OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
AutoML-Zero: Evolving Machine Learning Algorithms From Scratch
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

Machine learning research has advanced in multiple aspects, including model structures and learning methods. The effort to automate such research, known as AutoML, has also made significant progress. However, this progress has largely focused on the architecture of neural networks, where it has relied on sophisticated expert-designed layers as building blocks---or similarly restrictive search spaces. Our goal is to show that AutoML can go further: it is possible today to automatically discover complete machine learning algorithms just using basic mathematical operations as building blocks. We demonstrate this by introducing a novel framework that significantly reduces human bias through a generic search space. Despite the vastness of this space, evolutionary search can still discover two-layer neural networks trained by backpropagation. These simple neural networks can then be surpassed by evolving directly on tasks of interest, e.g. CIFAR-10 variants, where modern techniques emerge in the top algorithms, such as bilinear interactions, normalized gradients, and weight averaging. Moreover, evolution adapts algorithms to different task types: e.g., dropout-like techniques appear when little data is available. We believe these preliminary successes in discovering machine learning algorithms from scratch indicate a promising new direction for the field.
Active Learning on Attributed Graphs via Graph Cognizant Logistic Regression and Preemptive Query Generation
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

Node classification in attributed graphs is an important task in multiple practical settings, but it can often be difficult or expensive to obtain labels. Active learning can improve the achieved classification performance for a given budget on the number of queried labels. The best existing methods are based on graph neural networks, but they often perform poorly unless a sizeable validation set of labelled nodes is available in order to choose good hyperparameters. We propose a novel graph-based active learning algorithm for the task of node classification in attributed graphs; our algorithm uses graph cognizant logistic regression, equivalent to a linearized graph convolutional neural network (GCN), for the prediction phase and maximizes the expected error reduction in the query phase. To reduce the delay experienced by a labeller interacting with the system, we derive a preemptive querying system that calculates a new query during the labelling process, and to address the setting where learning starts with almost no labelled data, we also develop a hybrid algorithm that performs adaptive model averaging of label propagation and linearized GCN inference. We conduct experiments on five public benchmark datasets, demonstrating a significant improvement over state-of-the-art approaches and illustrate the practical value of the method by applying it to a private microwave link network dataset.
Overfitting in adversarially robust deep learning
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

It is common practice in deep learning to use overparameterized networks and train for as long as possible; there are numerous studies that show, both theoretically and empirically, that such practices surprisingly do not unduly harm the generalization performance of the classifier. In this paper, we empirically study this phenomenon in the setting of adversarially trained deep networks, which are trained to minimize the loss under worst-case adversarial perturbations. We find that overfitting to the training set does in fact harm robust performance to a very large degree in adversarially robust training across multiple datasets (SVHN, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet) and perturbation models ($\ell_\infty$ and $\ell_2$). Based upon this observed effect, we show that the performance gains of virtually all recent algorithmic improvements upon adversarial training can be matched by simply using early stopping. We also show that effects such as the double descent curve do still occur in adversarially trained models, yet fail to explain the observed overfitting. Finally, we study several classical and modern deep learning remedies for overfitting, including regularization and data augmentation, and find that no approach in isolation improves significantly upon the gains achieved by early stopping. All code for reproducing the experiments as well as pretrained model weights and training logs can be found at https://github.com/locuslab/robust_overfitting.
Interpretations are Useful: Penalizing Explanations to Align Neural Networks with Prior Knowledge
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

For an explanation of a deep learning model to be effective, it must provide both insight into a model and suggest a corresponding action in order to achieve some objective. Too often, the litany of proposed explainable deep learning methods stop at the first step, providing practitioners with insight into a model, but no way to act on it. In this paper, we propose contextual decomposition explanation penalization (CDEP), a method which enables practitioners to leverage existing explanation methods in order to increase the predictive accuracy of deep learning models. In particular, when shown that a model has incorrectly assigned importance to some features, CDEP enables practitioners to correct these errors by directly regularizing the provided explanations. Using explanations provided by contextual decomposition (CD) (Murdoch et al., 2018), we demonstrate the ability of our method to increase performance on an array of toy and real datasets.
Strength from Weakness: Fast Learning Using Weak Supervision
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

We study generalization properties of weakly supervised learning. That is, learning where only a few "strong" labels (the actual target of our prediction) are present but many more "weak" labels are available. In particular, we show that having access to weak labels can significantly accelerate the learning rate for the strong task to the fast rate of $\mathcal{O}(\nicefrac1n)$, where $n$ denotes the number of strongly labeled data points. This acceleration can happen even if by itself the strongly labeled data admits only the slower $\mathcal{O}(\nicefrac{1}{\sqrt{n}})$ rate. The actual acceleration depends continuously on the number of weak labels available, and on the relation between the two tasks. Our theoretical results are reflected empirically across a range of tasks and illustrate how weak labels speed up learning on the strong task.
FR-Train: A Mutual Information-Based Approach to Fair and Robust Training
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

Trustworthy AI is a critical issue in machine learning where, in addition to training a model that is accurate, one must consider both fair and robust training in the presence of data bias and poisoning. However, the existing model fairness techniques mistakenly view poisoned data as an additional bias to be fixed, resulting in severe performance degradation. To address this problem, we propose FR-Train, which holistically performs fair and robust model training. We provide a mutual information-based interpretation of an existing adversarial training-based fairness-only method, and apply this idea to architect an additional discriminator that can identify poisoned data using a clean validation set and reduce its influence. In our experiments, FR-Train shows almost no decrease in fairness and accuracy in the presence of data poisoning by both mitigating the bias and defending against poisoning. We also demonstrate how to construct clean validation sets using crowdsourcing, and release new benchmark datasets.
Balancing Competing Objectives with Noisy Data: Score-Based Classifiers for Welfare-Aware Machine Learning
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

While real-world decisions involve many competing objectives, algorithmic decisions are often evaluated with a single objective function. In this paper, we study algorithmic policies which explicitly trade off between a private objective (such as profit) and a public objective (such as social welfare). We analyze a natural class of policies which trace an empirical Pareto frontier based on learned scores, and focus on how such decisions can be made in noisy or data-limited regimes. Our theoretical results characterize the optimal strategies in this class, bound the Pareto errors due to inaccuracies in the scores, and show an equivalence between optimal strategies and a rich class of fairness-constrained profit-maximizing policies. We then present empirical results in two different contexts -- online content recommendation and sustainable abalone fisheries -- to underscore the applicability of our approach to a wide range of practical decisions. Taken together, these results shed light on inherent trade-offs in using machine learning for decisions that impact social welfare.
Reverse-engineering deep ReLU networks
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

It has been widely assumed that a neural network cannot be recovered from its outputs, as the network depends on its parameters in a highly nonlinear way. Here, we prove that in fact it is often possible to identify the architecture, weights, and biases of an unknown deep ReLU network by observing only its output. Every ReLU network defines a piecewise linear function, where the boundaries between linear regions correspond to inputs for which some neuron in the network switches between inactive and active ReLU states. By dissecting the set of region boundaries into components associated with particular neurons, we show both theoretically and empirically that it is possible to recover the weights of neurons and their arrangement within the network, up to isomorphism.
Attentive Group Equivariant Convolutional Networks
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

Although group convolutional networks are able to learn powerful representations based on symmetry patterns, they lack explicit means to learn meaningful relationships among them (e.g., relative positions and poses). In this paper, we present attentive group equivariant convolutions, a generalization of the group convolution, in which attention is applied during the course of convolution to accentuate meaningful symmetry combinations and suppress non-plausible, misleading ones. We indicate that prior work on visual attention can be described as special cases of our proposed framework and show empirically that our attentive group equivariant convolutional networks consistently outperform conventional group convolutional networks on benchmark image datasets. Simultaneously, we provide interpretability to the learned concepts through the visualization of equivariant attention maps.
Predicting Choice with Set-Dependent Aggregation
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

Providing users with alternatives to choose from is an essential component in many online platforms, making the accurate prediction of choice vital to their success. A renewed interest in learning choice models has led to significant progress in modeling power, but most current methods are either limited in the types of choice behavior they capture, cannot be applied to large-scale data, or both. Here we propose a learning framework for predicting choice that is accurate, versatile, theoretically grounded, and scales well. Our key modeling point is that to account for how humans choose, predictive models must capture certain set-related invariances. Building on recent results in economics, we derive a class of models that can express any behavioral choice pattern, enjoy favorable sample complexity guarantees, and can be efficiently trained end-to-end. Experiments on three large choice datasets demonstrate the utility of our approach.
Certified Robustness to Label-Flipping Attacks via Randomized Smoothing
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

Machine learning algorithms are known to be susceptible to data poisoning attacks, where an adversary manipulates the training data to degrade performance of the resulting classifier. In this work, we present a unifying view of randomized smoothing over arbitrary functions, and we leverage this novel characterization to propose a new strategy for building classifiers that are pointwise-certifiably robust to general data poisoning attacks. As a specific instantiation, we utilize our framework to build linear classifiers that are robust to a strong variant of label flipping, where each test example is targeted independently. In other words, for each test point, our classifier includes a certification that its prediction would be the same had some number of training labels been changed adversarially. Randomized smoothing has previously been used to guarantee---with high probability---test-time robustness to adversarial manipulation of the input to a classifier; we derive a variant which provides a deterministic, analytical bound, sidestepping the probabilistic certificates that traditionally result from the sampling subprocedure. Further, we obtain these certified bounds with minimal additional runtime complexity over standard classification and no assumptions on the train or test distributions. We generalize our results to the multi-class case, providing the first multi-class classification algorithm that is certifiably robust to label-flipping attacks.
Revisiting Training Strategies and Generalization Performance in Deep Metric Learning
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

Deep Metric Learning (DML) is arguably one of the most influential lines of research for learning visual similarities with many proposed approaches every year. Although the field benefits from the rapid progress, the divergence in training protocols, architectures, and parameter choices make an unbiased comparison difficult. To provide a consistent reference point, we revisit the most widely used DML objective functions and conduct a study of the crucial parameter choices as well as the commonly neglected mini-batch sampling process. Under consistent comparison, DML objectives show much higher saturation than indicated by literature. Further based on our analysis, we uncover a correlation between the embedding space density and compression to the generalization performance of DML models. Exploiting these insights, we propose a simple, yet effective, training regularization to reliably boost the performance of ranking-based DML models on various standard benchmark datasets. Code and a publicly accessible WandB-repo are available at https://github.com/Confusezius/Revisiting_Deep_Metric_Learning_PyTorch.
FetchSGD: Communication-Efficient Federated Learning with Sketching
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

Existing approaches to federated learning suffer from a communication bottleneck as well as convergence issues due to sparse client participation. In this paper we introduce a novel algorithm, called FetchSGD, to overcome these challenges. FetchSGD compresses model updates using a Count Sketch, and then takes advantage of the mergeability of sketches to combine model updates from many workers. A key insight in the design of FetchSGD is that, because the Count Sketch is linear, momentum and error accumulation can both be carried out within the sketch. This allows the algorithm to move momentum and error accumulation from clients to the central aggregator, overcoming the challenges of sparse client participation while still achieving high compression rates and good convergence. We prove that FetchSGD has favorable convergence guarantees, and we demonstrate its empirical effectiveness by training two residual networks and a transformer model.
Simple and sharp analysis of k-means
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

We present a simple analysis of k-means|| (Bahmani et al., PVLDB 2012) -- a distributed variant of the k-means++ algorithm (Arthur and Vassilvitskii, SODA 2007). Moreover, the bound on the number of rounds is improved from $O(\log n)$ to $O(\log n / \log\log n)$, which we show to be tight.
Bio-Inspired Hashing for Unsupervised Similarity Search
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

The fruit fly Drosophila's olfactory circuit has inspired a new locality sensitive hashing (LSH) algorithm, FlyHash. In contrast with classical LSH algorithms that produce low dimensional hash codes, FlyHash produces sparse high-dimensional hash codes and has also been shown to have superior empirical performance compared to classical LSH algorithms in similarity search. However, FlyHash uses random projections and cannot learn from data. Building on inspiration from FlyHash and the ubiquity of sparse expansive representations in neurobiology, our work proposes a novel hashing algorithm BioHash that produces sparse high dimensional hash codes in a data-driven manner. We show that BioHash outperforms previously published benchmarks for various hashing methods. Since our learning algorithm is based on a local and biologically plausible synaptic plasticity rule, our work provides evidence for the proposal that LSH might be a computational reason for the abundance of sparse expansive motifs in a variety of biological systems. We also propose a convolutional variant BioConvHash that further improves performance. From the perspective of computer science, BioHash and BioConvHash are fast, scalable and yield compressed binary representations that are useful for similarity search.
An Investigation of Why Overparameterization Exacerbates Spurious Correlations
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

We study why overparameterization -- increasing model size well beyond the point of zero training error -- can hurt test error on minority groups despite improving average test error when there are spurious correlations in the data. Through simulations and experiments on two image datasets, we identify two key properties of the training data that drive this behavior: the proportions of majority versus minority groups, and the signal-to-noise ratio of the spurious correlations. We then analyze a linear setting and theoretically show how the inductive bias of models towards "memorizing" fewer examples can cause overparameterization to hurt. Our analysis leads to a counterintuitive approach of subsampling the majority group, which empirically achieves low minority error in the overparameterized regime, even though the standard approach of upweighting the minority fails. Overall, our results suggest a tension between using overparameterized models versus using all the training data for achieving low worst-group error.
From PAC to Instance-Optimal Sample Complexity in the Plackett-Luce Model
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

We consider PAC-learning a good item from $k$-subsetwise feedback information sampled from a Plackett-Luce probability model, with instance-dependent sample complexity performance. In the setting where subsets of a fixed size can be tested and top-ranked feedback is made available to the learner, we give an algorithm with optimal instance-dependent sample complexity, for PAC best arm identification, of $O\bigg(\frac{θ_{[k]}}{k}\sum_{i = 2}^n\max\Big(1,\frac{1}{Δ_i^2}\Big) \ln\frac{k}δ\Big(\ln \frac{1}{Δ_i}\Big)\bigg)$, $Δ_i$ being the Plackett-Luce parameter gap between the best and the $i^{th}$ best item, and $θ_{[k]}$ is the sum of the \pl\, parameters for the top-$k$ items. The algorithm is based on a wrapper around a PAC winner-finding algorithm with weaker performance guarantees to adapt to the hardness of the input instance. The sample complexity is also shown to be multiplicatively better depending on the length of rank-ordered feedback available in each subset-wise play. We show optimality of our algorithms with matching sample complexity lower bounds. We next address the winner-finding problem in Plackett-Luce models in the fixed-budget setting with instance dependent upper and lower bounds on the misidentification probability, of $Ω\left(\exp(-2 \tilde ΔQ) \right)$ for a given budget $Q$, where $\tilde Δ$ is an explicit instance-dependent problem complexity parameter. Numerical performance results are also reported.
Measuring Non-Expert Comprehension of Machine Learning Fairness Metrics
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

Bias in machine learning has manifested injustice in several areas, such as medicine, hiring, and criminal justice. In response, computer scientists have developed myriad definitions of fairness to correct this bias in fielded algorithms. While some definitions are based on established legal and ethical norms, others are largely mathematical. It is unclear whether the general public agrees with these fairness definitions, and perhaps more importantly, whether they understand these definitions. We take initial steps toward bridging this gap between ML researchers and the public, by addressing the question: does a lay audience understand a basic definition of ML fairness? We develop a metric to measure comprehension of three such definitions--demographic parity, equal opportunity, and equalized odds. We evaluate this metric using an online survey, and investigate the relationship between comprehension and sentiment, demographics, and the definition itself.
From Sets to Multisets: Provable Variational Inference for Probabilistic Integer Submodular Models
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

Submodular functions have been studied extensively in machine learning and data mining. In particular, the optimization of submodular functions over the integer lattice (integer submodular functions) has recently attracted much interest, because this domain relates naturally to many practical problem settings, such as multilabel graph cut, budget allocation and revenue maximization with discrete assignments. In contrast, the use of these functions for probabilistic modeling has received surprisingly little attention so far. In this work, we firstly propose the Generalized Multilinear Extension, a continuous DR-submodular extension for integer submodular functions. We study central properties of this extension and formulate a new probabilistic model which is defined through integer submodular functions. Then, we introduce a block-coordinate ascent algorithm to perform approximate inference for those class of models. Finally, we demonstrate its effectiveness and viability on several real-world social connection graph datasets with integer submodular objectives.
Learning to Simulate Complex Physics with Graph Networks
Venue: Conference ICML 2020
Year: 2020

Here we present a machine learning framework and model implementation that can learn to simulate a wide variety of challenging physical domains, involving fluids, rigid solids, and deformable materials interacting with one another. Our framework---which we term "Graph Network-based Simulators" (GNS)---represents the state of a physical system with particles, expressed as nodes in a graph, and computes dynamics via learned message-passing. Our results show that our model can generalize from single-timestep predictions with thousands of particles during training, to different initial conditions, thousands of timesteps, and at least an order of magnitude more particles at test time. Our model was robust to hyperparameter choices across various evaluation metrics: the main determinants of long-term performance were the number of message-passing steps, and mitigating the accumulation of error by corrupting the training data with noise. Our GNS framework advances the state-of-the-art in learned physical simulation, and holds promise for solving a wide range of complex forward and inverse problems.