Jean‐François Bercher

Nicolas Michel, Romain Negrel, Giovanni Chierchia et al.

We study Online Continual Learning with missing labels and propose SemiCon, a new contrastive loss designed for partly labeled data. We demonstrate its efficiency by devising a memory-based method trained on an unlabeled data stream, where every data added to memory is labeled using an oracle. Our approach outperforms existing semi-supervised methods when few labels are available, and obtain similar results to state-of-the-art supervised methods while using only 2.6% of labels on Split-CIFAR10 and 10% of labels on Split-CIFAR100.

Pierre Larrenie, Jean-François Bercher, Olivier Venard et al.

Software Defined Networks have opened the door to statistical and AI-based techniques to improve efficiency of networking. Especially to ensure a certain Quality of Service (QoS) for specific applications by routing packets with awareness on content nature (VoIP, video, files, etc.) and its needs (latency, bandwidth, etc.) to use efficiently resources of a network. Predicting various Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) at any level may handle such problems while preserving network bandwidth. The question addressed in this work is the design of efficient and low-cost algorithms for KPI prediction, implementable at the local level. We focus on end-to-end latency prediction, for which we illustrate our approaches and results on a public dataset from the recent international challenge on GNN [1]. We propose several low complexity, locally implementable approaches, achieving significantly lower wall time both for training and inference, with marginally worse prediction accuracy compared to state-of-the-art global GNN solutions.

Pierre Larrenie, Jean-François Bercher, Olivier Venard et al.

Software Defined Networks have opened the door to statistical and AI-based techniques to improve efficiency of networking. Especially to ensure a certain Quality of Service (QoS) for specific applications by routing packets with awareness on content nature (VoIP, video, files, etc.) and its needs (latency, bandwidth, etc.) to use efficiently resources of a network. Monitoring and predicting various Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) at any level may handle such problems while preserving network bandwidth. The question addressed in this work is the design of efficient, low-cost adaptive algorithms for KPI estimation, monitoring and prediction. We focus on end-to-end latency prediction, for which we illustrate our approaches and results on data obtained from a public generator provided after the recent international challenge on GNN [12]. In this paper, we improve our previously proposed low-cost estimators [6] by adding the adaptive dimension, and show that the performances are minimally modified while gaining the ability to track varying networks.

Nicolas Michel, Giovanni Chierchia, Romain Negrel et al.

Deep neural networks have shown remarkable performance when trained on independent and identically distributed data from a fixed set of classes. However, in real-world scenarios, it can be desirable to train models on a continuous stream of data where multiple classification tasks are presented sequentially. This scenario, known as Continual Learning (CL) poses challenges to standard learning algorithms which struggle to maintain knowledge of old tasks while learning new ones. This stability-plasticity dilemma remains central to CL and multiple metrics have been proposed to adequately measure stability and plasticity separately. However, none considers the increasing difficulty of the classification task, which inherently results in performance loss for any model. In that sense, we analyze some limitations of current metrics and identify the presence of setup-induced forgetting. Therefore, we propose new metrics that account for the task's increasing difficulty. Through experiments on benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed metrics can provide new insights into the stability-plasticity trade-off achieved by models in the continual learning environment.

Jean-François Bercher

In this communication, we describe some interrelations between generalized $q$-entropies and a generalized version of Fisher information. In information theory, the de Bruijn identity links the Fisher information and the derivative of the entropy. We show that this identity can be extended to generalized versions of entropy and Fisher information. More precisely, a generalized Fisher information naturally pops up in the expression of the derivative of the Tsallis entropy. This generalized Fisher information also appears as a special case of a generalized Fisher information for estimation problems. Indeed, we derive here a new Cramér-Rao inequality for the estimation of a parameter, which involves a generalized form of Fisher information. This generalized Fisher information reduces to the standard Fisher information as a particular case. In the case of a translation parameter, the general Cramér-Rao inequality leads to an inequality for distributions which is saturated by generalized $q$-Gaussian distributions. These generalized $q$-Gaussians are important in several areas of physics and mathematics. They are known to maximize the $q$-entropies subject to a moment constraint. The Cramér-Rao inequality shows that the generalized $q$-Gaussians also minimize the generalized Fisher information among distributions with a fixed moment. Similarly, the generalized $q$-Gaussians also minimize the generalized Fisher information among distributions with a given $q$-entropy.

Jean-François Bercher

We propose a modified $χ^β$-divergence, give some of its properties, and show that this leads to the definition of a generalized Fisher information. We give generalized Cramér-Rao inequalities, involving this Fisher information, an extension of the Fisher information matrix, and arbitrary norms and power of the estimation error. In the case of a location parameter, we obtain new characterizations of the generalized $q$-Gaussians, for instance as the distribution with a given moment that minimizes the generalized Fisher information. Finally we indicate how the generalized Fisher information can lead to new uncertainty relations.