采样在机器学习方法中无处不在。由于大数据集和模型复杂性的增长，我们希望在训练A表示时学习和适应采样过程。为了实现这一宏伟的目标，已经提出了各种抽样技术。但是，他们中的大多数要么使用固定采样方案，要么基于简单的启发式方法调整采样方案。他们不能选择在不同阶段进行模型培训的最佳样本。受认知科学中的“思考，快速和系统2）的启发，我们提出了一种奖励指导的采样策略，称为自适应样本，并奖励（ASR）来应对这一挑战。据我们所知，这是利用强化学习（RL）解决代表学习中抽样问题的第一项工作。我们的方法最佳地调整了采样过程以实现最佳性能。我们通过基于距离的采样来探索样品之间的地理关系，以最大程度地提高整体累积奖励。我们将ASR应用于基于相似性的损失函数中的长期抽样问题。信息检索和聚类中的经验结果证明了ASR在不同数据集中的出色性能。我们还讨论了一种令人着迷的现象，我们将其称为实验中的“ ASR重力”。

稀疏性损失最小化问题在包括机器学习，数据挖掘和现代统计的各个领域中起着重要作用。近端梯度下降法和坐标下降法是解决最小化问题的最流行方法。尽管现有方法可以实现隐式模型识别，但在有限数量的迭代中，也就是支持集合识别，但在高维情况下，这些方法仍然遭受巨大的计算成本和内存负担。原因是这些方法中的支持集识别是隐式的，因此无法明确识别实践中的低复杂性结构，即，它们无法通过降低尺寸丢弃相关特征的无用系数，以实现算法加速。为了应对这一挑战，我们提出了一种新颖的加速双随机梯度下降（ADSGD）方法，用于稀疏性损失最小化问题，这可以通过在优化过程中消除无效系数来减少块迭代次数的数量，并最终实现更快的显式模型识别和改进的模型识别和改进和改进的模型识别和改进速度算法效率。从理论上讲，我们首先证明ADSGD可以达到线性收敛速率并降低总体计算复杂性。更重要的是，我们证明ADSGD可以实现显式模型识别的线性速率。从数值上讲，基准数据集上的实验结果证实了我们提出的方法的效率。

Optimal transport (OT) has become a widely used tool in the machine learning field to measure the discrepancy between probability distributions. For instance, OT is a popular loss function that quantifies the discrepancy between an empirical distribution and a parametric model. Recently, an entropic penalty term and the celebrated Sinkhorn algorithm have been commonly used to approximate the original OT in a computationally efficient way. However, since the Sinkhorn algorithm runs a projection associated with the Kullback-Leibler divergence, it is often vulnerable to outliers. To overcome this problem, we propose regularizing OT with the \beta-potential term associated with the so-called $\beta$-divergence, which was developed in robust statistics. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the $\beta$-potential can prevent the mass from being transported to outliers. We experimentally demonstrate that the transport matrix computed with our algorithm helps estimate a probability distribution robustly even in the presence of outliers. In addition, our proposed method can successfully detect outliers from a contaminated dataset

In the era of Internet of Things (IoT), network-wide anomaly detection is a crucial part of monitoring IoT networks due to the inherent security vulnerabilities of most IoT devices. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) has been proposed to separate network traffics into two disjoint subspaces corresponding to normal and malicious behaviors for anomaly detection. However, the privacy concerns and limitations of devices' computing resources compromise the practical effectiveness of PCA. We propose a federated PCA-based Grassmannian optimization framework that coordinates IoT devices to aggregate a joint profile of normal network behaviors for anomaly detection. First, we introduce a privacy-preserving federated PCA framework to simultaneously capture the profile of various IoT devices' traffic. Then, we investigate the alternating direction method of multipliers gradient-based learning on the Grassmann manifold to guarantee fast training and the absence of detecting latency using limited computational resources. Empirical results on the NSL-KDD dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline approaches. Finally, we show that the Grassmann manifold algorithm is highly adapted for IoT anomaly detection, which permits drastically reducing the analysis time of the system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first federated PCA algorithm for anomaly detection meeting the requirements of IoT networks.

In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, the Enhanced Interactive Transformer (EIT), to address the issue of head degradation in self-attention mechanisms. Our approach replaces the traditional multi-head self-attention mechanism with the Enhanced Multi-Head Attention (EMHA) mechanism, which relaxes the one-to-one mapping constraint among queries and keys, allowing each query to attend to multiple keys. Furthermore, we introduce two interaction models, Inner-Subspace Interaction and Cross-Subspace Interaction, to fully utilize the many-to-many mapping capabilities of EMHA. Extensive experiments on a wide range of tasks (e.g. machine translation, abstractive summarization, grammar correction, language modelling and brain disease automatic diagnosis) show its superiority with a very modest increase in model size.

Task transfer learning is a popular technique in image processing applications that uses pre-trained models to reduce the supervision cost of related tasks. An important question is to determine task transferability, i.e. given a common input domain, estimating to what extent representations learned from a source task can help in learning a target task. Typically, transferability is either measured experimentally or inferred through task relatedness, which is often defined without a clear operational meaning. In this paper, we present a novel metric, H-score, an easily-computable evaluation function that estimates the performance of transferred representations from one task to another in classification problems using statistical and information theoretic principles. Experiments on real image data show that our metric is not only consistent with the empirical transferability measurement, but also useful to practitioners in applications such as source model selection and task transfer curriculum learning.

Summary quality assessment metrics have two categories: reference-based and reference-free. Reference-based metrics are theoretically more accurate but are limited by the availability and quality of the human-written references, which are both difficulty to ensure. This inspires the development of reference-free metrics, which are independent from human-written references, in the past few years. However, existing reference-free metrics cannot be both zero-shot and accurate. In this paper, we propose a zero-shot but accurate reference-free approach in a sneaky way: feeding documents, based upon which summaries generated, as references into reference-based metrics. Experimental results show that this zero-shot approach can give us the best-performing reference-free metrics on nearly all aspects on several recently-released datasets, even beating reference-free metrics specifically trained for this task sometimes. We further investigate what reference-based metrics can benefit from such repurposing and whether our additional tweaks help.

The quality of knowledge retrieval is crucial in knowledge-intensive conversations. Two common strategies to improve the retrieval quality are finetuning the retriever or generating a self-contained query, while they encounter heavy burdens on expensive computation and elaborate annotations. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised query enhanced approach for knowledge-intensive conversations, namely QKConv. There are three modules in QKConv: a query generator, an off-the-shelf knowledge selector, and a response generator. Without extra supervision, the end-to-end joint training of QKConv explores multiple candidate queries and utilizes corresponding selected knowledge to yield the target response. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted comprehensive experiments on conversational question-answering, task-oriented dialogue, and knowledge-grounded conversation. Experimental results demonstrate that QKConv achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to unsupervised methods and competitive performance compared to supervised methods.

In this paper, we carry out numerical analysis to prove convergence of a novel sample-wise back-propagation method for training a class of stochastic neural networks (SNNs). The structure of the SNN is formulated as discretization of a stochastic differential equation (SDE). A stochastic optimal control framework is introduced to model the training procedure, and a sample-wise approximation scheme for the adjoint backward SDE is applied to improve the efficiency of the stochastic optimal control solver, which is equivalent to the back-propagation for training the SNN. The convergence analysis is derived with and without convexity assumption for optimization of the SNN parameters. Especially, our analysis indicates that the number of SNN training steps should be proportional to the square of the number of layers in the convex optimization case. Numerical experiments are carried out to validate the analysis results, and the performance of the sample-wise back-propagation method for training SNNs is examined by benchmark machine learning examples.

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.