An Optimization Framework For Anomaly Detection Scores Refinement With Side Information

This paper considers an anomaly detection problem in which a detection algorithm assigns anomaly scores to multi-dimensional data points, such as cellular networks' Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). We propose an optimization framework to refine these anomaly scores by leveraging side information in the form of a causality graph between the various features of the data points. The refinement block builds on causality theory and a proposed notion of confidence scores. After motivating our framework, smoothness properties are proved for the ensuing mathematical expressions. Next, equipped with these results, a gradient descent algorithm is proposed, and a proof of its convergence to a stationary point is provided. Our results hold (i) for any causal anomaly detection algorithm and (ii) for any side information in the form of a directed acyclic graph. Numerical results are provided to illustrate the advantage of our proposed framework in dealing with False Positives (FPs) and False Negatives (FNs). Additionally, the effect of the graph's structure on the expected performance advantage and the various trade-offs that take place are analyzed.

Improving Out-of-Distribution Generalization by Adversarial Training with Structured Priors

Deep models often fail to generalize well in test domains when the data distribution differs from that in the training domain. Among numerous approaches to address this Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization problem, there has been a growing surge of interest in exploiting Adversarial Training (AT) to improve OOD performance. Recent works have revealed that the robust model obtained by conducting sample-wise AT also retains transferability to biased test domains. In this paper, we empirically show that sample-wise AT has limited improvement on OOD performance. Specifically, we find that AT can only maintain performance at smaller scales of perturbation while Universal AT (UAT) is more robust to larger-scale perturbations. This provides us with clues that adversarial perturbations with universal (low dimensional) structures can enhance the robustness against large data distribution shifts that are common in OOD scenarios. Inspired by this, we propose two AT variants with low-rank structures to train OOD-robust models. Extensive experiments on DomainBed benchmark show that our proposed approaches outperform Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) and sample-wise AT. Our code is available at https://github.com/NOVAglow646/NIPS22-MAT-and-LDAT-for-OOD.

OptEmbed: Learning Optimal Embedding Table for Click-through Rate Prediction

Learning embedding table plays a fundamental role in Click-through rate(CTR) prediction from the view of the model performance and memory usage. The embedding table is a two-dimensional tensor, with its axes indicating the number of feature values and the embedding dimension, respectively. To learn an efficient and effective embedding table, recent works either assign various embedding dimensions for feature fields and reduce the number of embeddings respectively or mask the embedding table parameters. However, all these existing works cannot get an optimal embedding table. On the one hand, various embedding dimensions still require a large amount of memory due to the vast number of features in the dataset. On the other hand, decreasing the number of embeddings usually suffers from performance degradation, which is intolerable in CTR prediction. Finally, pruning embedding parameters will lead to a sparse embedding table, which is hard to be deployed. To this end, we propose an optimal embedding table learning framework OptEmbed, which provides a practical and general method to find an optimal embedding table for various base CTR models. Specifically, we propose pruning the redundant embeddings regarding corresponding features' importance by learnable pruning thresholds. Furthermore, we consider assigning various embedding dimensions as one single candidate architecture. To efficiently search the optimal embedding dimensions, we design a uniform embedding dimension sampling scheme to equally train all candidate architectures, meaning architecture-related parameters and learnable thresholds are trained simultaneously in one supernet. We then propose an evolution search method based on the supernet to find the optimal embedding dimensions for each field. Experiments on public datasets show that OptEmbed can learn a compact embedding table which can further improve the model performance.

DIWIFT: Discovering Instance-wise Influential Features for Tabular Data

Tabular data is one of the most common data storage formats in business applications, ranging from retail, bank and E-commerce. These applications rely heavily on machine learning models to achieve business success. One of the critical problems in learning tabular data is to distinguish influential features from all the predetermined features. Global feature selection has been well-studied for quite some time, assuming that all instances have the same influential feature subsets. However, different instances rely on different feature subsets in practice, which also gives rise to that instance-wise feature selection receiving increasing attention in recent studies. In this paper, we first propose a novel method for discovering instance-wise influential features for tabular data (DIWIFT), the core of which is to introduce the influence function to measure the importance of an instance-wise feature. DIWIFT is capable of automatically discovering influential feature subsets of different sizes in different instances, which is different from global feature selection that considers all instances with the same influential feature subset. On the other hand, different from the previous instance-wise feature selection, DIWIFT minimizes the validation loss on the validation set and is thus more robust to the distribution shift existing in the training dataset and test dataset, which is important in tabular data. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to validate the effectiveness of our DIWIFT, compared it with baseline methods. Moreover, we also demonstrate the robustness of our method via some ablation experiments.

Regularization Penalty Optimization for Addressing Data Quality Variance in OoD Algorithms

Due to the poor generalization performance of traditional empirical risk minimization (ERM) in the case of distributional shift, Out-of-Distribution (OoD) generalization algorithms receive increasing attention. However, OoD generalization algorithms overlook the great variance in the quality of training data, which significantly compromises the accuracy of these methods. In this paper, we theoretically reveal the relationship between training data quality and algorithm performance and analyze the optimal regularization scheme for Lipschitz regularized invariant risk minimization. A novel algorithm is proposed based on the theoretical results to alleviate the influence of low-quality data at both the sample level and the domain level. The experiments on both the regression and classification benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method with statistical significance.

CoDo: Contrastive Learning with Downstream Background Invariance for Detection

The prior self-supervised learning researches mainly select image-level instance discrimination as pretext task. It achieves a fantastic classification performance that is comparable to supervised learning methods. However, with degraded transfer performance on downstream tasks such as object detection. To bridge the performance gap, we propose a novel object-level self-supervised learning method, called Contrastive learning with Downstream background invariance (CoDo). The pretext task is converted to focus on instance location modeling for various backgrounds, especially for downstream datasets. The ability of background invariance is considered vital for object detection. Firstly, a data augmentation strategy is proposed to paste the instances onto background images, and then jitter the bounding box to involve background information. Secondly, we implement architecture alignment between our pretraining network and the mainstream detection pipelines. Thirdly, hierarchical and multi views contrastive learning is designed to improve performance of visual representation learning. Experiments on MSCOCO demonstrate that the proposed CoDo with common backbones, ResNet50-FPN, yields strong transfer learning results for object detection.

Yuan 1.0: Large-Scale Pre-trained Language Model in Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Learning

Recent work like GPT-3 has demonstrated excellent performance of Zero-Shot and Few-Shot learning on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks by scaling up model size, dataset size and the amount of computation. However, training a model like GPT-3 requires huge amount of computational resources which makes it challengeable to researchers. In this work, we propose a method that incorporates large-scale distributed training performance into model architecture design. With this method, Yuan 1.0, the current largest singleton language model with 245B parameters, achieves excellent performance on thousands GPUs during training, and the state-of-the-art results on NLP tasks. A data processing method is designed to efficiently filter massive amount of raw data. The current largest high-quality Chinese corpus with 5TB high quality texts is built based on this method. In addition, a calibration and label expansion method is proposed to improve the Zero-Shot and Few-Shot performance, and steady improvement is observed on the accuracy of various tasks. Yuan 1.0 presents strong capacity of natural language generation, and the generated articles are difficult to distinguish from the human-written ones.

Discovering Boundary Values of Feature-based Machine Learning Classifiers through Exploratory Datamorphic Testing

Testing has been widely recognised as difficult for AI applications. This paper proposes a set of testing strategies for testing machine learning applications in the framework of the datamorphism testing methodology. In these strategies, testing aims at exploring the data space of a classification or clustering application to discover the boundaries between classes that the machine learning application defines. This enables the tester to understand precisely the behaviour and function of the software under test. In the paper, three variants of exploratory strategies are presented with the algorithms implemented in the automated datamorphic testing tool Morphy. The correctness of these algorithms are formally proved. Their capability and cost of discovering borders between classes are evaluated via a set of controlled experiments with manually designed subjects and a set of case studies with real machine learning models.

Non-invasive Self-attention for Side Information Fusion in Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommender systems aim to model users' evolving interests from their historical behaviors, and hence make customized time-relevant recommendations. Compared with traditional models, deep learning approaches such as CNN and RNN have achieved remarkable advancements in recommendation tasks. Recently, the BERT framework also emerges as a promising method, benefited from its self-attention mechanism in processing sequential data. However, one limitation of the original BERT framework is that it only considers one input source of the natural language tokens. It is still an open question to leverage various types of information under the BERT framework. Nonetheless, it is intuitively appealing to utilize other side information, such as item category or tag, for more comprehensive depictions and better recommendations. In our pilot experiments, we found naive approaches, which directly fuse types of side information into the item embeddings, usually bring very little or even negative effects. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the NOninVasive self-attention mechanism (NOVA) to leverage side information effectively under the BERT framework. NOVA makes use of side information to generate better attention distribution, rather than directly altering the item embedding, which may cause information overwhelming. We validate the NOVA-BERT model on both public and commercial datasets, and our method can stably outperform the state-of-the-art models with negligible computational overheads.

End-to-end Generative Floor-plan and Layout with Attributes and Relation Graph

In this paper, we propose an end-end model for producing furniture layout for interior scene synthesis from the random vector. This proposed model is aimed to support professional interior designers to produce the interior decoration solutions more quickly. The proposed model combines a conditional floor-plan module of the room, a conditional graphical floor-plan module of the room and a conditional layout module. As compared with the prior work on scene synthesis, our proposed three modules enhance the ability of auto-layout generation given the dimensional category of the room. We conduct our experiments on the proposed real-world interior layout dataset that contains $191208$ designs from the professional designers. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed model yields higher-quality layouts in comparison with the state-of-the-art model. The dataset and code are released \href{https://github.com/CODE-SUBMIT/dataset3}{Dataset,Code}