Robust Network Learning via Inverse Scale Variational Sparsification

While neural networks have made significant strides in many AI tasks, they remain vulnerable to a range of noise types, including natural corruptions, adversarial noise, and low-resolution artifacts. Many existing approaches focus on enhancing robustness against specific noise types, limiting their adaptability to others. Previous studies have addressed general robustness by adopting a spectral perspective, which tends to blur crucial features like texture and object contours. Our proposed solution, however, introduces an inverse scale variational sparsification framework within a time-continuous inverse scale space formulation. This framework progressively learns finer-scale features by discerning variational differences between pixels, ultimately preserving only large-scale features in the smoothed image. Unlike frequency-based methods, our approach not only removes noise by smoothing small-scale features where corruptions often occur but also retains high-contrast details such as textures and object contours. Moreover, our framework offers simplicity and efficiency in implementation. By integrating this algorithm into neural network training, we guide the model to prioritize learning large-scale features. We show the efficacy of our approach through enhanced robustness against various noise types.

LAC-Net: Linear-Fusion Attention-Guided Convolutional Network for Accurate Robotic Grasping Under the Occlusion

This paper addresses the challenge of perceiving complete object shapes through visual perception. While prior studies have demonstrated encouraging outcomes in segmenting the visible parts of objects within a scene, amodal segmentation, in particular, has the potential to allow robots to infer the occluded parts of objects. To this end, this paper introduces a new framework that explores amodal segmentation for robotic grasping in cluttered scenes, thus greatly enhancing robotic grasping abilities. Initially, we use a conventional segmentation algorithm to detect the visible segments of the target object, which provides shape priors for completing the full object mask. Particularly, to explore how to utilize semantic features from RGB images and geometric information from depth images, we propose a Linear-fusion Attention-guided Convolutional Network (LAC-Net). LAC-Net utilizes the linear-fusion strategy to effectively fuse this cross-modal data, and then uses the prior visible mask as attention map to guide the network to focus on target feature locations for further complete mask recovery. Using the amodal mask of the target object provides advantages in selecting more accurate and robust grasp points compared to relying solely on the visible segments. The results on different datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, the robot experiments validate the feasibility and robustness of this method in the real world. Our code and demonstrations are available on the project page: https://jrryzh.github.io/LAC-Net.

Bayesian Intervention Optimization for Causal Discovery

Causal discovery is crucial for understanding complex systems and informing decisions. While observational data can uncover causal relationships under certain assumptions, it often falls short, making active interventions necessary. Current methods, such as Bayesian and graph-theoretical approaches, do not prioritize decision-making and often rely on ideal conditions or information gain, which is not directly related to hypothesis testing. We propose a novel Bayesian optimization-based method inspired by Bayes factors that aims to maximize the probability of obtaining decisive and correct evidence. Our approach uses observational data to estimate causal models under different hypotheses, evaluates potential interventions pre-experimentally, and iteratively updates priors to refine interventions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through various experiments. Our contributions provide a robust framework for efficient causal discovery through active interventions, enhancing the practical application of theoretical advancements.

The Blessings of Multiple Treatments and Outcomes in Treatment Effect Estimation

Assessing causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding is a challenging problem. Existing studies leveraged proxy variables or multiple treatments to adjust for the confounding bias. In particular, the latter approach attributes the impact on a single outcome to multiple treatments, allowing estimating latent variables for confounding control. Nevertheless, these methods primarily focus on a single outcome, whereas in many real-world scenarios, there is greater interest in studying the effects on multiple outcomes. Besides, these outcomes are often coupled with multiple treatments. Examples include the intensive care unit (ICU), where health providers evaluate the effectiveness of therapies on multiple health indicators. To accommodate these scenarios, we consider a new setting dubbed as multiple treatments and multiple outcomes. We then show that parallel studies of multiple outcomes involved in this setting can assist each other in causal identification, in the sense that we can exploit other treatments and outcomes as proxies for each treatment effect under study. We proceed with a causal discovery method that can effectively identify such proxies for causal estimation. The utility of our method is demonstrated in synthetic data and sepsis disease.

Exploring Counterfactual Alignment Loss towards Human-centered AI

Deep neural networks have demonstrated impressive accuracy in supervised learning tasks. However, their lack of transparency makes it hard for humans to trust their results, especially in safe-critic domains such as healthcare. To address this issue, recent explanation-guided learning approaches proposed to align the gradient-based attention map to image regions annotated by human experts, thereby obtaining an intrinsically human-centered model. However, the attention map these methods are based on may fail to causally attribute the model predictions, thus compromising their validity for alignment. To address this issue, we propose a novel human-centered framework based on counterfactual generation. In particular, we utilize the counterfactual generation's ability for causal attribution to introduce a novel loss called the CounterFactual Alignment (CF-Align) loss. This loss guarantees that the features attributed by the counterfactual generation for the classifier align with the human annotations. To optimize the proposed loss that entails a counterfactual generation with an implicit function form, we leverage the implicit function theorem for backpropagation. Our method is architecture-agnostic and, therefore can be applied to any neural network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a lung cancer diagnosis dataset, showcasing faithful alignment to humans.

Doubly Robust Proximal Causal Learning for Continuous Treatments

Proximal causal learning is a promising framework for identifying the causal effect under the existence of unmeasured confounders. Within this framework, the doubly robust (DR) estimator was derived and has shown its effectiveness in estimation, especially when the model assumption is violated. However, the current form of the DR estimator is restricted to binary treatments, while the treatment can be continuous in many real-world applications. The primary obstacle to continuous treatments resides in the delta function present in the original DR estimator, making it infeasible in causal effect estimation and introducing a heavy computational burden in nuisance function estimation. To address these challenges, we propose a kernel-based DR estimator that can well handle continuous treatments. Equipped with its smoothness, we show that its oracle form is a consistent approximation of the influence function. Further, we propose a new approach to efficiently solve the nuisance functions. We then provide a comprehensive convergence analysis in terms of the mean square error. We demonstrate the utility of our estimator on synthetic datasets and real-world applications.

DIVERSIFY: A General Framework for Time Series Out-of-distribution Detection and Generalization

Time series remains one of the most challenging modalities in machine learning research. The out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and generalization on time series tend to suffer due to its non-stationary property, i.e., the distribution changes over time. The dynamic distributions inside time series pose great challenges to existing algorithms to identify invariant distributions since they mainly focus on the scenario where the domain information is given as prior knowledge. In this paper, we attempt to exploit subdomains within a whole dataset to counteract issues induced by non-stationary for generalized representation learning. We propose DIVERSIFY, a general framework, for OOD detection and generalization on dynamic distributions of time series. DIVERSIFY takes an iterative process: it first obtains the "worst-case" latent distribution scenario via adversarial training, then reduces the gap between these latent distributions. We implement DIVERSIFY via combining existing OOD detection methods according to either extracted features or outputs of models for detection while we also directly utilize outputs for classification. In addition, theoretical insights illustrate that DIVERSIFY is theoretically supported. Extensive experiments are conducted on seven datasets with different OOD settings across gesture recognition, speech commands recognition, wearable stress and affect detection, and sensor-based human activity recognition. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that DIVERSIFY learns more generalized features and significantly outperforms other baselines.

Causal Discovery with Unobserved Variables: A Proxy Variable Approach

Discovering causal relations from observational data is important. The existence of unobserved variables, such as latent confounders or mediators, can mislead the causal identification. To address this issue, proximal causal discovery methods proposed to adjust for the bias with the proxy of the unobserved variable. However, these methods presumed the data is discrete, which limits their real-world application. In this paper, we propose a proximal causal discovery method that can well handle the continuous variables. Our observation is that discretizing continuous variables can can lead to serious errors and comprise the power of the proxy. Therefore, to use proxy variables in the continuous case, the critical point is to control the discretization error. To this end, we identify mild regularity conditions on the conditional distributions, enabling us to control the discretization error to an infinitesimal level, as long as the proxy is discretized with sufficiently fine, finite bins. Based on this, we design a proxy-based hypothesis test for identifying causal relationships when unobserved variables are present. Our test is consistent, meaning it has ideal power when large samples are available. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method using synthetic and real-world data.

Causal Discovery from Subsampled Time Series with Proxy Variables

Inferring causal structures from time series data is the central interest of many scientific inquiries. A major barrier to such inference is the problem of subsampling, i.e., the frequency of measurement is much lower than that of causal influence. To overcome this problem, numerous methods have been proposed, yet either was limited to the linear case or failed to achieve identifiability. In this paper, we propose a constraint-based algorithm that can identify the entire causal structure from subsampled time series, without any parametric constraint. Our observation is that the challenge of subsampling arises mainly from hidden variables at the unobserved time steps. Meanwhile, every hidden variable has an observed proxy, which is essentially itself at some observable time in the future, benefiting from the temporal structure. Based on these, we can leverage the proxies to remove the bias induced by the hidden variables and hence achieve identifiability. Following this intuition, we propose a proxy-based causal discovery algorithm. Our algorithm is nonparametric and can achieve full causal identification. Theoretical advantages are reflected in synthetic and real-world experiments.

Knockoffs-SPR: Clean Sample Selection in Learning with Noisy Labels

A noisy training set usually leads to the degradation of the generalization and robustness of neural networks. In this paper, we propose a novel theoretically guaranteed clean sample selection framework for learning with noisy labels. Specifically, we first present a Scalable Penalized Regression (SPR) method, to model the linear relation between network features and one-hot labels. In SPR, the clean data are identified by the zero mean-shift parameters solved in the regression model. We theoretically show that SPR can recover clean data under some conditions. Under general scenarios, the conditions may be no longer satisfied; and some noisy data are falsely selected as clean data. To solve this problem, we propose a data-adaptive method for Scalable Penalized Regression with Knockoff filters (Knockoffs-SPR), which is provable to control the False-Selection-Rate (FSR) in the selected clean data. To improve the efficiency, we further present a split algorithm that divides the whole training set into small pieces that can be solved in parallel to make the framework scalable to large datasets. While Knockoffs-SPR can be regarded as a sample selection module for a standard supervised training pipeline, we further combine it with a semi-supervised algorithm to exploit the support of noisy data as unlabeled data. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets and real-world noisy datasets show the effectiveness of our framework and validate the theoretical results of Knockoffs-SPR. Our code and pre-trained models will be released.