We consider the problem of detecting causal relationships between discrete time series, in the presence of potential confounders. A hypothesis test is introduced for identifying the temporally causal influence of $(x_n)$ on $(y_n)$, causally conditioned on a possibly confounding third time series $(z_n)$. Under natural Markovian modeling assumptions, it is shown that the null hypothesis, corresponding to the absence of temporally causal influence, is equivalent to the underlying `causal conditional directed information rate' being equal to zero. The plug-in estimator for this functional is identified with the log-likelihood ratio test statistic for the desired test. This statistic is shown to be asymptotically normal under the alternative hypothesis and asymptotically $\chi^2$ distributed under the null, facilitating the computation of $p$-values when used on empirical data. The effectiveness of the resulting hypothesis test is illustrated on simulated data, validating the underlying theory. The test is also employed in the analysis of spike train data recorded from neurons in the V4 and FEF brain regions of behaving animals during a visual attention task. There, the test results are seen to identify interesting and biologically relevant information.
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We consider the task of identifying the causal parents of a target variable among a set of candidate variables from observational data. Our main assumption is that the candidate variables are observed in different environments which may, for example, correspond to different settings of a machine or different time intervals in a dynamical process. Under certain assumptions different environments can be regarded as interventions on the observed system. We assume a linear relationship between target and covariates, which can be different in each environment with the only restriction that the causal structure is invariant across environments. This is an extension of the ICP ($\textbf{I}$nvariant $\textbf{C}$ausal $\textbf{P}$rediction) principle by Peters et al. [2016], who assumed a fixed linear relationship across all environments. Within our proposed setting we provide sufficient conditions for identifiability of the causal parents and introduce a practical method called LoLICaP ($\textbf{Lo}$cally $\textbf{L}$inear $\textbf{I}$nvariant $\textbf{Ca}$usal $\textbf{P}$rediction), which is based on a hypothesis test for parent identification using a ratio of minimum and maximum statistics. We then show in a simplified setting that the statistical power of LoLICaP converges exponentially fast in the sample size, and finally we analyze the behavior of LoLICaP experimentally in more general settings.
Many high-stakes decision-making problems, such as those found within cybersecurity and economics, can be modeled as competitive resource allocation games. In these games, multiple players must allocate limited resources to overcome their opponent(s), while minimizing any induced individual losses. However, existing means of assessing the performance of resource allocation algorithms are highly disparate and problem-dependent. As a result, evaluating such algorithms is unreliable or impossible in many contexts and applications, especially when considering differing levels of feedback. To resolve this problem, we propose a generalized definition of payoff which uses an arbitrary user-provided function. This unifies performance evaluation under all contexts and levels of feedback. Using this definition, we develop metrics for evaluating player performance, and estimators to approximate them under uncertainty (i.e., bandit or semi-bandit feedback). These metrics and their respective estimators provide a problem-agnostic means to contextualize and evaluate algorithm performance. To validate the accuracy of our estimator, we explore the Colonel Blotto ($\mathcal{CB}$) game as an example. To this end, we propose a graph-pruning approach to efficiently identify feasible opponent decisions, which are used in computing our estimation metrics. Using various resource allocation algorithms and game parameters, a suite of $\mathcal{CB}$ games are simulated and used to compute and evaluate the quality of our estimates. These simulations empirically show our approach to be highly accurate at estimating the metrics associated with the unseen outcomes of an opponent's latent behavior.
We develop a general theory to optimize the frequentist regret for sequential learning problems, where efficient bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms can be derived from unified Bayesian principles. We propose a novel optimization approach to generate "algorithmic beliefs" at each round, and use Bayesian posteriors to make decisions. The optimization objective to create "algorithmic beliefs," which we term "Algorithmic Information Ratio," represents an intrinsic complexity measure that effectively characterizes the frequentist regret of any algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematical approach to make Bayesian-type algorithms prior-free and applicable to adversarial settings, in a generic and optimal manner. Moreover, the algorithms are simple and often efficient to implement. As a major application, we present a novel algorithm for multi-armed bandits that achieves the "best-of-all-worlds" empirical performance in the stochastic, adversarial, and non-stationary environments. And we illustrate how these principles can be used in linear bandits, bandit convex optimization, and reinforcement learning.
To resolve the semantic ambiguity in texts, we propose a model, which innovatively combines a knowledge graph with an improved attention mechanism. An existing knowledge base is utilized to enrich the text with relevant contextual concepts. The model operates at both character and word levels to deepen its understanding by integrating the concepts. We first adopt information gain to select import words. Then an encoder-decoder framework is used to encode the text along with the related concepts. The local attention mechanism adjusts the weight of each concept, reducing the influence of irrelevant or noisy concepts during classification. We improve the calculation formula for attention scores in the local self-attention mechanism, ensuring that words with different frequencies of occurrence in the text receive higher attention scores. Finally, the model employs a Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU), which is effective in feature extraction from texts for improved classification accuracy. Its performance is demonstrated on datasets such as AGNews, Ohsumed, and TagMyNews, achieving accuracy of 75.1%, 58.7%, and 68.5% respectively, showing its effectiveness in classifying tasks.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
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.
The accurate and interpretable prediction of future events in time-series data often requires the capturing of representative patterns (or referred to as states) underpinning the observed data. To this end, most existing studies focus on the representation and recognition of states, but ignore the changing transitional relations among them. In this paper, we present evolutionary state graph, a dynamic graph structure designed to systematically represent the evolving relations (edges) among states (nodes) along time. We conduct analysis on the dynamic graphs constructed from the time-series data and show that changes on the graph structures (e.g., edges connecting certain state nodes) can inform the occurrences of events (i.e., time-series fluctuation). Inspired by this, we propose a novel graph neural network model, Evolutionary State Graph Network (EvoNet), to encode the evolutionary state graph for accurate and interpretable time-series event prediction. Specifically, Evolutionary State Graph Network models both the node-level (state-to-state) and graph-level (segment-to-segment) propagation, and captures the node-graph (state-to-segment) interactions over time. Experimental results based on five real-world datasets show that our approach not only achieves clear improvements compared with 11 baselines, but also provides more insights towards explaining the results of event predictions.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.
Detecting carried objects is one of the requirements for developing systems to reason about activities involving people and objects. We present an approach to detect carried objects from a single video frame with a novel method that incorporates features from multiple scales. Initially, a foreground mask in a video frame is segmented into multi-scale superpixels. Then the human-like regions in the segmented area are identified by matching a set of extracted features from superpixels against learned features in a codebook. A carried object probability map is generated using the complement of the matching probabilities of superpixels to human-like regions and background information. A group of superpixels with high carried object probability and strong edge support is then merged to obtain the shape of the carried object. We applied our method to two challenging datasets, and results show that our method is competitive with or better than the state-of-the-art.
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