Defining the number of latent factors has been one of the most challenging problems in factor analysis. Infinite factor models offer a solution to this problem by applying increasing shrinkage on the columns of factor loading matrices, thus penalising increasing factor dimensionality. The adaptive MCMC algorithms used for inference in such models allow to defer the dimension of the latent factor space automatically based on the data. This paper presents an overview of Bayesian models for infinite factorisations with some discussion on the properties of such models as well as their comparative advantages and drawbacks.
We assume to be given structural equations over discrete variables inducing a directed acyclic graph, namely, a structural causal model, together with data about its internal nodes. The question we want to answer is how we can compute bounds for partially identifiable counterfactual queries from such an input. We start by giving a map from structural casual models to credal networks. This allows us to compute exact counterfactual bounds via algorithms for credal nets on a subclass of structural causal models. Exact computation is going to be inefficient in general given that, as we show, causal inference is NP-hard even on polytrees. We target then approximate bounds via a causal EM scheme. We evaluate their accuracy by providing credible intervals on the quality of the approximation; we show through a synthetic benchmark that the EM scheme delivers accurate results in a fair number of runs. In the course of the discussion, we also point out what seems to be a neglected limitation to the trending idea that counterfactual bounds can be computed without knowledge of the structural equations. We also present a real case study on palliative care to show how our algorithms can readily be used for practical purposes.
Markov chain analysis is a key technique in formal verification. A practical obstacle is that all probabilities in Markov models need to be known. However, system quantities such as failure rates or packet loss ratios, etc. are often not -- or only partially -- known. This motivates considering parametric models with transitions labeled with functions over parameters. Whereas traditional Markov chain analysis relies on a single, fixed set of probabilities, analysing parametric Markov models focuses on synthesising parameter values that establish a given safety or performance specification $\varphi$. Examples are: what component failure rates ensure the probability of a system breakdown to be below 0.00000001?, or which failure rates maximise the performance, for instance the throughput, of the system? This paper presents various analysis algorithms for parametric discrete-time Markov chains and Markov decision processes. We focus on three problems: (a) do all parameter values within a given region satisfy $\varphi$?, (b) which regions satisfy $\varphi$ and which ones do not?, and (c) an approximate version of (b) focusing on covering a large fraction of all possible parameter values. We give a detailed account of the various algorithms, present a software tool realising these techniques, and report on an extensive experimental evaluation on benchmarks that span a wide range of applications.
Denoising Diffusion models have exhibited remarkable capabilities in image generation. However, generating high-quality samples requires a large number of iterations. Knowledge distillation for diffusion models is an effective method to address this limitation with a shortened sampling process but causes degraded generative quality. Based on our analysis with bias-variance decomposition and experimental observations, we attribute the degradation to the spatial fitting error occurring in the training of both the teacher and student model. Accordingly, we propose $\textbf{S}$patial $\textbf{F}$itting-$\textbf{E}$rror $\textbf{R}$eduction $\textbf{D}$istillation model ($\textbf{SFERD}$). SFERD utilizes attention guidance from the teacher model and a designed semantic gradient predictor to reduce the student's fitting error. Empirically, our proposed model facilitates high-quality sample generation in a few function evaluations. We achieve an FID of 5.31 on CIFAR-10 and 9.39 on ImageNet 64$\times$64 with only one step, outperforming existing diffusion methods. Our study provides a new perspective on diffusion distillation by highlighting the intrinsic denoising ability of models.
For industrial learning-to-rank (LTR) systems, it is common that the output of a ranking model is modified, either as a results of post-processing logic that enforces business requirements, or as a result of unforeseen design flaws or bugs present in real-world production systems. This poses a challenge for deploying off-policy learning and evaluation methods, as these often rely on the assumption that rankings implied by the model's scores coincide with displayed items to the users. Further requirements for reliable offline evaluation are proper randomization and correct estimation of the propensities of displaying each item in any given position of the ranking, which are also impacted by the aforementioned post-processing. We investigate empirically how these scenarios impair off-policy evaluation for learning-to-rank models. We then propose a novel correction method based on the Birkhoff-von-Neumann decomposition that is robust to this type of post-processing. We obtain more accurate off-policy estimates in offline experiments, overcoming the problem of post-processed rankings. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study on the impact of real-world business rules on offline evaluation of LTR models.
Diffusion models are a class of generative models that serve to establish a stochastic transport map between an empirically observed, yet unknown, target distribution and a known prior. Despite their remarkable success in real-world applications, a theoretical understanding of their generalization capabilities remains underdeveloped. This work embarks on a comprehensive theoretical exploration of the generalization attributes of diffusion models. We establish theoretical estimates of the generalization gap that evolves in tandem with the training dynamics of score-based diffusion models, suggesting a polynomially small generalization error ($O(n^{-2/5}+m^{-4/5})$) on both the sample size $n$ and the model capacity $m$, evading the curse of dimensionality (i.e., not exponentially large in the data dimension) when early-stopped. Furthermore, we extend our quantitative analysis to a data-dependent scenario, wherein target distributions are portrayed as a succession of densities with progressively increasing distances between modes. This precisely elucidates the adverse effect of "modes shift" in ground truths on the model generalization. Moreover, these estimates are not solely theoretical constructs but have also been confirmed through numerical simulations. Our findings contribute to the rigorous understanding of diffusion models' generalization properties and provide insights that may guide practical applications.
We analyze the structure of the market for foundation models, i.e., large AI models such as those that power ChatGPT and that are adaptable to downstream uses, and we examine the implications for competition policy and regulation. We observe that the most capable models will have a tendency towards natural monopoly and may have potentially vast markets. This calls for a two-pronged regulatory response: (i) Antitrust authorities need to ensure the contestability of the market by tackling strategic behavior, in particular by ensuring that monopolies do not propagate vertically to downstream uses, and (ii) given the diminished potential for market discipline, there is a role for regulators to ensure that the most capable models meet sufficient quality standards (including safety, privacy, non-discrimination, reliability and interoperability standards) to maximally contribute to social welfare. Regulators should also ensure a level regulatory playing field between AI and non-AI applications in all sectors of the economy. For models that are behind the frontier, we expect competition to be quite intense, implying a more limited role for competition policy, although a role for regulation remains.
As artificial intelligence (AI) models continue to scale up, they are becoming more capable and integrated into various forms of decision-making systems. For models involved in moral decision-making, also known as artificial moral agents (AMA), interpretability provides a way to trust and understand the agent's internal reasoning mechanisms for effective use and error correction. In this paper, we provide an overview of this rapidly-evolving sub-field of AI interpretability, introduce the concept of the Minimum Level of Interpretability (MLI) and recommend an MLI for various types of agents, to aid their safe deployment in real-world settings.
As soon as abstract mathematical computations were adapted to computation on digital computers, the problem of efficient representation, manipulation, and communication of the numerical values in those computations arose. Strongly related to the problem of numerical representation is the problem of quantization: in what manner should a set of continuous real-valued numbers be distributed over a fixed discrete set of numbers to minimize the number of bits required and also to maximize the accuracy of the attendant computations? This perennial problem of quantization is particularly relevant whenever memory and/or computational resources are severely restricted, and it has come to the forefront in recent years due to the remarkable performance of Neural Network models in computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed integer values represented in four bits or less holds the potential to reduce the memory footprint and latency by a factor of 16x; and, in fact, reductions of 4x to 8x are often realized in practice in these applications. Thus, it is not surprising that quantization has emerged recently as an important and very active sub-area of research in the efficient implementation of computations associated with Neural Networks. In this article, we survey approaches to the problem of quantizing the numerical values in deep Neural Network computations, covering the advantages/disadvantages of current methods. With this survey and its organization, we hope to have presented a useful snapshot of the current research in quantization for Neural Networks and to have given an intelligent organization to ease the evaluation of future research in this area.
Residual networks (ResNets) have displayed impressive results in pattern recognition and, recently, have garnered considerable theoretical interest due to a perceived link with neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs). This link relies on the convergence of network weights to a smooth function as the number of layers increases. We investigate the properties of weights trained by stochastic gradient descent and their scaling with network depth through detailed numerical experiments. We observe the existence of scaling regimes markedly different from those assumed in neural ODE literature. Depending on certain features of the network architecture, such as the smoothness of the activation function, one may obtain an alternative ODE limit, a stochastic differential equation or neither of these. These findings cast doubts on the validity of the neural ODE model as an adequate asymptotic description of deep ResNets and point to an alternative class of differential equations as a better description of the deep network limit.
Traffic forecasting is an important factor for the success of intelligent transportation systems. Deep learning models including convolution neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied in traffic forecasting problems to model the spatial and temporal dependencies. In recent years, to model the graph structures in the transportation systems as well as the contextual information, graph neural networks (GNNs) are introduced as new tools and have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in a series of traffic forecasting problems. In this survey, we review the rapidly growing body of recent research using different GNNs, e.g., graph convolutional and graph attention networks, in various traffic forecasting problems, e.g., road traffic flow and speed forecasting, passenger flow forecasting in urban rail transit systems, demand forecasting in ride-hailing platforms, etc. We also present a collection of open data and source resources for each problem, as well as future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first comprehensive survey that explores the application of graph neural networks for traffic forecasting problems. We have also created a public Github repository to update the latest papers, open data and source resources.