No Arabic abstract
Optimal transport (OT) is a widely used technique for distribution alignment, with applications throughout the machine learning, graphics, and vision communities. Without any additional structural assumptions on trans-port, however, OT can be fragile to outliers or noise, especially in high dimensions. Here, we introduce a new form of structured OT that simultaneously learns low-dimensional structure in data while leveraging this structure to solve the alignment task. Compared with OT, the resulting transport plan has better structural interpretability, highlighting the connections between individual data points and local geometry, and is more robust to noise and sampling. We apply the method to synthetic as well as real datasets, where we show that our method can facilitate alignment in noisy settings and can be used to both correct and interpret domain shift.
Accessible epidemiological data are of great value for emergency preparedness and response, understanding disease progression through a population, and building statistical and mechanistic disease models that enable forecasting. The status quo, however, renders acquiring and using such data difficult in practice. In many cases, a primary way of obtaining epidemiological data is through the internet, but the methods by which the data are presented to the public often differ drastically among institutions. As a result, there is a strong need for better data sharing practices. This paper identifies, in detail and with examples, the three key challenges one encounters when attempting to acquire and use epidemiological data: 1) interfaces, 2) data formatting, and 3) reporting. These challenges are used to provide suggestions and guidance for improvement as these systems evolve in the future. If these suggested data and interface recommendations were adhered to, epidemiological and public health analysis, modeling, and informatics work would be significantly streamlined, which can in turn yield better public health decision-making capabilities.
Optimizing economic and public policy is critical to address socioeconomic issues and trade-offs, e.g., improving equality, productivity, or wellness, and poses a complex mechanism design problem. A policy designer needs to consider multiple objectives, policy levers, and behavioral responses from strategic actors who optimize for their individual objectives. Moreover, real-world policies should be explainable and robust to simulation-to-reality gaps, e.g., due to calibration issues. Existing approaches are often limited to a narrow set of policy levers or objectives that are hard to measure, do not yield explicit optimal policies, or do not consider strategic behavior, for example. Hence, it remains challenging to optimize policy in real-world scenarios. Here we show that the AI Economist framework enables effective, flexible, and interpretable policy design using two-level reinforcement learning (RL) and data-driven simulations. We validate our framework on optimizing the stringency of US state policies and Federal subsidies during a pandemic, e.g., COVID-19, using a simulation fitted to real data. We find that log-linear policies trained using RL significantly improve social welfare, based on both public health and economic outcomes, compared to past outcomes. Their behavior can be explained, e.g., well-performing policies respond strongly to changes in recovery and vaccination rates. They are also robust to calibration errors, e.g., infection rates that are over or underestimated. As of yet, real-world policymaking has not seen adoption of machine learning methods at large, including RL and AI-driven simulations. Our results show the potential of AI to guide policy design and improve social welfare amidst the complexity of the real world.
In label-noise learning, textit{noise transition matrix}, denoting the probabilities that clean labels flip into noisy labels, plays a central role in building textit{statistically consistent classifiers}. Existing theories have shown that the transition matrix can be learned by exploiting textit{anchor points} (i.e., data points that belong to a specific class almost surely). However, when there are no anchor points, the transition matrix will be poorly learned, and those current consistent classifiers will significantly degenerate. In this paper, without employing anchor points, we propose a textit{transition-revision} ($T$-Revision) method to effectively learn transition matrices, leading to better classifiers. Specifically, to learn a transition matrix, we first initialize it by exploiting data points that are similar to anchor points, having high textit{noisy class posterior probabilities}. Then, we modify the initialized matrix by adding a textit{slack variable}, which can be learned and validated together with the classifier by using noisy data. Empirical results on benchmark-simulated and real-world label-noise datasets demonstrate that without using exact anchor points, the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art label-noise learning methods.
In the field of machine learning there is a growing interest towards more robust and generalizable algorithms. This is for example important to bridge the gap between the environment in which the training data was collected and the environment where the algorithm is deployed. Machine learning algorithms have increasingly been shown to excel in finding patterns and correlations from data. Determining the consistency of these patterns and for example the distinction between causal correlations and nonsensical spurious relations has proven to be much more difficult. In this paper a regularization scheme is introduced that prefers universal causal correlations. This approach is based on 1) the robustness of causal correlations and 2) the data not being independently and identically distribute (i.i.d.). The scheme is demonstrated with a classification task by clustering the (non-i.i.d.) training set in subpopulations. A non-i.i.d. regularization term is then introduced that penalizes weights that are not invariant over these clusters. The resulting algorithm favours correlations that are universal over the subpopulations and indeed a better performance is obtained on an out-of-distribution test set with respect to a more conventional l_2-regularization.
To tackle the susceptibility of deep neural networks to examples, the adversarial training has been proposed which provides a notion of robust through an inner maximization problem presenting the first-order embedded within the outer minimization of the training loss. To generalize the adversarial robustness over different perturbation types, the adversarial training method has been augmented with the improved inner maximization presenting a union of multiple perturbations e.g., various $ell_p$ norm-bounded perturbations.