Faithfully summarizing the knowledge encoded by a deep neural network (DNN) into a few symbolic primitive patterns without losing much information represents a core challenge in explainable AI. To this end, Ren et al. (2023c) have derived a series of theorems to prove that the inference score of a DNN can be explained as a small set of interactions between input variables. However, the lack of generalization power makes it still hard to consider such interactions as faithful primitive patterns encoded by the DNN. Therefore, given different DNNs trained for the same task, we develop a new method to extract interactions that are shared by these DNNs. Experiments show that the extracted interactions can better reflect common knowledge shared by different DNNs.
The consistency of the maximum likelihood estimator for mixtures of elliptically-symmetric distributions for estimating its population version is shown, where the underlying distribution $P$ is nonparametric and does not necessarily belong to the class of mixtures on which the estimator is based. In a situation where $P$ is a mixture of well enough separated but nonparametric distributions it is shown that the components of the population version of the estimator correspond to the well separated components of $P$. This provides some theoretical justification for the use of such estimators for cluster analysis in case that $P$ has well separated subpopulations even if these subpopulations differ from what the mixture model assumes.
Mendelian randomization is an instrumental variable method that utilizes genetic information to investigate the causal effect of a modifiable exposure on an outcome. In most cases, the exposure changes over time. Understanding the time-varying causal effect of the exposure can yield detailed insights into mechanistic effects and the potential impact of public health interventions. Recently, a growing number of Mendelian randomization studies have attempted to explore time-varying causal effects. However, the proposed approaches oversimplify temporal information and rely on overly restrictive structural assumptions, limiting their reliability in addressing time-varying causal problems. This paper considers a novel approach to estimate time-varying effects through continuous-time modelling by combining functional principal component analysis and weak-instrument-robust techniques. Our method effectively utilizes available data without making strong structural assumptions and can be applied in general settings where the exposure measurements occur at different timepoints for different individuals. We demonstrate through simulations that our proposed method performs well in estimating time-varying effects and provides reliable inference results when the time-varying effect form is correctly specified. The method could theoretically be used to estimate arbitrarily complex time-varying effects. However, there is a trade-off between model complexity and instrument strength. Estimating complex time-varying effects requires instruments that are unrealistically strong. We illustrate the application of this method in a case study examining the time-varying effects of systolic blood pressure on urea levels.
Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) are a widely used framework for sequential decision-making under parameter uncertainty. RMDPs have been extensively studied when the objective is to maximize the discounted return, but little is known for average optimality (optimizing the long-run average of the rewards obtained over time) and Blackwell optimality (remaining discount optimal for all discount factors sufficiently close to 1). In this paper, we prove several foundational results for RMDPs beyond the discounted return. We show that average optimal policies can be chosen stationary and deterministic for sa-rectangular RMDPs but, perhaps surprisingly, that history-dependent (Markovian) policies strictly outperform stationary policies for average optimality in s-rectangular RMDPs. We also study Blackwell optimality for sa-rectangular RMDPs, where we show that {\em approximate} Blackwell optimal policies always exist, although Blackwell optimal policies may not exist. We also provide a sufficient condition for their existence, which encompasses virtually any examples from the literature. We then discuss the connection between average and Blackwell optimality, and we describe several algorithms to compute the optimal average return. Interestingly, our approach leverages the connections between RMDPs and stochastic games.
We propose some new results on the comparison of the minimum or maximum order statistic from a random number of non-identical random variables. Under the non-identical set-up, with certain conditions, we prove that random minimum (maximum) of one system dominates the other in hazard rate (reversed hazard rate) order. Further, we prove variation diminishing property (Karlin [8]) for all possible restrictions to derive the new results.
With the increasing availability of large scale datasets, computational power and tools like automatic differentiation and expressive neural network architectures, sequential data are now often treated in a data-driven way, with a dynamical model trained from the observation data. While neural networks are often seen as uninterpretable black-box architectures, they can still benefit from physical priors on the data and from mathematical knowledge. In this paper, we use a neural network architecture which leverages the long-known Koopman operator theory to embed dynamical systems in latent spaces where their dynamics can be described linearly, enabling a number of appealing features. We introduce methods that enable to train such a model for long-term continuous reconstruction, even in difficult contexts where the data comes in irregularly-sampled time series. The potential for self-supervised learning is also demonstrated, as we show the promising use of trained dynamical models as priors for variational data assimilation techniques, with applications to e.g. time series interpolation and forecasting.
This study addresses the integration of diversity-based and uncertainty-based sampling strategies in active learning, particularly within the context of self-supervised pre-trained models. We introduce a straightforward heuristic called TCM that mitigates the cold start problem while maintaining strong performance across various data levels. By initially applying TypiClust for diversity sampling and subsequently transitioning to uncertainty sampling with Margin, our approach effectively combines the strengths of both strategies. Our experiments demonstrate that TCM consistently outperforms existing methods across various datasets in both low and high data regimes.
We show that the known list-decoding algorithms for univariate multiplicity and folded Reed-Solomon (FRS) codes can be made to run in nearly-linear time. This yields, to our knowledge, the first known family of codes that can be decoded in nearly linear time, even as they approach the list decoding capacity. Univariate multiplicity codes and FRS codes are natural variants of Reed-Solomon codes that were discovered and studied for their applications to list-decoding. It is known that for every $\epsilon >0$, and rate $R \in (0,1)$, there exist explicit families of these codes that have rate $R$ and can be list-decoded from a $(1-R-\epsilon)$ fraction of errors with constant list size in polynomial time (Guruswami & Wang (IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, 2013) and Kopparty, Ron-Zewi, Saraf & Wootters (SIAM J. Comput. 2023)). In this work, we present randomized algorithms that perform the above tasks in nearly linear time. Our algorithms have two main components. The first builds upon the lattice-based approach of Alekhnovich (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 2005), who designed a nearly linear time list-decoding algorithm for Reed-Solomon codes approaching the Johnson radius. As part of the second component, we design nearly-linear time algorithms for two natural algebraic problems. The first algorithm solves linear differential equations of the form $Q\left(x, f(x), \frac{df}{dx}, \dots,\frac{d^m f}{dx^m}\right) \equiv 0$ where $Q$ has the form $Q(x,y_0,\dots,y_m) = \tilde{Q}(x) + \sum_{i = 0}^m Q_i(x)\cdot y_i$. The second solves functional equations of the form $Q\left(x, f(x), f(\gamma x), \dots,f(\gamma^m x)\right) \equiv 0$ where $\gamma$ is a high-order field element. These algorithms can be viewed as generalizations of classical algorithms of Sieveking (Computing 1972) and Kung (Numer. Math. 1974) for computing the modular inverse of a power series, and might be of independent interest.
We discuss the inhomogeneous spiked Wigner model, a theoretical framework recently introduced to study structured noise in various learning scenarios, through the prism of random matrix theory, with a specific focus on its spectral properties. Our primary objective is to find an optimal spectral method and to extend the celebrated \cite{BBP} (BBP) phase transition criterion -- well-known in the homogeneous case -- to our inhomogeneous, block-structured, Wigner model. We provide a thorough rigorous analysis of a transformed matrix and show that the transition for the appearance of 1) an outlier outside the bulk of the limiting spectral distribution and 2) a positive overlap between the associated eigenvector and the signal, occurs precisely at the optimal threshold, making the proposed spectral method optimal within the class of iterative methods for the inhomogeneous Wigner problem.
Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging aims to reconstruct the three-dimensional hidden scenes from the data measured in the line-of-sight, which uses photon time-of-flight information encoded in light after multiple diffuse reflections. The under-sampled scanning data can facilitate fast imaging. However, the resulting reconstruction problem becomes a serious ill-posed inverse problem, the solution of which is highly possibility to be degraded due to noises and distortions. In this paper, we propose novel NLOS reconstruction models based on curvature regularization, i.e., the object-domain curvature regularization model and the dual (signal and object)-domain curvature regularization model. In what follows, we develop efficient optimization algorithms relying on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with the backtracking stepsize rule, for which all solvers can be implemented on GPUs. We evaluate the proposed algorithms on both synthetic and real datasets, which achieve state-of-the-art performance, especially in the compressed sensing setting. Based on GPU computing, our algorithm is the most effective among iterative methods, balancing reconstruction quality and computational time. All our codes and data are available at //github.com/Duanlab123/CurvNLOS.
Artificial neural networks thrive in solving the classification problem for a particular rigid task, acquiring knowledge through generalized learning behaviour from a distinct training phase. The resulting network resembles a static entity of knowledge, with endeavours to extend this knowledge without targeting the original task resulting in a catastrophic forgetting. Continual learning shifts this paradigm towards networks that can continually accumulate knowledge over different tasks without the need to retrain from scratch. We focus on task incremental classification, where tasks arrive sequentially and are delineated by clear boundaries. Our main contributions concern 1) a taxonomy and extensive overview of the state-of-the-art, 2) a novel framework to continually determine the stability-plasticity trade-off of the continual learner, 3) a comprehensive experimental comparison of 11 state-of-the-art continual learning methods and 4 baselines. We empirically scrutinize method strengths and weaknesses on three benchmarks, considering Tiny Imagenet and large-scale unbalanced iNaturalist and a sequence of recognition datasets. We study the influence of model capacity, weight decay and dropout regularization, and the order in which the tasks are presented, and qualitatively compare methods in terms of required memory, computation time, and storage.