Dongha Kim

Dongha Kim, Jaesung Hwang, Jongjin Lee et al.

The unsupervised outlier detection (UOD) problem refers to a task to identify inliers given training data which contain outliers as well as inliers, without any labeled information about inliers and outliers. It has been widely recognized that using fully-trained likelihood-based deep generative models (DGMs) often results in poor performance in distinguishing inliers from outliers. In this study, we claim that the likelihood itself could serve as powerful evidence for identifying inliers in UOD tasks, provided that DGMs are carefully under-fitted. Our approach begins with a novel observation called the inlier-memorization (IM) effect-when training a deep generative model with data including outliers, the model initially memorizes inliers before outliers. Based on this finding, we develop a new method called the outlier detection via the IM effect (ODIM). Remarkably, the ODIM requires only a few updates, making it computationally efficient-at least tens of times faster than other deep-learning-based algorithms. Also, the ODIM filters out outliers excellently, regardless of the data type, including tabular, image, and text data. To validate the superiority and efficiency of our method, we provide extensive empirical analyses on close to 60 datasets.

Seoyoung Cho, Jaesung Hwang, Kwan-Young Bak et al.

Outlier detection (OD) is the task of identifying unusual observations (or outliers) from a given or upcoming data by learning unique patterns of normal observations (or inliers). Recently, a study introduced a powerful unsupervised OD (UOD) solver based on a new observation of deep generative models, called inlier-memorization (IM) effect, which suggests that generative models memorize inliers before outliers in early learning stages. In this study, we aim to develop a theoretically principled method to address UOD tasks by maximally utilizing the IM effect. We begin by observing that the IM effect is observed more clearly when the given training data contain fewer outliers. This finding indicates a potential for enhancing the IM effect in UOD regimes if we can effectively exclude outliers from mini-batches when designing the loss function. To this end, we introduce two main techniques: 1) increasing the mini-batch size as the model training proceeds and 2) using an adaptive threshold to calculate the truncated loss function. We theoretically show that these two techniques effectively filter out outliers from the truncated loss function, allowing us to utilize the IM effect to the fullest. Coupled with an additional ensemble strategy, we propose our method and term it Adaptive Loss Truncation with Batch Increment (ALTBI). We provide extensive experimental results to demonstrate that ALTBI achieves state-of-the-art performance in identifying outliers compared to other recent methods, even with significantly lower computation costs. Additionally, we show that our method yields robust performances when combined with privacy-preserving algorithms.

Sejin Lee, Dongha Kim, Min Song

Goal-oriented chatbots are essential for automating user tasks, such as booking flights or making restaurant reservations. A key component of these systems is Dialogue State Tracking (DST), which interprets user intent and maintains the dialogue state. However, existing DST methods often rely on fixed ontologies and manually compiled slot values, limiting their adaptability to open-domain dialogues. We propose a novel approach that leverages instruction tuning and advanced prompt strategies to enhance DST performance, without relying on any predefined ontologies. Our method enables Large Language Model (LLM) to infer dialogue states through carefully designed prompts and includes an anti-hallucination mechanism to ensure accurate tracking in diverse conversation contexts. Additionally, we employ a Variational Graph Auto-Encoder (VGAE) to model and predict subsequent user intent. Our approach achieved state-of-the-art with a JGA of 42.57% outperforming existing ontology-less DST models, and performed well in open-domain real-world conversations. This work presents a significant advancement in creating more adaptive and accurate goal-oriented chatbots.

Minwoo Chae, Dongha Kim, Yongdai Kim et al.

We investigate statistical properties of a likelihood approach to nonparametric estimation of a singular distribution using deep generative models. More specifically, a deep generative model is used to model high-dimensional data that are assumed to concentrate around some low-dimensional structure. Estimating the distribution supported on this low-dimensional structure, such as a low-dimensional manifold, is challenging due to its singularity with respect to the Lebesgue measure in the ambient space. In the considered model, a usual likelihood approach can fail to estimate the target distribution consistently due to the singularity. We prove that a novel and effective solution exists by perturbing the data with an instance noise, which leads to consistent estimation of the underlying distribution with desirable convergence rates. We also characterize the class of distributions that can be efficiently estimated via deep generative models. This class is sufficiently general to contain various structured distributions such as product distributions, classically smooth distributions and distributions supported on a low-dimensional manifold. Our analysis provides some insights on how deep generative models can avoid the curse of dimensionality for nonparametric distribution estimation. We conduct a thorough simulation study and real data analysis to empirically demonstrate that the proposed data perturbation technique improves the estimation performance significantly.

Minjin Kim, Young-geun Kim, Dongha Kim et al.

The Mixup method (Zhang et al. 2018), which uses linearly interpolated data, has emerged as an effective data augmentation tool to improve generalization performance and the robustness to adversarial examples. The motivation is to curtail undesirable oscillations by its implicit model constraint to behave linearly at in-between observed data points and promote smoothness. In this work, we formally investigate this premise, propose a way to explicitly impose smoothness constraints, and extend it to incorporate with implicit model constraints. First, we derive a new function class composed of kernel-convoluted models (KCM) where the smoothness constraint is directly imposed by locally averaging the original functions with a kernel function. Second, we propose to incorporate the Mixup method into KCM to expand the domains of smoothness. In both cases of KCM and the KCM adapted with the Mixup, we provide risk analysis, respectively, under some conditions for kernels. We show that the upper bound of the excess risk is not slower than that of the original function class. The upper bound of the KCM with the Mixup remains dominated by that of the KCM if the perturbation of the Mixup vanishes faster than \(O(n^{-1/2})\) where \(n\) is a sample size. Using CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, our experiments demonstrate that the KCM with the Mixup outperforms the Mixup method in terms of generalization and robustness to adversarial examples.

Dongha Kim, Yongchan Choi, Yongdai Kim

In semi-supervised learning, virtual adversarial training (VAT) approach is one of the most attractive method due to its intuitional simplicity and powerful performances. VAT finds a classifier which is robust to data perturbation toward the adversarial direction. In this study, we provide a fundamental explanation why VAT works well in semi-supervised learning case and propose new techniques which are simple but powerful to improve the VAT method. Especially we employ the idea of Bad GAN approach, which utilizes bad samples distributed on complement of the support of the input data, without any additional deep generative architectures. We generate bad samples of high-quality by use of the adversarial training used in VAT and also give theoretical explanations why the adversarial training is good at both generating bad samples. An advantage of our proposed method is to achieve the competitive performances compared with other recent studies with much fewer computations. We demonstrate advantages our method by various experiments with well known benchmark image datasets.

Yongdai Kim, Dongha Kim

We provide a theoretical explanation of the role of the number of nodes at each layer in deep neural networks. We prove that the largest variation of a deep neural network with ReLU activation function arises when the layer with the fewest nodes changes its activation pattern. An important implication is that deep neural network is a useful tool to generate functions most of whose variations are concentrated on a smaller area of the input space near the boundaries corresponding to the layer with the fewest nodes. In turn, this property makes the function more invariant to input transformation. That is, our theoretical result gives a clue about how to design the architecture of a deep neural network to increase complexity and transformation invariancy simultaneously.