Gaussian process (GP) based Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful method for optimizing black-box functions efficiently. The practical performance and theoretical guarantees associated with this approach depend on having the correct GP hyperparameter values, which are usually unknown in advance and need to be estimated from the observed data. However, in practice, these estimations could be incorrect due to biased data sampling strategies commonly used in BO. This can lead to degraded performance and break the sub-linear global convergence guarantee of BO. To address this issue, we propose a new BO method that can sub-linearly converge to the global optimum of the objective function even when the true GP hyperparameters are unknown in advance and need to be estimated from the observed data. Our method uses a multi-armed bandit technique (EXP3) to add random data points to the BO process, and employs a novel training loss function for the GP hyperparameter estimation process that ensures unbiased estimation from the observed data. We further provide theoretical analysis of our proposed method. Finally, we demonstrate empirically that our method outperforms existing approaches on various synthetic and real-world problems.
Threshold signatures are a fundamental cryptographic primitive used in many practical applications. As proposed by Boneh and Komlo (CRYPTO'22), TAPS is a threshold signature that is a hybrid of privacy and accountability. It enables a combiner to combine t signature shares while revealing nothing about the threshold t or signing quorum to the public and asks a tracer to track a signature to the quorum that generates it. However, TAPS has three disadvantages: it 1) structures upon a centralized model, 2) assumes that both combiner and tracer are honest, and 3) leaves the tracing unnotarized and static. In this work, we introduce Decentralized, Threshold, dynamically Accountable and Private Signature (DeTAPS) that provides decentralized combining and tracing, enhanced privacy against untrusted combiners (tracers), and notarized and dynamic tracing. Specifically, we adopt Dynamic Threshold Public-Key Encryption (DTPKE) to dynamically notarize the tracing process, design non-interactive zero knowledge proofs to achieve public verifiability of notaries, and utilize the Key-Aggregate Searchable Encryption to bridge TAPS and DTPKE so as to awaken the notaries securely and efficiently. In addition, we formalize the definitions and security requirements for DeTAPS. Then we present a generic construction and formally prove its security and privacy. To evaluate the performance, we build a prototype based on SGX2 and Ethereum.
Recent diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have shown remarkable abilities of generated content, however, they often suffer from complex forward processes, resulting in inefficient solutions for the reversed process and prolonged sampling times. In this paper, we aim to address the aforementioned challenges by focusing on the diffusion process itself that we propose to decouple the intricate diffusion process into two comparatively simpler process to improve the generative efficacy and speed. In particular, we present a novel diffusion paradigm named DDM (Decoupled Diffusion Models) based on the Ito diffusion process, in which the image distribution is approximated by an explicit transition probability while the noise path is controlled by the standard Wiener process. We find that decoupling the diffusion process reduces the learning difficulty and the explicit transition probability improves the generative speed significantly. We prove a new training objective for DPM, which enables the model to learn to predict the noise and image components separately. Moreover, given the novel forward diffusion equation, we derive the reverse denoising formula of DDM that naturally supports fewer steps of generation without ordinary differential equation (ODE) based accelerators. Our experiments demonstrate that DDM outperforms previous DPMs by a large margin in fewer function evaluations setting and gets comparable performances in long function evaluations setting. We also show that our framework can be applied to image-conditioned generation and high-resolution image synthesis, and that it can generate high-quality images with only 10 function evaluations.
Learning to restore multiple image degradations within a single model is quite beneficial for real-world applications. Nevertheless, existing works typically concentrate on regarding each degradation independently, while their relationship has been less exploited to ensure the synergistic learning. To this end, we revisit the diverse degradations through the lens of singular value decomposition, with the observation that the decomposed singular vectors and singular values naturally undertake the different types of degradation information, dividing various restoration tasks into two groups,\ie, singular vector dominated and singular value dominated. The above analysis renders a more unified perspective to ascribe the diverse degradations, compared to previous task-level independent learning. The dedicated optimization of degraded singular vectors and singular values inherently utilizes the potential relationship among diverse restoration tasks, attributing to the Decomposition Ascribed Synergistic Learning (DASL). Specifically, DASL comprises two effective operators, namely, Singular VEctor Operator (SVEO) and Singular VAlue Operator (SVAO), to favor the decomposed optimization, which can be lightly integrated into existing convolutional image restoration backbone. Moreover, the congruous decomposition loss has been devised for auxiliary. Extensive experiments on blended five image restoration tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, including image deraining, image dehazing, image denoising, image deblurring, and low-light image enhancement.
Recent artificial intelligence (AI) systems have reached milestones in "grand challenges" ranging from Go to protein-folding. The capability to retrieve medical knowledge, reason over it, and answer medical questions comparably to physicians has long been viewed as one such grand challenge. Large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant progress in medical question answering; Med-PaLM was the first model to exceed a "passing" score in US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) style questions with a score of 67.2% on the MedQA dataset. However, this and other prior work suggested significant room for improvement, especially when models' answers were compared to clinicians' answers. Here we present Med-PaLM 2, which bridges these gaps by leveraging a combination of base LLM improvements (PaLM 2), medical domain finetuning, and prompting strategies including a novel ensemble refinement approach. Med-PaLM 2 scored up to 86.5% on the MedQA dataset, improving upon Med-PaLM by over 19% and setting a new state-of-the-art. We also observed performance approaching or exceeding state-of-the-art across MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and MMLU clinical topics datasets. We performed detailed human evaluations on long-form questions along multiple axes relevant to clinical applications. In pairwise comparative ranking of 1066 consumer medical questions, physicians preferred Med-PaLM 2 answers to those produced by physicians on eight of nine axes pertaining to clinical utility (p < 0.001). We also observed significant improvements compared to Med-PaLM on every evaluation axis (p < 0.001) on newly introduced datasets of 240 long-form "adversarial" questions to probe LLM limitations. While further studies are necessary to validate the efficacy of these models in real-world settings, these results highlight rapid progress towards physician-level performance in medical question answering.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising results on a broad spectrum of applications. Most empirical studies of GNNs directly take the observed graph as input, assuming the observed structure perfectly depicts the accurate and complete relations between nodes. However, graphs in the real world are inevitably noisy or incomplete, which could even exacerbate the quality of graph representations. In this work, we propose a novel Variational Information Bottleneck guided Graph Structure Learning framework, namely VIB-GSL, in the perspective of information theory. VIB-GSL advances the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle for graph structure learning, providing a more elegant and universal framework for mining underlying task-relevant relations. VIB-GSL learns an informative and compressive graph structure to distill the actionable information for specific downstream tasks. VIB-GSL deduces a variational approximation for irregular graph data to form a tractable IB objective function, which facilitates training stability. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the superior effectiveness and robustness of VIB-GSL.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to be effective models for different predictive tasks on graph-structured data. Recent work on their expressive power has focused on isomorphism tasks and countable feature spaces. We extend this theoretical framework to include continuous features - which occur regularly in real-world input domains and within the hidden layers of GNNs - and we demonstrate the requirement for multiple aggregation functions in this context. Accordingly, we propose Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation (PNA), a novel architecture combining multiple aggregators with degree-scalers (which generalize the sum aggregator). Finally, we compare the capacity of different models to capture and exploit the graph structure via a novel benchmark containing multiple tasks taken from classical graph theory, alongside existing benchmarks from real-world domains, all of which demonstrate the strength of our model. With this work, we hope to steer some of the GNN research towards new aggregation methods which we believe are essential in the search for powerful and robust models.
Aspect level sentiment classification aims to identify the sentiment expressed towards an aspect given a context sentence. Previous neural network based methods largely ignore the syntax structure in one sentence. In this paper, we propose a novel target-dependent graph attention network (TD-GAT) for aspect level sentiment classification, which explicitly utilizes the dependency relationship among words. Using the dependency graph, it propagates sentiment features directly from the syntactic context of an aspect target. In our experiments, we show our method outperforms multiple baselines with GloVe embeddings. We also demonstrate that using BERT representations further substantially boosts the performance.
Manually labeling objects by tracing their boundaries is a laborious process. In Polygon-RNN++ the authors proposed Polygon-RNN that produces polygonal annotations in a recurrent manner using a CNN-RNN architecture, allowing interactive correction via humans-in-the-loop. We propose a new framework that alleviates the sequential nature of Polygon-RNN, by predicting all vertices simultaneously using a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). Our model is trained end-to-end. It supports object annotation by either polygons or splines, facilitating labeling efficiency for both line-based and curved objects. We show that Curve-GCN outperforms all existing approaches in automatic mode, including the powerful PSP-DeepLab and is significantly more efficient in interactive mode than Polygon-RNN++. Our model runs at 29.3ms in automatic, and 2.6ms in interactive mode, making it 10x and 100x faster than Polygon-RNN++.
It is important to detect anomalous inputs when deploying machine learning systems. The use of larger and more complex inputs in deep learning magnifies the difficulty of distinguishing between anomalous and in-distribution examples. At the same time, diverse image and text data are available in enormous quantities. We propose leveraging these data to improve deep anomaly detection by training anomaly detectors against an auxiliary dataset of outliers, an approach we call Outlier Exposure (OE). This enables anomaly detectors to generalize and detect unseen anomalies. In extensive experiments on natural language processing and small- and large-scale vision tasks, we find that Outlier Exposure significantly improves detection performance. We also observe that cutting-edge generative models trained on CIFAR-10 may assign higher likelihoods to SVHN images than to CIFAR-10 images; we use OE to mitigate this issue. We also analyze the flexibility and robustness of Outlier Exposure, and identify characteristics of the auxiliary dataset that improve performance.
Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have struggled with counting objects in natural images so far. We identify a fundamental problem due to soft attention in these models as a cause. To circumvent this problem, we propose a neural network component that allows robust counting from object proposals. Experiments on a toy task show the effectiveness of this component and we obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the number category of the VQA v2 dataset without negatively affecting other categories, even outperforming ensemble models with our single model. On a difficult balanced pair metric, the component gives a substantial improvement in counting over a strong baseline by 6.6%.