In machine learning, the ability to assess uncertainty in model predictions is crucial for decision-making, safety-critical applications, and model generalizability. This work introduces a novel approach for epistemic uncertainty estimation for ensemble models using pairwise-distance estimators (PaiDEs). These estimators utilize the pairwise-distance between model components to establish bounds on entropy, which are then used as estimates for information-based criterion. Unlike recent deep learning methods for epistemic uncertainty estimation, which rely on sample-based Monte Carlo estimators, PaiDEs are able to estimate epistemic uncertainty up to 100 times faster, over a larger input space (up to 100 times) and perform more accurately in higher dimensions. To validate our approach, we conducted a series of experiments commonly used to evaluate epistemic uncertainty estimation: 1D sinusoidal data, $\textit{Pendulum-v0}$, $\textit{Hopper-v2}$, $\textit{Ant-v2}$ and $\textit{Humanoid-v2}$. For each experimental setting, an Active Learning framework was applied to demonstrate the advantages of PaiDEs for epistemic uncertainty estimation.
Federated learning is known for its capability to safeguard participants' data privacy. However, recently emerged model inversion attacks (MIAs) have shown that a malicious parameter server can reconstruct individual users' local data samples through model updates. The state-of-the-art attacks either rely on computation-intensive search-based optimization processes to recover each input batch, making scaling difficult, or they involve the malicious parameter server adding extra modules before the global model architecture, rendering the attacks too conspicuous and easily detectable. To overcome these limitations, we propose Scale-MIA, a novel MIA capable of efficiently and accurately recovering training samples of clients from the aggregated updates, even when the system is under the protection of a robust secure aggregation protocol. Unlike existing approaches treating models as black boxes, Scale-MIA recognizes the importance of the intricate architecture and inner workings of machine learning models. It identifies the latent space as the critical layer for breaching privacy and decomposes the complex recovery task into an innovative two-step process to reduce computation complexity. The first step involves reconstructing the latent space representations (LSRs) from the aggregated model updates using a closed-form inversion mechanism, leveraging specially crafted adversarial linear layers. In the second step, the whole input batches are recovered from the LSRs by feeding them into a fine-tuned generative decoder. We implemented Scale-MIA on multiple commonly used machine learning models and conducted comprehensive experiments across various settings. The results demonstrate that Scale-MIA achieves excellent recovery performance on different datasets, exhibiting high reconstruction rates, accuracy, and attack efficiency on a larger scale compared to state-of-the-art MIAs.
Recently, multi-modal content generation has attracted lots of attention from researchers by investigating the utilization of visual instruction tuning based on large language models (LLMs). To enhance the performance and generalization ability of such LLMs, the practice of distilling knowledge from pretrained multi-modal models (a.k.a. teachers) to more compact multi-modal LLMs (students) has gained considerable interest. However, the prevailing paradigm of instructiontuning in multi-modal LLMs knowledge distillation is resource-intensive and unidirectional, neglecting the potential for mutual feedback between the student and teacher models. Thus, we propose an innovative Competitive Multi-modal Distillation framework (CoMD), which captures bidirectional feedback between teacher and student models and continually updates the multi-modal capabilities that the student model has learned. It comprises two stages: multi-modal pre-training and multi-modal competitive distillation. The first stage pre-trains the student model on a large number of filtered multi-modal datasets. The second stage facilitates a bidirectional knowledge transfer between the student and teacher models. Our experimental analysis of diverse datasets shows that our knowledge transfer method consistently improves the capabilities of the student model. Finally, the 7B-sized student model after four distillations surpassed the current state-of-the-art model LLaVA-13B on the ScienceQA and LLaVA Test dataset, also outperforms other strong baselines in the zero-shot setting.
Although deep learning-based segmentation models have achieved impressive performance on public benchmarks, generalizing well to unseen environments remains a major challenge. To improve the model's generalization ability to the new domain during evaluation, the test-time training (TTT) is a challenging paradigm that adapts the source-pretrained model in an online fashion. Early efforts on TTT mainly focus on the image classification task. Directly extending these methods to semantic segmentation easily experiences unstable adaption due to segmentation's inherent characteristics, such as extreme class imbalance and complex decision spaces. To stabilize the adaptation process, we introduce contrastive loss (CL), known for its capability to learn robust and generalized representations. Nevertheless, the traditional CL operates in the representation space and cannot directly enhance predictions. In this paper, we resolve this limitation by adapting the CL to the output space, employing a high temperature, and simplifying the formulation, resulting in a straightforward yet effective loss function called Output Contrastive Loss (OCL). Our comprehensive experiments validate the efficacy of our approach across diverse evaluation scenarios. Notably, our method excels even when applied to models initially pre-trained using domain adaptation methods on test domain data, showcasing its resilience and adaptability.\footnote{Code and more information could be found at~ \url{//github.com/dazhangyu123/OCL}}
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers an appealing approach to real-world tasks by learning policies from pre-collected datasets without interacting with the environment. However, the performance of existing offline RL algorithms heavily depends on the scale and state-action space coverage of datasets. Real-world data collection is often expensive and uncontrollable, leading to small and narrowly covered datasets and posing significant challenges for practical deployments of offline RL. In this paper, we provide a new insight that leveraging the fundamental symmetry of system dynamics can substantially enhance offline RL performance under small datasets. Specifically, we propose a Time-reversal symmetry (T-symmetry) enforced Dynamics Model (TDM), which establishes consistency between a pair of forward and reverse latent dynamics. TDM provides both well-behaved representations for small datasets and a new reliability measure for OOD samples based on compliance with the T-symmetry. These can be readily used to construct a new offline RL algorithm (TSRL) with less conservative policy constraints and a reliable latent space data augmentation procedure. Based on extensive experiments, we find TSRL achieves great performance on small benchmark datasets with as few as 1% of the original samples, which significantly outperforms the recent offline RL algorithms in terms of data efficiency and generalizability.Code is available at: //github.com/pcheng2/TSRL
Meta reinforcement learning (Meta RL) has been amply explored to quickly learn an unseen task by transferring previously learned knowledge from similar tasks. However, most state-of-the-art algorithms require the meta-training tasks to have a dense coverage on the task distribution and a great amount of data for each of them. In this paper, we propose MetaDreamer, a context-based Meta RL algorithm that requires less real training tasks and data by doing meta-imagination and MDP-imagination. We perform meta-imagination by interpolating on the learned latent context space with disentangled properties, as well as MDP-imagination through the generative world model where physical knowledge is added to plain VAE networks. Our experiments with various benchmarks show that MetaDreamer outperforms existing approaches in data efficiency and interpolated generalization.
Existing recommender systems extract the user preference based on learning the correlation in data, such as behavioral correlation in collaborative filtering, feature-feature, or feature-behavior correlation in click-through rate prediction. However, regretfully, the real world is driven by causality rather than correlation, and correlation does not imply causation. For example, the recommender systems can recommend a battery charger to a user after buying a phone, in which the latter can serve as the cause of the former, and such a causal relation cannot be reversed. Recently, to address it, researchers in recommender systems have begun to utilize causal inference to extract causality, enhancing the recommender system. In this survey, we comprehensively review the literature on causal inference-based recommendation. At first, we present the fundamental concepts of both recommendation and causal inference as the basis of later content. We raise the typical issues that the non-causality recommendation is faced. Afterward, we comprehensively review the existing work of causal inference-based recommendation, based on a taxonomy of what kind of problem causal inference addresses. Last, we discuss the open problems in this important research area, along with interesting future works.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
Influenced by the stunning success of deep learning in computer vision and language understanding, research in recommendation has shifted to inventing new recommender models based on neural networks. In recent years, we have witnessed significant progress in developing neural recommender models, which generalize and surpass traditional recommender models owing to the strong representation power of neural networks. In this survey paper, we conduct a systematic review on neural recommender models, aiming to summarize the field to facilitate future progress. Distinct from existing surveys that categorize existing methods based on the taxonomy of deep learning techniques, we instead summarize the field from the perspective of recommendation modeling, which could be more instructive to researchers and practitioners working on recommender systems. Specifically, we divide the work into three types based on the data they used for recommendation modeling: 1) collaborative filtering models, which leverage the key source of user-item interaction data; 2) content enriched models, which additionally utilize the side information associated with users and items, like user profile and item knowledge graph; and 3) context enriched models, which account for the contextual information associated with an interaction, such as time, location, and the past interactions. After reviewing representative works for each type, we finally discuss some promising directions in this field, including benchmarking recommender systems, graph reasoning based recommendation models, and explainable and fair recommendations for social good.
Since hardware resources are limited, the objective of training deep learning models is typically to maximize accuracy subject to the time and memory constraints of training and inference. We study the impact of model size in this setting, focusing on Transformer models for NLP tasks that are limited by compute: self-supervised pretraining and high-resource machine translation. We first show that even though smaller Transformer models execute faster per iteration, wider and deeper models converge in significantly fewer steps. Moreover, this acceleration in convergence typically outpaces the additional computational overhead of using larger models. Therefore, the most compute-efficient training strategy is to counterintuitively train extremely large models but stop after a small number of iterations. This leads to an apparent trade-off between the training efficiency of large Transformer models and the inference efficiency of small Transformer models. However, we show that large models are more robust to compression techniques such as quantization and pruning than small models. Consequently, one can get the best of both worlds: heavily compressed, large models achieve higher accuracy than lightly compressed, small models.