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Amirata Ghorbani

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

7 papers
2 author rows

Possible papers

7

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

DataPerf: Benchmarks for Data-Centric AI Development

  • Mark Mazumder
  • Colby Banbury
  • Xiaozhe Yao
  • Bojan Karlaš
  • William Gaviria Rojas
  • Sudnya Diamos
  • Greg Diamos
  • Lynn He

Machine learning research has long focused on models rather than datasets, and prominent datasets are used for common ML tasks without regard to the breadth, difficulty, and faithfulness of the underlying problems. Neglecting the fundamental importance of data has given rise to inaccuracy, bias, and fragility in real-world applications, and research is hindered by saturation across existing dataset benchmarks. In response, we present DataPerf, a community-led benchmark suite for evaluating ML datasets and data-centric algorithms. We aim to foster innovation in data-centric AI through competition, comparability, and reproducibility. We enable the ML community to iterate on datasets, instead of just architectures, and we provide an open, online platform with multiple rounds of challenges to support this iterative development. The first iteration of DataPerf contains five benchmarks covering a wide spectrum of data-centric techniques, tasks, and modalities in vision, speech, acquisition, debugging, and diffusion prompting, and we support hosting new contributed benchmarks from the community. The benchmarks, online evaluation platform, and baseline implementations are open source, and the MLCommons Association will maintain DataPerf to ensure long-term benefits to academia and industry.

ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

How Does Mixup Help With Robustness and Generalization?

  • Linjun Zhang
  • Zhun Deng
  • Kenji Kawaguchi
  • Amirata Ghorbani
  • James Y. Zou

Mixup is a popular data augmentation technique based on on convex combinations of pairs of examples and their labels. This simple technique has shown to substantially improve both the model's robustness as well as the generalization of the trained model. However, it is not well-understood why such improvement occurs. In this paper, we provide theoretical analysis to demonstrate how using Mixup in training helps model robustness and generalization. For robustness, we show that minimizing the Mixup loss corresponds to approximately minimizing an upper bound of the adversarial loss. This explains why models obtained by Mixup training exhibits robustness to several kinds of adversarial attacks such as Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM). For generalization, we prove that Mixup augmentation corresponds to a specific type of data-adaptive regularization which reduces overfitting. Our analysis provides new insights and a framework to understand Mixup.

ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

A Distributional Framework For Data Valuation

  • Amirata Ghorbani
  • Michael P. Kim
  • James Y. Zou

Shapley value is a classic notion from game theory, historically used to quantify the contributions of individuals within groups, and more recently applied to assign values to data points when training machine learning models. Despite its foundational role, a key limitation of the data Shapley framework is that it only provides valuations for points within a fixed data set. It does not account for statistical aspects of the data and does not give a way to reason about points outside the data set. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework – distributional Shapley– where the value of a point is defined in the context of an underlying data distribution. We prove that distributional Shapley has several desirable statistical properties; for example, the values are stable under perturbations to the data points themselves and to the underlying data distribution. We leverage these properties to develop a new algorithm for estimating values from data, which comes with formal guarantees and runs two orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art algorithms for computing the (non distributional) data Shapley values. We apply distributional Shapley to diverse data sets and demonstrate its utility in a data market setting.

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Neuron Shapley: Discovering the Responsible Neurons

  • Amirata Ghorbani
  • James Y. Zou

We develop Neuron Shapley as a new framework to quantify the contribution of individual neurons to the prediction and performance of a deep network. By accounting for interactions across neurons, Neuron Shapley is more effective in identifying important filters compared to common approaches based on activation patterns. Interestingly, removing just 30 filters with the highest Shapley scores effectively destroys the prediction accuracy of Inception-v3 on ImageNet. Visualization of these few critical filters provides insights into how the network functions. Neuron Shapley is a flexible framework and can be applied to identify responsible neurons in many tasks. We illustrate additional applications of identifying filters that are responsible for biased prediction in facial recognition and filters that are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Removing these filters is a quick way to repair models. Computing exact Shapley values is computationally infeasible and therefore sampling-based approximations are used in practice. We introduce a new multi-armed bandit algorithm that is able to efficiently detect neurons with the largest Shapley value orders of magnitude faster than existing Shapley value approximation methods.

ICML Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Data Shapley: Equitable Valuation of Data for Machine Learning

  • Amirata Ghorbani
  • James Y. Zou

As data becomes the fuel driving technological and economic growth, a fundamental challenge is how to quantify the value of data in algorithmic predictions and decisions. For example, in healthcare and consumer markets, it has been suggested that individuals should be compensated for the data that they generate, but it is not clear what is an equitable valuation for individual data. In this work, we develop a principled framework to address data valuation in the context of supervised machine learning. Given a learning algorithm trained on $n$ data points to produce a predictor, we propose data Shapley as a metric to quantify the value of each training datum to the predictor performance. Data Shapley uniquely satisfies several natural properties of equitable data valuation. We develop Monte Carlo and gradient-based methods to efficiently estimate data Shapley values in practical settings where complex learning algorithms, including neural networks, are trained on large datasets. In addition to being equitable, extensive experiments across biomedical, image and synthetic data demonstrate that data Shapley has several other benefits: 1) it is more powerful than the popular leave-one-out or leverage score in providing insight on what data is more valuable for a given learning task; 2) low Shapley value data effectively capture outliers and corruptions; 3) high Shapley value data inform what type of new data to acquire to improve the predictor.

AAAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Interpretation of Neural Networks Is Fragile

  • Amirata Ghorbani
  • Abubakar Abid
  • James Zou

In order for machine learning to be trusted in many applications, it is critical to be able to reliably explain why the machine learning algorithm makes certain predictions. For this reason, a variety of methods have been developed recently to interpret neural network predictions by providing, for example, feature importance maps. For both scientific robustness and security reasons, it is important to know to what extent can the interpretations be altered by small systematic perturbations to the input data, which might be generated by adversaries or by measurement biases. In this paper, we demonstrate how to generate adversarial perturbations that produce perceptively indistinguishable inputs that are assigned the same predicted label, yet have very different interpretations. We systematically characterize the robustness of interpretations generated by several widely-used feature importance interpretation methods (feature importance maps, integrated gradients, and DeepLIFT) on ImageNet and CIFAR-10. In all cases, our experiments show that systematic perturbations can lead to dramatically different interpretations without changing the label. We extend these results to show that interpretations based on exemplars (e. g. influence functions) are similarly susceptible to adversarial attack. Our analysis of the geometry of the Hessian matrix gives insight on why robustness is a general challenge to current interpretation approaches.

NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Towards Automatic Concept-based Explanations

  • Amirata Ghorbani
  • James Wexler
  • James Zou
  • Been Kim

Interpretability has become an important topic of research as more machine learning (ML) models are deployed and widely used to make important decisions. Most of the current explanation methods provide explanations through feature importance scores, which identify features that are important for each individual input. However, how to systematically summarize and interpret such per sample feature importance scores itself is challenging. In this work, we propose principles and desiderata for \emph{concept} based explanation, which goes beyond per-sample features to identify higher level human-understandable concepts that apply across the entire dataset. We develop a new algorithm, ACE, to automatically extract visual concepts. Our systematic experiments demonstrate that \alg discovers concepts that are human-meaningful, coherent and important for the neural network's predictions.

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