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Kristian Kersting

Publications and source records attributed to Kristian Kersting.

At least 199 records · Page 11Linked to original sources

Explaining Deep Tractable Probabilistic Models: The sum-product network case

We consider the problem of explaining a class of tractable deep probabilistic models, the Sum-Product Networks (SPNs) and present an algorithm ExSPN to generate explanations. To this effect, we define the notion of a context-specific independence tree(CSI-tree) and present an iterative algorithm that converts an SPN to a CSI-tree. The resulting CSI-tree is both interpretable and explainable to the domain expert. We achieve this by extracting the conditional independencies encoded by the SPN and approximating the local context specified by the structure of the SPN. Our extensive empirical evaluations on synthetic, standard, and real-world clinical data sets demonstrate that the CSI-tree exhibits superior explainability.

cs.LG↗

LogicRank: Logic Induced Reranking for Generative Text-to-Image Systems

Text-to-image models have recently achieved remarkable success with seemingly accurate samples in photo-realistic quality. However as state-of-the-art language models still struggle evaluating precise statements consistently, so do language model based image generation processes. In this work we showcase problems of state-of-the-art text-to-image models like DALL-E with generating accurate samples from statements related to the draw bench benchmark. Furthermore we show that CLIP is not able to rerank those generated samples consistently. To this end we propose LogicRank, a neuro-symbolic reasoning framework that can result in a more accurate ranking-system for such precision-demanding settings. LogicRank integrates smoothly into the generation process of text-to-image models and moreover can be used to further fine-tune towards a more logical precise model.

cs.AI↗

Can Machines Help Us Answering Question 16 in Datasheets, and In Turn Reflecting on Inappropriate Content?

Large datasets underlying much of current machine learning raise serious issues concerning inappropriate content such as offensive, insulting, threatening, or might otherwise cause anxiety. This calls for increased dataset documentation, e.g., using datasheets. They, among other topics, encourage to reflect on the composition of the datasets. So far, this documentation, however, is done manually and therefore can be tedious and error-prone, especially for large image datasets. Here we ask the arguably "circular" question of whether a machine can help us reflect on inappropriate content, answering Question 16 in Datasheets. To this end, we propose to use the information stored in pre-trained transformer models to assist us in the documentation process. Specifically, prompt-tuning based on a dataset of socio-moral values steers CLIP to identify potentially inappropriate content, therefore reducing human labor. We then document the inappropriate images found using word clouds, based on captions generated using a vision-language model. The documentations of two popular, large-scale computer vision datasets -- ImageNet and OpenImages -- produced this way suggest that machines can indeed help dataset creators to answer Question 16 on inappropriate image content.

cs.AI↗

Machines Explaining Linear Programs

There has been a recent push in making machine learning models more interpretable so that their performance can be trusted. Although successful, these methods have mostly focused on the deep learning methods while the fundamental optimization methods in machine learning such as linear programs (LP) have been left out. Even if LPs can be considered as whitebox or clearbox models, they are not easy to understand in terms of relationships between inputs and outputs. As a linear program only provides the optimal solution to an optimization problem, further explanations are often helpful. In this work, we extend the attribution methods for explaining neural networks to linear programs. These methods explain the model by providing relevance scores for the model inputs, to show the influence of each input on the output. Alongside using classical gradient-based attribution methods we also propose a way to adapt perturbation-based attribution methods to LPs. Our evaluations of several different linear and integer problems showed that attribution methods can generate useful explanations for linear programs. However, we also demonstrate that using a neural attribution method directly might come with some drawbacks, as the properties of these methods on neural networks do not necessarily transfer to linear programs. The methods can also struggle if a linear program has more than one optimal solution, as a solver just returns one possible solution. Our results can hopefully be used as a good starting point for further research in this direction.

cs.LG↗

Tearing Apart NOTEARS: Controlling the Graph Prediction via Variance Manipulation

Simulations are ubiquitous in machine learning. Especially in graph learning, simulations of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) are being deployed for evaluating new algorithms. In the literature, it was recently argued that continuous-optimization approaches to structure discovery such as NOTEARS might be exploiting the sortability of the variable's variances in the available data due to their use of least square losses. Specifically, since structure discovery is a key problem in science and beyond, we want to be invariant to the scale being used for measuring our data (e.g. meter versus centimeter should not affect the causal direction inferred by the algorithm). In this work, we further strengthen this initial, negative empirical suggestion by both proving key results in the multivariate case and corroborating with further empirical evidence. In particular, we show that we can control the resulting graph with our targeted variance attacks, even in the case where we can only partially manipulate the variances of the data.

cs.LG↗

Attributions Beyond Neural Networks: The Linear Program Case

Linear Programs (LPs) have been one of the building blocks in machine learning and have championed recent strides in differentiable optimizers for learning systems. While there exist solvers for even high-dimensional LPs, understanding said high-dimensional solutions poses an orthogonal and unresolved problem. We introduce an approach where we consider neural encodings for LPs that justify the application of attribution methods from explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) designed for neural learning systems. The several encoding functions we propose take into account aspects such as feasibility of the decision space, the cost attached to each input, or the distance to special points of interest. We investigate the mathematical consequences of several XAI methods on said neural LP encodings. We empirically show that the attribution methods Saliency and LIME reveal indistinguishable results up to perturbation levels, and we propose the property of Directedness as the main discriminative criterion between Saliency and LIME on one hand, and a perturbation-based Feature Permutation approach on the other hand. Directedness indicates whether an attribution method gives feature attributions with respect to an increase of that feature. We further notice the baseline selection problem beyond the classical computer vision setting for Integrated Gradients.

cs.LG↗

Plug & Play Attacks: Towards Robust and Flexible Model Inversion Attacks

Model inversion attacks (MIAs) aim to create synthetic images that reflect the class-wise characteristics from a target classifier's private training data by exploiting the model's learned knowledge. Previous research has developed generative MIAs that use generative adversarial networks (GANs) as image priors tailored to a specific target model. This makes the attacks time- and resource-consuming, inflexible, and susceptible to distributional shifts between datasets. To overcome these drawbacks, we present Plug & Play Attacks, which relax the dependency between the target model and image prior, and enable the use of a single GAN to attack a wide range of targets, requiring only minor adjustments to the attack. Moreover, we show that powerful MIAs are possible even with publicly available pre-trained GANs and under strong distributional shifts, for which previous approaches fail to produce meaningful results. Our extensive evaluation confirms the improved robustness and flexibility of Plug & Play Attacks and their ability to create high-quality images revealing sensitive class characteristics.

cs.LG↗

DAFNe: A One-Stage Anchor-Free Approach for Oriented Object Detection

We present DAFNe, a Dense one-stage Anchor-Free deep Network for oriented object detection. As a one-stage model, it performs bounding box predictions on a dense grid over the input image, being architecturally simpler in design, as well as easier to optimize than its two-stage counterparts. Furthermore, as an anchor-free model, it reduces the prediction complexity by refraining from employing bounding box anchors. With DAFNe we introduce an orientation-aware generalization of the center-ness function for arbitrarily oriented bounding boxes to down-weight low-quality predictions and a center-to-corner bounding box prediction strategy that improves object localization performance. Our experiments show that DAFNe outperforms all previous one-stage anchor-free models on DOTA 1.0, DOTA 1.5, and UCAS-AOD and is on par with the best models on HRSC2016.

cs.CV↗

Gradient-based Counterfactual Explanations using Tractable Probabilistic Models

Counterfactual examples are an appealing class of post-hoc explanations for machine learning models. Given input $x$ of class $y_1$, its counterfactual is a contrastive example $x^\prime$ of another class $y_0$. Current approaches primarily solve this task by a complex optimization: define an objective function based on the loss of the counterfactual outcome $y_0$ with hard or soft constraints, then optimize this function as a black-box. This "deep learning" approach, however, is rather slow, sometimes tricky, and may result in unrealistic counterfactual examples. In this work, we propose a novel approach to deal with these problems using only two gradient computations based on tractable probabilistic models. First, we compute an unconstrained counterfactual $u$ of $x$ to induce the counterfactual outcome $y_0$. Then, we adapt $u$ to higher density regions, resulting in $x^{\prime}$. Empirical evidence demonstrates the dominant advantages of our approach.

cs.LG↗

Adaptable Adapters

State-of-the-art pretrained NLP models contain a hundred million to trillion parameters. Adapters provide a parameter-efficient alternative for the full finetuning in which we can only finetune lightweight neural network layers on top of pretrained weights. Adapter layers are initialized randomly. However, existing work uses the same adapter architecture -- i.e., the same adapter layer on top of each layer of the pretrained model -- for every dataset, regardless of the properties of the dataset or the amount of available training data. In this work, we introduce adaptable adapters that contain (1) learning different activation functions for different layers and different input data, and (2) a learnable switch to select and only use the beneficial adapter layers. We show that adaptable adapters achieve on-par performances with the standard adapter architecture while using a considerably smaller number of adapter layers. In addition, we show that the selected adapter architecture by adaptable adapters transfers well across different data settings and similar tasks. We propose to use adaptable adapters for designing efficient and effective adapter architectures. The resulting adapters (a) contain about 50% of the learning parameters of the standard adapter and are therefore more efficient at training and inference, and require less storage space, and (b) achieve considerably higher performances in low-data settings.

cs.CL↗

Interactive Disentanglement: Learning Concepts by Interacting with their Prototype Representations

Learning visual concepts from raw images without strong supervision is a challenging task. In this work, we show the advantages of prototype representations for understanding and revising the latent space of neural concept learners. For this purpose, we introduce interactive Concept Swapping Networks (iCSNs), a novel framework for learning concept-grounded representations via weak supervision and implicit prototype representations. iCSNs learn to bind conceptual information to specific prototype slots by swapping the latent representations of paired images. This semantically grounded and discrete latent space facilitates human understanding and human-machine interaction. We support this claim by conducting experiments on our novel data set "Elementary Concept Reasoning" (ECR), focusing on visual concepts shared by geometric objects.

cs.CV↗

Finding Structure and Causality in Linear Programs

Linear Programs (LP) are celebrated widely, particularly so in machine learning where they have allowed for effectively solving probabilistic inference tasks or imposing structure on end-to-end learning systems. Their potential might seem depleted but we propose a foundational, causal perspective that reveals intriguing intra- and inter-structure relations for LP components. We conduct a systematic, empirical investigation on general-, shortest path- and energy system LPs.

cs.AI↗

Do Multilingual Language Models Capture Differing Moral Norms?

Massively multilingual sentence representations are trained on large corpora of uncurated data, with a very imbalanced proportion of languages included in the training. This may cause the models to grasp cultural values including moral judgments from the high-resource languages and impose them on the low-resource languages. The lack of data in certain languages can also lead to developing random and thus potentially harmful beliefs. Both these issues can negatively influence zero-shot cross-lingual model transfer and potentially lead to harmful outcomes. Therefore, we aim to (1) detect and quantify these issues by comparing different models in different languages, (2) develop methods for improving undesirable properties of the models. Our initial experiments using the multilingual model XLM-R show that indeed multilingual LMs capture moral norms, even with potentially higher human-agreement than monolingual ones. However, it is not yet clear to what extent these moral norms differ between languages.

cs.CL↗

Interactively Providing Explanations for Transformer Language Models

Transformer language models are state of the art in a multitude of NLP tasks. Despite these successes, their opaqueness remains problematic. Recent methods aiming to provide interpretability and explainability to black-box models primarily focus on post-hoc explanations of (sometimes spurious) input-output correlations. Instead, we emphasize using prototype networks directly incorporated into the model architecture and hence explain the reasoning process behind the network's decisions. Our architecture performs on par with several language models and, moreover, enables learning from user interactions. This not only offers a better understanding of language models but uses human capabilities to incorporate knowledge outside of the rigid range of purely data-driven approaches.

cs.CL↗

Neuro-Symbolic Verification of Deep Neural Networks

Formal verification has emerged as a powerful approach to ensure the safety and reliability of deep neural networks. However, current verification tools are limited to only a handful of properties that can be expressed as first-order constraints over the inputs and output of a network. While adversarial robustness and fairness fall under this category, many real-world properties (e.g., "an autonomous vehicle has to stop in front of a stop sign") remain outside the scope of existing verification technology. To mitigate this severe practical restriction, we introduce a novel framework for verifying neural networks, named neuro-symbolic verification. The key idea is to use neural networks as part of the otherwise logical specification, enabling the verification of a wide variety of complex, real-world properties, including the one above. Moreover, we demonstrate how neuro-symbolic verification can be implemented on top of existing verification infrastructure for neural networks, making our framework easily accessible to researchers and practitioners alike.

cs.AI↗

Large Pre-trained Language Models Contain Human-like Biases of What is Right and Wrong to Do

Artificial writing is permeating our lives due to recent advances in large-scale, transformer-based language models (LMs) such as BERT, its variants, GPT-2/3, and others. Using them as pre-trained models and fine-tuning them for specific tasks, researchers have extended state of the art for many NLP tasks and shown that they capture not only linguistic knowledge but also retain general knowledge implicitly present in the data. Unfortunately, LMs trained on unfiltered text corpora suffer from degenerated and biased behaviour. While this is well established, we show that recent LMs also contain human-like biases of what is right and wrong to do, some form of ethical and moral norms of the society -- they bring a "moral direction" to surface. That is, we show that these norms can be captured geometrically by a direction, which can be computed, e.g., by a PCA, in the embedding space, reflecting well the agreement of phrases to social norms implicitly expressed in the training texts and providing a path for attenuating or even preventing toxic degeneration in LMs. Being able to rate the (non-)normativity of arbitrary phrases without explicitly training the LM for this task, we demonstrate the capabilities of the "moral direction" for guiding (even other) LMs towards producing normative text and showcase it on RealToxicityPrompts testbed, preventing the neural toxic degeneration in GPT-2.

cs.CL↗

CLEVA-Compass: A Continual Learning EValuation Assessment Compass to Promote Research Transparency and Comparability

What is the state of the art in continual machine learning? Although a natural question for predominant static benchmarks, the notion to train systems in a lifelong manner entails a plethora of additional challenges with respect to set-up and evaluation. The latter have recently sparked a growing amount of critiques on prominent algorithm-centric perspectives and evaluation protocols being too narrow, resulting in several attempts at constructing guidelines in favor of specific desiderata or arguing against the validity of prevalent assumptions. In this work, we depart from this mindset and argue that the goal of a precise formulation of desiderata is an ill-posed one, as diverse applications may always warrant distinct scenarios. Instead, we introduce the Continual Learning EValuation Assessment Compass: the CLEVA-Compass. The compass provides the visual means to both identify how approaches are practically reported and how works can simultaneously be contextualized in the broader literature landscape. In addition to promoting compact specification in the spirit of recent replication trends, it thus provides an intuitive chart to understand the priorities of individual systems, where they resemble each other, and what elements are missing towards a fair comparison.

cs.LG↗

Right for the Right Latent Factors: Debiasing Generative Models via Disentanglement

A key assumption of most statistical machine learning methods is that they have access to independent samples from the distribution of data they encounter at test time. As such, these methods often perform poorly in the face of biased data, which breaks this assumption. In particular, machine learning models have been shown to exhibit Clever-Hans-like behaviour, meaning that spurious correlations in the training set are inadvertently learnt. A number of works have been proposed to revise deep classifiers to learn the right correlations. However, generative models have been overlooked so far. We observe that generative models are also prone to Clever-Hans-like behaviour. To counteract this issue, we propose to debias generative models by disentangling their internal representations, which is achieved via human feedback. Our experiments show that this is effective at removing bias even when human feedback covers only a small fraction of the desired distribution. In addition, we achieve strong disentanglement results in a quantitative comparison with recent methods.

cs.LG↗