By connecting the LU factorization and the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization without any normalization, closed-forms for the coefficients of the ordinary least squares estimates are presented. Instead of using matrix inversion explicitly, each of the coefficients is expressed and computed directly as a linear combination of non-normalized Gram-Schmidt vectors and the original data matrix and also in terms of the upper triangular factor from LU factorization. The coefficients may computed iteratively using backward or forward algorithms given.
Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods such as VICReg, Barlow Twins or W-MSE avoid collapse of their joint embedding architectures by constraining or regularizing the covariance matrix of their projector's output. This study highlights important properties of such strategy, which we coin Variance-Covariance regularization (VCReg). More precisely, we show that {\em VCReg combined to a MLP projector enforces pairwise independence between the features of the learned representation}. This result emerges by bridging VCReg applied on the projector's output to kernel independence criteria applied on the projector's input. We empirically validate our findings where (i) we put in evidence which projector's characteristics favor pairwise independence, (ii) we demonstrate pairwise independence to be beneficial for out-of-domain generalization, (iii) we demonstrate that the scope of VCReg goes beyond SSL by using it to solve Independent Component Analysis. This provides the first theoretical motivation and explanation of MLP projectors in SSL.
Reduced-rank regression recognises the possibility of a rank-deficient matrix of coefficients. We propose a novel Bayesian model for estimating the rank of the coefficient matrix, which obviates the need for post-processing steps and allows for uncertainty quantification. Our method employs a mixture prior on the regression coefficient matrix along with a global-local shrinkage prior on its low-rank decomposition. Then, we rely on the Signal Adaptive Variable Selector to perform sparsification and define two novel tools: the Posterior Inclusion Probability uncertainty index and the Relevance Index. The validity of the method is assessed in a simulation study, and then its advantages and usefulness are shown in real-data applications on the chemical composition of tobacco and on the photometry of galaxies.
Vision--Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as the dominant approach for zero-shot recognition, adept at handling diverse scenarios and significant distribution changes. However, their deployment in risk-sensitive areas requires a deeper understanding of their uncertainty estimation capabilities, a relatively uncharted area. In this study, we explore the calibration properties of VLMs across different architectures, datasets, and training strategies. In particular, we analyze the uncertainty estimation performance of VLMs when calibrated in one domain, label set or hierarchy level, and tested in a different one. Our findings reveal that while VLMs are not inherently calibrated for uncertainty, temperature scaling significantly and consistently improves calibration, even across shifts in distribution and changes in label set. Moreover, VLMs can be calibrated with a very small set of examples. Through detailed experimentation, we highlight the potential applications and importance of our insights, aiming for more reliable and effective use of VLMs in critical, real-world scenarios.
Instruction tuned Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have significantly advanced in generalizing across a diverse set of multi-modal tasks, especially for Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, generating detailed responses that are visually grounded is still a challenging task for these models. We find that even the current state-of-the-art LVLMs (InstructBLIP) still contain a staggering 30 percent of the hallucinatory text in the form of non-existent objects, unfaithful descriptions, and inaccurate relationships. To address this, we introduce M-HalDetect, a (M)ultimodal (Hal)lucination (Detect)ion Dataset that can be used to train and benchmark models for hallucination detection and prevention. M-HalDetect consists of 16k fine-grained annotations on VQA examples, making it the first comprehensive multi-modal hallucination detection dataset for detailed image descriptions. Unlike previous work that only consider object hallucination, we additionally annotate both entity descriptions and relationships that are unfaithful. To demonstrate the potential of this dataset for hallucination prevention, we optimize InstructBLIP through our novel Fine-grained Direct Preference Optimization (FDPO). We also train fine-grained multi-modal reward models from InstructBLIP and evaluate their effectiveness with best-of-n rejection sampling. We perform human evaluation on both FDPO and rejection sampling, and find that they reduce hallucination rates in InstructBLIP by 41% and 55% respectively. We also find that our reward model generalizes to other multi-modal models, reducing hallucinations in LLaVA and mPLUG-OWL by 15% and 57% respectively, and has strong correlation with human evaluated accuracy scores.
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been widely and successfully applied to solve multi-objective optimization problems, due to their nature of population-based search. Population update, a key component in multi-objective EAs (MOEAs), is usually performed in a greedy, deterministic manner. That is, the next-generation population is formed by selecting the best solutions from the current population and newly-generated solutions (irrespective of the selection criteria used such as Pareto dominance, crowdedness and indicators). In this paper, we question this practice. We analytically present that stochastic population update can be beneficial for the search of MOEAs. Specifically, we prove that the expected running time of two well-established MOEAs, SMS-EMOA and NSGA-II, for solving two bi-objective problems, OneJumpZeroJump and bi-objective RealRoyalRoad, can be exponentially decreased if replacing its deterministic population update mechanism by a stochastic one. Empirical studies also verify the effectiveness of the proposed population update method. This work is an attempt to challenge a common practice in the design of existing MOEAs. Its positive results, which might hold more generally, should encourage the exploration of developing new MOEAs in the area.
The success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the ability to learn robust representations from the observations of the environment. In most cases, the representations learned purely by the reinforcement learning loss can differ vastly across states depending on how the value functions change. However, the representations learned need not be very specific to the task at hand. Relying only on the RL objective may yield representations that vary greatly across successive time steps. In addition, since the RL loss has a changing target, the representations learned would depend on how good the current values/policies are. Thus, disentangling the representations from the main task would allow them to focus not only on the task-specific features but also the environment dynamics. To this end, we propose locally constrained representations, where an auxiliary loss forces the state representations to be predictable by the representations of the neighboring states. This encourages the representations to be driven not only by the value/policy learning but also by an additional loss that constrains the representations from over-fitting to the value loss. We evaluate the proposed method on several known benchmarks and observe strong performance. Especially in continuous control tasks, our experiments show a significant performance improvement.
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to detect the emotion label for each utterance. Motivated by recent studies which have proven that feeding training examples in a meaningful order rather than considering them randomly can boost the performance of models, we propose an ERC-oriented hybrid curriculum learning framework. Our framework consists of two curricula: (1) conversation-level curriculum (CC); and (2) utterance-level curriculum (UC). In CC, we construct a difficulty measurer based on "emotion shift" frequency within a conversation, then the conversations are scheduled in an "easy to hard" schema according to the difficulty score returned by the difficulty measurer. For UC, it is implemented from an emotion-similarity perspective, which progressively strengthens the model's ability in identifying the confusing emotions. With the proposed model-agnostic hybrid curriculum learning strategy, we observe significant performance boosts over a wide range of existing ERC models and we are able to achieve new state-of-the-art results on four public ERC datasets.
Promoting behavioural diversity is critical for solving games with non-transitive dynamics where strategic cycles exist, and there is no consistent winner (e.g., Rock-Paper-Scissors). Yet, there is a lack of rigorous treatment for defining diversity and constructing diversity-aware learning dynamics. In this work, we offer a geometric interpretation of behavioural diversity in games and introduce a novel diversity metric based on \emph{determinantal point processes} (DPP). By incorporating the diversity metric into best-response dynamics, we develop \emph{diverse fictitious play} and \emph{diverse policy-space response oracle} for solving normal-form games and open-ended games. We prove the uniqueness of the diverse best response and the convergence of our algorithms on two-player games. Importantly, we show that maximising the DPP-based diversity metric guarantees to enlarge the \emph{gamescape} -- convex polytopes spanned by agents' mixtures of strategies. To validate our diversity-aware solvers, we test on tens of games that show strong non-transitivity. Results suggest that our methods achieve much lower exploitability than state-of-the-art solvers by finding effective and diverse strategies.
The problem of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) consists in following the trajectory of different objects in a sequence, usually a video. In recent years, with the rise of Deep Learning, the algorithms that provide a solution to this problem have benefited from the representational power of deep models. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on works that employ Deep Learning models to solve the task of MOT on single-camera videos. Four main steps in MOT algorithms are identified, and an in-depth review of how Deep Learning was employed in each one of these stages is presented. A complete experimental comparison of the presented works on the three MOTChallenge datasets is also provided, identifying a number of similarities among the top-performing methods and presenting some possible future research directions.
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.