The use of neural networks has been very successful in a wide variety of applications. However, it has recently been observed that it is difficult to generalize the performance of neural networks under the condition of distributional shift. Several efforts have been made to identify potential out-of-distribution inputs. Although existing literature has made significant progress with regard to images and textual data, finance has been overlooked. The aim of this paper is to investigate the distribution shift in the credit scoring problem, one of the most important applications of finance. For the potential distribution shift problem, we propose a novel two-stage model. Using the out-of-distribution detection method, data is first separated into confident and unconfident sets. As a second step, we utilize the domain knowledge with a mean-variance optimization in order to provide reliable bounds for unconfident samples. Using empirical results, we demonstrate that our model offers reliable predictions for the vast majority of datasets. It is only a small portion of the dataset that is inherently difficult to judge, and we leave them to the judgment of human beings. Based on the two-stage model, highly confident predictions have been made and potential risks associated with the model have been significantly reduced.
Adversarial training of Deep Neural Networks is known to be significantly more data-hungry when compared to standard training. Furthermore, complex data augmentations such as AutoAugment, which have led to substantial gains in standard training of image classifiers, have not been successful with Adversarial Training. We first explain this contrasting behavior by viewing augmentation during training as a problem of domain generalization, and further propose Diverse Augmentation-based Joint Adversarial Training (DAJAT) to use data augmentations effectively in adversarial training. We aim to handle the conflicting goals of enhancing the diversity of the training dataset and training with data that is close to the test distribution by using a combination of simple and complex augmentations with separate batch normalization layers during training. We further utilize the popular Jensen-Shannon divergence loss to encourage the joint learning of the diverse augmentations, thereby allowing simple augmentations to guide the learning of complex ones. Lastly, to improve the computational efficiency of the proposed method, we propose and utilize a two-step defense, Ascending Constraint Adversarial Training (ACAT), that uses an increasing epsilon schedule and weight-space smoothing to prevent gradient masking. The proposed method DAJAT achieves substantially better robustness-accuracy trade-off when compared to existing methods on the RobustBench Leaderboard on ResNet-18 and WideResNet-34-10. The code for implementing DAJAT is available here: //github.com/val-iisc/DAJAT.
Predictive algorithms, such as deep neural networks (DNNs), are used in many domain sciences to directly estimate internal parameters of interest in simulator-based models, especially in settings where the observations include images or other complex high-dimensional data. In parallel, modern neural density estimators, such as normalizing flows, are becoming increasingly popular for uncertainty quantification, especially when both parameters and observations are high-dimensional. However, parameter inference is an inverse problem and not a prediction task; thus, an open challenge is to construct conditionally valid and precise confidence regions, with a guaranteed probability of covering the true parameters of the data-generating process, no matter what the (unknown) parameter values are, and without relying on large-sample theory. Many simulator-based inference (SBI) methods are indeed known to produce biased or overly confident parameter regions, yielding misleading uncertainty estimates. This paper presents WALDO, a novel method for constructing confidence regions with finite-sample conditional validity by leveraging prediction algorithms or posterior estimators that are currently widely adopted in SBI. WALDO reframes the well-known Wald test statistic, and uses a computationally efficient regression-based machinery for classical Neyman inversion of hypothesis tests. We apply our method to a recent high-energy physics problem, where prediction with DNNs has previously led to estimates with prediction bias. We also illustrate how our approach can correct overly confident posterior regions computed with normalizing flows.
To protect the privacy of individuals whose data is being shared, it is of high importance to develop methods allowing researchers and companies to release textual data while providing formal privacy guarantees to its originators. In the field of NLP, substantial efforts have been directed at building mechanisms following the framework of local differential privacy, thereby anonymizing individual text samples before releasing them. In practice, these approaches are often dissatisfying in terms of the quality of their output language due to the strong noise required for local differential privacy. In this paper, we approach the problem at hand using global differential privacy, particularly by training a generative language model in a differentially private manner and consequently sampling data from it. Using natural language prompts and a new prompt-mismatch loss, we are able to create highly accurate and fluent textual datasets taking on specific desired attributes such as sentiment or topic and resembling statistical properties of the training data. We perform thorough experiments indicating that our synthetic datasets do not leak information from our original data and are of high language quality and highly suitable for training models for further analysis on real-world data. Notably, we also demonstrate that training classifiers on private synthetic data outperforms directly training classifiers on real data with DP-SGD.
Extreme multi-label text classification (XMTC) is the task of finding the most relevant subset labels from an extremely large-scale label collection. Recently, some deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art results in XMTC tasks. These models commonly predict scores for all labels by a fully connected layer as the last layer of the model. However, such models can't predict a relatively complete and variable-length label subset for each document, because they select positive labels relevant to the document by a fixed threshold or take top k labels in descending order of scores. A less popular type of deep learning models called sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) focus on predicting variable-length positive labels in sequence style. However, the labels in XMTC tasks are essentially an unordered set rather than an ordered sequence, the default order of labels restrains Seq2Seq models in training. To address this limitation in Seq2Seq, we propose an autoregressive sequence-to-set model for XMTC tasks named OTSeq2Set. Our model generates predictions in student-forcing scheme and is trained by a loss function based on bipartite matching which enables permutation-invariance. Meanwhile, we use the optimal transport distance as a measurement to force the model to focus on the closest labels in semantic label space. Experiments show that OTSeq2Set outperforms other competitive baselines on 4 benchmark datasets. Especially, on the Wikipedia dataset with 31k labels, it outperforms the state-of-the-art Seq2Seq method by 16.34% in micro-F1 score. The code is available at //github.com/caojie54/OTSeq2Set.
Detection of out-of-distribution samples is one of the critical tasks for real-world applications of computer vision. The advancement of deep learning has enabled us to analyze real-world data which contain unexplained samples, accentuating the need to detect out-of-distribution instances more than before. GAN-based approaches have been widely used to address this problem due to their ability to perform distribution fitting; however, they are accompanied by training instability and mode collapse. We propose a simple yet efficient reconstruction-based method that avoids adding complexities to compensate for the limitations of GAN models while outperforming them. Unlike previous reconstruction-based works that only utilize reconstruction error or generated samples, our proposed method simultaneously incorporates both of them in the detection task. Our model, which we call "Connective Novelty Detection" has two subnetworks, an autoencoder, and a binary classifier. The autoencoder learns the representation of the positive class by reconstructing them. Then, the model creates negative and connected positive examples using real and generated samples. Negative instances are generated via manipulating the real data, so their distribution is close to the positive class to achieve a more accurate boundary for the classifier. To boost the robustness of the detection to reconstruction error, connected positive samples are created by combining the real and generated samples. Finally, the binary classifier is trained using connected positive and negative examples. We demonstrate a considerable improvement in novelty detection over state-of-the-art methods on MNIST and Caltech-256 datasets.
Human head pose estimation is an essential problem in facial analysis in recent years that has a lot of computer vision applications such as gaze estimation, virtual reality, and driver assistance. Because of the importance of the head pose estimation problem, it is necessary to design a compact model to resolve this task in order to reduce the computational cost when deploying on facial analysis-based applications such as large camera surveillance systems, AI cameras while maintaining accuracy. In this work, we propose a lightweight model that effectively addresses the head pose estimation problem. Our approach has two main steps. 1) We first train many teacher models on the synthesis dataset - 300W-LPA to get the head pose pseudo labels. 2) We design an architecture with the ResNet18 backbone and train our proposed model with the ensemble of these pseudo labels via the knowledge distillation process. To evaluate the effectiveness of our model, we use AFLW-2000 and BIWI - two real-world head pose datasets. Experimental results show that our proposed model significantly improves the accuracy in comparison with the state-of-the-art head pose estimation methods. Furthermore, our model has the real-time speed of $\sim$300 FPS when inferring on Tesla V100.
Reliably estimating the uncertainty of a prediction throughout the model lifecycle is crucial in many safety-critical applications. The most common way to measure this uncertainty is via the predicted confidence. While this tends to work well for in-domain samples, these estimates are unreliable under domain drift. Alternatively, a bias-variance decomposition allows to directly measure the predictive uncertainty across the entire input space. But, such a decomposition for proper scores does not exist in current literature, and for exponential families it is convoluted. In this work, we introduce a general bias-variance decomposition for proper scores and reformulate the exponential family case, giving rise to the Bregman Information as the variance term in both cases. This allows us to prove that the Bregman Information for classification measures the uncertainty in the logit space. We showcase the practical relevance of this decomposition on two downstream tasks. First, we show how to construct confidence intervals for predictions on the instance-level based on the Bregman Information. Second, we demonstrate how different approximations of the instance-level Bregman Information allow reliable out-of-distribution detection for all degrees of domain drift.
Reasoning over natural language is a challenging problem in NLP. In this work, we focus on proof generation: Given a hypothesis and a set of supporting facts, the model generates a proof tree indicating how to derive the hypothesis from supporting facts. Compared to generating the entire proof in one shot, stepwise generation can better exploit the compositionality and generalize to longer proofs but has achieved limited success on real-world data. Existing stepwise methods struggle to generate proof steps that are both logically valid and relevant to the hypothesis. Instead, they tend to hallucinate invalid steps given the hypothesis. In this paper, we present a novel stepwise method, NLProofS (Natural Language Proof Search), which learns to generate relevant steps conditioning on the hypothesis. At the core of our approach, we train an independent verifier to check the validity of the proof steps to prevent hallucination. Instead of generating steps greedily, we search for proofs maximizing a global proof score judged by the verifier. NLProofS achieves state-of-the-art performance on EntailmentBank and RuleTaker. Specifically, it improves the correctness of predicted proofs from 27.7% to 33.3% in the distractor setting of EntailmentBank, demonstrating the effectiveness of NLProofS in generating challenging human-authored proofs.
In domains where sample sizes are limited, efficient learning algorithms are critical. Learning using privileged information (LuPI) offers increased sample efficiency by allowing prediction models access to auxiliary information at training time which is unavailable when the models are used. In recent work, it was shown that for prediction in linear-Gaussian dynamical systems, a LuPI learner with access to intermediate time series data is never worse and often better in expectation than any unbiased classical learner. We provide new insights into this analysis and generalize it to nonlinear prediction tasks in latent dynamical systems, extending theoretical guarantees to the case where the map connecting latent variables and observations is known up to a linear transform. In addition, we propose algorithms based on random features and representation learning for the case when this map is unknown. A suite of empirical results confirm theoretical findings and show the potential of using privileged time-series information in nonlinear prediction.
Recently pre-trained language representation models such as BERT have shown great success when fine-tuned on downstream tasks including information retrieval (IR). However, pre-training objectives tailored for ad-hoc retrieval have not been well explored. In this paper, we propose Pre-training with Representative wOrds Prediction (PROP) for ad-hoc retrieval. PROP is inspired by the classical statistical language model for IR, specifically the query likelihood model, which assumes that the query is generated as the piece of text representative of the "ideal" document. Based on this idea, we construct the representative words prediction (ROP) task for pre-training. Given an input document, we sample a pair of word sets according to the document language model, where the set with higher likelihood is deemed as more representative of the document. We then pre-train the Transformer model to predict the pairwise preference between the two word sets, jointly with the Masked Language Model (MLM) objective. By further fine-tuning on a variety of representative downstream ad-hoc retrieval tasks, PROP achieves significant improvements over baselines without pre-training or with other pre-training methods. We also show that PROP can achieve exciting performance under both the zero- and low-resource IR settings. The code and pre-trained models are available at //github.com/Albert-Ma/PROP.