Stochastic process models for spatiotemporal data underlying random fields find substantial utility in a range of scientific disciplines. Subsequent to predictive inference on the values of the random field (or spatial surface indexed continuously over time) at arbitrary space-time coordinates, scientific interest often turns to gleaning information regarding zones of rapid spatial-temporal change. We develop Bayesian modeling and inference for directional rates of change along a given surface. These surfaces, which demarcate regions of rapid change, are referred to as ``wombling'' surface boundaries. Existing methods for studying such changes have often been associated with curves and are not easily extendable to surfaces resulting from curves evolving over time. Our current contribution devises a fully model-based inferential framework for analyzing differential behavior in spatiotemporal responses by formalizing the notion of a ``wombling'' surface boundary using conventional multi-linear vector analytic frameworks and geometry followed by posterior predictive computations using triangulated surface approximations. We illustrate our methodology with comprehensive simulation experiments followed by multiple applications in environmental and climate science; pollutant analysis in environmental health; and brain imaging.
Disentangled Representation Learning (DRL) aims to learn a model capable of identifying and disentangling the underlying factors hidden in the observable data in representation form. The process of separating underlying factors of variation into variables with semantic meaning benefits in learning explainable representations of data, which imitates the meaningful understanding process of humans when observing an object or relation. As a general learning strategy, DRL has demonstrated its power in improving the model explainability, controlability, robustness, as well as generalization capacity in a wide range of scenarios such as computer vision, natural language processing, data mining etc. In this article, we comprehensively review DRL from various aspects including motivations, definitions, methodologies, evaluations, applications and model designs. We discuss works on DRL based on two well-recognized definitions, i.e., Intuitive Definition and Group Theory Definition. We further categorize the methodologies for DRL into four groups, i.e., Traditional Statistical Approaches, Variational Auto-encoder Based Approaches, Generative Adversarial Networks Based Approaches, Hierarchical Approaches and Other Approaches. We also analyze principles to design different DRL models that may benefit different tasks in practical applications. Finally, we point out challenges in DRL as well as potential research directions deserving future investigations. We believe this work may provide insights for promoting the DRL research in the community.
We present prompt distribution learning for effectively adapting a pre-trained vision-language model to address downstream recognition tasks. Our method not only learns low-bias prompts from a few samples but also captures the distribution of diverse prompts to handle the varying visual representations. In this way, we provide high-quality task-related content for facilitating recognition. This prompt distribution learning is realized by an efficient approach that learns the output embeddings of prompts instead of the input embeddings. Thus, we can employ a Gaussian distribution to model them effectively and derive a surrogate loss for efficient training. Extensive experiments on 12 datasets demonstrate that our method consistently and significantly outperforms existing methods. For example, with 1 sample per category, it relatively improves the average result by 9.1% compared to human-crafted prompts.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
Humans perceive the world by concurrently processing and fusing high-dimensional inputs from multiple modalities such as vision and audio. Machine perception models, in stark contrast, are typically modality-specific and optimised for unimodal benchmarks, and hence late-stage fusion of final representations or predictions from each modality (`late-fusion') is still a dominant paradigm for multimodal video classification. Instead, we introduce a novel transformer based architecture that uses `fusion bottlenecks' for modality fusion at multiple layers. Compared to traditional pairwise self-attention, our model forces information between different modalities to pass through a small number of bottleneck latents, requiring the model to collate and condense the most relevant information in each modality and only share what is necessary. We find that such a strategy improves fusion performance, at the same time reducing computational cost. We conduct thorough ablation studies, and achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple audio-visual classification benchmarks including Audioset, Epic-Kitchens and VGGSound. All code and models will be released.
Minimizing cross-entropy over the softmax scores of a linear map composed with a high-capacity encoder is arguably the most popular choice for training neural networks on supervised learning tasks. However, recent works show that one can directly optimize the encoder instead, to obtain equally (or even more) discriminative representations via a supervised variant of a contrastive objective. In this work, we address the question whether there are fundamental differences in the sought-for representation geometry in the output space of the encoder at minimal loss. Specifically, we prove, under mild assumptions, that both losses attain their minimum once the representations of each class collapse to the vertices of a regular simplex, inscribed in a hypersphere. We provide empirical evidence that this configuration is attained in practice and that reaching a close-to-optimal state typically indicates good generalization performance. Yet, the two losses show remarkably different optimization behavior. The number of iterations required to perfectly fit to data scales superlinearly with the amount of randomly flipped labels for the supervised contrastive loss. This is in contrast to the approximately linear scaling previously reported for networks trained with cross-entropy.
The information bottleneck (IB) method is a technique for extracting information that is relevant for predicting the target random variable from the source random variable, which is typically implemented by optimizing the IB Lagrangian that balances the compression and prediction terms. However, the IB Lagrangian is hard to optimize, and multiple trials for tuning values of Lagrangian multiplier are required. Moreover, we show that the prediction performance strictly decreases as the compression gets stronger during optimizing the IB Lagrangian. In this paper, we implement the IB method from the perspective of supervised disentangling. Specifically, we introduce Disentangled Information Bottleneck (DisenIB) that is consistent on compressing source maximally without target prediction performance loss (maximum compression). Theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that our method is consistent on maximum compression, and performs well in terms of generalization, robustness to adversarial attack, out-of-distribution detection, and supervised disentangling.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used in representation learning on graphs and achieved state-of-the-art performance in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, most existing GNNs are designed to learn node representations on the fixed and homogeneous graphs. The limitations especially become problematic when learning representations on a misspecified graph or a heterogeneous graph that consists of various types of nodes and edges. In this paper, we propose Graph Transformer Networks (GTNs) that are capable of generating new graph structures, which involve identifying useful connections between unconnected nodes on the original graph, while learning effective node representation on the new graphs in an end-to-end fashion. Graph Transformer layer, a core layer of GTNs, learns a soft selection of edge types and composite relations for generating useful multi-hop connections so-called meta-paths. Our experiments show that GTNs learn new graph structures, based on data and tasks without domain knowledge, and yield powerful node representation via convolution on the new graphs. Without domain-specific graph preprocessing, GTNs achieved the best performance in all three benchmark node classification tasks against the state-of-the-art methods that require pre-defined meta-paths from domain knowledge.
Embedding entities and relations into a continuous multi-dimensional vector space have become the dominant method for knowledge graph embedding in representation learning. However, most existing models ignore to represent hierarchical knowledge, such as the similarities and dissimilarities of entities in one domain. We proposed to learn a Domain Representations over existing knowledge graph embedding models, such that entities that have similar attributes are organized into the same domain. Such hierarchical knowledge of domains can give further evidence in link prediction. Experimental results show that domain embeddings give a significant improvement over the most recent state-of-art baseline knowledge graph embedding models.
We investigate a lattice-structured LSTM model for Chinese NER, which encodes a sequence of input characters as well as all potential words that match a lexicon. Compared with character-based methods, our model explicitly leverages word and word sequence information. Compared with word-based methods, lattice LSTM does not suffer from segmentation errors. Gated recurrent cells allow our model to choose the most relevant characters and words from a sentence for better NER results. Experiments on various datasets show that lattice LSTM outperforms both word-based and character-based LSTM baselines, achieving the best results.
The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.8 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.