29 research outputs found
Robust Graph Representation Learning via Predictive Coding
Predictive coding is a message-passing framework initially developed to model
information processing in the brain, and now also topic of research in machine
learning due to some interesting properties. One of such properties is the
natural ability of generative models to learn robust representations thanks to
their peculiar credit assignment rule, that allows neural activities to
converge to a solution before updating the synaptic weights. Graph neural
networks are also message-passing models, which have recently shown outstanding
results in diverse types of tasks in machine learning, providing
interdisciplinary state-of-the-art performance on structured data. However,
they are vulnerable to imperceptible adversarial attacks, and unfit for
out-of-distribution generalization. In this work, we address this by building
models that have the same structure of popular graph neural network
architectures, but rely on the message-passing rule of predictive coding.
Through an extensive set of experiments, we show that the proposed models are
(i) comparable to standard ones in terms of performance in both inductive and
transductive tasks, (ii) better calibrated, and (iii) robust against multiple
kinds of adversarial attacks.Comment: 27 Pages, 31 Figure
BoxE: A Box Embedding Model for Knowledge Base Completion
Knowledge base completion (KBC) aims to automatically infer missing facts by
exploiting information already present in a knowledge base (KB). A promising
approach for KBC is to embed knowledge into latent spaces and make predictions
from learned embeddings. However, existing embedding models are subject to at
least one of the following limitations: (1) theoretical inexpressivity, (2)
lack of support for prominent inference patterns (e.g., hierarchies), (3) lack
of support for KBC over higher-arity relations, and (4) lack of support for
incorporating logical rules. Here, we propose a spatio-translational embedding
model, called BoxE, that simultaneously addresses all these limitations. BoxE
embeds entities as points, and relations as a set of hyper-rectangles (or
boxes), which spatially characterize basic logical properties. This seemingly
simple abstraction yields a fully expressive model offering a natural encoding
for many desired logical properties. BoxE can both capture and inject rules
from rich classes of rule languages, going well beyond individual inference
patterns. By design, BoxE naturally applies to higher-arity KBs. We conduct a
detailed experimental analysis, and show that BoxE achieves state-of-the-art
performance, both on benchmark knowledge graphs and on more general KBs, and we
empirically show the power of integrating logical rules.Comment: Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Conference on Advances in
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020). Code and data available
at: http://www.github.com/ralphabb/Box
Predictive Coding Can Do Exact Backpropagation on Any Neural Network
Intersecting neuroscience and deep learning has brought benefits and
developments to both fields for several decades, which help to both understand
how learning works in the brain, and to achieve the state-of-the-art
performances in different AI benchmarks. Backpropagation (BP) is the most
widely adopted method for the training of artificial neural networks, which,
however, is often criticized for its biological implausibility (e.g., lack of
local update rules for the parameters). Therefore, biologically plausible
learning methods (e.g., inference learning (IL)) that rely on predictive coding
(a framework for describing information processing in the brain) are
increasingly studied. Recent works prove that IL can approximate BP up to a
certain margin on multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), and asymptotically on any
other complex model, and that zero-divergence inference learning (Z-IL), a
variant of IL, is able to exactly implement BP on MLPs. However, the recent
literature shows also that there is no biologically plausible method yet that
can exactly replicate the weight update of BP on complex models. To fill this
gap, in this paper, we generalize (IL and) Z-IL by directly defining them on
computational graphs. To our knowledge, this is the first biologically
plausible algorithm that is shown to be equivalent to BP in the way of updating
parameters on any neural network, and it is thus a great breakthrough for the
interdisciplinary research of neuroscience and deep learning.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figure
Bird-Eye Transformers for Text Generation Models
Transformers have become an indispensable module for text generation models
since their great success in machine translation. Previous works attribute
the~success of transformers to the query-key-value dot-product attention, which
provides a robust inductive bias by the fully connected token graphs. However,
we found that self-attention has a severe limitation. When predicting the
(i+1)-th token, self-attention only takes the i-th token as an information
collector, and it tends to give a high attention weight to those tokens similar
to itself. Therefore, most of the historical information that occurred before
the i-th token is not taken into consideration. Based on this observation, in
this paper, we propose a new architecture, called bird-eye transformer(BET),
which goes one step further to improve the performance of transformers by
reweighting self-attention to encourage it to focus more on important
historical information. We have conducted experiments on multiple text
generation tasks, including machine translation (2 datasets) and language
models (3 datasets). These experimental~results show that our proposed model
achieves a better performance than the baseline transformer architectures
on~all~datasets. The code is released at:
\url{https://sites.google.com/view/bet-transformer/home}
Backpropagation at the Infinitesimal Inference Limit of Energy-Based Models: Unifying Predictive Coding, Equilibrium Propagation, and Contrastive Hebbian Learning
How the brain performs credit assignment is a fundamental unsolved problem in
neuroscience. Many `biologically plausible' algorithms have been proposed,
which compute gradients that approximate those computed by backpropagation
(BP), and which operate in ways that more closely satisfy the constraints
imposed by neural circuitry. Many such algorithms utilize the framework of
energy-based models (EBMs), in which all free variables in the model are
optimized to minimize a global energy function. However, in the literature,
these algorithms exist in isolation and no unified theory exists linking them
together. Here, we provide a comprehensive theory of the conditions under which
EBMs can approximate BP, which lets us unify many of the BP approximation
results in the literature (namely, predictive coding, equilibrium propagation,
and contrastive Hebbian learning) and demonstrate that their approximation to
BP arises from a simple and general mathematical property of EBMs at free-phase
equilibrium. This property can then be exploited in different ways with
different energy functions, and these specific choices yield a family of
BP-approximating algorithms, which both includes the known results in the
literature and can be used to derive new ones.Comment: 31/05/22 initial upload; 22/06/22 change corresponding author;
03/08/22 revision
Predictive Coding beyond Gaussian Distributions
A large amount of recent research has the far-reaching goal of finding
training methods for deep neural networks that can serve as alternatives to
backpropagation (BP). A prominent example is predictive coding (PC), which is a
neuroscience-inspired method that performs inference on hierarchical Gaussian
generative models. These methods, however, fail to keep up with modern neural
networks, as they are unable to replicate the dynamics of complex layers and
activation functions. In this work, we solve this problem by generalizing PC to
arbitrary probability distributions, enabling the training of architectures,
such as transformers, that are hard to approximate with only Gaussian
assumptions. We perform three experimental analyses. First, we study the gap
between our method and the standard formulation of PC on multiple toy examples.
Second, we test the reconstruction quality on variational autoencoders, where
our method reaches the same reconstruction quality as BP. Third, we show that
our method allows us to train transformer networks and achieve a performance
comparable with BP on conditional language models. More broadly, this method
allows neuroscience-inspired learning to be applied to multiple domains, since
the internal distributions can be flexibly adapted to the data, tasks, and
architectures used
Brain-Inspired Computational Intelligence via Predictive Coding
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming one of the key technologies
of this century. The majority of results in AI thus far have been achieved
using deep neural networks trained with the error backpropagation learning
algorithm. However, the ubiquitous adoption of this approach has highlighted
some important limitations such as substantial computational cost, difficulty
in quantifying uncertainty, lack of robustness, unreliability, and biological
implausibility. It is possible that addressing these limitations may require
schemes that are inspired and guided by neuroscience theories. One such theory,
called predictive coding (PC), has shown promising performance in machine
intelligence tasks, exhibiting exciting properties that make it potentially
valuable for the machine learning community: PC can model information
processing in different brain areas, can be used in cognitive control and
robotics, and has a solid mathematical grounding in variational inference,
offering a powerful inversion scheme for a specific class of continuous-state
generative models. With the hope of foregrounding research in this direction,
we survey the literature that has contributed to this perspective, highlighting
the many ways that PC might play a role in the future of machine learning and
computational intelligence at large.Comment: 37 Pages, 9 Figure
Roma: Oltre le baraccopoli: Agenda politica per ripartire dalle periferie dimenticate
Con il presente documento, presentato in vista delle elezioni comunali che si svolgeranno a Roma nel 2016, l’Associazione 21 luglio vuole proporre alle forze politiche e ai candidati a cariche elettive i principi essenziali per mutare radicalmente le politiche verso gli abitanti delle baraccopoli e dei micro insediamenti presenti nella Capitale. Le azioni previste nel documento hanno come obiettivo, nell’arco temporale di 5 anni: la chiusura graduale e progressiva delle baraccopoli e dei micro insediamenti della Capitale e il superamento dei centri di raccolta dove sono concentrate le famiglie vittime degli sgomberi che nel passato hanno coinvolto abitanti di numerose baraccopoli. “Roma: oltre le baraccopoli” si avvale degli studi condotti dall’Associazione 21 luglio e, nell’ultima parte, del prezioso apporto del prof. Tommaso Vitale, Sciences Po (Université Sorbonne Paris Cité)1. Il testo condivide medesimi principi e metodi riportati all’interno della “Delibera di iniziativa popolare per il superamento dei campi rom”, promossa da nove associazioni2 e sottoscritta da oltre 6.000 cittadini, depositata in Campidoglio l’11 settembre 2015
Effect of dietary supplementation with ultramicronized palmitoylethanolamide in maintaining remission in cats with nonflea hypersensitivity dermatitis: a double-blind, multicentre, randomized, placebo-controlled study
Background Feline nonflea hypersensitivity dermatitis (NFHD) is a frequent cause of over-grooming, scratching and skin lesions. Multimodal therapy often is necessary. Hypothesis/Objectives To investigate the efficacy of ultramicronized palmitoylethanolamide (PEA-um) in maintaining methylprednisolone-induced remission in NFHD cats. Animals Fifty-seven NFHD cats with nonseasonal pruritus were enrolled originally, of which 25 completed all study requirements to be eligible for analysis. Methods and materials Cats were randomly assigned to PEA-um (15 mg/kg per os, once daily; n = 29) or placebo (n = 28) while receiving a 28 day tapering methylprednisolone course. Cats responding favourably to methylprednisolone were then administered only PEA-um (n = 21) or placebo (n = 23) for another eight weeks, followed by a four week long treatment-free period. Cats were maintained in the study until relapse or study end, whichever came first. Primary outcome was time to relapse. Secondary outcomes were pruritus Visual Analog Scale (pVAS), SCORing Feline Allergic Dermatitis scale (SCORFAD) and owner Global Assessment Score (GAS). Results Mean relapse time was 40.5 days (+/- 7.8 SE) in PEA-um treated cats (n = 13) and 22.2 days (+/- 3.7 SE) for placebo (n = 12; P = 0.04). On Day 28, the severity of pruritus was lower in the PEA-um treated cats compared to placebo (P = 0.03). Mean worsening of pruritus at the final study day was lower in the PEA-um group compared to placebo (P = 0.04), whereas SCORFAD was not different between groups. Mean owner GAS at the final study day was better in the PEA-um than the placebo-treated group (P = 0.05). Conclusion and clinical importance Ultramicronized palmitoylethanolamide could represent an effective and safe option to delay relapse in NFHD cats