Saksham Jain

Beyond conditional average treatment effects, treatments may impact the entire outcome distribution in covariate-dependent ways, for example, by altering the variance or tail risks for specific subpopulations. We propose a novel estimand to capture such conditional distributional treatment effects, and develop a doubly robust estimator that is minimax optimal in the local asymptotic sense. Using this, we develop a test for the global homogeneity of conditional potential outcome distributions that accommodates discrepancies beyond the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), has provably valid type 1 error, and is consistent against fixed alternatives – the first test, to our knowledge, with such guarantees in this setting. Furthermore, we derive exact closed-form expressions for two natural discrepancies (including the MMD), and provide a computationally efficient, permutation-free algorithm for our test.

After a person is arrested and charged with a crime, they may be released on bail and required to participate in a community supervision program while awaiting trial. These ’pre-trial programs’ are common throughout the United States, but very little research has demonstrated their effectiveness. Researchers have emphasized the need for more rigorous program evaluation methods, which we introduce in this article. We describe a program evaluation pipeline that uses recent interpretable machine learning techniques for observational causal inference, and demonstrate these techniques in a study of a pre-trial program in Durham, North Carolina. Our findings show no evidence that the program either significantly increased or decreased the probability of new criminal charges. If these findings replicate, the criminal-legal system needs to either improve pre-trial programs or consider alternatives to them. The simplest option is to release low-risk individuals back into the community without subjecting them to any restrictions or conditions. Another option is to assign individuals to pre-trial programs that incentivize pro-social behavior. We believe that the techniques introduced here can provide researchers the rigorous tools they need to evaluate these programs.

Accurate geospatial information about the causes and consequences of climate change, including energy systems infrastructure, is critical to planning climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. When up-to-date spatial data on infrastructure is lacking, one approach to fill this gap is to learn from overhead imagery using deep-learning-based object detection algorithms. However, the performance of these algorithms can suffer when applied to diverse geographies, which is a common case. We propose a technique to generate realistic synthetic overhead images of an object (e.g., a generator) to enhance the ability of these techniques to transfer across diverse geographic domains. Our technique blends example objects into unlabeled images from the target domain using generative adversarial networks. This requires minimal labeled examples of the target object and is computationally efficient such that it can be used to generate a large corpus of synthetic imagery. We show that including these synthetic images in the training of an object detection model improves its ability to generalize to new domains (measured in terms of average precision) when compared to a baseline model and other relevant domain adaptation techniques.

Deep learning techniques, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), dominate the benchmarks for most computer vision tasks. These state-of-the-art results are typically obtained through supervised learning, for which large annotated datasets are required. However, acquiring such datasets for manufacturing applications remains a challenging proposition due to the time and costs involved in their collection. To overcome this disadvantage, a novel framework is proposed for data augmentation by creating synthetic images using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The generator synthesizes new surface defect images from random noise which is trained over time to get realistic fakes. These synthetic images can be used further for training of classification algorithms. Three GAN architectures are trained, and the entire data augmentation pipeline is implemented for the Northeastern University (China) Classification (NEU-CLS) dataset for hot-rolled steel strips from NEU Surface Defect Database. The classification accuracy of a simple CNN architecture is measured on synthetic augmented data and further it is compared with similar state-of-the-arts. It is observed that the proposed GANs-based augmentation scheme significantly improves the performance of CNN for classification of surface defects. The classically augmented CNN yields sensitivity and specificity of 90.28% and 98.06% respectively. In contrast, the synthetically augmented CNN yields better results, with sensitivity and specificity of 95.33% and 99.16% respectively. Also, the use of GANs is demonstrated to disentangle the representation space and to add additional domain knowledge through synthetic augmentation that can be difficult to replicate through classic augmentation. The proposed framework demonstrates high generalization capability. It may be applied to other supervised surface inspection tasks, and thus facilitate the development of advanced vision-based inspection instruments for manufacturing applications.

Pretrained deep models hold their learnt knowledge in the form of model parameters. These parameters act as “memory” for the trained models and help them generalize well on unseen data. However, in absence of training data, the utility of a trained model is merely limited to either inference or better initialization towards a target task. In this paper, we go further and extract synthetic data by leveraging the learnt model parameters. We dub them Data Impressions , which act as proxy to the training data and can be used to realize a variety of tasks. These are useful in scenarios where only the pretrained models are available and the training data is not shared (e.g., due to privacy or sensitivity concerns). We show the applicability of data impressions in solving several computer vision tasks such as unsupervised domain adaptation, continual learning as well as knowledge distillation. We also study the adversarial robustness of lightweight models trained via knowledge distillation using these data impressions. Further, we demonstrate the efficacy of data impressions in generating data-free Universal Adversarial Perturbations (UAPs) with better fooling rates. Extensive experiments performed on benchmark datasets demonstrate competitive performance achieved using data impressions in absence of original training data.