Most Influential Subset Selection: Challenges, Promises, and Beyond

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Hu, Yuzheng, Hu, Pingbang, Zhao, Han, Ma, Jiaqi W.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866913642131226624
author Hu, Yuzheng
Hu, Pingbang
Zhao, Han
Ma, Jiaqi W.
author_facet Hu, Yuzheng
Hu, Pingbang
Zhao, Han
Ma, Jiaqi W.
contents How can we attribute the behaviors of machine learning models to their training data? While the classic influence function sheds light on the impact of individual samples, it often fails to capture the more complex and pronounced collective influence of a set of samples. To tackle this challenge, we study the Most Influential Subset Selection (MISS) problem, which aims to identify a subset of training samples with the greatest collective influence. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of the prevailing approaches in MISS, elucidating their strengths and weaknesses. Our findings reveal that influence-based greedy heuristics, a dominant class of algorithms in MISS, can provably fail even in linear regression. We delineate the failure modes, including the errors of influence function and the non-additive structure of the collective influence. Conversely, we demonstrate that an adaptive version of these heuristics which applies them iteratively, can effectively capture the interactions among samples and thus partially address the issues. Experiments on real-world datasets corroborate these theoretical findings and further demonstrate that the merit of adaptivity can extend to more complex scenarios such as classification tasks and non-linear neural networks. We conclude our analysis by emphasizing the inherent trade-off between performance and computational efficiency, questioning the use of additive metrics such as the Linear Datamodeling Score, and offering a range of discussions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_18153
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Most Influential Subset Selection: Challenges, Promises, and Beyond
Hu, Yuzheng
Hu, Pingbang
Zhao, Han
Ma, Jiaqi W.
Machine Learning
How can we attribute the behaviors of machine learning models to their training data? While the classic influence function sheds light on the impact of individual samples, it often fails to capture the more complex and pronounced collective influence of a set of samples. To tackle this challenge, we study the Most Influential Subset Selection (MISS) problem, which aims to identify a subset of training samples with the greatest collective influence. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of the prevailing approaches in MISS, elucidating their strengths and weaknesses. Our findings reveal that influence-based greedy heuristics, a dominant class of algorithms in MISS, can provably fail even in linear regression. We delineate the failure modes, including the errors of influence function and the non-additive structure of the collective influence. Conversely, we demonstrate that an adaptive version of these heuristics which applies them iteratively, can effectively capture the interactions among samples and thus partially address the issues. Experiments on real-world datasets corroborate these theoretical findings and further demonstrate that the merit of adaptivity can extend to more complex scenarios such as classification tasks and non-linear neural networks. We conclude our analysis by emphasizing the inherent trade-off between performance and computational efficiency, questioning the use of additive metrics such as the Linear Datamodeling Score, and offering a range of discussions.
title Most Influential Subset Selection: Challenges, Promises, and Beyond
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18153