United States

We propose a new generative modeling technique for learning multidimensional cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) in the form of copulas. Specifically, we consider certain classes of copulas known as Archimedean and hierarchical Archimedean copulas, popular for their parsimonious representation and ability to model different tail dependencies. We consider their representation as mixture models with Laplace transforms of latent random variables from generative neural networks. This alternative representation allows for computational efficiencies and easy sampling, especially in high dimensions. We describe multiple methods for optimizing the network parameters. Finally, we present empirical results that demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method in learning multidimensional CDFs and its computational efficiency compared to existing methods.

UAI 2021

Generative Archimedean Copulas

copula

archimedean

generative

neural networks

The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier international conferences on research related to knowledge representation, learning, and reasoning in the presence of uncertainty. It is supported by the [Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI).](https://www.auai.org/)

The 37th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2021) is held fully online. We have an exciting program consisting of keynote talks by [Susan Murphy](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=A), [Eric Horvitz](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=B), [Lenka Zdeborová](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=C), [Judea Pearl](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=D) and [Ankur Moitra](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=E), a town hall meeting, peer-reviewed papers, and three workshops. The main conference is single-track and each paper is show-cased with a live component (either a live discussion and Q&A, or a live lightning talk). All papers are also featured in video presentations and in poster sessions in gather.town. The three parallel workshops on Friday allow for smaller meetings on current topics.

The walkthrough video below shows how you can navigate this site and use the different possibilities for interaction: UAIsland2021 on gather.town for posters and social interactions, the mementor platform for virtual mentoring sessions, and the chat and Q&A systems for discussions about talks and posters.

Have a great UAI 2021! 
<br>
<br>Cassio de Campos and Marloes Maathuis
<br>UAI 2021 Program Chairs
<br>uai2021programchairs@gmail.com

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https://auai.org/uai2021/registration

The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier international conferences on research related to knowledge representation, learning, and reasoning in the presence of uncertainty. It is supported by the [Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI).](https://www.auai.org/)

**BRACIS** originated from the combination of the two most important scientific events in Brazil in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Intelligence (CI): the Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence – **SBIA** (22 editions), and the Brazilian Symposium on Neural Networks – **SBRN** (13 editions). <br>**ENIAC** is a national forum for researchers, practitioners, educators and students to present and discuss innovations, trends, experiences, developments and work in progress in the fields of Artificial and Computational Intelligence. <br>**STIL** is the bi-annual Language Technology event.
All events are supported by the Brazilian Computer Society – Special Interest Groups: **CE-IA**, **CE-IC** and **CE-PLN**.<br><br><br>

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[Register now](http://c4ai.inova.usp.br/bracis2021/)

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BRACIS 2021

Organized by C4AI, the 10th Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems (BRACIS) will take place from November 29th to December 3rd, 2021.

technical paper

Feature selection is an important problem in machine learning, which aims to select variables that lead to an optimal predictive model. In this paper, we focus on feature selection for post-intervention outcome prediction from pre-intervention variables. We are motivated by healthcare settings, where the goal is often to select the treatment that will maximize a specific patient's outcome; however, we do not have sufficient randomized control trial data to identify well the conditional treatment effect. We show how we can use observational data to improve feature selection and effect estimation in two cases: (a) when we know the causal graph, and (b) when we do not know the causal graph but have limited experimental data. Our paper extends the notion of Markov boundary to treatment-outcome pairs. We provide theoretical guarantees for the methods we introduce. In simulated data, we show that combining observational and experimental data improves feature selection and effect estimation.

Causal Markov Boundaries

In many real-world scenarios, such as gene knockout experiments, targeted interventions are often accompanied by unknown interventions at off-target sites. Moreover, different units can get randomly exposed to different unknown interventions, thereby creating a mixture of interventions. Identifying different components of this mixture can be very valuable in some applications. Motivated by such situations, in this work, we study the problem of identifying all components present in a mixture of interventions on a given causal Bayesian Network. We construct an example to show that, in general, the components are not identifiable from the mixture distribution. Next, assuming that the given network satisfies a positivity condition, we show that, if the set of mixture components satisfy a mild exclusion assumption, then they can be uniquely identified. Our proof gives an efficient algorithm to recover these targets from the exponentially large search space of possible targets. In the more realistic scenario, where distributions are given via finitely many samples, we conduct a simulation study to analyze the performance of an algorithm derived from our identifiability proof.

Disentangling Mixtures of Unknown Causal Interventions

Density ratio estimation serves as an important technique in the unsupervised machine learning toolbox. However, such ratios are difficult to estimate for complex, high-dimensional data, particularly when the densities of interest are sufficiently different. In our work, we propose to leverage an invertible generative model to map the two distributions into a common feature space prior to estimation. This featurization brings the densities closer together in latent space, sidestepping pathological scenarios where the learned density ratios in input space can be arbitrarily inaccurate. At the same time, the invertibility of our feature map guarantees that the ratios computed in feature space are equivalent to those in input space. Empirically, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in a variety of downstream tasks that require access to accurate density ratios such as mutual information estimation, targeted sampling in deep generative models, and classification with data augmentation.

Featurized Density Ratio Estimation

Weighted model counting (WMC) has emerged as the unifying inference mechanism across many (probabilistic) domains. Encoding an inference problem as an instance of WMC typically necessitates adding extra literals and clauses. This is partly so because the predominant definition of WMC assigns weights to models based on weights on literals, and this severely restricts what probability distributions can be represented. We develop a measure-theoretic perspective on WMC and propose a way to encode conditional weights on literals analogously to conditional probabilities. This representation can be as succinct as standard WMC with weights on literals but can also expand as needed to represent probability distributions with less structure. To demonstrate the performance benefits of conditional weights over the addition of extra literals, we develop a new WMC encoding for Bayesian networks and adapt a state-of-the-art WMC algorithm ADDMC to the new format. Our experiments show that the new encoding significantly improves the performance of the algorithm on most benchmark instances.

Weighted Model Counting with Conditional Weights for Bayesian Networks

Program synthesis has emerged as a successful approach to the image parsing task. Most prior works rely on a two-step scheme involving supervised pretraining of a Seq2Seq model with synthetic programs followed by reinforcement learning (RL) for fine-tuning with real reference images. Fully unsupervised approaches promise to train the model directly on the target images without requiring curated pretraining datasets. However, they struggle with the inherent sparsity of meaningful programs in the search space. In this paper, we present the first unsupervised algorithm capable of parsing constructive solid geometry (CSG) images into context-free grammar (CFG) without pretraining via non-differentiable renderer. To tackle the \emph{non-Markovian} sparse reward problem, we combine three key ingredients---(i) a grammar-encoded tree LSTM ensuring program validity (ii) entropy regularization and (iii) sampling without replacement from the CFG syntax tree. Empirically, our algorithm recovers meaningful programs in large search spaces (up to $3.8 \times 10^{28}$). Further, even though our approach is fully unsupervised, it generalizes better than supervised methods on the synthetic 2D CSG dataset. On the 2D computer aided design (CAD) dataset, our approach significantly outperforms the supervised pretrained model and is competitive to the refined model.

Unsupervised Program Synthesis for Images By Sampling Without Replacement

We study linear contextual bandits with access to a large, confounded, offline dataset that was sampled from some fixed policy. We show that this problem is closely related to a variant of the bandit problem with side information. We construct a linear bandit algorithm that takes advantage of the projected information, and prove regret bounds. Our results demonstrate the ability to take advantage of confounded offline data. Particularly, we prove regret bounds that improve current bounds by a factor related to the visible dimensionality of the contexts in the data. Our results indicate that confounded offline data can significantly improve online learning algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate various characteristics of our approach through synthetic simulations.

Bandits with Partially Observable Confounded Data

One of the core assumptions in causal discovery is the faithfulness assumption---i.e. assuming that independencies found in the data are due to separations in the true causal graph. This assumption can, however, be violated in many ways, including xor connections, deterministic functions or cancelling paths. In this work, we propose a weaker assumption that we call 2-adjacency faithfulness. In contrast to adjacency faithfulness, which assumes that there is no conditional independence between each pair of variables that are connected in the causal graph, we only require no conditional independence between a node and a subset of its Markov blanket that can contain up to two nodes. Equivalently, we adapt orientation faithfulness to this setting.

A Weaker Faithfulness Assumption based on Triple Interactions

A key task in multi-label classification is modeling the structure between the involved classes. Modeling this structure by probabilistic and interpretable means enables application in a broad variety of tasks such as zero-shot learning or learning from incomplete data. In this paper, we present the probabilistic rule stacking learner (pRSL) which uses probabilistic propositional logic rules and belief propagation to combine the predictions of several underlying classifiers. We derive algorithms for exact and approximate inference and learning and show that pRSL reaches state-of-the-art performance on various benchmark datasets.

Interpretable Multi-label Stacking by Learning Probabilistic Rules

We design a new efficient strategy synthesis method applicable to adversarial patrolling problems on graphs with arbitrary-length edges and possibly imperfect intrusion detection. The core ingredient is an efficient algorithm for computing the value and the gradient of a function assigning to every strategy its ``protection'' achieved. This allows for designing an efficient strategy improvement algorithm by differentiable programming and optimization techniques. Our method is the first one applicable to real-world patrolling graphs of reasonable sizes. It outperforms the state-of-the-art strategy synthesis algorithm by a margin.

Efficient Strategy Synthesis for Adversarial Patrolling Games

Black-box machine learning models can be extremely accurate.

Generative Archimedean Copulas

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Generative Archimedean Copulas

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Next from UAI 2021

Causal Markov Boundaries

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A New Heuristic for Radius Estimation in RBF Neural Networks

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Downloads