Qiang Liu

Yuanzhi Duan, Yue Zhou, Peng He et al.

Channel pruning is widely used to reduce the complexity of deep network models. Recent pruning methods usually identify which parts of the network to discard by proposing a channel importance criterion. However, recent studies have shown that these criteria do not work well in all conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Shift Minimization (FSM) method to compress CNN models, which evaluates the feature shift by converging the information of both features and filters. Specifically, we first investigate the compression efficiency with some prevalent methods in different layer-depths and then propose the feature shift concept. Then, we introduce an approximation method to estimate the magnitude of the feature shift, since it is difficult to compute it directly. Besides, we present a distribution-optimization algorithm to compensate for the accuracy loss and improve the network compression efficiency. The proposed method yields state-of-the-art performance on various benchmark networks and datasets, verified by extensive experiments. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/lscgx/FSM.

Zhaocheng Liu, Yingtao Luo, Di Zeng et al. · cmu

Modeling users' dynamic preferences from historical behaviors lies at the core of modern recommender systems. Due to the diverse nature of user interests, recent advances propose the multi-interest networks to encode historical behaviors into multiple interest vectors. In real scenarios, the corresponding items of captured interests are usually retrieved together to get exposure and collected into training data, which produces dependencies among interests. Unfortunately, multi-interest networks may incorrectly concentrate on subtle dependencies among captured interests. Misled by these dependencies, the spurious correlations between irrelevant interests and targets are captured, resulting in the instability of prediction results when training and test distributions do not match. In this paper, we introduce the widely used Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) to measure the degree of independence among captured interests and empirically show that the continuous increase of HSIC may harm model performance. Based on this, we propose a novel multi-interest network, named DEep Stable Multi-Interest Learning (DESMIL), which tries to eliminate the influence of subtle dependencies among captured interests via learning weights for training samples and make model concentrate more on underlying true causation. We conduct extensive experiments on public recommendation datasets, a large-scale industrial dataset and the synthetic datasets which simulate the out-of-distribution data. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed DESMIL outperforms state-of-the-art models by a significant margin. Besides, we also conduct comprehensive model analysis to reveal the reason why DESMIL works to a certain extent.

Xingchao Liu, Lemeng Wu, Mao Ye et al.

Diffusion-based generative models have achieved promising results recently, but raise an array of open questions in terms of conceptual understanding, theoretical analysis, algorithm improvement and extensions to discrete, structured, non-Euclidean domains. This work tries to re-exam the overall framework, in order to gain better theoretical understandings and develop algorithmic extensions for data from arbitrary domains. By viewing diffusion models as latent variable models with unobserved diffusion trajectories and applying maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) with latent trajectories imputed from an auxiliary distribution, we show that both the model construction and the imputation of latent trajectories amount to constructing diffusion bridge processes that achieve deterministic values and constraints at end point, for which we provide a systematic study and a suit of tools. Leveraging our framework, we present 1) a first theoretical error analysis for learning diffusion generation models, and 2) a simple and unified approach to learning on data from different discrete and constrained domains. Experiments show that our methods perform superbly on generating images, semantic segments and 3D point clouds.

Qiang Liu, Zhaocheng Liu, Zhenxi Zhu et al.

Recently, multi-interest models, which extract interests of a user as multiple representation vectors, have shown promising performances for sequential recommendation. However, none of existing multi-interest recommendation models consider the Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) generalization problem, in which interest distribution may change. Considering multiple interests of a user are usually highly correlated, the model has chance to learn spurious correlations between noisy interests and target items. Once the data distribution changes, the correlations among interests may also change, and the spurious correlations will mislead the model to make wrong predictions. To tackle with above OOD generalization problem, we propose a novel multi-interest network, named DEep Stable Multi-Interest Learning (DESMIL), which attempts to de-correlate the extracted interests in the model, and thus spurious correlations can be eliminated. DESMIL applies an attentive module to extract multiple interests, and then selects the most important one for making final predictions. Meanwhile, DESMIL incorporates a weighted correlation estimation loss based on Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC), with which training samples are weighted, to minimize the correlations among extracted interests. Extensive experiments have been conducted under both OOD and random settings, and up to 36.8% and 21.7% relative improvements are achieved respectively.

Yingtao Luo, Zhaocheng Liu, Qiang Liu · cmu

Deep learning models have achieved promising disease prediction performance of the Electronic Health Records (EHR) of patients. However, most models developed under the I.I.D. hypothesis fail to consider the agnostic distribution shifts, diminishing the generalization ability of deep learning models to Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) data. In this setting, spurious statistical correlations that may change in different environments will be exploited, which can cause sub-optimal performances of deep learning models. The unstable correlation between procedures and diagnoses existed in the training distribution can cause spurious correlation between historical EHR and future diagnosis. To address this problem, we propose to use a causal representation learning method called Causal Healthcare Embedding (CHE). CHE aims at eliminating the spurious statistical relationship by removing the dependencies between diagnoses and procedures. We introduce the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) to measure the degree of independence between the embedded diagnosis and procedure features. Based on causal view analyses, we perform the sample weighting technique to get rid of such spurious relationship for the stable learning of EHR across different environments. Moreover, our proposed CHE method can be used as a flexible plug-and-play module that can enhance existing deep learning models on EHR. Extensive experiments on two public datasets and five state-of-the-art baselines unequivocally show that CHE can improve the prediction accuracy of deep learning models on out-of-distribution data by a large margin. In addition, the interpretability study shows that CHE could successfully leverage causal structures to reflect a more reasonable contribution of historical records for predictions.

Mao Ye, Ruichen Jiang, Haoxiang Wang et al.

One of the key challenges of learning an online recommendation model is the temporal domain shift, which causes the mismatch between the training and testing data distribution and hence domain generalization error. To overcome, we propose to learn a meta future gradient generator that forecasts the gradient information of the future data distribution for training so that the recommendation model can be trained as if we were able to look ahead at the future of its deployment. Compared with Batch Update, a widely used paradigm, our theory suggests that the proposed algorithm achieves smaller temporal domain generalization error measured by a gradient variation term in a local regret. We demonstrate the empirical advantage by comparing with various representative baselines.

Haoxin Wang, Ziran Wang, Dawei Chen et al.

A Metaverse is a perpetual, immersive, and shared digital universe that is linked to but beyond the physical reality, and this emerging technology is attracting enormous attention from different industries. In this article, we define the first holistic realization of the metaverse in the mobility domain, coined as ``metamobility". We present our vision of what metamobility will be and describe its basic architecture. We also propose two use cases, tactile live maps and meta-empowered advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), to demonstrate how the metamobility will benefit and reshape future mobility systems. Each use case is discussed from the perspective of the technology evolution, future vision, and critical research challenges, respectively. Finally, we identify multiple concrete open research issues for the development and deployment of the metamobility.

Ruiqing Yan, Fan Zhang, Mengyuan Huang et al.

Detection of object anomalies is crucial in industrial processes, but unsupervised anomaly detection and localization is particularly important due to the difficulty of obtaining a large number of defective samples and the unpredictable types of anomalies in real life. Among the existing unsupervised anomaly detection and localization methods, the NF-based scheme has achieved better results. However, the two subnets (complex functions) $s_{i}(u_{i})$ and $t_{i}(u_{i})$ in NF are usually multilayer perceptrons, which need to squeeze the input visual features from 2D flattening to 1D, destroying the spatial location relationship in the feature map and losing the spatial structure information. In order to retain and effectively extract spatial structure information, we design in this study a complex function model with alternating CBAM embedded in a stacked $3\times3$ full convolution, which is able to retain and effectively extract spatial structure information in the normalized flow model. Extensive experimental results on the MVTec AD dataset show that CAINNFlow achieves advanced levels of accuracy and inference efficiency based on CNN and Transformer backbone networks as feature extractors, and CAINNFlow achieves a pixel-level AUC of $98.64\%$ for anomaly detection in MVTec AD.

Dilin Wang, Chengyue Gong, Meng Li et al.

Weight-sharing neural architecture search (NAS) is an effective technique for automating efficient neural architecture design. Weight-sharing NAS builds a supernet that assembles all the architectures as its sub-networks and jointly trains the supernet with the sub-networks. The success of weight-sharing NAS heavily relies on distilling the knowledge of the supernet to the sub-networks. However, we find that the widely used distillation divergence, i.e., KL divergence, may lead to student sub-networks that over-estimate or under-estimate the uncertainty of the teacher supernet, leading to inferior performance of the sub-networks. In this work, we propose to improve the supernet training with a more generalized alpha-divergence. By adaptively selecting the alpha-divergence, we simultaneously prevent the over-estimation or under-estimation of the uncertainty of the teacher model. We apply the proposed alpha-divergence based supernets training to both slimmable neural networks and weight-sharing NAS, and demonstrate significant improvements. Specifically, our discovered model family, AlphaNet, outperforms prior-art models on a wide range of FLOPs regimes, including BigNAS, Once-for-All networks, and AttentiveNAS. We achieve ImageNet top-1 accuracy of 80.0% with only 444M FLOPs. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/AlphaNet.

Dingshuo Chen, Shuchen Xue, Liuji Chen et al.

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs), widely recognized for their potential to generate high-quality samples, tend to go unnoticed in representation learning. While recent progress has highlighted their potential for capturing visual semantics, adapting DPMs to graph representation learning remains in its infancy. In this paper, we introduce Graffe, a self-supervised diffusion model proposed for graph representation learning. It features a graph encoder that distills a source graph into a compact representation, which, in turn, serves as the condition to guide the denoising process of the diffusion decoder. To evaluate the effectiveness of our model, we first explore the theoretical foundations of applying diffusion models to representation learning, proving that the denoising objective implicitly maximizes the conditional mutual information between data and its representation. Specifically, we prove that the negative logarithm of the denoising score matching loss is a tractable lower bound for the conditional mutual information. Empirically, we conduct a series of case studies to validate our theoretical insights. In addition, Graffe delivers competitive results under the linear probing setting on node and graph classification tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance on 9 of the 11 real-world datasets. These findings indicate that powerful generative models, especially diffusion models, serve as an effective tool for graph representation learning.

Jinghao Zhang, Yanqiao Zhu, Qiang Liu et al.

Recent years have witnessed growing interests in multimedia recommendation, which aims to predict whether a user will interact with an item with multimodal contents. Previous studies focus on modeling user-item interactions with multimodal features included as side information. However, this scheme is not well-designed for multimedia recommendation. Firstly, only collaborative item-item relationships are implicitly modeled through high-order item-user-item co-occurrences. We argue that the latent semantic item-item structures underlying these multimodal contents could be beneficial for learning better item representations and assist the recommender models to comprehensively discover candidate items. Secondly, previous studies disregard the fine-grained multimodal fusion. Although having access to multiple modalities might allow us to capture rich information, we argue that the simple coarse-grained fusion by linear combination or concatenation in previous work is insufficient to fully understand content information and item relationships.To this end, we propose a latent structure MIning with ContRastive mOdality fusion method (MICRO for brevity). To be specific, we devise a novel modality-aware structure learning module, which learns item-item relationships for each modality. Based on the learned modality-aware latent item relationships, we perform graph convolutions that explicitly inject item affinities to modality-aware item representations. Then, we design a novel contrastive method to fuse multimodal features. These enriched item representations can be plugged into existing collaborative filtering methods to make more accurate recommendations. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art baselines.

Mao Ye, Qiang Liu

Bootstrap is a principled and powerful frequentist statistical tool for uncertainty quantification. Unfortunately, standard bootstrap methods are computationally intensive due to the need of drawing a large i.i.d. bootstrap sample to approximate the ideal bootstrap distribution; this largely hinders their application in large-scale machine learning, especially deep learning problems. In this work, we propose an efficient method to explicitly \emph{optimize} a small set of high quality ``centroid'' points to better approximate the ideal bootstrap distribution. We achieve this by minimizing a simple objective function that is asymptotically equivalent to the Wasserstein distance to the ideal bootstrap distribution. This allows us to provide an accurate estimation of uncertainty with a small number of bootstrap centroids, outperforming the naive i.i.d. sampling approach. Empirically, we show that our method can boost the performance of bootstrap in a variety of applications.

Mengqi Zhang, Shu Wu, Xueli Yu et al.

Modeling user preference from his historical sequences is one of the core problems of sequential recommendation. Existing methods in this field are widely distributed from conventional methods to deep learning methods. However, most of them only model users' interests within their own sequences and ignore the dynamic collaborative signals among different user sequences, making it insufficient to explore users' preferences. We take inspiration from dynamic graph neural networks to cope with this challenge, modeling the user sequence and dynamic collaborative signals into one framework. We propose a new method named Dynamic Graph Neural Network for Sequential Recommendation (DGSR), which connects different user sequences through a dynamic graph structure, exploring the interactive behavior of users and items with time and order information. Furthermore, we design a Dynamic Graph Recommendation Network to extract user's preferences from the dynamic graph. Consequently, the next-item prediction task in sequential recommendation is converted into a link prediction between the user node and the item node in a dynamic graph. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks show that DGSR outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. Further studies demonstrate the rationality and effectiveness of modeling user sequences through a dynamic graph.

Xingchao Liu, Xing Han, Na Zhang et al.

Learning monotonic models with respect to a subset of the inputs is a desirable feature to effectively address the fairness, interpretability, and generalization issues in practice. Existing methods for learning monotonic neural networks either require specifically designed model structures to ensure monotonicity, which can be too restrictive/complicated, or enforce monotonicity by adjusting the learning process, which cannot provably guarantee the learned model is monotonic on selected features. In this work, we propose to certify the monotonicity of the general piece-wise linear neural networks by solving a mixed integer linear programming problem.This provides a new general approach for learning monotonic neural networks with arbitrary model structures. Our method allows us to train neural networks with heuristic monotonicity regularizations, and we can gradually increase the regularization magnitude until the learned network is certified monotonic. Compared to prior works, our approach does not require human-designed constraints on the weight space and also yields more accurate approximation. Empirical studies on various datasets demonstrate the efficiency of our approach over the state-of-the-art methods, such as Deep Lattice Networks.

Zeyu Cui, Feng Yu, Shu Wu et al.

Item representations in recommendation systems are expected to reveal the properties of items. Collaborative recommender methods usually represent an item as one single latent vector. Nowadays the e-commercial platforms provide various kinds of attribute information for items (e.g., category, price and style of clothing). Utilizing these attribute information for better item representations is popular in recent years. Some studies use the given attribute information as side information, which is concatenated with the item latent vector to augment representations. However, the mixed item representations fail to fully exploit the rich attribute information or provide explanation in recommender systems. To this end, we propose a fine-grained Disentangled Item Representation (DIR) for recommender systems in this paper, where the items are represented as several separated attribute vectors instead of a single latent vector. In this way, the items are represented at the attribute level, which can provide fine-grained information of items in recommendation. We introduce a learning strategy, LearnDIR, which can allocate the corresponding attribute vectors to items. We show how DIR can be applied to two typical models, Matrix Factorization (MF) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Experimental results on two real-world datasets show that the models developed under the framework of DIR are effective and efficient. Even using fewer parameters, the proposed model can outperform the state-of-the-art methods, especially in the cold-start situation. In addition, we make visualizations to show that our proposition can provide explanation for users in real-world applications.

Yihao Feng, Tongzheng Ren, Ziyang Tang et al.

We consider off-policy evaluation (OPE), which evaluates the performance of a new policy from observed data collected from previous experiments, without requiring the execution of the new policy. This finds important applications in areas with high execution cost or safety concerns, such as medical diagnosis, recommendation systems and robotics. In practice, due to the limited information from off-policy data, it is highly desirable to construct rigorous confidence intervals, not just point estimation, for the policy performance. In this work, we propose a new variational framework which reduces the problem of calculating tight confidence bounds in OPE into an optimization problem on a feasible set that catches the true state-action value function with high probability. The feasible set is constructed by leveraging statistical properties of a recently proposed kernel Bellman loss (Feng et al., 2019). We design an efficient computational approach for calculating our bounds, and extend it to perform post-hoc diagnosis and correction for existing estimators. Empirical results show that our method yields tight confidence intervals in different settings.

Mao Ye, Chengyue Gong, Qiang Liu

State-of-the-art NLP models can often be fooled by human-unaware transformations such as synonymous word substitution. For security reasons, it is of critical importance to develop models with certified robustness that can provably guarantee that the prediction is can not be altered by any possible synonymous word substitution. In this work, we propose a certified robust method based on a new randomized smoothing technique, which constructs a stochastic ensemble by applying random word substitutions on the input sentences, and leverage the statistical properties of the ensemble to provably certify the robustness. Our method is simple and structure-free in that it only requires the black-box queries of the model outputs, and hence can be applied to any pre-trained models (such as BERT) and any types of models (world-level or subword-level). Our method significantly outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods for certified robustness on both IMDB and Amazon text classification tasks. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first work to achieve certified robustness on large systems such as BERT with practically meaningful certified accuracy.

Mao Ye, Chengyue Gong, Lizhen Nie et al.

Recent empirical works show that large deep neural networks are often highly redundant and one can find much smaller subnetworks without a significant drop of accuracy. However, most existing methods of network pruning are empirical and heuristic, leaving it open whether good subnetworks provably exist, how to find them efficiently, and if network pruning can be provably better than direct training using gradient descent. We answer these problems positively by proposing a simple greedy selection approach for finding good subnetworks, which starts from an empty network and greedily adds important neurons from the large network. This differs from the existing methods based on backward elimination, which remove redundant neurons from the large network. Theoretically, applying the greedy selection strategy on sufficiently large {pre-trained} networks guarantees to find small subnetworks with lower loss than networks directly trained with gradient descent. Our results also apply to pruning randomly weighted networks. Practically, we improve prior arts of network pruning on learning compact neural architectures on ImageNet, including ResNet, MobilenetV2/V3, and ProxylessNet. Our theory and empirical results on MobileNet suggest that we should fine-tune the pruned subnetworks to leverage the information from the large model, instead of re-training from new random initialization as suggested in \citet{liu2018rethinking}.

Pengchuan Zhang, Hunter Lang, Qiang Liu et al.

We propose a statistical adaptive procedure called SALSA for automatically scheduling the learning rate (step size) in stochastic gradient methods. SALSA first uses a smoothed stochastic line-search procedure to gradually increase the learning rate, then automatically switches to a statistical method to decrease the learning rate. The line search procedure ``warms up'' the optimization process, reducing the need for expensive trial and error in setting an initial learning rate. The method for decreasing the learning rate is based on a new statistical test for detecting stationarity when using a constant step size. Unlike in prior work, our test applies to a broad class of stochastic gradient algorithms without modification. The combined method is highly robust and autonomous, and it matches the performance of the best hand-tuned learning rate schedules in our experiments on several deep learning tasks.

Dinghuai Zhang, Mao Ye, Chengyue Gong et al.

Randomized classifiers have been shown to provide a promising approach for achieving certified robustness against adversarial attacks in deep learning. However, most existing methods only leverage Gaussian smoothing noise and only work for $\ell_2$ perturbation. We propose a general framework of adversarial certification with non-Gaussian noise and for more general types of attacks, from a unified functional optimization perspective. Our new framework allows us to identify a key trade-off between accuracy and robustness via designing smoothing distributions, helping to design new families of non-Gaussian smoothing distributions that work more efficiently for different $\ell_p$ settings, including $\ell_1$, $\ell_2$ and $\ell_\infty$ attacks. Our proposed methods achieve better certification results than previous works and provide a new perspective on randomized smoothing certification.

Chengyue Gong, Tongzheng Ren, Mao Ye et al.

We propose \emph{MaxUp}, an embarrassingly simple, highly effective technique for improving the generalization performance of machine learning models, especially deep neural networks. The idea is to generate a set of augmented data with some random perturbations or transforms and minimize the maximum, or worst case loss over the augmented data. By doing so, we implicitly introduce a smoothness or robustness regularization against the random perturbations, and hence improve the generation performance. For example, in the case of Gaussian perturbation, \emph{MaxUp} is asymptotically equivalent to using the gradient norm of the loss as a penalty to encourage smoothness. We test \emph{MaxUp} on a range of tasks, including image classification, language modeling, and adversarial certification, on which \emph{MaxUp} consistently outperforms the existing best baseline methods, without introducing substantial computational overhead. In particular, we improve ImageNet classification from the state-of-the-art top-1 accuracy $85.5\%$ without extra data to $85.8\%$. Code will be released soon.

Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Liang Wang

Visual information is an important factor in recommender systems, in which users' selections consist of two components: \emph{preferences} and \emph{demands}. Some studies has been done for modeling users' preferences in visual recommendation. However, conventional methods models items in a common visual feature space, which may fail in capturing \emph{styles} of items. We propose a DeepStyle method for learning style features of items. DeepStyle eliminates the categorical information of items, which is dominant in the original visual feature space, based on a Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) architecture. For modeling users' demands on different categories of items, the problem can be formulated as recommendation with contextual and sequential information. To solve this problem, we propose a Context-Aware Gated Recurrent Unit (CA-GRU) method, which can capture sequential and contextual information simultaneously. Furthermore, the aggregation of prediction on preferences and demands, i.e., prediction generated by DeepStyle and CA-GRU, can model users' selection behaviors more completely. Experiments conducted on real-world datasets illustrates the effectiveness of our proposed methods in visual recommendation.

Dilin Wang, Meng Li, Lemeng Wu et al.

Designing energy-efficient networks is of critical importance for enabling state-of-the-art deep learning in mobile and edge settings where the computation and energy budgets are highly limited. Recently, Liu et al. (2019) framed the search of efficient neural architectures into a continuous splitting process: it iteratively splits existing neurons into multiple off-springs to achieve progressive loss minimization, thus finding novel architectures by gradually growing the neural network. However, this method was not specifically tailored for designing energy-efficient networks, and is computationally expensive on large-scale benchmarks. In this work, we substantially improve Liu et al. (2019) in two significant ways: 1) we incorporate the energy cost of splitting different neurons to better guide the splitting process, thereby discovering more energy-efficient network architectures; 2) we substantially speed up the splitting process of Liu et al. (2019), which requires expensive eigen-decomposition, by proposing a highly scalable Rayleigh-quotient stochastic gradient algorithm. Our fast algorithm allows us to reduce the computational cost of splitting to the same level of typical back-propagation updates and enables efficient implementation on GPU. Extensive empirical results show that our method can train highly accurate and energy-efficient networks on challenging datasets such as ImageNet, improving a variety of baselines, including the pruning-based methods and expert-designed architectures.

Dilin Wang, Hao Liu, Qiang Liu

Variational inference with α-divergences has been widely used in modern probabilistic machine learning. Compared to Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, a major advantage of using α-divergences (with positive α values) is their mass-covering property. However, estimating and optimizing α-divergences require to use importance sampling, which could have extremely large or infinite variances due to heavy tails of importance weights. In this paper, we propose a new class of tail-adaptive f-divergences that adaptively change the convex function f with the tail of the importance weights, in a way that theoretically guarantees finite moments, while simultaneously achieving mass-covering properties. We test our methods on Bayesian neural networks, as well as deep reinforcement learning in which our method is applied to improve a recent soft actor-critic (SAC) algorithm. Our results show that our approach yields significant advantages compared with existing methods based on classical KL and α-divergences.

Pan Li, Qiang Liu, Wentao Zhao et al.

In big data era, machine learning is one of fundamental techniques in intrusion detection systems (IDSs). However, practical IDSs generally update their decision module by feeding new data then retraining learning models in a periodical way. Hence, some attacks that comprise the data for training or testing classifiers significantly challenge the detecting capability of machine learning-based IDSs. Poisoning attack, which is one of the most recognized security threats towards machine learning-based IDSs, injects some adversarial samples into the training phase, inducing data drifting of training data and a significant performance decrease of target IDSs over testing data. In this paper, we adopt the Edge Pattern Detection (EPD) algorithm to design a novel poisoning method that attack against several machine learning algorithms used in IDSs. Specifically, we propose a boundary pattern detection algorithm to efficiently generate the points that are near to abnormal data but considered to be normal ones by current classifiers. Then, we introduce a Batch-EPD Boundary Pattern (BEBP) detection algorithm to overcome the limitation of the number of edge pattern points generated by EPD and to obtain more useful adversarial samples. Based on BEBP, we further present a moderate but effective poisoning method called chronic poisoning attack. Extensive experiments on synthetic and three real network data sets demonstrate the performance of the proposed poisoning method against several well-known machine learning algorithms and a practical intrusion detection method named FMIFS-LSSVM-IDS.

Pengchuan Zhang, Qiang Liu, Dengyong Zhou et al.

Generative adversarial training can be generally understood as minimizing certain moment matching loss defined by a set of discriminator functions, typically neural networks. The discriminator set should be large enough to be able to uniquely identify the true distribution (discriminative), and also be small enough to go beyond memorizing samples (generalizable). In this paper, we show that a discriminator set is guaranteed to be discriminative whenever its linear span is dense in the set of bounded continuous functions. This is a very mild condition satisfied even by neural networks with a single neuron. Further, we develop generalization bounds between the learned distribution and true distribution under different evaluation metrics. When evaluated with neural distance, our bounds show that generalization is guaranteed as long as the discriminator set is small enough, regardless of the size of the generator or hypothesis set. When evaluated with KL divergence, our bound provides an explanation on the counter-intuitive behaviors of testing likelihood in GAN training. Our analysis sheds lights on understanding the practical performance of GANs.

Hao Liu, Yihao Feng, Yi Mao et al.

Policy gradient methods have achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. However, it still often suffers from the large variance issue on policy gradient estimation, which leads to poor sample efficiency during training. In this work, we propose a control variate method to effectively reduce variance for policy gradient methods. Motivated by the Stein's identity, our method extends the previous control variate methods used in REINFORCE and advantage actor-critic by introducing more general action-dependent baseline functions. Empirical studies show that our method significantly improves the sample efficiency of the state-of-the-art policy gradient approaches.

Jinglin Chen, Jian Peng, Qiang Liu

We propose a new localized inference algorithm for answering marginalization queries in large graphical models with the correlation decay property. Given a query variable and a large graphical model, we define a much smaller model in a local region around the query variable in the target model so that the marginal distribution of the query variable can be accurately approximated. We introduce two approximation error bounds based on the Dobrushin's comparison theorem and apply our bounds to derive a greedy expansion algorithm that efficiently guides the selection of neighbor nodes for localized inference. We verify our theoretical bounds on various datasets and demonstrate that our localized inference algorithm can provide fast and accurate approximation for large graphical models.

Jiaqi Guan, Yang Liu, Qiang Liu et al.

Deep neural networks have been remarkable successful in various AI tasks but often cast high computation and energy cost for energy-constrained applications such as mobile sensing. We address this problem by proposing a novel framework that optimizes the prediction accuracy and energy cost simultaneously, thus enabling effective cost-accuracy trade-off at test time. In our framework, each data instance is pushed into a cascade of deep neural networks with increasing sizes, and a selection module is used to sequentially determine when a sufficiently accurate classifier can be used for this data instance. The cascade of neural networks and the selection module are jointly trained in an end-to-end fashion by the REINFORCE algorithm to optimize a trade-off between the computational cost and the predictive accuracy. Our method is able to simultaneously improve the accuracy and efficiency by learning to assign easy instances to fast yet sufficiently accurate classifiers to save computation and energy cost, while assigning harder instances to deeper and more powerful classifiers to ensure satisfiable accuracy. With extensive experiments on several image classification datasets using cascaded ResNet classifiers, we demonstrate that our method outperforms the standard well-trained ResNets in accuracy but only requires less than 20% and 50% FLOPs cost on the CIFAR-10/100 datasets and 66% on the ImageNet dataset, respectively.

Jun Han, Qiang Liu

We propose a novel adaptive importance sampling algorithm which incorporates Stein variational gradient decent algorithm (SVGD) with importance sampling (IS). Our algorithm leverages the nonparametric transforms in SVGD to iteratively decrease the KL divergence between our importance proposal and the target distribution. The advantages of this algorithm are twofold: first, our algorithm turns SVGD into a standard IS algorithm, allowing us to use standard diagnostic and analytic tools of IS to evaluate and interpret the results; second, we do not restrict the choice of our importance proposal to predefined distribution families like traditional (adaptive) IS methods. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our algorithm performs well on evaluating partition functions of restricted Boltzmann machines and testing likelihood of variational auto-encoders.

Yingzhen Li, Richard E. Turner, Qiang Liu

We propose a novel approximate inference algorithm that approximates a target distribution by amortising the dynamics of a user-selected MCMC sampler. The idea is to initialise MCMC using samples from an approximation network, apply the MCMC operator to improve these samples, and finally use the samples to update the approximation network thereby improving its quality. This provides a new generic framework for approximate inference, allowing us to deploy highly complex, or implicitly defined approximation families with intractable densities, including approximations produced by warping a source of randomness through a deep neural network. Experiments consider image modelling with deep generative models as a challenging test for the method. Deep models trained using amortised MCMC are shown to generate realistic looking samples as well as producing diverse imputations for images with regions of missing pixels.

Qiang Liu, Yihao Feng

Variational inference provides a powerful tool for approximate probabilistic in- ference on complex, structured models. Typical variational inference methods, however, require to use inference networks with computationally tractable proba- bility density functions. This largely limits the design and implementation of vari- ational inference methods. We consider wild variational inference methods that do not require tractable density functions on the inference networks, and hence can be applied in more challenging cases. As an example of application, we treat stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) as an inference network, and use our methods to automatically adjust the step sizes of SGLD, yielding significant improvement over the hand-designed step size schemes

Qiang Cui, Shu Wu, Qiang Liu et al.

Sequential recommendation is a fundamental task for network applications, and it usually suffers from the item cold start problem due to the insufficiency of user feedbacks. There are currently three kinds of popular approaches which are respectively based on matrix factorization (MF) of collaborative filtering, Markov chain (MC), and recurrent neural network (RNN). Although widely used, they have some limitations. MF based methods could not capture dynamic user's interest. The strong Markov assumption greatly limits the performance of MC based methods. RNN based methods are still in the early stage of incorporating additional information. Based on these basic models, many methods with additional information only validate incorporating one modality in a separate way. In this work, to make the sequential recommendation and deal with the item cold start problem, we propose a Multi-View Recurrent Neural Network (MV-RNN}) model. Given the latent feature, MV-RNN can alleviate the item cold start problem by incorporating visual and textual information. First, At the input of MV-RNN, three different combinations of multi-view features are studied, like concatenation, fusion by addition and fusion by reconstructing the original multi-modal data. MV-RNN applies the recurrent structure to dynamically capture the user's interest. Second, we design a separate structure and a united structure on the hidden state of MV-RNN to explore a more effective way to handle multi-view features. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that MV-RNN can effectively generate the personalized ranking list, tackle the missing modalities problem and significantly alleviate the item cold start problem.

Dilin Wang, Qiang Liu

We propose a simple algorithm to train stochastic neural networks to draw samples from given target distributions for probabilistic inference. Our method is based on iteratively adjusting the neural network parameters so that the output changes along a Stein variational gradient that maximumly decreases the KL divergence with the target distribution. Our method works for any target distribution specified by their unnormalized density function, and can train any black-box architectures that are differentiable in terms of the parameters we want to adapt. As an application of our method, we propose an amortized MLE algorithm for training deep energy model, where a neural sampler is adaptively trained to approximate the likelihood function. Our method mimics an adversarial game between the deep energy model and the neural sampler, and obtains realistic-looking images competitive with the state-of-the-art results.

Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Diyi Wang et al.

Since sequential information plays an important role in modeling user behaviors, various sequential recommendation methods have been proposed. Methods based on Markov assumption are widely-used, but independently combine several most recent components. Recently, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) based methods have been successfully applied in several sequential modeling tasks. However, for real-world applications, these methods have difficulty in modeling the contextual information, which has been proved to be very important for behavior modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel model, named Context-Aware Recurrent Neural Networks (CA-RNN). Instead of using the constant input matrix and transition matrix in conventional RNN models, CA-RNN employs adaptive context-specific input matrices and adaptive context-specific transition matrices. The adaptive context-specific input matrices capture external situations where user behaviors happen, such as time, location, weather and so on. And the adaptive context-specific transition matrices capture how lengths of time intervals between adjacent behaviors in historical sequences affect the transition of global sequential features. Experimental results show that the proposed CA-RNN model yields significant improvements over state-of-the-art sequential recommendation methods and context-aware recommendation methods on two public datasets, i.e., the Taobao dataset and the Movielens-1M dataset.

Qiang Liu, Dilin Wang

We propose a general purpose variational inference algorithm that forms a natural counterpart of gradient descent for optimization. Our method iteratively transports a set of particles to match the target distribution, by applying a form of functional gradient descent that minimizes the KL divergence. Empirical studies are performed on various real world models and datasets, on which our method is competitive with existing state-of-the-art methods. The derivation of our method is based on a new theoretical result that connects the derivative of KL divergence under smooth transforms with Stein's identity and a recently proposed kernelized Stein discrepancy, which is of independent interest.

Gedas Bertasius, Qiang Liu, Lorenzo Torresani et al.

Conditional random fields (CRFs) provide a powerful tool for structured prediction, but cast significant challenges in both the learning and inference steps. Approximation techniques are widely used in both steps, which should be considered jointly to guarantee good performance (a.k.a. "inferning"). Perturb-and-MAP models provide a promising alternative to CRFs, but require global combinatorial optimization and hence they are usable only on specific models. In this work, we present a new Local Perturb-and-MAP (locPMAP) framework that replaces the global optimization with a local optimization by exploiting our observed connection between locPMAP and the pseudolikelihood of the original CRF model. We test our approach on three different vision tasks and show that our method achieves consistently improved performance over other approximate inference techniques optimized to a pseudolikelihood objective. Additionally, we demonstrate that we can integrate our method in the fully convolutional network framework to increase our model's complexity. Finally, our observed connection between locPMAP and the pseudolikelihood leads to a novel perspective for understanding and using pseudolikelihood.

Qiang Liu, Alexander Ihler

The marginal maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) estimation problem, which calculates the mode of the marginal posterior distribution of a subset of variables with the remaining variables marginalized, is an important inference problem in many models, such as those with hidden variables or uncertain parameters. Unfortunately, marginal MAP can be NP-hard even on trees, and has attracted less attention in the literature compared to the joint MAP (maximization) and marginalization problems. We derive a general dual representation for marginal MAP that naturally integrates the marginalization and maximization operations into a joint variational optimization problem, making it possible to easily extend most or all variational-based algorithms to marginal MAP. In particular, we derive a set of "mixed-product" message passing algorithms for marginal MAP, whose form is a hybrid of max-product, sum-product and a novel "argmax-product" message updates. We also derive a class of convergent algorithms based on proximal point methods, including one that transforms the marginal MAP problem into a sequence of standard marginalization problems. Theoretically, we provide guarantees under which our algorithms give globally or locally optimal solutions, and provide novel upper bounds on the optimal objectives. Empirically, we demonstrate that our algorithms significantly outperform the existing approaches, including a state-of-the-art algorithm based on local search methods.