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Necessity and sufficiency are the building blocks of all successful explanations. Yet despite their importance, these notions have been conceptually underdeveloped and inconsistently applied in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), a fast-growing research area that is so far lacking in firm theoretical foundations. Building on work in logic, probability, and causality, we establish the central role of necessity and sufficiency in XAI, unifying seemingly disparate methods in a single formal framework. We provide a sound and complete algorithm for computing explanatory factors with respect to a given context, and demonstrate its flexibility and competitive performance against state of the art alternatives on various tasks.

UAI 2021

Local Explanations via Necessity and Sufficiency: Unifying Theory and Practice

explainable artificial intelligence

causality

interpretable machine learning

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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A ticket is required to access this conference. Please use the provided link to register for the event.

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/)

technical paper

We place an Indian Buffet process (IBP) prior over the structure of a Bayesian Neural Network (BNN), thus allowing the complexity of the BNN to increase and decrease automatically. We further extend this model such that the prior on the structure of each hidden layer is shared globally across all layers, using a Hierarchical-IBP (H-IBP). We apply this model to the problem of resource allocation in Continual Learning (CL) where new tasks occur and the network requires extra resources. Our model uses online variational inference with reparameterisation of the Bernoulli and Beta distributions, which constitute the IBP and H-IBP priors. As we automatically learn the number of weights in each layer of the BNN, overfitting and underfitting problems are largely overcome. We show empirically that our approach offers a competitive edge over existing methods in CL.

Hierarchical Indian Buffet Neural Networks for Bayesian Continual Learning

The susceptibility of deep neural networks to untrustworthy predictions, including out-of-distribution (OOD) data and adversarial examples, still prevent their widespread use in safety-critical applications. Most existing methods either require a retraining of a given model to achieve robust identification of adversarial attacks or are limited to out-of-distribution sample detection only. In this work, we propose a geometric gradient analysis (GGA) to improve the identification of untrustworthy predictions without retraining of a given model. GGA analyzes the geometry of the loss landscape of neural networks based on the saliency maps of their respective input. We observe considerable differences between the input gradient geometry of trustworthy and untrustworthy predictions. Using these differences, GGA outperforms prior approaches in detecting OOD data and adversarial attacks, including state-of-the-art and adaptive attacks. Code is available at: https://github.com/mad-lab-fau/GGA-Identifying-Untrustworthy-Predictions

Identifying Untrustworthy Predictions in Neural Networks by Geometric Gradient Analysis

The goal of fairness in classification is to learn a classifier that does not discriminate against groups of individuals based on sensitive attributes, such as race and gender. One approach to designing fair algorithms is to use relaxations of fairness notions as regularization terms or in a constrained optimization problem. We observe that the hyperbolic tangent function can approximate the indicator function. We leverage this property to define a differentiable relaxation that approximates fairness notions provably better than existing relaxations. In addition, we propose a model-agnostic multi-objective architecture that can simultaneously optimize for multiple fairness notions and multiple sensitive attributes and supports all statistical parity-based notions of fairness. We use our relaxation with the multi-objective architecture to learn fair classifiers. Experiments on public datasets show that our method suffers a significantly lower loss of accuracy than current debiasing algorithms relative to the unconstrained model.

Addressing Fairness in Classification with a Model-Agnostic Multi-ObjectiveAlgorithm

Given the pressing need for assuring algorithmic transparency, Explainable AI (XAI) has emerged as one of the key areas of AI research. In this paper, we develop a novel Bayesian extension to the LIME framework, one of the most widely used approaches in XAI -- which we call BayLIME. Compared to LIME, BayLIME exploits prior knowledge and Bayesian reasoning to improve both the consistency in repeated explanations of a single prediction and the robustness to kernel settings. BayLIME also exhibits better explanation fidelity than the state-of-the-art (LIME, SHAP and GradCAM) by its ability to integrate prior knowledge from, e.g., a variety of other XAI techniques, as well as verification and validation (V\&V) methods. We demonstrate the desirable properties of BayLIME through both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments.

Bayesian Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations

This paper studies the complexity for finding approximate stationary points of nonconvex-strongly-concave (NC-SC) smooth minimax problems, in both general and averaged smooth finite-sum settings. We establish nontrivial lower complexity bounds of $\Omega(\sqrt{\kappa}\Delta L\epsilon^{-2})$ and $\Omega(n+\sqrt{n\kappa}\Delta L\epsilon^{-2})$ for the two settings, respectively, where $\kappa$ is the condition number, $L$ is the smoothness constant, and $\Delta$ is the initial gap. Our result reveals substantial gaps between these limits and best-known upper bounds in the literature. To close these gaps, we introduce a generic acceleration scheme that deploys existing gradient-based methods to solve a sequence of crafted strongly-convex-strongly-concave subproblems. In the general setting, the complexity of our proposed algorithm nearly matches the lower bound; in particular, it removes an additional poly-logarithmic dependence on accuracy present in previous works. In the averaged smooth finite-sum setting, our proposed algorithm improves over previous algorithms by providing a nearly-tight dependence on the condition number.

The Complexity of Nonconvex-Strongly-Concave Minimax Optimization

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful paradigm for efficient optimization of black-box objective functions. High-dimensional BO presents a particular challenge, in part because the curse of dimensionality makes it difficult to define---as well as do inference over---a suitable class of surrogate models. We argue that Gaussian process surrogate models defined on sparse axis-aligned subspaces offer an attractive compromise between flexibility and parsimony. We demonstrate that our approach, which relies on Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for inference, can rapidly identify sparse subspaces relevant to modeling the unknown objective function, enabling sample-efficient high-dimensional BO. In an extensive suite of experiments comparing to existing methods for high-dimensional BO we demonstrate that our algorithm, Sparse Axis-Aligned Subspace BO (SAASBO), achieves excellent performance on several synthetic and real-world problems without the need to set problem-specific hyperparameters.

 High-Dimensional Bayesian Optimization with Sparse Axis-Aligned Subspaces

Convex clustering has drawn recent attention because of its competitive performance and nice property to guarantee global optimality. However, convex clustering is infeasible due to its high computational cost for large-scale data sets. We propose a novel method to solve the L1 fusion convex clustering problem by dynamic programming. We develop the Convex clustering Path Algorithm In Near-linear Time (C-PAINT) algorithm to construct the solution path efficiently. The proposed C-PAINT yields the exact solution while other general solvers for convex problems applied in the convex clustering depend on tuning parameters such as step size and threshold, and it usually takes many iterations to converge. Including a sorting process that almost takes no time in practice, the main part of the algorithm takes only linear time. Thus, C-PAINT has superior scalability comparing to other state-of-art algorithms. Moreover, C-PAINT enables the path visualization of clustering solutions for large data. In particular, experiments show our proposed method can solve the convex clustering with 10^7 data points in two minutes. We demonstrate the proposed method using both synthetic data and real data. Our algorithms are implemented in the dpcc R package.

Dynamic visualization for L1 fusion convex clustering in near-linear time

Auto-Encoder (AE) based neural generative frameworks model the joint-distribution between the data and the latent space using an Encoder-Decoder pair, with regularization imposed in terms of a prior over the latent space. Despite their advantages, such as stability in training, efficient inference, the performance of AE based models has not reached the superior standards of the other generative models such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Motivated by this, we examine the effect of the latent prior on the generation quality of deterministic AE models in this paper. Specifically, we consider the class of Generative AE models with deterministic Encoder-Decoder pair (such as Wasserstein Auto-Encoder (WAE), Adversarial Auto-Encoder (AAE)), and show that having a fixed prior distribution, \textit{a priori}, oblivious to the dimensionality of the `true' latent space, will lead to the infeasibility of the optimization problem considered. As a remedy to the issue mentioned above, we introduce an additional state space in the form of flexibly learnable latent priors, in the optimization objective of WAE/AAE. Additionally, we employ a latent-space interpolation based smoothing scheme to address the non-smoothness that may arise from highly flexible priors. We show the efficacy of our proposed models, called FlexAE and FlexAE-SR, through several experiments on multiple datasets, and demonstrate that FlexAE-SR is the new state-of-the-art for the AE based generative models in terms of generation quality as measured by several metrics such as Fr\'echet Inception Distance, Precision/Recall score. Code for our paper is available at: \url{https://github.com/dair-iitd/FlexAE}

Flexibly Learning Latent Priors for Wasserstein Auto-Encoders

Greedy coordinate descent (GCD) is an efficient optimization algorithm for a wide range of machine learning and data mining applications. GCD could be significantly faster than randomized coordinate descent (RCD) if they have similar per iteration cost. Nevertheless, in some cases, the greedy rule used in GCD cannot be efficiently implemented, leading to huge per iteration cost and making GCD slower than RCD. To alleviate the cost per iteration, the existing solutions rely on maximum inner product search (MIPS) as an approximate greedy rule. But it has been empirically shown that GCD with approximate greedy rule could suffer from slow convergence even with the state-of-the-art MIPS algorithms. We propose a hybrid coordinate descent algorithm with a simple variable partition strategy to tackle the cases when greedy rule cannot be implemented efficiently. The convergence rate and theoretical properties of the new algorithm are presented. The proposed method is shown to be especially useful when the data matrix has a group structure. Numerical experiments with both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that our new algorithm is competitive against RCD, GCD, approximate GCD with MIPS and their accelerated variants.

Efficient Greedy Coordinate Descent via Variable Partitioning

Tucker decomposition is a classical tensor factorization model. Compared with the most widely used CP decomposition, the Tucker model is much more flexible and interpretable in that it accounts for every possible (multiplicative) interaction between the factors in different modes. However, this also brings in the risk of overfitting and computational challenges, especially in the case of fast streaming data. To address these issues, we develop BASS-Tucker, a BAyesian Streaming Sparse Tucker decomposition method. We place a spike-and-slab prior over the core tensor elements to automatically select meaningful factor interactions so as to prevent overfitting and to further enhance the interpretability. To enable efficient streaming factorization, we use conditional moment matching and Delta's method to develop one-shot incremental update of the latent factors and core tensor upon receiving each streaming batch. Thereby, we avoid processing the data points one by one as in the standard assumed density filtering, which needs to update the core tensor for each point and is quite inefficient. We explicitly introduce and update a sparse prior approximation in the running posterior to fulfill effective sparse estimation in the streaming inference. We show the advantage of BASS-Tucker in several real-world applications.

Local Explanations via Necessity and Sufficiency: Unifying Theory and Practice

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