skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: A generic approach for reproducible model distillation
Abstract Model distillation has been a popular method for producing interpretable machine learning. It uses an interpretable “student” model to mimic the predictions made by the black box “teacher” model. However, when the student model is sensitive to the variability of the data sets used for training even when keeping the teacher fixed, the corresponded interpretation is not reliable. Existing strategies stabilize model distillation by checking whether a large enough sample of pseudo-data is generated to reliably reproduce student models, but methods to do so have so far been developed separately for each specific class of student model. In this paper, we develop a generic approach for stable model distillation based on central limit theorem for the estimated fidelity of the student to the teacher. We start with a collection of candidate student models and search for candidates that reasonably agree with the teacher. Then we construct a multiple testing framework to select a sample size such that the consistent student model would be selected under different pseudo samples. We demonstrate the application of our proposed approach on three commonly used intelligible models: decision trees, falling rule lists and symbolic regression. Finally, we conduct simulation experiments on Mammographic Mass and Breast Cancer datasets and illustrate the testing procedure throughout a theoretical analysis with Markov process. The code is publicly available athttps://github.com/yunzhe-zhou/GenericDistillation.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1933497
PAR ID:
10530743
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Springer Science + Business Media
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Machine Learning
Volume:
113
Issue:
10
ISSN:
0885-6125
Format(s):
Medium: X Size: p. 7645-7688
Size(s):
p. 7645-7688
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. We introduce a novel semi-supervised learning approach, named Teacher-Student Bayesian Optimization TSBO, integrating the teacher-student paradigm into BO to minimize expensive labeled data queries for the first time. TSBO incorporates a teacher model, an unlabeled data sampler, and a student model. The student is trained on unlabeled data locations generated by the sampler, with pseudo labels predicted by the teacher. The interplay between these three components implements a unique selective regularization to the teacher in the form of student feedback. This scheme enables the teacher to predict high-quality pseudo labels, enhancing the generalization of the GP surrogate model in the search space. To fully exploit TSBO, we propose two optimized unlabeled data samplers to construct effective student feedback that well aligns with the objective of Bayesian optimization. Furthermore, we quantify and leverage the uncertainty of the teacher-student model for the provision of reliable feedback to the teacher in the presence of risky pseudo-label predictions. TSBO demonstrates significantly improved sample-efficiency in several global optimization tasks under tight labeled data budgets. The implementation is available at https://github.com/reminiscenty/TSBO-Official. 
    more » « less
  2. We introduce a novel semi-supervised learning approach, named Teacher-Student Bayesian Optimization TSBO, integrating the teacher-student paradigm into BO to minimize expensive labeled data queries for the first time. TSBO incorporates a teacher model, an unlabeled data sampler, and a student model. The student is trained on unlabeled data locations generated by the sampler, with pseudo labels predicted by the teacher. The interplay between these three components implements a unique selective regularization to the teacher in the form of student feedback. This scheme enables the teacher to predict high-quality pseudo labels, enhancing the generalization of the GP surrogate model in the search space. To fully exploit TSBO, we propose two optimized unlabeled data samplers to construct effective student feedback that well aligns with the objective of Bayesian optimization. Furthermore, we quantify and leverage the uncertainty of the teacher-student model for the provision of reliable feedback to the teacher in the presence of risky pseudo-label predictions. TSBO demonstrates significantly improved sample-efficiency in several global optimization tasks under tight labeled data budgets. The implementation is available at https://github.com/reminiscenty/TSBO-Official. 
    more » « less
  3. Abstract Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is widely used to analyze high-dimensional count data because, in contrast to real-valued alternatives such as factor analysis, it produces an interpretable parts-based representation. However, in applications such as spatial transcriptomics, NMF fails to incorporate known structure between observations. Here, we present nonnegative spatial factorization (NSF), a spatially-aware probabilistic dimension reduction model based on transformed Gaussian processes that naturally encourages sparsity and scales to tens of thousands of observations. NSF recovers ground truth factors more accurately than real-valued alternatives such as MEFISTO in simulations, and has lower out-of-sample prediction error than probabilistic NMF on three spatial transcriptomics datasets from mouse brain and liver. Since not all patterns of gene expression have spatial correlations, we also propose a hybrid extension of NSF that combines spatial and nonspatial components, enabling quantification of spatial importance for both observations and features. A TensorFlow implementation of NSF is available fromhttps://github.com/willtownes/nsf-paper. 
    more » « less
  4. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown satisfying performance on various graph learning tasks. To achieve better fitting capability, most GNNs are with a large number of parameters, which makes these GNNs computationally expensive. Therefore, it is difficult to deploy them onto edge devices with scarce computational resources, e.g., mobile phones and wearable smart devices. Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a common solution to compress GNNs, where a light-weighted model (i.e., the student model) is encouraged to mimic the behavior of a computationally expensive GNN (i.e., the teacher GNN model). Nevertheless, most existing GNN-based KD methods lack fairness consideration. As a consequence, the student model usually inherits and even exaggerates the bias from the teacher GNN. To handle such a problem, we take initial steps towards fair knowledge distillation for GNNs. Specifically, we first formulate a novel problem of fair knowledge distillation for GNN-based teacher-student frameworks. Then we propose a principled framework named RELIANT to mitigate the bias exhibited by the student model. Notably the design of RELIANT is decoupled from any specific teacher and student model structures, and thus can be easily adapted to various GNN-based KD frameworks. We perform extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, which corroborates that RELIANT achieves less biased GNN knowledge distillation while maintaining high prediction utility. Open-source code can be found at https://github.com/yushundong/RELIANT. 
    more » « less
  5. Abstract Deep learning has emerged as a revolutionary technology for protein residue‐residue contact prediction since the 2012 CASP10 competition. Considerable advancements in the predictive power of the deep learning‐based contact predictions have been achieved since then. However, little effort has been put into interpreting the black‐box deep learning methods. Algorithms that can interpret the relationship between predicted contact maps and the internal mechanism of the deep learning architectures are needed to explore the essential components of contact inference and improve their explainability. In this study, we present an attention‐based convolutional neural network for protein contact prediction, which consists of two attention mechanism‐based modules: sequence attention and regional attention. Our benchmark results on the CASP13 free‐modeling targets demonstrate that the two attention modules added on top of existing typical deep learning models exhibit a complementary effect that contributes to prediction improvements. More importantly, the inclusion of the attention mechanism provides interpretable patterns that contain useful insights into the key fold‐determining residues in proteins. We expect the attention‐based model can provide a reliable and practically interpretable technique that helps break the current bottlenecks in explaining deep neural networks for contact prediction. The source code of our method is available athttps://github.com/jianlin-cheng/InterpretContactMap. 
    more » « less