Wei Cheng NEC Labs America

Wei Cheng

Senior Researcher

Data Science and System Security

Posts

Dynamic Causal Discovery in Imitation Learning

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Imitation learning, which learns agent policy by mimicking expert demonstration, has shown promising results in many applications such as medical treatment regimes and self-driving vehicles. However, it remains a difficult task to interpret control policies learned by the agent. Difficulties mainly come from two aspects: 1) agents in imitation learning are usually implemented as deep neural networks, which are black-box models and lack interpretability; 2) the latent causal mechanism behind agents’ decisions may vary along the trajectory, rather than staying static throughout time steps. To increase transparency and offer better interpretability of the neural agent, we propose to expose its captured knowledge in the form of a directed acyclic causal graph, with nodes being action and state variables and edges denoting the causal relations behind predictions. Furthermore, we design this causal discovery process to be state-dependent, enabling it to model the dynamics in latent causal graphs. Concretely, we conduct causal discovery from the perspective of Granger causality and propose a self-explainable imitation learning framework, CAIL. The proposed framework is composed of three parts: a dynamic causal discovery module, a causality encoding module, and a prediction module, and is trained in an end-to-end manner. After the model is learned, we can obtain causal relations among states and action variables behind its decisions, exposing policies learned by it. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CAIL in learning the dynamic causal graphs for understanding the decision-making of imitation learning meanwhilemaintaining high prediction accuracy.

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Prompt-based Domain Discrimination for Multi-source Time Series Domain Adaptation

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Time series domain adaptation stands as a pivotal and intricate challenge with diverse applications, including but not limited to human activity recognition, sleep stage classification, and machine fault diagnosis. Despite the numerous domain adaptation techniques proposed to tackle this complex problem, their primary focus has been on the common representations of time series data. This concentration might inadvertently lead to the oversight of valuable domain-specific information originating from different source domains. To bridge this gap, we introduce POND, a novel prompt-based deep learning model designed explicitly for multi-source time series domain adaptation. POND is tailored to address significant challenges, notably: 1) The unavailability of a quantitative relationship between meta-data information and time series distributions, and 2) The dearth of exploration into extracting domain specific meta-data information. In this paper, we present an instance-level prompt generator and afidelity loss mechanism to facilitate the faithful learning of meta-data information. Additionally, we propose a domain discrimination technique to discern domain-specific meta-data information from multiple source domains. Our approach involves a simple yet effective meta-learning algorithm to optimize the objective efficiently. Furthermore, we augment the model’s performance by incorporating the Mixture of Expert (MoE) technique. The efficacy and robustness of our proposed POND model are extensively validated through experiments across 50 scenarios encompassing five datasets, which demonstrates that our proposed POND model outperforms the state-of the-art methods by up to 66% on the F1-score.

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Hierarchical Gaussian Mixture based Task Generative Model for Robust Meta-Learning

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Meta-learning enables quick adaptation of machine learning models to new tasks with limited data. While tasks could come from varying distributions in reality, most of the existing meta-learning methods consider both training and testing tasks as from the same uni-component distribution, overlooking two critical needs of a practical solution: (1) the various sources of tasks may compose a multi-component mixture distribution, and (2) novel tasks may come from a distribution that is unseen during meta-training. In this paper, we demonstrate these two challenges can be solved jointly by modeling the density of task instances. We develop a meta training framework underlain by a novel Hierarchical Gaussian Mixture based Task Generative Model (HTGM). HTGM extends the widely used empirical process of sampling tasks to a theoretical model, which learns task embeddings, fits the mixture distribution of tasks, and enables density-based scoring of novel tasks. The framework is agnostic to the encoder and scales well with large backbone networks. The model parameters are learned end-to-end by maximum likelihood estimation via an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets indicate the effectiveness of our method for both sample classification and novel task detection.

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Open-Ended Commonsense Reasoning with Unrestricted Answer Scope

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Open-ended Commonsense Reasoning is defined as solving a commonsense question without providing 1) a short list of answer candidates and 2) a pre-defined answer scope. Conventional ways of formulating the commonsense question into a question-answering form or utilizing external knowledge to learn retrieval-based methods are less applicable in the open-ended setting due to an inherent challenge. Without pre-defining an answer scope or a few candidates, open-ended commonsense reasoning entails predicting answers by searching over an extremely large searching space. Moreover, most questions require implicit multi-hop reasoning, which presents even more challenges to our problem. In this work, we leverage pre-trained language models to iteratively retrieve reasoning paths on the external knowledge base, which does not require task-specific supervision. The reasoning paths can help to identify the most precise answer to the commonsense question. We conduct experiments on two commonsense benchmark datasets. Compared to other approaches, our proposed method achieves better performance both quantitatively and qualitatively.

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NEC Labs America Team Heading to NeurIPS23 in New Orleans

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NEC Labs America is proud to be a Silver Sponsor for NeurIPS 2023 in New Orleans from December 10-16. Visit our booth to meet our team and learn about our intern opportunities in machine learning, data science, media analytics and integrated systems. Also, our Vijay Kumar.B.G, Samuel Schulter & Manmohan Chandraker, along with Zaid Khan, Northeastern University and Yun Fu, UC San Diego will present a paper, Exploring Question Decomposition for Zero-Shot VQA.

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GLAD: Content-Aware Dynamic Graphs for Log Anomaly Detection

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Logs play a crucial role in system monitoring and debugging by recording valuable system information, including events and status. Although various methods have been proposed to detect anomalies in log sequences, they often overlook the significance of considering relationships among system components, such as services and users, which can be identified from log contents. Understanding these relationships is vital for identifying anomalies and their underlying causes. To address this issue, we introduce GLAD, a Graph-based Log Anomaly Detection framework designed to detect relational anomalies in system logs. GLAD incorporates log semantics, relationship patterns, and sequential patterns into a unified framework for anomaly detection. Specifically, GLAD first introduces a field extraction module that utilizes prompt-based few-shot learning to extract essential field information, such as services and users, from log contents. Then GLAD constructs dynamic log graphs for sliding windows by leveraging the log events and extracted fields. These graphs represent events and fields as nodes and their relationships as edges. Subsequently, we propose atemporal-attentive graph edge anomaly detection model for identifying anomalous relationships in the dynamic log graphs. This model employs a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based encoder enhanced with transformers to capture structural, content, and temporal features. We evaluate our proposed method on three datasets, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of GLAD in detecting anomalies indicated by varying relation patterns.

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AutoTCL: Automated Time Series Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentations

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Read AutoTCL: Automated Time Series Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentations publication. Modern techniques like contrastive learning have been effectively used in many areas, including computer vision, natural language processing, and graph-structured data. Creating positive examples that assist the model in learning robust and discriminative representations is a crucial stage in contrastive learning approaches. Usually, preset human intuition directs the selection of relevant data augmentations. Due to patterns that are easily recognized by humans, this rule of thumb works well in the vision and language domains. However, it is impractical to visually inspect the temporal structures in time series. The diversity of time series augmentations at both the dataset and instance levels makes it difficult to choose meaningful augmentations on the fly. Thus, although prevalent, contrastive learning with data augmentation has been less studied in the time series domain. In this study, we address this gap by analyzing time series data augmentation using information theory and summarizing the most commonly adopted augmentations in a unified format. We then propose a parameterized augmentation method, AutoTCL, which can be adaptively employed to support time series representation learning. The proposed approach is encoder-agnostic, allowing it to be seamlessly integrated with different backbone encoders. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the highly competitive results of our method, with an average 10.3% reduction in MSE and 7.0% in MAE over the leading baselines.

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Skill Disentanglement for Imitation Learning from Suboptimal Demonstrations

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Imitation learning has achieved great success in many sequential decision-making tasks, in which a neural agent is learned by imitating collected human demonstrations. However, existing algorithms typically require a large number of high-quality demonstrations that are difficult and expensive to collect. Usually, a trade-off between demonstration quality and quantity needs to be made. Targeting this problem, in this work we consider the imitation of sub-optimal demonstrations, with both a small clean demonstration set and a large noisy set. Some pioneering works have been proposed, but they suffer from many limitations, e.g., assuming a demonstration to be of the same optimality throughout time steps and failing to provide any interpretation w.r.t knowledge learned from the noisy set. Addressing these problems, we propose method by evaluating and imitating at the sub-demonstration level, encoding action primitives of varying quality into different skills. Concretely, SDIL consists of a high-level controller to discover skills and a skill-conditioned module to capture action-taking policies and is trained following a two-phase pipeline by first discovering skills with all demonstrations and then adapting the controller to only the clean set. A mutual-information-based regularization and a dynamic sub-demonstration optimality estimator are designed to promote disentanglement in the skill space. Extensive experiments are conducted over two gym environments and a real-world healthcare dataset to demonstrate the superiority of SDIL in learning from sub-optimal demonstrations and its improved interpretability by examining learned skills.

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FedSkill: Privacy Preserved Interpretable Skill Learning via Imitation

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Read FedSkill: Privacy Preserved Interpretable Skill Learning via Imitation publication. Imitation learning that replicates experts’ skills via their demonstrations has shown significant success in various decision-making tasks. However, two critical challenges still hinder the deployment of imitation learning techniques in real-world application scenarios. First, existing methods lack the intrinsic interpretability to explicitly explain the underlying rationale of the learned skill and thus making learned policy untrustworthy. Second, due to the scarcity of expert demonstrations from each end user (client), learning a policy based on different data silos is necessary but challenging in privacy-sensitive applications such as finance and healthcare. To this end, we present a privacy-preserved interpretable skill learning framework (FedSkill) that enables global policy learning to incorporate data from different sources and provides explainable interpretations to each local user without violating privacy and data sovereignty. Specifically, our proposed interpretable skill learning model can capture the varying patterns in the trajectories of expert demonstrations, and extract prototypical information as skills that provide implicit guidance for policy learning and explicit explanations in the reasoning process. Moreover, we design a novel aggregation mechanism coupled with the based skill learning model to preserve global information utilization and maintain local interpretability under the federated framework. Thoroughly experiments on three datasets and empirical studies demonstrate that our proposed FedSkill framework not only outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning methods but also exhibits good interpretability under a federated setting. Our proposed FedSkill framework is the first attempt to bridge the gaps among federated learning, interpretable machine learning, and imitation learning.

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Personalized Federated Learning under Mixture Distributions

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The recent trend towards Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) has garnered significant attention as it allows for the training of models that are tailored to each client while maintaining data privacy. However, current PFL techniques primarily focus on modeling the conditional distribution heterogeneity (i.e. concept shift), which can result in suboptimal performance when the distribution of input data across clients diverges (i.e. covariate shift). Additionally, these techniques often lack the ability to adapt to unseen data, further limiting their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach, FedGMM, which utilizes Gaussian mixture models (GMM) to effectively fit the input data distributions across diverse clients. The model parameters are estimated by maximum likelihood estimation utilizing a federated Expectation-Maximization algorithm, which is solved in closed form and does not assume gradient similarity. Furthermore, FedGMM possesses an additional advantage of adapting to new clients with minimal overhead, and it also enables uncertainty quantification. Empirical evaluations on synthetic and benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method in both PFL classification and novel sample detection.

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