arXiv subjects

Yifei Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Yifei Wang.

At least 199 records · Page 11Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

MCoCo: Multi-level Consistency Collaborative Multi-view Clustering

Multi-view clustering can explore consistent information from different views to guide clustering. Most existing works focus on pursuing shallow consistency in the feature space and integrating the information of multiple views into a unified representation for clustering. These methods did not fully consider and explore the consistency in the semantic space. To address this issue, we proposed a novel Multi-level Consistency Collaborative learning framework (MCoCo) for multi-view clustering. Specifically, MCoCo jointly learns cluster assignments of multiple views in feature space and aligns semantic labels of different views in semantic space by contrastive learning. Further, we designed a multi-level consistency collaboration strategy, which utilizes the consistent information of semantic space as a self-supervised signal to collaborate with the cluster assignments in feature space. Thus, different levels of spaces collaborate with each other while achieving their own consistency goals, which makes MCoCo fully mine the consistent information of different views without fusion. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.

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arXiv2023

Contrastive Label Enhancement

Label distribution learning (LDL) is a new machine learning paradigm for solving label ambiguity. Since it is difficult to directly obtain label distributions, many studies are focusing on how to recover label distributions from logical labels, dubbed label enhancement (LE). Existing LE methods estimate label distributions by simply building a mapping relationship between features and label distributions under the supervision of logical labels. They typically overlook the fact that both features and logical labels are descriptions of the instance from different views. Therefore, we propose a novel method called Contrastive Label Enhancement (ConLE) which integrates features and logical labels into the unified projection space to generate high-level features by contrastive learning strategy. In this approach, features and logical labels belonging to the same sample are pulled closer, while those of different samples are projected farther away from each other in the projection space. Subsequently, we leverage the obtained high-level features to gain label distributions through a welldesigned training strategy that considers the consistency of label attributes. Extensive experiments on LDL benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.

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arXiv2023

ContraNorm: A Contrastive Learning Perspective on Oversmoothing and Beyond

Oversmoothing is a common phenomenon in a wide range of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers, where performance worsens as the number of layers increases. Instead of characterizing oversmoothing from the view of complete collapse in which representations converge to a single point, we dive into a more general perspective of dimensional collapse in which representations lie in a narrow cone. Accordingly, inspired by the effectiveness of contrastive learning in preventing dimensional collapse, we propose a novel normalization layer called ContraNorm. Intuitively, ContraNorm implicitly shatters representations in the embedding space, leading to a more uniform distribution and a slighter dimensional collapse. On the theoretical analysis, we prove that ContraNorm can alleviate both complete collapse and dimensional collapse under certain conditions. Our proposed normalization layer can be easily integrated into GNNs and Transformers with negligible parameter overhead. Experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed ContraNorm. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/ContraNorm.

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arXiv2023

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis in Document -- FOMC Meeting Minutes on Economic Projection

The Federal Open Market Committee within the Federal Reserve System is responsible for managing inflation, maximizing employment, and stabilizing interest rates. Meeting minutes play an important role for market movements because they provide the birds eye view of how this economic complexity is constantly re-weighed. Therefore, There has been growing interest in analyzing and extracting sentiments on various aspects from large financial texts for economic projection. However, Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis is not widely used on financial data due to the lack of large labeled dataset. In this paper, I propose a model to train ABSA on financial documents under weak supervision and analyze its predictive power on various macroeconomic indicators.

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arXiv2023

Optimal Demand Shut-offs of AC Microgrid using AO-SBQP Method

Microgrids are increasingly being utilized to improve the resilience and operational flexibility of power grids, and act as a backup power source during grid outages. However, it necessitates that the microgrid itself could provide power to the critical loads. This paper presents an algorithm named alternating optimization based sequential boolean quadratic programming tailored for solving optimal demand shut-offs problems arising in microgrids. Moreover, we establish local superlinear convergence of the proposed approximate Boolean quadratic programming method over nonconvex problems. In the end, the performance of the proposed method is illustrated on the modified IEEE 30-bus case study.

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arXiv2023

How Mask Matters: Towards Theoretical Understandings of Masked Autoencoders

Masked Autoencoders (MAE) based on a reconstruction task have risen to be a promising paradigm for self-supervised learning (SSL) and achieve state-of-the-art performance across different benchmark datasets. However, despite its impressive empirical success, there is still limited theoretical understanding of it. In this paper, we propose a theoretical understanding of how masking matters for MAE to learn meaningful features. We establish a close connection between MAE and contrastive learning, which shows that MAE implicit aligns the mask-induced positive pairs. Built upon this connection, we develop the first downstream guarantees for MAE methods, and analyze the effect of mask ratio. Besides, as a result of the implicit alignment, we also point out the dimensional collapse issue of MAE, and propose a Uniformity-enhanced MAE (U-MAE) loss that can effectively address this issue and bring significant improvements on real-world datasets, including CIFAR-10, ImageNet-100, and ImageNet-1K. Code is available at (https://github.com/zhangq327/U-MAE).

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arXiv2023

CFA: Class-wise Calibrated Fair Adversarial Training

Adversarial training has been widely acknowledged as the most effective method to improve the adversarial robustness against adversarial examples for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). So far, most existing works focus on enhancing the overall model robustness, treating each class equally in both the training and testing phases. Although revealing the disparity in robustness among classes, few works try to make adversarial training fair at the class level without sacrificing overall robustness. In this paper, we are the first to theoretically and empirically investigate the preference of different classes for adversarial configurations, including perturbation margin, regularization, and weight averaging. Motivated by this, we further propose a \textbf{C}lass-wise calibrated \textbf{F}air \textbf{A}dversarial training framework, named CFA, which customizes specific training configurations for each class automatically. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed CFA can improve both overall robustness and fairness notably over other state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/PKU-ML/CFA}.

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arXiv2023

A Message Passing Perspective on Learning Dynamics of Contrastive Learning

In recent years, contrastive learning achieves impressive results on self-supervised visual representation learning, but there still lacks a rigorous understanding of its learning dynamics. In this paper, we show that if we cast a contrastive objective equivalently into the feature space, then its learning dynamics admits an interpretable form. Specifically, we show that its gradient descent corresponds to a specific message passing scheme on the corresponding augmentation graph. Based on this perspective, we theoretically characterize how contrastive learning gradually learns discriminative features with the alignment update and the uniformity update. Meanwhile, this perspective also establishes an intriguing connection between contrastive learning and Message Passing Graph Neural Networks (MP-GNNs). This connection not only provides a unified understanding of many techniques independently developed in each community, but also enables us to borrow techniques from MP-GNNs to design new contrastive learning variants, such as graph attention, graph rewiring, jumpy knowledge techniques, etc. We believe that our message passing perspective not only provides a new theoretical understanding of contrastive learning dynamics, but also bridges the two seemingly independent areas together, which could inspire more interleaving studies to benefit from each other. The code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/Message-Passing-Contrastive-Learning.

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arXiv2023

A Decomposition Augmented Lagrangian Method for Low-rank Semidefinite Programming

We develop a decomposition method based on the augmented Lagrangian framework to solve a broad family of semidefinite programming problems, possibly with nonlinear objective functions, nonsmooth regularization, and general linear equality/inequality constraints. In particular, the positive semidefinite variable along with a group of linear constraints can be transformed into a variable on a smooth manifold via matrix factorization. The nonsmooth regularization and other general linear constraints are handled by the augmented Lagrangian method. Therefore, each subproblem can be solved by a semismooth Newton method on a manifold. Theoretically, we show that the first and second-order necessary optimality conditions for the factorized subproblem are also sufficient for the original subproblem under certain conditions. Convergence analysis is established for the Riemannian subproblem and the augmented Lagrangian method. Extensive numerical experiments on large-scale semidefinite programming problems such as max-cut, nearest correlation estimation, clustering, and sparse principal component analysis demonstrate the strength of our proposed method compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2023

Parallel Deep Neural Networks Have Zero Duality Gap

Training deep neural networks is a challenging non-convex optimization problem. Recent work has proven that the strong duality holds (which means zero duality gap) for regularized finite-width two-layer ReLU networks and consequently provided an equivalent convex training problem. However, extending this result to deeper networks remains to be an open problem. In this paper, we prove that the duality gap for deeper linear networks with vector outputs is non-zero. In contrast, we show that the zero duality gap can be obtained by stacking standard deep networks in parallel, which we call a parallel architecture, and modifying the regularization. Therefore, we prove the strong duality and existence of equivalent convex problems that enable globally optimal training of deep networks. As a by-product of our analysis, we demonstrate that the weight decay regularization on the network parameters explicitly encourages low-rank solutions via closed-form expressions. In addition, we show that strong duality holds for three-layer standard ReLU networks given rank-1 data matrices.

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arXiv2023

Towards a Unified Theoretical Understanding of Non-contrastive Learning via Rank Differential Mechanism

Recently, a variety of methods under the name of non-contrastive learning (like BYOL, SimSiam, SwAV, DINO) show that when equipped with some asymmetric architectural designs, aligning positive pairs alone is sufficient to attain good performance in self-supervised visual learning. Despite some understandings of some specific modules (like the predictor in BYOL), there is yet no unified theoretical understanding of how these seemingly different asymmetric designs can all avoid feature collapse, particularly considering methods that also work without the predictor (like DINO). In this work, we propose a unified theoretical understanding for existing variants of non-contrastive learning. Our theory named Rank Differential Mechanism (RDM) shows that all these asymmetric designs create a consistent rank difference in their dual-branch output features. This rank difference will provably lead to an improvement of effective dimensionality and alleviate either complete or dimensional feature collapse. Different from previous theories, our RDM theory is applicable to different asymmetric designs (with and without the predictor), and thus can serve as a unified understanding of existing non-contrastive learning methods. Besides, our RDM theory also provides practical guidelines for designing many new non-contrastive variants. We show that these variants indeed achieve comparable performance to existing methods on benchmark datasets, and some of them even outperform the baselines. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/PKU-ML/Rank-Differential-Mechanism}.

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arXiv2023

Rethinking the Effect of Data Augmentation in Adversarial Contrastive Learning

Recent works have shown that self-supervised learning can achieve remarkable robustness when integrated with adversarial training (AT). However, the robustness gap between supervised AT (sup-AT) and self-supervised AT (self-AT) remains significant. Motivated by this observation, we revisit existing self-AT methods and discover an inherent dilemma that affects self-AT robustness: either strong or weak data augmentations are harmful to self-AT, and a medium strength is insufficient to bridge the gap. To resolve this dilemma, we propose a simple remedy named DYNACL (Dynamic Adversarial Contrastive Learning). In particular, we propose an augmentation schedule that gradually anneals from a strong augmentation to a weak one to benefit from both extreme cases. Besides, we adopt a fast post-processing stage for adapting it to downstream tasks. Through extensive experiments, we show that DYNACL can improve state-of-the-art self-AT robustness by 8.84% under Auto-Attack on the CIFAR-10 dataset, and can even outperform vanilla supervised adversarial training for the first time. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/PKU-ML/DYNACL}.

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arXiv2023

Multi-view Semantic Consistency based Information Bottleneck for Clustering

Multi-view clustering can make use of multi-source information for unsupervised clustering. Most existing methods focus on learning a fused representation matrix, while ignoring the influence of private information and noise. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel Multi-view Semantic Consistency based Information Bottleneck for clustering (MSCIB). Specifically, MSCIB pursues semantic consistency to improve the learning process of information bottleneck for different views. It conducts the alignment operation of multiple views in the semantic space and jointly achieves the valuable consistent information of multi-view data. In this way, the learned semantic consistency from multi-view data can improve the information bottleneck to more exactly distinguish the consistent information and learn a unified feature representation with more discriminative consistent information for clustering. Experiments on various types of multi-view datasets show that MSCIB achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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arXiv2023

Overparameterized ReLU Neural Networks Learn the Simplest Models: Neural Isometry and Exact Recovery

The practice of deep learning has shown that neural networks generalize remarkably well even with an extreme number of learned parameters. This appears to contradict traditional statistical wisdom, in which a trade-off between model complexity and fit to the data is essential. We aim to address this discrepancy by adopting a convex optimization and sparse recovery perspective. We consider the training and generalization properties of two-layer ReLU networks with standard weight decay regularization. Under certain regularity assumptions on the data, we show that ReLU networks with an arbitrary number of parameters learn only simple models that explain the data. This is analogous to the recovery of the sparsest linear model in compressed sensing. For ReLU networks and their variants with skip connections or normalization layers, we present isometry conditions that ensure the exact recovery of planted neurons. For randomly generated data, we show the existence of a phase transition in recovering planted neural network models, which is easy to describe: whenever the ratio between the number of samples and the dimension exceeds a numerical threshold, the recovery succeeds with high probability; otherwise, it fails with high probability. Surprisingly, ReLU networks learn simple and sparse models that generalize well even when the labels are noisy . The phase transition phenomenon is confirmed through numerical experiments.

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arXiv2023

USER: Unsupervised Structural Entropy-based Robust Graph Neural Network

Unsupervised/self-supervised graph neural networks (GNN) are vulnerable to inherent randomness in the input graph data which greatly affects the performance of the model in downstream tasks. In this paper, we alleviate the interference of graph randomness and learn appropriate representations of nodes without label information. To this end, we propose USER, an unsupervised robust version of graph neural networks that is based on structural entropy. We analyze the property of intrinsic connectivity and define intrinsic connectivity graph. We also identify the rank of the adjacency matrix as a crucial factor in revealing a graph that provides the same embeddings as the intrinsic connectivity graph. We then introduce structural entropy in the objective function to capture such a graph. Extensive experiments conducted on clustering and link prediction tasks under random-noises and meta-attack over three datasets show USER outperforms benchmarks and is robust to heavier randomness.

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arXiv2022

On the Connection between Invariant Learning and Adversarial Training for Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Despite impressive success in many tasks, deep learning models are shown to rely on spurious features, which will catastrophically fail when generalized to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) is proposed to alleviate this issue by extracting domain-invariant features for OOD generalization. Nevertheless, recent work shows that IRM is only effective for a certain type of distribution shift (e.g., correlation shift) while it fails for other cases (e.g., diversity shift). Meanwhile, another thread of method, Adversarial Training (AT), has shown better domain transfer performance, suggesting that it has the potential to be an effective candidate for extracting domain-invariant features. This paper investigates this possibility by exploring the similarity between the IRM and AT objectives. Inspired by this connection, we propose Domainwise Adversarial Training (DAT), an AT-inspired method for alleviating distribution shift by domain-specific perturbations. Extensive experiments show that our proposed DAT can effectively remove domain-varying features and improve OOD generalization under both correlation shift and diversity shift.

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arXiv2022

Beyond the Best: Estimating Distribution Functionals in Infinite-Armed Bandits

In the infinite-armed bandit problem, each arm's average reward is sampled from an unknown distribution, and each arm can be sampled further to obtain noisy estimates of the average reward of that arm. Prior work focuses on identifying the best arm, i.e., estimating the maximum of the average reward distribution. We consider a general class of distribution functionals beyond the maximum, and propose unified meta algorithms for both the offline and online settings, achieving optimal sample complexities. We show that online estimation, where the learner can sequentially choose whether to sample a new or existing arm, offers no advantage over the offline setting for estimating the mean functional, but significantly reduces the sample complexity for other functionals such as the median, maximum, and trimmed mean. The matching lower bounds utilize several different Wasserstein distances. For the special case of median estimation, we identify a curious thresholding phenomenon on the indistinguishability between Gaussian convolutions with respect to the noise level, which may be of independent interest.

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arXiv2022

Sketching the Krylov Subspace: Faster Computation of the Entire Ridge Regularization Path

We propose a fast algorithm for computing the entire ridge regression regularization path in nearly linear time. Our method constructs a basis on which the solution of ridge regression can be computed instantly for any value of the regularization parameter. Consequently, linear models can be tuned via cross-validation or other risk estimation strategies with substantially better efficiency. The algorithm is based on iteratively sketching the Krylov subspace with a binomial decomposition over the regularization path. We provide a convergence analysis with various sketching matrices and show that it improves the state-of-the-art computational complexity. We also provide a technique to adaptively estimate the sketching dimension. This algorithm works for both the over-determined and under-determined problems. We also provide an extension for matrix-valued ridge regression. The numerical results on real medium and large scale ridge regression tasks illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to standard baselines which require super-linear computational time.

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