Self-knowledge distillation improves NLP performance.
problem Efficient knowledge representation in NLP models.
method A new knowledge distillation method using soft target probabilities from the training model itself.
result Improves performance on language model and neural machine translation tasks.
Proposes IFCDA framework to improve cross-domain adaptation.
problem Negative transfer and difficulty in handling category-irrelevant losses in DA.
method Importance filtered mechanism to generate filtered soft labels, combined with graph-based label propagation.
result Significantly improves performance in both Closed-Set and Open-Set DA scenarios.
Paper proposes a new loss function for conditional models using soft targets.
problem Improving generalization performance of deep neural networks on supervised classification tasks.
method Introduces a new loss function compatible with soft targets, based on noise contrastive estimation.
result Soft target InfoNCE loss performs on par with cross-entropy baselines and outperforms other losses.
This paper analyzes how periodic and soft target updates stabilize linear Q-learning.
problem Theoretical explanation of stabilization mechanisms for linear Q-learning.
method Exact analysis using switched linear system dynamics and the joint spectral radius.
result Periodic and soft target updates can guarantee convergence to the exact projected Q-Bellman solution under specific conditions.
Binary classification is a common statistical learning problem in which a model is estimated on a set of covariates for some outcome indicating the membership of one of two classes. In the literature, there exists a distinction between hard and soft classification. In soft classification, the conditional class probabil…
New approach transfers rewards learned in one environment to reinforcement learning in a new environment.
problem Transfer of rewards learned using inverse reinforcement learning from one environment to a new, different environment.
method Formulate the problem as a joint system of Bellman equations, develop minimax estimators for the target soft-q-function, solve the source and target system of equations jointly. result The coupled approach removes the first-order influence of source Bellman residual error compared to the sequential approach.
A new update rule for deep reinforcement learning reduces learning variance and variance in reference signals.
problem Learning variance and incorrect reference signals in deep reinforcement learning.
method t-soft update method inspired by student-t distribution, which reduces extreme updates and accelerates similar updates.
result The t-soft update method outperforms conventional methods in terms of return and variance in PyBullet robotics simulations.
Proposes STN for HDA by aligning domain-shared classifier and subspace.
problem Learning in target domain using knowledge from heterogeneous source domain.
method End-to-end learning of domain-shared classifier and domain-invariant subspace; soft-label strategy for unlabeled data; adaptive coefficient for soft-labels.
result Significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in various transfer tasks.
In industrial systems, certain process variables that need to be monitored for detecting faults are often difficult or impossible to measure. Soft sensor techniques are widely used to estimate such difficult-to-measure process variables from easy-to-measure ones. Soft sensor modeling requires training datasets includin…
Bayesian neural networks update beliefs with soft evidence, improving accuracy and calibration.
problem Updating neural network weights with uncertain or soft evidence.
method Developed two algorithms to approximate Jeffrey's rule for updating neural network weights.
result Jeffrey-based methods outperform traditional approaches in accuracy and calibration, especially in noisy data.
New PL method improves ASR accuracy without pseudo-labels.
problem Improving ASR accuracy with limited labeled data.
method End-to-end continuous pseudo-labeling with soft-labels.
result Soft-labels can lead to model collapse, but regularization can mitigate this.
This work proposes a model to disentangle image factors effectively and control their manipulation.
problem Controlling disentanglement during image editing while preserving object identity.
method Encoder-decoder architecture with decorrelation regularization and soft target representations.
result The model successfully disentangles image factors and manipulates them effectively.
This paper tackles disentanglement in image editing and reconstruction.
problem Learning disentangled image representations and balancing disentanglement strength and reconstruction quality.
method Distance covariance based decorrelation regularization for disentanglement, soft target representation for reconstruction, and collapsing AE decoder and GAN generator.
result The proposed model improves the disentanglement strength and perceptual quality of generated images.
A novel method to propagate uncertainty through the soft-thresholding nonlinearity is proposed in this paper. At every layer the current distribution of the target vector is represented as a spike and slab distribution, which represents the probabilities of each variable being zero, or Gaussian-distributed. Using the p…
Proposes a new sampling policy for ranking and selection problems.
problem Improving ranking and selection in adaptive sampling policies.
method Annealed entropic allocation, using soft-min weights and saddlepoint corrections.
result Consistently competitive performance in various settings.
New approach to control diffusion processes with soft constraints.
problem Finding an optimal diffusion process with a target terminal distribution.
method Generalized Schrödinger bridge problem with soft constraints, solving for a geometric mixture of target and other distributions.
result The terminal distribution of the optimally controlled process is a geometric mixture of the target and another distribution.
Rotation invariant algorithms fail with hard labels sampled from sparse targets.
problem Rotation invariant algorithms fail to learn from hard labels sampled from sparse targets.
method Proving the excess risk of rotation invariant algorithms and proposing a simple non-rotation invariant algorithm.
result Rotation invariant algorithms incur an excess risk of $Ω\left(\frac{d-1}{n}
ight)$, while non-rotation invariant algorithms have an excess risk of $O\left(\frac{s\log d}{n}
ight).
New method improves stability of soft FQI for offline RL.
problem Stability issues in soft FQI under function approximation.
method Stationary reweighting to align operator norms.
result Local linear convergence proved under certain conditions.
OTSS learns personalized decision weights from logged decisions and outputs.
problem Learning context-specific decision weights from logged decisions and outputs.
method Output-targeted soft-segmentation model that deploys personalized decision-ready weight vectors.
result OTSS achieves the lowest mean regret in benchmark settings.
Improved segmentation model adaptation for new domains.
problem Reduced performance of pre-trained models on new domains.
method Calculated soft-label prototypes and predicted closest to class probabilities.
result Significant performance improvements on synthetic-to-real segmentation.
We use partial class memberships in soft classification to model uncertain labelling and mixtures of classes. Partial class memberships are not restricted to predictions, but may also occur in reference labels (ground truth, gold standard diagnosis) for training and validation data. Classifier performance is usually ex…
A framework learns dynamic soft labels to improve model generalization and accuracy.
problem Models trained on one-hot labels overfit and are sensitive to noisy annotations.
method Proposes a framework where labels are treated as learnable parameters, adapting dynamically during optimization.
result Consistent gains across different datasets and architectures, improving ResNet18 by 2.1% on CIFAR100.
New algorithms optimize a soft-robust criterion in reinforcement learning, reducing conservatism.
problem Computing robust policies for high-stakes decisions with limited data.
method Soft-robust criterion using risk measures, two algorithms for optimization.
result Our algorithms produce less conservative solutions than existing methods.
Pretraining reinforcement learning methods with demonstrations has been an important concept in the study of reinforcement learning since a large amount of computing power is spent on online simulations with existing reinforcement learning algorithms. Pretraining reinforcement learning remains a significant challenge i…
GACBO optimizes unknown causal graphs with interventions.
problem Optimizing a target variable on an unknown causal graph with interventions.
method Graph Agnostic Causal Bayesian Optimisation (GACBO) seeks to balance exploitation and exploration of causal structures and functions.
result GACBO outperforms baselines in simulated and real-world applications.
Study improves S&P 500 volatility forecasting through regime-switching methods.
problem Accurate prediction of S&P 500 volatility for risk management and investment.
method Regime-switching methods including soft Markov switching, spectral clustering, and coefficient-based clustering.
result Coefficient-based clustering algorithm outperformed other models during all time periods.
Annealed Entropic Allocation improves ranking and selection by mitigating hard switching and improving finite-budget discrimination.
problem Sequential budget allocation in ranking and selection
method Annealed weighted soft-min framework
result Surrogate converges uniformly to the hard minimum, soft-min weights concentrate on active challengers, and target allocation map is continuous.
Model identifies causal structure from paired observational and interventional data with unknown soft interventions.
problem Identifying causal structure from observational and interventional data with unknown soft interventions.
method Proposes a scalable causal discovery model that aggregates subset-level PDAGs and applies contrastive cross-regime orientation rules.
result The model asymptotically recovers the identifiable PDAG and can orient additional edges compared to non-contrastive subset-restricted methods.
There is growing evidence that converting targets to soft targets in supervised learning can provide considerable gains in performance. Much of this work has considered classification, converting hard zero-one values to soft labels---such as by adding label noise, incorporating label ambiguity or using distillation. In…
EAST aligns neural network classifiers with user-defined evaluation metrics.
problem Mismatch between neural network training and evaluation metrics leads to suboptimal performance.
method EAST uses dynamic thresholding, soft-set confusion matrix, and annealing to align neural network predictions with target evaluation metrics.
result EAST improves alignment between training objectives and evaluation metrics, outperforming existing methods.
NLE embeds labels for domain adaptation with neural networks.
problem Adapting deep neural networks with unpaired source and target domain data.
method Distill source-domain knowledge into l-vectors, soft targets for adaptation.
result 14.1% relative word error rate reduction over direct re-training.
Theory for soft-margin classifiers on object manifolds.
problem Classifying object manifolds with variability.
method Mean-field theory of soft-margin classifiers applied to object manifolds.
result Prediction of classification errors and their dependence on regularization.
We study the sparse entropy-regularized reinforcement learning (ERL) problem in which the entropy term is a special form of the Tsallis entropy. The optimal policy of this formulation is sparse, i.e.,~at each state, it has non-zero probability for only a small number of actions. This addresses the main drawback of the …
Study uses regression and ML for COVID-19 mortality forecasting.
problem Forecasting COVID-19 mortality during the first wave in Spain.
method Cyclical curve log-regression, multivariate time series spatial residual correlation analysis, Bayesian approach, machine learning.
result Empirical analysis shows ML regression models perform better than traditional methods.
A new method for unsupervised domain adaptation using manifold learning.
problem Leveraging rich source domain information to target domain without labeled data.
method Discriminative Manifold Embedding and Alignment framework.
result Consistent transferability and discriminability achieved through manifold metric alignment.
TT-DAC-PS: A deterministic actor-critic approach for optimal trade execution
problem Optimal execution of large stock sell programs
method Twin-Target Deterministic Actor-Critic with Policy Smoothing
result Reduces mean implementation shortfall percentage
New PAC-Bayesian approach stabilizes actor-critic learning.
problem Training instability in actor-critic algorithms.
method Employing PAC-Bayesian bound as the critic training objective.
result Significant improvement in online learning performance.
Learning using privileged information is an attractive problem setting that helps many learning scenarios in the real world. A state-of-the-art method of Gaussian process classification (GPC) with privileged information is GPC+, which incorporates privileged information into a noise term of the likelihood. A drawback o…
We introduce an algorithmic method for population anomaly detection based on gaussianization through an adversarial autoencoder. This method is applicable to detection of `soft' anomalies in arbitrarily distributed highly-dimensional data. A soft, or population, anomaly is characterized by a shift in the distribution o…
Proposes a deep ordinal regression framework using optimal transport loss and unimodal output probabilities.
problem Lack of unimodal output probabilities in recent ordinal regression models.
method Introduces a deep learning framework based on optimal transport loss and unimodal output distribution, inspired by the Proportional Odds model.
result Demonstrates improved performance and unimodal output probabilities on real-world datasets compared to existing methods.
Paper introduces a new uncertainty measure for misclassification detection.
problem Effective detection of unreliable model predictions in machine learning.
method Data-driven measure of uncertainty relative to an observer based on soft-predictions.
result Demonstrates improved misclassification detection over state-of-the-art methods.
Bayesian method for inferring causal relations from mixed observational and interventional data.
problem Challenges in causal inference from heterogeneous study conditions with unknown soft interventions.
method Interventional Bayesian Gaussian equivalent score for a mixture of observational and interventional data.
result Effective characterisation of posterior distributions of causal structures and intervention effects.
Proposes a framework to improve domain adaptation without labeled data.
problem Improving adaptability and preserving intrinsic data structure in unsupervised domain adaptation.
method Discriminative Manifold Propagation framework using soft labels and manifold metric alignment.
result The method achieves better transferability and discriminability compared to existing approaches.
Band-limited SAC improves learning efficiency and stability in simulated environments.
problem Improving sample efficiency and stability in SAC algorithms.
method Artificially bandlimiting the target critic's spatial resolution using a convolutional filter.
result Bandlimited SAC outperforms classic twin-critic SAC in various Gym environments and is more stable.
Unsupervised models can provide supplementary soft constraints to help classify new target data under the assumption that similar objects in the target set are more likely to share the same class label. Such models can also help detect possible differences between training and target distributions, which is useful in a…
New method generates plausible counterfactuals for time series classification.
problem Generating realistic counterfactuals for time series data.
method Gradient-based optimization with soft-DTW alignment and multi-faceted loss function.
result Our method outperforms existing approaches in temporal realism and distributional alignment.
Paper introduces RCaI, a risk-sensitive control method using Rényi divergence.
problem Risk-sensitive control in reinforcement learning.
method RCaI extends CaI using Rényi divergence variational inference.
result Risk-sensitive optimal policy can be obtained by solving a soft Bellman equation.
GAIT-prop derives a biologically plausible learning rule from backpropagation.
problem Biological implausibility in traditional backpropagation for neural networks.
method GAIT-prop uses a top-down model to convert output error into plausible targets for weight updates.
result GAIT-prop and backpropagation give identical weight updates under certain conditions.