arXiv subjects

Peng Cui

Publications and source records attributed to Peng Cui.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Model Agnostic Sample Reweighting for Out-of-Distribution Learning

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) and invariant risk minimization (IRM) are two popular methods proposed to improve out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization performance of machine learning models. While effective for small models, it has been observed that these methods can be vulnerable to overfitting with large overparameterized models. This work proposes a principled method, \textbf{M}odel \textbf{A}gnostic sam\textbf{PL}e r\textbf{E}weighting (\textbf{MAPLE}), to effectively address OOD problem, especially in overparameterized scenarios. Our key idea is to find an effective reweighting of the training samples so that the standard empirical risk minimization training of a large model on the weighted training data leads to superior OOD generalization performance. The overfitting issue is addressed by considering a bilevel formulation to search for the sample reweighting, in which the generalization complexity depends on the search space of sample weights instead of the model size. We present theoretical analysis in linear case to prove the insensitivity of MAPLE to model size, and empirically verify its superiority in surpassing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/x-zho14/MAPLE}.

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arXiv2023

Product Ranking for Revenue Maximization with Multiple Purchases

Product ranking is the core problem for revenue-maximizing online retailers. To design proper product ranking algorithms, various consumer choice models are proposed to characterize the consumers' behaviors when they are provided with a list of products. However, existing works assume that each consumer purchases at most one product or will keep viewing the product list after purchasing a product, which does not agree with the common practice in real scenarios. In this paper, we assume that each consumer can purchase multiple products at will. To model consumers' willingness to view and purchase, we set a random attention span and purchase budget, which determines the maximal amount of products that he/she views and purchases, respectively. Under this setting, we first design an optimal ranking policy when the online retailer can precisely model consumers' behaviors. Based on the policy, we further develop the Multiple-Purchase-with-Budget UCB (MPB-UCB) algorithms with $Õ(\sqrt{T})$ regret that estimate consumers' behaviors and maximize revenue simultaneously in online settings. Experiments on both synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

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arXiv2022

Stable Learning via Sparse Variable Independence

The problem of covariate-shift generalization has attracted intensive research attention. Previous stable learning algorithms employ sample reweighting schemes to decorrelate the covariates when there is no explicit domain information about training data. However, with finite samples, it is difficult to achieve the desirable weights that ensure perfect independence to get rid of the unstable variables. Besides, decorrelating within stable variables may bring about high variance of learned models because of the over-reduced effective sample size. A tremendous sample size is required for these algorithms to work. In this paper, with theoretical justification, we propose SVI (Sparse Variable Independence) for the covariate-shift generalization problem. We introduce sparsity constraint to compensate for the imperfectness of sample reweighting under the finite-sample setting in previous methods. Furthermore, we organically combine independence-based sample reweighting and sparsity-based variable selection in an iterative way to avoid decorrelating within stable variables, increasing the effective sample size to alleviate variance inflation. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the improvement of covariate-shift generalization performance brought by SVI.

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arXiv2022

Distributionally Robust Learning with Stable Adversarial Training

Machine learning algorithms with empirical risk minimization are vulnerable under distributional shifts due to the greedy adoption of all the correlations found in training data. There is an emerging literature on tackling this problem by minimizing the worst-case risk over an uncertainty set. However, existing methods mostly construct ambiguity sets by treating all variables equally regardless of the stability of their correlations with the target, resulting in the overwhelmingly-large uncertainty set and low confidence of the learner. In this paper, we propose a novel Stable Adversarial Learning (SAL) algorithm that leverages heterogeneous data sources to construct a more practical uncertainty set and conduct differentiated robustness optimization, where covariates are differentiated according to the stability of their correlations with the target. We theoretically show that our method is tractable for stochastic gradient-based optimization and provide the performance guarantees for our method. Empirical studies on both simulation and real datasets validate the effectiveness of our method in terms of uniformly good performance across unknown distributional shifts.

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arXiv2022

PointSee: Image Enhances Point Cloud

There is a trend to fuse multi-modal information for 3D object detection (3OD). However, the challenging problems of low lightweightness, poor flexibility of plug-and-play, and inaccurate alignment of features are still not well-solved, when designing multi-modal fusion newtorks. We propose PointSee, a lightweight, flexible and effective multi-modal fusion solution to facilitate various 3OD networks by semantic feature enhancement of LiDAR point clouds assembled with scene images. Beyond the existing wisdom of 3OD, PointSee consists of a hidden module (HM) and a seen module (SM): HM decorates LiDAR point clouds using 2D image information in an offline fusion manner, leading to minimal or even no adaptations of existing 3OD networks; SM further enriches the LiDAR point clouds by acquiring point-wise representative semantic features, leading to enhanced performance of existing 3OD networks. Besides the new architecture of PointSee, we propose a simple yet efficient training strategy, to ease the potential inaccurate regressions of 2D object detection networks. Extensive experiments on the popular outdoor/indoor benchmarks show numerical improvements of our PointSee over twenty-two state-of-the-arts.

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arXiv2022

Semi-UFormer: Semi-supervised Uncertainty-aware Transformer for Image Dehazing

Image dehazing is fundamental yet not well-solved in computer vision. Most cutting-edge models are trained in synthetic data, leading to the poor performance on real-world hazy scenarios. Besides, they commonly give deterministic dehazed images while neglecting to mine their uncertainty. To bridge the domain gap and enhance the dehazing performance, we propose a novel semi-supervised uncertainty-aware transformer network, called Semi-UFormer. Semi-UFormer can well leverage both the real-world hazy images and their uncertainty guidance information. Specifically, Semi-UFormer builds itself on the knowledge distillation framework. Such teacher-student networks effectively absorb real-world haze information for quality dehazing. Furthermore, an uncertainty estimation block is introduced into the model to estimate the pixel uncertainty representations, which is then used as a guidance signal to help the student network produce haze-free images more accurately. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Semi-UFormer generalizes well from synthetic to real-world images.

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arXiv2022

ZIN: When and How to Learn Invariance Without Environment Partition?

It is commonplace to encounter heterogeneous data, of which some aspects of the data distribution may vary but the underlying causal mechanisms remain constant. When data are divided into distinct environments according to the heterogeneity, recent invariant learning methods have proposed to learn robust and invariant models based on this environment partition. It is hence tempting to utilize the inherent heterogeneity even when environment partition is not provided. Unfortunately, in this work, we show that learning invariant features under this circumstance is fundamentally impossible without further inductive biases or additional information. Then, we propose a framework to jointly learn environment partition and invariant representation, assisted by additional auxiliary information. We derive sufficient and necessary conditions for our framework to provably identify invariant features under a fairly general setting. Experimental results on both synthetic and real world datasets validate our analysis and demonstrate an improved performance of the proposed framework over existing methods. Finally, our results also raise the need of making the role of inductive biases more explicit in future works, when considering learning invariant models without environment partition. Codes are available at https://github.com/linyongver/ZIN_official .

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arXiv2022

A Survey of Trustworthy Graph Learning: Reliability, Explainability, and Privacy Protection

Deep graph learning has achieved remarkable progresses in both business and scientific areas ranging from finance and e-commerce, to drug and advanced material discovery. Despite these progresses, how to ensure various deep graph learning algorithms behave in a socially responsible manner and meet regulatory compliance requirements becomes an emerging problem, especially in risk-sensitive domains. Trustworthy graph learning (TwGL) aims to solve the above problems from a technical viewpoint. In contrast to conventional graph learning research which mainly cares about model performance, TwGL considers various reliability and safety aspects of the graph learning framework including but not limited to robustness, explainability, and privacy. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of recent leading approaches in the TwGL field from three dimensions, namely, reliability, explainability, and privacy protection. We give a general categorization for existing work and review typical work for each category. To give further insights for TwGL research, we provide a unified view to inspect previous works and build the connection between them. We also point out some important open problems remaining to be solved in the future developments of TwGL.

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arXiv2022

NICO++: Towards Better Benchmarking for Domain Generalization

Despite the remarkable performance that modern deep neural networks have achieved on independent and identically distributed (I.I.D.) data, they can crash under distribution shifts. Most current evaluation methods for domain generalization (DG) adopt the leave-one-out strategy as a compromise on the limited number of domains. We propose a large-scale benchmark with extensive labeled domains named NICO++ along with more rational evaluation methods for comprehensively evaluating DG algorithms. To evaluate DG datasets, we propose two metrics to quantify covariate shift and concept shift, respectively. Two novel generalization bounds from the perspective of data construction are proposed to prove that limited concept shift and significant covariate shift favor the evaluation capability for generalization. Through extensive experiments, NICO++ shows its superior evaluation capability compared with current DG datasets and its contribution in alleviating unfairness caused by the leak of oracle knowledge in model selection.

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arXiv2022

A Roadmap for Big Model

With the rapid development of deep learning, training Big Models (BMs) for multiple downstream tasks becomes a popular paradigm. Researchers have achieved various outcomes in the construction of BMs and the BM application in many fields. At present, there is a lack of research work that sorts out the overall progress of BMs and guides the follow-up research. In this paper, we cover not only the BM technologies themselves but also the prerequisites for BM training and applications with BMs, dividing the BM review into four parts: Resource, Models, Key Technologies and Application. We introduce 16 specific BM-related topics in those four parts, they are Data, Knowledge, Computing System, Parallel Training System, Language Model, Vision Model, Multi-modal Model, Theory&Interpretability, Commonsense Reasoning, Reliability&Security, Governance, Evaluation, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Dialogue and Protein Research. In each topic, we summarize clearly the current studies and propose some future research directions. At the end of this paper, we conclude the further development of BMs in a more general view.

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arXiv2022

Towards Unsupervised Domain Generalization

Domain generalization (DG) aims to help models trained on a set of source domains generalize better on unseen target domains. The performances of current DG methods largely rely on sufficient labeled data, which are usually costly or unavailable, however. Since unlabeled data are far more accessible, we seek to explore how unsupervised learning can help deep models generalize across domains. Specifically, we study a novel generalization problem called unsupervised domain generalization (UDG), which aims to learn generalizable models with unlabeled data and analyze the effects of pre-training on DG. In UDG, models are pretrained with unlabeled data from various source domains before being trained on labeled source data and eventually tested on unseen target domains. Then we propose a method named Domain-Aware Representation LearnING (DARLING) to cope with the significant and misleading heterogeneity within unlabeled pretraining data and severe distribution shifts between source and target data. Surprisingly we observe that DARLING can not only counterbalance the scarcity of labeled data but also further strengthen the generalization ability of models when the labeled data are insufficient. As a pretraining approach, DARLING shows superior or comparable performance compared with ImageNet pretraining protocol even when the available data are unlabeled and of a vastly smaller amount compared to ImageNet, which may shed light on improving generalization with large-scale unlabeled data.

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arXiv2022

Towards Domain Generalization in Object Detection

Despite the striking performance achieved by modern detectors when training and test data are sampled from the same or similar distribution, the generalization ability of detectors under unknown distribution shifts remains hardly studied. Recently several works discussed the detectors' adaptation ability to a specific target domain which are not readily applicable in real-world applications since detectors may encounter various environments or situations while pre-collecting all of them before training is inconceivable. In this paper, we study the critical problem, domain generalization in object detection (DGOD), where detectors are trained with source domains and evaluated on unknown target domains. To thoroughly evaluate detectors under unknown distribution shifts, we formulate the DGOD problem and propose a comprehensive evaluation benchmark to fill the vacancy. Moreover, we propose a novel method named Region Aware Proposal reweighTing (RAPT) to eliminate dependence within RoI features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that current DG methods fail to address the DGOD problem and our method outperforms other state-of-the-art counterparts.

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arXiv2022

Adversarial Attack Framework on Graph Embedding Models with Limited Knowledge

With the success of the graph embedding model in both academic and industry areas, the robustness of graph embedding against adversarial attack inevitably becomes a crucial problem in graph learning. Existing works usually perform the attack in a white-box fashion: they need to access the predictions/labels to construct their adversarial loss. However, the inaccessibility of predictions/labels makes the white-box attack impractical to a real graph learning system. This paper promotes current frameworks in a more general and flexible sense -- we demand to attack various kinds of graph embedding models with black-box driven. We investigate the theoretical connections between graph signal processing and graph embedding models and formulate the graph embedding model as a general graph signal process with a corresponding graph filter. Therefore, we design a generalized adversarial attacker: GF-Attack. Without accessing any labels and model predictions, GF-Attack can perform the attack directly on the graph filter in a black-box fashion. We further prove that GF-Attack can perform an effective attack without knowing the number of layers of graph embedding models. To validate the generalization of GF-Attack, we construct the attacker on four popular graph embedding models. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of GF-Attack on several benchmark datasets.

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arXiv2022

Permutation-equivariant and Proximity-aware Graph Neural Networks with Stochastic Message Passing

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are emerging machine learning models on graphs. Permutation-equivariance and proximity-awareness are two important properties highly desirable for GNNs. Both properties are needed to tackle some challenging graph problems, such as finding communities and leaders. In this paper, we first analytically show that the existing GNNs, mostly based on the message-passing mechanism, cannot simultaneously preserve the two properties. Then, we propose Stochastic Message Passing (SMP) model, a general and simple GNN to maintain both proximity-awareness and permutation-equivariance. In order to preserve node proximities, we augment the existing GNNs with stochastic node representations. We theoretically prove that the mechanism can enable GNNs to preserve node proximities, and at the same time, maintain permutation-equivariance with certain parametrization. We report extensive experimental results on ten datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of SMP for various typical graph mining tasks, including graph reconstruction, node classification, and link prediction.

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arXiv2022

Regulatory Instruments for Fair Personalized Pricing

Personalized pricing is a business strategy to charge different prices to individual consumers based on their characteristics and behaviors. It has become common practice in many industries nowadays due to the availability of a growing amount of high granular consumer data. The discriminatory nature of personalized pricing has triggered heated debates among policymakers and academics on how to design regulation policies to balance market efficiency and equity. In this paper, we propose two sound policy instruments, i.e., capping the range of the personalized prices or their ratios. We investigate the optimal pricing strategy of a profit-maximizing monopoly under both regulatory constraints and the impact of imposing them on consumer surplus, producer surplus, and social welfare. We theoretically prove that both proposed constraints can help balance consumer surplus and producer surplus at the expense of total surplus for common demand distributions, such as uniform, logistic, and exponential distributions. Experiments on both simulation and real-world datasets demonstrate the correctness of these theoretical results. Our findings and insights shed light on regulatory policy design for the increasingly monopolized business in the digital era.

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arXiv2022

CausPref: Causal Preference Learning for Out-of-Distribution Recommendation

In spite of the tremendous development of recommender system owing to the progressive capability of machine learning recently, the current recommender system is still vulnerable to the distribution shift of users and items in realistic scenarios, leading to the sharp decline of performance in testing environments. It is even more severe in many common applications where only the implicit feedback from sparse data is available. Hence, it is crucial to promote the performance stability of recommendation method in different environments. In this work, we first make a thorough analysis of implicit recommendation problem from the viewpoint of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Then under the guidance of our theoretical analysis, we propose to incorporate the recommendation-specific DAG learner into a novel causal preference-based recommendation framework named CausPref, mainly consisting of causal learning of invariant user preference and anti-preference negative sampling to deal with implicit feedback. Extensive experimental results from real-world datasets clearly demonstrate that our approach surpasses the benchmark models significantly under types of out-of-distribution settings, and show its impressive interpretability.

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arXiv2022

Causal Disentanglement for Semantics-Aware Intent Learning in Recommendation

Traditional recommendation models trained on observational interaction data have generated large impacts in a wide range of applications, it faces bias problems that cover users' true intent and thus deteriorate the recommendation effectiveness. Existing methods tracks this problem as eliminating bias for the robust recommendation, e.g., by re-weighting training samples or learning disentangled representation. The disentangled representation methods as the state-of-the-art eliminate bias through revealing cause-effect of the bias generation. However, how to design the semantics-aware and unbiased representation for users true intents is largely unexplored. To bridge the gap, we are the first to propose an unbiased and semantics-aware disentanglement learning called CaDSI (Causal Disentanglement for Semantics-Aware Intent Learning) from a causal perspective. Particularly, CaDSI explicitly models the causal relations underlying recommendation task, and thus produces semantics-aware representations via disentangling users true intents aware of specific item context. Moreover, the causal intervention mechanism is designed to eliminate confounding bias stemmed from context information, which further to align the semantics-aware representation with users true intent. Extensive experiments and case studies both validate the robustness and interpretability of our proposed model.

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arXiv2021

Conditional Attention Networks for Distilling Knowledge Graphs in Recommendation

Knowledge graph is generally incorporated into recommender systems to improve overall performance. Due to the generalization and scale of the knowledge graph, most knowledge relationships are not helpful for a target user-item prediction. To exploit the knowledge graph to capture target-specific knowledge relationships in recommender systems, we need to distill the knowledge graph to reserve the useful information and refine the knowledge to capture the users' preferences. To address the issues, we propose Knowledge-aware Conditional Attention Networks (KCAN), which is an end-to-end model to incorporate knowledge graph into a recommender system. Specifically, we use a knowledge-aware attention propagation manner to obtain the node representation first, which captures the global semantic similarity on the user-item network and the knowledge graph. Then given a target, i.e., a user-item pair, we automatically distill the knowledge graph into the target-specific subgraph based on the knowledge-aware attention. Afterward, by applying a conditional attention aggregation on the subgraph, we refine the knowledge graph to obtain target-specific node representations. Therefore, we can gain both representability and personalization to achieve overall performance. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework over the state-of-the-art algorithms.

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