OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Bayesian Semi-supervised Learning with Graph Gaussian Processes
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a data-efficient Gaussian process-based Bayesian approach to the semi-supervised learning problem on graphs. The proposed model shows extremely competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art graph neural networks on semi-supervised learning benchmark experiments, and outperforms the neural networks in active learning experiments where labels are scarce. Furthermore, the model does not require a validation data set for early stopping to control over-fitting. Our model can be viewed as an instance of empirical distribution regression weighted locally by network connectivity. We further motivate the intuitive construction of the model with a Bayesian linear model interpretation where the node features are filtered by an operator related to the graph Laplacian. The method can be easily implemented by adapting off-the-shelf scalable variational inference algorithms for Gaussian processes.
Learning to Reconstruct Shapes from Unseen Classes
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

From a single image, humans are able to perceive the full 3D shape of an object by exploiting learned shape priors from everyday life. Contemporary single-image 3D reconstruction algorithms aim to solve this task in a similar fashion, but often end up with priors that are highly biased by training classes. Here we present an algorithm, Generalizable Reconstruction (GenRe), designed to capture more generic, class-agnostic shape priors. We achieve this with an inference network and training procedure that combine 2.5D representations of visible surfaces (depth and silhouette), spherical shape representations of both visible and non-visible surfaces, and 3D voxel-based representations, in a principled manner that exploits the causal structure of how 3D shapes give rise to 2D images. Experiments demonstrate that GenRe performs well on single-view shape reconstruction, and generalizes to diverse novel objects from categories not seen during training.
Poison Frogs! Targeted Clean-Label Poisoning Attacks on Neural Networks
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

Data poisoning is an attack on machine learning models wherein the attacker adds examples to the training set to manipulate the behavior of the model at test time. This paper explores poisoning attacks on neural nets. The proposed attacks use "clean-labels"; they don't require the attacker to have any control over the labeling of training data. They are also targeted; they control the behavior of the classifier on a $\textit{specific}$ test instance without degrading overall classifier performance. For example, an attacker could add a seemingly innocuous image (that is properly labeled) to a training set for a face recognition engine, and control the identity of a chosen person at test time. Because the attacker does not need to control the labeling function, poisons could be entered into the training set simply by leaving them on the web and waiting for them to be scraped by a data collection bot. We present an optimization-based method for crafting poisons, and show that just one single poison image can control classifier behavior when transfer learning is used. For full end-to-end training, we present a "watermarking" strategy that makes poisoning reliable using multiple ($\approx$50) poisoned training instances. We demonstrate our method by generating poisoned frog images from the CIFAR dataset and using them to manipulate image classifiers.
Distilled Wasserstein Learning for Word Embedding and Topic Modeling
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a novel Wasserstein method with a distillation mechanism, yielding joint learning of word embeddings and topics. The proposed method is based on the fact that the Euclidean distance between word embeddings may be employed as the underlying distance in the Wasserstein topic model. The word distributions of topics, their optimal transports to the word distributions of documents, and the embeddings of words are learned in a unified framework. When learning the topic model, we leverage a distilled underlying distance matrix to update the topic distributions and smoothly calculate the corresponding optimal transports. Such a strategy provides the updating of word embeddings with robust guidance, improving the algorithmic convergence. As an application, we focus on patient admission records, in which the proposed method embeds the codes of diseases and procedures and learns the topics of admissions, obtaining superior performance on clinically-meaningful disease network construction, mortality prediction as a function of admission codes, and procedure recommendation.
Generating Informative and Diverse Conversational Responses via Adversarial Information Maximization
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

Responses generated by neural conversational models tend to lack informativeness and diversity. We present Adversarial Information Maximization (AIM), an adversarial learning strategy that addresses these two related but distinct problems. To foster response diversity, we leverage adversarial training that allows distributional matching of synthetic and real responses. To improve informativeness, our framework explicitly optimizes a variational lower bound on pairwise mutual information between query and response. Empirical results from automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that our methods significantly boost informativeness and diversity.
Discovery of Latent 3D Keypoints via End-to-end Geometric Reasoning
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents KeypointNet, an end-to-end geometric reasoning framework to learn an optimal set of category-specific 3D keypoints, along with their detectors. Given a single image, KeypointNet extracts 3D keypoints that are optimized for a downstream task. We demonstrate this framework on 3D pose estimation by proposing a differentiable objective that seeks the optimal set of keypoints for recovering the relative pose between two views of an object. Our model discovers geometrically and semantically consistent keypoints across viewing angles and instances of an object category. Importantly, we find that our end-to-end framework using no ground-truth keypoint annotations outperforms a fully supervised baseline using the same neural network architecture on the task of pose estimation. The discovered 3D keypoints on the car, chair, and plane categories of ShapeNet are visualized at http://keypointnet.github.io/.
Maximum Causal Tsallis Entropy Imitation Learning
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose a novel maximum causal Tsallis entropy (MCTE) framework for imitation learning which can efficiently learn a sparse multi-modal policy distribution from demonstrations. We provide the full mathematical analysis of the proposed framework. First, the optimal solution of an MCTE problem is shown to be a sparsemax distribution, whose supporting set can be adjusted. The proposed method has advantages over a softmax distribution in that it can exclude unnecessary actions by assigning zero probability. Second, we prove that an MCTE problem is equivalent to robust Bayes estimation in the sense of the Brier score. Third, we propose a maximum causal Tsallis entropy imitation learning (MCTEIL) algorithm with a sparse mixture density network (sparse MDN) by modeling mixture weights using a sparsemax distribution. In particular, we show that the causal Tsallis entropy of an MDN encourages exploration and efficient mixture utilization while Boltzmann Gibbs entropy is less effective. We validate the proposed method in two simulation studies and MCTEIL outperforms existing imitation learning methods in terms of average returns and learning multi-modal policies.
Importance Weighting and Variational Inference
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

Recent work used importance sampling ideas for better variational bounds on likelihoods. We clarify the applicability of these ideas to pure probabilistic inference, by showing the resulting Importance Weighted Variational Inference (IWVI) technique is an instance of augmented variational inference, thus identifying the looseness in previous work. Experiments confirm IWVI's practicality for probabilistic inference. As a second contribution, we investigate inference with elliptical distributions, which improves accuracy in low dimensions, and convergence in high dimensions.
Are ResNets Provably Better than Linear Predictors?
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

A residual network (or ResNet) is a standard deep neural net architecture, with state-of-the-art performance across numerous applications. The main premise of ResNets is that they allow the training of each layer to focus on fitting just the residual of the previous layer's output and the target output. Thus, we should expect that the trained network is no worse than what we can obtain if we remove the residual layers and train a shallower network instead. However, due to the non-convexity of the optimization problem, it is not at all clear that ResNets indeed achieve this behavior, rather than getting stuck at some arbitrarily poor local minimum. In this paper, we rigorously prove that arbitrarily deep, nonlinear residual units indeed exhibit this behavior, in the sense that the optimization landscape contains no local minima with value above what can be obtained with a linear predictor (namely a 1-layer network). Notably, we show this under minimal or no assumptions on the precise network architecture, data distribution, or loss function used. We also provide a quantitative analysis of approximate stationary points for this problem. Finally, we show that with a certain tweak to the architecture, training the network with standard stochastic gradient descent achieves an objective value close or better than any linear predictor.
Meta-Gradient Reinforcement Learning
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

The goal of reinforcement learning algorithms is to estimate and/or optimise the value function. However, unlike supervised learning, no teacher or oracle is available to provide the true value function. Instead, the majority of reinforcement learning algorithms estimate and/or optimise a proxy for the value function. This proxy is typically based on a sampled and bootstrapped approximation to the true value function, known as a return. The particular choice of return is one of the chief components determining the nature of the algorithm: the rate at which future rewards are discounted; when and how values should be bootstrapped; or even the nature of the rewards themselves. It is well-known that these decisions are crucial to the overall success of RL algorithms. We discuss a gradient-based meta-learning algorithm that is able to adapt the nature of the return, online, whilst interacting and learning from the environment. When applied to 57 games on the Atari 2600 environment over 200 million frames, our algorithm achieved a new state-of-the-art performance.
Spectral Signatures in Backdoor Attacks
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

A recent line of work has uncovered a new form of data poisoning: so-called \emph{backdoor} attacks. These attacks are particularly dangerous because they do not affect a network's behavior on typical, benign data. Rather, the network only deviates from its expected output when triggered by a perturbation planted by an adversary. In this paper, we identify a new property of all known backdoor attacks, which we call \emph{spectral signatures}. This property allows us to utilize tools from robust statistics to thwart the attacks. We demonstrate the efficacy of these signatures in detecting and removing poisoned examples on real image sets and state of the art neural network architectures. We believe that understanding spectral signatures is a crucial first step towards designing ML systems secure against such backdoor attacks
Forward Modeling for Partial Observation Strategy Games - A StarCraft Defogger
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

We formulate the problem of defogging as state estimation and future state prediction from previous, partial observations in the context of real-time strategy games. We propose to employ encoder-decoder neural networks for this task, and introduce proxy tasks and baselines for evaluation to assess their ability of capturing basic game rules and high-level dynamics. By combining convolutional neural networks and recurrent networks, we exploit spatial and sequential correlations and train well-performing models on a large dataset of human games of StarCraft: Brood War. Finally, we demonstrate the relevance of our models to downstream tasks by applying them for enemy unit prediction in a state-of-the-art, rule-based StarCraft bot. We observe improvements in win rates against several strong community bots.
PacGAN: The power of two samples in generative adversarial networks
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are innovative techniques for learning generative models of complex data distributions from samples. Despite remarkable recent improvements in generating realistic images, one of their major shortcomings is the fact that in practice, they tend to produce samples with little diversity, even when trained on diverse datasets. This phenomenon, known as mode collapse, has been the main focus of several recent advances in GANs. Yet there is little understanding of why mode collapse happens and why existing approaches are able to mitigate mode collapse. We propose a principled approach to handling mode collapse, which we call packing. The main idea is to modify the discriminator to make decisions based on multiple samples from the same class, either real or artificially generated. We borrow analysis tools from binary hypothesis testing---in particular the seminal result of Blackwell [Bla53]---to prove a fundamental connection between packing and mode collapse. We show that packing naturally penalizes generators with mode collapse, thereby favoring generator distributions with less mode collapse during the training process. Numerical experiments on benchmark datasets suggests that packing provides significant improvements in practice as well.
Generalized Inverse Optimization through Online Learning
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

Inverse optimization is a powerful paradigm for learning preferences and restrictions that explain the behavior of a decision maker, based on a set of external signal and the corresponding decision pairs. However, most inverse optimization algorithms are designed specifically in batch setting, where all the data is available in advance. As a consequence, there has been rare use of these methods in an online setting suitable for real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a general framework for inverse optimization through online learning. Specifically, we develop an online learning algorithm that uses an implicit update rule which can handle noisy data. Moreover, under additional regularity assumptions in terms of the data and the model, we prove that our algorithm converges at a rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ and is statistically consistent. In our experiments, we show the online learning approach can learn the parameters with great accuracy and is very robust to noises, and achieves a dramatic improvement in computational efficacy over the batch learning approach.
Semidefinite relaxations for certifying robustness to adversarial examples
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

Despite their impressive performance on diverse tasks, neural networks fail catastrophically in the presence of adversarial inputs---imperceptibly but adversarially perturbed versions of natural inputs. We have witnessed an arms race between defenders who attempt to train robust networks and attackers who try to construct adversarial examples. One promise of ending the arms race is developing certified defenses, ones which are provably robust against all attackers in some family. These certified defenses are based on convex relaxations which construct an upper bound on the worst case loss over all attackers in the family. Previous relaxations are loose on networks that are not trained against the respective relaxation. In this paper, we propose a new semidefinite relaxation for certifying robustness that applies to arbitrary ReLU networks. We show that our proposed relaxation is tighter than previous relaxations and produces meaningful robustness guarantees on three different "foreign networks" whose training objectives are agnostic to our proposed relaxation.
DeepPINK: reproducible feature selection in deep neural networks
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

Deep learning has become increasingly popular in both supervised and unsupervised machine learning thanks to its outstanding empirical performance. However, because of their intrinsic complexity, most deep learning methods are largely treated as black box tools with little interpretability. Even though recent attempts have been made to facilitate the interpretability of deep neural networks (DNNs), existing methods are susceptible to noise and lack of robustness. Therefore, scientists are justifiably cautious about the reproducibility of the discoveries, which is often related to the interpretability of the underlying statistical models. In this paper, we describe a method to increase the interpretability and reproducibility of DNNs by incorporating the idea of feature selection with controlled error rate. By designing a new DNN architecture and integrating it with the recently proposed knockoffs framework, we perform feature selection with a controlled error rate, while maintaining high power. This new method, DeepPINK (Deep feature selection using Paired-Input Nonlinear Knockoffs), is applied to both simulated and real data sets to demonstrate its empirical utility.
Plug-in Estimation in High-Dimensional Linear Inverse Problems: A Rigorous Analysis
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

Estimating a vector $\mathbf{x}$ from noisy linear measurements $\mathbf{Ax}+\mathbf{w}$ often requires use of prior knowledge or structural constraints on $\mathbf{x}$ for accurate reconstruction. Several recent works have considered combining linear least-squares estimation with a generic or "plug-in" denoiser function that can be designed in a modular manner based on the prior knowledge about $\mathbf{x}$. While these methods have shown excellent performance, it has been difficult to obtain rigorous performance guarantees. This work considers plug-in denoising combined with the recently-developed Vector Approximate Message Passing (VAMP) algorithm, which is itself derived via Expectation Propagation techniques. It shown that the mean squared error of this "plug-and-play" VAMP can be exactly predicted for high-dimensional right-rotationally invariant random $\mathbf{A}$ and Lipschitz denoisers. The method is demonstrated on applications in image recovery and parametric bilinear estimation.
Deep Dynamical Modeling and Control of Unsteady Fluid Flows
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

The design of flow control systems remains a challenge due to the nonlinear nature of the equations that govern fluid flow. However, recent advances in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) have enabled the simulation of complex fluid flows with high accuracy, opening the possibility of using learning-based approaches to facilitate controller design. We present a method for learning the forced and unforced dynamics of airflow over a cylinder directly from CFD data. The proposed approach, grounded in Koopman theory, is shown to produce stable dynamical models that can predict the time evolution of the cylinder system over extended time horizons. Finally, by performing model predictive control with the learned dynamical models, we are able to find a straightforward, interpretable control law for suppressing vortex shedding in the wake of the cylinder.
Learning Deep Disentangled Embeddings With the F-Statistic Loss
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

Deep-embedding methods aim to discover representations of a domain that make explicit the domain's class structure and thereby support few-shot learning. Disentangling methods aim to make explicit compositional or factorial structure. We combine these two active but independent lines of research and propose a new paradigm suitable for both goals. We propose and evaluate a novel loss function based on the $F$ statistic, which describes the separation of two or more distributions. By ensuring that distinct classes are well separated on a subset of embedding dimensions, we obtain embeddings that are useful for few-shot learning. By not requiring separation on all dimensions, we encourage the discovery of disentangled representations. Our embedding method matches or beats state-of-the-art, as evaluated by performance on recall@$k$ and few-shot learning tasks. Our method also obtains performance superior to a variety of alternatives on disentangling, as evaluated by two key properties of a disentangled representation: modularity and explicitness. The goal of our work is to obtain more interpretable, manipulable, and generalizable deep representations of concepts and categories.
Leveraged volume sampling for linear regression
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

Suppose an $n \times d$ design matrix in a linear regression problem is given, but the response for each point is hidden unless explicitly requested. The goal is to sample only a small number $k \ll n$ of the responses, and then produce a weight vector whose sum of squares loss over all points is at most $1+ε$ times the minimum. When $k$ is very small (e.g., $k=d$), jointly sampling diverse subsets of points is crucial. One such method called volume sampling has a unique and desirable property that the weight vector it produces is an unbiased estimate of the optimum. It is therefore natural to ask if this method offers the optimal unbiased estimate in terms of the number of responses $k$ needed to achieve a $1+ε$ loss approximation. Surprisingly we show that volume sampling can have poor behavior when we require a very accurate approximation -- indeed worse than some i.i.d. sampling techniques whose estimates are biased, such as leverage score sampling. We then develop a new rescaled variant of volume sampling that produces an unbiased estimate which avoids this bad behavior and has at least as good a tail bound as leverage score sampling: sample size $k=O(d\log d + d/ε)$ suffices to guarantee total loss at most $1+ε$ times the minimum with high probability. Thus, we improve on the best previously known sample size for an unbiased estimator, $k=O(d^2/ε)$. Our rescaling procedure leads to a new efficient algorithm for volume sampling which is based on a determinantal rejection sampling technique with potentially broader applications to determinantal point processes. Other contributions include introducing the combinatorics needed for rescaled volume sampling and developing tail bounds for sums of dependent random matrices which arise in the process.
Scalable Robust Matrix Factorization with Nonconvex Loss
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2018
Year: 2018

Robust matrix factorization (RMF), which uses the $\ell_1$-loss, often outperforms standard matrix factorization using the $\ell_2$-loss, particularly when outliers are present. The state-of-the-art RMF solver is the RMF-MM algorithm, which, however, cannot utilize data sparsity. Moreover, sometimes even the (convex) $\ell_1$-loss is not robust enough. In this paper, we propose the use of nonconvex loss to enhance robustness. To address the resultant difficult optimization problem, we use majorization-minimization (MM) optimization and propose a new MM surrogate. To improve scalability, we exploit data sparsity and optimize the surrogate via its dual with the accelerated proximal gradient algorithm. The resultant algorithm has low time and space complexities and is guaranteed to converge to a critical point. Extensive experiments demonstrate its superiority over the state-of-the-art in terms of both accuracy and scalability.