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Learn Dynamic-Aware State Embedding for Transfer Learningworkpreprint / 2021 / arXiv Avoid Overfitting User Specific Information in Federated Keyword Spottingworkpreprint / 2022 / arXiv Revisiting Adam for Streaming Reinforcement Learningworkpreprint / 2026 / arXiv Machine Learningtopic49008 works

preprint2021arXiv

Learn Dynamic-Aware State Embedding for Transfer Learning

Transfer reinforcement learning aims to improve the sample efficiency of solving unseen new tasks by leveraging experiences obtained from previous tasks. We consider the setting where all tasks (MDPs) share the same environment dynamic except reward function. In this setting, the MDP dynamic is a good knowledge to transfer, which can be inferred by uniformly random policy. However, trajectories generated by uniform random policy are not useful for policy improvement, which impairs the sample efficiency severely. Instead, we observe that the binary MDP dynamic can be inferred from trajectories of any policy which avoids the need of uniform random policy. As the binary MDP dynamic contains the state structure shared over all tasks we believe it is suitable to transfer. Built on this observation, we introduce a method to infer the binary MDP dynamic on-line and at the same time utilize it to guide state embedding learning, which is then transferred to new tasks. We keep state embedding learning and policy learning separately. As a result, the learned state embedding is task and policy agnostic which makes it ideal for transfer learning. In addition, to facilitate the exploration over the state space, we propose a novel intrinsic reward based on the inferred binary MDP dynamic. Our method can be used out-of-box in combination with model-free RL algorithms. We show two instances on the basis of \algo{DQN} and \algo{A2C}. Empirical results of intensive experiments show the advantage of our proposed method in various transfer learning tasks.

preprint2022arXiv

Avoid Overfitting User Specific Information in Federated Keyword Spotting

Keyword spotting (KWS) aims to discriminate a specific wake-up word from other signals precisely and efficiently for different users. Recent works utilize various deep networks to train KWS models with all users' speech data centralized without considering data privacy. Federated KWS (FedKWS) could serve as a solution without directly sharing users' data. However, the small amount of data, different user habits, and various accents could lead to fatal problems, e.g., overfitting or weight divergence. Hence, we propose several strategies to encourage the model not to overfit user-specific information in FedKWS. Specifically, we first propose an adversarial learning strategy, which updates the downloaded global model against an overfitted local model and explicitly encourages the global model to capture user-invariant information. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive local training strategy, letting clients with more training data and more uniform class distributions undertake more local update steps. Equivalently, this strategy could weaken the negative impacts of those users whose data is less qualified. Our proposed FedKWS-UI could explicitly and implicitly learn user-invariant information in FedKWS. Abundant experimental results on federated Google Speech Commands verify the effectiveness of FedKWS-UI.

preprint2026arXiv

Revisiting Adam for Streaming Reinforcement Learning

Learning from a sequence of interactions, as soon as observations are perceived and acted upon, without explicitly storing them, holds the promise of simpler, more efficient and adaptive algorithms. For over a decade, however, deep reinforcement learning walked the contrary path, augmenting agents with replay buffers or parallel sampling routines, in an effort to tame learning instability. Recently, this topic has been revisited by Elsayed et al. (2024), focusing on update computation through eligibility traces and modifications to the optimisation routine, resulting in the StreamQ algorithm. In this work we take a step back, investigating the efficacy of established updates, such as those implemented by DQN and C51 within this online setting. Not only do we find that they perform well, but through analysing how the optimisation algorithm generally, and Adam in particular, interacts with these updates, we contend that two properties are essential for robust performance: i) the derivative of the objective is to be bounded and ii) weight updates are variance-adjusted. Rigorous and exhaustive experimentation demonstrates that C51, which exhibits both characteristics, is competitive with StreamQ across a subset of 55 Atari games. Using these insights, we derive a variance-adjusted algorithm based on eligibility traces, termed Adaptive Q$(λ)$, which approaches double the human baseline on the same subset, surpassing existing methods by all performance metrics.

preprint2026arXiv

A Proof-of-Concept Simulation-Driven Digital Twin Framework for Decision-Aware Diabetes Modeling

This paper presents a proof-of-concept digital twin framework for simulation-driven diabetes modeling using benchmark clinical data, synthetic temporal augmentation, and illustrative continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) analysis. Unlike traditional predictive models, the framework focuses on generating interpretable simulated trajectories rather than clinically validated outcomes. Evaluation is conducted using a public dataset combined with controlled synthetic scenarios to illustrate temporal behavior and intervention effects. Results illustrate the feasibility of integrating prediction with counterfactual simulation for decision-aware analysis. This work does not claim clinical readiness but provides a foundation for future research on simulation-driven digital twin systems in healthcare.

preprint2015arXiv

Fast Mixing for Discrete Point Processes

We investigate the systematic mechanism for designing fast mixing Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms to sample from discrete point processes under the Dobrushin uniqueness condition for Gibbs measures. Discrete point processes are defined as probability distributions $μ(S)\propto \exp(βf(S))$ over all subsets $S\in 2^V$ of a finite set $V$ through a bounded set function $f:2^V\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ and a parameter $β>0$. A subclass of discrete point processes characterized by submodular functions (which include log-submodular distributions, submodular point processes, and determinantal point processes) has recently gained a lot of interest in machine learning and shown to be effective for modeling diversity and coverage. We show that if the set function (not necessarily submodular) displays a natural notion of decay of correlation, then, for $β$ small enough, it is possible to design fast mixing Markov chain Monte Carlo methods that yield error bounds on marginal approximations that do not depend on the size of the set $V$. The sufficient conditions that we derive involve a control on the (discrete) Hessian of set functions, a quantity that has not been previously considered in t

preprint2023arXiv

Multi-spatial Multi-temporal Air Quality Forecasting with Integrated Monitoring and Reanalysis Data

Accurate air quality forecasting is crucial for public health, environmental monitoring and protection, and urban planning. However, existing methods fail to effectively utilize multi-scale information, both spatially and temporally. Spatially, there is a lack of integration between individual monitoring stations and city-wide scales. Temporally, the periodic nature of air quality variations is often overlooked or inadequately considered. To address these limitations, we present a novel Multi-spatial Multi-temporal air quality forecasting method based on Graph Convolutional Networks and Gated Recurrent Units (M2G2), bridging the gap in air quality forecasting across spatial and temporal scales. The proposed framework consists of two modules: Multi-scale Spatial GCN (MS-GCN) for spatial information fusion and Multi-scale Temporal GRU(MT-GRU) for temporal information integration. In the spatial dimension, the MS-GCN module employs a bidirectional learnable structure and a residual structure, enabling comprehensive information exchange between individual monitoring stations and the city-scale graph. Regarding the temporal dimension, the MT-GRU module adaptively combines information from different temporal scales through parallel hidden states. Leveraging meteorological indicators and four air quality indicators, we present comprehensive comparative analyses and ablation experiments, showcasing the higher accuracy of M2G2 in comparison to nine currently available advanced approaches across all aspects. The improvements of M2G2 over the second-best method on RMSE of the 24h/48h/72h are as follows: PM2.5: (7.72%, 6.67%, 10.45%); PM10: (6.43%, 5.68%, 7.73%); NO2: (5.07%, 7.76%, 16.60%); O3: (6.46%, 6.86%, 9.79%). Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of each module of M2G2 by ablation study.

preprint2023arXiv

UMIX: Improving Importance Weighting for Subpopulation Shift via Uncertainty-Aware Mixup

Subpopulation shift widely exists in many real-world machine learning applications, referring to the training and test distributions containing the same subpopulation groups but varying in subpopulation frequencies. Importance reweighting is a normal way to handle the subpopulation shift issue by imposing constant or adaptive sampling weights on each sample in the training dataset. However, some recent studies have recognized that most of these approaches fail to improve the performance over empirical risk minimization especially when applied to over-parameterized neural networks. In this work, we propose a simple yet practical framework, called uncertainty-aware mixup (UMIX), to mitigate the overfitting issue in over-parameterized models by reweighting the ''mixed'' samples according to the sample uncertainty. The training-trajectories-based uncertainty estimation is equipped in the proposed UMIX for each sample to flexibly characterize the subpopulation distribution. We also provide insightful theoretical analysis to verify that UMIX achieves better generalization bounds over prior works. Further, we conduct extensive empirical studies across a wide range of tasks to validate the effectiveness of our method both qualitatively and quantitatively. Code is available at https://github.com/TencentAILabHealthcare/UMIX.

preprint2015arXiv

Algorithms for Differentially Private Multi-Armed Bandits

We present differentially private algorithms for the stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem. This is a problem for applications such as adaptive clinical trials, experiment design, and user-targeted advertising where private information is connected to individual rewards. Our major contribution is to show that there exist $(ε, δ)$ differentially private variants of Upper Confidence Bound algorithms which have optimal regret, $O(ε^{-1} + \log T)$. This is a significant improvement over previous results, which only achieve poly-log regret $O(ε^{-2} \log^{2} T)$, because of our use of a novel interval-based mechanism. We also substantially improve the bounds of previous family of algorithms which use a continual release mechanism. Experiments clearly validate our theoretical bounds.

preprint2022arXiv

Robustness to Label Noise Depends on the Shape of the Noise Distribution in Feature Space

Machine learning classifiers have been demonstrated, both empirically and theoretically, to be robust to label noise under certain conditions -- notably the typical assumption is that label noise is independent of the features given the class label. We provide a theoretical framework that generalizes beyond this typical assumption by modeling label noise as a distribution over feature space. We show that both the scale and the shape of the noise distribution influence the posterior likelihood; and the shape of the noise distribution has a stronger impact on classification performance if the noise is concentrated in feature space where the decision boundary can be moved. For the special case of uniform label noise (independent of features and the class label), we show that the Bayes optimal classifier for $c$ classes is robust to label noise until the ratio of noisy samples goes above $\frac{c-1}{c}$ (e.g. 90% for 10 classes), which we call the tipping point. However, for the special case of class-dependent label noise (independent of features given the class label), the tipping point can be as low as 50%. Most importantly, we show that when the noise distribution targets decision boundaries (label noise is directly dependent on feature space), classification robustness can drop off even at a small scale of noise. Even when evaluating recent label-noise mitigation methods we see reduced accuracy when label noise is dependent on features. These findings explain why machine learning often handles label noise well if the noise distribution is uniform in feature-space; yet it also points to the difficulty of overcoming label noise when it is concentrated in a region of feature space where a decision boundary can move.

preprint2026arXiv

Quotient-Categorical Representations for Bellman-Compatible Average-Reward Distributional Reinforcement Learning

Average-reward reinforcement learning requires estimating the gain and the bias, which is defined only up to an additive constant. This makes direct distributional analogues ill-posed on the real line. We introduce a quotient-space formulation in which state-indexed bias laws are identified up to a common translation, together with a categorical parameterization that respects this symmetry. On this quotient-categorical space, we define a projected average-reward distributional operator and show that it is well-defined, non-expansive in a coordinate Cramér metric, and admits fixed points. We then study sampled recursions whose mean-field maps are asynchronous relaxations of this operator. In an idealized centered-reward setting, a one-state temporal-difference update enjoys almost sure convergence together with finite-iteration residual bounds under both i.i.d. and Markovian sampling. When the gain is unknown, we augment the recursion with an online gain estimator, and prove non-expansiveness and Markovian convergence of the resulting coupled scheme. Finally, we show that synchronous exact updates are gain-independent at the quotient-law level, isolating a structural contrast between ideal quotient distributions and practical fixed-grid categorical representations.

preprint2022arXiv

Federated Random Reshuffling with Compression and Variance Reduction

Random Reshuffling (RR), which is a variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) employing sampling without replacement, is an immensely popular method for training supervised machine learning models via empirical risk minimization. Due to its superior practical performance, it is embedded and often set as default in standard machine learning software. Under the name FedRR, this method was recently shown to be applicable to federated learning (Mishchenko et al.,2021), with superior performance when compared to common baselines such as Local SGD. Inspired by this development, we design three new algorithms to improve FedRR further: compressed FedRR and two variance reduced extensions: one for taming the variance coming from shuffling and the other for taming the variance due to compression. The variance reduction mechanism for compression allows us to eliminate dependence on the compression parameter, and applying additional controlled linear perturbations for Random Reshuffling, introduced by Malinovsky et al.(2021) helps to eliminate variance at the optimum. We provide the first analysis of compressed local methods under standard assumptions without bounded gradient assumptions and for heterogeneous data, overcoming the limitations of the compression operator. We corroborate our theoretical results with experiments on synthetic and real data sets.

preprint2026arXiv

Do Fair Models Reason Fairly? Counterfactual Explanation Consistency for Procedural Fairness in Credit Decisions

Machine learning algorithms in socially sensitive domains (e.g., credit decisions) often focus on equalizing predictive outcomes. However, satisfying these metrics does not guarantee that models use the same reasoning for different groups. We show that existing outcome-fair models can still apply fundamentally different reasoning to individuals, a ``hidden procedural bias'' missed by standard fairness metrics and algorithms. We propose Counterfactual Explanation Consistency (CEC), a framework that detects and mitigates this bias by aligning feature attributions between individuals and their counterfactual counterparts. Key contributions include a nearest-neighbor counterfactual generation method, a modified baseline for integrated gradient comparisons, an individual-level procedural fairness metric, and a corresponding training loss. We introduce a taxonomy identifying ``Regime B'' (same outcome, different reasoning) as a critical blind spot. Experiments on synthetic data, German Credit, Adult Income, and HMDA mortgage data demonstrate that outcome-fair baselines exhibit substantial hidden bias, while CEC substantially reduces it with modest utility cost.

preprint2016arXiv

Distributed Clustering of Linear Bandits in Peer to Peer Networks

We provide two distributed confidence ball algorithms for solving linear bandit problems in peer to peer networks with limited communication capabilities. For the first, we assume that all the peers are solving the same linear bandit problem, and prove that our algorithm achieves the optimal asymptotic regret rate of any centralised algorithm that can instantly communicate information between the peers. For the second, we assume that there are clusters of peers solving the same bandit problem within each cluster, and we prove that our algorithm discovers these clusters, while achieving the optimal asymptotic regret rate within each one. Through experiments on several real-world datasets, we demonstrate the performance of proposed algorithms compared to the state-of-the-art.

preprint2020arXiv

Leave-one-out Approach for Matrix Completion: Primal and Dual Analysis

In this paper, we introduce a powerful technique based on Leave-one-out analysis to the study of low-rank matrix completion problems. Using this technique, we develop a general approach for obtaining fine-grained, entrywise bounds for iterative stochastic procedures in the presence of probabilistic dependency. We demonstrate the power of this approach in analyzing two of the most important algorithms for matrix completion: (i) the non-convex approach based on Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) for a rank-constrained formulation, also known as the Singular Value Projection algorithm, and (ii) the convex relaxation approach based on nuclear norm minimization (NNM). Using this approach, we establish the first convergence guarantee for the original form of PGD without regularization or sample splitting}, and in particular shows that it converges linearly in the infinity norm. For NNM, we use this approach to study a fictitious iterative procedure that arises in the dual analysis. Our results show that \NNM recovers an $ d $-by-$ d $ rank-$ r $ matrix with $\mathcal{O}(μr \log(μr) d \log d )$ observed entries. This bound has optimal dependence on the matrix dimension and is independent of

preprint2020arXiv

Tricking Adversarial Attacks To Fail

Recent adversarial defense approaches have failed. Untargeted gradient-based attacks cause classifiers to choose any wrong class. Our novel white-box defense tricks untargeted attacks into becoming attacks targeted at designated target classes. From these target classes, we can derive the real classes. Our Target Training defense tricks the minimization at the core of untargeted, gradient-based adversarial attacks: minimize the sum of (1) perturbation and (2) classifier adversarial loss. Target Training changes the classifier minimally, and trains it with additional duplicated points (at 0 distance) labeled with designated classes. These differently-labeled duplicated samples minimize both terms (1) and (2) of the minimization, steering attack convergence to samples of designated classes, from which correct classification is derived. Importantly, Target Training eliminates the need to know the attack and the overhead of generating adversarial samples of attacks that minimize perturbations. We obtain an 86.2% accuracy for CW-L2 (confidence=0) in CIFAR10, exceeding even unsecured classifier accuracy on non-adversarial samples. Target Training presents a fundamental change in adversar

preprint2022arXiv

A Theoretical Analysis on Feature Learning in Neural Networks: Emergence from Inputs and Advantage over Fixed Features

An important characteristic of neural networks is their ability to learn representations of the input data with effective features for prediction, which is believed to be a key factor to their superior empirical performance. To better understand the source and benefit of feature learning in neural networks, we consider learning problems motivated by practical data, where the labels are determined by a set of class relevant patterns and the inputs are generated from these along with some background patterns. We prove that neural networks trained by gradient descent can succeed on these problems. The success relies on the emergence and improvement of effective features, which are learned among exponentially many candidates efficiently by exploiting the data (in particular, the structure of the input distribution). In contrast, no linear models on data-independent features of polynomial sizes can learn to as good errors. Furthermore, if the specific input structure is removed, then no polynomial algorithm in the Statistical Query model can learn even weakly. These results provide theoretical evidence showing that feature learning in neural networks depends strongly on the input structure and leads to the superior performance. Our preliminary experimental results on synthetic and real data also provide positive support.

preprint2016arXiv

Stochastic Gradient MCMC with Stale Gradients

Stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) has played an important role in large-scale Bayesian learning, with well-developed theoretical convergence properties. In such applications of SG-MCMC, it is becoming increasingly popular to employ distributed systems, where stochastic gradients are computed based on some outdated parameters, yielding what are termed stale gradients. While stale gradients could be directly used in SG-MCMC, their impact on convergence properties has not been well studied. In this paper we develop theory to show that while the bias and MSE of an SG-MCMC algorithm depend on the staleness of stochastic gradients, its estimation variance (relative to the expected estimate, based on a prescribed number of samples) is independent of it. In a simple Bayesian distributed system with SG-MCMC, where stale gradients are computed asynchronously by a set of workers, our theory indicates a linear speedup on the decrease of estimation variance w.r.t. the number of workers. Experiments on synthetic data and deep neural networks validate our theory, demonstrating the effectiveness and scalability of SG-MCMC with stale gradients.

preprint2016arXiv

Deep Extreme Feature Extraction: New MVA Method for Searching Particles in High Energy Physics

In this paper, we present Deep Extreme Feature Extraction (DEFE), a new ensemble MVA method for searching $τ^{+}τ^{-}$ channel of Higgs bosons in high energy physics. DEFE can be viewed as a deep ensemble learning scheme that trains a strongly diverse set of neural feature learners without explicitly encouraging diversity and penalizing correlations. This is achieved by adopting an implicit neural controller (not involved in feedforward compuation) that directly controls and distributes gradient flows from higher level deep prediction network. Such model-independent controller results in that every single local feature learned are used in the feature-to-output mapping stage, avoiding the blind averaging of features. DEFE makes the ensembles 'deep' in the sense that it allows deep post-process of these features that tries to learn to select and abstract the ensemble of neural feature learners. With the application of this model, a selection regions full of signal process can be obtained through the training of a miniature collision events set. In comparison of the Classic Deep Neural Network, DEFE shows a state-of-the-art performance: the error rate has decreased by about 37

preprint2011arXiv

Attacking and Defending Covert Channels and Behavioral Models

In this paper we present methods for attacking and defending $k$-gram statistical analysis techniques that are used, for example, in network traffic analysis and covert channel detection. The main new result is our demonstration of how to use a behavior's or process' $k$-order statistics to build a stochastic process that has those same $k$-order stationary statistics but possesses different, deliberately designed, $(k+1)$-order statistics if desired. Such a model realizes a "complexification" of the process or behavior which a defender can use to monitor whether an attacker is shaping the behavior. By deliberately introducing designed $(k+1)$-order behaviors, the defender can check to see if those behaviors are present in the data. We also develop constructs for source codes that respect the $k$-order statistics of a process while encoding covert information. One fundamental consequence of these results is that certain types of behavior analyses techniques come down to an {\em arms race} in the sense that the advantage goes to the party that has more computing resources applied to the problem.

preprint2015arXiv

Supervised Learning for Dynamical System Learning

Recently there has been substantial interest in spectral methods for learning dynamical systems. These methods are popular since they often offer a good tradeoff between computational and statistical efficiency. Unfortunately, they can be difficult to use and extend in practice: e.g., they can make it difficult to incorporate prior information such as sparsity or structure. To address this problem, we present a new view of dynamical system learning: we show how to learn dynamical systems by solving a sequence of ordinary supervised learning problems, thereby allowing users to incorporate prior knowledge via standard techniques such as L1 regularization. Many existing spectral methods are special cases of this new framework, using linear regression as the supervised learner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by showing examples where nonlinear regression or lasso let us learn better state representations than plain linear regression does; the correctness of these instances follows directly from our general analysis.

preprint2016arXiv

Localized Multiple Kernel Learning---A Convex Approach

We propose a localized approach to multiple kernel learning that can be formulated as a convex optimization problem over a given cluster structure. For which we obtain generalization error guarantees and derive an optimization algorithm based on the Fenchel dual representation. Experiments on real-world datasets from the application domains of computational biology and computer vision show that convex localized multiple kernel learning can achieve higher prediction accuracies than its global and non-convex local counterparts.

preprint2020arXiv

FedGAN: Federated Generative Adversarial Networks for Distributed Data

We propose Federated Generative Adversarial Network (FedGAN) for training a GAN across distributed sources of non-independent-and-identically-distributed data sources subject to communication and privacy constraints. Our algorithm uses local generators and discriminators which are periodically synced via an intermediary that averages and broadcasts the generator and discriminator parameters. We theoretically prove the convergence of FedGAN with both equal and two time-scale updates of generator and discriminator, under standard assumptions, using stochastic approximations and communication efficient stochastic gradient descents. We experiment FedGAN on toy examples (2D system, mixed Gaussian, and Swiss role), image datasets (MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CelebA), and time series datasets (household electricity consumption and electric vehicle charging sessions). We show FedGAN converges and has similar performance to general distributed GAN, while reduces communication complexity. We also show its robustness to reduced communications.

preprint2023arXiv

DIAMOND: Taming Sample and Communication Complexities in Decentralized Bilevel Optimization

Decentralized bilevel optimization has received increasing attention recently due to its foundational role in many emerging multi-agent learning paradigms (e.g., multi-agent meta-learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning) over peer-to-peer edge networks. However, to work with the limited computation and communication capabilities of edge networks, a major challenge in developing decentralized bilevel optimization techniques is to lower sample and communication complexities. This motivates us to develop a new decentralized bilevel optimization called DIAMOND (decentralized single-timescale stochastic approximation with momentum and gradient-tracking). The contributions of this paper are as follows: i) our DIAMOND algorithm adopts a single-loop structure rather than following the natural double-loop structure of bilevel optimization, which offers low computation and implementation complexity; ii) compared to existing approaches, the DIAMOND algorithm does not require any full gradient evaluations, which further reduces both sample and computational complexities; iii) through a careful integration of momentum information and gradient tracking techniques, we show that the DIAMOND algorithm enjoys $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-3/2})$ in sample and communication complexities for achieving an $ε$-stationary solution, both of which are independent of the dataset sizes and significantly outperform existing works. Extensive experiments also verify our theoretical findings.

preprint2013arXiv

On Sampling from the Gibbs Distribution with Random Maximum A-Posteriori Perturbations

In this paper we describe how MAP inference can be used to sample efficiently from Gibbs distributions. Specifically, we provide means for drawing either approximate or unbiased samples from Gibbs' distributions by introducing low dimensional perturbations and solving the corresponding MAP assignments. Our approach also leads to new ways to derive lower bounds on partition functions. We demonstrate empirically that our method excels in the typical "high signal - high coupling" regime. The setting results in ragged energy landscapes that are challenging for alternative approaches to sampling and/or lower bounds.

preprint2022arXiv

The "Collections as ML Data" Checklist for Machine Learning & Cultural Heritage

Within the cultural heritage sector, there has been a growing and concerted effort to consider a critical sociotechnical lens when applying machine learning techniques to digital collections. Though the cultural heritage community has collectively developed an emerging body of work detailing responsible operations for machine learning in libraries and other cultural heritage institutions at the organizational level, there remains a paucity of guidelines created specifically for practitioners embarking on machine learning projects. The manifold stakes and sensitivities involved in applying machine learning to cultural heritage underscore the importance of developing such guidelines. This paper contributes to this need by formulating a detailed checklist with guiding questions and practices that can be employed while developing a machine learning project that utilizes cultural heritage data. I call the resulting checklist the "Collections as ML Data" checklist, which, when completed, can be published with the deliverables of the project. By surveying existing projects, including my own project, Newspaper Navigator, I justify the "Collections as ML Data" checklist and demonstrate how the formulated guiding questions can be employed and operationalized.

preprint2014arXiv

Towards Using Unlabeled Data in a Sparse-coding Framework for Human Activity Recognition

We propose a sparse-coding framework for activity recognition in ubiquitous and mobile computing that alleviates two fundamental problems of current supervised learning approaches. (i) It automatically derives a compact, sparse and meaningful feature representation of sensor data that does not rely on prior expert knowledge and generalizes extremely well across domain boundaries. (ii) It exploits unlabeled sample data for bootstrapping effective activity recognizers, i.e., substantially reduces the amount of ground truth annotation required for model estimation. Such unlabeled data is trivial to obtain, e.g., through contemporary smartphones carried by users as they go about their everyday activities. Based on the self-taught learning paradigm we automatically derive an over-complete set of basis vectors from unlabeled data that captures inherent patterns present within activity data. Through projecting raw sensor data onto the feature space defined by such over-complete sets of basis vectors effective feature extraction is pursued. Given these learned feature representations, classification backends are then trained using small amounts of labeled training data. We study the new ap

preprint2022arXiv

Mask CycleGAN: Unpaired Multi-modal Domain Translation with Interpretable Latent Variable

We propose Mask CycleGAN, a novel architecture for unpaired image domain translation built based on CycleGAN, with an aim to address two issues: 1) unimodality in image translation and 2) lack of interpretability of latent variables. Our innovation in the technical approach is comprised of three key components: masking scheme, generator and objective. Experimental results demonstrate that this architecture is capable of bringing variations to generated images in a controllable manner and is reasonably robust to different masks.

preprint2021arXiv

Label Smoothed Embedding Hypothesis for Out-of-Distribution Detection

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) examples is critical in many applications. We propose an unsupervised method to detect OOD samples using a $k$-NN density estimate with respect to a classification model's intermediate activations on in-distribution samples. We leverage a recent insight about label smoothing, which we call the \emph{Label Smoothed Embedding Hypothesis}, and show that one of the implications is that the $k$-NN density estimator performs better as an OOD detection method both theoretically and empirically when the model is trained with label smoothing. Finally, we show that our proposal outperforms many OOD baselines and also provide new finite-sample high-probability statistical results for $k$-NN density estimation's ability to detect OOD examples.

preprint2022arXiv

Active Learning for Domain Adaptation: An Energy-Based Approach

Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit \textit{free energy biases} when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of target data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at https://github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.

preprint2014arXiv

Online Stochastic Optimization under Correlated Bandit Feedback

In this paper we consider the problem of online stochastic optimization of a locally smooth function under bandit feedback. We introduce the high-confidence tree (HCT) algorithm, a novel any-time $\mathcal{X}$-armed bandit algorithm, and derive regret bounds matching the performance of existing state-of-the-art in terms of dependency on number of steps and smoothness factor. The main advantage of HCT is that it handles the challenging case of correlated rewards, whereas existing methods require that the reward-generating process of each arm is an identically and independent distributed (iid) random process. HCT also improves on the state-of-the-art in terms of its memory requirement as well as requiring a weaker smoothness assumption on the mean-reward function in compare to the previous anytime algorithms. Finally, we discuss how HCT can be applied to the problem of policy search in reinforcement learning and we report preliminary empirical results.

preprint2022arXiv

Lazy Lagrangians with Predictions for Online Learning

We consider the general problem of online convex optimization with time-varying additive constraints in the presence of predictions for the next cost and constraint functions. A novel primal-dual algorithm is designed by combining a Follow-The-Regularized-Leader iteration with prediction-adaptive dynamic steps. The algorithm achieves $\mathcal O(T^{\frac{3-β}{4}})$ regret and $\mathcal O(T^{\frac{1+β}{2}})$ constraint violation bounds that are tunable via parameter $β\!\in\![1/2,1)$ and have constant factors that shrink with the predictions quality, achieving eventually $\mathcal O(1)$ regret for perfect predictions. Our work extends the FTRL framework for this constrained OCO setting and outperforms the respective state-of-the-art greedy-based solutions, without imposing conditions on the quality of predictions, the cost functions or the geometry of constraints, beyond convexity.

preprint2020arXiv

Estimating Stochastic Poisson Intensities Using Deep Latent Models

We present methodology for estimating the stochastic intensity of a doubly stochastic Poisson process. Statistical and theoretical analyses of traffic traces show that these processes are appropriate models of high intensity traffic arriving at an array of service systems. The statistical estimation of the underlying latent stochastic intensity process driving the traffic model involves a rather complicated nonlinear filtering problem. We develop a novel simulation methodology, using deep neural networks to approximate the path measures induced by the stochastic intensity process, for solving this nonlinear filtering problem. Our simulation studies demonstrate that the method is quite accurate on both in-sample estimation and on an out-of-sample performance prediction task for an infinite server queue.