Chih-Kuan Yeh

Che-Ping Tsai, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Pradeep Ravikumar

Shapley values, which were originally designed to assign attributions to individual players in coalition games, have become a commonly used approach in explainable machine learning to provide attributions to input features for black-box machine learning models. A key attraction of Shapley values is that they uniquely satisfy a very natural set of axiomatic properties. However, extending the Shapley value to assigning attributions to interactions rather than individual players, an interaction index, is non-trivial: as the natural set of axioms for the original Shapley values, extended to the context of interactions, no longer specify a unique interaction index. Many proposals thus introduce additional less ''natural'' axioms, while sacrificing the key axiom of efficiency, in order to obtain unique interaction indices. In this work, rather than introduce additional conflicting axioms, we adopt the viewpoint of Shapley values as coefficients of the most faithful linear approximation to the pseudo-Boolean coalition game value function. By extending linear to $\ell$-order polynomial approximations, we can then define the general family of faithful interaction indices. We show that by additionally requiring the faithful interaction indices to satisfy interaction-extensions of the standard individual Shapley axioms (dummy, symmetry, linearity, and efficiency), we obtain a unique Faithful Shapley Interaction index, which we denote Faith-Shap, as a natural generalization of the Shapley value to interactions. We then provide some illustrative contrasts of Faith-Shap with previously proposed interaction indices, and further investigate some of its interesting algebraic properties. We further show the computational efficiency of computing Faith-Shap, together with some additional qualitative insights, via some illustrative experiments.

Andrew Bai, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Pradeep Ravikumar et al.

Concept-based interpretations of black-box models are often more intuitive for humans to understand. The most widely adopted approach for concept-based interpretation is Concept Activation Vector (CAV). CAV relies on learning a linear relation between some latent representation of a given model and concepts. The linear separability is usually implicitly assumed but does not hold true in general. In this work, we started from the original intent of concept-based interpretation and proposed Concept Gradient (CG), extending concept-based interpretation beyond linear concept functions. We showed that for a general (potentially non-linear) concept, we can mathematically evaluate how a small change of concept affecting the model's prediction, which leads to an extension of gradient-based interpretation to the concept space. We demonstrated empirically that CG outperforms CAV in both toy examples and real world datasets.

Che-Ping Tsai, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Pradeep Ravikumar

We propose a general class of sample based explanations of machine learning models, which we term generalized representers. To measure the effect of a training sample on a model's test prediction, generalized representers use two components: a global sample importance that quantifies the importance of the training point to the model and is invariant to test samples, and a local sample importance that measures similarity between the training sample and the test point with a kernel. A key contribution of the paper is to show that generalized representers are the only class of sample based explanations satisfying a natural set of axiomatic properties. We discuss approaches to extract global importances given a kernel, and also natural choices of kernels given modern non-linear models. As we show, many popular existing sample based explanations could be cast as generalized representers with particular choices of kernels and approaches to extract global importances. Additionally, we conduct empirical comparisons of different generalized representers on two image and two text classification datasets.

Gemini Team, Petko Georgiev, Ving Ian Lei et al. · deepmind, mila

In this report, we introduce the Gemini 1.5 family of models, representing the next generation of highly compute-efficient multimodal models capable of recalling and reasoning over fine-grained information from millions of tokens of context, including multiple long documents and hours of video and audio. The family includes two new models: (1) an updated Gemini 1.5 Pro, which exceeds the February version on the great majority of capabilities and benchmarks; (2) Gemini 1.5 Flash, a more lightweight variant designed for efficiency with minimal regression in quality. Gemini 1.5 models achieve near-perfect recall on long-context retrieval tasks across modalities, improve the state-of-the-art in long-document QA, long-video QA and long-context ASR, and match or surpass Gemini 1.0 Ultra's state-of-the-art performance across a broad set of benchmarks. Studying the limits of Gemini 1.5's long-context ability, we find continued improvement in next-token prediction and near-perfect retrieval (>99%) up to at least 10M tokens, a generational leap over existing models such as Claude 3.0 (200k) and GPT-4 Turbo (128k). Finally, we highlight real-world use cases, such as Gemini 1.5 collaborating with professionals on completing their tasks achieving 26 to 75% time savings across 10 different job categories, as well as surprising new capabilities of large language models at the frontier; when given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content.

Gheorghe Comanici, Eric Bieber, Mike Schaekermann et al. · amazon-science, baidu

In this report, we introduce the Gemini 2.X model family: Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, as well as our earlier Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite models. Gemini 2.5 Pro is our most capable model yet, achieving SoTA performance on frontier coding and reasoning benchmarks. In addition to its incredible coding and reasoning skills, Gemini 2.5 Pro is a thinking model that excels at multimodal understanding and it is now able to process up to 3 hours of video content. Its unique combination of long context, multimodal and reasoning capabilities can be combined to unlock new agentic workflows. Gemini 2.5 Flash provides excellent reasoning abilities at a fraction of the compute and latency requirements and Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite provide high performance at low latency and cost. Taken together, the Gemini 2.X model generation spans the full Pareto frontier of model capability vs cost, allowing users to explore the boundaries of what is possible with complex agentic problem solving.

Andrew Bai, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Cho-Jui Hsieh et al.

Incrementally fine-tuning foundational models on new tasks or domains is now the de facto approach in NLP. A known pitfall of this approach is the \emph{catastrophic forgetting} of prior knowledge that happens during fine-tuning. A common approach to alleviate such forgetting is to rehearse samples from prior tasks during fine-tuning. Several existing works assume a fixed memory buffer to store prior task examples, while relying on inferences (forward passes) with the model at hand for choosing examples for rehearsal from the buffer. However, given the increasing computational cost of model inference, and decreasing cost of data storage, we focus on the setting to rehearse samples with a fixed computational budget instead of a fixed memory budget. We propose a sampling scheme, \texttt{\bf mix-cd}, that prioritizes rehearsal of ``collateral damage'' samples, which are samples predicted correctly by the prior model but forgotten by the incrementally tuned one. The crux of our scheme is a procedure to efficiently estimate the density of collateral damage samples without incurring additional model inferences. Our approach is computationally efficient, easy to implement, and outperforms several leading continual learning methods in compute-constrained settings. All the code will be publicly available at https://github.com/jybai/mix-cd-rehearsal.

Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Chun-Liang Li, Chih-Kuan Yeh et al.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) is challenging because they are memory inefficient and compute-intensive for practical applications. In reaction, researchers train smaller task-specific models by either finetuning with human labels or distilling using LLM-generated labels. However, finetuning and distillation require large amounts of training data to achieve comparable performance to LLMs. We introduce Distilling step-by-step, a new mechanism that (a) trains smaller models that outperform LLMs, and (b) achieves so by leveraging less training data needed by finetuning or distillation. Our method extracts LLM rationales as additional supervision for training small models within a multi-task framework. We present three findings across 4 NLP benchmarks: First, compared to both finetuning and distillation, our mechanism achieves better performance with much fewer labeled/unlabeled training examples. Second, compared to few-shot prompted LLMs, we achieve better performance using substantially smaller model sizes. Third, we reduce both the model size and the amount of data required to outperform LLMs; our finetuned 770M T5 model outperforms the few-shot prompted 540B PaLM model using only 80% of available data on a benchmark, whereas standard finetuning the same T5 model struggles to match even by using 100% of the dataset. We release the code at: https://github.com/google-research/distilling-step-by-step .

Chih-Kuan Yeh, Been Kim, Sercan O. Arik et al.

Human explanations of high-level decisions are often expressed in terms of key concepts the decisions are based on. In this paper, we study such concept-based explainability for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). First, we define the notion of completeness, which quantifies how sufficient a particular set of concepts is in explaining a model's prediction behavior based on the assumption that complete concept scores are sufficient statistics of the model prediction. Next, we propose a concept discovery method that aims to infer a complete set of concepts that are additionally encouraged to be interpretable, which addresses the limitations of existing methods on concept explanations. To define an importance score for each discovered concept, we adapt game-theoretic notions to aggregate over sets and propose ConceptSHAP. Via proposed metrics and user studies, on a synthetic dataset with apriori-known concept explanations, as well as on real-world image and language datasets, we validate the effectiveness of our method in finding concepts that are both complete in explaining the decisions and interpretable. (The code is released at https://github.com/chihkuanyeh/concept_exp)

Dami Choi, Derrick Xin, Hamid Dadkhahi et al.

In this paper, we empirically study the optimization dynamics of multi-task learning, particularly focusing on those that govern a collection of tasks with significant data imbalance. We present a simple yet effective method of pre-training on high-resource tasks, followed by fine-tuning on a mixture of high/low-resource tasks. We provide a thorough empirical study and analysis of this method's benefits showing that it achieves consistent improvements relative to the performance trade-off profile of standard static weighting. We analyze under what data regimes this method is applicable and show its improvements empirically in neural machine translation (NMT) and multi-lingual language modeling.

Peter Schafhalter, Shun Liao, Yanqi Zhou et al.

Domain-specific adaptation is critical to maximizing the performance of pre-trained language models (PLMs) on one or multiple targeted tasks, especially under resource-constrained use cases, such as edge devices. However, existing methods often struggle to balance domain-specific performance, retention of general knowledge, and efficiency for training and inference. To address these challenges, we propose Modular Domain Experts (MoDE). MoDE is a mixture-of-experts architecture that augments a general PLMs with modular, domain-specialized experts. These experts are trained independently and composed together via a lightweight training process. In contrast to standard low-rank adaptation methods, each MoDE expert consists of several transformer layers which scale better with more training examples and larger parameter counts. Our evaluation demonstrates that MoDE achieves comparable target performances to full parameter fine-tuning while achieving 1.65% better retention performance. Moreover, MoDE's architecture enables flexible sharding configurations and improves training speeds by up to 38% over state-of-the-art distributed training configurations.

Gemini Team, Rohan Anil, Sebastian Borgeaud et al.

This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks - notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of the Gemini family in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases. We discuss our approach toward post-training and deploying Gemini models responsibly to users through services including Gemini, Gemini Advanced, Google AI Studio, and Cloud Vertex AI.

Chih-Kuan Yeh, Been Kim, Pradeep Ravikumar

Understanding complex machine learning models such as deep neural networks with explanations is crucial in various applications. Many explanations stem from the model perspective, and may not necessarily effectively communicate why the model is making its predictions at the right level of abstraction. For example, providing importance weights to individual pixels in an image can only express which parts of that particular image are important to the model, but humans may prefer an explanation which explains the prediction by concept-based thinking. In this work, we review the emerging area of concept based explanations. We start by introducing concept explanations including the class of Concept Activation Vectors (CAV) which characterize concepts using vectors in appropriate spaces of neural activations, and discuss different properties of useful concepts, and approaches to measure the usefulness of concept vectors. We then discuss approaches to automatically extract concepts, and approaches to address some of their caveats. Finally, we discuss some case studies that showcase the utility of such concept-based explanations in synthetic settings and real world applications.

Chih-Kuan Yeh, Kuan-Yun Lee, Frederick Liu et al.

A popular explainable AI (XAI) approach to quantify feature importance of a given model is via Shapley values. These Shapley values arose in cooperative games, and hence a critical ingredient to compute these in an XAI context is a so-called value function, that computes the "value" of a subset of features, and which connects machine learning models to cooperative games. There are many possible choices for such value functions, which broadly fall into two categories: on-manifold and off-manifold value functions, which take an observational and an interventional viewpoint respectively. Both these classes however have their respective flaws, where on-manifold value functions violate key axiomatic properties and are computationally expensive, while off-manifold value functions pay less heed to the data manifold and evaluate the model on regions for which it wasn't trained. Thus, there is no consensus on which class of value functions to use. In this paper, we show that in addition to these existing issues, both classes of value functions are prone to adversarial manipulations on low density regions. We formalize the desiderata of value functions that respect both the model and the data manifold in a set of axioms and are robust to perturbation on off-manifold regions, and show that there exists a unique value function that satisfies these axioms, which we term the Joint Baseline value function, and the resulting Shapley value the Joint Baseline Shapley (JBshap), and validate the effectiveness of JBshap in experiments.

Chih-Kuan Yeh, Ankur Taly, Mukund Sundararajan et al.

The ability to identify influential training examples enables us to debug training data and explain model behavior. Existing techniques to do so are based on the flow of training data influence through the model parameters. For large models in NLP applications, it is often computationally infeasible to study this flow through all model parameters, therefore techniques usually pick the last layer of weights. However, we observe that since the activation connected to the last layer of weights contains "shared logic", the data influenced calculated via the last layer weights prone to a ``cancellation effect'', where the data influence of different examples have large magnitude that contradicts each other. The cancellation effect lowers the discriminative power of the influence score, and deleting influential examples according to this measure often does not change the model's behavior by much. To mitigate this, we propose a technique called TracIn-WE that modifies a method called TracIn to operate on the word embedding layer instead of the last layer, where the cancellation effect is less severe. One potential concern is that influence based on the word embedding layer may not encode sufficient high level information. However, we find that gradients (unlike embeddings) do not suffer from this, possibly because they chain through higher layers. We show that TracIn-WE significantly outperforms other data influence methods applied on the last layer significantly on the case deletion evaluation on three language classification tasks for different models. In addition, TracIn-WE can produce scores not just at the level of the overall training input, but also at the level of words within the training input, a further aid in debugging.

Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Xuanqing Liu et al.

Feature based explanations, that provide importance of each feature towards the model prediction, is arguably one of the most intuitive ways to explain a model. In this paper, we establish a novel set of evaluation criteria for such feature based explanations by robustness analysis. In contrast to existing evaluations which require us to specify some way to "remove" features that could inevitably introduces biases and artifacts, we make use of the subtler notion of smaller adversarial perturbations. By optimizing towards our proposed evaluation criteria, we obtain new explanations that are loosely necessary and sufficient for a prediction. We further extend the explanation to extract the set of features that would move the current prediction to a target class by adopting targeted adversarial attack for the robustness analysis. Through experiments across multiple domains and a user study, we validate the usefulness of our evaluation criteria and our derived explanations.

Biswajit Paria, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Ian E. H. Yen et al.

Deep representation learning has become one of the most widely adopted approaches for visual search, recommendation, and identification. Retrieval of such representations from a large database is however computationally challenging. Approximate methods based on learning compact representations, have been widely explored for this problem, such as locality sensitive hashing, product quantization, and PCA. In this work, in contrast to learning compact representations, we propose to learn high dimensional and sparse representations that have similar representational capacity as dense embeddings while being more efficient due to sparse matrix multiplication operations which can be much faster than dense multiplication. Following the key insight that the number of operations decreases quadratically with the sparsity of embeddings provided the non-zero entries are distributed uniformly across dimensions, we propose a novel approach to learn such distributed sparse embeddings via the use of a carefully constructed regularization function that directly minimizes a continuous relaxation of the number of floating-point operations (FLOPs) incurred during retrieval. Our experiments show that our approach is competitive to the other baselines and yields a similar or better speed-vs-accuracy tradeoff on practical datasets.

Chih-Kuan Yeh, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Arun Sai Suggala et al.

We consider objective evaluation measures of saliency explanations for complex black-box machine learning models. We propose simple robust variants of two notions that have been considered in recent literature: (in)fidelity, and sensitivity. We analyze optimal explanations with respect to both these measures, and while the optimal explanation for sensitivity is a vacuous constant explanation, the optimal explanation for infidelity is a novel combination of two popular explanation methods. By varying the perturbation distribution that defines infidelity, we obtain novel explanations by optimizing infidelity, which we show to out-perform existing explanations in both quantitative and qualitative measurements. Another salient question given these measures is how to modify any given explanation to have better values with respect to these measures. We propose a simple modification based on lowering sensitivity, and moreover show that when done appropriately, we could simultaneously improve both sensitivity as well as fidelity.

Chih-Kuan Yeh, Jianshu Chen, Chengzhu Yu et al.

We consider the problem of training speech recognition systems without using any labeled data, under the assumption that the learner can only access to the input utterances and a phoneme language model estimated from a non-overlapping corpus. We propose a fully unsupervised learning algorithm that alternates between solving two sub-problems: (i) learn a phoneme classifier for a given set of phoneme segmentation boundaries, and (ii) refining the phoneme boundaries based on a given classifier. To solve the first sub-problem, we introduce a novel unsupervised cost function named Segmental Empirical Output Distribution Matching, which generalizes the work in (Liu et al., 2017) to segmental structures. For the second sub-problem, we develop an approximate MAP approach to refining the boundaries obtained from Wang et al. (2017). Experimental results on TIMIT dataset demonstrate the success of this fully unsupervised phoneme recognition system, which achieves a phone error rate (PER) of 41.6%. Although it is still far away from the state-of-the-art supervised systems, we show that with oracle boundaries and matching language model, the PER could be improved to 32.5%.This performance approaches the supervised system of the same model architecture, demonstrating the great potential of the proposed method.

Chih-Kuan Yeh, Joon Sik Kim, Ian E. H. Yen et al.

We propose to explain the predictions of a deep neural network, by pointing to the set of what we call representer points in the training set, for a given test point prediction. Specifically, we show that we can decompose the pre-activation prediction of a neural network into a linear combination of activations of training points, with the weights corresponding to what we call representer values, which thus capture the importance of that training point on the learned parameters of the network. But it provides a deeper understanding of the network than simply training point influence: with positive representer values corresponding to excitatory training points, and negative values corresponding to inhibitory points, which as we show provides considerably more insight. Our method is also much more scalable, allowing for real-time feedback in a manner not feasible with influence functions.

Chung-Wei Lee, Wei Fang, Chih-Kuan Yeh et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning architecture for multi-label zero-shot learning (ML-ZSL), which is able to predict multiple unseen class labels for each input instance. Inspired by the way humans utilize semantic knowledge between objects of interests, we propose a framework that incorporates knowledge graphs for describing the relationships between multiple labels. Our model learns an information propagation mechanism from the semantic label space, which can be applied to model the interdependencies between seen and unseen class labels. With such investigation of structured knowledge graphs for visual reasoning, we show that our model can be applied for solving multi-label classification and ML-ZSL tasks. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, comparable or improved performances can be achieved by our method.

Shang-Fu Chen, Yi-Chen Chen, Chih-Kuan Yeh et al.

In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.

Chih-Kuan Yeh, Wei-Chieh Wu, Wei-Jen Ko et al.

Multi-label classification is a practical yet challenging task in machine learning related fields, since it requires the prediction of more than one label category for each input instance. We propose a novel deep neural networks (DNN) based model, Canonical Correlated AutoEncoder (C2AE), for solving this task. Aiming at better relating feature and label domain data for improved classification, we uniquely perform joint feature and label embedding by deriving a deep latent space, followed by the introduction of label-correlation sensitive loss function for recovering the predicted label outputs. Our C2AE is achieved by integrating the DNN architectures of canonical correlation analysis and autoencoder, which allows end-to-end learning and prediction with the ability to exploit label dependency. Moreover, our C2AE can be easily extended to address the learning problem with missing labels. Our experiments on multiple datasets with different scales confirm the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed method, which is shown to perform favorably against state-of-the-art methods for multi-label classification.

Chih-Kuan Yeh, Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang

The paradigm shift from shallow classifiers with hand-crafted features to end-to-end trainable deep learning models has shown significant improvements on supervised learning tasks. Despite the promising power of deep neural networks (DNN), how to alleviate overfitting during training has been a research topic of interest. In this paper, we present a Generative-Discriminative Variational Model (GDVM) for visual classification, in which we introduce a latent variable inferred from inputs for exhibiting generative abilities towards prediction. In other words, our GDVM casts the supervised learning task as a generative learning process, with data discrimination to be jointly exploited for improved classification. In our experiments, we consider the tasks of multi-class classification, multi-label classification, and zero-shot learning. We show that our GDVM performs favorably against the baselines or recent generative DNN models.

Chih-Kuan Yeh, Hsuan-Tien Lin

Bridge is among the zero-sum games for which artificial intelligence has not yet outperformed expert human players. The main difficulty lies in the bidding phase of bridge, which requires cooperative decision making under partial information. Existing artificial intelligence systems for bridge bidding rely on and are thus restricted by human-designed bidding systems or features. In this work, we propose a pioneering bridge bidding system without the aid of human domain knowledge. The system is based on a novel deep reinforcement learning model, which extracts sophisticated features and learns to bid automatically based on raw card data. The model includes an upper-confidence-bound algorithm and additional techniques to achieve a balance between exploration and exploitation. Our experiments validate the promising performance of our proposed model. In particular, the model advances from having no knowledge about bidding to achieving superior performance when compared with a champion-winning computer bridge program that implements a human-designed bidding system.