DeepNLP/ICLR-2023-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
DCI-ES: An Extended Disentanglement Framework with Connections to Identifiability
Authors: Cian Eastwood,Andrei Liviu Nicolicioiu,Julius Von Kügelgen,Armin Kekić,Frederik Träuble,Andrea Dittadi,Bernhard Schölkopf

In representation learning, a common approach is to seek representations which disentangle the underlying factors of variation. Eastwood & Williams (2018) proposed three metrics for quantifying the quality of such disentangled representations: disentanglement (D), completeness (C) and informativeness (I). In this work, we first connect this DCI framework to two common notions of linear and nonlinear identifiability, thereby establishing a formal link between disentanglement and the closely-related field of independent component analysis. We then propose an extended DCI-ES framework with two new measures of representation quality—explicitness (E) and size (S)—and point out how D and C can be computed for black-box predictors. Our main idea is that the functional capacity required to use a representation is an important but thus-far neglected aspect of representation quality, which we quantify using explicitness or ease-of-use (E). We illustrate the relevance of our extensions on the MPI3D and Cars3D datasets.
Faster federated optimization under second-order similarity
Authors: Ahmed Khaled,Chi Jin

Federated learning (FL) is a subfield of machine learning where multiple clients try to collaboratively learn a model over a network under communication constraints. We consider finite-sum federated optimization under a second-order function similarity condition and strong convexity, and propose two new algorithms: SVRP and Catalyzed SVRP. This second-order similarity condition has grown popular recently, and is satisfied in many applications including distributed statistical learning and differentially private empirical risk minimization. The first algorithm, SVRP, combines approximate stochastic proximal point evaluations, client sampling, and variance reduction. We show that SVRP is communication efficient and achieves superior performance to many existing algorithms when function similarity is high enough. Our second algorithm, Catalyzed SVRP, is a Catalyst-accelerated variant of SVRP that achieves even better performance and uniformly improves upon existing algorithms for federated optimization under second-order similarity and strong convexity. In the course of analyzing these algorithms, we provide a new analysis of the Stochastic Proximal Point Method (SPPM) that might be of independent interest. Our analysis of SPPM is simple, allows for approximate proximal point evaluations, does not require any smoothness assumptions, and shows a clear benefit in communication complexity over ordinary distributed stochastic gradient descent.
Mutual Partial Label Learning with Competitive Label Noise
Authors: Yan Yan,Yuhong Guo

Partial label learning (PLL) is an important weakly supervised learning problem, where each training instance is associated with a set of candidate labels that include both the true label and additional noisy labels. Most existing PLL methods assume the candidate noisy labels are randomly chosen, which hardly holds in real-world learning scenarios. In this paper, we consider a more realistic PLL scenario with competitive label noise that is more difficult to distinguish from the true label than the random label noise. We propose a novel Mutual Learning based PLL approach named ML-PLL to address this challenging problem. ML-PLL learns a prediction network based classifier and a class-prototype based classifier cooperatively through interactive mutual learning and label correction. Moreover, we use a transformation network to model the association relationships between the true label and candidate labels, and learn it together with the prediction network to match the observed candidate labels in the training data and enhance label correction. Extensive experiments are conducted on several benchmark PLL datasets, and the proposed ML-PLL approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance for partial label learning.
Partial Label Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Class-Prototype Alignment
Authors: Yan Yan,Yuhong Guo

Partial label learning (PLL) tackles the problem where each instance is associated with a set of candidate labels, only one of which is the ground-truth label. Most existing PLL approaches assume that both the training and test sets share an identical data distribution. However, this assumption does not hold in many real-world scenarios where the training and test data come from different distributions. In this paper, we formalize this learning scenario as a new problem called partial label unsupervised domain adaptation (PLUDA). To address this challenging PLUDA problem, we propose a novel Prototype Alignment based PLUDA method named PAPLUDA, which dynamically refines the pseudo-labels of instances from both the source and target domains by consulting the outputs of a teacher-student model in a moving-average manner, and bridges the cross-domain discrepancy through inter-domain class-prototype alignment. In addition, a teacher-student model based contrastive regularization is deployed to enhance prediction stability and hence improve the class-prototypes in both domains for PLUDA. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that PAPLUDA achieves state-of-the-art performance on the widely used benchmark datasets.
simpleKT: A Simple But Tough-to-Beat Baseline for Knowledge Tracing
Authors: Zitao Liu,Qiongqiong Liu,Jiahao Chen,Shuyan Huang,Weiqi Luo

Knowledge tracing (KT) is the problem of predicting students' future performance based on their historical interactions with intelligent tutoring systems. Recently, many works present lots of special methods for applying deep neural networks to KT from different perspectives like model architecture, adversarial augmentation and etc., which make the overall algorithm and system become more and more complex. Furthermore, due to the lack of standardized evaluation protocol \citep{liu2022pykt}, there is no widely agreed KT baselines and published experimental comparisons become inconsistent and self-contradictory, i.e., the reported AUC scores of DKT on ASSISTments2009 range from 0.721 to 0.821 \citep{minn2018deep,yeung2018addressing}. Therefore, in this paper, we provide a strong but simple baseline method to deal with the KT task named \textsc{simpleKT}. Inspired by the Rasch model in psychometrics, we explicitly model question-specific variations to capture the individual differences among questions covering the same set of knowledge components that are a generalization of terms of concepts or skills needed for learners to accomplish steps in a task or a problem. Furthermore, instead of using sophisticated representations to capture student forgetting behaviors, we use the ordinary dot-product attention function to extract the time-aware information embedded in the student learning interactions. Extensive experiments show that such a simple baseline is able to always rank top 3 in terms of AUC scores and achieve 57 wins, 3 ties and 16 loss against 12 DLKT baseline methods on 7 public datasets of different domains. We believe this work serves as a strong baseline for future KT research. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/pykt-team/pykt-toolkit}\footnote{We merged our model to the \textsc{pyKT} benchmark at \url{https://pykt.org/}.}.
Weighted Ensemble Self-Supervised Learning
Authors: Yangjun Ruan,Saurabh Singh,Warren Richard Morningstar,Alexander A Alemi,Sergey Ioffe,Ian Fischer,Joshua V. Dillon

Ensembling has proven to be a powerful technique for boosting model performance, uncertainty estimation, and robustness in supervised learning. Advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) enable leveraging large unlabeled corpora for state-of-the-art few-shot and supervised learning performance. In this paper, we explore how ensemble methods can improve recent SSL techniques by developing a framework that permits data-dependent weighted cross-entropy losses.  We refrain from ensembling the representation backbone; this choice yields an efficient ensemble method that incurs a small training cost and requires no architectural changes or computational overhead to downstream evaluation. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated with two state-of-the-art SSL methods, DINO (Caron et al., 2021) and MSN (Assran et al., 2022). Our method outperforms both in multiple evaluation metrics on ImageNet-1K, particularly in the few-shot setting. We explore several weighting schemes and find that those which increase the diversity of ensemble heads lead to better downstream evaluation results. Thorough experiments yield improved prior art baselines which our method still surpasses; e.g., our overall improvement with MSN ViT-B/16 is 3.9 p.p. for 1-shot learning.
Guiding Safe Exploration with Weakest Preconditions
Authors: Greg Anderson,Swarat Chaudhuri,Isil Dillig

In reinforcement learning for safety-critical settings, it is often desirable for the agent to obey safety constraints at all points in time, including during training. We present a novel neurosymbolic approach called SPICE to solve this safe exploration problem. SPICE uses an online shielding layer based on symbolic weakest preconditions to achieve a more precise safety analysis than existing tools without unduly impacting the training process. We evaluate the approach on a suite of continuous control benchmarks and show that it can achieve comparable performance to existing safe learning techniques while incurring fewer safety violations. Additionally, we present theoretical results showing that SPICE converges to the optimal safe policy under reasonable assumptions.
Is a Caption Worth a Thousand Images? A Study on Representation Learning
Authors: Shibani Santurkar,Yann Dubois,Rohan Taori,Percy Liang,Tatsunori Hashimoto

The development of CLIP [Radford et al., 2021] has sparked a debate on whether adding language supervision can yield vision models with more transferable representations than traditional image-only methods. Our work studies this question through a carefully controlled comparison of two approaches, in terms of their ability to learn representations that generalize to downstream classification tasks. We find that when the pre-training data meets certain criteria---it is sufficiently large and contains descriptive captions with low variability----image-only methods do not match CLIP's  performance even when they are trained with more image data. However, contrary to what one might expect, there are practical settings in which these criteria are not met, wherein added supervision through captions is actually detrimental.
Motivated by our findings, we devise simple data and algorithmic interventions to improve the transfer performance of CLIP-style models.
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Design Spaces
Authors: Jiaao Chen,Aston Zhang,Xingjian Shi,Mu Li,Alex Smola,Diyi Yang

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning aims to achieve comparable performances of fine-tuning with much fewer trainable parameters. Recently, various tuning strategies (e.g., Adapters, Prefix Tuning, BitFit, and LoRA) have been proposed. However, their designs are hand-crafted separately, and it remains unclear whether certain design patterns exist for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Thus, we present a parameter-efficient fine-tuning design paradigm and discover design patterns that are applicable to different experimental settings. Instead of focusing on designing another individual tuning strategy, we introduce parameter-efficient fine-tuning design spaces that parameterize tuning structures and tuning strategies. Specifically, any design space is characterized by four components: layer grouping, trainable parameter allocation, tunable groups, and strategy assignment. Our comprehensive empirical study leads to the discovery of design patterns: (i) grouping layers in a spindle pattern, (ii) uniformly allocating the number of trainable parameters to layers, (ii) tuning all the groups, and (iv) tuning different groups with proper strategies. Our discovered design patterns result in new parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. Experiments show that these methods consistently outperform investigated parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies across different backbone models and different tasks in natural language processing.
Concept Gradient: Concept-based Interpretation Without Linear Assumption
Authors: Andrew Bai,Chih-Kuan Yeh,Neil Y.C. Lin,Pradeep Kumar Ravikumar,Cho-Jui Hsieh

Concept-based interpretations of black-box models are often more intuitive for humans to understand. The most widely adopted approach for concept-based, gradient interpretation is Concept Activation Vector (CAV). CAV relies on learning a linear relation between some latent representation of a given model and concepts. The premise of meaningful concepts lying in a linear subspace of model layers is usually implicitly assumed but does not hold true in general. In this work we proposed Concept Gradient (CG), which extends concept-based, gradient interpretation methods to non-linear concept functions. We showed that for a general (potentially non-linear) concept, we can mathematically measure how a small change of concept affects the model’s prediction, which is an extension of gradient-based interpretation to the concept space. We demonstrated empirically that CG outperforms CAV in attributing concept importance on real world datasets and performed case study on a medical dataset. The code is available at github.com/jybai/concept-gradients.
Constraining Representations Yields Models That Know What They Don't Know
Authors: Joao Monteiro,Pau Rodriguez,Pierre-Andre Noel,Issam H. Laradji,David Vazquez

A well-known failure mode of neural networks is that they may confidently return erroneous predictions. Such unsafe behaviour is particularly frequent when the use case slightly differs from the training context, and/or in the presence of an adversary. This work presents a novel direction to address these issues in a broad, general manner: imposing class-aware constraints on a model's internal activation patterns. Specifically, we assign to each class a unique, fixed, randomly-generated binary vector - hereafter called class code - and train the model so that its cross-depths activation patterns predict the appropriate class code according to the input sample's class. The resulting predictors are dubbed total activation classifiers (TAC), and TACs may either be trained from scratch, or used with negligible cost as a thin add-on on top of a frozen, pre-trained neural network. The distance between a TAC's activation pattern and the closest valid code acts as an additional confidence score, besides the default unTAC'ed prediction head's. In the add-on case, the original neural network's inference head is completely unaffected (so its accuracy remains the same) but we now have the option to use TAC's own confidence and prediction when determining which course of action to take in an hypothetical production workflow. In particular, we show that TAC strictly improves the value derived from models allowed to reject/defer. We provide further empirical evidence that TAC works well on multiple types of architectures and data modalities and that it is at least as good as state-of-the-art alternative confidence scores derived from existing models.
An Extensible Multi-modal Multi-task Object Dataset with Materials
Authors: Trevor Scott Standley,Ruohan Gao,Dawn Chen,Jiajun Wu,Silvio Savarese

We present EMMa, an Extensible, Multimodal dataset of Amazon product listings that contains rich Material annotations. It contains more than 2.8 million objects, each with image(s), listing text, mass, price, product ratings, and position in Amazon’s product-category taxonomy. We also design a comprehensive taxonomy of 182 physical materials (e.g., Plastic → Thermoplastic → Acrylic). Objects areannotated with one or more materials from this taxonomy. With the numerous attributes available for each object, we develop a Smart Labeling framework to quickly add new binary labels to all objects with very little manual labeling effort, making the dataset extensible. Each object attribute in our dataset can be included in either the model inputs or outputs, leading to combinatorial possibilities in task configurations. For example, we can train a model to predict the object category from the listing text, or the mass and price from the product listing image. EMMa offers a new benchmark for multi-task learning in computer vision and NLP, and allows practitioners to efficiently add new tasks and object attributes at scale.
Sampling with Mollified Interaction Energy Descent
Authors: Lingxiao Li,qiang liu,Anna Korba,Mikhail Yurochkin,Justin Solomon

Sampling from a target measure whose density is only known up to a normalization constant is a fundamental problem in computational statistics and machine learning. In this paper, we present a new optimization-based method for sampling called mollified interaction energy descent (MIED). MIED minimizes a new class of energies on probability measures called mollified interaction energies (MIEs). These energies rely on mollifier functions---smooth approximations of the Dirac delta originated from PDE theory. We show that as the mollifier approaches the Dirac delta, the MIE converges to the chi-square divergence with respect to the target measure and the gradient flow of the MIE agrees with that of the chi-square divergence. Optimizing this energy with proper discretization yields a practical first-order particle-based algorithm for sampling in both unconstrained and constrained domains. We show experimentally that for unconstrained sampling problems our algorithm performs on par with existing particle-based algorithms like SVGD, while for constrained sampling problems our method readily incorporates constrained optimization techniques to handle more flexible constraints with strong performance compared to alternatives.
Self-Stabilization: The Implicit Bias of Gradient Descent at the Edge of Stability
Authors: Alex Damian,Eshaan Nichani,Jason D. Lee

Traditional analyses of gradient descent show that when the largest eigenvalue of the Hessian, also known as the sharpness $S(\theta)$, is bounded by $2/\eta$, training is "stable" and the training loss decreases monotonically. Recent works, however, have observed that this assumption does not hold when training modern neural networks with full batch or large batch gradient descent. Most recently, Cohen at al. (2021) detailed two important phenomena. The first, dubbed \emph{progressive sharpening}, is that the sharpness steadily increases throughout training until it reaches the instability cutoff $2/\eta$. The second, dubbed \emph{edge of stability}, is that the sharpness hovers at $2/\eta$ for the remainder of training while the loss continues decreasing, albeit non-monotonically. We demonstrate that, far from being chaotic, the dynamics of gradient descent at the edge of stability can be captured by a cubic Taylor expansion: as the iterates diverge in direction of the top eigenvector of the Hessian due to instability, the cubic term in the local Taylor expansion of the loss function causes the curvature to decrease until stability is restored. This property, which we call \emph{self-stabilization}, is a general property of gradient descent and explains its behavior at the edge of stability. A key consequence of self-stabilization is that gradient descent at the edge of stability implicitly follows \emph{projected} gradient descent (PGD) under the constraint $S(\theta) \le 2/\eta$. Our analysis provides precise predictions for the loss, sharpness, and deviation from the PGD trajectory throughout training, which we verify both empirically in a number of standard settings and theoretically under mild conditions. Our analysis uncovers the mechanism for gradient descent's implicit bias towards stability.
TILP: Differentiable Learning of Temporal Logical Rules on Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Siheng Xiong,Yuan Yang,Faramarz Fekri,James Clayton Kerce

Compared with static knowledge graphs, temporal knowledge graphs (tKG), which can capture the evolution and change of information over time, are more realistic and general. However, due to the complexity that the notion of time introduces to the learning of the rules, an accurate graph reasoning, e.g., predicting new links between entities, is still a difficult problem. In this paper, we propose TILP, a differentiable framework for temporal logical rules learning. By designing a constrained random walk mechanism and the introduction of temporal operators, we ensure the efficiency of our model. We present temporal features modeling in tKG, e.g., recurrence, temporal order, interval between pair of relations, and duration, and incorporate it into our learning process. We compare TILP with state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. We show that our proposed framework can improve upon the performance of baseline methods while providing interpretable results. In particular, we consider various scenarios in which training samples are limited, data is biased, and the time range between training and inference are different. In all these cases, TILP works much better than the state-of-the-art methods.
Open-Vocabulary Object Detection upon Frozen Vision and Language Models
Authors: Weicheng Kuo,Yin Cui,Xiuye Gu,AJ Piergiovanni,Anelia Angelova

We present F-VLM, a simple open-vocabulary object detection method built uponFrozenVision andLanguageModels.  F-VLM simplifies the current multi-stage training pipeline by eliminating the need for knowledge distillation or detection-tailored pretraining.  Surprisingly, we observe that a frozen VLM: 1) retains the locality-sensitive features necessary for detection, and 2) is a strong region classifier.  We finetune only the detector head and combine the detector and VLM outputs for each region at inference time.  F-VLM shows compelling scaling behavior and achieves +6.5 mask AP improvement over the previous state of theart  on  novel  categories  of  LVIS  open-vocabulary  detection  benchmark. In addition, we demonstrate very competitive results on COCO open-vocabulary detection benchmark and cross-dataset transfer detection, in addition to significant training speed-up and compute savings. Code will be released.