our results include an empirical-Bernstein CSS for bounded random vectors (resulting in a novel empirical-Bernstein confidence interval with asymptotic width scaling proportionally to the true unknown variance), CSSs for sub-$\psi$ random vectors (which includes sub-gamma, sub-Poisson, and sub-exponential), and CSSs for heavy-tailed random vectors (two moments only). Finally, we provide two CSSs that are robust to contamination by Huber noise. The first is a robust version of our empirical-Bernstein CSS, and the second extends recent work in the univariate setting to heavy-tailed multivariate distributions.
Finding the exact spanning ratio of a Delaunay graph has been one of the longstanding open problems in Computational Geometry. Currently there are only four convex shapes for which the exact spanning ratio of their Delaunay graph is known: the equilateral triangle, the square, the regular hexagon and the rectangle. In this paper, we show the exact spanning ratio of the parallelogram Delaunay graph, making the parallelogram the fifth convex shape for which an exact bound is known. The worst-case spanning ratio is exactly $$\frac{\sqrt{2}\sqrt{1+A^2+2A\cos(\theta_0)+(A+\cos(\theta_0))\sqrt{1+A^2+2A\cos(\theta_0)}}}{\sin(\theta_0)} .$$ where $A$ is the aspect ratio and $\theta_0$ is the non-obtuse angle of the parallelogram. Moreover, we show how to construct a parallelogram Delaunay graph whose spanning ratio matches the above mentioned spanning ratio.
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to detect the emotion label for each utterance. Motivated by recent studies which have proven that feeding training examples in a meaningful order rather than considering them randomly can boost the performance of models, we propose an ERC-oriented hybrid curriculum learning framework. Our framework consists of two curricula: (1) conversation-level curriculum (CC); and (2) utterance-level curriculum (UC). In CC, we construct a difficulty measurer based on "emotion shift" frequency within a conversation, then the conversations are scheduled in an "easy to hard" schema according to the difficulty score returned by the difficulty measurer. For UC, it is implemented from an emotion-similarity perspective, which progressively strengthens the model's ability in identifying the confusing emotions. With the proposed model-agnostic hybrid curriculum learning strategy, we observe significant performance boosts over a wide range of existing ERC models and we are able to achieve new state-of-the-art results on four public ERC datasets.
Recently, Mutual Information (MI) has attracted attention in bounding the generalization error of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, it is intractable to accurately estimate the MI in DNNs, thus most previous works have to relax the MI bound, which in turn weakens the information theoretic explanation for generalization. To address the limitation, this paper introduces a probabilistic representation of DNNs for accurately estimating the MI. Leveraging the proposed MI estimator, we validate the information theoretic explanation for generalization, and derive a tighter generalization bound than the state-of-the-art relaxations.