United States

Combining the increasing availability and abundance of healthcare data and the current advances in machine learning methods have created renewed opportunities to improve clinical decision support systems. However, in healthcare risk prediction applications, the proportion of cases with the condition (label) of interest is often very low relative to the available sample size. Though very prevalent in healthcare, such imbalanced classification settings are also common and challenging in many other scenarios. So motivated, we propose a variational disentanglement approach to semi-parametrically learn from rare events in heavily imbalanced classification problems. Specifically, we leverage the imposed extreme-distribution behavior on a latent space to extract information from low-prevalence events, and develop a robust prediction arm that joins the merits of the generalized additive model and isotonic neural nets. Results on synthetic studies and diverse real-world datasets, including mortality prediction on a COVID-19 cohort, demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms existing alternatives.

AAAI 2021

Variational Disentanglement for Rare Event Modeling

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

technical paper

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

Knowledge distillation (KD) has proved to be an effective approach for deep neural network compression, which learns a compact network (student) by transferring the knowledge from a pre-trained, over-parameterized network (teacher). In traditional KD, the transferred knowledge is usually obtained by feeding training samples to the teacher network to obtain the class probabilities. However, the original training dataset is not always available due to storage costs or privacy issues. In this study, we propose a novel data-free KD approach by modeling the intermediate feature space of the teacher with a multivariate normal distribution and leveraging the soft targeted labels generated by the distribution to synthesize pseudo samples as the transfer set. Several student networks trained with these synthesized transfer sets present competitive performance compared to the networks trained with the original training set and other data-free KD approaches.

Data-Free Knowledge Distillation with Soft Targeted Transfer Set Synthesis

Adversarial attacks by generating examples which are almost indistinguishable from natural examples, pose a serious threat to learning models. Defending against adversarial attacks is a critical element for a reliable learning system. Support vector machine (SVM) is a classical yet still important learning algorithm even in the current deep learning era. Although a wide range of researches have been done in recent years to improve the adversarial robustness of learning models, but most of them are limited to deep neural networks (DNNs) and the work for kernel SVM is still vacant. In this paper, we aim at kernel SVM and propose adv-SVM to improve its adversarial robustness via adversarial training, which has been demonstrated to be the most promising defense techniques. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that devotes to the fast and scalable adversarial training of kernel SVM. Specifically, we first build connection of perturbations of samples between original and kernel spaces, and then give a reduced and equivalent formulation of adversarial training of kernel SVM based on the connection. Next, doubly stochastic gradients (DSG) based on two unbiased stochastic approximations (i.e., one is on training points and another is on random features) are applied to update the solution of our objective function. Finally, we prove that our algorithm optimized by DSG converges to the optimal solution at the rate of O(1/$t$) under the constant and diminishing stepsizes. Comprehensive experimental results show that our adversarial training algorithm enjoys robustness against various attacks and meanwhile has the similar efficiency and scalability with classical DSG algorithm.

Fast and Scalable Adversarial Training of Kernel SVM via Doubly Stochastic Gradients

Despite the recent success of deep reinforcement learning (RL), domain adaptation remains an open problem. Although the generalization ability of RL agents is critical for the real-world applicability of Deep RL, zero-shot policy transfer is still a challenging problem since even minor visual changes could make the trained agent completely fail in the new task. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage RL agent that first learns a latent unified state representation (LUSR) which is consistent across multiple domains in the first stage, and then do RL training in one source domain based on LUSR in the second stage. The cross-domain consistency of LUSR allows the policy acquired from the source domain to generalize to other target domains without extra training. We first demonstrate our approach in variants of CarRacing games with customized manipulations, and then verify it in CARLA, an autonomous driving simulator with more complex and realistic visual observations. Our results show that this approach can achieve state-of-the-art domain adaptation performance in related RL tasks and outperforms prior approaches based on latent-representation based RL and image-to-image translation.

Domain Adaptation in Reinforcement Learning via Latent Unified State Representation

Ordinal loss is widely used in solving regression problems with deep learning technologies. Its basic idea is to convert regression to classification while preserving the natural order. However, the order constraint is enforced only by ordinal label implicitly, leading to the real output values not strictly in order. It causes the network to learn separable feature rather than discriminative feature, and possibly overfit on training set. In this paper, we propose order regularization on ordinal loss, which makes the outputs in order by explicitly constraining the ordinal classifiers in order. The proposed method contains two parts, i.e. similar-weights constraint, which reduces the ineffective space between classifiers, and differential-bias constraint, which enforces the decision planes in order and enhances the discrimination power of the classifiers. Experimental results show that our proposed method boosts the performance of original ordinal loss on various regression problems such as head pose, age, and gaze estimation, with significant error reduction of around 5%. Furthermore, our method outperforms the state of the art on all these tasks, with the performance gain of 14.4%, 2.2% and 6.5% on head pose, age and gaze estimation respectively.

Order Regularization on Ordinal Loss for Head Pose, Age and Gaze Estimation

Recently, regression based conditional independence (CI) tests have been employed to solve the problem of causal discovery. These methods provide an alternative way to test for CI by transforming CI to independence between residuals. Generally, it is nontrivial to check for independence when these residuals are linearly uncorrelated. With the ability to represent high-order moments, kernel-based methods are usually used to achieve this goal, but at a cost of considerable time. In this paper, we investigate the independence between two linear combinations under linear non-Gaussian structural equation model (SEM). We show that generally the 1-st to 4-th moments of the two linear combinations contain enough information to infer whether or not they are independent. The proposed method provides a simpler but more effective way to measure CIs, with only calculating the 1-st to 4-th moments of the input variables. When applied to causal discovery, the proposed method outperforms kernel-based methods in terms of both speed and accuracy. which is validated by extensive experiments.

Testing Independence between Linear Combinations for Causal Discovery

Multiagent systems can use commitments as the core of a general coordination infrastructure, supporting both cooperative and non-cooperative interactions. Agents whose objectives are aligned, and where one agent can help another achieve greater reward by sacrificing some of its own reward, should choose a cooperative commitment to maximize their joint reward. We present a solution to the problem of how cooperative agents can efficiently find an (approximately) optimal commitment by querying about carefully-selected commitment choices. We prove structural properties of the agents' values as functions of the parameters of the commitment specification, and develop a greedy method for composing a query with provable approximation bounds, which we empirically show can find nearly optimal commitments in a fraction of the time methods that lack our insights require.

Efficient Querying for Cooperative Probabilistic Commitments

Segmentation of organs of interest in 3D medical images is necessary for accurate diagnosis and longitudinal studies. Though recent advances using deep learning have shown success for many segmentation tasks, large datasets are required for high performance and the annotation process is both time consuming and labor intensive. In this paper, we propose a 3D few shot segmentation framework for accurate organ segmentation using limited training samples of the target organ annotation. To achieve this, a U-Net like network is designed to predict segmentation by learning the relationship between 2D slices of support data and a query image, including a bidirectional gated recurrent unit (GRU) that learns consistency of encoded features between adjacent slices. Also, we introduce a transfer learning method to adapt the characteristics of the target image and organ by updating the model before testing with arbitrary support and query data sampled from the support data. We evaluate our proposed model using three 3D CT datasets with annotations of different organs. Our model yielded significantly improved performance over state-of-the-art few shot segmentation models and was comparable to a fully supervised model trained with more target training data.

Bidirectional RNN Based Few Shot Learning for 3D Medical Image Segmentation

Training a model with limited data is an essential task for machine learning and visual recognition. Few-shot learning approaches meta-learn a task-level inductive bias from SEEN class few-shot tasks, and the meta-model is expected to facilitate the few-shot learning with UNSEEN classes. Inspired by the idea that unlabeled data can be utilized to smooth the model space in traditional semi-supervised learning, we propose TAsk COoperation (TACO) which takes advantage of unsupervised tasks to smooth the meta-model space. Specifically, we couple the labeled support set in a few-shot task with easily-collected unlabeled instances, prediction agreement on which encodes the relationship between tasks. The learned smooth meta-model promotes the generalization ability on supervised UNSEEN few-shot tasks. The state-of-the-art few-shot classification results on MiniImageNet and TieredImageNet verify the superiority of TACO to leverage unlabeled data and task relationship in meta-learning.

Task Cooperation for Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Learning

Recent progress on physics-based character animation has shown impressive breakthroughs on human motion synthesis, through imitating motion capture data via deep reinforcement learning. However, results have mostly been demonstrated on imitating a single distinct motion pattern, and do not generalize to interactive tasks that require flexible motion patterns due to varying human-object spatial configurations. To bridge this gap, we focus on one class of interactive tasks---sitting onto a chair. We propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework which relies on a collection of subtask controllers trained to imitate simple, reusable mocap motions, and a meta controller trained to execute the subtasks properly to complete the main task. We experimentally demonstrate the strength of our approach over different non-hierarchical and hierarchical baselines. We also show that our approach can be applied to motion prediction given an image input. A supplementary video can be found at https://youtu.be/3CeN0OGz2cA.

Learning To Sit: Synthesizing Human-Chair Interactions via Hierarchical Control

This paper considers online optimal control with affine constraints on the states and actions under linear dynamics with bounded random disturbances. The system dynamics and constraints are assumed to be known and time invariant but the convex stage cost functions change adversarially.
To solve this problem,  we propose Online Gradient Descent with Buffer Zones (OGD-BZ). Theoretically, we show that OGD-BZ with proper parameters can guarantee the system to satisfy all the constraints despite any admissible disturbances. Further, we investigate the policy regret of OGD-BZ, which compares OGD-BZ's performance with the performance of the optimal linear policy in hindsight. We show that OGD-BZ can achieve a policy regret upper bound that is square root of the horizon length multiplied by some logarithmic terms of the horizon length under proper algorithm parameters.

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