OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Augmented Sliced Wasserstein Distances
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

While theoretically appealing, the application of the Wasserstein distance to large-scale machine learning problems has been hampered by its prohibitive computational cost. The sliced Wasserstein distance and its variants improve the computational efficiency through the random projection, yet they suffer from low accuracy if the number of projections is not sufficiently large, because the majority of projections result in trivially small values. In this work, we propose a new family of distance metrics, called augmented sliced Wasserstein distances (ASWDs), constructed by first mapping samples to higher-dimensional hypersurfaces parameterized by neural networks. It is derived from a key observation that (random) linear projections of samples residing on these hypersurfaces would translate to much more flexible nonlinear projections in the original sample space, so they can capture complex structures of the data distribution. We show that the hypersurfaces can be optimized by gradient ascent efficiently. We provide the condition under which the ASWD is a valid metric and show that this can be obtained by an injective neural network architecture. Numerical results demonstrate that the ASWD significantly outperforms other Wasserstein variants for both synthetic and real-world problems.
Sparsity Winning Twice: Better Robust Generalization from More Efficient Training
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Recent studies demonstrate that deep networks, even robustified by the state-of-the-art adversarial training (AT), still suffer from large robust generalization gaps, in addition to the much more expensive training costs than standard training. In this paper, we investigate this intriguing problem from a new perspective, i.e., injecting appropriate forms of sparsity during adversarial training. We introduce two alternatives for sparse adversarial training: (i) static sparsity, by leveraging recent results from the lottery ticket hypothesis to identify critical sparse subnetworks arising from the early training; (ii) dynamic sparsity, by allowing the sparse subnetwork to adaptively adjust its connectivity pattern (while sticking to the same sparsity ratio) throughout training. We find both static and dynamic sparse methods to yield win-win: substantially shrinking the robust generalization gap and alleviating the robust overfitting, meanwhile significantly saving training and inference FLOPs. Extensive experiments validate our proposals with multiple network architectures on diverse datasets, including CIFAR-10/100 and Tiny-ImageNet. For example, our methods reduce robust generalization gap and overfitting by 34.44% and 4.02%, with comparable robust/standard accuracy boosts and 87.83%/87.82% training/inference FLOPs savings on CIFAR-100 with ResNet-18. Besides, our approaches can be organically combined with existing regularizers, establishing new state-of-the-art results in AT. Codes are available in https://github.com/VITA-Group/Sparsity-Win-Robust-Generalization.
Shuffle Private Stochastic Convex Optimization
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

In shuffle privacy, each user sends a collection of randomized messages to a trusted shuffler, the shuffler randomly permutes these messages, and the resulting shuffled collection of messages must satisfy differential privacy. Prior work in this model has largely focused on protocols that use a single round of communication to compute algorithmic primitives like means, histograms, and counts. We present interactive shuffle protocols for stochastic convex optimization. Our protocols rely on a new noninteractive protocol for summing vectors of bounded $\ell_2$ norm. By combining this sum subroutine with mini-batch stochastic gradient descent, accelerated gradient descent, and Nesterov's smoothing method, we obtain loss guarantees for a variety of convex loss functions that significantly improve on those of the local model and sometimes match those of the central model.
Meta Discovery: Learning to Discover Novel Classes given Very Limited Data
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

In novel class discovery (NCD), we are given labeled data from seen classes and unlabeled data from unseen classes, and we train clustering models for the unseen classes. However, the implicit assumptions behind NCD are still unclear. In this paper, we demystify assumptions behind NCD and find that high-level semantic features should be shared among the seen and unseen classes. Based on this finding, NCD is theoretically solvable under certain assumptions and can be naturally linked to meta-learning that has exactly the same assumption as NCD. Thus, we can empirically solve the NCD problem by meta-learning algorithms after slight modifications. This meta-learning-based methodology significantly reduces the amount of unlabeled data needed for training and makes it more practical, as demonstrated in experiments. The use of very limited data is also justified by the application scenario of NCD: since it is unnatural to label only seen-class data, NCD is sampling instead of labeling in causality. Therefore, unseen-class data should be collected on the way of collecting seen-class data, which is why they are novel and first need to be clustered.
Node Feature Extraction by Self-Supervised Multi-scale Neighborhood Prediction
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Learning on graphs has attracted significant attention in the learning community due to numerous real-world applications. In particular, graph neural networks (GNNs), which take numerical node features and graph structure as inputs, have been shown to achieve state-of-the-art performance on various graph-related learning tasks. Recent works exploring the correlation between numerical node features and graph structure via self-supervised learning have paved the way for further performance improvements of GNNs. However, methods used for extracting numerical node features from raw data are still graph-agnostic within standard GNN pipelines. This practice is sub-optimal as it prevents one from fully utilizing potential correlations between graph topology and node attributes. To mitigate this issue, we propose a new self-supervised learning framework, Graph Information Aided Node feature exTraction (GIANT). GIANT makes use of the eXtreme Multi-label Classification (XMC) formalism, which is crucial for fine-tuning the language model based on graph information, and scales to large datasets. We also provide a theoretical analysis that justifies the use of XMC over link prediction and motivates integrating XR-Transformers, a powerful method for solving XMC problems, into the GIANT framework. We demonstrate the superior performance of GIANT over the standard GNN pipeline on Open Graph Benchmark datasets: For example, we improve the accuracy of the top-ranked method GAMLP from $68.25\%$ to $69.67\%$, SGC from $63.29\%$ to $66.10\%$ and MLP from $47.24\%$ to $61.10\%$ on the ogbn-papers100M dataset by leveraging GIANT.
You are AllSet: A Multiset Function Framework for Hypergraph Neural Networks
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Hypergraphs are used to model higher-order interactions amongst agents and there exist many practically relevant instances of hypergraph datasets. To enable efficient processing of hypergraph-structured data, several hypergraph neural network platforms have been proposed for learning hypergraph properties and structure, with a special focus on node classification. However, almost all existing methods use heuristic propagation rules and offer suboptimal performance on many datasets. We propose AllSet, a new hypergraph neural network paradigm that represents a highly general framework for (hyper)graph neural networks and for the first time implements hypergraph neural network layers as compositions of two multiset functions that can be efficiently learned for each task and each dataset. Furthermore, AllSet draws on new connections between hypergraph neural networks and recent advances in deep learning of multiset functions. In particular, the proposed architecture utilizes Deep Sets and Set Transformer architectures that allow for significant modeling flexibility and offer high expressive power. To evaluate the performance of AllSet, we conduct the most extensive experiments to date involving ten known benchmarking datasets and three newly curated datasets that represent significant challenges for hypergraph node classification. The results demonstrate that AllSet has the unique ability to consistently either match or outperform all other hypergraph neural networks across the tested datasets.
Real-Time Neural Voice Camouflage
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Automatic speech recognition systems have created exciting possibilities for applications, however they also enable opportunities for systematic eavesdropping. We propose a method to camouflage a person's voice over-the-air from these systems without inconveniencing the conversation between people in the room. Standard adversarial attacks are not effective in real-time streaming situations because the characteristics of the signal will have changed by the time the attack is executed. We introduce predictive attacks, which achieve real-time performance by forecasting the attack that will be the most effective in the future. Under real-time constraints, our method jams the established speech recognition system DeepSpeech 3.9x more than baselines as measured through word error rate, and 6.6x more as measured through character error rate. We furthermore demonstrate our approach is practically effective in realistic environments over physical distances.
DKM: Differentiable k-Means Clustering Layer for Neural Network Compression
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Deep neural network (DNN) model compression for efficient on-device inference is becoming increasingly important to reduce memory requirements and keep user data on-device. To this end, we propose a novel differentiable k-means clustering layer (DKM) and its application to train-time weight clustering-based DNN model compression. DKM casts k-means clustering as an attention problem and enables joint optimization of the DNN parameters and clustering centroids. Unlike prior works that rely on additional regularizers and parameters, DKM-based compression keeps the original loss function and model architecture fixed. We evaluated DKM-based compression on various DNN models for computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Our results demonstrate that DKM delivers superior compression and accuracy trade-off on ImageNet1k and GLUE benchmarks. For example, DKM-based compression can offer 74.5% top-1 ImageNet1k accuracy on ResNet50 DNN model with 3.3MB model size (29.4x model compression factor). For MobileNet-v1, which is a challenging DNN to compress, DKM delivers 63.9% top-1 ImageNet1k accuracy with 0.72 MB model size (22.4x model compression factor). This result is 6.8% higher top-1accuracy and 33% relatively smaller model size than the current state-of-the-art DNN compression algorithms. Additionally, DKM enables compression of DistilBERT model by 11.8x with minimal (1.1%) accuracy loss on GLUE NLP benchmarks.
Deep Point Cloud Reconstruction
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Point cloud obtained from 3D scanning is often sparse, noisy, and irregular. To cope with these issues, recent studies have been separately conducted to densify, denoise, and complete inaccurate point cloud. In this paper, we advocate that jointly solving these tasks leads to significant improvement for point cloud reconstruction. To this end, we propose a deep point cloud reconstruction network consisting of two stages: 1) a 3D sparse stacked-hourglass network as for the initial densification and denoising, 2) a refinement via transformers converting the discrete voxels into 3D points. In particular, we further improve the performance of transformer by a newly proposed module called amplified positional encoding. This module has been designed to differently amplify the magnitude of positional encoding vectors based on the points' distances for adaptive refinements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our network achieves state-of-the-art performance among the recent studies in the ScanNet, ICL-NUIM, and ShapeNetPart datasets. Moreover, we underline the ability of our network to generalize toward real-world and unmet scenes.
MonoDistill: Learning Spatial Features for Monocular 3D Object Detection
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

3D object detection is a fundamental and challenging task for 3D scene understanding, and the monocular-based methods can serve as an economical alternative to the stereo-based or LiDAR-based methods. However, accurately detecting objects in the 3D space from a single image is extremely difficult due to the lack of spatial cues. To mitigate this issue, we propose a simple and effective scheme to introduce the spatial information from LiDAR signals to the monocular 3D detectors, without introducing any extra cost in the inference phase. In particular, we first project the LiDAR signals into the image plane and align them with the RGB images. After that, we use the resulting data to train a 3D detector (LiDAR Net) with the same architecture as the baseline model. Finally, this LiDAR Net can serve as the teacher to transfer the learned knowledge to the baseline model. Experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly boost the performance of the baseline model and ranks the $1^{st}$ place among all monocular-based methods on the KITTI benchmark. Besides, extensive ablation studies are conducted, which further prove the effectiveness of each part of our designs and illustrate what the baseline model has learned from the LiDAR Net. Our code will be released at \url{https://github.com/monster-ghost/MonoDistill}.
The Spectral Bias of Polynomial Neural Networks
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Polynomial neural networks (PNNs) have been recently shown to be particularly effective at image generation and face recognition, where high-frequency information is critical. Previous studies have revealed that neural networks demonstrate a $\textit{spectral bias}$ towards low-frequency functions, which yields faster learning of low-frequency components during training. Inspired by such studies, we conduct a spectral analysis of the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) of PNNs. We find that the $Π$-Net family, i.e., a recently proposed parametrization of PNNs, speeds up the learning of the higher frequencies. We verify the theoretical bias through extensive experiments. We expect our analysis to provide novel insights into designing architectures and learning frameworks by incorporating multiplicative interactions via polynomials.
Filling the G_ap_s: Multivariate Time Series Imputation by Graph Neural Networks
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Dealing with missing values and incomplete time series is a labor-intensive, tedious, inevitable task when handling data coming from real-world applications. Effective spatio-temporal representations would allow imputation methods to reconstruct missing temporal data by exploiting information coming from sensors at different locations. However, standard methods fall short in capturing the nonlinear time and space dependencies existing within networks of interconnected sensors and do not take full advantage of the available - and often strong - relational information. Notably, most state-of-the-art imputation methods based on deep learning do not explicitly model relational aspects and, in any case, do not exploit processing frameworks able to adequately represent structured spatio-temporal data. Conversely, graph neural networks have recently surged in popularity as both expressive and scalable tools for processing sequential data with relational inductive biases. In this work, we present the first assessment of graph neural networks in the context of multivariate time series imputation. In particular, we introduce a novel graph neural network architecture, named GRIN, which aims at reconstructing missing data in the different channels of a multivariate time series by learning spatio-temporal representations through message passing. Empirical results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the imputation task on relevant real-world benchmarks with mean absolute error improvements often higher than 20%.
Imbedding Deep Neural Networks
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Continuous-depth neural networks, such as Neural ODEs, have refashioned the understanding of residual neural networks in terms of non-linear vector-valued optimal control problems. The common solution is to use the adjoint sensitivity method to replicate a forward-backward pass optimisation problem. We propose a new approach which explicates the network's `depth' as a fundamental variable, thus reducing the problem to a system of forward-facing initial value problems. This new method is based on the principle of `Invariant Imbedding' for which we prove a general solution, applicable to all non-linear, vector-valued optimal control problems with both running and terminal loss. Our new architectures provide a tangible tool for inspecting the theoretical--and to a great extent unexplained--properties of network depth. They also constitute a resource of discrete implementations of Neural ODEs comparable to classes of imbedded residual neural networks. Through a series of experiments, we show the competitive performance of the proposed architectures for supervised learning and time series prediction.
Bundle Networks: Fiber Bundles, Local Trivializations, and a Generative Approach to Exploring Many-to-one Maps
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Many-to-one maps are ubiquitous in machine learning, from the image recognition model that assigns a multitude of distinct images to the concept of "cat" to the time series forecasting model which assigns a range of distinct time-series to a single scalar regression value. While the primary use of such models is naturally to associate correct output to each input, in many problems it is also useful to be able to explore, understand, and sample from a model's fibers, which are the set of input values $x$ such that $f(x) = y$, for fixed $y$ in the output space. In this paper we show that popular generative architectures are ill-suited to such tasks. Motivated by this we introduce a novel generative architecture, a Bundle Network, based on the concept of a fiber bundle from (differential) topology. BundleNets exploit the idea of a local trivialization wherein a space can be locally decomposed into a product space that cleanly encodes the many-to-one nature of the map. By enforcing this decomposition in BundleNets and by utilizing state-of-the-art invertible components, investigating a network's fibers becomes natural.
The Neural Data Router: Adaptive Control Flow in Transformers Improves Systematic Generalization
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Despite progress across a broad range of applications, Transformers have limited success in systematic generalization. The situation is especially frustrating in the case of algorithmic tasks, where they often fail to find intuitive solutions that route relevant information to the right node/operation at the right time in the grid represented by Transformer columns. To facilitate the learning of useful control flow, we propose two modifications to the Transformer architecture, copy gate and geometric attention. Our novel Neural Data Router (NDR) achieves 100% length generalization accuracy on the classic compositional table lookup task, as well as near-perfect accuracy on the simple arithmetic task and a new variant of ListOps testing for generalization across computational depths. NDR's attention and gating patterns tend to be interpretable as an intuitive form of neural routing. Our code is public.
Learning Graphon Mean Field Games and Approximate Nash Equilibria
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Recent advances at the intersection of dense large graph limits and mean field games have begun to enable the scalable analysis of a broad class of dynamical sequential games with large numbers of agents. So far, results have been largely limited to graphon mean field systems with continuous-time diffusive or jump dynamics, typically without control and with little focus on computational methods. We propose a novel discrete-time formulation for graphon mean field games as the limit of non-linear dense graph Markov games with weak interaction. On the theoretical side, we give extensive and rigorous existence and approximation properties of the graphon mean field solution in sufficiently large systems. On the practical side, we provide general learning schemes for graphon mean field equilibria by either introducing agent equivalence classes or reformulating the graphon mean field system as a classical mean field system. By repeatedly finding a regularized optimal control solution and its generated mean field, we successfully obtain plausible approximate Nash equilibria in otherwise infeasible large dense graph games with many agents. Empirically, we are able to demonstrate on a number of examples that the finite-agent behavior comes increasingly close to the mean field behavior for our computed equilibria as the graph or system size grows, verifying our theory. More generally, we successfully apply policy gradient reinforcement learning in conjunction with sequential Monte Carlo methods.
Graph-Augmented Normalizing Flows for Anomaly Detection of Multiple Time Series
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Anomaly detection is a widely studied task for a broad variety of data types; among them, multiple time series appear frequently in applications, including for example, power grids and traffic networks. Detecting anomalies for multiple time series, however, is a challenging subject, owing to the intricate interdependencies among the constituent series. We hypothesize that anomalies occur in low density regions of a distribution and explore the use of normalizing flows for unsupervised anomaly detection, because of their superior quality in density estimation. Moreover, we propose a novel flow model by imposing a Bayesian network among constituent series. A Bayesian network is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) that models causal relationships; it factorizes the joint probability of the series into the product of easy-to-evaluate conditional probabilities. We call such a graph-augmented normalizing flow approach GANF and propose joint estimation of the DAG with flow parameters. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of GANF for density estimation, anomaly detection, and identification of time series distribution drift.