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Growing Efficient Deep Networks by Structured Continuous Sparsification
deep learning computer vision network pruning neural architecture search
We develop an approach to growing deep network architectures over the course of training, driven by a principled combination of accuracy and sparsity objectives. Unlike existing pruning or architecture search techniques that operate on full-sized models or supernet architectures, our method can start from a small, simple seed architecture and dynamically grow and prune both layers and filters. By combining a continuous relaxation of discrete network structure optimization with a scheme for sampling sparse subnetworks, we produce compact, pruned networks, while also drastically reducing the computational expense of training. For example, we achieve $49.7\%$ inference FLOPs and $47.4\%$ training FLOPs savings compared to a baseline ResNet-50 on ImageNet, while maintaining $75.2\%$ top-1 validation accuracy --- all without any dedicated fine-tuning stage. Experiments across CIFAR, ImageNet, PASCAL VOC, and Penn Treebank, with convolutional networks for image classification and semantic segmentation, and recurrent networks for language modeling, demonstrate that we both train faster and produce more efficient networks than competing architecture pruning or search methods.
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ScheduleNet: Learn to Solve MinMax mTSP Using Reinforcement Learning with Delayed Reward
minmax mtsp learn reinforcement problems co problems tsp salesmen schedulenet delayed reward schedulenet
Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems are theoretically challenging yet crucial in practice. Numerous works used Reinforcement Learning (RL) to tackle these CO problems. As current approaches mainly focus on single-worker CO problems such as the famous Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), we focus on more practical extension of TSP to multi-worker (salesmen) setting, specifically MinMax mTSP. From the RL perspective, Minmax mTSP raises several significant challenges, such as the cooperation of multiple workers and the need for a well-engineered reward function. In this paper, we present the RL framework with (1) worker-task heterograph and type-aware Graph Neural Network, and (2) the RL training method that is stable, has fast convergence speed, and directly optimizes the objective of MinMax mTSP in a delayed reward setting. We achieve comparable performance to a highly optimized meta-heuristic baseline, OR-Tools, and outperforms it in 10% of the cases, both on in-training and out-of-training problem distributions. Moreover, our problem formulation enables us to solve problems with any number of salesmen (workers) and cities.
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Toward Trustworthy Difficulty Assessments: Large Language Models as Judges in Programming and Synthetic Tasks
Large Language Models (LLMs) Competitive Programming Difficulty GPT-4o Interpretable Machine Learning Interpretable Model Synthetic Problem Generation Numeric Constraints Automated Assessment
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing but face challenges in structured tasks such as predicting the difficulty of competitive programming problems. We compare GPT-4o against an interpretable LightGBM ensemble on a dataset of 1,825 LeetCode problems labeled Easy, Medium, or Hard. Our experiments reveal that GPT-4o achieves only 37.75\% accuracy, significantly below the 86\% achieved by LightGBM. Detailed analyses, including confusion matrices and SHAP-based interpretability, highlight that numeric constraints play a crucial role in classifying harder problems. By contrast, GPT-4o often overlooks such details and exhibits a bias toward simpler categories. Additionally, we investigate GPT-4o's performance in generating and classifying synthetic Hard problems. Surprisingly, GPT-4o labels almost all synthetic Hard problems as Medium, contradicting its behavior on real Hard problems. These findings have implications for automated difficulty assessment, educational platforms, and reinforcement learning pipelines reliant on LLM-based evaluations.
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How Important is Importance Sampling for Deep Budgeted Training?
Budgeted training importance sampling data augmentation deep learning
Long iterative training processes for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are commonly required to achieve state-of-the-art performance in many computer vision tasks. Core-set selection and importance sampling approaches might play a key role in budgeted training regimes, i.e.~when limiting the number of training iterations. The former demonstrate that retaining informative samples is important to avoid large drops in accuracy, and the later aim at dynamically estimating the sample importance to speed-up convergence. This work explores this paradigm and how a budget constraint interacts with importance sampling approaches and data augmentation techniques. We show that under budget restrictions, importance sampling approaches do not provide a consistent improvement over uniform sampling. We suggest that, given a specific budget, the best course of action is to disregard the importance and introduce adequate data augmentation. For example, training in CIFAR-10/100 with 30% of the full training budget, a uniform sampling strategy with certain data augmentation surpasses the performance of 100% budget models trained with standard data augmentation. We conclude from our work that DNNs under budget restrictions benefit greatly from variety in the samples and that finding the right samples to train is not the most effective strategy when balancing high performance with low computational requirements. The code will be released after the review process.
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On the Origin of Implicit Regularization in Stochastic Gradient Descent
SGD learning rate batch size optimization generalization implicit regularization backward error analysis SDE stochastic differential equation ODE ordinary differential equation
For infinitesimal learning rates, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) follows the path of gradient flow on the full batch loss function. However moderately large learning rates can achieve higher test accuracies, and this generalization benefit is not explained by convergence bounds, since the learning rate which maximizes test accuracy is often larger than the learning rate which minimizes training loss. To interpret this phenomenon we prove that for SGD with random shuffling, the mean SGD iterate also stays close to the path of gradient flow if the learning rate is small and finite, but on a modified loss. This modified loss is composed of the original loss function and an implicit regularizer, which penalizes the norms of the minibatch gradients. Under mild assumptions, when the batch size is small the scale of the implicit regularization term is proportional to the ratio of the learning rate to the batch size. We verify empirically that explicitly including the implicit regularizer in the loss can enhance the test accuracy when the learning rate is small.
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TaskSet: A Dataset of Optimization Tasks
optimizers meta-learning
We present TaskSet, a dataset of tasks for use in training and evaluating optimizers. TaskSet is unique in its size and diversity, containing over a thousand tasks ranging from image classification with fully connected or convolutional neural networks, to variational autoencoders, to non-volume preserving flows on a variety of datasets. As an example application of such a dataset we explore meta-learning an ordered list of hyperparameters to try sequentially. By learning this hyperparameter list from data generated using TaskSet we achieve large speedups in sample efficiency over random search. Next we use the diversity of the TaskSet and our method for learning hyperparameter lists to empirically explore the generalization of these lists to new optimization tasks in a variety of settings including ImageNet classification with Resnet50 and LM1B language modeling with transformers. As part of this work we have opensourced code for all tasks, as well as ~29 million training curves for these problems and the corresponding hyperparameters.
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Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models
image restoration inverse problems super resolution denoising deblurring colorization inpainting diffusion models variational inference
Many interesting tasks in image restoration can be cast as linear inverse problems. A recent family of approaches for solving these problems uses stochastic algorithms that sample from the posterior distribution of natural images given the measurements. However, efficient solutions often require problem-specific supervised training to model the posterior, whereas unsupervised methods that are not problem-specific typically rely on inefficient iterative methods. This work addresses these issues by introducing Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models (DDRM), an efficient, unsupervised posterior sampling method. Motivated by variational inference, DDRM takes advantage of a pre-trained denoising diffusion generative model for solving any linear inverse problem. We demonstrate DDRM's versatility on several image datasets for super-resolution, deblurring, inpainting, and colorization under various amounts of measurement noise. DDRM outperforms the current leading unsupervised methods on the diverse ImageNet dataset in reconstruction quality, perceptual quality, and runtime, being $5\times$ faster than the nearest competitor. DDRM also generalizes well for natural images out of the distribution of the observed ImageNet training set.
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Balancing training time vs. performance with Bayesian Early Pruning
Efficient Training Multi-Output Gaussian Process Gaussian Process Bayesian Single-shot network pruning Dynamic Sparse Reparameterization Lottery Ticket Hypothesis
Pruning is an approach to alleviate overparameterization of deep neural networks (DNN) by zeroing out or pruning DNN elements with little to no efficacy at a given task. In contrast to related works that do pruning before or after training, this paper presents a novel method to perform early pruning of DNN elements (e.g., neurons or convolutional filters) during the training process while preserving performance upon convergence. To achieve this, we model the future efficacy of DNN elements in a Bayesian manner conditioned upon efficacy data collected during the training and prune DNN elements which are predicted to have low efficacy after training completion. Empirical evaluations show that the proposed Bayesian early pruning improves the computational efficiency of DNN training with small sacrifices in performance. Using our approach we are able to achieve a $48.6\%$ faster training time for ResNet-$50$ on ImageNet to achieve a validation accuracy of $72.5\%$.
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Reinforcement Learning with Bayesian Classifiers: Efficient Skill Learning from Outcome Examples
Reinforcement Learning Goal Reaching Bayesian Classification Reward Inference
Exploration in reinforcement learning is, in general, a challenging problem. In this work, we study a more tractable class of reinforcement learning problems defined by data that provides examples of successful outcome states. In this case, the reward function can be obtained automatically by training a classifier to classify states as successful or not. We argue that, with appropriate representation and regularization, such a classifier can guide a reinforcement learning algorithm to an effective solution. However, as we will show, this requires the classifier to make uncertainty-aware predictions that are very difficult with standard deep networks. To address this, we propose a novel mechanism for obtaining calibrated uncertainty based on an amortized technique for computing the normalized maximum likelihood distribution. We show that the resulting algorithm has a number of intriguing connections to both count-based exploration methods and prior algorithms for learning reward functions from data, while being able to guide algorithms towards the specified goal more effectively. We show how using amortized normalized maximum likelihood for reward inference is able to provide effective reward guidance for solving a number of challenging navigation and robotic manipulation tasks which prove difficult for other algorithms.
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Behavioral Cloning from Noisy Demonstrations
Imitation Learning Inverse Reinforcement Learning Noisy Demonstrations
We consider the problem of learning an optimal expert behavior policy given noisy demonstrations that contain observations from both optimal and non-optimal expert behaviors. Popular imitation learning algorithms, such as generative adversarial imitation learning, assume that (clear) demonstrations are given from optimal expert policies but not the non-optimal ones, and thus often fail to imitate the optimal expert behaviors given the noisy demonstrations. Prior works that address the problem require (1) learning policies through environment interactions in the same fashion as reinforcement learning, and (2) annotating each demonstration with confidence scores or rankings. However, such environment interactions and annotations in real-world settings take impractically long training time and a significant human effort. In this paper, we propose an imitation learning algorithm to address the problem without any environment interactions and annotations associated with the non-optimal demonstrations. The proposed algorithm learns ensemble policies with a generalized behavioral cloning (BC) objective function where we exploit another policy already learned by BC. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can learn behavior policies that are much closer to the optimal policies than ones learned by BC.
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SPEX: Scaling Feature Interaction Explanations for LLMs
Interpretability Signal Processing Sparsity SHAP Interactions
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized machine learning due to their ability to capture complex interactions between input features. Popular post-hoc explanation methods like SHAP provide *marginal* feature attributions, while their extensions to interaction importances only scale to small input lengths ($\approx 20$). We propose *Spectral Explainer* (SPEX, a model-agnostic interaction attribution algorithm that efficiently scales to large input lengths ($\approx 1000)$. SPEX exploits underlying natural sparsity among interactions—common in real-world data—and applies a sparse Fourier transform using a channel decoding algorithm to efficiently identify important interactions.
We perform experiments across three difficult long-context datasets that require LLMs to utilize interactions between inputs to complete the task. For large inputs, SPEX outperforms marginal attribution methods by up to 20\% in terms of faithfully reconstructing LLM outputs. Further, SPEX successfully identifies key features and interactions that strongly influence model output. For one of our datasets, *HotpotQA*, SPEX provides interactions that align with human annotations. Finally, we use our model-agnostic approach to generate explanations to demonstrate abstract reasoning in closed-source LLMs (*GPT-4o mini*) and compositional reasoning in vision-language models.
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Search-Guided, Lightly-Supervised Training of Structured Prediction Energy Networks
light supervision structured prediction indirect supervision domain knowledge
In structured output prediction tasks, labeling ground-truth training output is often expensive. However, for many tasks, even when the true output is unknown, we can evaluate predictions using a scalar reward function, which may be easily assembled from human knowledge or non-differentiable pipelines. But searching through the entire output space to find the best output with respect to this reward function is typically intractable. In this paper, we instead use efficient truncated randomized search in this reward function to train structured prediction energy networks (SPENs), which provide efficient test-time inference using gradient-based search on a smooth, learned representation of the score landscape, and have previously yielded state-of-the-art results in structured prediction. In particular, this truncated randomized search in the reward function yields previously unknown local improvements, providing effective supervision to SPENs, avoiding their traditional need for labeled training data.
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Ordering-Based Causal Discovery with Reinforcement Learning
Causal Discovery Reinforcement Learning Ordering Search
It is a long-standing question to discover causal relations among a set of variables in many empirical sciences. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved promising results in causal discovery. However, searching the space of directed graphs directly and enforcing acyclicity by implicit penalties tend to be inefficient and restrict the method to the small problems. In this work, we alternatively consider searching an ordering by RL from the variable ordering space that is much smaller than that of directed graphs, which also helps avoid dealing with acyclicity. Specifically, we formulate the ordering search problem as a Markov decision process, and then use different reward designs to optimize the ordering generating model. A generated ordering is then processed using variable selection methods to obtain the final directed acyclic graph. In contrast to other causal discovery methods, our method can also utilize a pretrained model to accelerate training. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, and show that the proposed method outperforms other baselines on important metrics even on large graph tasks.
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A Simple yet Effective Baseline for Robust Deep Learning with Noisy Labels
Learning with noisy labels generalization of deep neural networks robust deep learning
Recently deep neural networks have shown their capacity to memorize training data, even with noisy labels, which hurts generalization performance. To mitigate this issue, we propose a simple but effective method that is robust to noisy labels, even with severe noise. Our objective involves a variance regularization term that implicitly penalizes the Jacobian norm of the neural network on the whole training set (including the noisy-labeled data), which encourages generalization and prevents overfitting to the corrupted labels. Experiments on noisy benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with a high tolerance to severe noise.
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Coverage as a Principle for Discovering Transferable Behavior in Reinforcement Learning
deep reinforcement learning transfer learning unsupervised learning exploration
Designing agents that acquire knowledge autonomously and use it to solve new tasks efficiently is an important challenge in reinforcement learning. Unsupervised learning provides a useful paradigm for autonomous acquisition of task-agnostic knowledge. In supervised settings, representations discovered through unsupervised pre-training offer important benefits when transferred to downstream tasks. Given the nature of the reinforcement learning problem, we explore how to transfer knowledge through behavior instead of representations. The behavior of pre-trained policies may be used for solving the task at hand (exploitation), as well as for collecting useful data to solve the problem (exploration). We argue that pre-training policies to maximize coverage will result in behavior that is useful for both strategies. When using these policies for both exploitation and exploration, our agents discover solutions that lead to larger returns. The largest gains are generally observed in domains requiring structured exploration, including settings where the behavior of the pre-trained policies is misaligned with the downstream task.
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Latent Diffusion Transformer with Local Neural Field as PDE Surrogate Model
Dynamical Systems PDE Deep Learning Diffusion Transformer Neural Fields
We introduce a diffusion transformer architecture, AROMA (Attentive Reduced Order Model with Attention), for dynamics modeling of complex systems. By employing a discretization-free encoder and a local neural field decoder, we construct a latent space that accurately captures spatiality without requiring traditional space discretization. The diffusion transformer models the dynamics in this latent space conditioned on the previous state. It refines the predictions providing enhanced stability compared to traditional transformers and then enabling longer rollouts. AROMA demonstrates superior performance over existing neural field methods in simulating 1D and 2D equations, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach in capturing complex dynamical behaviors.
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Succinct Explanations with Cascading Decision Trees
Decision Trees Explainability Interpretability
Classic decision tree learning is a binary classification algorithm that constructs models with first-class transparency - every classification has a directly derivable explanation. However, learning decision trees on modern datasets generates large trees, which in turn generate decision paths of excessive depth, obscuring the explanation of classifications. To improve the comprehensibility of classifications, we propose a new decision tree model that we call Cascading Decision Trees. Cascading Decision Trees shorten the size of explanations of classifications, without sacrificing model performance overall. Our key insight is to separate the notion of a decision path and an explanation path. Utilizing this insight, instead of having one monolithic decision tree, we build several smaller decision subtrees and cascade them in sequence. Our cascading decision subtrees are designed to specifically target explanations for positive classifications. This way each subtree identifies the smallest set of features that can classify as many positive samples as possible, without misclassifying any negative samples. Applying cascading decision trees to new samples results in a significantly shorter and succinct explanation, if one of the subtrees detects a positive classification. In that case, we immediately stop and report the decision path of only the current subtree to the user as an explanation for the classification. We evaluate our algorithm on standard datasets, as well as new real-world applications and find that our model shortens the explanation depth by over 40.8\% for positive classifications compared to the classic decision tree model.
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Searching towards Class-Aware Generators for Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks
NAS cGAN
Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGAN) were designed to generate images based on the provided conditions, e.g., class-level distributions. However, existing methods have used the same generating architecture for all classes. This paper presents a novel idea that adopts NAS to find a distinct architecture for each class. The search space contains regular and class-modulated convolutions, where the latter is designed to introduce class-specific information while avoiding the reduction of training data for each class generator. The search algorithm follows a weight-sharing pipeline with mixed-architecture optimization so that the search cost does not grow with the number of classes. To learn the sampling policy, a Markov decision process is embedded into the search algorithm and a moving average is applied for better stability. We evaluate our approach on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100. Besides achieving better image generation quality in terms of FID scores, we discover several insights that are helpful in designing cGAN models.
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TimeAutoML: Autonomous Representation Learning for Multivariate Irregularly Sampled Time Series
representation learning AutoML irregularly sampled time series anomaly detection clustering
Multivariate time series (MTS) data are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in diverse domains, e.g., IoT systems, health informatics, and 5G networks. To obtain an effective representation of MTS data, it is not only essential to consider unpredictable dynamics and highly variable lengths of these data but also important to address the irregularities in the sampling rates of MTS. Existing parametric approaches rely on manual hyperparameter tuning and may cost a huge amount of labor effort. Therefore, it is desirable to learn the representation automatically and efficiently. To this end, we propose an autonomous representation learning approach for multivariate time series (TimeAutoML) with irregular sampling rates and variable lengths. As opposed to previous works, we first present a representation learning pipeline in which the configuration and hyperparameter optimization
are fully automatic and can be tailored for various tasks, e.g., anomaly detection, clustering, etc. Next, a negative sample generation approach and an auxiliary classification task are developed and integrated within TimeAutoML to enhance
its representation capability. Extensive empirical studies on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed TimeAutoML outperforms competing approaches on various tasks by a large margin. In fact, it achieves the best anomaly detection
performance among all comparison algorithms on 78 out of all 85 UCR datasets, acquiring up to 20% performance improvement in terms of AUC score.
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Accelerating Neural Differential Equations for Irregularly-Sampled Dynamical Systems Using Variational Formulation
Neural differential equations irregularly-sampled dynamical systems variational formulation acceleration
Neural ODEs have exhibited remarkable capabilities in continuously modeling dynamical systems from observational data. However, existing training methods, often based on adaptive-step-size numerical ODE solvers, are time-consuming and may introduce additional errors. Despite recent attempts to address these issues, existing methods rely heavily on numerical ODE solvers and lack efficient solutions. In this work, we propose the Fast-VF Neural ODE, a novel approach based on variational formulation (VF) to accelerate the training of Neural ODEs for dynamical systems. To further mitigate the influence of oscillatory terms in the VF loss, we incorporate the Filon's method into our design. Extensive experimental results show that our method can accelerate the training of Neural ODEs by 10 $\times$ to 100 $\times$ compared to the baselines while achieving comparable accuracy in irregularly-sampled dynamical systems.
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SaliencyMix: A Saliency Guided Data Augmentation Strategy for Better Regularization
SaliencyMix Saliency Guided Data Augmentation Data Augmentation Regularization
Advanced data augmentation strategies have widely been studied to improve the generalization ability of deep learning models. Regional dropout is one of the popular solutions that guides the model to focus on less discriminative parts by randomly removing image regions, resulting in improved regularization. However, such information removal is undesirable. On the other hand, recent strategies suggest to randomly cut and mix patches and their labels among training images, to enjoy the advantages of regional dropout without having any pointless pixel in the augmented images. We argue that such random selection strategies of the patches may not necessarily represent sufficient information about the corresponding object and thereby mixing the labels according to that uninformative patch enables the model to learn unexpected feature representation. Therefore, we propose SaliencyMix that carefully selects a representative image patch with the help of a saliency map and mixes this indicative patch with the target image, thus leading the model to learn more appropriate feature representation. SaliencyMix achieves the best known top-1 error of $21.26\%$ and $20.09\%$ for ResNet-50 and ResNet-101 architectures on ImageNet classification, respectively, and also improves the model robustness against adversarial perturbations. Furthermore, models that are trained with SaliencyMix, help to improve the object detection performance. Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/SaliencyMix/SaliencyMix}.
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Mechanistic Neural Networks for Scientific Machine Learning
ODE PDE Differentiable Optimization
This paper presents *Mechanistic Neural Networks*, a neural network design for machine learning applications in the sciences. It incorporates a new *Mechanistic Block* in standard architectures to explicitly learn governing differential equations as representations, revealing the underlying dynamics of data and enhancing interpretability and efficiency in data modeling.
Central to our approach is a novel fast, parallel and scalable *Relaxed Linear Programming Solver* (NeuRLP) using a differentiable optimization approach for ODE learning and solving.
Mechanistic Neural Networks demonstrate their versatility for scientific machine learning applications on tasks from equation discovery to dynamic systems modeling.
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QRGAN: Quantile Regression Generative Adversarial Networks
Quantile Regression Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) Frechet Inception Distance (FID) Generative Neural Networks
Learning high-dimensional probability distributions by competitively training generative and discriminative neural networks is a prominent approach of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) among generative models to model complex real-world data. Nevertheless, training GANs likely suffer from non-convergence problem, mode collapse and gradient explosion or vanishing. Least Squares GAN (LSGANs) and Wasserstein GANs (WGAN) are of representative variants of GANs in literature that diminish the inherent problems of GANs by proposing the modification methodology of loss functions. However, LSGANs often fall into local minima and cause mode collapse. While WGANs unexpectedly encounter with inefficient computation and slow training due to its constraints in Wasserstein distance approximation. In this paper, we propose Quantile Regression GAN (QRGAN) in which quantile regression is adopted to minimize 1-Wasserstein distance between real and generated data distribution as a novel approach in modification of loss functions for improvement of GANs. To study the culprits of mode collapse problem, the output space of discriminator and gradients of fake samples are analyzed to see if the discriminator guides the generator well. And we found that the discriminator should not be bounded to specific numbers. Our proposed QRGAN exposes high robustness against mode collapse problem. Furthermore, QRGAN obtains an apparent improvement in the evaluation and comparison of Frechet Inception Distance (FID) for generation performance assessment compared to existing variants of GANs.
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Planning from Pixels using Inverse Dynamics Models
model based reinforcement learning deep reinforcement learning multi-task learning deep learning goal-conditioned reinforcement learning
Learning dynamics models in high-dimensional observation spaces can be challenging for model-based RL agents. We propose a novel way to learn models in a latent space by learning to predict sequences of future actions conditioned on task completion. These models track task-relevant environment dynamics over a distribution of tasks, while simultaneously serving as an effective heuristic for planning with sparse rewards. We evaluate our method on challenging visual goal completion tasks and show a substantial increase in performance compared to prior model-free approaches.
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In Defense of Pseudo-Labeling: An Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo-label Selection Framework for Semi-Supervised Learning
Semi-Supervised Learning Pseudo-Labeling Uncertainty Calibration Deep Learning
The recent research in semi-supervised learning (SSL) is mostly dominated by consistency regularization based methods which achieve strong performance. However, they heavily rely on domain-specific data augmentations, which are not easy to generate for all data modalities. Pseudo-labeling (PL) is a general SSL approach that does not have this constraint but performs relatively poorly in its original formulation. We argue that PL underperforms due to the erroneous high confidence predictions from poorly calibrated models; these predictions generate many incorrect pseudo-labels, leading to noisy training. We propose an uncertainty-aware pseudo-label selection (UPS) framework which improves pseudo labeling accuracy by drastically reducing the amount of noise encountered in the training process. Furthermore, UPS generalizes the pseudo-labeling process, allowing for the creation of negative pseudo-labels; these negative pseudo-labels can be used for multi-label classification as well as negative learning to improve the single-label classification. We achieve strong performance when compared to recent SSL methods on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets. Also, we demonstrate the versatility of our method on the video dataset UCF-101 and the multi-label dataset Pascal VOC.
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Vision Transformer
Vision transformer(ViT) self-attention deep learning
In last 10 years there has been significant development in Computer vision after development of Convolutional neural network(ConvNets). There has been research around combining self-attention with CNN after success seen in NLP with transformer models. In the blog-post we discuss the model “Vision transformer”(ViT) in detail and its new intuitions.
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Importance and Coherence: Methods for Evaluating Modularity in Neural Networks
interpretability modularity
As deep neural networks become more advanced and widely-used, it is important to understand their inner workings. Toward this goal, modular interpretations are appealing because they offer flexible levels of abstraction aside from standard architectural building blocks (e.g., neurons, channels, layers). In this paper, we consider the problem of assessing how functionally interpretable a given partitioning of neurons is. We propose two proxies for this: importance which reflects how crucial sets of neurons are to network performance, and coherence which reflects how consistently their neurons associate with input/output features. To measure these proxies, we develop a set of statistical methods based on techniques that have conventionally been used for the interpretation of individual neurons. We apply these methods on partitionings generated by a spectral clustering algorithm which uses a graph representation of the network's neurons and weights. We show that despite our partitioning algorithm using neither activations nor gradients, it reveals clusters with a surprising amount of importance and coherence. Together, these results support the use of modular interpretations, and graph-based partitionings in particular, for interpretability.
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Benchmarking Bias Mitigation Algorithms in Representation Learning through Fairness Metrics
fairness model evaluation fair deep learning adversarial fairness
With the recent expanding attention of machine learning researchers and practitioners to fairness, there is a void of a common framework to analyze and compare the capabilities of proposed models in deep representation learning. In this paper, we evaluate different fairness methods trained with deep neural networks on a common synthetic dataset to obtain a better insight into the working of these methods. In particular, we train about 2000 different models in various setups, including unbalanced and correlated data configurations, to verify the limits of the current models and better understand in which setups they are subject to failure. In doing so we present a dataset, a large subset of proposed fairness metrics in the literature, and rigorously evaluate recent promising debiasing algorithms in a common framework hoping the research community would take this benchmark as a common entry point for fair deep learning.
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Pointwise Binary Classification with Pairwise Confidence Comparisons
Binary classification pairwise comparisons unbiased risk estimator
Ordinary (pointwise) binary classification aims to learn a binary classifier from pointwise labeled data. However, such pointwise labels may not be directly accessible due to privacy, confidentiality, or security considerations. In this case, can we still learn an accurate binary classifier? This paper proposes a novel setting, namely pairwise comparison (Pcomp) classification, where we are given only pairs of unlabeled data that we know one is more likely to be positive than the other, instead of pointwise labeled data. Compared with pointwise labels, pairwise comparisons are easier to collect, and Pcomp classification is useful for subjective classification tasks. To solve this problem, we present a mathematical formulation for the generation process of pairwise comparison data, based on which we exploit an unbiased risk estimator (URE) to train a binary classifier by empirical risk minimization and establish an estimation error bound. We first prove that a URE can be derived and improve it using correction functions. Then, we start from the noisy-label learning perspective to introduce a progressive URE and improve it by imposing consistency regularization. Finally, experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed solutions for Pcomp classification.
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Not All Lotteries Are Made Equal
lottery ticket hypothesis sparsity pruning
The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) states that for a reasonably sized neural network, there exists a subnetwork within the same network that yields no less performance than the dense counterpart when trained from the same initialization. To the best of our knowledge, prior work regarding the LTH has only investigated overparameterized models, and the emergence of the LTH is often attributed to the initial model being large, i.e., a dense sampling of tickets. In this blog post, we present evidence that challenges this notion of the LTH. We investigate the effect of model size and the ease of finding winning tickets. Through this work, we show that winning tickets is easier to find for smaller models.
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$\alpha$VIL: Learning to Leverage Auxiliary Tasks for Multitask Learning
multitask learning meta-optimization deep learning
Multitask Learning is a Machine Learning paradigm that aims to train a range of (usually related) tasks with the help of a shared model. While the goal is often to improve the joint performance of all training tasks, another approach is to focus on the performance of a specific target task, while treating the remaining ones as auxiliary data from which to possibly leverage positive transfer towards the target during training. In such settings, it becomes important to estimate the positive or negative influence auxiliary tasks will have on the target. While many ways have been proposed to estimate task weights before or during training they typically rely on heuristics or extensive search of the weighting space. We propose a novel method called $\alpha$-Variable Importance Learning ($\alpha$VIL) that is able to adjust task weights dynamically during model training, by making direct use of task-specific updates of the underlying model's parameters between training epochs. Experiments indicate that $\alpha$VIL is able to outperform other Multitask Learning approaches in a variety of settings. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt at making direct use of model updates for task weight estimation.
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Disambiguating Symbolic Expressions in Informal Documents
symbolic expressions dataset informal documents task informal stem documents form files precise semantics abstract syntax tree
We propose the task of \emph{disambiguating} symbolic expressions in informal STEM documents in the form of \LaTeX files -- that is, determining their precise semantics and abstract syntax tree -- as a neural machine translation task. We discuss the distinct challenges involved and present a dataset with roughly 33,000 entries. We evaluated several baseline models on this dataset, which failed to yield even syntactically valid \LaTeX before overfitting. Consequently, we describe a methodology using a \emph{transformer} language model pre-trained on sources obtained from \url{arxiv.org}, which yields promising results despite the small size of the dataset. We evaluate our model using a plurality of dedicated techniques, taking syntax and semantics of symbolic expressions into account.
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Normalizing Flows for Calibration and Recalibration
recalibration normalizing flows uncertainty
In machine learning, due to model misspecification and overfitting, estimates of the aleatoric uncertainty are often inaccurate.
One approach to fix this is isotonic regression, in which a monotonic function is fit on a validation set to map the model's CDF to an optimally calibrated CDF. However, this makes it infeasible to compute additional statistics of interest on the model distribution (such as the mean). In this paper, through a reframing of recalibration as MLE, we replace isotonic regression with normalizing flows. This allows us to retain the ability to compute the statistical properties of the model (such as closed-form likelihoods, mean, correlation, etc.) and provides an opportunity for additional capacity at the cost of possible overfitting. Most importantly, the fundamental properties of normalizing flows allow us to generalize recalibration to conditional and multivariate distributions. To aid in detecting miscalibration and measuring our success at fixing it, we use a simple extension of the calibration Q-Q plot.
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GraphLog: A Benchmark for Measuring Logical Generalization in Graph Neural Networks
graph neural networks dataset benchmark logic
Relational inductive biases have a key role in building learning agents that can generalize and reason in a compositional manner. While relational learning algorithms such as graph neural networks (GNNs) show promise, we do not understand their effectiveness to adapt to new tasks. In this work, we study the logical generalization capabilities of GNNs by designing a benchmark suite grounded in first-order logic. Our benchmark suite, GraphLog, requires that learning algorithms perform rule induction in different synthetic logics, represented as knowledge graphs.
GraphLog consists of relation prediction tasks on 57 distinct procedurally generated logical worlds. We use GraphLog to evaluate GNNs in three different setups: single-task supervised learning, multi-task (with pretraining), and continual learning. Unlike previous benchmarks, GraphLog enables us to precisely control the logical relationship between the different worlds by controlling the underlying first-order logic rules. We find that models' ability to generalize and adapt strongly correlates to the availability of diverse sets of logical rules during multi-task training. We also find the severe catastrophic forgetting effect in continual learning scenarios, and GraphLog provides a precise mechanism to control the distribution shift. Overall, our results highlight new challenges for the design of GNN models, opening up an exciting area of research in generalization using graph-structured data.
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Self-supervised Adversarial Robustness for the Low-label, High-data Regime
self-supervised adversarial training robustness
Recent work discovered that training models to be invariant to adversarial perturbations requires substantially larger datasets than those required for standard classification. Perhaps more surprisingly, these larger datasets can be "mostly" unlabeled. Pseudo-labeling, a technique simultaneously pioneered by four separate and simultaneous works in 2019, has been proposed as a competitive alternative to labeled data for training adversarially robust models. However, when the amount of labeled data decreases, the performance of pseudo-labeling catastrophically drops, thus questioning the theoretical insights put forward by Uesato et al. (2019), which suggest that the sample complexity for learning an adversarially robust model from unlabeled data should match the fully supervised case. We introduce Bootstrap Your Own Robust Latents (BYORL), a self-supervised learning technique based on BYOL for training adversarially robust models. Our method enables us to train robust representations without any labels (reconciling practice with theory). Most notably, this robust representation can be leveraged by a linear classifier to train adversarially robust models, even when the linear classifier is not trained adversarially. We evaluate BYORL and pseudo-labeling on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet and demonstrate that BYORL achieves significantly higher robustness (i.e., models resulting from BYORL are up to two times more accurate). Experiments on CIFAR-10 against $\ell_2$ and $\ell_\infty$ norm-bounded perturbations demonstrate that BYORL achieves near state-of-the-art robustness with as little as 500 labeled examples. We also note that against $\ell_2$ norm-bounded perturbations of size $\epsilon = 128/255$, BYORL surpasses the known state-of-the-art with an accuracy under attack of 77.61% (against 72.91% for the prior art).
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Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries From Natural Language Using Reinforcement Learning
deep learning reinforcement learning dataset natural language processing natural language interface sql
Relational databases store a significant amount of the worlds data. However, accessing this data currently requires users to understand a query language such as SQL. We propose Seq2SQL, a deep neural network for translating natural language questions to corresponding SQL queries. Our model uses rewards from in the loop query execution over the database to learn a policy to generate the query, which contains unordered parts that are less suitable for optimization via cross entropy loss. Moreover, Seq2SQL leverages the structure of SQL to prune the space of generated queries and significantly simplify the generation problem. In addition to the model, we release WikiSQL, a dataset of 80654 hand-annotated examples of questions and SQL queries distributed across 24241 tables fromWikipedia that is an order of magnitude larger than comparable datasets. By applying policy based reinforcement learning with a query execution environment to WikiSQL, Seq2SQL outperforms a state-of-the-art semantic parser, improving execution accuracy from 35.9% to 59.4% and logical form accuracy from 23.4% to 48.3%.
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Combining Imitation and Reinforcement Learning with Free Energy Principle
Imitation Reinforcement Learning Free Energy Principle
Imitation Learning (IL) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) from high dimensional sensory inputs are often introduced as separate problems, but a more realistic problem setting is how to merge the techniques so that the agent can reduce exploration costs by partially imitating experts at the same time it maximizes its return. Even when the experts are suboptimal (e.g. Experts learned halfway with other RL methods or human-crafted experts), it is expected that the agent outperforms the suboptimal experts’ performance. In this paper, we propose to address the issue by using and theoretically extending Free Energy Principle, a unified brain theory that explains perception, action and model learning in a Bayesian probabilistic way. We find that both IL and RL can be achieved based on the same free energy objective function. Our results show that our approach is promising in visual control tasks especially with sparse-reward environments.
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Identifying the Sources of Uncertainty in Object Classification
Classification Interpretability Disentangled Representations Uncertainty Estimation
In image-based object classification, the visual appearance of objects determines which class they are assigned to. External variables that are independent of the object, such as the perspective or the lighting conditions, can modify the object's appearance resulting in ambiguous images that lead to misclassifications. Previous work has proposed methods for estimating the uncertainty of predictions and measure their confidence. However, such methods do not indicate which variables are the potential sources that cause uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a method for image-based object classification that uses disentangled representations to indicate which are the external variables that contribute the most to the uncertainty of the predictions. This information can be used to identify the external variables that should be modified to decrease the uncertainty and improve the classification.
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ProGAE: A Geometric Autoencoder-based Generative Model for Disentangling Protein Conformational Space
generative models deep learning interpretability
Understanding the protein conformational landscape is critical, as protein function, as well as modulations thereof due to ligand binding or changes in environment, are intimately connected with structural variations. This work focuses on learning a generative neural network on a simulated ensemble of protein structures obtained using molecular simulation to characterize the distinct structural fluctuations of a protein bound to various drug molecules. Specifically, we use a geometric autoencoder framework to learn separate latent space encodings of the intrinsic and extrinsic geometries of the system. For this purpose, the proposed Protein Geometric AutoEncoder (ProGAE) model is trained on the length of the alpha-carbon pseudobonds and the orientation of the backbone bonds of the protein. Using ProGAE latent embeddings, we reconstruct and generate the conformational ensemble of a protein at or near the experimental resolution. Empowered by the disentangled latent space learning, the intrinsic latent embedding help in geometric error correction, whereas the extrinsic latent embedding is successfully used for classification or property prediction of different drugs bound to a specific protein. Additionally, ProGAE is able to be transferred to the structures of a different state of the same protein or to a completely different protein of different size, where only the dense layer decoding from the latent representation needs to be retrained. Results show that our geometric learning-based method enjoys both accuracy and efficiency for generating complex structural variations, charting the path toward scalable and improved approaches for analyzing and enhancing molecular simulations.
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Iterative convergent computation is not a useful inductive bias for ResNets
Residual neural networks Recurrent neural networks Computer vision
Recent work has suggested that feedforward residual neural networks (ResNets) approximate iterative recurrent computations. Iterative computations are useful in many domains, so they might provide good solutions for neural networks to learn. Here we quantify the degree to which ResNets learn iterative solutions and introduce a regularization approach that encourages learning of iterative solutions. Iterative methods are characterized by two properties: iteration and convergence. To quantify these properties, we define three indices of iterative convergence. Consistent with previous work, we show that, even though ResNets can express iterative solutions, they do not learn them when trained conventionally on computer vision tasks. We then introduce regularizations to encourage iterative convergent computation and test whether this provides a useful inductive bias. To make the networks more iterative, we manipulate the degree of weight sharing across layers using soft gradient coupling. This new method provides a form of recurrence regularization and can interpolate smoothly between an ordinary ResNet and a ``recurrent" ResNet (i.e., one that uses identical weights across layers and thus could be physically implemented with a recurrent network computing the successive stages iteratively across time). To make the networks more convergent we impose a Lipschitz constraint on the residual functions using spectral normalization. The three indices of iterative convergence reveal that the gradient coupling and the Lipschitz constraint succeed at making the networks iterative and convergent, respectively. However, neither recurrence regularization nor spectral normalization improve classification accuracy on standard visual recognition tasks (MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100) or on challenging recognition tasks with partial occlusions (Digitclutter). Iterative convergent computation, in these tasks, does not provide a useful inductive bias for ResNets.
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Human-interpretable model explainability on high-dimensional data
data explainability model explainability latent features importance machine learning architectures become complex unique challenges
The importance of explainability in machine learning continues to grow, as both neural-network architectures and the data they model become increasingly complex. Unique challenges arise when a model's input features become high-dimensional: on one hand, principled model-agnostic approaches to explainability become too computationally expensive; on the other, more efficient explainability algorithms lack natural interpretations for general users. In this work, we introduce a framework for human-interpretable explainability on high-dimensional data, consisting of two modules. First, we apply a semantically-meaningful latent representation, both to reduce the raw dimensionality of the data, and to ensure its human interpretability. These latent features can be learnt, e.g. explicitly as disentangled representations or implicitly through image-to-image translation, or they can be based on any computable quantities the user chooses. Second, we adapt the Shapley paradigm for model-agnostic explainability to operate on these latent features. This leads to interpretable model explanations that are both theoretically controlled and computationally tractable. We benchmark our approach on synthetic data and demonstrate its effectiveness on several image-classification tasks.
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Language-Agnostic Representation Learning of Source Code from Structure and Context
machine learning for code code summarization
Source code (Context) and its parsed abstract syntax tree (AST; Structure) are two complementary representations of the same computer program. Traditionally, designers of machine learning models have relied predominantly either on Structure or Context. We propose a new model, which jointly learns on Context and Structure of source code. In contrast to previous approaches, our model uses only language-agnostic features, i.e., source code and features that can be computed directly from the AST. Besides obtaining state-of-the-art on monolingual code summarization on all five programming languages considered in this work, we propose the first multilingual code summarization model. We show that jointly training on non-parallel data from multiple programming languages improves results on all individual languages, where the strongest gains are on low-resource languages. Remarkably, multilingual training only from Context does not lead to the same improvements, highlighting the benefits of combining Structure and Context for representation learning on code.
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Does Adversarial Transferability Indicate Knowledge Transferability?
adversarial transferability knowledge transferability
Despite the immense success that deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved, \emph{adversarial examples}, which are perturbed inputs that aim to mislead DNNs to make mistakes, have recently led to great concerns. On the other hand, adversarial examples exhibit interesting phenomena, such as \emph{adversarial transferability}. DNNs also exhibit knowledge transfer, which is critical to improving learning efficiency and learning in domains that lack high-quality training data. To uncover the fundamental connections between these phenomena, we investigate and give an affirmative answer to the question: \emph{does adversarial transferability indicate knowledge transferability?} We theoretically analyze the relationship between adversarial transferability and knowledge transferability, and outline easily checkable sufficient conditions that identify when adversarial transferability indicates knowledge transferability. In particular, we show that composition with an affine function is sufficient to reduce the difference between two models when they possess high adversarial transferability. Furthermore, we provide empirical evaluation for different transfer learning scenarios on diverse datasets, showing a strong positive correlation between the adversarial transferability and knowledge transferability, thus illustrating that our theoretical insights are predictive of practice.
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Addressing Distribution Shift in Online Reinforcement Learning with Offline Datasets
reinforcement learning offline reinforcement learning control distribution shift
Recent progress in offline reinforcement learning (RL) has made it possible to train strong RL agents from previously-collected, static datasets. However, depending on the quality of the trained agents and the application being considered, it is often desirable to improve such offline RL agents with further online interaction. As it turns out, fine-tuning offline RL agents is a non-trivial challenge, due to distribution shift – the agent encounters out-of-distribution samples during online interaction, which may cause bootstrapping error in Q-learning and instability during fine-tuning. In order to address the issue, we present a simple yet effective framework, which incorporates a balanced replay scheme and an ensemble distillation scheme. First, we propose to keep separate offline and online replay buffers, and carefully balance the number of samples from each buffer during updates. By utilizing samples from a wider distribution, i.e., both online and offline samples, we stabilize the Q-learning. Next, we present an ensemble distillation scheme, where we train an ensemble of independent actor-critic agents, then distill the policies into a single policy. In turn, we improve the policy using the Q-ensemble during fine-tuning, which allows the policy updates to be more robust to error in each individual Q-function. We demonstrate the superiority of our method on MuJoCo datasets from the recently proposed D4RL benchmark suite.
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A Temporal Kernel Approach for Deep Learning with Continuous-time Information
Kernel Learning Continuous-time System Spectral Distribution Random Feature Reparameterization Learning Theory
Sequential deep learning models such as RNN, causal CNN and attention mechanism do not readily consume continuous-time information. Discretizing the temporal data, as we show, causes inconsistency even for simple continuous-time processes. Current approaches often handle time in a heuristic manner to be consistent with the existing deep learning architectures and implementations. In this paper, we provide a principled way to characterize continuous-time systems using deep learning tools. Notably, the proposed approach applies to all the major deep learning architectures and requires little modifications to the implementation. The critical insight is to represent the continuous-time system by composing neural networks with a temporal kernel, where we gain our intuition from the recent advancements in understanding deep learning with Gaussian process and neural tangent kernel. To represent the temporal kernel, we introduce the random feature approach and convert the kernel learning problem to spectral density estimation under reparameterization. We further prove the convergence and consistency results even when the temporal kernel is non-stationary, and the spectral density is misspecified. The simulations and real-data experiments demonstrate the empirical effectiveness of our temporal kernel approach in a broad range of settings.
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Hyperbolic Neural Networks++
Hyperbolic Geometry Poincaré Ball Model Parameter-Reduced MLR Geodesic-Aware FC Layer Convolutional Layer Attention Mechanism
Hyperbolic spaces, which have the capacity to embed tree structures without distortion owing to their exponential volume growth, have recently been applied to machine learning to better capture the hierarchical nature of data. In this study, we generalize the fundamental components of neural networks in a single hyperbolic geometry model, namely, the Poincaré ball model. This novel methodology constructs a multinomial logistic regression, fully-connected layers, convolutional layers, and attention mechanisms under a unified mathematical interpretation, without increasing the parameters. Experiments show the superior parameter efficiency of our methods compared to conventional hyperbolic components, and stability and outperformance over their Euclidean counterparts.
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Factored Action Spaces in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Deep Reinforcement Learning Large action spaces Parameterized action spaces Multi-Agent Continuous Control
Very large action spaces constitute a critical challenge for deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. An existing approach consists in splitting the action space into smaller components and choosing either independently or sequentially actions in each dimension. This approach led to astonishing results for the StarCraft and Dota 2 games, however it remains underexploited and understudied. In this paper, we name this approach Factored Actions Reinforcement Learning (FARL) and study both its theoretical impact and practical use. Notably, we provide a theoretical analysis of FARL on the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor Critic (SAC) algorithms and evaluate these agents in different classes of problems. We show that FARL is a very versatile and efficient approach to combinatorial and continuous control problems.
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Continual learning in recurrent neural networks
Recurrent Neural Networks Continual Learning
While a diverse collection of continual learning (CL) methods has been proposed to prevent catastrophic forgetting, a thorough investigation of their effectiveness for processing sequential data with recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is lacking. Here, we provide the first comprehensive evaluation of established CL methods on a variety of sequential data benchmarks. Specifically, we shed light on the particularities that arise when applying weight-importance methods, such as elastic weight consolidation, to RNNs. In contrast to feedforward networks, RNNs iteratively reuse a shared set of weights and require working memory to process input samples. We show that the performance of weight-importance methods is not directly affected by the length of the processed sequences, but rather by high working memory requirements, which lead to an increased need for stability at the cost of decreased plasticity for learning subsequent tasks. We additionally provide theoretical arguments supporting this interpretation by studying linear RNNs. Our study shows that established CL methods can be successfully ported to the recurrent case, and that a recent regularization approach based on hypernetworks outperforms weight-importance methods, thus emerging as a promising candidate for CL in RNNs. Overall, we provide insights on the differences between CL in feedforward networks and RNNs, while guiding towards effective solutions to tackle CL on sequential data.
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Knowledge Graph Papers @ ICLR 2021
knowledge graph graph representation learning nlp reasoning question answering
This post aims at providing an overview of ICLR 2021 papers focusing on knowledge graphs (KGs). In particular, we highlight the research in four wide areas: complex query answering and reasoning in KGs, temporal logics and KGs, NLP point of view and entity linking, multimodal question answering with KGs. We hope this post could be of use for researchers and practitioners from adjacent areas to demonstrate the benefits of employing knowledge graphs in those various domains solving important problems.
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Toward Trainability of Quantum Neural Networks
Near-term Quantum Algorithm Quantum Neural Network Trainability Hierarchical Structure
Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) have been recently proposed as generalizations of classical neural networks to achieve the quantum speed-up. Despite the potential to outperform classical models, serious bottlenecks exist for training QNNs; namely, QNNs with random structures have poor trainability due to the vanishing gradient with rate exponential to the input qubit number. The vanishing gradient could seriously influence the applications of large-size QNNs. In this work, we provide the first viable solution with theoretical guarantees. Specifically, we prove that QNNs with tree tensor and step controlled architectures have gradients that vanish at most polynomially with the qubit number. Moreover, our result holds irrespective of which encoding methods are employed. We numerically demonstrate QNNs with tree tensor and step controlled structures for the application of binary classification. Simulations show faster convergent rates and better accuracy compared to QNNs with random structures.
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Wasserstein-2 Generative Networks
wasserstein-2 distance optimal transport maps non-minimax optimization cycle-consistency regularization input-convex neural networks
We propose a novel end-to-end non-minimax algorithm for training optimal transport mappings for the quadratic cost (Wasserstein-2 distance). The algorithm uses input convex neural networks and a cycle-consistency regularization to approximate Wasserstein-2 distance. In contrast to popular entropic and quadratic regularizers, cycle-consistency does not introduce bias and scales well to high dimensions. From the theoretical side, we estimate the properties of the generative mapping fitted by our algorithm. From the practical side, we evaluate our algorithm on a wide range of tasks: image-to-image color transfer, latent space optimal transport, image-to-image style transfer, and domain adaptation.
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LEARNING NEUROSYMBOLIC GENERATIVE MODELS VIA PROGRAM SYNTHESIS
structure deep learning generative models structured prediction
Significant strides have been made toward designing better generative models in recent years. Despite this progress, however, state-of-the-art approaches are still largely unable to capture complex global structure in data. For example, images of buildings typically contain spatial patterns such as windows repeating at regular intervals; state-of-the-art generative methods can’t easily reproduce these structures. We propose to address this problem by incorporating programs representing global structure into the generative model—e.g., a 2D for-loop may represent a configuration of windows. Furthermore, we propose a framework for learning these models by leveraging program synthesis to generate training data. On both synthetic and real-world data, we demonstrate that our approach is substantially better than the state-of-the-art at both generating and completing images that contain global structure.
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Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network for Spatio-Temporal Data Modeling
Federated Learning Graph Neural Network Spatio-Temporal Data Modeling
Vast amount of data generated from networks of sensors, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices underscores the need for advanced modeling techniques that leverage the spatio-temporal structure of decentralized data due to the need for edge computation and licensing (data access) issues. While federated learning (FL) has emerged as a framework for model training without requiring direct data sharing and exchange, effectively modeling the complex spatio-temporal dependencies to improve forecasting capabilities still remains an open problem. On the other hand, state-of-the-art spatio-temporal forecasting models assume unfettered access to the data, neglecting constraints on data sharing. To bridge this gap, we propose a federated spatio-temporal model -- Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network (CNFGNN) -- which explicitly encodes the underlying graph structure using graph neural network (GNN)-based architecture under the constraint of cross-node federated learning, which requires that data in a network of nodes is generated locally on each node and remains decentralized. CNFGNN operates by disentangling the temporal dynamics modeling on devices and spatial dynamics on the server, utilizing alternating optimization to reduce the communication cost, facilitating computations on the edge devices. Experiments on the traffic flow forecasting task show that CNFGNN achieves the best forecasting performance in both transductive and inductive learning settings with no extra computation cost on edge devices, while incurring modest communication cost.
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Representing Partial Programs with Blended Abstract Semantics
program synthesis representation learning abstract interpretation modular neural networks
Synthesizing programs from examples requires searching over a vast, combinatorial space of possible programs. In this search process, a key challenge is representing the behavior of a partially written program before it can be executed, to judge if it is on the right track and predict where to search next. We introduce a general technique for representing partially written programs in a program synthesis engine. We take inspiration from the technique of abstract interpretation, in which an approximate execution model is used to determine if an unfinished program will eventually satisfy a goal specification. Here we learn an approximate execution model implemented as a modular neural network. By constructing compositional program representations that implicitly encode the interpretation semantics of the underlying programming language, we can represent partial programs using a flexible combination of concrete execution state and learned neural representations, using the learned approximate semantics when concrete semantics are not known (in unfinished parts of the program). We show that these hybrid neuro-symbolic representations enable execution-guided synthesizers to use more powerful language constructs, such as loops and higher-order functions, and can be used to synthesize programs more accurately for a given search budget than pure neural approaches in several domains.
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The Language Tool
language representation externalism. emergent
The idea of emergent communication is something that I have been developing a theoretical framework for, from the vantage point of a philosopher of cognitive science, over the past few years. I’ve included here a blurb for the book I am currently writing and an excerpt from a recent paper "The Language Tool" as my submission. I have another paper that develops the language acquisition process under this framework further, but I'm assuming that people will be giving presentations on their ideas and then leading discussion so perhaps this is enough as a statement of what the theme of the session would be.
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On the use of linguistic similarities to improve Neural Machine Translation for African Languages
Machine Translation Multilingualism Linguistic similarity Dataset African languages Multi-task learning
In recent years, there has been a resurgence in research on empirical methods for machine translation. Most of this research has been focused on high-resource, European languages. Despite the fact that around 30% of all languages spoken worldwide are African, the latter have been heavily under investigated and this, partly due to the lack of public parallel corpora online. Furthermore, despite their large number (more than 2,000) and the similarities between them, there is currently no publicly available study on how to use this multilingualism (and associated similarities) to improve machine translation systems performance on African languages. So as to address these issues:
We propose a new dataset for African languages that provides parallel data for vernaculars not present in commonly used dataset like JW300 [1]. To exploit multilingualism, we first use a historical approach based on historical origins of these languages, their morphologies, their geographical and cultural distributions as well as migrations of population to identify similar vernaculars.
We also propose a new metric to automatically evaluate similarities between languages. This new metric does not require word level parallelism like traditional methods but only paragraph level parallelism.
We then show that performing Masked Language Modelling and Translation Language Modeling in addition to multi-task learning on a cluster of similar languages leads to a strong boost of performance in translating individual pairs inside this cluster.
In particular, we record an improvement of 29 BLEU on the pair Bafia-Ewondo using our approaches compared to previous work methods that did not exploit multilingualism in any way.
[1] http://opus.nlpl.eu/JW300.php
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A Theory of Self-Supervised Framework for Few-Shot Learning
fsl theory learning training framework ssl data novel classes algorithms transferable knowledge
Recently, self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms have been applied to Few-shot learning(FSL). FSL aims at distilling transferable knowledge on existing classes with large-scale labeled data to cope with novel classes for which only a few labeled data are available. Due to the limited number of novel classes, the initial embedding network becomes an essential component and can largely affect the performance in practice. But almost no one analyzes why a pre-trained embedding network with self-supervised training can provide representation for downstream FSL tasks in theory. In this paper, we first summarized the supervised FSL methods and explained why SSL is suitable for FSL. Then we further analyzed the main difference between supervised training and self-supervised training on FSL and obtained the bound for the gap between self-supervised loss and supervised loss. Finally, we proposed potential ways to improve the test accuracy under the setting of self-supervised FSL.
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Bayesian Learning to Optimize: Quantifying the Optimizer Uncertainty
Optimizer Uncertainty Optimization Uncertainty Quantification
Optimizing an objective function with uncertainty awareness is well-known to improve the accuracy and confidence of optimization solutions. Meanwhile, another relevant but very different question remains yet open: how to model and quantify the uncertainty of an optimization algorithm itself? To close such a gap, the prerequisite is to consider the optimizers as sampled from a distribution, rather than a few pre-defined and fixed update rules. We first take the novel angle to consider the algorithmic space of optimizers, each being parameterized by a neural network. We then propose a Boltzmann-shaped posterior over this optimizer space, and approximate the posterior locally as Gaussian distributions through variational inference. Our novel model, Bayesian learning to optimize (BL2O) is the first study to recognize and quantify the uncertainty of the optimization algorithm. Our experiments on optimizing test functions, energy functions in protein-protein interactions and loss functions in image classification and data privacy attack demonstrate that, compared to state-of-the-art methods, BL2O improves optimization and uncertainty quantification (UQ) in aforementioned problems as well as calibration and out-of-domain detection in image classification.
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Representational aspects of depth and conditioning in normalizing flows
normalizing flows representational power conditioning depth theory
Normalizing flows are among the most popular paradigms in generative modeling, especially for images, primarily because we can efficiently evaluate the likelihood of a data point. This is desirable both for evaluating the fit of a model, and for ease of training, as maximizing the likelihood can be done by gradient descent. However, training normalizing flows comes with difficulties as well: models which produce good samples typically need to be extremely deep -- which comes with accompanying vanishing/exploding gradient problems. A very related problem is that they are often poorly \emph{conditioned}: since they are parametrized as invertible maps from $\mathbb{R}^d \to \mathbb{R}^d$, and typical training data like images intuitively is lower-dimensional, the learned maps often have Jacobians that are close to being singular.
In our paper, we tackle representational aspects around depth and conditioning of normalizing flows---both for general invertible architectures, and for a particular common architecture---affine couplings.
For general invertible architectures, we prove that invertibility comes at a cost in terms of depth: we show examples where a much deeper normalizing flow model may need to be used to match the performance of a non-invertible generator.
For affine couplings, we first show that the choice of partitions isn't a likely bottleneck for depth: we show that any invertible linear map (and hence a permutation) can be simulated by a constant number of affine coupling layers, using a fixed partition. This shows that the extra flexibility conferred by 1x1 convolution layers, as in GLOW, can in principle be simulated by increasing the size by a constant factor. Next, in terms of conditioning, we show that affine couplings are universal approximators -- provided the Jacobian of the model is allowed to be close to singular. We furthermore empirically explore the benefit of different kinds of padding -- a common strategy for improving conditioning.
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MISSO: Minimization by Incremental Stochastic Surrogate Optimization for Large Scale Nonconvex and Nonsmooth Problems
nonconvex optimization stochastic sampling MCMC majorization-minimization
Many constrained, nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems can be tackled using the majorization-minimization (MM) method which alternates between constructing a surrogate function which upper bounds the objective function, and then minimizing this surrogate. For problems which minimize a finite sum of functions, a stochastic version of the MM method selects a batch of functions at random at each iteration and optimizes the accumulated surrogate.
However, in many cases of interest such as variational inference for latent variable models, the surrogate functions are expressed as an expectation. In this contribution, we propose a doubly stochastic MM method based on Monte Carlo approximation of these stochastic surrogates.
We establish asymptotic and non-asymptotic convergence of our scheme in a constrained, nonconvex, nonsmooth optimization setting. We apply our new framework for inference of logistic regression model with missing data and for variational inference of Bayesian variants of LeNet-5 and Resnet-18 on respectively the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets.
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HyperDynamics: Meta-Learning Object and Agent Dynamics with Hypernetworks
hyperdynamics object agent dynamics dynamics agent interactions environment visual observations dynamical system hypernetworks hyperdynamics
We propose HyperDynamics, a dynamics meta-learning framework that conditions on an agent’s interactions with the environment and optionally its visual observations, and generates the parameters of neural dynamics models based on inferred properties of the dynamical system. Physical and visual properties of the environment that are not part of the low-dimensional state yet affect its temporal dynamics are inferred from the interaction history and visual observations, and are implicitly captured in the generated parameters. We test HyperDynamics on a set of object pushing and locomotion tasks. It outperforms existing dynamics models in the literature that adapt to environment variations by learning dynamics over high dimensional visual observations, capturing the interactions of the agent in recurrent state representations, or using gradient-based meta-optimization. We also show our method matches the performance of an ensemble of separately trained experts, while also being able to generalize well to unseen environment variations at test time. We attribute its good performance to the multiplicative interactions between the inferred system properties—captured in the generated parameters—and the low-dimensional state representation of the dynamical system.
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PriorityCut: Occlusion-aware Regularization for Image Animation
image animation occlusion inpainting gan augmentation regularization
Image animation generates a video of a source image following the motion of a driving video. Self-supervised image animation approaches do not require explicit pose references as inputs, thus offering large flexibility in learning. State-of-the-art self-supervised image animation approaches mostly warp the source image according to the motion of the driving video, and recover the warping artifacts by inpainting. When the source and the driving images have large pose differences, heavy inpainting is necessary. Without guidance, heavily inpainted regions usually suffer from loss of details. While previous data augmentation techniques such as CutMix are effective in regularizing non-warp-based image generation, directly applying them to image animation ignores the difficulty of inpainting on the warped image. We propose PriorityCut, a novel augmentation approach that uses the top-$k$ percent occluded pixels of the foreground to regularize image animation. By taking into account the difficulty of inpainting, PriorityCut preserves better identity than vanilla CutMix and outperforms state-of-the-art image animation models in terms of the pixel-wise difference, low-level similarity, keypoint distance, and feature embedding distance.
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VideoGen: Generative Modeling of Videos using VQ-VAE and Transformers
video generation vqvae transformers gpt
We present VideoGen: a conceptually simple architecture for scaling likelihood based generative modeling to natural videos. VideoGen uses VQ-VAE that learns learns downsampled discrete latent representations of a video by employing 3D convolutions and axial self-attention. A simple GPT-like architecture is then used to autoregressively model the discrete latents using spatio-temporal position encodings. Despite the simplicity in formulation, ease of training and a light compute requirement, our architecture is able to generate samples competitive with state-of-the-art GAN models for video generation on the BAIR Robot dataset, and generate coherent action-conditioned samples based on experiences gathered from the VizDoom simulator. We hope our proposed architecture serves as a reproducible reference for a minimalistic implementation of transformer based video generation models without requiring industry scale compute resources. Samples are available at https://sites.google.com/view/videogen
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Neural ODE Processes
differential equations neural processes dynamics deep learning neural ode
Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) use a neural network to model the instantaneous rate of change in the state of a system. However, despite their apparent suitability for dynamics-governed time-series, NODEs present a few disadvantages. First, they are unable to adapt to incoming data-points, a fundamental requirement for real-time applications imposed by the natural direction of time. Second, time-series are often composed of a sparse set of measurements that could be explained by many possible underlying dynamics. NODEs do not capture this uncertainty. In contrast, Neural Processes (NPs) are a new class of stochastic processes providing uncertainty estimation and fast data-adaptation, but lack an explicit treatment of the flow of time. To address these problems, we introduce Neural ODE Processes (NDPs), a new class of stochastic processes determined by a distribution over Neural ODEs. By maintaining an adaptive data-dependent distribution over the underlying ODE, we show that our model can successfully capture the dynamics of low-dimensional systems from just a few data-points. At the same time, we demonstrate that NDPs scale up to challenging high-dimensional time-series with unknown latent dynamics such as rotating MNIST digits.
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Conditional Networks
Conditional Computation Generalization
In this work we tackle the problem of out-of-distribution generalization through conditional computation. Real-world applications often exhibit a larger distributional shift between training and test data than most datasets used in research. On the other hand, training data in such applications often comes with additional annotation. We propose a method for leveraging this extra information by using an auxiliary network that modulates activations of the main network. We show that this approach improves performance over a strong baseline on the Inria Aerial Image Labeling and the Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes (TIL) Datasets, which by design evaluate out-of-distribution generalization in both semantic segmentation and image classification.
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HeteroFL: Computation and Communication Efficient Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Clients
Federated Learning Internet of Things Heterogeneity
Federated Learning (FL) is a method of training machine learning models on private data distributed over a large number of possibly heterogeneous clients such as mobile phones and IoT devices. In this work, we propose a new federated learning framework named HeteroFL to address heterogeneous clients equipped with very different computation and communication capabilities. Our solution can enable the training of heterogeneous local models with varying computation complexities and still produce a single global inference model. For the first time, our method challenges the underlying assumption of existing work that local models have to share the same architecture as the global model. We demonstrate several strategies to enhance FL training and conduct extensive empirical evaluations, including five computation complexity levels of three model architecture on three datasets. We show that adaptively distributing subnetworks according to clients' capabilities is both computation and communication efficient.
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Sample-Efficient Automated Deep Reinforcement Learning
AutoRL Deep Reinforcement Learning Hyperparameter Optimization Neuroevolution
Despite significant progress in challenging problems across various domains, applying state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms remains challenging due to their sensitivity to the choice of hyperparameters. This sensitivity can partly be attributed to the non-stationarity of the RL problem, potentially requiring different hyperparameter settings at various stages of the learning process. Additionally, in the RL setting, hyperparameter optimization (HPO) requires a large number of environment interactions, hindering the transfer of the successes in RL to real-world applications. In this work, we tackle the issues of sample-efficient and dynamic HPO in RL. We propose a population-based automated RL (AutoRL) framework to meta-optimize arbitrary off-policy RL algorithms. In this framework, we optimize the hyperparameters and also the neural architecture while simultaneously training the agent. By sharing the collected experience across the population, we substantially increase the sample efficiency of the meta-optimization. We demonstrate the capabilities of our sample-efficient AutoRL approach in a case study with the popular TD3 algorithm in the MuJoCo benchmark suite, where we reduce the number of environment interactions needed for meta-optimization by up to an order of magnitude compared to population-based training.
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Causal Policy Ranking
reinforcement learning causal reasoning counterfactual reasoning causal effects
Policies trained via reinforcement learning (RL) are often very complex even for simple tasks. In an episode with n time steps, a policy will make n decisions on actions to take, many of which may appear non-intuitive to the observer. Moreover, it is not clear which of these decisions directly contribute towards achieving the reward and how significant is their contribution. Given a trained policy, we propose a black-box method based on counterfactual reasoning that estimates the causal effect that these decisions have on reward attainment and ranks the decisions according to this estimate. In this preliminary work, we compare our measure against an alternative, non-causal, ranking procedure, highlight the benefits of causality-based policy ranking, and discuss potential future work integrating causal algorithms into the interpretation of RL agent policies.
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Physics-constrained DeepONet for Surrogate CFD models: a curved backward-facing step case
Neural operators DeepONet Navier-Stokes equations Surrogate model Backward-Facing step
The Physics-Constrained DeepONet (PC-DeepONet), an architecture that incorporates fundamental physics knowledge into the data-driven DeepONet model, is presented in this study. This methodology is exemplified through surrogate modeling of fluid dynamics over a curved backward-facing step, a benchmark problem in computational fluid dynamics. The model was trained on computational fluid dynamics data generated for a range of parameterized geometries. The PC-DeepONet was able to learn the mapping from the parameters describing the geometry to the velocity and pressure fields. While the DeepONet is solely data-driven, the PC-DeepONet imposes the divergence constraint from the continuity equation onto the network. The PC-DeepONet demonstrates higher accuracy than the data-driven baseline, especially when trained on sparse data. Both models attain convergence with a small dataset of 50 samples and require only 50 iterations for convergence, highlighting the efficiency of neural operators in learning the dynamics governed by partial differential equations.
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The Quenching-Activation Behavior of the Gradient Descent Dynamics for Two-layer Neural Network Models
Gradient descent neural networks implicit regularization quenching-activation
A numerical and phenomenological study of the gradient descent (GD) algorithm for training two-layer neural network models is carried out for different parameter regimes. It is found that there are two distinctive phases in the GD dynamics in the under-parameterized regime: An early phase in which the GD dynamics follows closely that of the corresponding random feature model, followed by a late phase in which the neurons are divided into two groups: a group of a few (maybe none) “activated” neurons that dominate the dynamics and a group of ``quenched” neurons that support the continued activation and deactivation process. In particular, when the target function can be accurately approximated by a relatively small number of neurons, this quenching-activation process biases GD to picking sparse solutions. This neural network-like behavior is continued into the mildly over-parameterized regime, in which it undergoes a transition to a random feature-like behavior where the inner-layer parameters are effectively frozen during the training process. The quenching process seems to provide a clear mechanism for ``implicit regularization''. This is qualitatively different from the GD dynamics associated with the ``mean-field'' scaling where all neurons participate equally.
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ONLY SPARSITY BASED LOSS FUNCTION FOR LEARNING REPRESENTATIONS
Sparsity Unsupervised Learning Single Layer Models
We study the emergence of sparse representations in neural networks. We show that in unsupervised
models with regularization, the emergence of sparsity is the result of the input data samples being
distributed along highly non-linear or discontinuous manifold. We also derive a similar argument
for discriminatively trained networks and present experiments to support this hypothesis. Based
on our study of sparsity, we introduce a new loss function which can be used as regularization
term for models like autoencoders and MLPs. Further, the same loss function can also be used
as a cost function for an unsupervised single-layered neural network model for learning efficient
representations.
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Emergent Road Rules In Multi-Agent Driving Environments
road rules autonomous vehicles human drivers environments emergence agents emergent road rules driving environments share
For autonomous vehicles to safely share the road with human drivers, autonomous vehicles must abide by specific "road rules" that human drivers have agreed to follow. "Road rules" include rules that drivers are required to follow by law – such as the requirement that vehicles stop at red lights – as well as more subtle social rules – such as the implicit designation of fast lanes on the highway. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that suggests that – instead of hard-coding road rules into self-driving algorithms – a scalable alternative may be to design multi-agent environments in which road rules emerge as optimal solutions to the problem of maximizing traffic flow. We analyze what ingredients in driving environments cause the emergence of these road rules and find that two crucial factors are noisy perception and agents’ spatial density. We provide qualitative and quantitative evidence of the emergence of seven social driving behaviors, ranging from obeying traffic signals to following lanes, all of which emerge from training agents to drive quickly to destinations without colliding. Our results add empirical support for the social road rules that countries worldwide have agreed on for safe, efficient driving.
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Learning to Share in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
agents marl global objective neighbors share reinforcement learning network ltos share reward policy
In this paper, we study the problem of networked multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where a number of agents are deployed as a partially connected network. Networked MARL requires all agents make decision in a decentralized manner to optimize a global objective with restricted communication between neighbors over the network. We propose a hierarchically decentralized MARL method, \textit{LToS}, which enables agents to learn to dynamically share reward with neighbors so as to encourage agents to cooperate on the global objective. For each agent, the high-level policy learns how to share reward with neighbors to decompose the global objective, while the low-level policy learns to optimize local objective induced by the high-level policies in the neighborhood. The two policies form a bi-level optimization and learn alternately. We empirically demonstrate that LToS outperforms existing methods in both social dilemma and two networked MARL scenarios.
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Efficient Estimators for Heavy-Tailed Machine Learning
distributions efficient estimators machine tasks dramatic improvement data collection technologies massive amounts unstructured heterogeneous datasets prevalence
A dramatic improvement in data collection technologies has aided in procuring massive amounts of unstructured and heterogeneous datasets. This has consequently led to a prevalence of heavy-tailed distributions across a broad range of tasks in machine learning. In this work, we perform thorough empirical studies to show that modern machine learning models such as generative adversarial networks and invertible flow models are plagued with such ill-behaved distributions during the phase of training them. To alleviate this problem, we develop a computationally-efficient estimator for mean estimation with provable guarantees which can handle such ill-behaved distributions. We provide specific consequences of our theory for supervised learning tasks such as linear regression and generalized linear models. Furthermore, we study the performance of our algorithm on synthetic tasks and real-world experiments and show that our methods convincingly outperform a variety of practical baselines.
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Steering Fine-Tuning Generalization with Targeted Concept Ablation
Interpretability Mechanistic Interpretability Fine-Tuning Artificial Intelligence AI Sparse Autoencoders Machine Learning
Models often learn unintended behaviors during fine-tuning, such as adopting spurious correlations present in training data. We present a novel technique for controlling what models learn during fine-tuning by identifying and ablating specific sparse autoencoder latents that represent undesired concepts. Our approach steers models toward intended generalizations even in cases where multiple policies correctly fit the training data. We evaluate our method on two tasks, significantly outperforming baselines: a gender bias task containing spurious correlations and a double multiple choice task where models must learn to focus on intended questions while ignoring others. On gender bias, our method completely eliminates spurious correlations, leading to strong performance out of distribution. In double multiple choice, it succeeds in 10 out of 16 scenarios. Our results mark an initial step toward using interpretability techniques to ensure the safe and reliable deployment of frontier AI systems.
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Quantifying and Learning Disentangled Representations with Limited Supervision
Representation Learning Disentanglement Group Theory
Learning low-dimensional representations that disentangle the underlying factors of variation in data has been posited as an important step towards interpretable machine learning with good generalization. To address the fact that there is no consensus on what disentanglement entails, Higgins et al. (2018) propose a formal definition for Linear Symmetry-Based Disentanglement, or LSBD, arguing that underlying real-world transformations give exploitable structure to data.
Although several works focus on learning LSBD representations, such methods require supervision on the underlying transformations for the entire dataset, and cannot deal with unlabeled data. Moreover, none of these works provide a metric to quantify LSBD.
We propose a metric to quantify LSBD representations that is easy to compute under certain well-defined assumptions. Furthermore, we present a method that can leverage unlabeled data, such that LSBD representations can be learned with limited supervision on transformations. Using our LSBD metric, our results show that limited supervision is indeed sufficient to learn LSBD representations.
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AlignFlow: Cycle Consistent Learning from Multiple Domains via Normalizing Flows
alignflow domains translation cycle consistent multiple domains unpaired framework flows normalizing goal
The goal of unpaired cross-domain translation is to learn useful mappings between two domains, given unpaired sets of datapoints from these domains. While this formulation is highly underconstrained, recent work has shown that it is possible to learn mappings useful for downstream tasks by encouraging approximate cycle consistency in the mappings between the two domains [Zhu et al., 2017]. In this work, we propose AlignFlow, a framework for unpaired cross-domain translation that ensures exact cycle consistency in the learned mappings. Our framework uses a normalizing flow model to specify a single invertible mapping between the two domains. In contrast to prior works in cycle-consistent translations, we can learn AlignFlow via adversarial training, maximum likelihood estimation, or a hybrid of the two methods. Theoretically, we derive consistency results for AlignFlow which guarantee recovery of desirable mappings under suitable assumptions. Empirically, AlignFlow demonstrates significant improvements over relevant baselines on image-to-image translation and unsupervised domain adaptation tasks on benchmark datasets.
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Log representation as an interface for log processing applications
Vector embedding Logs Search Causal Analysis Anomaly Detection
Log files are files that record events, messages, or transactions. Logs are rich containers of data because they can store a sequence of structured textual and numerical data. Many sequential forms of data including natural languages and temporal signals can be represented as logs.
We propose to represent logs at a few levels of abstraction including field level, log level, and log sequence level. The representation for each level can be computed from the previous level. These representations are in vector format and serve as interfaces to downstream applications. We use a version of transformer networks to encode numerical information as well as textual information that is suitable for log embedding. We show how a number of log processing applications can be readily solved with our representation.
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Symmetry Control Neural Networks
Inductive (symmetry) Bias Predictive Models Hamiltonian Dynamics Physics
This paper continues the quest for designing the optimal physics bias for neural networks predicting the dynamics of systems when the underlying dynamics shall be inferred from the data directly. The description of physical systems is greatly simplified when the underlying symmetries of the system are taken into account. In classical systems described via Hamiltonian dynamics this is achieved by using appropriate coordinates, so-called cyclic coordinates, which reveal conserved quantities directly. Without changing the Hamiltonian, these coordinates can be obtained via canonical transformations. We show that such coordinates can be searched for automatically with appropriate loss functions which naturally arise from Hamiltonian dynamics. As a proof of principle, we test our method on standard classical physics systems using synthetic and experimental data where our network identifies the conserved quantities in an unsupervised way and find improved performance on predicting the dynamics of the system compared to networks biasing just to the Hamiltonian. Effectively, these new coordinates guarantee that motion takes place on symmetry orbits in phase space, i.e.~appropriate lower dimensional sub-spaces of phase space. By fitting analytic formulae we recover that our networks are utilising conserved quantities such as (angular) momentum.
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Dual-Tree Wavelet Packet CNNs for Image Classification
convolutional neural networks wavelet packet transform dual-tree wavelet packet transform image classification deep learning image processing
In this paper, we target an important issue of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) — the lack of a mathematical understanding of their properties. We present an explicit formalism that is motivated by the similarities between trained CNN kernels and oriented Gabor filters for addressing this problem. The core idea is to constrain the behavior of convolutional layers by splitting them into a succession of wavelet packet decompositions, which are modulated by freely-trained mixture weights. We evaluate our approach with three variants of wavelet decompositions with the AlexNet architecture for image classification as an example. The first variant relies on the separable wavelet packet transform while the other two implement the 2D dual-tree real and complex wavelet packet transforms, taking advantage of their feature extraction properties such as directional selectivity and shift invariance. Our experiments show that we achieve the accuracy rate of standard AlexNet, but with a significantly lower number of parameters, and an interpretation of the network that is grounded in mathematical theory.
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CompOFA – Compound Once-For-All Networks for Faster Multi-Platform Deployment
Efficient Deep Learning Latency-aware Neural Architecture Search AutoML
The emergence of CNNs in mainstream deployment has necessitated methods to design and train efficient architectures tailored to maximize the accuracy under diverse hardware and latency constraints. To scale these resource-intensive tasks with an increasing number of deployment targets, Once-For-All (OFA) proposed an approach to jointly train several models at once with a constant training cost. However, this cost remains as high as 40-50 GPU days and also suffers from a combinatorial explosion of sub-optimal model configurations. We seek to reduce this search space -- and hence the training budget -- by constraining search to models close to the accuracy-latency Pareto frontier. We incorporate insights of compound relationships between model dimensions to build CompOFA, a design space smaller by several orders of magnitude. Through experiments on ImageNet, we demonstrate that even with simple heuristics we can achieve a 2x reduction in training time and 216x speedup in model search/extraction time compared to the state of the art, without loss of Pareto optimality! We also show that this smaller design space is dense enough to support equally accurate models for a similar diversity of hardware and latency targets, while also reducing the complexity of the training and subsequent extraction algorithms. Our source code is available at https://github.com/gatech-sysml/CompOFA
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Continuous Wasserstein-2 Barycenter Estimation without Minimax Optimization
wasserstein-2 barycenters non-minimax optimization cycle-consistency regularizer input convex neural networks continuous case
Wasserstein barycenters provide a geometric notion of the weighted average of probability measures based on optimal transport. In this paper, we present a scalable algorithm to compute Wasserstein-2 barycenters given sample access to the input measures, which are not restricted to being discrete. While past approaches rely on entropic or quadratic regularization, we employ input convex neural networks and cycle-consistency regularization to avoid introducing bias. As a result, our approach does not resort to minimax optimization. We provide theoretical analysis on error bounds as well as empirical evidence of the effectiveness of the proposed approach in low-dimensional qualitative scenarios and high-dimensional quantitative experiments.
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Minimum Description Length Recurrent Neural Networks
recurrent neural network neural network language modeling minimum description length genetic algorithm semantics syntax
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) face two well-known challenges: (a) the difficulty of such networks to generalize appropriately as opposed to memorizing, especially from very short input sequences (generalization); and (b) the difficulty for us to understand the knowledge that the network has attained (transparency). We explore the implications to these challenges of employing a general search through neural architectures using a genetic algorithm with Minimum Description Length (MDL) as an objective function. We find that MDL leads the networks to reach adequate levels of generalization from very small corpora, improving over backpropagation-based alternatives. We demonstrate this approach by evolving networks which perform tasks of increasing complexity with absolute correctness. The resulting networks are small, easily interpretable, and unlike classical RNNs, are provably appropriate for sequences of arbitrary length even when trained on very limited corpora. One case study is addition, for which our system grows a network with just four cells, reaching 100% accuracy (and at least .999 certainty) for arbitrary large numbers.
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Biomedical Named Entity Recognition via Reference-Set Augmented Bootstrapping
Name Entity Recognition Bootstrapping Neural Networks Reference Set Biomedicine
We present a weakly-supervised data augmentation approach to improve Named Entity Recognition (NER) in a challenging domain: extracting biomedical entities (e.g., proteins) from the scientific literature. First, we train a neural NER (NNER) model over a small seed of fully-labeled examples. Second, we use a reference set of entity names (e.g., proteins in UniProt) to identify entity mentions with high precision, but low recall, on an unlabeled corpus. Third, we use the NNER model to assign weak labels to the corpus. Finally, we retrain our NNER model iteratively over the augmented training set, including the seed, the reference-set examples, and the weakly-labeled examples, which results in refined labels. We show empirically that this augmented bootstrapping process significantly improves NER performance, and discuss the factors impacting the efficacy of the approach.
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Overcoming barriers to the training of effective learned optimizers
learned optimizers meta-learning
In this work we focus on general-purpose learned optimizers capable of training a wide variety of problems with no user-specified hyperparameters. We introduce a new, neural network parameterized, hierarchical optimizer with access to additional features such as validation loss to enable automatic regularization. Most learned optimizers have been trained on only a single task, or a small number of tasks. We train our optimizers on thousands of tasks, making use of orders of magnitude more compute, resulting in optimizers that generalize better to unseen tasks. The learned optimizers not only perform well, but learn behaviors that are distinct from existing first order optimizers. For instance, they generate update steps that have implicit regularization and adapt as the problem hyperparameters (e.g. batch size) or architecture (e.g. neural network width) change. Finally, these learned optimizers show evidence of being useful for out of distribution tasks such as training themselves from scratch.
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Implicit Acceleration of Gradient Flow in Overparameterized Linear Models
gradient flow implicit acceleration difference overparameterized linear models linear models conservation law dynamics certain trajectories input
We study the implicit acceleration of gradient flow in over-parameterized two-layer linear models. We show that implicit acceleration emerges from a conservation law that constrains the dynamics to follow certain trajectories. More precisely, gradient flow preserves the difference of the Gramian~matrices of the input and output weights and we show that the amount of acceleration depends on both the magnitude of that difference (which is fixed at initialization) and the spectrum of the data. In addition, and generalizing prior work, we prove our results without assuming small, balanced or spectral initialization for the weights, and establish interesting connections between the matrix factorization problem and Riccati type differential equations.
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Does injecting linguistic structure into language models lead to better alignment with brain recordings?
neurolinguistics natural language processing computational neuroscience
Neuroscientists evaluate deep neural networks for natural language processing as possible candidate models for how language is processed in the brain. These models are often trained without explicit linguistic supervision, but have been shown to learn some linguistic structure in the absence of such supervision (Manning et. al, 2020), potentially questioning the relevance of symbolic linguistic theories in modeling such cognitive processes (Warstadt & Bowman, 2020). We evaluate across two fMRI datasets whether language models align better with brain recordings, if their attention is biased by annotations from syntactic or semantic formalisms. Using structure from dependency or minimal recursion semantic annotations, we find alignments improve significantly for one of the datasets. For another dataset, we see more mixed results. We present an extensive analysis of these results. Our proposed approach enables the evaluation of more targeted hypotheses about the composition of meaning in the brain, expanding the range of possible scientific inferences a neuroscientist could make, and opens up new opportunities for cross-pollination between computational neuroscience and linguistics.
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Comparison of Paragram and GloVe Results for Similarity Benchmarks
language models vector spaces word embedding similarity
Distributional Semantics Models(DSM) derive word space from linguistic items
in context. Meaning is obtained by defining a distance measure between vectors
corresponding to lexical entities. Such vectors present several problems. This
work concentrates on quality of word embeddings, improvement of word embedding
vectors, applicability of a novel similarity metric used ‘on top’ of the
word embeddings. In this paper we provide comparison between two methods
for post process improvements to the baseline DSM vectors. The counter-fitting
method which enforces antonymy and synonymy constraints into the Paragram
vector space representations recently showed improvement in the vectors’ capability
for judging semantic similarity. The second method is our novel RESM
method applied to GloVe baseline vectors. By applying the hubness reduction
method, implementing relational knowledge into the model by retrofitting synonyms
and providing a new ranking similarity definition RESM that gives maximum
weight to the top vector component values we equal the results for the ESL
and TOEFL sets in comparison with our calculations using the Paragram and Paragram
+ Counter-fitting methods. For SIMLEX-999 gold standard since we cannot
use the RESM the results using GloVe and PPDB are significantly worse compared
to Paragram. Apparently, counter-fitting corrects hubness. The Paragram
or our cosine retrofitting method are state-of-the-art results for the SIMLEX-999
gold standard. They are 0.2 better for SIMLEX-999 than word2vec with sense
de-conflation (that was announced to be state-of the-art method for less reliable
gold standards). Apparently relational knowledge and counter-fitting is more important
for judging semantic similarity than sense determination for words. It is to
be mentioned, though that Paragram hyperparameters are fitted to SIMLEX-999
results. The lesson is that many corrections to word embeddings are necessary
and methods with more parameters and hyperparameters perform better.
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Variational Structured Attention Networks for Dense Pixel-Wise Prediction
attention network pixel-wise prediction
State-of-the-art performances in dense pixel-wise prediction tasks are obtained with specifically designed convolutional networks. These models often benefit from attention mechanisms that allow better learning of deep representations. Recent works showed the importance of estimating both spatial- and channel-wise attention tensors. In this paper, we propose a unified approach to jointly estimate spatial attention maps and channel attention vectors so as to structure the resulting attention tensor. Moreover, we integrate the estimation of the attention within a probabilistic framework, leading to VarIational STructured Attention networks(VISTA). We implement the inference rules within the neural network, thus allowing for joint learning of the probabilistic and the CNN front-end parameters. Importantly, as demonstrated by our extensive empirical evaluation on six large-scale datasets VISTA outperforms the state-of-the-art in multiple continuous and discrete pixel-level prediction tasks, thus confirming the benefit of structuring the attention tensor and of inferring it within a probabilistic formulation.
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MFC-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal Fact-Checking with Large Vision-Language Models
benchmarking evaluation cross-modal application multimodality trustworthy
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have significantly improved multimodal reasoning tasks, such as visual question answering and image captioning. These models embed multimodal facts within their parameters, rather than relying on external knowledge bases to store factual information explicitly. However, the content discerned by LVLMs may deviate from factuality due to inherent bias or incorrect inference. In this work, we introduce MFC-Bench, a rigorous and comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the factual accuracy of LVLMs across three stages of verdict prediction for multimodal fact-checking (MFC): Manipulation, Out-of-Context, and Veracity Classification. Through our evaluation on MFC-Bench, we benchmarked a dozen diverse and representative LVLMs, uncovering that current models still fall short in MFC and demonstrate insensitivity to various forms of manipulated content. We hope that MFC-Bench could raise attention to the trustworthy AI potentially assisted by LVLMs in the future.
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DuoRC: Towards Complex Language Understanding with Paraphrased Reading Comprehension
reading comprehension question answering
We propose DuoRC, a novel dataset for Reading Comprehension (RC) that motivates several new challenges for neural approaches in language understanding beyond those offered by existing RC datasets. DuoRC contains 186,089 unique question-answer pairs created from a collection of 7680 pairs of movie plots where each pair in the collection reflects two versions of the same movie - one from Wikipedia and the other from IMDb - written by two different authors. We asked crowdsourced workers to create questions from one version of the plot and a different set of workers to extract or synthesize corresponding answers from the other version. This unique characteristic of DuoRC where questions and answers are created from different versions of a document narrating the same underlying story, ensures by design, that there is very little lexical overlap between the questions created from one version and the segments containing the answer in the other version. Further, since the two versions have different level of plot detail, narration style, vocabulary, etc., answering questions from the second version requires deeper language understanding and incorporating background knowledge not available in the given text. Additionally, the narrative style of passages arising from movie plots (as opposed to typical descriptive passages in existing datasets) exhibits the need to perform complex reasoning over events across multiple sentences. Indeed, we observe that state-of-the-art neural RC models which have achieved near human performance on the SQuAD dataset, even when coupled with traditional NLP techniques to address the challenges presented in DuoRC exhibit very poor performance (F1 score of 37.42% on DuoRC v/s 86% on SQuAD dataset). This opens up several interesting research avenues wherein DuoRC could complement other Reading Comprehension style datasets to explore novel neural approaches for studying language understanding.
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MMVAE+: Enhancing the Generative Quality of Multimodal VAEs without Compromises
multimodal learning variational autoencoder deep generative models
Multimodal VAEs have recently gained attention as efficient models for weakly-supervised generative learning with a large number of modalities. However, all existing variants of multimodal VAEs are affected by a non-trivial trade-off between generative quality and generative coherence. We focus on the mixture-of-experts multimodal VAE (MMVAE), which achieves good coherence only at the expense of sample diversity and a resulting lack of generative quality. We present a novel variant of the MMVAE that improves its generative quality, while maintaining high semantic coherence. For this, shared and modality-specific information is modelled in separate latent subspaces. In contrast to previous approaches with separate subspaces, our model is robust to changes in latent dimensionality and regularization hyperparameters. We show that our model achieves both good generative coherence and high generative quality in challenging experiments, including more complex multimodal datasets than those used in previous works.
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Flow Neural Network for Traffic Flow Modelling in IP Networks
Flow neural network contrastive induction learning representation learning spatio-temporal induction
This paper presents and investigates a novel and timely application domain for deep learning: sub-second traffic flow modelling in IP networks. Traffic flows are the most fundamental components in an IP based networking system. The accurate modelling of the generative patterns of these flows is crucial for many practical network applications. However, the high nonlinearity and dynamics of both the traffic and network conditions make this task challenging, particularly at the time granularity of sub-second. In this paper, we cast this problem as a representation learning task to model the intricate patterns in data traffic according to the IP network structure and working mechanism. Accordingly, we propose a customized Flow Neural Network, which works in a self-supervised way to extract the domain-specific data correlations. We report the state-of-the-art performances on both synthetic and realistic traffic patterns on multiple practical network applications, which provides a good testament to the strength of our approach.
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Predicting Floor-Level for 911 Calls with Neural Networks and Smartphone Sensor Data
Recurrent Neural Networks RNN LSTM Mobile Device Sensors
In cities with tall buildings, emergency responders need an accurate floor level location to find 911 callers quickly. We introduce a system to estimate a victim's floor level via their mobile device's sensor data in a two-step process. First, we train a neural network to determine when a smartphone enters or exits a building via GPS signal changes. Second, we use a barometer equipped smartphone to measure the change in barometric pressure from the entrance of the building to the victim's indoor location. Unlike impractical previous approaches, our system is the first that does not require the use of beacons, prior knowledge of the building infrastructure, or knowledge of user behavior. We demonstrate real-world feasibility through 63 experiments across five different tall buildings throughout New York City where our system predicted the correct floor level with 100% accuracy.
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An Open Review of OpenReview: A Critical Analysis of the Machine Learning Conference Review Process
Conference Review OpenReview Gender Bias Reproducibility Fairness
Mainstream machine learning conferences have seen a dramatic increase in the number of participants, along with a growing range of perspectives, in recent years. Members of the machine learning community are likely to overhear allegations ranging from randomness of acceptance decisions to institutional bias. In this work, we critically analyze the review process through a comprehensive study of papers submitted to ICLR between 2017 and 2020. We quantify reproducibility/randomness in review scores and acceptance decisions, and examine whether scores correlate with paper impact. Our findings suggest strong institutional bias in accept/reject decisions, even after controlling for paper quality. Furthermore, we find evidence for a gender gap, with female authors receiving lower scores, lower acceptance rates, and fewer citations per paper than their male counterparts. We conclude our work with recommendations for future conference organizers.
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Uncertainty in Neural Processes
Neural Processes Meta-learning Variational Inference
We explore the effects of architecture and training objective choice on amortized posterior predictive inference in probabilistic conditional generative models. We aim this work to be a counterpoint to a recent trend in the literature that stresses achieving good samples when the amount of conditioning data is large. We instead focus our attention on the case where the amount of conditioning data is small. We highlight specific architecture and objective choices that we find lead to qualitative and quantitative improvement to posterior inference in this low data regime. Specifically we explore the effects of choices of pooling operator and variational family on posterior quality in neural processes. Superior posterior predictive samples drawn from our novel neural process architectures are demonstrated via image completion/in-painting experiments.
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On training Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Oscillating Problems
physics-informed machine learning PINNs DeepONets oscillating partial differential equations
Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) offer an efficient approach to solving partial differential equations (PDEs). In theory, they can provide the solution to a PDE at an arbitrary point for the computational cost of a single forward pass of a neural network.
However, PINNs often pose challenges during training, necessitating complex hyperparameter tuning, particularly for PDEs with oscillating solutions.
In this paper, we propose a PINN training scheme for PDEs with oscillating solutions. We analyze the impact of sinusoidal activation functions as model prior and incorporate self-adaptive weights into the training process.
Our experiments utilize the double mass-spring-damper system to examine shortcomings in training PINNs.
Our results show that strong model priors, such as sinusoidal activation functions, are immensely beneficial and, combined with self-adaptive training, significantly improve performance and convergence of PINNs.
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Contrasting LMU with LSTM
machine-learning LSTM LMU
Both Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) suffer from disappearing transitions and (vanishing \& exploding) gradient problems. LSTM maintains a long time-range dependency on a sequencing task. However, information flow in the network tends to saturate once the number of time steps exceeds a few thousand. Legendre Memory Unit (LMU) is a revolutionary evolution on the design of RNN that can conveniently handle extremely long-range dependency. Let's try to figure out why the LMU exceeds the performance of the LSTM in this blog.
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Blind Pareto Fairness and Subgroup Robustness
fairness fairness in machine learning fairness without demographics robustness subgroup robustness blind fairness pareto fairness
With the wide adoption of machine learning algorithms across various application domains, there is a growing interest in the fairness properties of such algorithms. The vast majority of the activity in the field of group fairness addresses disparities between predefined groups based on protected features such as gender, age, and race, which need to be available at train, and often also at test, time. These approaches are static and retrospective, since algorithms designed to protect groups identified a priori cannot anticipate and protect the needs of different at-risk groups in the future. In this work we analyze the space of solutions for worst-case fairness beyond demographics, and propose Blind Pareto Fairness (BPF), a method that leverages no-regret dynamics to recover a fair minimax classifier that reduces worst-case risk of any potential subgroup of sufficient size, and guarantees that the remaining population receives the best possible level of service. BPF addresses fairness beyond demographics, that is, it does not rely on predefined notions of at-risk groups, neither at train nor at test time. Our experimental results show that the proposed framework improves worst-case risk in multiple standard datasets, while simultaneously providing better levels of service for the remaining population, in comparison to competing methods.
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Variable-Shot Adaptation for Online Meta-Learning
meta-learning deep learning
Few-shot meta-learning methods consider the problem of learning new tasks from a small, fixed number of examples, by meta-learning across static data from a set of previous tasks. However, in many real world settings, it is more natural to view the problem as one of minimizing the total amount of supervision --- both the number of examples needed to learn a new task and the amount of data needed for meta-learning. Such a formulation can be studied in a sequential learning setting, where tasks are presented in sequence. When studying meta-learning in this online setting, a critical question arises: can meta-learning improve over the sample complexity and regret of standard empirical risk minimization methods, when considering both meta-training and adaptation together? The answer is particularly non-obvious for meta-learning algorithms with complex bi-level optimizations that may demand large amounts of meta-training data. To answer this question, we extend previous meta-learning algorithms to handle the variable-shot settings that naturally arise in sequential learning: from many-shot learning at the start, to zero-shot learning towards the end. On sequential learning problems, we find that meta-learning solves the full task set with fewer overall labels and achieves greater cumulative performance, compared to standard supervised methods. These results suggest that meta-learning is an important ingredient for building learning systems that continuously learn and improve over a sequence of problems.
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