离散的无向图形模型，也称为Markov随机字段（MRFS），可以灵活地编码多个变量的概率交互，并享有成功的应用程序到广泛的问题。然而，众所周知的尚未研究的离散MRF的限制是他们无法捕获特定于上下文的独立性（CSI）。现有方法需要仔细开发的理论和专用构建推理方法，这限制了它们的应用程序只有小规模问题。在本文中，我们提出了Markov注意模型（MAM），这是一种独立的MRF系列，它包括注意机制。关注机制允许变量动态地参加其他变量，同时忽略其余部分，并启用MRFS中的CSIS捕获。将MAM配制为MRF，使其能够从丰富的现有MRF推理方法和规模中受益于大型模型和数据集。为了展示MAM以规模捕获CSI的能力，我们将MAM应用于捕获一种重要类型的CSI，其以感知分组中的复发计算的符号方法存在。在最近提出的两个综合性感知分组任务和现实图像上的实验证明了MAMS在与强大的经常性神经网络基线相比的采样效率，可解释性和概括性的优势，并验证MAM能力以规模有效地捕获CSIS。

Perturb-and-MAP offers an elegant approach to approximately sample from an energy-based model (EBM) by computing the maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) configuration of a perturbed version of the model. Sampling in turn enables learning. However, this line of research has been hindered by the general intractability of the MAP computation. Very few works venture outside tractable models, and when they do, they use linear programming approaches, which as we show, have several limitations. In this work, we present perturb-and-max-product (PMP), a parallel and scalable mechanism for sampling and learning in discrete EBMs. Models can be arbitrary as long as they are built using tractable factors. We show that (a) for Ising models, PMP is orders of magnitude faster than Gibbs and Gibbs-with-Gradients (GWG) at learning and generating samples of similar or better quality; (b) PMP is able to learn and sample from RBMs; (c) in a large, entangled graphical model in which Gibbs and GWG fail to mix, PMP succeeds.Preprint. Under review.

在稀疏线性建模 - 最佳子集选择中，研究了一个看似意外的，相对不太理解的基本工具的过度选择，这最小化了对非零系数的约束的限制的剩余平方和。虽然当信噪比（SNR）高时，最佳子集选择过程通常被视为稀疏学习中的“黄金标准”，但是当SNR低时，其预测性能会恶化。特别是，它通过连续收缩方法而言，例如脊回归和套索。我们研究了高噪声制度中最佳子集选择的行为，并提出了一种基于最小二乘标准的正则化版本的替代方法。我们提出的估算员（a）在很大程度上减轻了高噪声制度的最佳次集选择的可预测性能差。 （b）相对于通过脊回归和套索的最佳预测模型，通常递送大幅稀疏模型的同时表现出有利的。我们对所提出的方法的预测性质进行广泛的理论分析，并在噪声水平高时提供相对于最佳子集选择的优越预测性能的理由。我们的估算器可以表达为混合整数二阶圆锥优化问题的解决方案，因此，来自数学优化的现代计算工具可供使用。

Reading comprehension of legal text can be a particularly challenging task due to the length and complexity of legal clauses and a shortage of expert-annotated datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce the Merger Agreement Understanding Dataset (MAUD), an expert-annotated reading comprehension dataset based on the American Bar Association's 2021 Public Target Deal Points Study, with over 39,000 examples and over 47,000 total annotations. Our fine-tuned Transformer baselines show promising results, with models performing well above random on most questions. However, on a large subset of questions, there is still room for significant improvement. As the only expert-annotated merger agreement dataset, MAUD is valuable as a benchmark for both the legal profession and the NLP community.

The increasingly widespread adoption of large language models has highlighted the need for improving their explainability. We present context length probing, a novel explanation technique for causal language models, based on tracking the predictions of a model as a function of the length of available context, and allowing to assign differential importance scores to different contexts. The technique is model-agnostic and does not rely on access to model internals beyond computing token-level probabilities. We apply context length probing to large pre-trained language models and offer some initial analyses and insights, including the potential for studying long-range dependencies. The source code and a demo of the method are available.

Over the past decade, neural networks have been successful at making predictions from biological sequences, especially in the context of regulatory genomics. As in other fields of deep learning, tools have been devised to extract features such as sequence motifs that can explain the predictions made by a trained network. Here we intend to go beyond explainable machine learning and introduce SEISM, a selective inference procedure to test the association between these extracted features and the predicted phenotype. In particular, we discuss how training a one-layer convolutional network is formally equivalent to selecting motifs maximizing some association score. We adapt existing sampling-based selective inference procedures by quantizing this selection over an infinite set to a large but finite grid. Finally, we show that sampling under a specific choice of parameters is sufficient to characterize the composite null hypothesis typically used for selective inference-a result that goes well beyond our particular framework. We illustrate the behavior of our method in terms of calibration, power and speed and discuss its power/speed trade-off with a simpler data-split strategy. SEISM paves the way to an easier analysis of neural networks used in regulatory genomics, and to more powerful methods for genome wide association studies (GWAS).

Recent methods demonstrate that data augmentation using counterfactual knowledge can teach models the causal structure of a task, leading to robust and generalizable models. However, such counterfactual data often has a limited scale and diversity if crowdsourced and is computationally expensive to extend to new perturbation types if generated using supervised methods. To address this, we introduce a new framework called DISCO for automatically generating high-quality counterfactual data at scale. DISCO engineers prompts to generate phrasal perturbations with a large general language model. Then, a task-specific teacher model filters the generation to distill high-quality counterfactual data. We show that learning with this counterfactual data yields a comparatively small student model that is 6% (absolute) more robust and generalizes 5% better across distributions than baselines on various challenging evaluations. This model is also 15% more sensitive in differentiating original and counterfactual examples, on three evaluation sets written by human workers and via human-AI collaboration.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

We study inductive matrix completion (matrix completion with side information) under an i.i.d. subgaussian noise assumption at a low noise regime, with uniform sampling of the entries. We obtain for the first time generalization bounds with the following three properties: (1) they scale like the standard deviation of the noise and in particular approach zero in the exact recovery case; (2) even in the presence of noise, they converge to zero when the sample size approaches infinity; and (3) for a fixed dimension of the side information, they only have a logarithmic dependence on the size of the matrix. Differently from many works in approximate recovery, we present results both for bounded Lipschitz losses and for the absolute loss, with the latter relying on Talagrand-type inequalities. The proofs create a bridge between two approaches to the theoretical analysis of matrix completion, since they consist in a combination of techniques from both the exact recovery literature and the approximate recovery literature.

With an increasing amount of data in the art world, discovering artists and artworks suitable to collectors' tastes becomes a challenge. It is no longer enough to use visual information, as contextual information about the artist has become just as important in contemporary art. In this work, we present a generic Natural Language Processing framework (called ArtLM) to discover the connections among contemporary artists based on their biographies. In this approach, we first continue to pre-train the existing general English language models with a large amount of unlabelled art-related data. We then fine-tune this new pre-trained model with our biography pair dataset manually annotated by a team of professionals in the art industry. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our ArtLM achieves 85.6% accuracy and 84.0% F1 score and outperforms other baseline models. We also provide a visualisation and a qualitative analysis of the artist network built from ArtLM's outputs.