Most link prediction methods return estimates of the connection probability of missing edges in a graph. Such output can be used to rank the missing edges from most to least likely to be a true edge, but does not directly provide a classification into true and non-existent. In this work, we consider the problem of identifying a set of true edges with a control of the false discovery rate (FDR). We propose a novel method based on high-level ideas from the literature on conformal inference. The graph structure induces intricate dependence in the data, which we carefully take into account, as this makes the setup different from the usual setup in conformal inference, where data exchangeability is assumed. The FDR control is empirically demonstrated for both simulated and real data.
Network reconstruction consists in determining the unobserved pairwise couplings between $N$ nodes given only observational data on the resulting behavior that is conditioned on those couplings -- typically a time-series or independent samples from a graphical model. A major obstacle to the scalability of algorithms proposed for this problem is a seemingly unavoidable quadratic complexity of $\Omega(N^2)$, corresponding to the requirement of each possible pairwise coupling being contemplated at least once, despite the fact that most networks of interest are sparse, with a number of non-zero couplings that is only $O(N)$. Here we present a general algorithm applicable to a broad range of reconstruction problems that significantly outperforms this quadratic baseline. Our algorithm relies on a stochastic second neighbor search (Dong et al., 2011) that produces the best edge candidates with high probability, thus bypassing an exhaustive quadratic search. If we rely on the conjecture that the second-neighbor search finishes in log-linear time (Baron & Darling, 2020; 2022), we demonstrate theoretically that our algorithm finishes in subquadratic time, with a data-dependent complexity loosely upper bounded by $O(N^{3/2}\log N)$, but with a more typical log-linear complexity of $O(N\log^2N)$. In practice, we show that our algorithm achieves a performance that is many orders of magnitude faster than the quadratic baseline -- in a manner consistent with our theoretical analysis -- allows for easy parallelization, and thus enables the reconstruction of networks with hundreds of thousands and even millions of nodes and edges.
Successfully addressing a wide variety of tasks is a core ability of autonomous agents, requiring flexibly adapting the underlying decision-making strategies and, as we argue in this work, also adapting the perception modules. An analogical argument would be the human visual system, which uses top-down signals to focus attention determined by the current task. Similarly, we adapt pre-trained large vision models conditioned on specific downstream tasks in the context of multi-task policy learning. We introduce task-conditioned adapters that do not require finetuning any pre-trained weights, combined with a single policy trained with behavior cloning and capable of addressing multiple tasks. We condition the visual adapters on task embeddings, which can be selected at inference if the task is known, or alternatively inferred from a set of example demonstrations. To this end, we propose a new optimization-based estimator. We evaluate the method on a wide variety of tasks from the CortexBench benchmark and show that, compared to existing work, it can be addressed with a single policy. In particular, we demonstrate that adapting visual features is a key design choice and that the method generalizes to unseen tasks given a few demonstrations.
We study the properties of a family of distances between functions of a single variable. These distances are examples of integral probability metrics, and have been used previously for comparing probability measures on the line; special cases include the Earth Mover's Distance and the Kolmogorov Metric. We examine their properties for general signals, proving that they are robust to a broad class of deformations. We also establish corresponding robustness results for the induced sliced distances between multivariate functions. Finally, we establish error bounds for approximating the univariate metrics from finite samples, and prove that these approximations are robust to additive Gaussian noise. The results are illustrated in numerical experiments, which include comparisons with Wasserstein distances.
The evaluation of text-generative vision-language models is a challenging yet crucial endeavor. By addressing the limitations of existing Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmarks and proposing innovative evaluation methodologies, our research seeks to advance our understanding of these models' capabilities. We propose a novel VQA benchmark based on well-known visual classification datasets which allows a granular evaluation of text-generative vision-language models and their comparison with discriminative vision-language models. To improve the assessment of coarse answers on fine-grained classification tasks, we suggest using the semantic hierarchy of the label space to ask automatically generated follow-up questions about the ground-truth category. Finally, we compare traditional NLP and LLM-based metrics for the problem of evaluating model predictions given ground-truth answers. We perform a human evaluation study upon which we base our decision on the final metric. We apply our benchmark to a suite of vision-language models and show a detailed comparison of their abilities on object, action, and attribute classification. Our contributions aim to lay the foundation for more precise and meaningful assessments, facilitating targeted progress in the exciting field of vision-language modeling.
Neural network (NN) designed for challenging machine learning tasks is in general a highly nonlinear mapping that contains massive variational parameters. High complexity of NN, if unbounded or unconstrained, might unpredictably cause severe issues including over-fitting, loss of generalization power, and unbearable cost of hardware. In this work, we propose a general compression scheme that significantly reduces the variational parameters of NN by encoding them to deep automatically-differentiable tensor network (ADTN) that contains exponentially-fewer free parameters. Superior compression performance of our scheme is demonstrated on several widely-recognized NN's (FC-2, LeNet-5, AlextNet, ZFNet and VGG-16) and datasets (MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100). For instance, we compress two linear layers in VGG-16 with approximately $10^{7}$ parameters to two ADTN's with just 424 parameters, where the testing accuracy on CIFAR-10 is improved from $90.17 \%$ to $91.74\%$. Our work suggests TN as an exceptionally efficient mathematical structure for representing the variational parameters of NN's, which exhibits superior compressibility over the commonly-used matrices and multi-way arrays.
We propose an abstract conceptual framework for analysing complex security systems using a new notion of modes and mode transitions. A mode is an independent component of a system with its own objectives, monitoring data, algorithms, and scope and limits. The behaviour of a mode, including its transitions to other modes, is determined by interpretations of the mode's monitoring data in the light of its objectives and capabilities -- these interpretations we call beliefs. We formalise the conceptual framework mathematically and, by quantifying and visualising beliefs in higher-dimensional geometric spaces, we argue our models may help both design, analyse and explain systems. The mathematical models are based on simplicial complexes.
We introduce a new nonparametric framework for classification problems in the presence of missing data. The key aspect of our framework is that the regression function decomposes into an anova-type sum of orthogonal functions, of which some (or even many) may be zero. Working under a general missingness setting, which allows features to be missing not at random, our main goal is to derive the minimax rate for the excess risk in this problem. In addition to the decomposition property, the rate depends on parameters that control the tail behaviour of the marginal feature distributions, the smoothness of the regression function and a margin condition. The ambient data dimension does not appear in the minimax rate, which can therefore be faster than in the classical nonparametric setting. We further propose a new method, called the Hard-thresholding Anova Missing data (HAM) classifier, based on a careful combination of a k-nearest neighbour algorithm and a thresholding step. The HAM classifier attains the minimax rate up to polylogarithmic factors and numerical experiments further illustrate its utility.
We consider the problem of finite-time identification of linear dynamical systems from $T$ samples of a single trajectory. Recent results have predominantly focused on the setup where no structural assumption is made on the system matrix $A^* \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times n}$, and have consequently analyzed the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator in detail. We assume prior structural information on $A^*$ is available, which can be captured in the form of a convex set $\mathcal{K}$ containing $A^*$. For the solution of the ensuing constrained least squares estimator, we derive non-asymptotic error bounds in the Frobenius norm that depend on the local size of $\mathcal{K}$ at $A^*$. To illustrate the usefulness of these results, we instantiate them for four examples, namely when (i) $A^*$ is sparse and $\mathcal{K}$ is a suitably scaled $\ell_1$ ball; (ii) $\mathcal{K}$ is a subspace; (iii) $\mathcal{K}$ consists of matrices each of which is formed by sampling a bivariate convex function on a uniform $n \times n$ grid (convex regression); (iv) $\mathcal{K}$ consists of matrices each row of which is formed by uniform sampling (with step size $1/T$) of a univariate Lipschitz function. In all these situations, we show that $A^*$ can be reliably estimated for values of $T$ much smaller than what is needed for the unconstrained setting.
The influence of natural image transformations on receptive field responses is crucial for modelling visual operations in computer vision and biological vision. In this regard, covariance properties with respect to geometric image transformations in the earliest layers of the visual hierarchy are essential for expressing robust image operations, and for formulating invariant visual operations at higher levels. This paper defines and proves a set of joint covariance properties under compositions of spatial scaling transformations, spatial affine transformations, Galilean transformations and temporal scaling transformations, which make it possible to characterize how different types of image transformations interact with each other and the associated spatio-temporal receptive field responses. In this regard, we also extend the notion of scale-normalized derivatives to affine-normalized derivatives, to be able to obtain true affine-covariant properties of spatial derivatives, that are computed based on spatial smoothing with affine Gaussian kernels. The derived relations show how the parameters of the receptive fields need to be transformed, in order to match the output from spatio-temporal receptive fields under composed spatio-temporal image transformations. As a side effect, the presented proof for the joint covariance property over the integrated combination of the different geometric image transformations also provides specific proofs for the individual transformation properties, which have not previously been fully reported in the literature. The paper also presents an in-depth theoretical analysis of geometric interpretations of the derived covariance properties, as well as outlines a number of biological interpretations of these results.
Hashing has been widely used in approximate nearest search for large-scale database retrieval for its computation and storage efficiency. Deep hashing, which devises convolutional neural network architecture to exploit and extract the semantic information or feature of images, has received increasing attention recently. In this survey, several deep supervised hashing methods for image retrieval are evaluated and I conclude three main different directions for deep supervised hashing methods. Several comments are made at the end. Moreover, to break through the bottleneck of the existing hashing methods, I propose a Shadow Recurrent Hashing(SRH) method as a try. Specifically, I devise a CNN architecture to extract the semantic features of images and design a loss function to encourage similar images projected close. To this end, I propose a concept: shadow of the CNN output. During optimization process, the CNN output and its shadow are guiding each other so as to achieve the optimal solution as much as possible. Several experiments on dataset CIFAR-10 show the satisfying performance of SRH.