Active Learning on Neural Networks through Interactive Generation of Digit Patterns and Visual Representation

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been broadly utilized to analyze various data and solve different domain problems. However, neural networks (NNs) have been considered a black box operation for years because their underlying computation and meaning are hidden. Due to this nature, users often face difficulties in interpreting the underlying mechanism of the NNs and the benefits of using them. In this paper, to improve users' learning and understanding of NNs, an interactive learning system is designed to create digit patterns and recognize them in real time. To help users clearly understand the visual differences of digit patterns (i.e., 0 ~ 9) and their results with an NN, integrating visualization is considered to present all digit patterns in a two-dimensional display space with supporting multiple user interactions. An evaluation with multiple datasets is conducted to determine its usability for active learning. In addition, informal user testing is managed during a summer workshop by asking the workshop participants to use the system.

Towards Effective Semantic OOD Detection in Unseen Domains: A Domain Generalization Perspective

Two prevalent types of distributional shifts in machine learning are the covariate shift (as observed across different domains) and the semantic shift (as seen across different classes). Traditional OOD detection techniques typically address only one of these shifts. However, real-world testing environments often present a combination of both covariate and semantic shifts. In this study, we introduce a novel problem, semantic OOD detection across domains, which simultaneously addresses both distributional shifts. To this end, we introduce two regularization strategies: domain generalization regularization, which ensures semantic invariance across domains to counteract the covariate shift, and OOD detection regularization, designed to enhance OOD detection capabilities against the semantic shift through energy bounding. Through rigorous testing on three standard domain generalization benchmarks, our proposed framework showcases its superiority over conventional domain generalization approaches in terms of OOD detection performance. Moreover, it holds its ground by maintaining comparable InD classification accuracy.

Learning Implicit Entity-object Relations by Bidirectional Generative Alignment for Multimodal NER

The challenge posed by multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) is mainly two-fold: (1) bridging the semantic gap between text and image and (2) matching the entity with its associated object in image. Existing methods fail to capture the implicit entity-object relations, due to the lack of corresponding annotation. In this paper, we propose a bidirectional generative alignment method named BGA-MNER to tackle these issues. Our BGA-MNER consists of \texttt{image2text} and \texttt{text2image} generation with respect to entity-salient content in two modalities. It jointly optimizes the bidirectional reconstruction objectives, leading to aligning the implicit entity-object relations under such direct and powerful constraints. Furthermore, image-text pairs usually contain unmatched components which are noisy for generation. A stage-refined context sampler is proposed to extract the matched cross-modal content for generation. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance without image input during inference.

ReIDTrack: Multi-Object Track and Segmentation Without Motion

In recent years, dominant Multi-object tracking (MOT) and segmentation (MOTS) methods mainly follow the tracking-by-detection paradigm. Transformer-based end-to-end (E2E) solutions bring some ideas to MOT and MOTS, but they cannot achieve a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in major MOT and MOTS benchmarks. Detection and association are two main modules of the tracking-by-detection paradigm. Association techniques mainly depend on the combination of motion and appearance information. As deep learning has been recently developed, the performance of the detection and appearance model is rapidly improved. These trends made us consider whether we can achieve SOTA based on only high-performance detection and appearance model. Our paper mainly focuses on exploring this direction based on CBNetV2 with Swin-B as a detection model and MoCo-v2 as a self-supervised appearance model. Motion information and IoU mapping were removed during the association. Our method wins 1st place on the MOTS track and wins 2nd on the MOT track in the CVPR2023 WAD workshop. We hope our simple and effective method can give some insights to the MOT and MOTS research community. Source code will be released under this git repository

Chain-of-Thought Prompt Distillation for Multimodal Named Entity and Multimodal Relation Extraction

Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) and Multimodal Relation Extraction (MRE) necessitate the fundamental reasoning capacity for intricate linguistic and multimodal comprehension. In this study, we explore distilling the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) into a more compact student model by generating a \textit{chain of thought} (CoT) -- a sequence of intermediate reasoning steps. Specifically, we commence by exemplifying the elicitation of such reasoning ability from LLMs through CoT prompts covering multi-grain (noun, sentence, multimodality) and data-augmentation (style, entity, image) dimensions. Subsequently, we present a novel conditional prompt distillation method to assimilate the commonsense reasoning ability from LLMs, thereby enhancing the utility of the student model in addressing text-only inputs without the requisite addition of image and CoT knowledge. Extensive experiments reveal that our approach attains state-of-the-art accuracy and manifests a plethora of advantages concerning interpretability, data efficiency, and cross-domain generalization on MNER and MRE datasets.

Pretraining task diversity and the emergence of non-Bayesian in-context learning for regression

Pretrained transformers exhibit the remarkable ability of in-context learning (ICL): they can learn tasks from just a few examples provided in the prompt without updating any weights. This raises a foundational question: can ICL solve fundamentally $\textit{new}$ tasks that are very different from those seen during pretraining? To probe this question, we examine ICL's performance on linear regression while varying the diversity of tasks in the pretraining dataset. We empirically demonstrate a $\textit{task diversity threshold}$ for the emergence of ICL. Below this threshold, the pretrained transformer cannot solve unseen regression tasks as it behaves like a Bayesian estimator with the $\textit{non-diverse pretraining task distribution}$ as the prior. Beyond this threshold, the transformer significantly outperforms this estimator; its behavior aligns with that of ridge regression, corresponding to a Gaussian prior over $\textit{all tasks}$, including those not seen during pretraining. These results highlight that, when pretrained on data with task diversity greater than the threshold, transformers $\textit{can}$ solve fundamentally new tasks in-context. Importantly, this capability hinges on it deviating from the Bayes optimal estimator with the pretraining distribution as the prior. This study underscores, in a concrete example, the critical role of task diversity, alongside data and model scale, in the emergence of ICL. Code is available at https://github.com/mansheej/icl-task-diversity.

Stochastic Collapse: How Gradient Noise Attracts SGD Dynamics Towards Simpler Subnetworks

In this work, we reveal a strong implicit bias of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) that drives overly expressive networks to much simpler subnetworks, thereby dramatically reducing the number of independent parameters, and improving generalization. To reveal this bias, we identify invariant sets, or subsets of parameter space that remain unmodified by SGD. We focus on two classes of invariant sets that correspond to simpler subnetworks and commonly appear in modern architectures. Our analysis uncovers that SGD exhibits a property of stochastic attractivity towards these simpler invariant sets. We establish a sufficient condition for stochastic attractivity based on a competition between the loss landscape's curvature around the invariant set and the noise introduced by stochastic gradients. Remarkably, we find that an increased level of noise strengthens attractivity, leading to the emergence of attractive invariant sets associated with saddle-points or local maxima of the train loss. We observe empirically the existence of attractive invariant sets in trained deep neural networks, implying that SGD dynamics often collapses to simple subnetworks with either vanishing or redundant neurons. We further demonstrate how this simplifying process of stochastic collapse benefits generalization in a linear teacher-student framework. Finally, through this analysis, we mechanistically explain why early training with large learning rates for extended periods benefits subsequent generalization.

Interpreting GNN-based IDS Detections Using Provenance Graph Structural Features

The black-box nature of complex Neural Network (NN)-based models has hindered their widespread adoption in security domains due to the lack of logical explanations and actionable follow-ups for their predictions. To enhance the transparency and accountability of Graph Neural Network (GNN) security models used in system provenance analysis, we propose PROVEXPLAINER, a framework for projecting abstract GNN decision boundaries onto interpretable feature spaces. We first replicate the decision-making process of GNNbased security models using simpler and explainable models such as Decision Trees (DTs). To maximize the accuracy and fidelity of the surrogate models, we propose novel graph structural features founded on classical graph theory and enhanced by extensive data study with security domain knowledge. Our graph structural features are closely tied to problem-space actions in the system provenance domain, which allows the detection results to be explained in descriptive, human language. PROVEXPLAINER allowed simple DT models to achieve 95% fidelity to the GNN on program classification tasks with general graph structural features, and 99% fidelity on malware detection tasks with a task-specific feature package tailored for direct interpretation. The explanations for malware classification are demonstrated with case studies of five real-world malware samples across three malware families.

Learning Causally Disentangled Representations via the Principle of Independent Causal Mechanisms

Learning disentangled causal representations is a challenging problem that has gained significant attention recently due to its implications for extracting meaningful information for downstream tasks. In this work, we define a new notion of causal disentanglement from the perspective of independent causal mechanisms. We propose ICM-VAE, a framework for learning causally disentangled representations supervised by causally related observed labels. We model causal mechanisms using learnable flow-based diffeomorphic functions to map noise variables to latent causal variables. Further, to promote the disentanglement of causal factors, we propose a causal disentanglement prior that utilizes the known causal structure to encourage learning a causally factorized distribution in the latent space. Under relatively mild conditions, we provide theoretical results showing the identifiability of causal factors and mechanisms up to permutation and elementwise reparameterization. We empirically demonstrate that our framework induces highly disentangled causal factors, improves interventional robustness, and is compatible with counterfactual generation.

Towards Fair Disentangled Online Learning for Changing Environments

In the problem of online learning for changing environments, data are sequentially received one after another over time, and their distribution assumptions may vary frequently. Although existing methods demonstrate the effectiveness of their learning algorithms by providing a tight bound on either dynamic regret or adaptive regret, most of them completely ignore learning with model fairness, defined as the statistical parity across different sub-population (e.g., race and gender). Another drawback is that when adapting to a new environment, an online learner needs to update model parameters with a global change, which is costly and inefficient. Inspired by the sparse mechanism shift hypothesis, we claim that changing environments in online learning can be attributed to partial changes in learned parameters that are specific to environments and the rest remain invariant to changing environments. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel algorithm under the assumption that data collected at each time can be disentangled with two representations, an environment-invariant semantic factor and an environment-specific variation factor. The semantic factor is further used for fair prediction under a group fairness constraint. To evaluate the sequence of model parameters generated by the learner, a novel regret is proposed in which it takes a mixed form of dynamic and static regret metrics followed by a fairness-aware long-term constraint. The detailed analysis provides theoretical guarantees for loss regret and violation of cumulative fairness constraints. Empirical evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate our proposed method sequentially outperforms baseline methods in model accuracy and fairness.