Designing Consistent and Convex Surrogates for General Prediction Tasks

Supervised machine learning algorithms are often predicated on the minimization of loss functions which measure error of a given prediction against a ground truth label. The choice of loss function to minimize corresponds to a summary statistic of the underlying data distribution that is learned in this process. Historically, loss function design has often been ad-hoc, and often results in losses that are not actually statistically consistent with respect to the target prediction task. This work focuses on the design of losses that are simultaneously convex, consistent with respect to a target prediction task, and efficient in the dimension of the prediction space. We provide frameworks to construct such losses in both discrete prediction and continuous estimation settings, as well as tools to lower bound the prediction dimension for certain classes of consistent convex losses. We apply our results throughout to understand prediction tasks such as high-confidence classification, top-k prediction, variance estimation, conditional value at risk, and ratios of expectations

Jaccard Metric Losses: Optimizing the Jaccard Index with Soft Labels

IoU losses are surrogates that directly optimize the Jaccard index. In semantic segmentation, leveraging IoU losses as part of the loss function is shown to perform better with respect to the Jaccard index measure than optimizing pixel-wise losses such as the cross-entropy loss alone. The most notable IoU losses are the soft Jaccard loss and the Lovasz-Softmax loss. However, these losses are incompatible with soft labels which are ubiquitous in machine learning. In this paper, we propose Jaccard metric losses (JMLs), which are identical to the soft Jaccard loss in a standard setting with hard labels, but are compatible with soft labels. With JMLs, we study two of the most popular use cases of soft labels: label smoothing and knowledge distillation. With a variety of architectures, our experiments show significant improvements over the cross-entropy loss on three semantic segmentation datasets (Cityscapes, PASCAL VOC and DeepGlobe Land), and our simple approach outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge distillation methods by a large margin. Code is available at: \href{https://github.com/zifuwanggg/JDTLosses}{https://github.com/zifuwanggg/JDTLosses}.Comment: Submitted to ICML2023. Code is available at https://github.com/zifuwanggg/JDTLosse

Rank-based Decomposable Losses in Machine Learning: A Survey

Recent works have revealed an essential paradigm in designing loss functions that differentiate individual losses vs. aggregate losses. The individual loss measures the quality of the model on a sample, while the aggregate loss combines individual losses/scores over each training sample. Both have a common procedure that aggregates a set of individual values to a single numerical value. The ranking order reflects the most fundamental relation among individual values in designing losses. In addition, decomposability, in which a loss can be decomposed into an ensemble of individual terms, becomes a significant property of organizing losses/scores. This survey provides a systematic and comprehensive review of rank-based decomposable losses in machine learning. Specifically, we provide a new taxonomy of loss functions that follows the perspectives of aggregate loss and individual loss. We identify the aggregator to form such losses, which are examples of set functions. We organize the rank-based decomposable losses into eight categories. Following these categories, we review the literature on rank-based aggregate losses and rank-based individual losses. We describe general formulas for these losses and connect them with existing research topics. We also suggest future research directions spanning unexplored, remaining, and emerging issues in rank-based decomposable losses.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI