arXiv subjects

Yixuan Li

Publications and source records attributed to Yixuan Li.

At least 253 records · Page 14Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

MOS: Towards Scaling Out-of-distribution Detection for Large Semantic Space

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs is a central challenge for safely deploying machine learning models in the real world. Existing solutions are mainly driven by small datasets, with low resolution and very few class labels (e.g., CIFAR). As a result, OOD detection for large-scale image classification tasks remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we bridge this critical gap by proposing a group-based OOD detection framework, along with a novel OOD scoring function termed MOS. Our key idea is to decompose the large semantic space into smaller groups with similar concepts, which allows simplifying the decision boundaries between in- vs. out-of-distribution data for effective OOD detection. Our method scales substantially better for high-dimensional class space than previous approaches. We evaluate models trained on ImageNet against four carefully curated OOD datasets, spanning diverse semantics. MOS establishes state-of-the-art performance, reducing the average FPR95 by 14.33% while achieving 6x speedup in inference compared to the previous best method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

MOOD: Multi-level Out-of-distribution Detection

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential to prevent anomalous inputs from causing a model to fail during deployment. While improved OOD detection methods have emerged, they often rely on the final layer outputs and require a full feedforward pass for any given input. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, multi-level out-of-distribution detection MOOD, which exploits intermediate classifier outputs for dynamic and efficient OOD inference. We explore and establish a direct relationship between the OOD data complexity and optimal exit level, and show that easy OOD examples can be effectively detected early without propagating to deeper layers. At each exit, the OOD examples can be distinguished through our proposed adjusted energy score, which is both empirically and theoretically suitable for networks with multiple classifiers. We extensively evaluate MOOD across 10 OOD datasets spanning a wide range of complexities. Experiments demonstrate that MOOD achieves up to 71.05% computational reduction in inference, while maintaining competitive OOD detection performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection

Determining whether inputs are out-of-distribution (OOD) is an essential building block for safely deploying machine learning models in the open world. However, previous methods relying on the softmax confidence score suffer from overconfident posterior distributions for OOD data. We propose a unified framework for OOD detection that uses an energy score. We show that energy scores better distinguish in- and out-of-distribution samples than the traditional approach using the softmax scores. Unlike softmax confidence scores, energy scores are theoretically aligned with the probability density of the inputs and are less susceptible to the overconfidence issue. Within this framework, energy can be flexibly used as a scoring function for any pre-trained neural classifier as well as a trainable cost function to shape the energy surface explicitly for OOD detection. On a CIFAR-10 pre-trained WideResNet, using the energy score reduces the average FPR (at TPR 95%) by 18.03% compared to the softmax confidence score. With energy-based training, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on common benchmarks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Gravitational Footprints of Black Holes and Their Microstate Geometries

We construct a family of non-supersymmetric extremal black holes and their horizonless microstate geometries in four dimensions. The black holes can have finite angular momentum and an arbitrary charge-to-mass ratio, unlike their supersymmetric cousins. These features make them and their microstate geometries astrophysically relevant. Thus, they provide interesting prototypes to study deviations from Kerr solutions caused by new horizon-scale physics. In this paper, we compute the gravitational multipole structure of these solutions and compare them to Kerr black holes. The multipoles of the black hole differ significantly from Kerr as they depend non-trivially on the charge-to-mass ratio. The horizonless microstate geometries have the same multipoles as their corresponding black hole, with small deviations set by the scale of their microstructure.

hep-th↗

arXiv2020

Learning Implicit Credit Assignment for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

We present a multi-agent actor-critic method that aims to implicitly address the credit assignment problem under fully cooperative settings. Our key motivation is that credit assignment among agents may not require an explicit formulation as long as (1) the policy gradients derived from a centralized critic carry sufficient information for the decentralized agents to maximize their joint action value through optimal cooperation and (2) a sustained level of exploration is enforced throughout training. Under the centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) paradigm, we achieve the former by formulating the centralized critic as a hypernetwork such that a latent state representation is integrated into the policy gradients through its multiplicative association with the stochastic policies; to achieve the latter, we derive a simple technique called adaptive entropy regularization where magnitudes of the entropy gradients are dynamically rescaled based on the current policy stochasticity to encourage consistent levels of exploration. Our algorithm, referred to as LICA, is evaluated on several benchmarks including the multi-agent particle environments and a set of challenging StarCraft II micromanagement tasks, and we show that LICA significantly outperforms previous methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Enhancing The Reliability of Out-of-distribution Image Detection in Neural Networks

We consider the problem of detecting out-of-distribution images in neural networks. We propose ODIN, a simple and effective method that does not require any change to a pre-trained neural network. Our method is based on the observation that using temperature scaling and adding small perturbations to the input can separate the softmax score distributions between in- and out-of-distribution images, allowing for more effective detection. We show in a series of experiments that ODIN is compatible with diverse network architectures and datasets. It consistently outperforms the baseline approach by a large margin, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance on this task. For example, ODIN reduces the false positive rate from the baseline 34.7% to 4.3% on the DenseNet (applied to CIFAR-10) when the true positive rate is 95%.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Actions as Moving Points

The existing action tubelet detectors often depend on heuristic anchor design and placement, which might be computationally expensive and sub-optimal for precise localization. In this paper, we present a conceptually simple, computationally efficient, and more precise action tubelet detection framework, termed as MovingCenter Detector (MOC-detector), by treating an action instance as a trajectory of moving points. Based on the insight that movement information could simplify and assist action tubelet detection, our MOC-detector is composed of three crucial head branches: (1) Center Branch for instance center detection and action recognition, (2) Movement Branch for movement estimation at adjacent frames to form trajectories of moving points, (3) Box Branch for spatial extent detection by directly regressing bounding box size at each estimated center. These three branches work together to generate the tubelet detection results, which could be further linked to yield video-level tubes with a matching strategy. Our MOC-detector outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods for both metrics of frame-mAP and video-mAP on the JHMDB and UCF101-24 datasets. The performance gap is more evident for higher video IoU, demonstrating that our MOC-detector is particularly effective for more precise action detection. We provide the code at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MOC-Detector.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Model Patching: Closing the Subgroup Performance Gap with Data Augmentation

Classifiers in machine learning are often brittle when deployed. Particularly concerning are models with inconsistent performance on specific subgroups of a class, e.g., exhibiting disparities in skin cancer classification in the presence or absence of a spurious bandage. To mitigate these performance differences, we introduce model patching, a two-stage framework for improving robustness that encourages the model to be invariant to subgroup differences, and focus on class information shared by subgroups. Model patching first models subgroup features within a class and learns semantic transformations between them, and then trains a classifier with data augmentations that deliberately manipulate subgroup features. We instantiate model patching with CAMEL, which (1) uses a CycleGAN to learn the intra-class, inter-subgroup augmentations, and (2) balances subgroup performance using a theoretically-motivated subgroup consistency regularizer, accompanied by a new robust objective. We demonstrate CAMEL's effectiveness on 3 benchmark datasets, with reductions in robust error of up to 33% relative to the best baseline. Lastly, CAMEL successfully patches a model that fails due to spurious features on a real-world skin cancer dataset.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Deep-learning-enabled geometric constraints and phase unwrapping for single-shot absolute 3D shape measurement

Fringe projection profilometry (FPP) is one of the most popular three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement techniques, and has becoming more prevalently adopted in intelligent manufacturing, defect detection and some other important applications. In FPP, how to efficiently recover the absolute phase has always been a great challenge. The stereo phase unwrapping (SPU) technologies based on geometric constraints can eliminate phase ambiguity without projecting any additional fringe patterns, which maximizes the efficiency of the retrieval of absolute phase. Inspired by the recent success of deep learning technologies for phase analysis, we demonstrate that deep learning can be an effective tool that organically unifies the phase retrieval, geometric constraints, and phase unwrapping steps into a comprehensive framework. Driven by extensive training dataset, the neutral network can gradually "learn" how to transfer one high-frequency fringe pattern into the "physically meaningful", and "most likely" absolute phase, instead of "step by step" as in convention approaches. Based on the properly trained framework, high-quality phase retrieval and robust phase ambiguity removal can be achieved based on only single-frame projection. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with traditional SPU, our method can more efficiently and stably unwrap the phase of dense fringe images in a larger measurement volume with fewer camera views. Limitations about the proposed approach are also discussed. We believe the proposed approach represents an important step forward in high-speed, high-accuracy, motion-artifacts-free absolute 3D shape measurement for complicated object from a single fringe pattern.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2019

Defense Against Adversarial Images using Web-Scale Nearest-Neighbor Search

A plethora of recent work has shown that convolutional networks are not robust to adversarial images: images that are created by perturbing a sample from the data distribution as to maximize the loss on the perturbed example. In this work, we hypothesize that adversarial perturbations move the image away from the image manifold in the sense that there exists no physical process that could have produced the adversarial image. This hypothesis suggests that a successful defense mechanism against adversarial images should aim to project the images back onto the image manifold. We study such defense mechanisms, which approximate the projection onto the unknown image manifold by a nearest-neighbor search against a web-scale image database containing tens of billions of images. Empirical evaluations of this defense strategy on ImageNet suggest that it is very effective in attack settings in which the adversary does not have access to the image database. We also propose two novel attack methods to break nearest-neighbor defenses, and demonstrate conditions under which nearest-neighbor defense fails. We perform a series of ablation experiments, which suggest that there is a trade-off between robustness and accuracy in our defenses, that a large image database (with hundreds of millions of images) is crucial to get good performance, and that careful construction the image database is important to be robust against attacks tailored to circumvent our defenses.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Multiphase unsteady Stokes flow over grooved surfaces: an analytical study

This paper studies multiphase flow within grooved textures exposed to external unsteadiness. We derive analytical expressions for multiphase unsteady Stokes flow driven by oscillating streamwise/spanwise velocity in the presence of periodic grooves. Good agreement is obtained between the analytical solution and direct numerical simulations performed using the volume of fluid method. The effects of oscillation frequency, Reynolds number, and the multiphase interface location on the transfer function between the input signal external to the groove and output near the interface, are examined. The effective slip length and the shear stress over the grooved plane are described.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2019

Cosmological consequences of Omnia Sequestra

Vacuum energy sequestering is a mechanism for cancelling off the radiative corrections to vacuum energy. The most comprehensive low energy model, proposed in 1606.04958 [hep-th], has the ability to cancel off radiative corrections to vacuum energy for loops of both matter and gravitons, in contrast to earlier proposals. Here we explore the framework and cosmological consequences of this model, which we call Omnia Sequestra, owing to its ability to sequester all. A computation of historic integrals on a cosmological background reveals some subtleties with UV sensitivity not seen in earlier models, but which are tamed in a Universe that grows sufficiently old. For these old Universes, we estimate the size of the radiatively stable residual cosmological constant and show that it does not exceed the critical density of our Universe today. We also study the effect of phase transitions, both homogeneous and inhomogeneous, and find that generically spacetime regions with a small cosmological constant do not need to be fine-tuned against the scale of the transition, a result which is now seen to hold across all models of sequestering. The model is developed in other ways, from its compatibility with inflation, to the correct inclusion of boundaries and the geometric consequences of certain choices of boundary data.

hep-th↗

arXiv2018

Enhancing Stock Market Prediction with Extended Coupled Hidden Markov Model over Multi-Sourced Data

Traditional stock market prediction methods commonly only utilize the historical trading data, ignoring the fact that stock market fluctuations can be impacted by various other information sources such as stock related events. Although some recent works propose event-driven prediction approaches by considering the event data, how to leverage the joint impacts of multiple data sources still remains an open research problem. In this work, we study how to explore multiple data sources to improve the performance of the stock prediction. We introduce an Extended Coupled Hidden Markov Model incorporating the news events with the historical trading data. To address the data sparsity issue of news events for each single stock, we further study the fluctuation correlations between the stocks and incorporate the correlations into the model to facilitate the prediction task. Evaluations on China A-share market data in 2016 show the superior performance of our model against previous methods.

q-fin.ST↗

arXiv2018

Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining

State-of-the-art visual perception models for a wide range of tasks rely on supervised pretraining. ImageNet classification is the de facto pretraining task for these models. Yet, ImageNet is now nearly ten years old and is by modern standards "small". Even so, relatively little is known about the behavior of pretraining with datasets that are multiple orders of magnitude larger. The reasons are obvious: such datasets are difficult to collect and annotate. In this paper, we present a unique study of transfer learning with large convolutional networks trained to predict hashtags on billions of social media images. Our experiments demonstrate that training for large-scale hashtag prediction leads to excellent results. We show improvements on several image classification and object detection tasks, and report the highest ImageNet-1k single-crop, top-1 accuracy to date: 85.4% (97.6% top-5). We also perform extensive experiments that provide novel empirical data on the relationship between large-scale pretraining and transfer learning performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Understanding the Loss Surface of Neural Networks for Binary Classification

It is widely conjectured that the reason that training algorithms for neural networks are successful because all local minima lead to similar performance, for example, see (LeCun et al., 2015, Choromanska et al., 2015, Dauphin et al., 2014). Performance is typically measured in terms of two metrics: training performance and generalization performance. Here we focus on the training performance of single-layered neural networks for binary classification, and provide conditions under which the training error is zero at all local minima of a smooth hinge loss function. Our conditions are roughly in the following form: the neurons have to be strictly convex and the surrogate loss function should be a smooth version of hinge loss. We also provide counterexamples to show that when the loss function is replaced with quadratic loss or logistic loss, the result may not hold.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel generative model named Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks (SGAN), which is trained to invert the hierarchical representations of a bottom-up discriminative network. Our model consists of a top-down stack of GANs, each learned to generate lower-level representations conditioned on higher-level representations. A representation discriminator is introduced at each feature hierarchy to encourage the representation manifold of the generator to align with that of the bottom-up discriminative network, leveraging the powerful discriminative representations to guide the generative model. In addition, we introduce a conditional loss that encourages the use of conditional information from the layer above, and a novel entropy loss that maximizes a variational lower bound on the conditional entropy of generator outputs. We first train each stack independently, and then train the whole model end-to-end. Unlike the original GAN that uses a single noise vector to represent all the variations, our SGAN decomposes variations into multiple levels and gradually resolves uncertainties in the top-down generative process. Based on visual inspection, Inception scores and visual Turing test, we demonstrate that SGAN is able to generate images of much higher quality than GANs without stacking.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Snapshot Ensembles: Train 1, get M for free

Ensembles of neural networks are known to be much more robust and accurate than individual networks. However, training multiple deep networks for model averaging is computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a method to obtain the seemingly contradictory goal of ensembling multiple neural networks at no additional training cost. We achieve this goal by training a single neural network, converging to several local minima along its optimization path and saving the model parameters. To obtain repeated rapid convergence, we leverage recent work on cyclic learning rate schedules. The resulting technique, which we refer to as Snapshot Ensembling, is simple, yet surprisingly effective. We show in a series of experiments that our approach is compatible with diverse network architectures and learning tasks. It consistently yields lower error rates than state-of-the-art single models at no additional training cost, and compares favorably with traditional network ensembles. On CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 our DenseNet Snapshot Ensembles obtain error rates of 3.4% and 17.4% respectively.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2016

Scalable and Robust Local Community Detection via Adaptive Subgraph Extraction and Diffusions

Local community detection, the problem of identifying a set of relevant nodes nearby a small set of input seed nodes, is an important graph primitive with a wealth of applications and research activity. Recent approaches include using local spectral information, graph diffusions, and random walks to determine a community from input seeds. As networks grow to billions of nodes and exhibit diverse structures, it is important that community detection algorithms are not only efficient, but also robust to different structural features. Toward this goal, we explore pre-processing techniques and modifications to existing local methods aimed at improving the scalability and robustness of algorithms related to community detection. Experiments show that our modifications improve both speed and quality of existing methods for locating ground truth communities, and are more robust across graphs and communities of varying sizes, densities, and diameters. Our subgraph extraction method uses adaptively selected PageRank parameters to improve on the recall and runtime of a walk-based pre-processing technique of Li et al. for extracting subgraphs before searching for a community. We then use this technique to enable the first scalable implementation of the recent Local Fiedler method of Mahoney et al. Our experimental evaluation shows our pre-processed version of Local Fiedler, as well as our novel simplification of the LEMON community detection framework of Li et al., offer significant speedups over their predecessors and obtain cluster quality competitive with the state of the art.

cs.SI↗