Author name cluster

Ga Wu

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9 papers

2 author rows

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Data-centric Prediction Explanation via Kernelized Stein Discrepancy

Mahtab Sarvmaili
Hassan Sajjad 0001
Ga Wu

Existing example-based prediction explanation methods often bridge test and training data points through the model’s parameters or latent representations. While these methods offer clues to the causes of model predictions, they often exhibit innate shortcomings, such as incurring significant computational overhead or producing coarse-grained explanations. This paper presents a Highly-precise and Data-centric Explanation (HD-Explain) prediction explanation method that exploits properties of Kernelized Stein Discrepancy (KSD). Specifically, the KSD uniquely defines a parameterized kernel function for a trained model that encodes model-dependent data correlation. By leveraging the kernel function, one can identify training samples that provide the best predictive support to a test point efficiently. We conducted thorough analyses and experiments across multiple classification domains, where we show that HD-Explain outperforms existing methods from various aspects, including 1) preciseness (fine-grained explanation), 2) consistency, and 3) computation efficiency, leading to a surprisingly simple, effective, and robust prediction explanation solution.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Resolving Lexical Bias in Model Editing

Hammad Rizwan
Domenic Rosati
Ga Wu
Hassan Sajjad 0001

Model editing aims to modify the outputs of large language models after they are trained. Previous approaches have often involved direct alterations to model weights, which can result in model degradation. Recent techniques avoid making modifications to the model’s weights by using an adapter that applies edits to the model when triggered by semantic similarity in the representation space. We demonstrate that current adapter methods are critically vulnerable to strong lexical biases, leading to issues such as applying edits to irrelevant prompts with overlapping words. This paper presents a principled approach to learning a disentangled representation space that facilitates precise localization of edits by maintaining distance between irrelevant prompts while preserving proximity among paraphrases. In our empirical study, we show that our method (Projector Editor Networks for Model Editing - PENME) achieves state-of-the-art model editing results while being more computationally efficient during inference than previous methods and adaptable across different architectures.

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ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Self-supervised Representation Learning from Random Data Projectors

Yi Sui 0001
Tongzi Wu
Jesse C. Cresswell
Ga Wu
George Stein
Xiao Shi Huang
Xiaochen Zhang
Maksims Volkovs

Self-supervised representation learning (SSRL) has advanced considerably by exploiting the transformation invariance assumption under artificially designed data augmentations. While augmentation-based SSRL algorithms push the boundaries of performance in computer vision and natural language processing, they are often not directly applicable to other data modalities, and can conflict with application-specific data augmentation constraints. This paper presents an SSRL approach that can be applied to any data modality and network architecture because it does not rely on augmentations or masking. Specifically, we show that high-quality data representations can be learned by reconstructing random data projections. We evaluate the proposed approach on a wide range of representation learning tasks that span diverse modalities and real-world applications. We show that it outperforms multiple state-of-the-art SSRL baselines. Due to its wide applicability and strong empirical results, we argue that learning from randomness is a fruitful research direction worthy of attention and further study.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

PUMA: Performance Unchanged Model Augmentation for Training Data Removal

Ga Wu
Masoud Hashemi
Christopher Srinivasa

Preserving the performance of a trained model while removing unique characteristics of marked training data points is challenging. Recent research usually suggests retraining a model from scratch with remaining training data or refining the model by reverting the model optimization on the marked data points. Unfortunately, aside from their computational inefficiency, those approaches inevitably hurt the resulting model’s generalization ability since they remove not only unique characteristics but also discard shared (and possibly contributive) information. To address the performance degradation problem, this paper presents a novel approach called Performance Unchanged Model Augmentation (PUMA). The proposed PUMA framework explicitly models the influence of each training data point on the model’s generalization ability with respect to various performance criteria. It then complements the negative impact of removing marked data by reweighting the remaining data optimally. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the PUMA framework, we compared it with multiple state-of-theart data removal techniques in the experiments, where we show the PUMA can effectively and efficiently remove the unique characteristics of marked training data without retraining the model that can 1) fool a membership attack, and 2) resist performance degradation. In addition, as PUMA estimates the data importance during its operation, we show it could serve to debug mislabelled data points more efficiently than existing approaches.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Representer Point Selection via Local Jacobian Expansion for Post-hoc Classifier Explanation of Deep Neural Networks and Ensemble Models

Yi Sui
Ga Wu
Scott Sanner

Explaining the influence of training data on deep neural network predictions is a critical tool for debugging models through data curation. A recent tractable and appealing approach for this task was provided via the concept of Representer Point Selection (RPS), i. e. a method the leverages the dual form of $l_2$ regularized optimization in the last layer of the neural network to identify the contribution of training points to the prediction. However, two key drawbacks of RPS are that they (i) lead to disagreement between the originally trained network and the RP regularized network modification and (ii) often yield a static ranking of training data for the same class, independent of the data being classified. Inspired by the RPS approach, we propose an alternative method based on a local Jacobian Taylor expansion (LJE) of the Jacobian. We empirically compared RPS-LJE with the original RPS-$l_2$ on image classification (with ResNet), text classification recurrent neural networks (with Bi-LSTM), and tabular classification (with XGBoost) tasks. Quantitatively, we show that RPS-LJE slightly outperforms RPS-$l_2$ and other state-of-the-art data explanation methods by up to 3\% on a data debugging task. Qualitatively, we observe that RPS-LJE provides individualized explanations for each test data point rather than the class-specific static ranking of points in the original approach. Overall, RPS-LJE represents a novel approach to RPS that provides a powerful tool for data-oriented explanation and debugging.

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JAIR Journal 2020 Journal Article

Scalable Planning with Deep Neural Network Learned Transition Models

Ga Wu
Buser Say
Scott Sanner

In many complex planning problems with factored, continuous state and action spaces such as Reservoir Control, Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC), and Navigation domains, it is difficult to obtain a model of the complex nonlinear dynamics that govern state evolution. However, the ubiquity of modern sensors allows us to collect large quantities of data from each of these complex systems and build accurate, nonlinear deep neural network models of their state transitions. But there remains one major problem for the task of control – how can we plan with deep network learned transition models without resorting to Monte Carlo Tree Search and other black-box transition model techniques that ignore model structure and do not easily extend to continuous domains? In this paper, we introduce two types of planning methods that can leverage deep neural network learned transition models: Hybrid Deep MILP Planner (HD-MILP-Plan) and Tensorflow Planner (TF-Plan). In HD-MILP-Plan, we make the critical observation that the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) transfer function for deep networks not only allows faster convergence of model learning, but also permits a direct compilation of the deep network transition model to a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) encoding. Further, we identify deep network specific optimizations for HD-MILP-Plan that improve performance over a base encoding and show that we can plan optimally with respect to the learned deep networks. In TF-Plan, we take advantage of the efficiency of auto-differentiation tools and GPU-based computation where we encode a subclass of purely continuous planning problems as Recurrent Neural Networks and directly optimize the actions through backpropagation. We compare both planners and show that TF-Plan is able to approximate the optimal plans found by HD-MILP-Plan in less computation time. Hence this article offers two novel planners for continuous state and action domains with learned deep neural net transition models: one optimal method (HD-MILP-Plan) and a scalable alternative for large-scale problems (TF-Plan).

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IJCAI Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Nonlinear Hybrid Planning with Deep Net Learned Transition Models and Mixed-Integer Linear Programming

Buser Say
Ga Wu
Yu Qing Zhou
Scott Sanner

In many real-world hybrid (mixed discrete continuous) planning problems such as Reservoir Control, Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC), and Navigation, it is difficult to obtain a model of the complex nonlinear dynamics that govern state evolution. However, the ubiquity of modern sensors allow us to collect large quantities of data from each of these complex systems and build accurate, nonlinear deep network models of their state transitions. But there remains one major problem for the task of control -- how can we plan with deep network learned transition models without resorting to Monte Carlo Tree Search and other black-box transition model techniques that ignore model structure and do not easily extend to mixed discrete and continuous domains? In this paper, we make the critical observation that the popular Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) transfer function for deep networks not only allows accurate nonlinear deep net model learning, but also permits a direct compilation of the deep network transition model to a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) encoding in a planner we call Hybrid Deep MILP Planning (HD-MILP-PLAN). We identify deep net specific optimizations and a simple sparsification method for HD-MILP-PLAN that improve performance over a naive encoding, and show that we are able to plan optimally with respect to the learned deep network.

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NeurIPS Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Scalable Planning with Tensorflow for Hybrid Nonlinear Domains

Ga Wu
Buser Say
Scott Sanner

Given recent deep learning results that demonstrate the ability to effectively optimize high-dimensional non-convex functions with gradient descent optimization on GPUs, we ask in this paper whether symbolic gradient optimization tools such as Tensorflow can be effective for planning in hybrid (mixed discrete and continuous) nonlinear domains with high dimensional state and action spaces? To this end, we demonstrate that hybrid planning with Tensorflow and RMSProp gradient descent is competitive with mixed integer linear program (MILP) based optimization on piecewise linear planning domains (where we can compute optimal solutions) and substantially outperforms state-of-the-art interior point methods for nonlinear planning domains. Furthermore, we remark that Tensorflow is highly scalable, converging to a strong plan on a large-scale concurrent domain with a total of 576, 000 continuous action parameters distributed over a horizon of 96 time steps and 100 parallel instances in only 4 minutes. We provide a number of insights that clarify such strong performance including observations that despite long horizons, RMSProp avoids both the vanishing and exploding gradient problems. Together these results suggest a new frontier for highly scalable planning in nonlinear hybrid domains by leveraging GPUs and the power of recent advances in gradient descent with highly optimized toolkits like Tensorflow.

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AAAI Conference 2015 Conference Paper

Bayesian Model Averaging Naive Bayes (BMA-NB): Averaging over an Exponential Number of Feature Models in Linear Time

Ga Wu
Scott Sanner
Rodrigo Oliveira

Naive Bayes (NB) is well-known to be a simple but effective classifier, especially when combined with feature selection. Unfortunately, feature selection methods are often greedy and thus cannot guarantee an optimal feature set is selected. An alternative to feature selection is to use Bayesian model averaging (BMA), which computes a weighted average over multiple predictors; when the different predictor models correspond to different feature sets, BMA has the advantage over feature selection that its predictions tend to have lower variance on average in comparison to any single model. In this paper, we show for the first time that it is possible to exactly evaluate BMA over the exponentiallysized powerset of NB feature models in linear-time in the number of features; this yields an algorithm about as expensive to train as a single NB model with all features, but yet provably converges to the globally optimal feature subset in the asymptotic limit of data. We evaluate this novel BMA-NB classifier on a range of datasets showing that it never underperforms NB (as expected) and sometimes offers performance competitive (or superior) to classifiers such as SVMs and logistic regression while taking a fraction of the time to train.

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