Deep neural networks have enabled improved image quality and fast inference times for various inverse problems, including accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction. However, such models require large amounts of fully-sampled ground truth data, which are difficult to curate and are sensitive to distribution drifts. In this work, we propose applying physics-driven data augmentations for consistency training that leverage our domain knowledge of the forward MRI data acquisition process and MRI physics for improved data efficiency and robustness to clinically-relevant distribution drifts. Our approach, termed VORTEX (1) demonstrates strong improvements over supervised baselines with and without augmentation in robustness to signal-to-noise ratio change and motion corruption in data-limited regimes; (2) considerably outperforms state-of-the-art data augmentation techniques that are purely image-based on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution data; and (3) enables composing heterogeneous image-based and physics-driven augmentations.
A central goal of sequence modeling is designing a single principled model that can address sequence data across a range of modalities and tasks, particularly on long-range dependencies. Although conventional models including RNNs, CNNs, and Transformers have specialized variants for capturing long dependencies, they still struggle to scale to very long sequences of $10000$ or more steps. A promising recent approach proposed modeling sequences by simulating the fundamental state space model (SSM) \( x'(t) = Ax(t) + Bu(t), y(t) = Cx(t) + Du(t) \), and showed that for appropriate choices of the state matrix \( A \), this system could handle long-range dependencies mathematically and empirically. However, this method has prohibitive computation and memory requirements, rendering it infeasible as a general sequence modeling solution. We propose the Structured State Space (S4) sequence model based on a new parameterization for the SSM, and show that it can be computed much more efficiently than prior approaches while preserving their theoretical strengths. Our technique involves conditioning \( A \) with a low-rank correction, allowing it to be diagonalized stably and reducing the SSM to the well-studied computation of a Cauchy kernel. S4 achieves strong empirical results across a diverse range of established benchmarks, including (i) 91\% accuracy on sequential CIFAR-10 with no data augmentation or auxiliary losses, on par with a larger 2-D ResNet, (ii) substantially closing the gap to Transformers on image and language modeling tasks, while performing generation $60\times$ faster (iii) SoTA on every task from the Long Range Arena benchmark, including solving the challenging Path-X task of length 16k that all prior work fails on, while being as efficient as all competitors.
Recent advances in efficient Transformers have exploited either the sparsity or low-rank properties of attention matrices to reduce the computational and memory bottlenecks of modeling long sequences. However, it is still challenging to balance the trade-off between model quality and efficiency to perform a one-size-fits-all approximation for different tasks. To better understand this trade-off, we observe that sparse and low-rank approximations excel in different regimes, determined by the softmax temperature in attention, and sparse + low-rank can outperform each individually. Inspired by the classical robust-PCA algorithm for sparse and low-rank decomposition, we propose Scatterbrain, a novel way to unify sparse (via locality sensitive hashing) and low-rank (via kernel feature map) attention for accurate and efficient approximation. The estimation is unbiased with provably low error. We empirically show that Scatterbrain can achieve 2.1x lower error than baselines when serving as a drop-in replacement in BigGAN image generation and pre-trained T2T-ViT. On a pre-trained T2T Vision transformer, even without fine-tuning, Scatterbrain can reduce 98% of attention memory at the cost of only 1% drop in accuracy. We demonstrate Scatterbrain for end-to-end training with up to 4 points better perplexity and 5 points better average accuracy than sparse or low-rank efficient transformers on language modeling and long-range-arena tasks.
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs), temporal convolutions, and neural differential equations (NDEs) are popular families of deep learning models for time-series data, each with unique strengths and tradeoffs in modeling power and computational efficiency. We introduce a simple sequence model inspired by control systems that generalizes these approaches while addressing their shortcomings. The Linear State-Space Layer (LSSL) maps a sequence $u \mapsto y$ by simply simulating a linear continuous-time state-space representation $\dot{x} = Ax + Bu, y = Cx + Du$. Theoretically, we show that LSSL models are closely related to the three aforementioned families of models and inherit their strengths. For example, they generalize convolutions to continuous-time, explain common RNN heuristics, and share features of NDEs such as time-scale adaptation. We then incorporate and generalize recent theory on continuous-time memorization to introduce a trainable subset of structured matrices $A$ that endow LSSLs with long-range memory. Empirically, stacking LSSL layers into a simple deep neural network obtains state-of-the-art results across time series benchmarks for long dependencies in sequential image classification, real-world healthcare regression tasks, and speech. On a difficult speech classification task with length-16000 sequences, LSSL outperforms prior approaches by 24 accuracy points, and even outperforms baselines that use hand-crafted features on 100x shorter sequences.
Named entity disambiguation (NED), which involves mapping textual mentions to structured entities, is particularly challenging in the medical domain due to the presence of rare entities. Existing approaches are limited by the presence of coarse-grained structural resources in biomedical knowledge bases as well as the use of training datasets that provide low coverage over uncommon resources. In this work, we address these issues by proposing a cross-domain data integration method that transfers structural knowledge from a general text knowledge base to the medical domain. We utilize our integration scheme to augment structural resources and generate a large biomedical NED dataset for pretraining. Our pretrained model with injected structural knowledge achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark medical NED datasets: MedMentions and BC5CDR. Furthermore, we improve disambiguation of rare entities by up to 57 accuracy points.
AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.
In cognitive decoding, researchers aim to characterize a brain region's representations by identifying the cognitive states (e.g., accepting/rejecting a gamble) that can be identified from the region's activity. Deep learning (DL) methods are highly promising for cognitive decoding, with their unmatched ability to learn versatile representations of complex data. Yet, their widespread application in cognitive decoding is hindered by their general lack of interpretability as well as difficulties in applying them to small datasets and in ensuring their reproducibility and robustness. We propose to approach these challenges by leveraging recent advances in explainable artificial intelligence and transfer learning, while also providing specific recommendations on how to improve the reproducibility and robustness of DL modeling results.
In the last years machine learning (ML) has moved from a academic endeavor to a pervasive technology adopted in almost every aspect of computing. ML-powered products are now embedded in our digital lives: from recommendations of what to watch, to divining our search intent, to powering virtual assistants in consumer and enterprise settings. Recent successes in applying ML in natural sciences revealed that ML can be used to tackle some of the hardest real-world problems humanity faces today. For these reasons ML has become central in the strategy of tech companies and has gathered even more attention from academia than ever before. Despite these successes, what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning. Right now the people training and using ML models are expert developers working within large organizations, but we believe the next wave of ML systems will allow a larger amount of people, potentially without coding skills, to perform the same tasks. These new ML systems will not require users to fully understand all the details of how models are trained and utilized for obtaining predictions. Declarative interfaces are well suited for this goal, by hiding complexity and favouring separation of interests, and can lead to increased productivity. We worked on such abstract interfaces by developing two declarative ML systems, Overton and Ludwig, that require users to declare only their data schema (names and types of inputs) and tasks rather then writing low level ML code. In this article we will describe how ML systems are currently structured, highlight important factors for their success and adoption, what are the issues current ML systems are facing and how the systems we developed addressed them. Finally we will talk about learnings from the development of ML systems throughout the years and how we believe the next generation of ML systems will look like.
Machine learning models are often deployed in different settings than they were trained and validated on, posing a challenge to practitioners who wish to predict how well the deployed model will perform on a target distribution. If an unlabeled sample from the target distribution is available, along with a labeled sample from a possibly different source distribution, standard approaches such as importance weighting can be applied to estimate performance on the target. However, importance weighting struggles when the source and target distributions have non-overlapping support or are high-dimensional. Taking inspiration from fields such as epidemiology and polling, we develop Mandoline, a new evaluation framework that mitigates these issues. Our key insight is that practitioners may have prior knowledge about the ways in which the distribution shifts, which we can use to better guide the importance weighting procedure. Specifically, users write simple "slicing functions" - noisy, potentially correlated binary functions intended to capture possible axes of distribution shift - to compute reweighted performance estimates. We further describe a density ratio estimation framework for the slices and show how its estimation error scales with slice quality and dataset size. Empirical validation on NLP and vision tasks shows that \name can estimate performance on the target distribution up to $3\times$ more accurately compared to standard baselines.