United States

Sub-seasonal forecasting (SSF) is the prediction of key climate variables such as temperature and precipitation on the 2-week to 2-month time horizon. Skillful SSF would have substantial societal value in areas such as agricultural productivity, hydrology and water resource management, and emergency planning for extreme events such as droughts and wildfires. Despite its societal importance, SSF has stayed a challenging problem compared to both short-term weather forecasting and long-term seasonal forecasting. Recent studies have shown the potential of machine learning (ML) models to advance SSF. In this paper, for the first time, we perform a fine-grained comparison of a suite of modern ML models with start-of-the-art physics-based dynamical models from the Subseasonal Experiment (SubX) project for SSF in the western contiguous United States. Additionally, we explore mechanisms to enhance the ML models by using forecasts from dynamical models. Empirical results illustrate that, on average, ML models outperform dynamical models while the ML models tend to generate forecasts with conservative magnitude compared to the SubX models. Further, we illustrate that ML models make forecasting errors under extreme weather conditions, e.g., cold waves due to the polar vortex, highlighting the need for separate models for extreme events. Finally, we show that suitably incorporating dynamical model forecasts as inputs to ML models can substantially improve the forecasting performance of the ML models. The SSF dataset constructed for the work and code for the ML models are released along with the paper for the benefit of the artificial intelligence community.

AAAI 2022

Learning and Dynamical Models for Sub-Seasonal Climate Forecasting: Comparison and Collaboration

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

technical paper

Understanding events entails recognizing the structural and temporal orders between event mentions to build event structures/graphs for input documents. To achieve this goal, our work addresses the problems of subevent relation extraction (SRE) and temporal event relation extraction (TRE) that aim to predict subevent and temporal relations between two given event mentions/triggers in texts. Recent state-of-the-art methods for such problems have employed transformer-based language models (e.g., BERT) to induce effective contextual representations for input event mention pairs. However, a major limitation of existing transformer-based models for SRE and TRE is that they can only encode input texts of limited length (i.e., up to 512 sub-tokens in BERT), thus unable to effectively capture important context sentences that are farther away in the documents. In this work, we introduce a novel method to better model document-level context with important context sentences for event-event relation extraction. Our method seeks to identify the most important context sentences for a given entity mention pair in a document and pack them into shorter documents to be consume entirely by transformer-based language models for representation learning. The REINFORCE algorithm is employed to train models where novel reward functions are presented to capture model performance, and context-based and knowledge-based similarity between sentences for our problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method with state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets.

Selecting Optimal Context Sentences for Event-Event Relation Extraction

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is important for deploying machine learning models in the real world, where test data from shifted distributions can naturally arise. While a plethora of algorithmic approaches have recently emerged for OOD detection, a critical gap remains in theoretical understanding. In this work, we develop an analytical framework that characterizes and unifies the theoretical understanding for OOD detection. Our analytical framework motivates a novel OOD detection method for neural networks, GEM, which demonstrates both theoretical and empirical superiority. In particular, on CIFAR-100 as in-distribution data, our method outperforms a competitive baseline by 16.57% (FPR95). Lastly, we formally provide provable guarantees and comprehensive analysis of our method, underpinning how various properties of data distribution affect the performance of OOD detection.

Provable Guarantees for Understanding Out-of-distribution Detection

This paper studies the problem of expected loss minimization given a data distribution that is dependent on the decision-maker's action and evolves dynamically in time according to a geometric decay process.  Novel algorithms for both the information setting in which the decision-maker has a first order gradient oracle and the setting in which they have simply a loss function oracle are introduced. The algorithms operate on the same underlying principle: the decision-maker deploys a fixed decision repeatedly over the length of an epoch,  thereby allowing the dynamically changing environment to sufficiently mix before updating the decision.  The iteration complexity in each of the settings is shown to match existing rates for first and zero order stochastic gradient methods up to logarithmic factors. The algorithms are evaluated on a ``semi-synthetic" example using real world data from the SFpark dynamic pricing pilot study; it is shown that the announced prices result in an improvement for the institution's objective (target occupancy), while achieving an overall reduction in parking rates.

Decision-Dependent Risk Minimization in Geometrically Decaying Dynamic Environments

In this paper, we propose a framework for achieving long-term fair sequential decision making. By conducting both the hard and soft interventions, we propose to take path-specific effects on the time-lagged causal graph as a quantitative tool for measuring long-term fairness. The problem of fair sequential decision making is then formulated as a constrained optimization problem with the utility as the objective and the long-term and short-term fairness as constraints. We show that such an optimization problem can be converted to a performative risk optimization. Finally, repeated risk minimization (RRM) is used for model training, and the convergence of RRM is theoretically analyzed. The empirical evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on synthetic and semi-synthetic temporal datasets.

Achieving Long-Term Fairness in Sequential Decision Making

Many model watermarking methods have been developed to prevent valuable deployed commercial models from being stealthily stolen by model distillations.
 However, watermarks produced by most existing model watermarking methods can be easily evaded by ensemble distillation, because averaging the outputs of multiple ensembled models can significantly reduce or even erase the watermarks.
 In this paper, we focus on tackling the challenging task of defending against ensemble distillation.
 We propose a novel watermarking technique named CosWM to achieve outstanding model watermarking performance against ensemble distillation.
 CosWM is not only elegant in design, but also comes with desirable theoretical guarantees.
 Our extensive experiments on public data sets demonstrate the excellent performance of CosWM and its advantages over the state-of-the-art baselines.

Cosine Model Watermarking Against Ensemble Distillation

Quantum computers can theoretically have significant acceleration over classical computers; but, the near-future era of quantum computing is limited due to small number of qubits that are also error prone. QUILT is a framework for performing multi-class classification task designed to work effectively on current error-prone quantum computers. QUILT is evaluated with real quantum machines as well as with projected noise levels as quantum machines become more noise free. QUILT demonstrates up to 85% multi-class classification accuracy with the MNIST dataset on a five-qubit system.

QUILT: Effective Multi-Class Classification on Quantum Computers Using an Ensemble of Diverse Quantum Classifiers

We consider a sequential blocked matching (SBM) model where strategic agents repeatedly report ordinal preferences over a set of services to a central planner. The planner's goal is to elicit agents' true preferences and design a policy that matches services to agents in order to maximize the expected social welfare with the added constraint that  each matched service can be blocked or unavailable for a number of time periods. Naturally, SBM models the repeated allocation of reusable services to a set of agents where each allocated service becomes unavailable for a fixed duration. 

We first consider the offline SBM setting, where the strategic agents are aware of their true preferences. We measure the performance of any policy by distortion, the worst-case multiplicative approximation guaranteed by any policy. For the setting with s services, we establish lower bounds of Î©(s) and Î©(âˆšs) on the distortions of any deterministic and randomised mechanisms, respectively. We complement these results by providing approximately truthful, measured by incentive ratio, deterministic and randomised policies based on random serial dictatorship which match our lower bounds. Our results show that there is a significant improvement if one considers the class of randomised policies.  Finally, we consider the online SBM setting with bandit feedback where each agent is initially unaware of her true preferences, and the planner must facilitate each agent in the learning of their preferences through the matching of services over time. We design an approximately truthful mechanism based on the explore-then-commit paradigm, which achieves logarithmic dynamic approximate regret.

Sequential Blocked Matching

Hierarchical reinforcement learning has focused on discovering temporally extended actions, such as options, that can provide benefits in problems requiring extensive exploration. One promising approach that learns these options end-to-end is the option-critic (OC) framework. We examine and show in this paper that OC does not decompose a problem into simpler sub-problems, but instead increases the size of the search over policy space with each option considering the entire state space during learning. This issue can result in practical limitations of this method, including sample inefficient learning. To address this problem, we introduce Context-Specific Representation Abstraction for Deep Option Learning (CRADOL), a new framework that considers both temporal abstraction and context-specific representation abstraction to effectively reduce the size of the search over policy space. Specifically, our method learns a factored belief state representation that enables each option to learn a policy over only a subsection of the state space. We test our method against hierarchical, non-hierarchical, and modular recurrent neural network baselines, demonstrating significant sample efficiency improvements in challenging partially observable environments.

Context-Specific Representation Abstraction for Deep Option Learning

Text-based image captioning (TextCap) requires simultaneous comprehension of visual content and reading the text of images to generate a natural language description. Although a task can teach machines to understand the complex human environment further given that text is omnipresent in our daily surroundings, it poses additional challenges in normal captioning. A text-based image intuitively contains abundant and complex multimodal relational content, that is, image details can be described diversely from multiview rather than a single caption. Certainly, we can introduce additional paired training data to show the diversity of images' descriptions, this process is labor-intensive and time-consuming for TextCap pair annotations with extra texts. Based on the insight mentioned above, we investigate how to generate diverse captions that focus on different image parts using an unpaired training paradigm. We propose the Multimodal relAtional Graph adversarIal InferenCe (MAGIC) framework for diverse and unpaired TextCap. This framework can adaptively construct multiple multimodal relational graphs of images and model complex relationships among graphs to represent descriptive diversity. Moreover, a cascaded generative adversarial network is developed from modeled graphs to infer the unpaired caption generation in imageâ€“sentence feature alignment and linguistic coherence levels. We validate the effectiveness of MAGIC in generating diverse captions from different relational information items of an image. Experimental results show that MAGIC can generate very promising outcomes without using any imageâ€“caption training pairs.

MAGIC: Multimodal relAtional Graph adversarIal inferenCe for Diverse and Unpaired Text-Based Image Captioning

We propose a novel policy gradient method for multi-agent reinforcement learning, which leverages two different variance-reduction techniques and does not require large batches over iterations. Specifically, we propose a momentum-based decentralized policy gradient tracking (MDPGT) where a new momentum-based variance reduction technique is used to approximate the local policy gradient surrogate with importance sampling, and an intermediate parameter is adopted to track two consecutive policy gradient surrogates. MDPGT provably achieves the best available sample complexity of O(N -1 e -3) for converging to an e-stationary point of the global average of N local performance functions (possibly nonconcave). This outperforms the state-of-the-art sample complexity in decentralized model-free reinforcement learning and when initialized with a single trajectory, the sample complexity matches those obtained by the existing decentralized policy gradient methods. We further validate the theoretical claim for the Gaussian policy function. When the required error tolerance e is small enough, MDPGT leads to a linear speed up, which has been previously established in decentralized stochastic optimization, but not for reinforcement learning. Lastly, we provide empirical results on a multi-agent reinforcement learning benchmark environment to support our theoretical findings.

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