Qi Qi

Qi Qi, Shervin Ardeshir

Despite the success of deep-learning models in many tasks, there have been concerns about such models learning shortcuts, and their lack of robustness to irrelevant confounders. When it comes to models directly trained on human faces, a sensitive confounder is that of human identities. Many face-related tasks should ideally be identity-independent, and perform uniformly across different individuals (i.e. be fair). One way to measure and enforce such robustness and performance uniformity is through enforcing it during training, assuming identity-related information is available at scale. However, due to privacy concerns and also the cost of collecting such information, this is often not the case, and most face datasets simply contain input images and their corresponding task-related labels. Thus, improving identity-related robustness without the need for such annotations is of great importance. Here, we explore using face-recognition embedding vectors, as proxies for identities, to enforce such robustness. We propose to use the structure in the face-recognition embedding space, to implicitly emphasize rare samples within each class. We do so by weighting samples according to their conditional inverse density (CID) in the proxy embedding space. Our experiments suggest that such a simple sample weighting scheme, not only improves the training robustness, it often improves the overall performance as a result of such robustness. We also show that employing such constraints during training results in models that are significantly less sensitive to different levels of bias in the dataset.

Qi Qi, Shervin Ardeshir, Yi Xu et al.

Improving fairness between privileged and less-privileged sensitive attribute groups (e.g, {race, gender}) has attracted lots of attention. To enhance the model performs uniformly well in different sensitive attributes, we propose a principled \underline{R}obust \underline{A}dversarial \underline{A}ttribute \underline{N}eighbourhood (RAAN) loss to debias the classification head and promote a fairer representation distribution across different sensitive attribute groups. The key idea of RAAN is to mitigate the differences of biased representations between different sensitive attribute groups by assigning each sample an adversarial robust weight, which is defined on the representations of adversarial attribute neighbors, i.e, the samples from different protected groups. To provide efficient optimization algorithms, we cast the RAAN into a sum of coupled compositional functions and propose a stochastic adaptive (Adam-style) and non-adaptive (SGD-style) algorithm framework SCRAAN with provable theoretical guarantee. Extensive empirical studies on fairness-related benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Qi Qi, Yi Xu, Rong Jin et al.

In this paper, we present a simple yet effective provable method (named ABSGD) for addressing the data imbalance or label noise problem in deep learning. Our method is a simple modification to momentum SGD where we assign an individual importance weight to each sample in the mini-batch. The individual-level weight of sampled data is systematically proportional to the exponential of a scaled loss value of the data, where the scaling factor is interpreted as the regularization parameter in the framework of distributionally robust optimization (DRO). Depending on whether the scaling factor is positive or negative, ABSGD is guaranteed to converge to a stationary point of an information-regularized min-max or min-min DRO problem, respectively. Compared with existing class-level weighting schemes, our method can capture the diversity between individual examples within each class. Compared with existing individual-level weighting methods using meta-learning that require three backward propagations for computing mini-batch stochastic gradients, our method is more efficient with only one backward propagation at each iteration as in standard deep learning methods. ABSGD is flexible enough to combine with other robust losses without any additional cost. Our empirical studies on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.\footnote{Code is available at:\url{https://github.com/qiqi-helloworld/ABSGD/}}

Hanbing Liu, Haoyang Li, Xiaokang Zhang et al.

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in complex reasoning tasks like math word problems and code generation. However, when applied to Text-to-SQL datasets, it often fails to improve performance and can even degrade it. Our investigation reveals the root cause: unlike math and code tasks, which naturally integrate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with DPO, Text-to-SQL datasets typically include only final answers (gold SQL queries) without detailed CoT solutions. By augmenting Text-to-SQL datasets with synthetic CoT solutions, we achieve, for the first time, consistent and significant performance improvements using DPO. Our analysis shows that CoT reasoning is crucial for unlocking DPO's potential, as it mitigates reward hacking, strengthens discriminative capabilities, and improves scalability. These findings offer valuable insights for building more robust Text-to-SQL models. To support further research, we publicly release the code and CoT-enhanced datasets.

Yuanyi Wang, Haifeng Sun, Jingyu Wang et al.

Entity alignment (EA), a pivotal process in integrating multi-source Knowledge Graphs (KGs), seeks to identify equivalent entity pairs across these graphs. Most existing approaches regard EA as a graph representation learning task, concentrating on enhancing graph encoders. However, the decoding process in EA - essential for effective operation and alignment accuracy - has received limited attention and remains tailored to specific datasets and model architectures, necessitating both entity and additional explicit relation embeddings. This specificity limits its applicability, particularly in GNN-based models. To address this gap, we introduce a novel, generalized, and efficient decoding approach for EA, relying solely on entity embeddings. Our method optimizes the decoding process by minimizing Dirichlet energy, leading to the gradient flow within the graph, to maximize graph homophily. The discretization of the gradient flow produces a fast and scalable approach, termed Triple Feature Propagation (TFP). TFP innovatively generalizes adjacency matrices to multi-views matrices:entity-to-entity, entity-to-relation, relation-to-entity, and relation-to-triple. The gradient flow through generalized matrices enables TFP to harness the multi-view structural information of KGs. Rigorous experimentation on diverse public datasets demonstrates that our approach significantly enhances various EA methods. Notably, the approach achieves these advancements with less than 6 seconds of additional computational time, establishing a new benchmark in efficiency and adaptability for future EA methods.

Qi Qi, Youzhi Luo, Zhao Xu et al.

Areas under ROC (AUROC) and precision-recall curves (AUPRC) are common metrics for evaluating classification performance for imbalanced problems. Compared with AUROC, AUPRC is a more appropriate metric for highly imbalanced datasets. While stochastic optimization of AUROC has been studied extensively, principled stochastic optimization of AUPRC has been rarely explored. In this work, we propose a principled technical method to optimize AUPRC for deep learning. Our approach is based on maximizing the averaged precision (AP), which is an unbiased point estimator of AUPRC. We cast the objective into a sum of {\it dependent compositional functions} with inner functions dependent on random variables of the outer level. We propose efficient adaptive and non-adaptive stochastic algorithms named SOAP with {\it provable convergence guarantee under mild conditions} by leveraging recent advances in stochastic compositional optimization. Extensive experimental results on image and graph datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms prior methods on imbalanced problems in terms of AUPRC. To the best of our knowledge, our work represents the first attempt to optimize AUPRC with provable convergence. The SOAP has been implemented in the libAUC library at~\url{https://libauc.org/}.

Qi Qi, Pak Hay Kwok

This paper details our solution to Traffic4cast 2020. Similar to Traffic4cast 2019, Traffic4cast 2020 challenged its contestants to develop algorithms that can predict the future traffic states of big cities. Our team tackled this challenge on two fronts. We studied the importance of feature and loss function design, and achieved significant improvement to the best performing U-Net solution from last year. We also explored the use of Graph Neural Networks and introduced a novel ensemble GNN architecture which outperformed the GNN solution from last year. While our GNN was improved, it was still unable to match the performance of U-Nets and the potential reasons for this shortfall were discussed. Our final solution, an ensemble of our U-Net and GNN, achieved the 4th place solution in Traffic4cast 2020.

Zhengyang Wang, Meng Liu, Youzhi Luo et al.

Properties of molecules are indicative of their functions and thus are useful in many applications. With the advances of deep learning methods, computational approaches for predicting molecular properties are gaining increasing momentum. However, there lacks customized and advanced methods and comprehensive tools for this task currently. Here we develop a suite of comprehensive machine learning methods and tools spanning different computational models, molecular representations, and loss functions for molecular property prediction and drug discovery. Specifically, we represent molecules as both graphs and sequences. Built on these representations, we develop novel deep models for learning from molecular graphs and sequences. In order to learn effectively from highly imbalanced datasets, we develop advanced loss functions that optimize areas under precision-recall curves. Altogether, our work not only serves as a comprehensive tool, but also contributes towards developing novel and advanced graph and sequence learning methodologies. Results on both online and offline antibiotics discovery and molecular property prediction tasks show that our methods achieve consistent improvements over prior methods. In particular, our methods achieve #1 ranking in terms of both ROC-AUC and PRC-AUC on the AI Cures Open Challenge for drug discovery related to COVID-19. Our software is released as part of the MoleculeX library under AdvProp.

Daoming Lyu, Qi Qi, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh et al.

Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues with convergence. A few variance-reduced on-policy policy gradient algorithms have been recently proposed that use methods from stochastic optimization to reduce the variance of the gradient estimate in the REINFORCE algorithm. However, these algorithms are not designed for the off-policy setting and are memory-inefficient, since they need to collect and store a large ``reference'' batch of samples from time to time. To achieve variance-reduced off-policy-stable policy optimization, we propose an algorithm family that is memory-efficient, stochastically variance-reduced, and capable of learning from off-policy samples. Empirical studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.