Chao Chen

Saarthak Kapse, Pushpak Pati, Srijan Das et al.

Introducing interpretability and reasoning into Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) methods for Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis is challenging, given the complexity of gigapixel slides. Traditionally, MIL interpretability is limited to identifying salient regions deemed pertinent for downstream tasks, offering little insight to the end-user (pathologist) regarding the rationale behind these selections. To address this, we propose Self-Interpretable MIL (SI-MIL), a method intrinsically designed for interpretability from the very outset. SI-MIL employs a deep MIL framework to guide an interpretable branch grounded on handcrafted pathological features, facilitating linear predictions. Beyond identifying salient regions, SI-MIL uniquely provides feature-level interpretations rooted in pathological insights for WSIs. Notably, SI-MIL, with its linear prediction constraints, challenges the prevalent myth of an inevitable trade-off between model interpretability and performance, demonstrating competitive results compared to state-of-the-art methods on WSI-level prediction tasks across three cancer types. In addition, we thoroughly benchmark the local and global-interpretability of SI-MIL in terms of statistical analysis, a domain expert study, and desiderata of interpretability, namely, user-friendliness and faithfulness.

Tianle Pu, Changjun Fan, Mutian Shen et al.

Many complex problems encountered in both production and daily life can be conceptualized as combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) over graphs. Recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) based models have emerged as a promising direction, which treat the COPs solving as a heuristic learning problem. However, current finite-horizon-MDP based RL models have inherent limitations. They are not allowed to explore adquately for improving solutions at test time, which may be necessary given the complexity of NP-hard optimization tasks. Some recent attempts solve this issue by focusing on reward design and state feature engineering, which are tedious and ad-hoc. In this work, we instead propose a much simpler but more effective technique, named gauge transformation (GT). The technique is originated from physics, but is very effective in enabling RL agents to explore to continuously improve the solutions during test. Morever, GT is very simple, which can be implemented with less than 10 lines of Python codes, and can be applied to a vast majority of RL models. Experimentally, we show that traditional RL models with GT technique produce the state-of-the-art performances on the MaxCut problem. Furthermore, since GT is independent of any RL models, it can be seamlessly integrated into various RL frameworks, paving the way of these models for more effective explorations in the solving of general COPs.

Wenjie Chu, Shen Li, Chao Chen et al.

Most of the existing methods for debaising in click-through rate (CTR) prediction depend on an oversimplified assumption, i.e., the click probability is the product of observation probability and relevance probability. However, since there is a complicated interplay between these two probabilities, these methods cannot be applied to other scenarios, e.g. query auto completion (QAC) and route recommendation. We propose a general debiasing framework without simplifying the relationships between variables, which can handle all scenarios in CTR prediction. Simulation experiments show that: under the simplest scenario, our method maintains a similar AUC with the state-of-the-art methods; in other scenarios, our method achieves considerable improvements compared with existing methods. Meanwhile, in online experiments, the framework also gains significant improvements consistently.

Yuantian Miao, Chao Chen, Lei Pan et al.

Stealing attack against controlled information, along with the increasing number of information leakage incidents, has become an emerging cyber security threat in recent years. Due to the booming development and deployment of advanced analytics solutions, novel stealing attacks utilize machine learning (ML) algorithms to achieve high success rate and cause a lot of damage. Detecting and defending against such attacks is challenging and urgent so that governments, organizations, and individuals should attach great importance to the ML-based stealing attacks. This survey presents the recent advances in this new type of attack and corresponding countermeasures. The ML-based stealing attack is reviewed in perspectives of three categories of targeted controlled information, including controlled user activities, controlled ML model-related information, and controlled authentication information. Recent publications are summarized to generalize an overarching attack methodology and to derive the limitations and future directions of ML-based stealing attacks. Furthermore, countermeasures are proposed towards developing effective protections from three aspects -- detection, disruption, and isolation.