Predictive uncertainties in classification tasks are often a consequence of model inadequacy or insufficient training data. In popular applications, such as image processing, we are often required to scrutinise these uncertainties by meaningfully attributing them to input features. This helps to improve interpretability assessments. However, there exist few effective frameworks for this purpose. Vanilla forms of popular methods for the provision of saliency masks, such as SHAP or integrated gradients, adapt poorly to target measures of uncertainty. Thus, state-of-the-art tools instead proceed by creating counterfactual or adversarial feature vectors, and assign attributions by direct comparison to original images. In this paper, we present a novel framework that combines path integrals, counterfactual explanations and generative models, in order to procure attributions that contain few observable artefacts or noise. We evidence that this outperforms existing alternatives through quantitative evaluations with popular benchmarking methods and data sets of varying complexity.
As different people perceive others' emotional expressions differently, their annotation in terms of arousal and valence are per se subjective. To address this, these emotion annotations are typically collected by multiple annotators and averaged across annotators in order to obtain labels for arousal and valence. However, besides the average, also the uncertainty of a label is of interest, and should also be modeled and predicted for automatic emotion recognition. In the literature, for simplicity, label uncertainty modeling is commonly approached with a Gaussian assumption on the collected annotations. However, as the number of annotators is typically rather small due to resource constraints, we argue that the Gaussian approach is a rather crude assumption. In contrast, in this work we propose to model the label distribution using a Student's t-distribution which allows us to account for the number of annotations available. With this model, we derive the corresponding Kullback-Leibler divergence based loss function and use it to train an estimator for the distribution of emotion labels, from which the mean and uncertainty can be inferred. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, we show the benefits of the t-distribution over a Gaussian distribution. We validate our proposed method on the AVEC'16 dataset. Results reveal that our t-distribution based approach improves over the Gaussian approach with state-of-the-art uncertainty modeling results in speech-based emotion recognition, along with an optimal and even faster convergence.
Many internet platforms that collect behavioral big data use it to predict user behavior for internal purposes and for their business customers (e.g., advertisers, insurers, security forces, governments, political consulting firms) who utilize the predictions for personalization, targeting, and other decision-making. Improving predictive accuracy is therefore extremely valuable. Data science researchers design algorithms, models, and approaches to improve prediction. Prediction is also improved with larger and richer data. Beyond improving algorithms and data, platforms can stealthily achieve better prediction accuracy by pushing users' behaviors towards their predicted values, using behavior modification techniques, thereby demonstrating more certain predictions. Such apparent "improved" prediction can result from employing reinforcement learning algorithms that combine prediction and behavior modification. This strategy is absent from the machine learning and statistics literature. Investigating its properties requires integrating causal with predictive notation. To this end, we incorporate Pearl's causal do(.) operator into the predictive vocabulary. We then decompose the expected prediction error given behavior modification, and identify the components impacting predictive power. Our derivation elucidates implications of such behavior modification to data scientists, platforms, their customers, and the humans whose behavior is manipulated. Behavior modification can make users' behavior more predictable and even more homogeneous; yet this apparent predictability might not generalize when business customers use predictions in practice. Outcomes pushed towards their predictions can be at odds with customers' intentions, and harmful to manipulated users.
Explaining the decisions of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model is increasingly critical in many real-world, high-stake applications. Hundreds of papers have either proposed new feature attribution methods, discussed or harnessed these tools in their work. However, despite humans being the target end-users, most attribution methods were only evaluated on proxy automatic-evaluation metrics (Zhang et al. 2018; Zhou et al. 2016; Petsiuk et al. 2018). In this paper, we conduct the first user study to measure attribution map effectiveness in assisting humans in ImageNet classification and Stanford Dogs fine-grained classification, and when an image is natural or adversarial (i.e., contains adversarial perturbations). Overall, feature attribution is surprisingly not more effective than showing humans nearest training-set examples. On a harder task of fine-grained dog categorization, presenting attribution maps to humans does not help, but instead hurts the performance of human-AI teams compared to AI alone. Importantly, we found automatic attribution-map evaluation measures to correlate poorly with the actual human-AI team performance. Our findings encourage the community to rigorously test their methods on the downstream human-in-the-loop applications and to rethink the existing evaluation metrics.
We present a sampling-based control approach that can generate smooth actions for general nonlinear systems without external smoothing algorithms. Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control has been utilized in numerous robotic applications due to its appealing characteristics to solve non-convex optimization problems. However, the stochastic nature of sampling-based methods can cause significant chattering in the resulting commands. Chattering becomes more prominent in cases where the environment changes rapidly, possibly even causing the MPPI to diverge. To address this issue, we propose a method that seamlessly combines MPPI with an input-lifting strategy. In addition, we introduce a new action cost to smooth control sequence during trajectory rollouts while preserving the information theoretic interpretation of MPPI, which was derived from non-affine dynamics. We validate our method in two nonlinear control tasks with neural network dynamics: a pendulum swing-up task and a challenging autonomous driving task. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the MPPI baselines with additionally applied smoothing algorithms.
Model Predictive Control (MPC) approaches are widely used in robotics, since they allow to compute updated trajectories while the robot is moving. They generally require heuristic references for the tracking terms and proper tuning of parameters of the cost function in order to obtain good performance. When for example, a legged robot has to react to disturbances from the environment (e.g., recover after a push) or track a certain goal with statically unstable gaits, the effectiveness of the algorithm can degrade. In this work we propose a novel optimization-based Reference Generator, named Governor, which exploits a Linear Inverted Pendulum model to compute reference trajectories for the Center of Mass, while taking into account the possible under-actuation of a gait (e.g. in a trot). The obtained trajectories are used as references for the cost function of the Nonlinear MPC presented in our previous work [1]. We also present a formulation that can guarantee a certain response time to reach a goal, without the need to tune the weights of the cost terms. In addition, foothold locations are corrected to drive the robot towards the goal. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach both in simulations and experiments in different scenarios with the Aliengo robot.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely applied in various fields due to their significant power on processing graph-structured data. Typical GCN and its variants work under a homophily assumption (i.e., nodes with same class are prone to connect to each other), while ignoring the heterophily which exists in many real-world networks (i.e., nodes with different classes tend to form edges). Existing methods deal with heterophily by mainly aggregating higher-order neighborhoods or combing the immediate representations, which leads to noise and irrelevant information in the result. But these methods did not change the propagation mechanism which works under homophily assumption (that is a fundamental part of GCNs). This makes it difficult to distinguish the representation of nodes from different classes. To address this problem, in this paper we design a novel propagation mechanism, which can automatically change the propagation and aggregation process according to homophily or heterophily between node pairs. To adaptively learn the propagation process, we introduce two measurements of homophily degree between node pairs, which is learned based on topological and attribute information, respectively. Then we incorporate the learnable homophily degree into the graph convolution framework, which is trained in an end-to-end schema, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of homophily. More importantly, we theoretically prove that our model can constrain the similarity of representations between nodes according to their homophily degree. Experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that this new approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under heterophily or low homophily, and gains competitive performance under homophily.
Recent years have seen important advances in the quality of state-of-the-art models, but this has come at the expense of models becoming less interpretable. This survey presents an overview of the current state of Explainable AI (XAI), considered within the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP). We discuss the main categorization of explanations, as well as the various ways explanations can be arrived at and visualized. We detail the operations and explainability techniques currently available for generating explanations for NLP model predictions, to serve as a resource for model developers in the community. Finally, we point out the current gaps and encourage directions for future work in this important research area.
Deep Learning algorithms have achieved the state-of-the-art performance for Image Classification and have been used even in security-critical applications, such as biometric recognition systems and self-driving cars. However, recent works have shown those algorithms, which can even surpass the human capabilities, are vulnerable to adversarial examples. In Computer Vision, adversarial examples are images containing subtle perturbations generated by malicious optimization algorithms in order to fool classifiers. As an attempt to mitigate these vulnerabilities, numerous countermeasures have been constantly proposed in literature. Nevertheless, devising an efficient defense mechanism has proven to be a difficult task, since many approaches have already shown to be ineffective to adaptive attackers. Thus, this self-containing paper aims to provide all readerships with a review of the latest research progress on Adversarial Machine Learning in Image Classification, however with a defender's perspective. Here, novel taxonomies for categorizing adversarial attacks and defenses are introduced and discussions about the existence of adversarial examples are provided. Further, in contrast to exisiting surveys, it is also given relevant guidance that should be taken into consideration by researchers when devising and evaluating defenses. Finally, based on the reviewed literature, it is discussed some promising paths for future research.
The notion of "in-domain data" in NLP is often over-simplistic and vague, as textual data varies in many nuanced linguistic aspects such as topic, style or level of formality. In addition, domain labels are many times unavailable, making it challenging to build domain-specific systems. We show that massive pre-trained language models implicitly learn sentence representations that cluster by domains without supervision -- suggesting a simple data-driven definition of domains in textual data. We harness this property and propose domain data selection methods based on such models, which require only a small set of in-domain monolingual data. We evaluate our data selection methods for neural machine translation across five diverse domains, where they outperform an established approach as measured by both BLEU and by precision and recall of sentence selection with respect to an oracle.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.