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Jiaqi Ma

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22 papers
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22

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Driving with Regulation: Trustworthy and Interpretable Decision-Making for Autonomous Driving with Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning

  • Tianhui Cai
  • Yifan Liu
  • Zewei Zhou
  • Haoxuan Ma
  • Seth Z. Zhao
  • Zhiwen Wu
  • Xu Han
  • Zhiyu Huang

Understanding and adhering to traffic regulations is essential for autonomous vehicles to ensure safety and trustworthiness. However, traffic regulations are complex, context-dependent, and differ between regions, posing a major challenge to conventional rule-based decision-making approaches. We present an interpretable, regulation-aware decision-making framework, DriveReg, which enables autonomous vehicles to understand and adhere to region-specific traffic laws and safety guidelines. The framework integrates a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)-based Traffic Regulation Retrieval Agent, which retrieves relevant rules from regulatory documents based on the current situation, and a Large Language Model (LLM)-powered Reasoning Agent that evaluates actions for legal compliance and safety. Our design emphasizes interpretability to enhance transparency and trustworthiness. To support systematic evaluation, we introduce DriveReg Scenarios Dataset, a comprehensive dataset of driving scenarios across Boston, Singapore, and Los Angeles, with both hypothesized text-based cases and real-world driving data, specifically constructed and annotated to evaluate models’ capacity for regulation understanding and reasoning. We validate our framework on the DriveReg Scenarios Dataset and real-world deployment, demonstrating strong performance and robustness across diverse environments.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

A Reliable Cryptographic Framework for Empirical Machine Unlearning Evaluation

  • Yiwen Tu
  • Pingbang Hu
  • Jiaqi Ma

Machine unlearning updates machine learning models to remove information from specific training data samples, complying with data protection regulations that allow individuals to request the removal of their personal data. Despite the recent development of numerous unlearning algorithms, reliable evaluation of these algorithms remains an open research question. In this work, we focus on membership inference attack (MIA) based evaluation, one of the most common approaches for evaluating unlearning algorithms, and address various pitfalls of existing evaluation metrics that lack theoretical understanding and reliability. Specifically, by modeling the proposed evaluation process as a cryptographic game between unlearning algorithms and MIA adversaries, the naturally-induced evaluation metric measures the data removal efficacy of unlearning algorithms and enjoys provable guarantees that existing evaluation metrics fail to satisfy. Furthermore, we propose a practical and efficient approximation of the induced evaluation metric and demonstrate its effectiveness through both theoretical analysis and empirical experiments. Overall, this work presents a novel and reliable approach to empirically evaluating unlearning algorithms, paving the way for the development of more effective unlearning techniques.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

A Snapshot of Influence: A Local Data Attribution Framework for Online Reinforcement Learning

  • Yuzheng Hu
  • Fan Wu
  • Haotian Ye
  • David Forsyth
  • James Zou
  • Nan Jiang
  • Jiaqi Ma
  • Han Zhao

Online reinforcement learning (RL) excels in complex, safety-critical domains but suffers from sample inefficiency, training instability, and limited interpretability. Data attribution provides a principled way to trace model behavior back to training samples, yet existing methods assume fixed datasets, which is violated in online RL where each experience both updates the policy and shapes future data collection. In this paper, we initiate the study of data attribution for online RL, focusing on the widely used Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. We start by establishing a local attribution framework, interpreting model checkpoints with respect to the records in the recent training buffer. We design two target functions, capturing agent action and cumulative return respectively, and measure each record's contribution through gradient similarity between its training loss and these targets. We demonstrate the power of this framework through three concrete applications: diagnosis of learning, temporal analysis of behavior formation, and targeted intervention during training. Leveraging this framework, we further propose an algorithm, iterative influence-based filtering (IIF), for online RL training that iteratively performs experience filtering to refine policy updates. Across standard RL benchmarks (classic control, navigation, locomotion) to RLHF for large language models, IIF reduces sample complexity, speeds up training, and achieves higher returns. Together, these results open a new direction for making online RL more interpretable, efficient, and effective.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

  • Zewei Zhou
  • Tianhui Cai
  • Seth Zhao
  • Yun Zhang
  • Zhiyu Huang
  • Bolei Zhou
  • Jiaqi Ma

Recent advancements in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise for end-to-end autonomous driving by leveraging world knowledge and reasoning capabilities. However, current VLA models often struggle with physically infeasible action outputs, complex model structures, or unnecessarily long reasoning. In this paper, we propose AutoVLA, a novel VLA model that unifies reasoning and action generation within a single autoregressive generation model for end-to-end autonomous driving. AutoVLA performs semantic reasoning and trajectory planning directly from raw visual inputs and language instructions. We tokenize continuous trajectories into discrete, feasible actions, enabling direct integration into the language model. For training, we employ supervised fine-tuning to equip the model with dual thinking modes: fast thinking (trajectory-only) and slow thinking (enhanced with chain-of-thought reasoning). To further enhance planning performance and efficiency, we introduce a reinforcement fine-tuning method based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), reducing unnecessary reasoning in straightforward scenarios. Extensive experiments across real-world and simulated datasets and benchmarks, including nuPlan, nuScenes, Waymo, and CARLA, demonstrate the competitive performance of AutoVLA in both open-loop and closed-loop settings. Qualitative results showcase the adaptive reasoning and accurate planning capabilities of AutoVLA in diverse scenarios.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Data Attribution: A Data-Centric Approach for Trustworthy AI Development

  • Jiaqi Ma

Data plays an increasingly crucial role in both the performance and the safety of AI models. Data attribution is an emerging family of techniques aimed at quantifying the impact of individual training data points on a model trained on them, which has found data-centric applications such as instance-based explanation, unsafe training data detection, and copyright compensation. In this talk, I will comprehensively review our work contributing to the applications, methods, and open-source benchmarks of data attribution, and discuss open challenges in this field.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

DATE-LM: Benchmarking Data Attribution Evaluation for Large Language Models

  • Cathy Jiao
  • Yijun Pan
  • Emily Xiao
  • Daisy Sheng
  • Niket Jain
  • Hanzhang Zhao
  • Ishita Dasgupta
  • Jiaqi Ma

Data attribution methods quantify the influence of training data on model outputs and are becoming increasingly relevant for a wide range of LLM research and applications, including dataset curation, model interpretability, data valuation. However, there remain critical gaps in systematic LLM-centric evaluation of data attribution methods. To this end, we introduce DATE-LM (Data Attribution Evaluation in Language Models), a unified benchmark for evaluating data attribution methods through real-world LLM applications. DATE-LM measures attribution quality through three key tasks — training data selection, toxicity/bias filtering, and factual attribution. Our benchmark is designed for ease of use, enabling researchers to configure and run large-scale evaluations across diverse tasks and LLM architectures. Furthermore, we use DATE-LM to conduct a large-scale evaluation of existing data attribution methods. Our findings show that no single method dominates across all tasks, data attribution methods have trade-offs with simpler baselines, and method performance is sensitive to task-specific evaluation design. Finally, we release a public leaderboard for quick comparison of methods and to facilitate community engagement. We hope DATE-LM serves as a foundation for future data attribution research in LLMs.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

GraSS: Scalable Data Attribution with Gradient Sparsification and Sparse Projection

  • Pingbang Hu
  • Joseph Melkonian
  • Weijing Tang
  • Han Zhao
  • Jiaqi Ma

Gradient-based data attribution methods, such as influence functions, are critical for understanding the impact of individual training samples without requiring repeated model retraining. However, their scalability is often limited by the high computational and memory costs associated with per-sample gradient computation. In this work, we propose GraSS, a novel gradient compression algorithm and its variants FactGraSS for linear layers specifically, that explicitly leverage the inherent sparsity of per-sample gradients to achieve sub-linear space and time complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving substantial speedups while preserving data influence fidelity. In particular, FactGraSS achieves up to 165% faster throughput on billion-scale models compared to the previous state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is publicly available at https: //github. com/TRAIS-Lab/GraSS.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Taming Hyperparameter Sensitivity in Data Attribution: Practical Selection Without Costly Retraining

  • Weiyi Wang
  • Junwei Deng
  • Yuzheng Hu
  • Shiyuan Zhang
  • Xirui Jiang
  • Runting Zhang
  • Han Zhao
  • Jiaqi Ma

Data attribution methods, which quantify the influence of individual training data points on a machine learning model, have gained increasing popularity in data-centric applications in modern AI. Despite a recent surge of new methods developed in this space, the impact of hyperparameter tuning in these methods remains under-explored. In this work, we present the first large-scale empirical study to understand the hyperparameter sensitivity of common data attribution methods. Our results show that most methods are indeed sensitive to certain key hyperparameters. However, unlike typical machine learning algorithms---whose hyperparameters can be tuned using computationally-cheap validation metrics---evaluating data attribution performance often requires retraining models on subsets of training data, making such metrics prohibitively costly for hyperparameter tuning. This poses a critical open challenge for the practical application of data attribution methods. To address this challenge, we advocate for better theoretical understandings of hyperparameter behavior to inform efficient tuning strategies. As a case study, we provide a theoretical analysis of the regularization term that is critical in many variants of influence function methods. Building on this analysis, we propose a lightweight procedure for selecting the regularization value without model retraining, and validate its effectiveness across a range of standard data attribution benchmarks. Overall, our study identifies a fundamental yet overlooked challenge in the practical application of data attribution, and highlights the importance of careful discussion on hyperparameter selection in future method development.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

V2X-Radar: A Multi-modal Dataset with 4D Radar for Cooperative Perception

  • Lei Yang
  • Xinyu Zhang
  • Jun Li
  • Chen Wang
  • Jiaqi Ma
  • Zhiying Song
  • Tong Zhao
  • Ziying Song

Modern autonomous vehicle perception systems often struggle with occlusions and limited perception range. Previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of cooperative perception in extending the perception range and overcoming occlusions, thereby enhancing the safety of autonomous driving. In recent years, a series of cooperative perception datasets have emerged; however, these datasets primarily focus on cameras and LiDAR, neglecting 4D Radar—a sensor used in single-vehicle autonomous driving to provide robust perception in adverse weather conditions. In this paper, to bridge the gap created by the absence of 4D Radar datasets in cooperative perception, we present V2X-Radar, the first large-scale, real-world multi-modal dataset featuring 4D Radar. V2X-Radar dataset is collected using a connected vehicle platform and an intelligent roadside unit equipped with 4D Radar, LiDAR, and multi-view cameras. The collected data encompasses sunny and rainy weather conditions, spanning daytime, dusk, and nighttime, as well as various typical challenging scenarios. The dataset consists of 20K LiDAR frames, 40K camera images, and 20K 4D Radar data, including 350K annotated boxes across five categories. To support various research domains, we have established V2X-Radar-C for cooperative perception, V2X-Radar-I for roadside perception, and V2X-Radar-V for single-vehicle perception. Furthermore, we provide comprehensive benchmarks across these three sub-datasets.

TMLR Journal 2024 Journal Article

Can LLMs Effectively Leverage Graph Structural Information through Prompts, and Why?

  • Jin Huang
  • Xingjian Zhang
  • Qiaozhu Mei
  • Jiaqi Ma

Large language models (LLMs) are gaining increasing attention for their capability to process graphs with rich text attributes, especially in a zero-shot fashion. Recent studies demonstrate that LLMs obtain decent text classification performance on common text-rich graph benchmarks, and the performance can be improved by appending encoded structural information as natural languages into prompts. We aim to understand why the incorporation of structural information inherent in graph data can improve the prediction performance of LLMs. First, we rule out the concern of data leakage by curating a novel leakage-free dataset and conducting a comparative analysis alongside a previously widely-used dataset. Second, as past work usually encodes the ego-graph by describing the graph structure in natural language, we ask the question: do LLMs understand the prompts in graph structures? Third, we investigate why LLMs can improve their performance after incorporating structural information. Our exploration of these questions reveals that (i) there is no substantial evidence that the performance of LLMs is significantly attributed to data leakage; (ii) instead of understanding prompts as graph structures, LLMs tend to process prompts more as contextual paragraphs and (iii) the most efficient elements of the local neighborhood included in the prompt are phrases that are pertinent to the node label, rather than the graph structure.

EAAI Journal 2024 Journal Article

Structural asymmetric convolution for wireframe parsing

  • Jiahui Zhang
  • Jinfu Yang
  • Fuji Fu
  • Jiaqi Ma

Simultaneously extracting junctions and their corresponding line segments from images presents a promising approach to structural environment cognition. However, conventional methods employ square convolution for line feature extraction, resulting in the exclusion of long-range dependencies and the generation of suboptimal wireframe predictions. In this paper, we introduce an efficient and concise parsing method named Structural Asymmetric Convolution-based Wireframe Parser (SACWP). Taking advantage of the inherent similarities between structural asymmetric convolution and the predominant distribution of line segments in man-made environments, we propose a Structural Asymmetric Convolution module (SAC) that captures long-range contextual features while efficiently filtering out irrelevant information from neighboring pixels. Additionally, we introduce a feature aggregation module based on dilated convolution (DCFA) to seamlessly integrate contextual information from multiple receptive fields. We thoroughly evaluate our approach on the Wireframe and YorkUrban datasets, achieving preferable results of 69. 3% and 29. 7% msAP respectively. On the other hand, the promising results adequately demonstrate the effectiveness of SACWP to Wireframe Parsing task.

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

A Metadata-Driven Approach to Understand Graph Neural Networks

  • Ting Wei Li
  • Qiaozhu Mei
  • Jiaqi Ma

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in various applications, but their performance can be sensitive to specific data properties of the graph datasets they operate on. Current literature on understanding the limitations of GNNs has primarily employed a \emph{model-driven} approach that leverage heuristics and domain knowledge from network science or graph theory to model the GNN behaviors, which is time-consuming and highly subjective. In this work, we propose a \emph{metadata-driven} approach to analyze the sensitivity of GNNs to graph data properties, motivated by the increasing availability of graph learning benchmarks. We perform a multivariate sparse regression analysis on the metadata derived from benchmarking GNN performance across diverse datasets, yielding a set of salient data properties. To validate the effectiveness of our data-driven approach, we focus on one identified data property, the degree distribution, and investigate how this property influences GNN performance through theoretical analysis and controlled experiments. Our theoretical findings reveal that datasets with more balanced degree distribution exhibit better linear separability of node representations, thus leading to better GNN performance. We also conduct controlled experiments using synthetic datasets with varying degree distributions, and the results align well with our theoretical findings. Collectively, both the theoretical analysis and controlled experiments verify that the proposed metadata-driven approach is effective in identifying critical data properties for GNNs.

EAAI Journal 2023 Journal Article

MATC-Net: Learning compact sequence representation for hierarchical loop closure detection

  • Fuji Fu
  • Jinfu Yang
  • Jiahui Zhang
  • Jiaqi Ma

Loop closure detection (LCD) is a challenging task to judge whether the current position of an intelligent robot returns to the previously visited position. Mainstream appearance-based approaches apply robust image representation techniques to describe the scene. However, most of these methods are designed for single images, and the sequence representation method incorporating temporal sequence information is still in the preliminary exploration. In this paper, we propose a compact sequence representation method for hierarchical LCD, ensuring conspicuous performance for the LCD task. Deriving from a group of global features of image sequences, we propose a multi-scale asymmetric temporal convolution network (MATC-Net), which generates sequential features and transformed global features through its aggregation branch and transformation branch, respectively. Based on these two types of features, a MATC-Net-based hierarchical LCD framework including two similarity measurement processes is constructed, through which the best place match is identified. The experimental results show that our method outperforms other counterparts on three datasets, exhibiting the promising potential of leveraging sequential features to LCD task.

TMLR Journal 2023 Journal Article

Partition-Based Active Learning for Graph Neural Networks

  • Jiaqi Ma
  • Ziqiao Ma
  • Joyce Chai
  • Qiaozhu Mei

We study the problem of semi-supervised learning with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in an active learning setup. We propose GraphPart, a novel partition-based active learning approach for GNNs. GraphPart first splits the graph into disjoint partitions and then selects representative nodes within each partition to query. The proposed method is motivated by a novel analysis of the classification error under realistic smoothness assumptions over the graph and the node features. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing active learning methods for GNNs under a wide range of annotation budget constraints. In addition, the proposed method does not introduce additional hyperparameters, which is crucial for model training, especially in the active learning setting where a labeled validation set may not be available.

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Post Hoc Explanations of Language Models Can Improve Language Models

  • Satyapriya Krishna
  • Jiaqi Ma
  • Dylan Slack
  • Asma Ghandeharioun
  • Sameer Singh
  • Himabindu Lakkaraju

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in performing complex tasks. Moreover, recent research has shown that incorporating human-annotated rationales (e. g. , Chain-of-Thought prompting) during in-context learning can significantly enhance the performance of these models, particularly on tasks that require reasoning capabilities. However, incorporating such rationales poses challenges in terms of scalability as this requires a high degree of human involvement. In this work, we present a novel framework, Amplifying Model Performance by Leveraging In-Context Learning with Post Hoc Explanations (AMPLIFY), which addresses the aforementioned challenges by automating the process of rationale generation. To this end, we leverage post hoc explanation methods which output attribution scores (explanations) capturing the influence of each of the input features on model predictions. More specifically, we construct automated natural language rationales that embed insights from post hoc explanations to provide corrective signals to LLMs. Extensive experimentation with real-world datasets demonstrates that our framework, AMPLIFY, leads to prediction accuracy improvements of about 10-25% over a wide range of tasks, including those where prior approaches which rely on human-annotated rationales such as Chain-of-Thought prompting fall short. Our work makes one of the first attempts at highlighting the potential of post hoc explanations as valuable tools for enhancing the effectiveness of LLMs. Furthermore, we conduct additional empirical analyses and ablation studies to demonstrate the impact of each of the components of AMPLIFY, which, in turn, lead to critical insights for refining in context learning.

JBHI Journal 2022 Journal Article

Mul-SNO: A Novel Prediction Tool for S-Nitrosylation Sites Based on Deep Learning Methods

  • Qian Zhao
  • Jiaqi Ma
  • Yu Wang
  • Fang Xie
  • Zhibin Lv
  • Yaoqun Xu
  • Hua Shi
  • Ke Han

Protein s-nitrosylation (SNO) is one of the most important post-translational modifications and is formed by the covalent modification of nitric oxide and cysteine residues. Extensive studies have shown that SNO plays a pivotal role in the plant immune response and treating various major human diseases. In recent years, SNO sites have become a hot research topic. Traditional biochemical methods for SNO site identification are time-consuming and costly. In this study, we developed an economical and efficient SNO site prediction tool named Mul-SNO. Mul-SNO ensembled current popular and powerful deep learning model bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) and bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (BERT). Compared with existing state-of-the-art methods, Mul-SNO obtained better ACC of 0. 911 and 0. 796 based on 10-fold cross-validation and independent data sets, respectively.

JMLR Journal 2022 Journal Article

SODEN: A Scalable Continuous-Time Survival Model through Ordinary Differential Equation Networks

  • Weijing Tang
  • Jiaqi Ma
  • Qiaozhu Mei
  • Ji Zhu

In this paper, we propose a flexible model for survival analysis using neural networks along with scalable optimization algorithms. One key technical challenge for directly applying maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to censored data is that evaluating the objective function and its gradients with respect to model parameters requires the calculation of integrals. To address this challenge, we recognize from a novel perspective that the MLE for censored data can be viewed as a differential-equation constrained optimization problem. Following this connection, we model the distribution of event time through an ordinary differential equation and utilize efficient ODE solvers and adjoint sensitivity analysis to numerically evaluate the likelihood and the gradients. Using this approach, we are able to 1) provide a broad family of continuous-time survival distributions without strong structural assumptions, 2) obtain powerful feature representations using neural networks, and 3) allow efficient estimation of the model in large-scale applications using stochastic gradient descent. Through both simulation studies and real-world data examples, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison to existing state-of-the-art deep learning survival analysis models. The implementation of the proposed SODEN approach has been made publicly available at https://github.com/jiaqima/SODEN. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] [ code ] &copy JMLR 2022. ( edit, beta )

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Subgroup Generalization and Fairness of Graph Neural Networks

  • Jiaqi Ma
  • Junwei Deng
  • Qiaozhu Mei

Despite enormous successful applications of graph neural networks (GNNs), theoretical understanding of their generalization ability, especially for node-level tasks where data are not independent and identically-distributed (IID), has been sparse. The theoretical investigation of the generalization performance is beneficial for understanding fundamental issues (such as fairness) of GNN models and designing better learning methods. In this paper, we present a novel PAC-Bayesian analysis for GNNs under a non-IID semi-supervised learning setup. Moreover, we analyze the generalization performances on different subgroups of unlabeled nodes, which allows us to further study an accuracy-(dis)parity-style (un)fairness of GNNs from a theoretical perspective. Under reasonable assumptions, we demonstrate that the distance between a test subgroup and the training set can be a key factor affecting the GNN performance on that subgroup, which calls special attention to the training node selection for fair learning. Experiments across multiple GNN models and datasets support our theoretical results.

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Towards More Practical Adversarial Attacks on Graph Neural Networks

  • Jiaqi Ma
  • Shuangrui Ding
  • Qiaozhu Mei

We study the black-box attacks on graph neural networks (GNNs) under a novel and realistic constraint: attackers have access to only a subset of nodes in the network, and they can only attack a small number of them. A node selection step is essential under this setup. We demonstrate that the structural inductive biases of GNN models can be an effective source for this type of attacks. Specifically, by exploiting the connection between the backward propagation of GNNs and random walks, we show that the common gradient-based white-box attacks can be generalized to the black-box setting via the connection between the gradient and an importance score similar to PageRank. In practice, we find attacks based on this importance score indeed increase the classification loss by a large margin, but they fail to significantly increase the mis-classification rate. Our theoretical and empirical analyses suggest that there is a discrepancy between the loss and mis-classification rate, as the latter presents a diminishing-return pattern when the number of attacked nodes increases. Therefore, we propose a greedy procedure to correct the importance score that takes into account of the diminishing-return pattern. Experimental results show that the proposed procedure can significantly increase the mis-classification rate of common GNNs on real-world data without access to model parameters nor predictions.

NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

A Flexible Generative Framework for Graph-based Semi-supervised Learning

  • Jiaqi Ma
  • Weijing Tang
  • Ji Zhu
  • Qiaozhu Mei

We consider a family of problems that are concerned about making predictions for the majority of unlabeled, graph-structured data samples based on a small proportion of labeled samples. Relational information among the data samples, often encoded in the graph/network structure, is shown to be helpful for these semi-supervised learning tasks. However, conventional graph-based regularization methods and recent graph neural networks do not fully leverage the interrelations between the features, the graph, and the labels. In this work, we propose a flexible generative framework for graph-based semi-supervised learning, which approaches the joint distribution of the node features, labels, and the graph structure. Borrowing insights from random graph models in network science literature, this joint distribution can be instantiated using various distribution families. For the inference of missing labels, we exploit recent advances of scalable variational inference techniques to approximate the Bayesian posterior. We conduct thorough experiments on benchmark datasets for graph-based semi-supervised learning. Results show that the proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art models under most settings.

IJCAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Pseudo Supervised Matrix Factorization in Discriminative Subspace

  • Jiaqi Ma
  • Yipeng Zhang
  • Lefei Zhang
  • Bo Du
  • Dapeng Tao

Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) and spectral clustering have been proved to be efficient and effective for data clustering tasks and have been applied to various real-world scenes. However, there are still some drawbacks in traditional methods: (1) most existing algorithms only consider high-dimensional data directly while neglect the intrinsic data structure in the low-dimensional subspace; (2) the pseudo-information got in the optimization process is not relevant to most spectral clustering and manifold regularization methods. In this paper, a novel unsupervised matrix factorization method, Pseudo Supervised Matrix Factorization (PSMF), is proposed for data clustering. The main contributions are threefold: (1) to cluster in the discriminant subspace, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) combines with NMF to become a unified framework; (2) we propose a pseudo supervised manifold regularization term which utilizes the pseudo-information to instruct the regularization term in order to find subspace that discriminates different classes; (3) an efficient optimization algorithm is designed to solve the proposed problem with proved convergence. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets illustrate that the proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art clustering algorithms.

AAAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

SNR: Sub-Network Routing for Flexible Parameter Sharing in Multi-Task Learning

  • Jiaqi Ma
  • Zhe Zhao
  • Jilin Chen
  • Ang Li
  • Lichan Hong
  • Ed H. Chi

Machine learning applications, such as object detection and content recommendation, often require training a single model to predict multiple targets at the same time. Multi-task learning through neural networks became popular recently, because it not only helps improve the accuracy of many prediction tasks when they are related, but also saves computation cost by sharing model architectures and low-level representations. The latter is critical for real-time large-scale machine learning systems. However, classic multi-task neural networks may degenerate significantly in accuracy when tasks are less related. Previous works (Misra et al. 2016; Yang and Hospedales 2016; Ma et al. 2018) showed that having more flexible architectures in multi-task models, either manually-tuned or softparameter-sharing structures like gating networks, helps improve the prediction accuracy. However, manual tuning is not scalable, and the previous soft-parameter sharing models are either not flexible enough or computationally expensive. In this work, we propose a novel framework called Sub- Network Routing (SNR) to achieve more flexible parameter sharing while maintaining the computational advantage of the classic multi-task neural-network model. SNR modularizes the shared low-level hidden layers into multiple layers of subnetworks, and controls the connection of sub-networks with learnable latent variables to achieve flexible parameter sharing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a large-scale dataset YouTube8M. We show that the proposed method improves the accuracy of multi-task models while maintaining their computation efficiency.

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