Unlearnable example attacks are data poisoning attacks aiming to degrade the clean test accuracy of deep learning by adding imperceptible perturbations to the training samples, which can be formulated as a bi-level optimization problem. However, directly solving this optimization problem is intractable for deep neural networks. In this paper, we investigate unlearnable example attacks from a game-theoretic perspective, by formulating the attack as a nonzero sum Stackelberg game. First, the existence of game equilibria is proved under the normal setting and the adversarial training setting. It is shown that the game equilibrium gives the most powerful poison attack in that the victim has the lowest test accuracy among all networks within the same hypothesis space when certain loss functions are used. Second, we propose a novel attack method, called the Game Unlearnable Example (GUE), which has three main gradients. (1) The poisons are obtained by directly solving the equilibrium of the Stackelberg game with a first-order algorithm. (2) We employ an autoencoder-like generative network model as the poison attacker. (3) A novel payoff function is introduced to evaluate the performance of the poison. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that GUE can effectively poison the model in various scenarios. Furthermore, the GUE still works by using a relatively small percentage of the training data to train the generator, and the poison generator can generalize to unseen data well. Our implementation code can be found at https://github.com/hong-xian/gue.
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Sign language translation (SLT) aims to convert continuous sign language videos into textual sentences. As a typical multi-modal task, there exists an inherent modality gap between sign language videos and spoken language text, which makes the cross-modal alignment between visual and textual modalities crucial. However, previous studies tend to rely on an intermediate sign gloss representation to help alleviate the cross-modal problem thereby neglecting the alignment across modalities that may lead to compromised results. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework based on Conditional Variational autoencoder for SLT (CV-SLT) that facilitates direct and sufficient cross-modal alignment between sign language videos and spoken language text. Specifically, our CV-SLT consists of two paths with two Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergences to regularize the outputs of the encoder and decoder, respectively. In the prior path, the model solely relies on visual information to predict the target text; whereas in the posterior path, it simultaneously encodes visual information and textual knowledge to reconstruct the target text. The first KL divergence optimizes the conditional variational autoencoder and regularizes the encoder outputs, while the second KL divergence performs a self-distillation from the posterior path to the prior path, ensuring the consistency of decoder outputs.We further enhance the integration of textual information to the posterior path by employing a shared Attention Residual Gaussian Distribution (ARGD), which considers the textual information in the posterior path as a residual component relative to the prior path. Extensive experiments conducted on public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, achieving new state-of-the-art results while significantly alleviating the cross-modal representation discrepancy. The code and models are available at https://github.com/rzhao-zhsq/CV-SLT.
A Learnable Discrete-Prior Fusion Autoencoder with Contrastive Learning for Tabular Data Synthesis
PDF ↗The actual collection of tabular data for sharing involves confidentiality and privacy constraints, leaving the potential risks of machine learning for interventional data analysis unsafely averted. Synthetic data has emerged recently as a privacy-protecting solution to address this challenge. However, existing approaches regard discrete and continuous modal features as separate entities, thus falling short in properly capturing their inherent correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel contrastive learning guided Gaussian Transformer autoencoder, termed GTCoder, to synthesize photo-realistic multimodal tabular data for scientific research. Our approach introduces a transformer-based fusion module that seamlessly integrates multimodal features, permitting for mining more informative latent representations. The attention within the fusion module directs the integrated output features to focus on critical components that facilitate the task of generating latent embeddings. Moreover, we formulate a contrastive learning strategy to implicitly constrain the embeddings from discrete features in the latent feature space by encouraging the similar discrete feature distributions closer while pushing the dissimilar further away, in order to better enhance the representation of the latent embedding. Experimental results indicate that GTCoder is effective to generate photo-realistic synthetic data, with interactive interpretation of latent embedding, and performs favorably against some baselines on most real-world and simulated datasets.
Task-Free Continual Generation and Representation Learning via Dynamic Expansionable Memory Cluster
PDF ↗Human brains can continually acquire and learn new skills and knowledge over time from a dynamically changing environment without forgetting previously learnt information. Such a capacity can selectively transfer some important and recently seen information to the persistent knowledge regions of the brain. Inspired by this intuition, we propose a new memory-based approach for image reconstruction and generation in continual learning, consisting of a temporary and evolving memory, with two different storage strategies, corresponding to the temporary and permanent memorisation. The temporary memory aims to preserve up-to-date information while the evolving memory can dynamically increase its capacity in order to preserve permanent knowledge information. This is achieved by the proposed memory expansion mechanism that selectively transfers those data samples deemed as important from the temporary memory to new clusters defined within the evolved memory according to an information novelty criterion. Such a mechanism promotes the knowledge diversity among clusters in the evolved memory, resulting in capturing more diverse information by using a compact memory capacity. Furthermore, we propose a two-step optimization strategy for training a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to implement generation and representation learning tasks, which updates the generator and inference models separately using two optimisation paths. This approach leads to a better trade-off between generation and reconstruction performance. We show empirically and theoretically that the proposed approach can learn meaningful latent representations while generating diverse images from different domains. The source code and supplementary material (SM) are available at https://github.com/dtuzi123/DEMC.
In this work, we formulate a novel framework for adversarial robustness using the manifold hypothesis. This framework provides sufficient conditions for defending against adversarial examples. We develop an adversarial purification method with this framework. Our method combines manifold learning with variational inference to provide adversarial robustness without the need for expensive adversarial training. Experimentally, our approach can provide adversarial robustness even if attackers are aware of the existence of the defense. In addition, our method can also serve as a test-time defense mechanism for variational autoencoders.
Continuously observed event occurrences, often exhibit self and mutually exciting effects, which can be well modeled using temporal point processes. Beyond that, these event dynamics may also change over time, with certain periodic trends. We propose a novel variational autoencoder to capture such a mixture of temporal dynamics. More specifically, the whole time interval of the input sequence is partitioned into a set of sub intervals. The event dynamics are assumed to be stationary within each subinterval, but could be changing across those subintervals. In particular, we use a sequential latent variable model to learn a dependency graph between the observed dimensions, for each subinterval. The model predicts the future event times, by using the learned dependency graph to remove the non contributing influences of past events. By doing so, the proposed model demonstrates its higher accuracy in predicting inter event times and event types for several real world event sequences, compared with existing state of the art neural point processes.
Incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) aims to reveal shared clustering structures within multi-view data, where only partial views of the samples are available. Existing IMVC methods primarily suffer from two issues: 1) Imputation-based methods inevitably introduce inaccurate imputations, which in turn degrade clustering performance; 2) Imputation-free methods are susceptible to unbalanced information among views and fail to fully exploit shared information. To address these issues, we propose a novel method based on variational autoencoders. Specifically, we adopt multiple view-specific encoders to extract information from each view and utilize the Product-of-Experts approach to efficiently aggregate information to obtain the common representation. To enhance the shared information in the common representation, we introduce a coherence objective to mitigate the influence of information imbalance. By incorporating the Mixture-of-Gaussians prior information into the latent representation, our proposed method is able to learn the common representation with clustering-friendly structures. Extensive experiments on four datasets show that our method achieves competitive clustering performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Domain generalization is a critical challenge for machine learning systems. Prior domain generalization methods focus on extracting domain-invariant features across several stationary domains to enable generalization to new domains. However, in non-stationary tasks where new domains evolve in an underlying continuous structure, such as time, merely extracting the invariant features is insufficient for generalization to the evolving new domains. Nevertheless, it is non-trivial to learn both evolving and invariant features within a single model due to their conflicts. To bridge this gap, we build causal models to characterize the distribution shifts concerning the two patterns, and propose to learn both dynamic and invariant features via a new framework called Mutual Information-Based Sequential Autoencoders (MISTS). MISTS adopts information theoretic constraints onto sequential autoencoders to disentangle the dynamic and invariant features, and leverage an adaptive classifier to make predictions based on both evolving and invariant information. Our experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that MISTS succeeds in capturing both evolving and invariant information, and present promising results in evolving domain generalization tasks.
Continuous-time models such as Neural ODEs and Neural Flows have shown promising results in analyzing irregularly sampled time series frequently encountered in electronic health records. Based on these models, time series are typically processed with a hybrid of an initial value problem (IVP) solver and a recurrent neural network within the variational autoencoder architecture. Sequentially solving IVPs makes such models computationally less efficient. In this paper, we propose to model time series purely with continuous processes whose state evolution can be approximated directly by IVPs. This eliminates the need for recurrent computation and enables multiple states to evolve in parallel. We further fuse the encoder and decoder with one IVP solver utilizing its invertibility, which leads to fewer parameters and faster convergence. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that the proposed method can systematically outperform its predecessors, achieve state-of-the-art results, and have significant advantages in terms of data efficiency.
Financial simulators play an important role in enhancing forecasting accuracy, managing risks, and fostering strategic financial decision-making. Despite the development of financial market simulation methodologies, existing frameworks often struggle with adapting to specialized simulation context. We pinpoint the challenges as i) current financial datasets do not contain context labels; ii) current techniques are not designed to generate financial data with context as control, which demands greater precision compared to other modalities; iii) the inherent difficulties in generating context-aligned, high-fidelity data given the non-stationary, noisy nature of financial data. To address these challenges, our contributions are: i) we proposed the Contextual Market Dataset with market dynamics, stock ticker, and history state as context, leveraging a market dynamics modeling method that combines linear regression and clustering to extract market dynamics; ii) we present Market-GAN, a novel architecture incorporating a Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for the controllable generation with context, an autoencoder for learning low-dimension features, and supervisors for knowledge transfer; iii) we introduce a two-stage training scheme to ensure that Market-GAN captures the intrinsic market distribution with multiple objectives. In the pertaining stage, with the use of the autoencoder and supervisors, we prepare the generator with a better initialization for the adversarial training stage. We propose a set of holistic evaluation metrics that consider alignment, fidelity, data usability on downstream tasks, and market facts. We evaluate Market-GAN with the Dow Jones Industrial Average data from 2000 to 2023 and showcase superior performance in comparison to 4 state-of-the-art time-series generative models.
Self-supervised representation learning methods have achieved significant success in computer vision and natural language processing (NLP), where data samples exhibit explicit spatial or semantic dependencies. However, applying these methods to tabular data is challenging due to the less pronounced dependencies among data samples. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing SwitchTab, a novel self-supervised method specifically designed to capture latent dependencies in tabular data. SwitchTab leverages an asymmetric encoder-decoder framework to decouple mutual and salient features among data pairs, resulting in more representative embeddings. These embeddings, in turn, contribute to better decision boundaries and lead to improved results in downstream tasks. To validate the effectiveness of SwitchTab, we conduct extensive experiments across various domains involving tabular data. The results showcase superior performance in end-to-end prediction tasks with fine-tuning. Moreover, we demonstrate that pre-trained salient embeddings can be utilized as plug-and-play features to enhance the performance of various traditional classification methods (e.g., Logistic Regression, XGBoost, etc.). Lastly, we highlight the capability of SwitchTab to create explainable representations through visualization of decoupled mutual and salient features in the latent space.
Self-supervised learning on graphs can be bifurcated into contrastive and generative methods. Contrastive methods, also known as graph contrastive learning (GCL), have dominated graph self-supervised learning in the past few years, but the recent advent of graph masked autoencoder (GraphMAE) rekindles the momentum behind generative methods. Despite the empirical success of GraphMAE, there is still a dearth of theoretical understanding regarding its efficacy. Moreover, while both generative and contrastive methods have been shown to be effective, their connections and differences have yet to be thoroughly investigated. Therefore, we theoretically build a bridge between GraphMAE and GCL, and prove that the node-level reconstruction objective in GraphMAE implicitly performs context-level GCL. Based on our theoretical analysis, we further identify the limitations of the GraphMAE from the perspectives of alignment and uniformity, which have been considered as two key properties of high-quality representations in GCL. We point out that GraphMAE's alignment performance is restricted by the masking strategy, and the uniformity is not strictly guaranteed. To remedy the aforementioned limitations, we propose an Alignment-Uniformity enhanced Graph Masked AutoEncoder, named AUG-MAE. Specifically, we propose an easy-to-hard adversarial masking strategy to provide hard-to-align samples, which improves the alignment performance. Meanwhile, we introduce an explicit uniformity regularizer to ensure the uniformity of the learned representations. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over existing state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/AzureLeon1/AUG-MAE.
A Two-Stage Information Extraction Network for Incomplete Multi-View Multi-Label Classification
PDF ↗Recently, multi-view multi-label classification (MvMLC) has received a significant amount of research interest and many methods have been proposed based on the assumptions of view completion and label completion. However, in real-world scenarios, multi-view multi-label data tends to be incomplete due to various uncertainties involved in data collection and manual annotation. As a result, the conventional MvMLC methods fail. In this paper, we propose a new two-stage MvMLC network to solve this incomplete MvMLC issue with partial missing views and missing labels. Different from the existing works, our method attempts to leverage the diverse information from the partially missing data based on the information theory. Specifically, our method aims to minimize task-irrelevant information while maximizing task-relevant information through the principles of information bottleneck theory and mutual information extraction. The first stage of our network involves training view-specific classifiers to concentrate the task-relevant information. Subsequently, in the second stage, the hidden states of these classifiers serve as input for an alignment model, an autoencoder-based mutual information extraction framework, and a weighted fusion classifier to make the final prediction. Extensive experiments performed on five datasets validate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinTan10/TSIEN.
LDS2AE: Local Diffusion Shared-Specific Autoencoder for Multimodal Remote Sensing Image Classification with Arbitrary Missing Modalities
PDF ↗Recent research on the joint classification of multimodal remote sensing data has achieved great success. However, due to the limitations imposed by imaging conditions, the case of missing modalities often occurs in practice. Most previous researchers regard the classification in case of different missing modalities as independent tasks. They train a specific classification model for each fixed missing modality by extracting multimodal joint representation, which cannot handle the classification of arbitrary (including multiple and random) missing modalities. In this work, we propose a local diffusion shared-specific autoencoder (LDS2AE), which solves the classification of arbitrary missing modalities with a single model. The LDS2AE captures the data distribution of different modalities to learn multimodal shared feature for classification by designing a novel local diffusion autoencoder which consists of a modality-shared encoder and several modality-specific decoders. The modality-shared encoder is designed to extract multimodal shared feature by employing the same parameters to map multimodal data into a shared subspace. The modality-specific decoders put the multimodal shared feature to reconstruct the image of each modality, which facilitates the shared feature to learn unique information of different modalities. In addition, we incorporate masked training to the diffusion autoencoder to achieve local diffusion, which significantly reduces the training cost of model. The approach is tested on widely-used multimodal remote sensing datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed LDS2AE in addressing the classification of arbitrary missing modalities. The code is available at https://github.com/Jiahuiqu/LDS2AE.
In many real-world applications, from robotics to pedestrian trajectory prediction, there is a need to predict multiple real-valued outputs to represent several potential scenarios. Current deep learning techniques to address multiple-output problems are based on two main methodologies: (1) mixture density networks, which suffer from poor stability at high dimensions, or (2) multiple choice learning (MCL), an approach that uses M single-output functions, each only producing a point estimate hypothesis. This paper presents a Mixture of Multiple-Output functions (MoM) approach using a novel variant of dropout, Multiple Hypothesis Dropout. Unlike traditional MCL-based approaches, each multiple-output function not only estimates the mean but also the variance for its hypothesis. This is achieved through a novel stochastic winner-take-all loss which allows each multiple-output function to estimate variance through the spread of its subnetwork predictions. Experiments on supervised learning problems illustrate that our approach outperforms existing solutions for reconstructing multimodal output distributions. Additional studies on unsupervised learning problems show that estimating the parameters of latent posterior distributions within a discrete autoencoder significantly improves codebook efficiency, sample quality, precision and recall.
Distribution-Conditioned Adversarial Variational Autoencoder for Valid Instrumental Variable Generation
PDF ↗Instrumental variables (IVs), widely applied in economics and healthcare, enable consistent counterfactual prediction in the presence of hidden confounding factors, effectively addressing endogeneity issues. The prevailing IV-based counterfactual prediction methods typically rely on the availability of valid IVs (satisfying Relevance, Exclusivity, and Exogeneity), a requirement which often proves elusive in real-world scenarios. Various data-driven techniques are being developed to create valid IVs (or representations of IVs) from a pool of IV candidates. However, most of these techniques still necessitate the inclusion of valid IVs within the set of candidates. This paper proposes a distribution-conditioned adversarial variational autoencoder to tackle this challenge. Specifically: 1) for Relevance and Exclusivity, we deduce the corresponding evidence lower bound following the Bayesian network structure and build the variational autoencoder; accordingly, 2) for Exogeneity , we design an adversarial game to encourage latent factors originating from the marginal distribution, compelling the independence between IVs and other outcome-related factors. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness, stability and generality of our proposed model in generating valid IV factors in the absence of valid IV candidates.
The de novo generation of hit-like molecules that show bioactivity and drug-likeness is an important task in computer-aided drug discovery. Although artificial intelligence can generate molecules with desired chemical properties, most previous studies have ignored the influence of disease-related cellular environments. This study proposes a novel deep generative model called GxVAEs to generate hit-like molecules from gene expression profiles by leveraging two joint variational autoencoders (VAEs). The first VAE, ProfileVAE, extracts latent features from gene expression profiles. The extracted features serve as the conditions that guide the second VAE, which is called MolVAE, in generating hit-like molecules. GxVAEs bridge the gap between molecular generation and the cellular environment in a biological system, and produce molecules that are biologically meaningful in the context of specific diseases. Experiments and case studies on the generation of therapeutic molecules show that GxVAEs outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines and yield hit-like molecules with potential bioactivity and drug-like properties. We were able to successfully generate the potential molecular structures with therapeutic effects for various diseases from patients’ disease profiles.
In deep learning for drug discovery, molecular representations are often based on sequences, known as SMILES, which allow for straightforward implementation of natural language processing methodologies, one being the sequence-to-sequence autoencoder. However, we observe that training an autoencoder solely on SMILES is insufficient to learn molecular representations that are semantically meaningful, where semantics are specified by the structural (graph-to-graph) similarities between molecules. We demonstrate by example that SMILES-based autoencoders may map structurally similar molecules to distant codes, resulting in an incoherent latent space that does not necessarily respect the semantic similarities between molecules. To address this shortcoming we propose Semantically-Aware Latent Space Autoencoder (SALSA) for molecular representations: a SMILES-based transformer autoencoder modified with a contrastive task aimed at learning graph-to-graph similarities between molecules. To accomplish this, we develop a novel dataset comprised of sets of structurally similar molecules and opt for a supervised contrastive loss that is able to incorporate full sets of positive samples. We evaluate semantic awareness of SALSA representations by comparing to its ablated counterparts, and show empirically that SALSA learns representations that maintain 1) structural awareness, 2) physicochemical awareness, 3) biological awareness, and 4) semantic continuity.
Due to the efficiency of integrating semantic consensus and complementary information across different views, multi-view classification methods have attracted much attention in recent years. However, multi-view data often suffers from both the miss of view features and insufficient label information, which significantly decrease the performance of traditional multi-view classification methods in practice. Learning for such simultaneous lack of feature and label is crucial but rarely studied. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel Deep Incomplete Multi-view Learning Network (DIMvLN) by incorporating graph networks and semi-supervised learning in this paper. Specifically, DIMvLN firstly designs the deep graph networks to effectively recover missing data with assigning pseudo-labels of large amounts of unlabeled instances and refine the incomplete feature information. Meanwhile, to enhance the label information, a novel pseudo-label generation strategy with the similarity constraints of unlabeled instances is proposed to exploit additional supervisory information and guide the completion module to preserve more semantic information of absent multi-view data. Besides, we design view-specific representation extractors with the autoencoder structure and contrastive loss to learn high-level semantic representations for each view, promote cross-view consistencies and augment the separability between different categories. Finally, extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our DIMvLN, attaining noteworthy performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art competitors on several public benchmark datasets. Code will be available at GitHub.
Sketch-based terrain generation seeks to create realistic landscapes for virtual environments in various applications such as computer games, animation and virtual reality. Recently, deep learning based terrain generation has emerged, notably the ones based on generative adversarial networks (GAN). However, these methods often struggle to fulfill the requirements of flexible user control and maintain generative diversity for realistic terrain. Therefore, we propose a novel diffusion-based method, namely terrain diffusion network (TDN), which actively incorporates user guidance for enhanced controllability, taking into account terrain features like rivers, ridges, basins, and peaks. Instead of adhering to a conventional monolithic denoising process, which often compromises the fidelity of terrain details or the alignment with user control, a multi-level denoising scheme is proposed to generate more realistic terrains by taking into account fine-grained details, particularly those related to climatic patterns influenced by erosion and tectonic activities. Specifically, three terrain synthesisers are designed for structural, intermediate, and fine-grained level denoising purposes, which allow each synthesiser concentrate on a distinct terrain aspect. Moreover, to maximise the efficiency of our TDN, we further introduce terrain and sketch latent spaces for the synthesizers with pre-trained terrain autoencoders. Comprehensive experiments on a new dataset constructed from NASA Topology Images clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving the state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/TDNResearch/TDN.