arXiv subjects

Tanmay Chakraborty

Publications and source records attributed to Tanmay Chakraborty.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Efficient Contextual Preferential Bayesian Optimization with Historical Examples

State-of-the-art multi-objective optimization often assumes a known utility function, learns it interactively, or computes the full Pareto front-each requiring costly expert input.~Real-world problems, however, involve implicit preferences that are hard to formalize. To reduce expert involvement, we propose an offline, interpretable utility learning method that uses expert knowledge, historical examples, and coarse information about the utility space to reduce sample requirements. We model uncertainty via a full Bayesian posterior and propagate it throughout the optimization process. Our method outperforms standard Gaussian processes and BOPE across four domains, showing strong performance even with biased samples, as encountered in the real-world, and limited expert input.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Explainable Bayesian Optimization

Manual parameter tuning of cyber-physical systems is a common practice, but it is labor-intensive. Bayesian Optimization (BO) offers an automated alternative, yet its black-box nature reduces trust and limits human-BO collaborative system tuning. Experts struggle to interpret BO recommendations due to the lack of explanations. This paper addresses the post-hoc BO explainability problem for cyber-physical systems. We introduce TNTRules (Tune-No-Tune Rules), a novel algorithm that provides both global and local explanations for BO recommendations. TNTRules generates actionable rules and visual graphs, identifying optimal solution bounds and ranges, as well as potential alternative solutions. Unlike existing explainable AI (XAI) methods, TNTRules is tailored specifically for BO, by encoding uncertainty via a variance pruning technique and hierarchical agglomerative clustering. A multi-objective optimization approach allows maximizing explanation quality. We evaluate TNTRules using established XAI metrics (Correctness, Completeness, and Compactness) and compare it against adapted baseline methods. The results demonstrate that TNTRules generates high-fidelity, compact, and complete explanations, significantly outperforming three baselines on 5 multi-objective testing functions and 2 hyperparameter tuning problems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Comparative Explanations: Explanation Guided Decision Making for Human-in-the-Loop Preference Selection

This paper introduces Multi-Output LOcal Narrative Explanation (MOLONE), a novel comparative explanation method designed to enhance preference selection in human-in-the-loop Preference Bayesian optimization (PBO). The preference elicitation in PBO is a non-trivial task because it involves navigating implicit trade-offs between vector-valued outcomes, subjective priorities of decision-makers, and decision-makers' uncertainty in preference selection. Existing explainable AI (XAI) methods for BO primarily focus on input feature importance, neglecting the crucial role of outputs (objectives) in human preference elicitation. MOLONE addresses this gap by providing explanations that highlight both input and output importance, enabling decision-makers to understand the trade-offs between competing objectives and make more informed preference selections. MOLONE focuses on local explanations, comparing the importance of input features and outcomes across candidate samples within a local neighborhood of the search space, thus capturing nuanced differences relevant to preference-based decision-making. We evaluate MOLONE within a PBO framework using benchmark multi-objective optimization functions, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving convergence compared to noisy preference selections. Furthermore, a user study confirms that MOLONE significantly accelerates convergence in human-in-the-loop scenarios by facilitating more efficient identification of preferred options.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Explanation format does not matter; but explanations do -- An Eggsbert study on explaining Bayesian Optimisation tasks

Bayesian Optimisation (BO) is a family of methods for finding optimal parameters when the underlying function to be optimised is unknown. BO is used, for example, for hyperparameter tuning in machine learning and as an expert support tool for tuning cyberphysical systems. For settings where humans are involved in the tuning task, methods have been developed to explain BO (Explainable Bayesian Optimization, XBO). However, there is little guidance on how to present XBO results to humans so that they can tune the system effectively and efficiently. In this paper, we investigate how the XBO explanation format affects users' task performance, task load, understanding and trust in XBO. We chose a task that is accessible to a wide range of users. Specifically, we set up an egg cooking scenario with 6 parameters that participants had to adjust to achieve a perfect soft-boiled egg. We compared three different explanation formats: a bar chart, a list of rules and a textual explanation in a between-subjects online study with 213 participants. Our results show that adding any type of explanation increases task success, reduces the number of trials needed to achieve success, and improves comprehension and confidence. While explanations add more information for participants to process, we found no increase in user task load. We also found that the aforementioned results were independent of the explanation format; all formats had a similar effect. This is an interesting finding for practical applications, as it suggests that explanations can be added to BO tuning tasks without the burden of designing or selecting specific explanation formats. In the future, it would be interesting to investigate scenarios of prolonged use of the explanation formats and whether they have different effects on users' mental models of the underlying system.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

An Empirical Analysis of Fairness Notions under Differential Privacy

Recent works have shown that selecting an optimal model architecture suited to the differential privacy setting is necessary to achieve the best possible utility for a given privacy budget using differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD)(Tramer and Boneh 2020; Cheng et al. 2022). In light of these findings, we empirically analyse how different fairness notions, belonging to distinct classes of statistical fairness criteria (independence, separation and sufficiency), are impacted when one selects a model architecture suitable for DP-SGD, optimized for utility. Using standard datasets from ML fairness literature, we show using a rigorous experimental protocol, that by selecting the optimal model architecture for DP-SGD, the differences across groups concerning the relevant fairness metrics (demographic parity, equalized odds and predictive parity) more often decrease or are negligibly impacted, compared to the non-private baseline, for which optimal model architecture has also been selected to maximize utility. These findings challenge the understanding that differential privacy will necessarily exacerbate unfairness in deep learning models trained on biased datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Generalizing Adversarial Explanations with Grad-CAM

Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad- CAM), is an example-based explanation method that provides a gradient activation heat map as an explanation for Convolution Neural Network (CNN) models. The drawback of this method is that it cannot be used to generalize CNN behaviour. In this paper, we present a novel method that extends Grad-CAM from example-based explanations to a method for explaining global model behaviour. This is achieved by introducing two new metrics, (i) Mean Observed Dissimilarity (MOD) and (ii) Variation in Dissimilarity (VID), for model generalization. These metrics are computed by comparing a Normalized Inverted Structural Similarity Index (NISSIM) metric of the Grad-CAM generated heatmap for samples from the original test set and samples from the adversarial test set. For our experiment, we study adversarial attacks on deep models such as VGG16, ResNet50, and ResNet101, and wide models such as InceptionNetv3 and XceptionNet using Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM). We then compute the metrics MOD and VID for the automatic face recognition (AFR) use case with the VGGFace2 dataset. We observe a consistent shift in the region highlighted in the Grad-CAM heatmap, reflecting its participation to the decision making, across all models under adversarial attacks. The proposed method can be used to understand adversarial attacks and explain the behaviour of black box CNN models for image analysis.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

SpectralNET: Exploring Spatial-Spectral WaveletCNN for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral Image (HSI) classification using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) is widely found in the current literature. Approaches vary from using SVMs to 2D CNNs, 3D CNNs, 3D-2D CNNs. Besides 3D-2D CNNs and FuSENet, the other approaches do not consider both the spectral and spatial features together for HSI classification task, thereby resulting in poor performances. 3D CNNs are computationally heavy and are not widely used, while 2D CNNs do not consider multi-resolution processing of images, and only limits itself to the spatial features. Even though 3D-2D CNNs try to model the spectral and spatial features their performance seems limited when applied over multiple dataset. In this article, we propose SpectralNET, a wavelet CNN, which is a variation of 2D CNN for multi-resolution HSI classification. A wavelet CNN uses layers of wavelet transform to bring out spectral features. Computing a wavelet transform is lighter than computing 3D CNN. The spectral features extracted are then connected to the 2D CNN which bring out the spatial features, thereby creating a spatial-spectral feature vector for classification. Overall a better model is achieved that can classify multi-resolution HSI data with high accuracy. Experiments performed with SpectralNET on benchmark dataset, i.e. Indian Pines, University of Pavia, and Salinas Scenes confirm the superiority of proposed SpectralNET with respect to the state-of-the-art methods. The code is publicly available in https://github.com/tanmay-ty/SpectralNET.

eess.IV↗