Knockout: A simple way to handle missing inputs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Deep learning models can extract predictive and actionable information from complex inputs. The richer the inputs, the better these models usually perform. However, models that leverage rich inputs (e.g., multi-modality) can be difficult to deploy widely, because some inputs may be missing at inference. Current popular solutions to this problem include marginalization, imputation, and training multiple models. Marginalization can obtain calibrated predictions but it is computationally costly and therefore only feasible for low dimensional inputs. Imputation may result in inaccurate predictions because it employs point estimates for missing variables and does not work well for high dimensional inputs (e.g., images). Training multiple models whereby each model takes different subsets of inputs can work well but requires knowing missing input patterns in advance. Furthermore, training and retaining multiple models can be costly. We propose an efficient way to learn both the conditional distribution using full inputs and the marginal distributions. Our method, Knockout, randomly replaces input features with appropriate placeholder values during training. We provide a theoretical justification of Knockout and show that it can be viewed as an implicit marginalization strategy. We evaluate Knockout in a wide range of simulations and real-world datasets and show that it can offer strong empirical performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".