NLP in the era of generative AI, cognitive sciences, and societal transformation
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Publications
Neural FIM for learning Fisher information metrics from point cloud data
Although data diffusion embeddings are ubiquitous in unsupervised learning and have proven to be a viable technique for uncovering the under… (see more)lying intrinsic geometry of data, diffusion embeddings are inherently limited due to their discrete nature. To this end, we propose neural FIM, a method for computing the Fisher information metric (FIM) from point cloud data - allowing for a continuous manifold model for the data. Neural FIM creates an extensible metric space from discrete point cloud data such that information from the metric can inform us of manifold characteristics such as volume and geodesics. We demonstrate Neural FIM’s utility in selecting parameters for the PHATE visualization method as well as its ability to obtain information pertaining to local volume illuminating branching points and cluster centers embeddings of a toy dataset and two single-cell datasets of IPSC reprogramming and PBMCs (immune cells).
2023-07-03
Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)
Current protein language models (PLMs) learn protein representations mainly based on their sequences, thereby well capturing co-evolutionary… (see more) information, but they are unable to explicitly acquire protein functions, which is the end goal of protein representation learning. Fortunately, for many proteins, their textual property descriptions are available, where their various functions are also described. Motivated by this fact, we first build the ProtDescribe dataset to augment protein sequences with text descriptions of their functions and other important properties. Based on this dataset, we propose the ProtST framework to enhance Protein Sequence pre-training and understanding by biomedical Texts. During pre-training, we design three types of tasks, i.e., unimodal mask prediction, multimodal representation alignment and multimodal mask prediction, to enhance a PLM with protein property information with different granularities and, at the same time, preserve the PLM’s original representation power. On downstream tasks, ProtST enables both supervised learning and zero-shot prediction. We verify the superiority of ProtST-induced PLMs over previous ones on diverse representation learning benchmarks. Under the zero-shot setting, we show the effectiveness of ProtST on zero-shot protein classification, and ProtST also enables functional protein retrieval from a large-scale database without any function annotation.
2023-07-03
Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)
Multivariate probabilistic time series forecasts are commonly evaluated via proper scoring rules, i.e., functions that are minimal in expect… (see more)ation for the ground-truth distribution. However, this property is not sufficient to guarantee good discrimination in the non-asymptotic regime. In this paper, we provide the first systematic finite-sample study of proper scoring rules for time-series forecasting evaluation. Through a power analysis, we identify the"region of reliability"of a scoring rule, i.e., the set of practical conditions where it can be relied on to identify forecasting errors. We carry out our analysis on a comprehensive synthetic benchmark, specifically designed to test several key discrepancies between ground-truth and forecast distributions, and we gauge the generalizability of our findings to real-world tasks with an application to an electricity production problem. Our results reveal critical shortcomings in the evaluation of multivariate probabilistic forecasts as commonly performed in the literature.
2023-07-03
Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)
We consider the problem of performing Bayesian inference in probabilistic models where observations are accompanied by uncertainty, referred… (see more) to as "uncertain evidence.'' We explore how to interpret uncertain evidence, and by extension the importance of proper interpretation as it pertains to inference about latent variables. We consider a recently-proposed method "distributional evidence'' as well as revisit two older methods: Jeffrey's rule and virtual evidence. We devise guidelines on how to account for uncertain evidence and we provide new insights, particularly regarding consistency. To showcase the impact of different interpretations of the same uncertain evidence, we carry out experiments in which one interpretation is defined as "correct.'' We then compare inference results from each different interpretation illustrating the importance of careful consideration of uncertain evidence.
2023-07-03
Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)
Slot attention is a powerful method for object-centric modeling in images and videos. However, its set-equivariance limits its ability to ha… (see more)ndle videos with a dynamic number of objects because it cannot break ties. To overcome this limitation, we first establish a connection between slot attention and optimal transport. Based on this new perspective we propose **MESH** (Minimize Entropy of Sinkhorn): a cross-attention module that combines the tiebreaking properties of unregularized optimal transport with the speed of regularized optimal transport. We evaluate slot attention using MESH on multiple object-centric learning benchmarks and find significant improvements over slot attention in every setting.
2023-07-03
Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)
Stochastic min-max optimization has gained interest in the machine learning community with the advancements in GANs and adversarial training… (see more). Although game optimization is fairly well understood in the deterministic setting, some issues persist in the stochastic regime. Recent work has shown that stochastic gradient descent-ascent methods such as the optimistic gradient are highly sensitive to noise or can fail to converge. Although alternative strategies exist, they can be prohibitively expensive. We introduce Omega, a method with optimistic-like updates that mitigates the impact of noise by incorporating an EMA of historic gradients in its update rule. We also explore a variation of this algorithm that incorporates momentum. Although we do not provide convergence guarantees, our experiments on stochastic games show that Omega outperforms the optimistic gradient method when applied to linear players.