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Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Online Learning, Active Learning and Bandits

Volkan Cevher, Ashok Cutkosky, Ali Kavis, Georgios Piliouras, Stratis Skoulakis, Luca Viano

Motivated by alternating game-play in two-player games, we study an altenating variant of the \textit{Online Linear Optimization} (OLO). In alternating OLO, a \textit{learner} at each round $t \in [n]$ selects a vector $x^t$ and then an \textit{adversary} selects a cost-vector $c^t \in [-1,1]^n$. The learner then experiences cost $(c^t + c^{t-1})^\top x^t$ instead of $(c^t)^\top x^t$ as in standard OLO. We establish that under this small twist, the $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ lower bound on the regret is no longer valid. More precisely, we present two online learning algorithms for alternating OLO that respectively admit $\mathcal{O}((\log n)^{4/3} T^{1/3})$ regret for the $n$-dimensional simplex and $\mathcal{O}(\rho \log T)$ regret for the ball of radius $\rho>0$. Our results imply that in alternating game-play, an agent can always guarantee $\mathcal{\tilde{O}}((\log n)^{4/3} T^{1/3})$ regardless the strategies of the other agent while the regret bound improves to $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ in case the agent admits only two actions.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Kun Song, Huimin Ma, Bochao Zou, Huishuai Zhang, Weiran Huang

Due to the limited availability of data, existing few-shot learning methods trained from scratch fail to achieve satisfactory performance. In contrast, large-scale pre-trained models such as CLIP demonstrate remarkable few-shot and zero-shot capabilities. To enhance the performance of pre-trained models for downstream tasks, fine-tuning the model on downstream data is frequently necessary. However, fine-tuning the pre-trained model leads to a decrease in its generalizability in the presence of distribution shift, while the limited number of samples in few-shot learning makes the model highly susceptible to overfitting. Consequently, existing methods for fine-tuning few-shot learning primarily focus on fine-tuning the model's classification head or introducing additional structure. In this paper, we introduce a fine-tuning approach termed Feature Discrimination Alignment (FD-Align). Our method aims to bolster the model's generalizability by preserving the consistency of spurious features across the fine-tuning process. Extensive experimental results validate the efficacy of our approach for both ID and OOD tasks. Once fine-tuned, the model can seamlessly integrate with existing methods, leading to performance improvements. Our code can be found in https://github.com/skingorz/FD-Align.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Representation Learning

Aleksandar Stanić, Anand Gopalakrishnan, Kazuki Irie, Jürgen Schmidhuber

Current state-of-the-art object-centric models use slots and attention-based routing for binding. However, this class of models has several conceptual limitations: the number of slots is hardwired; all slots have equal capacity; training has high computational cost; there are no object-level relational factors within slots. Synchrony-based models in principle can address these limitations by using complex-valued activations which store binding information in their phase components. However, working examples of such synchrony-based models have been developed only very recently, and are still limited to toy grayscale datasets and simultaneous storage of less than three objects in practice. Here we introduce architectural modifications and a novel contrastive learning method that greatly improve the state-of-the-art synchrony-based model. For the first time, we obtain a class of synchrony-based models capable of discovering objects in an unsupervised manner in multi-object color datasets and simultaneously representing more than three objects.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/General Machine Learning Techniques

Weiduo Liao, Ying Wei, Mingchen Jiang, Qingfu Zhang, Hisao Ishibuchi

Compositionality facilitates the comprehension of novel objects using acquired concepts and the maintenance of a knowledge pool. This is particularly crucial for continual learners to prevent catastrophic forgetting and enable compositionally forward transfer of knowledge. However, the existing state-of-the-art benchmarks inadequately evaluate the capability of compositional generalization, leaving an intriguing question unanswered. To comprehensively assess this capability, we introduce two vision benchmarks, namely Compositional GQA (CGQA) and Compositional OBJects365 (COBJ), along with a novel evaluation framework called Compositional Few-Shot Testing (CFST). These benchmarks evaluate the systematicity, productivity, and substitutivity aspects of compositional generalization. Experimental results on five baselines and two modularity-based methods demonstrate that current continual learning techniques do exhibit somewhat favorable compositionality in their learned feature extractors. Nonetheless, further efforts are required in developing modularity-based approaches to enhance compositional generalization. We anticipate that our proposed benchmarks and evaluation protocol will foster research on continual learning and compositionality.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Representation Learning

Xueyuan Lin, Haihong E, Chengjin Xu, Gengxian Zhou, Haoran Luo, Tianyi Hu, Fenglong Su, Ningyuan Li, Mingzhi Sun

Multi-hop logical reasoning over knowledge graph plays a fundamental role in many artificial intelligence tasks. Recent complex query embedding methods for reasoning focus on static KGs, while temporal knowledge graphs have not been fully explored. Reasoning over TKGs has two challenges: 1. The query should answer entities or timestamps; 2. The operators should consider both set logic on entity set and temporal logic on timestamp set.To bridge this gap, we introduce the multi-hop logical reasoning problem on TKGs and then propose the first temporal complex query embedding named Temporal Feature-Logic Embedding framework (TFLEX) to answer the temporal complex queries. Specifically, we utilize fuzzy logic to compute the logic part of the Temporal Feature-Logic embedding, thus naturally modeling all first-order logic operations on the entity set. In addition, we further extend fuzzy logic on timestamp set to cope with three extra temporal operators (**After**, **Before** and **Between**).Experiments on numerous query patterns demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Sequential, Network, and Time Series Modeling

Xin Liu, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Jingfeng Yang, Tianyu Cao, Zhengyang Wang, Bing Yin, Yangqiu Song

The goal of session-based recommendation in E-commerce is to predict the next item that an anonymous user will purchase based on the browsing and purchase history. However, constructing global or local transition graphs to supplement session data can lead to noisy correlations and user intent vanishing. In this work, we propose the Frequent Attribute Pattern Augmented Transformer (FAPAT) that characterizes user intents by building attribute transition graphs and matching attribute patterns. Specifically, the frequent and compact attribute patterns are served as memory to augment session representations, followed by a gate and a transformer block to fuse the whole session information. Through extensive experiments on two public benchmarks and 100 million industrial data in three domains, we demonstrate that FAPAT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods by an average of 4.5% across various evaluation metrics (Hits, NDCG, MRR). Besides evaluating the next-item prediction, we estimate the models' capabilities to capture user intents via predicting items' attributes and period-item recommendations.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Haoqing Wang, Shibo Jie, Zhihong Deng

Since many pre-trained vision transformers emerge and provide strong representation for various downstream tasks, we aim to adapt them to few-shot image classification tasks in this work. The input images typically contain multiple entities. The model may not focus on the class-related entities for the current few-shot task, even with fine-tuning on support samples, and the noise information from the class-independent ones harms performance. To this end, we first propose a method that uses the attention and gradient information to automatically locate the positions of key entities, denoted as position prompts, in the support images. Then we employ the cross-entropy loss between their many-hot presentation and the attention logits to optimize the model to focus its attention on the key entities during fine-tuning. This ability then can generalize to the query samples. Our method is applicable to different vision transformers (e.g., columnar or pyramidal ones), and also to different pre-training ways (e.g., single-modal or vision-language pre-training). Extensive experiments show that our method can improve the performance of full or parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods on few-shot tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Haoqing-Wang/FORT.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Representation Learning

Michael Kirchhof, Bálint Mucsányi, Seong Joon Oh, Dr. Enkelejda Kasneci

Representation learning has significantly driven the field to develop pretrained models that can act as a valuable starting point when transferring to new datasets. With the rising demand for reliable machine learning and uncertainty quantification, there is a need for pretrained models that not only provide embeddings but also transferable uncertainty estimates. To guide the development of such models, we propose the Uncertainty-aware Representation Learning (URL) benchmark. Besides the transferability of the representations, it also measures the zero-shot transferability of the uncertainty estimate using a novel metric. We apply URL to evaluate ten uncertainty quantifiers that are pretrained on ImageNet and transferred to eight downstream datasets. We find that approaches that focus on the uncertainty of the representation itself or estimate the prediction risk directly outperform those that are based on the probabilities of upstream classes. Yet, achieving transferable uncertainty quantification remains an open challenge. Our findings indicate that it is not necessarily in conflict with traditional representation learning goals. Code is available at [https://github.com/mkirchhof/url](https://github.com/mkirchhof/url).

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Alex Fang, Simon Kornblith, Ludwig Schmidt

Does progress on ImageNet transfer to real-world datasets? We investigate this question by evaluating ImageNet pre-trained models with varying accuracy (57% - 83%) on six practical image classification datasets. In particular, we study datasets collected with the goal of solving real-world tasks (e.g., classifying images from camera traps or satellites), as opposed to web-scraped benchmarks collected for comparing models. On multiple datasets, models with higher ImageNet accuracy do not consistently yield performance improvements. For certain tasks, interventions such as data augmentation improve performance even when architectures do not. We hope that future benchmarks will include more diverse datasets to encourage a more comprehensive approach to improving learning algorithms.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Supervised Learning

Jacob Zavatone-Veth, Cengiz Pehlevan

In recent years, significant attention in deep learning theory has been devoted to analyzing when models that interpolate their training data can still generalize well to unseen examples. Many insights have been gained from studying models with multiple layers of Gaussian random features, for which one can compute precise generalization asymptotics. However, few works have considered the effect of weight anisotropy; most assume that the random features are generated using independent and identically distributed Gaussian weights, and allow only for structure in the input data. Here, we use the replica trick from statistical physics to derive learning curves for models with many layers of structured Gaussian features. We show that allowing correlations between the rows of the first layer of features can aid generalization, while structure in later layers is generally detrimental. Our results shed light on how weight structure affects generalization in a simple class of solvable models.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/General Machine Learning Techniques

Mononito Goswami, Vedant Sanil, Arjun Choudhry, Arvind Srinivasan, Chalisa Udompanyawit, Artur Dubrawski

Machine learning (ML) models are only as good as the data they are trained on. But recent studies have found datasets widely used to train and evaluate ML models, e.g. _ImageNet_, to have pervasive labeling errors. Erroneous labels on the train set hurt ML models' ability to generalize, and they impact evaluation and model selection using the test set. Consequently, learning in the presence of labeling errors is an active area of research, yet this field lacks a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate these methods. Most of these methods are evaluated on a few computer vision datasets with significant variance in the experimental protocols. With such a large pool of methods and inconsistent evaluation, it is also unclear how ML practitioners can choose the right models to assess label quality in their data. To this end, we propose a benchmarking environment _AQuA_ to rigorously evaluate methods that enable machine learning in the presence of label noise. We also introduce a design space to delineate concrete design choices of label error detection models. We hope that our proposed design space and benchmark enable practitioners to choose the right tools to improve their label quality and that our benchmark enables objective and rigorous evaluation of machine learning tools facing mislabeled data.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Kernel methods

Alexandre Capone, Sandra Hirche, Geoff Pleiss

While Gaussian processes are a mainstay for various engineering and scientific applications, the uncertainty estimates don't satisfy frequentist guarantees and can be miscalibrated in practice. State-of-the-art approaches for designing calibrated models rely on inflating the Gaussian process posterior variance, which yields confidence intervals that are potentially too coarse. To remedy this, we present a calibration approach that generates predictive quantiles using a computation inspired by the vanilla Gaussian process posterior variance but using a different set of hyperparameters chosen to satisfy an empirical calibration constraint. This results in a calibration approach that is considerably more flexible than existing approaches, which we optimize to yield tight predictive quantiles. Our approach is shown to yield a calibrated model under reasonable assumptions. Furthermore, it outperforms existing approaches in sharpness when employed for calibrated regression.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Kernel methods

Clement Benard, Brian Staber, Sébastien Da Veiga

Stein thinning is a promising algorithm proposed by (Riabiz et al., 2022) for post-processing outputs of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). The main principle is to greedily minimize the kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD), which only requires the gradient of the log-target distribution, and is thus well-suited for Bayesian inference. The main advantages of Stein thinning are the automatic remove of the burn-in period, the correction of the bias introduced by recent MCMC algorithms, and the asymptotic properties of convergence towards the target distribution. Nevertheless, Stein thinning suffers from several empirical pathologies, which may result in poor approximations, as observed in the literature. In this article, we conduct a theoretical analysis of these pathologies, to clearly identify the mechanisms at stake, and suggest improved strategies. Then, we introduce the regularized Stein thinning algorithm to alleviate the identified pathologies. Finally, theoretical guarantees and extensive experiments show the high efficiency of the proposed algorithm. An implementation of regularized Stein thinning as the kernax library in python and JAX is available at https://gitlab.com/drti/kernax.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Representation Learning

Hugues Van Assel, Titouan Vayer, Rémi Flamary, Nicolas Courty

Many approaches in machine learning rely on a weighted graph to encode thesimilarities between samples in a dataset. Entropic affinities (EAs), which are notably used in the popular Dimensionality Reduction (DR) algorithm t-SNE, are particular instances of such graphs. To ensure robustness to heterogeneous sampling densities, EAs assign a kernel bandwidth parameter to every sample in such a way that the entropy of each row in the affinity matrix is kept constant at a specific value, whose exponential is known as perplexity. EAs are inherently asymmetric and row-wise stochastic, but they are used in DR approaches after undergoing heuristic symmetrization methods that violate both the row-wise constant entropy and stochasticity properties. In this work, we uncover a novel characterization of EA as an optimal transport problem, allowing a natural symmetrization that can be computed efficiently using dual ascent. The corresponding novel affinity matrix derives advantages from symmetric doubly stochastic normalization in terms of clustering performance, while also effectively controlling the entropy of each row thus making it particularly robust to varying noise levels. Following, we present a new DR algorithm, SNEkhorn, that leverages this new affinity matrix. We show its clear superiority to state-of-the-art approaches with several indicators on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Representation Learning

Ruibin Yuan, Yinghao Ma, Yizhi Li, Ge Zhang, Xingran Chen, Hanzhi Yin, zhuo le, Yiqi Liu, Jiawen Huang, Zeyue Tian 等

In the era of extensive intersection between art and Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as image generation and fiction co-creation, AI for music remains relatively nascent, particularly in music understanding. This is evident in the limited work on deep music representations, the scarcity of large-scale datasets, and the absence of a universal and community-driven benchmark. To address this issue, we introduce the Music Audio Representation Benchmark for universaL Evaluation, termed MARBLE. It aims to provide a benchmark for various Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks by defining a comprehensive taxonomy with four hierarchy levels, including acoustic, performance, score, and high-level description. We then establish a unified protocol based on 18 tasks on 12 public-available datasets, providing a fair and standard assessment of representations of all open-sourced pre-trained models developed on music recordings as baselines. Besides, MARBLE offers an easy-to-use, extendable, and reproducible suite for the community, with a clear statement on copyright issues on datasets. Results suggest recently proposed large-scale pre-trained musical language models perform the best in most tasks, with room for further improvement. The leaderboard and toolkit repository are published to promote future music AI research.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Scalable Algorithms

Logan M Bhamidipaty, Tommy Bruzzese, Caryn Tran, Rami Ratl Mrad, Maxinder S. Kanwal

Modeling complex dynamical systems poses significant challenges, with traditional methods struggling to work on a variety of systems and scale to high-dimensional dynamics. In response, we present DynaDojo, a novel benchmarking platform designed for data-driven dynamical system identification. DynaDojo provides diagnostics on three ways an algorithm’s performance scales: across the number of training samples, the complexity of a dynamical system, and a target error to achieve. Furthermore, DynaDojo enables studying out-of-distribution generalization (by providing unique test conditions for each system) and active learning (by supporting closed-loop control). Through its user-friendly and easily extensible API, DynaDojo accommodates a wide range of user-defined \texttt{Algorithms}, \texttt{Systems}, and \texttt{Challenges} (evaluation metrics). The platform also prioritizes resource-efficient training with parallel processing strategies for running on a cluster. To showcase its utility, in DynaDojo 0.9, we include implementations of 7 baseline algorithms and 20 dynamical systems, along with several demos exhibiting insights researchers can glean using our platform. This work aspires to make DynaDojo a unifying benchmarking platform for system identification, paralleling the role of OpenAI’s Gym in reinforcement learning.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Scalable Algorithms

Yihua Zhang, Yimeng Zhang, Aochuan Chen, jinghan jia, Jiancheng Liu, Gaowen Liu, Mingyi Hong, Shiyu Chang, Sijia Liu

Massive data is often considered essential for deep learning applications, but it also incurs significant computational and infrastructural costs. Therefore, dataset pruning (DP) has emerged as an effective way to improve data efficiency by identifying and removing redundant training samples without sacrificing performance. In this work, we aim to address the problem of DP for transfer learning, i.e., how to prune a source dataset for improved pretraining efficiency and lossless finetuning accuracy on downstream target tasks. To our best knowledge, the problem of DP for transfer learning remains open, as previous studies have primarily addressed DP and transfer learning as separate problems. By contrast, we establish a unified viewpoint to integrate DP with transfer learning and find that existing DP methods are not suitable for the transfer learning paradigm. We then propose two new DP methods, label mapping and feature mapping, for supervised and self-supervised pretraining settings respectively, by revisiting the DP problem through the lens of source-target domain mapping. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on numerous transfer learning tasks. We show that source data classes can be pruned by up to $40\%\sim 80\%$ without sacrificing the downstream performance, resulting in a significant $2\sim 5\times$ speed-up during the pretraining stage. Besides, our proposal exhibits broad applicability and can improve other computationally intensive transfer learning techniques, such as adversarial pretraining.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Benedikt Blumenstiel, Johannes Jakubik, Hilde Kuehne, Michael Vössing

While semantic segmentation has seen tremendous improvements in the past, there are still significant labeling efforts necessary and the problem of limited generalization to classes that have not been present during training. To address this problem, zero-shot semantic segmentation makes use of large self-supervised vision-language models, allowing zero-shot transfer to unseen classes. In this work, we build a benchmark for Multi-domain Evaluation of Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation (MESS), which allows a holistic analysis of performance across a wide range of domain-specific datasets such as medicine, engineering, earth monitoring, biology, and agriculture. To do this, we reviewed 120 datasets, developed a taxonomy, and classified the datasets according to the developed taxonomy. We select a representative subset consisting of 22 datasets and propose it as the MESS benchmark. We evaluate eight recently published models on the proposed MESS benchmark and analyze characteristics for the performance of zero-shot transfer models. The toolkit is available at https://github.com/blumenstiel/MESS.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/Representation Learning

Yujia Zheng, Kun Zhang

Nonlinear independent component analysis (ICA) aims to uncover the true latent sources from their observable nonlinear mixtures. Despite its significance, the identifiability of nonlinear ICA is known to be impossible without additional assumptions. Recent advances have proposed conditions on the connective structure from sources to observed variables, known as Structural Sparsity, to achieve identifiability in an unsupervised manner. However, the sparsity constraint may not hold universally for all sources in practice. Furthermore, the assumptions of bijectivity of the mixing process and independence among all sources, which arise from the setting of ICA, may also be violated in many real-world scenarios. To address these limitations and generalize nonlinear ICA, we propose a set of new identifiability results in the general settings of undercompleteness, partial sparsity and source dependence, and flexible grouping structures. Specifically, we prove identifiability when there are more observed variables than sources (undercomplete), and when certain sparsity and/or source independence assumptions are not met for some changing sources. Moreover, we show that even in cases with flexible grouping structures (e.g., part of the sources can be divided into irreducible independent groups with various sizes), appropriate identifiability results can also be established. Theoretical claims are supported empirically on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning/General Machine Learning Techniques

Orr Zohar, Shih-Cheng Huang, Kuan-Chieh Wang, Serena Yeung

Pre-trained multi-modal vision-language models (VLMs) are becoming increasingly popular due to their exceptional performance on downstream vision applications, particularly in the few- and zero-shot settings. However, selecting the best-performing VLM for some downstream applications is non-trivial, as it is dataset and task-dependent. Meanwhile, the exhaustive evaluation of all available VLMs on a novel application is not only time and computationally demanding but also necessitates the collection of a labeled dataset for evaluation. As the number of open-source VLM variants increases, there is a need for an efficient model selection strategy that does not require access to a curated evaluation dataset. This paper proposes a novel task and benchmark for efficiently evaluating VLMs' zero-shot performance on downstream applications without access to the downstream task dataset. Specifically, we introduce a new task LOVM: **L**anguage-**O**nly **V**ision **M**odel Selection , where methods are expected to perform both model selection and performance prediction based solely on a text description of the desired downstream application. We then introduced an extensive LOVM benchmark consisting of ground-truth evaluations of 35 pre-trained VLMs and 23 datasets, where methods are expected to rank the pre-trained VLMs and predict their zero-shot performance.