Recent advances in genotyping technology have delivered a wealth of genetic data, which is rapidly advancing our understanding of the underlying genetic architecture of complex diseases. Mendelian Randomization (MR) leverages such genetic data to estimate the causal effect of an exposure factor on an outcome from observational studies. In this paper, we utilize genetic correlations to summarize information on a large set of genetic variants associated with the exposure factor. Our proposed approach is a generalization of the MR-inverse variance weighting (IVW) approach where we can accommodate many weak and pleiotropic effects. Our approach quantifies the variation explained by all valid instrumental variables (IVs) instead of estimating the individual effects and thus could accommodate weak IVs. This is particularly useful for performing MR estimation in small studies, or minority populations where the selection of valid IVs is unreliable and thus has a large influence on the MR estimation. Through simulation and real data analysis, we demonstrate that our approach provides a robust alternative to the existing MR methods. We illustrate the robustness of our proposed approach under the violation of MR assumptions and compare the performance with several existing approaches.
An open scientific challenge is how to classify events with reliable measures of uncertainty, when we have a mechanistic model of the data-generating process but the distribution over both labels and latent nuisance parameters is different between train and target data. We refer to this type of distributional shift as generalized label shift (GLS). Direct classification using observed data $\mathbf{X}$ as covariates leads to biased predictions and invalid uncertainty estimates of labels $Y$. We overcome these biases by proposing a new method for robust uncertainty quantification that casts classification as a hypothesis testing problem under nuisance parameters. The key idea is to estimate the classifier's receiver operating characteristic (ROC) across the entire nuisance parameter space, which allows us to devise cutoffs that are invariant under GLS. Our method effectively endows a pre-trained classifier with domain adaptation capabilities and returns valid prediction sets while maintaining high power. We demonstrate its performance on two challenging scientific problems in biology and astroparticle physics with data from realistic mechanistic models.
Existing research on malware detection focuses almost exclusively on the detection rate. However, in some cases, it is also important to understand the results of our algorithm, or to obtain more information, such as where to investigate in the file for an analyst. In this aim, we propose a new model to analyze Portable Executable files. Our method consists in splitting the files in different sections, then transform each section into an image, in order to train convolutional neural networks to treat specifically each identified section. Then we use all these scores returned by CNNs to compute a final detection score, using models that enable us to improve our analysis of the importance of each section in the final score.
Over the past decade, domain adaptation has become a widely studied branch of transfer learning that aims to improve performance on target domains by leveraging knowledge from the source domain. Conventional domain adaptation methods often assume access to both source and target domain data simultaneously, which may not be feasible in real-world scenarios due to privacy and confidentiality concerns. As a result, the research of Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) has drawn growing attention in recent years, which only utilizes the source-trained model and unlabeled target data to adapt to the target domain. Despite the rapid explosion of SFDA work, yet there has no timely and comprehensive survey in the field. To fill this gap, we provide a comprehensive survey of recent advances in SFDA and organize them into a unified categorization scheme based on the framework of transfer learning. Instead of presenting each approach independently, we modularize several components of each method to more clearly illustrate their relationships and mechanics in light of the composite properties of each method. Furthermore, we compare the results of more than 30 representative SFDA methods on three popular classification benchmarks, namely Office-31, Office-home, and VisDA, to explore the effectiveness of various technical routes and the combination effects among them. Additionally, we briefly introduce the applications of SFDA and related fields. Drawing from our analysis of the challenges facing SFDA, we offer some insights into future research directions and potential settings.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
With the advances of data-driven machine learning research, a wide variety of prediction problems have been tackled. It has become critical to explore how machine learning and specifically deep learning methods can be exploited to analyse healthcare data. A major limitation of existing methods has been the focus on grid-like data; however, the structure of physiological recordings are often irregular and unordered which makes it difficult to conceptualise them as a matrix. As such, graph neural networks have attracted significant attention by exploiting implicit information that resides in a biological system, with interactive nodes connected by edges whose weights can be either temporal associations or anatomical junctions. In this survey, we thoroughly review the different types of graph architectures and their applications in healthcare. We provide an overview of these methods in a systematic manner, organized by their domain of application including functional connectivity, anatomical structure and electrical-based analysis. We also outline the limitations of existing techniques and discuss potential directions for future research.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in power systems, ranging from pattern recognition to signal processing. The data in these tasks is typically represented in Euclidean domains. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of applications in power systems, where data are collected from non-Euclidean domains and represented as the graph-structured data with high dimensional features and interdependency among nodes. The complexity of graph-structured data has brought significant challenges to the existing deep neural networks defined in Euclidean domains. Recently, many studies on extending deep neural networks for graph-structured data in power systems have emerged. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in power systems is proposed. Specifically, several classical paradigms of GNNs structures (e.g., graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent neural networks, graph attention networks, graph generative networks, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks, and hybrid forms of GNNs) are summarized, and key applications in power systems such as fault diagnosis, power prediction, power flow calculation, and data generation are reviewed in detail. Furthermore, main issues and some research trends about the applications of GNNs in power systems are discussed.
Classical machine learning implicitly assumes that labels of the training data are sampled from a clean distribution, which can be too restrictive for real-world scenarios. However, statistical learning-based methods may not train deep learning models robustly with these noisy labels. Therefore, it is urgent to design Label-Noise Representation Learning (LNRL) methods for robustly training deep models with noisy labels. To fully understand LNRL, we conduct a survey study. We first clarify a formal definition for LNRL from the perspective of machine learning. Then, via the lens of learning theory and empirical study, we figure out why noisy labels affect deep models' performance. Based on the theoretical guidance, we categorize different LNRL methods into three directions. Under this unified taxonomy, we provide a thorough discussion of the pros and cons of different categories. More importantly, we summarize the essential components of robust LNRL, which can spark new directions. Lastly, we propose possible research directions within LNRL, such as new datasets, instance-dependent LNRL, and adversarial LNRL. Finally, we envision potential directions beyond LNRL, such as learning with feature-noise, preference-noise, domain-noise, similarity-noise, graph-noise, and demonstration-noise.
Current deep learning research is dominated by benchmark evaluation. A method is regarded as favorable if it empirically performs well on the dedicated test set. This mentality is seamlessly reflected in the resurfacing area of continual learning, where consecutively arriving sets of benchmark data are investigated. The core challenge is framed as protecting previously acquired representations from being catastrophically forgotten due to the iterative parameter updates. However, comparison of individual methods is nevertheless treated in isolation from real world application and typically judged by monitoring accumulated test set performance. The closed world assumption remains predominant. It is assumed that during deployment a model is guaranteed to encounter data that stems from the same distribution as used for training. This poses a massive challenge as neural networks are well known to provide overconfident false predictions on unknown instances and break down in the face of corrupted data. In this work we argue that notable lessons from open set recognition, the identification of statistically deviating data outside of the observed dataset, and the adjacent field of active learning, where data is incrementally queried such that the expected performance gain is maximized, are frequently overlooked in the deep learning era. Based on these forgotten lessons, we propose a consolidated view to bridge continual learning, active learning and open set recognition in deep neural networks. Our results show that this not only benefits each individual paradigm, but highlights the natural synergies in a common framework. We empirically demonstrate improvements when alleviating catastrophic forgetting, querying data in active learning, selecting task orders, while exhibiting robust open world application where previously proposed methods fail.
This work considers the question of how convenient access to copious data impacts our ability to learn causal effects and relations. In what ways is learning causality in the era of big data different from -- or the same as -- the traditional one? To answer this question, this survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of both traditional and frontier methods in learning causality and relations along with the connections between causality and machine learning. This work points out on a case-by-case basis how big data facilitates, complicates, or motivates each approach.