With the development of deep learning techniques, supervised learning has achieved performances surpassing those of humans. Researchers have designed numerous corresponding models for different data modalities, achieving excellent results in supervised tasks. However, with the exponential increase of data in multiple fields, the recognition and classification of unlabeled data have gradually become a hot topic. In this paper, we employed a Reinforcement Learning framework to simulate the cognitive processes of humans for effectively addressing novel class discovery in the Open-set domain. We deployed a Member-to-Leader Multi-Agent framework to extract and fuse features from multi-modal information, aiming to acquire a more comprehensive understanding of the feature space. Furthermore, this approach facilitated the incorporation of self-supervised learning to enhance model training. We employed a clustering method with varying constraint conditions, ranging from strict to loose, allowing for the generation of dependable labels for a subset of unlabeled data during the training phase. This iterative process is similar to human exploratory learning of unknown data. These mechanisms collectively update the network parameters based on rewards received from environmental feedback. This process enables effective control over the extent of exploration learning, ensuring the accuracy of learning in unknown data categories. We demonstrate the performance of our approach in both the 3D and 2D domains by employing the OS-MN40, OS-MN40-Miss, and Cifar10 datasets. Our approach achieves competitive competitive results.
Ensuring the correctness of critical real-time systems, involving concurrent behaviors and timing requirements, is crucial. Timed automata extend finite-state automata with clocks, compared in guards and invariants with integer constants. Parametric timed automata (PTAs) extend timed automata with timing parameters. Parameter synthesis aims at computing dense sets of valuations for the timing parameters, guaranteeing a good behavior. However, in most cases, the emptiness problem for reachability (i.e., whether the emptiness of the parameter valuations set for which some location is reachable) is undecidable for PTAs and, as a consequence, synthesis procedures do not terminate in general, even for bounded parameters. In this paper, we introduce a parametric extrapolation, that allows us to derive an underapproximation in the form of linear constraints containing not only all the integer points ensuring reachability, but also all the (non-necessarily integer) convex combinations of these integer points, for general PTAs with a bounded parameter domain. We also propose two further algorithms synthesizing parameter valuations guaranteeing unavoidability, and preservation of the untimed behavior w.r.t. a reference parameter valuation, respectively. Our algorithms terminate and can output constraints arbitrarily close to the complete result. We demonstrate their applicability and efficiency using the tool Rom\'eo on two classical benchmarks.
Mediation analysis is an important statistical tool in many research fields. Its aim is to investigate the mechanism along the causal pathway between an exposure and an outcome. The joint significance test is widely utilized as a prominent statistical approach for examining mediation effects in practical applications. Nevertheless, the limitation of this mediation testing method stems from its conservative Type I error, which reduces its statistical power and imposes certain constraints on its popularity and utility. The proposed solution to address this gap is the adaptive joint significance test for one mediator, a novel data-adaptive test for mediation effect that exhibits significant advancements compared to traditional joint significance test. The proposed method is designed to be user-friendly, eliminating the need for complicated procedures. We have derived explicit expressions for size and power, ensuring the theoretical validity of our approach. Furthermore, we extend the proposed adaptive joint significance tests for small-scale mediation hypotheses with family-wise error rate (FWER) control. Additionally, a novel adaptive Sobel-type approach is proposed for the estimation of confidence intervals for the mediation effects, demonstrating significant advancements over conventional Sobel's confidence intervals in terms of achieving desirable coverage probabilities. Our mediation testing and confidence intervals procedure is evaluated through comprehensive simulations, and compared with numerous existing approaches. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of our method by analysing three real-world datasets with continuous, binary and time-to-event outcomes, respectively.
Machine learning (ML) is widely used today, especially through deep neural networks (DNNs), however, increasing computational load and resource requirements have led to cloud-based solutions. To address this problem, a new generation of networks called Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) has emerged, which mimic the behavior of the human brain to improve efficiency and reduce energy consumption. These networks often process large amounts of sensitive information, such as confidential data, and thus privacy issues arise. Homomorphic encryption (HE) offers a solution, allowing calculations to be performed on encrypted data without decrypting it. This research compares traditional DNNs and SNNs using the Brakerski/Fan-Vercauteren (BFV) encryption scheme. The LeNet-5 model, a widely-used convolutional architecture, is used for both DNN and SNN models based on the LeNet-5 architecture, and the networks are trained and compared using the FashionMNIST dataset. The results show that SNNs using HE achieve up to 40% higher accuracy than DNNs for low values of the plaintext modulus t, although their execution time is longer due to their time-coding nature with multiple time-steps.
Contrastive loss has been increasingly used in learning representations from multiple modalities. In the limit, the nature of the contrastive loss encourages modalities to exactly match each other in the latent space. Yet it remains an open question how the modality alignment affects the downstream task performance. In this paper, based on an information-theoretic argument, we first prove that exact modality alignment is sub-optimal in general for downstream prediction tasks. Hence we advocate that the key of better performance lies in meaningful latent modality structures instead of perfect modality alignment. To this end, we propose three general approaches to construct latent modality structures. Specifically, we design 1) a deep feature separation loss for intra-modality regularization; 2) a Brownian-bridge loss for inter-modality regularization; and 3) a geometric consistency loss for both intra- and inter-modality regularization. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular multi-modal representation learning frameworks: the CLIP-based two-tower model and the ALBEF-based fusion model. We test our model on a variety of tasks including zero/few-shot image classification, image-text retrieval, visual question answering, visual reasoning, and visual entailment. Our method achieves consistent improvements over existing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed approach on latent modality structure regularization.
While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has fueled multiple high-profile successes in machine learning, it is held back from more widespread adoption by its often poor data efficiency and the limited generality of the policies it produces. A promising approach for alleviating these limitations is to cast the development of better RL algorithms as a machine learning problem itself in a process called meta-RL. Meta-RL is most commonly studied in a problem setting where, given a distribution of tasks, the goal is to learn a policy that is capable of adapting to any new task from the task distribution with as little data as possible. In this survey, we describe the meta-RL problem setting in detail as well as its major variations. We discuss how, at a high level, meta-RL research can be clustered based on the presence of a task distribution and the learning budget available for each individual task. Using these clusters, we then survey meta-RL algorithms and applications. We conclude by presenting the open problems on the path to making meta-RL part of the standard toolbox for a deep RL practitioner.
Despite the recent progress in deep learning, most approaches still go for a silo-like solution, focusing on learning each task in isolation: training a separate neural network for each individual task. Many real-world problems, however, call for a multi-modal approach and, therefore, for multi-tasking models. Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to leverage useful information across tasks to improve the generalization capability of a model. This thesis is concerned with multi-task learning in the context of computer vision. First, we review existing approaches for MTL. Next, we propose several methods that tackle important aspects of multi-task learning. The proposed methods are evaluated on various benchmarks. The results show several advances in the state-of-the-art of multi-task learning. Finally, we discuss several possibilities for future work.
Contrastive learning models have achieved great success in unsupervised visual representation learning, which maximize the similarities between feature representations of different views of the same image, while minimize the similarities between feature representations of views of different images. In text summarization, the output summary is a shorter form of the input document and they have similar meanings. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning model for supervised abstractive text summarization, where we view a document, its gold summary and its model generated summaries as different views of the same mean representation and maximize the similarities between them during training. We improve over a strong sequence-to-sequence text generation model (i.e., BART) on three different summarization datasets. Human evaluation also shows that our model achieves better faithfulness ratings compared to its counterpart without contrastive objectives.
Data augmentation has been widely used to improve generalizability of machine learning models. However, comparatively little work studies data augmentation for graphs. This is largely due to the complex, non-Euclidean structure of graphs, which limits possible manipulation operations. Augmentation operations commonly used in vision and language have no analogs for graphs. Our work studies graph data augmentation for graph neural networks (GNNs) in the context of improving semi-supervised node-classification. We discuss practical and theoretical motivations, considerations and strategies for graph data augmentation. Our work shows that neural edge predictors can effectively encode class-homophilic structure to promote intra-class edges and demote inter-class edges in given graph structure, and our main contribution introduces the GAug graph data augmentation framework, which leverages these insights to improve performance in GNN-based node classification via edge prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that augmentation via GAug improves performance across GNN architectures and datasets.
While existing machine learning models have achieved great success for sentiment classification, they typically do not explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction, which can lead to poor results for fine-grained analysis at the snippet level (a phrase or sentence). Factorization Machine provides a possible approach to learning element-wise interaction for recommender systems, but they are not directly applicable to our task due to the inability to model contexts and word sequences. In this work, we develop two Position-aware Factorization Machines which consider word interaction, context and position information. Such information is jointly encoded in a set of sentiment-oriented word interaction vectors. Compared to traditional word embeddings, SWI vectors explicitly capture sentiment-oriented word interaction and simplify the parameter learning. Experimental results show that while they have comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods for document-level classification, they benefit the snippet/sentence-level sentiment analysis.
Recently, deep learning has achieved very promising results in visual object tracking. Deep neural networks in existing tracking methods require a lot of training data to learn a large number of parameters. However, training data is not sufficient for visual object tracking as annotations of a target object are only available in the first frame of a test sequence. In this paper, we propose to learn hierarchical features for visual object tracking by using tree structure based Recursive Neural Networks (RNN), which have fewer parameters than other deep neural networks, e.g. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). First, we learn RNN parameters to discriminate between the target object and background in the first frame of a test sequence. Tree structure over local patches of an exemplar region is randomly generated by using a bottom-up greedy search strategy. Given the learned RNN parameters, we create two dictionaries regarding target regions and corresponding local patches based on the learned hierarchical features from both top and leaf nodes of multiple random trees. In each of the subsequent frames, we conduct sparse dictionary coding on all candidates to select the best candidate as the new target location. In addition, we online update two dictionaries to handle appearance changes of target objects. Experimental results demonstrate that our feature learning algorithm can significantly improve tracking performance on benchmark datasets.