United States

The estimation and inference of human predictive uncertainty have great potential to improve the sampling efficiency and prediction reliability of human-in-the-loop systems for smart healthcare, smart education, and human-computer interactions. Predictive uncertainty in humans is highly interpretable, but its measurement is poorly accessible. Contrarily, the predictive uncertainty of machine learning models, albeit with poor interpretability, is relatively easily accessible. Here, we demonstrate that the poor accessibility of human uncertainty can be resolved by exploiting simple and universally accessible deterministic neural networks. We propose a new model for human uncertainty inference, called proxy ensemble network (PEN). Simulations with a few benchmark datasets demonstrated that the model can efficiently learn human uncertainty from a small amount of data. To show its applicability in real-world problems, we performed behavioral experiments, in which 64 physicians classified medical images and reported their level of confidence. We showed that the PEN could predict both the uncertainty range and diagnoses given by subjects with high accuracy. Our results demonstrate the ability of machine learning in guiding human decision making; it can also help humans in learning more efficiently and accurately. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that explored the possibility of accessing human uncertainty via the lens of deterministic neural networks.

AAAI 2021

Human Uncertainty Inference via Deterministic Ensemble Neural Networks

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Efficiently computing the weighted Jaccard similarity has become an active research topic in machine learning and theory. For sparse data, the standard technique is based on the consistent weighed sampling (CWS). For dense data, however, methods based on rejection sampling (RS) can be much more efficient. Nevertheless, existing RS methods are still slow for practical purposes. In this paper, we propose to improve RS by  a strategy, which we call  efficient rejection sampling (ERS), based on ``early stopping + densification''.  We analyze the statistical property of  ERS and provide experimental results to compare ERS with RS and other algorithms for hashing weighted Jaccard. The results demonstrate that ERS significantly improves the existing methods for estimating the weighted Jaccard similarity in relatively dense data.

Rejection Sampling for Weighted Jaccard Similarity Revisited

Asynchronous distributed algorithms are a popular way to reduce synchronization costs in large-scale optimization, and in particular for neural network training. However, for nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives, few convergence guarantees exist beyond cases where closed-form proximal operator solutions are available. 
As training most popular deep neural networks corresponds to optimizing nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives, there is a pressing need for such convergence guarantees. In this paper, we analyze for the first time the convergence of stochastic asynchronous optimization for this general class of objectives. In particular, we focus on stochastic subgradient methods allowing for block variable partitioning, where the shared model is asynchronously updated by concurrent processes. To this end, we use a probabilistic model which captures key features of real asynchronous scheduling between concurrent processes. Under this model, we establish convergence with probability one to an invariant set for stochastic subgradient methods with momentum. 
From a practical perspective, one issue with the family of algorithms that we consider is that they are not efficiently supported by machine learning frameworks, which mostly focus on distributed data-parallel strategies. 
To address this, we propose a new implementation strategy for  shared-memory based training of deep neural networks for a partitioned but shared model in single- and multi-GPU settings.  
Based on this implementation, we achieve on average1.2x speed-up in comparison to state-of-the-art training methods for popular image classification tasks, without compromising accuracy.

Asynchronous Optimization Methods for Efficient Training of Deep Neural Networks with Guarantees

Recently the concept of teaching has been introduced into machine learning, in which a teacher model is used to guide the training of a student model (which will be used in real tasks) through  data selection, loss function design, etc. Learning to reweight, which is a specific kind of teaching that reweights training data using a teacher model, receives much attention due to its simplicity and effectiveness. In existing learning to reweight works, the teacher model only utilizes shallow/surface information such as training iteration number and loss/accuracy of the student model from training/validation sets, but ignores the internal states of the student model, which limits the potential of learning to reweight. In this work, we propose an improved data reweighting algorithm, in which the student model provides its internal states to the teacher model, and the teacher model returns adaptive weights of training samples to enhance the training of the student model. The teacher model is jointly trained with the student model using meta gradients propagated from a validation set. Experiments on image classification with clean/noisy labels and neural machine translation empirically demonstrate that our algorithm makes significant improvement over previous methods.

Learning to Reweight with Deep Interactions

We study the problem faced by a decision maker who wants to locate a set of facilities on a real line and allocate agents/items to the facilities. The items have given locations on the line, and can only be assigned to one of their closest facilities. The facilities are controlled by managers, who have additive utility over the items. An optimal solution that maximizes the (utilitarian or egalitarian) social welfare of the facilities may present a very unbalanced allocation of the items to the facilities and hence be perceived as unfair. In this paper, we are interested in fair allocation among facility managers and consider the well-studied proportionality and envy-freeness fairness notions and their relaxations. We assess the availability, existence, approximability, and the quality (price of fairness) of fair solutions, where the quality measures the system efficiency loss under a fair allocation compared to the one that maximizes the social welfare. Further, we show that one can find a Pareto-optimal solution in polynomial time.

Facility’s Perspective to Fair Facility Location Problems

In this paper, we consider online continuous DR-submodular maximization with linear stochastic long-term constraints. Compared to the prior work on online submodular maximization, our setting introduces the extra complication of stochastic linear constraint functions that are i.i.d. generated at each round. In particular, at each time step a DR-submodular utility function and a constraint vector, i.i.d. generated from an unknown distribution, are revealed after committing to an action and we aim to maximize the overall utility while the expected cumulative resource consumption is below a fixed budget. Stochastic long-term constraints arise naturally in applications where there is a limited budget or resource available and resource consumption at each step is governed by stochastically time-varying environments. We propose the Online Lagrangian Frank-Wolfe (OLFW) algorithm to solve this class of online problems. We analyze the performance of the OLFW algorithm and we obtain sub-linear regret bounds as well as sub-linear cumulative constraint violation bounds, both in expectation and with high probability.

Online DR-Submodular Maximization: Minimizing Regret and Constraint Violation

Tensor decomposition is one of the most effective techniques for multi-criteria recommendations. However, it suffers from data sparsity when dealing with three-dimensional (3D) user-item-criterion ratings. To mitigate this issue, we consider effectively incorporating the side information and cross-domain knowledge in tensor decomposition. A deep transfer tensor decomposition (DTTD) method is proposed by integrating deep structure and Tucker decomposition, where an orthogonal constrained stacked denoising autoencoder (OC-SDAE) is proposed for alleviating the scale variation in learning effective latent representation, and the side information is incorporated as a compensation for tensor sparsity. Tucker decomposition generates private users and items' latent factors to connect with OC-SDAEs and creates a common core tensor to bridge different domains. A cross-domain alignment algorithm (CDAA) is proposed to solve the rotation issue between two core tensors in source and target domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in Tucker decomposition based recommendations to use deep structure to incorporate the side information and cross-domain knowledge. Experiments show that DTTD outperforms state-of-the-art related works.

Deep Transfer Tensor Decomposition with Orthogonal Constraint for Recommender Systems

The policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) can be considered as maximization of its objective. However, due to the inherent non-concavity of its objective, the policy gradient method to a first-order stationary point (FOSP) cannot guar- antee a maximal point. A FOSP can be a minimal or even a saddle point, which is undesirable for RL. It has be found that if all the saddle points are strict, all the second-order station- ary points (SOSP) are exactly equivalent to local maxima. Instead of FOSP, we consider SOSP as the convergence criteria to characterize the sample complexity of policy gradient. Our result shows that policy gradient converges to an (Îµ, âˆšÎµÏ‡)-SOSP with probability at least 1 âˆ’ O(Î´) after the total cost of O(Îµâˆ’9/2)sinificantly improves the state of the art cost O(Îµâˆ’9).Our analysis is based on the key idea that decomposes the parameter space Rp into three non-intersected regions: non-stationary point region, saddle point region, and local optimal region, then making a local improvement of the objective of RL in each region. This technique can be potentially generalized to extensive policy gradient methods. For the complete proof, please refer to https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.01491.pdf.

Sample Complexity of Policy Gradient Finding Second-Order Stationary Points

Like humans, document summarization models can interpret a documentâ€™s contents in a number of ways. Unfortunately, the  neural models of today are largely black boxes that provide little explanation of how or why they generated a summary in the way they did. Therefore, to begin prying open the black box and to inject a level of control into the substance of the final summary, we developed a novel select-and-generate framework that focuses on explainability. By revealing the latent centrality and interactions between sentences, along with scores for novelty and relevance, users are given a window into the choices a model is making and an opportunity to guide those choices in a more desirable direction. A novel pair-wise matrix captures the sentence interactions, centrality and attribute scores, and a mask with tunable attribute thresholds allows the user to control which sentences are likely to be included in the extraction. A sentence-deployed attention mechanism in the abstractor ensures the final summary emphasizes the desired content. Additionally, the encoder is adaptable, supporting both Transformer- and BERT-based configurations. In a series of experiments assessed with ROUGE metrics and two human evaluations, ESCA outperformed eight state-of-the-art models on the CNN/DailyMail and NYT50 benchmark datasets.

Exploring Explainable Selection to Control Abstractive Summarization

One of the key factors of enabling machine learning models to comprehend and solve real-world tasks is to leverage multimodal data. Unfortunately, annotation of multimodal data is challenging and expensive. Recently, self-supervised multimodal methods that combine vision and language were proposed to learn multimodal representations without annotation. However, these methods often choose to ignore the presence of high levels of noise and thus yield sub-optimal results. In this work, we show that the problem of noise estimation for multimodal data can be reduced to a multimodal density estimation task. Using multimodal density estimation, we propose a noise estimation building block for multimodal representation learning that is based strictly on the inherent correlation between different modalities. We demonstrate how our noise estimation can be broadly integrated and achieves comparable results to state-of-the-art performance on five different benchmark datasets for two challenging multimodal tasks: Video Question Answering and Text-To-Video Retrieval. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical probabilistic error bound substantiating our empirical results and analyze failure cases. Code: https://github.com/elad-amrani/ssml.

Noise Estimation Using Density Estimation for Self-Supervised Multimodal Learning

We present a new approach for learning the structure of a treewidth-bounded Bayesian Network (BN). The key to our approach is applying an exact method (based on MaxSAT) locally, to improve the score of a heuristically computed BN. This approach allows us to scale the power of exact methodsâ€”so far only applicable to BNs with several dozens of random variablesâ€”to large BNs with several thousands of random variables. Our experiments show that our method improves the score of BNs provided by state-of-the-art heuristic methods, often significantly.

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