ICLR 2024 论文列表

The transferability of deep neural networks (DNNs) has made significant progress in image and language processing. However, due to the heterogeneity among tables, such DNN bonus is still far from being well exploited on tabular data prediction (e.g., regression or classification tasks). Condensing knowledge from diverse domains, language models (LMs) possess the capability to comprehend feature names from various tables, potentially serving as versatile learners in transferring knowledge across distinct tables and diverse prediction tasks, but their discrete text representation space is inherently incompatible with numerical feature values in tables. In this paper, we present TP-BERTa, a specifically pre-trained LM for tabular data prediction. Concretely, a novel relative magnitude tokenization converts scalar numerical feature values to finely discrete, high-dimensional tokens, and an intra-feature attention approach integrates feature values with the corresponding feature names. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our pre-trained TP-BERTa leads the performance among tabular DNNs and is competitive with Gradient Boosted Decision Tree models in typical tabular data regime.

Despite the success of deep learning for text and image data, tree-based ensemble models are still state-of-the-art for machine learning with heterogeneous tabular data. However, there is a significant need for tabular-specific gradient-based methods due to their high flexibility. In this paper, we propose $\text{GRANDE}$, $\text{GRA}$die$\text{N}$t-Based $\text{D}$ecision Tree $\text{E}$nsembles, a novel approach for learning hard, axis-aligned decision tree ensembles using end-to-end gradient descent. GRANDE is based on a dense representation of tree ensembles, which affords to use backpropagation with a straight-through operator to jointly optimize all model parameters. Our method combines axis-aligned splits, which is a useful inductive bias for tabular data, with the flexibility of gradient-based optimization. Furthermore, we introduce an advanced instance-wise weighting that facilitates learning representations for both, simple and complex relations, within a single model. We conducted an extensive evaluation on a predefined benchmark with 19 classification datasets and demonstrate that our method outperforms existing gradient-boosting and deep learning frameworks on most datasets. The method is available under: https://github.com/s-marton/GRANDE

Realistic synthetic electronic health records (EHRs) can be leveraged to acceler- ate methodological developments for research purposes while mitigating privacy concerns associated with data sharing. However, the training of Generative Ad- versarial Networks remains challenging, often resulting in issues like mode col- lapse. While diffusion models have demonstrated progress in generating qual- ity synthetic samples for tabular EHRs given ample denoising steps, their perfor- mance wanes when confronted with missing modalities in heterogeneous tabular EHRs data. For example, some EHRs contain solely static measurements, and some contain only contain temporal measurements, or a blend of both data types. To bridge this gap, we introduce FLEXGEN-EHR– a versatile diffusion model tai- lored for heterogeneous tabular EHRs, equipped with the capability of handling missing modalities in an integrative learning framework. We define an optimal transport module to align and accentuate the common feature space of hetero- geneity of EHRs. We empirically show that our model consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art synthetic EHR generation methods both in fidelity by up to 3.10% and utility by up to 7.16%. Additionally, we show that our method can be successfully used in privacy-sensitive settings, where the original patient-level data cannot be shared.