Wenchao Yul NEC Labs America

Wenchao Yu

Senior Researcher

Data Science and System Security

Posts

SEED: Sound Event Early Detection via Evidential Uncertainty

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Sound Event Early Detection (SEED) is an essential task in recognizing the acoustic environments and soundscapes. However, most of the existing methods focus on the offline sound event detection, which suffers from the over-confidence issue of early-stage event detection and usually yield unreliable results. To solve the problem, we propose a novel Polyphonic Evidential Neural Network (PENet) to model the evidential uncertainty of the class probability with Beta distribution. Specifically, we use a Beta distribution to model the distribution of class probabilities, and the evidential uncertainty enriches uncertainty representation with evidence information, which plays a central role in reliable prediction. To further improve the event detection performance, we design the backtrack inference method that utilizes both the forward and backward audio features of an ongoing event. Experiments on the DESED database show that the proposed method can simultaneously improve 13.0% and 3.8% in time delay and detection F1 score compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

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Dynamic Causal Discovery in Imitation Learning

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Using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to recover expert policies via imitation has been found to be promising in a wide range of applications. However, it remains a difficult task to interpret the control policy learned by the agent. Difficulties mainly come from two aspects: 1) agents in DRL are usually implemented as deep neural networks (DNNs), which are black-box models and lack in interpretability, 2) the latent causal mechanism behind agents’ decisions may vary along the trajectory, rather than staying static throughout time steps. To address these difficulties, in this paper, we propose a self-explaining imitation framework, which can expose causal relations among states and action variables behind its decisions. Specifically, a dynamic causal discovery module is designed to extract the causal graph basing on historical trajectory and current states at each time step, and a causality encoding module is designed to model the interactions among variables with discovered causal edges. After encoding causality into variable embeddings, a prediction model conducts the imitation learning on top of obtained representations. These three components are trained end-to-end, and discovered causal edges can provide interpretations on rules captured by the agent. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on the simulation dataset to analyze its causal discovery capacity, and we further test it on a real-world medical dataset MIMIC-IV. Experimental results demonstrate its potential of providing explanations behind decisions.

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You Are What and Where You Are: Graph Enhanced Attention Network for Explainable POI Recommendation

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Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation is an emerging area of research on location-based social networks to analyze user behaviors and contextual check-in information. For this problem, existing approaches, with shallow or deep architectures, have two major drawbacks. First, for these approaches, the attributes of individuals have been largely ignored. Therefore, it would be hard, if not impossible, to gather sufficient user attribute features to have complete coverage of possible motivation factors. Second, most existing models preserve the information of users or POIs by latent representations without explicitly highlighting salient factors or signals. Consequently, the trained models with unjustifiable parameters provide few persuasive rationales to explain why users favor or dislike certain POIs and what really causes a visit. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose GEAPR, a POI recommender that is able to interpret the POI prediction in an end-to-end fashion. Specifically, GEAPR learns user representations by aggregating different factors, such as structural context, neighbor impact, user attributes, and geolocation influence. GEAPR takes advantage of a triple attention mechanism to quantify the influences of different factors for each resulting recommendation and performs a thorough analysis of the model interpretability. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. GEAPR is deployed and under test on an internal web server. An example interface is presented to showcase its application on explainable POI recommendation.

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Towards Robustness of Deep Neural Networks via Networks via Regularization

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Recent studies have demonstrated the vulnerability of deep neural networks against adversarial examples. In-spired by the observation that adversarial examples often lie outside the natural image data manifold and the intrinsic dimension of image data is much smaller than its pixel space dimension, we propose to embed high-dimensional input images into a low-dimensional space and apply regularization on the embedding space to push the adversarial examples back to the manifold. The proposed framework is called Embedding Regularized Classifier (ER-Classifier), which improves the adversarial robustness of the classifier through embedding regularization. Besides improving classification accuracy against adversarial examples, the framework can be combined with detection methods to detect adversarial examples. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets show that, our proposed framework achieves good performance against strong adversarial at-tack methods.

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Hierarchical Imitation Learning with Contextual Bandits for Dynamic Treatment Regimes

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Imitation learning has been proved to be effective in mimicking experts’ behaviors from their demonstrations without access to explicit reward signals. Meanwhile, complex tasks, e.g., dynamic treatment regimes for patients with comorbidities, often suggest significant variability in expert demonstrations with multiple sub-tasks. In these cases, it could be difficult to use a single flat policy to handle tasks of hierarchical structures. In this paper, we propose the hierarchical imitation learning model, HIL, to jointly learn latent high-level policies and sub-policies (for individual sub-tasks) from expert demonstrations without prior knowledge. First, HIL learns sub-policies by imitating expert trajectories with the sub-task switching guidance from high-level policies. Second, HIL collects the feedback from its sub-policies to optimize high-level policies, which is modeled as a contextual multi-arm bandit that sequentially selects the best sub-policies at each time step based on the contextual information derived from demonstrations. Compared with state-of-the-art baselines on real-world medical data, HIL improves the likelihood of patient survival and provides better dynamic treatment regimes with the exploitation of hierarchical structures in expert demonstrations.

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Deep Multi-Instance Contrastive Learning with Dual Attention for Anomaly Precursor Detection

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Prognostics or early detection of incipient faults by leveraging the monitoring time series data in complex systems is valuable to automatic system management and predictive maintenance. However, this task is challenging. First, learning the multi-dimensional heterogeneous time series data with various anomaly types is hard. Second, the precise annotation of anomaly incipient periods is lacking. Third, the interpretable tools to diagnose the precursor symptoms are lacking. Despite some recent progresses, few of the existing approaches can jointly resolve these challenges. In this paper, we propose MCDA, a deep multi-instance contrastive learning approach with dual attention, to detect anomaly precursor. MCDA utilizes multi-instance learning to model the uncertainty of precursor period and employs recurrent neural network with tensorized hidden states to extract precursor features encoded in temporal dynamics as well as the correlations between different pairs of time series. A dual attention mechanism on both temporal aspect and time series variables is developed to pinpoint the time period and the sensors the precursor symptoms are involved in. A contrastive loss is designed to address the issue that annotated anomalies are few. To the best of our knowledge, MCDA is the first method studying the problem of ‘when’ and ‘where’ for the anomaly precursor detection simultaneously. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MCDA.

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Learning to Drop: Robust Graph Neural Network via Topological Denoising

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Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown to be powerful tools for graph analytics. The key idea is to recursively propagate and aggregate information along the edges of the given graph. Despite their success, however, the existing GNNs are usually sensitive to the quality of the input graph. Real-world graphs are often noisy and contain task-irrelevant edges, which may lead to suboptimal generalization performance in the learned GNN models. In this paper, we propose PTDNet, a parameterized topological denoising network, to improve the robustness and generalization performance of GNNs by learning to drop task-irrelevant edges. PTDNet prunes task-irrelevant edges by penalizing the number of edges in the sparsified graph with parameterized networks. To take into consideration the topology of the entire graph, the nuclear norm regularization is applied to impose the low-rank constraint on the resulting sparsified graph for better generalization. PTDNet can be used as a key component in GNN models to improve their performances on various tasks, such as node classification and link prediction. Experimental studies on both synthetic and benchmark datasets show that PTDNet can improve the performance of GNNs significantly and the performance gain becomes larger for more noisy datasets.

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Multi-Task Recurrent Modular Networks

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We consider the models of deep multi-task learning with recurrent architectures that exploit regularities across tasks to improve the performance of multiple sequence processing tasks jointly. Most existing architectures are painstakingly customized to learn task relationships for different problems, which is not flexible enough to model the dynamic task relationships and lacks generalization abilities to novel test-time scenarios. We propose multi-task recurrent modular networks (MT-RMN) that can be incorporated in any multi-task recurrent models to address the above drawbacks. MT-RMN consists of a shared encoder and multiple task-specific decoders, and recurrently operates over time. For better flexibility, it modularizes the encoder into multiple layers of sub-networks and dynamically controls the connection between these sub-networks and the decoders at different time steps, which provides the recurrent networks with varying degrees of parameter sharing for tasks with dynamic relatedness. For the generalization ability, MT-RMN aims to discover a set of generalizable sub-networks in the encoder that are assembled in different ways for different tasks. The policy networks augmented with the differentiable routers are utilized to make the binary connection decisions between the sub-networks. The experimental results on three multi-task sequence processing datasets consistently demonstrate the effectiveness of MT-RMN.

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Parameterized Explainer for Graph Neural Network

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Despite recent progress in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), explaining predictions made by GNNs remains a challenging open problem. The leading method independently addresses the local explanations (i.e., important subgraph structure and node features) to interpret why a GNN model makes the prediction for a single instance, e.g. a node or a graph. As a result, the explanation generated is painstakingly customized for each instance. The unique explanation interpreting each instance independently is not sufficient to provide a global understanding of the learned GNN model, leading to the lack of generalizability and hindering it from being used in the inductive setting. Besides, as it is designed for explaining a single instance, it is challenging to explain a set of instances naturally (e.g., graphs of a given class). In this study, we address these key challenges and propose PGExplainer, a parameterized explainer for GNNs. PGExplainer adopts a deep neural network to parameterize the generation process of explanations, which enables PGExplainer a natural approach to explaining multiple instances collectively. Compared to the existing work, PGExplainer has better generalization ability and can be utilized in an inductive setting easily. Experiments on both synthetic and real-life datasets show highly competitive performance with up to 24.7% relative improvement in AUC on explaining graph classification over the leading baseline.

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Node Classification in Temporal Graphs through Stochastic Sparsification and Temporal Structural Convolution

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Node classification in temporal graphs aims to predict node labels based on historical observations. In real-world applications, temporal graphs are complex with both graph topology and node attributes evolving rapidly, which poses a high overfitting risk to existing graph learning approaches. In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal Structural Network (TSNet) model, which jointly learns temporal and structural features for node classification from the sparsified temporal graphs. We show that the proposed TSNet learns how to sparsify temporal graphs to favor the subsequent classification tasks and prevent overfitting from complex neighborhood structures. The effective local features are then extracted by simultaneous convolutions in temporal and spatial domains. Using the standard stochastic gradient descent and backpropagation techniques, TSNet iteratively optimizes sparsification and node representations for subsequent classification tasks. Experimental study on public benchmark datasets demonstrates the competitive performance of the proposed model in node classification. Besides, TSNet has the potential to help domain experts to interpret and visualize the learned models.

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