OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Trust Region Policy Optimisation in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Trust region methods rigorously enabled reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn monotonically improving policies, leading to superior performance on a variety of tasks. Unfortunately, when it comes to multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), the property of monotonic improvement may not simply apply; this is because agents, even in cooperative games, could have conflicting directions of policy updates. As a result, achieving a guaranteed improvement on the joint policy where each agent acts individually remains an open challenge. In this paper, we extend the theory of trust region learning to MARL. Central to our findings are the multi-agent advantage decomposition lemma and the sequential policy update scheme. Based on these, we develop Heterogeneous-Agent Trust Region Policy Optimisation (HATPRO) and Heterogeneous-Agent Proximal Policy Optimisation (HAPPO) algorithms. Unlike many existing MARL algorithms, HATRPO/HAPPO do not need agents to share parameters, nor do they need any restrictive assumptions on decomposibility of the joint value function. Most importantly, we justify in theory the monotonic improvement property of HATRPO/HAPPO. We evaluate the proposed methods on a series of Multi-Agent MuJoCo and StarCraftII tasks. Results show that HATRPO and HAPPO significantly outperform strong baselines such as IPPO, MAPPO and MADDPG on all tested tasks, therefore establishing a new state of the art.
Policy Smoothing for Provably Robust Reinforcement Learning
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

The study of provable adversarial robustness for deep neural networks (DNNs) has mainly focused on static supervised learning tasks such as image classification. However, DNNs have been used extensively in real-world adaptive tasks such as reinforcement learning (RL), making such systems vulnerable to adversarial attacks as well. Prior works in provable robustness in RL seek to certify the behaviour of the victim policy at every time-step against a non-adaptive adversary using methods developed for the static setting. But in the real world, an RL adversary can infer the defense strategy used by the victim agent by observing the states, actions, etc., from previous time-steps and adapt itself to produce stronger attacks in future steps. We present an efficient procedure, designed specifically to defend against an adaptive RL adversary, that can directly certify the total reward without requiring the policy to be robust at each time-step. Our main theoretical contribution is to prove an adaptive version of the Neyman-Pearson Lemma -- a key lemma for smoothing-based certificates -- where the adversarial perturbation at a particular time can be a stochastic function of current and previous observations and states as well as previous actions. Building on this result, we propose policy smoothing where the agent adds a Gaussian noise to its observation at each time-step before passing it through the policy function. Our robustness certificates guarantee that the final total reward obtained by policy smoothing remains above a certain threshold, even though the actions at intermediate time-steps may change under the attack. Our experiments on various environments like Cartpole, Pong, Freeway and Mountain Car show that our method can yield meaningful robustness guarantees in practice.
Data-Driven Offline Optimization for Architecting Hardware Accelerators
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Industry has gradually moved towards application-specific hardware accelerators in order to attain higher efficiency. While such a paradigm shift is already starting to show promising results, designers need to spend considerable manual effort and perform a large number of time-consuming simulations to find accelerators that can accelerate multiple target applications while obeying design constraints. Moreover, such a "simulation-driven" approach must be re-run from scratch every time the set of target applications or design constraints change. An alternative paradigm is to use a "data-driven", offline approach that utilizes logged simulation data, to architect hardware accelerators, without needing any form of simulations. Such an approach not only alleviates the need to run time-consuming simulation, but also enables data reuse and applies even when set of target applications changes. In this paper, we develop such a data-driven offline optimization method for designing hardware accelerators, dubbed PRIME, that enjoys all of these properties. Our approach learns a conservative, robust estimate of the desired cost function, utilizes infeasible points, and optimizes the design against this estimate without any additional simulator queries during optimization. PRIME architects accelerators -- tailored towards both single and multiple applications -- improving performance upon state-of-the-art simulation-driven methods by about 1.54x and 1.20x, while considerably reducing the required total simulation time by 93% and 99%, respectively. In addition, PRIME also architects effective accelerators for unseen applications in a zero-shot setting, outperforming simulation-based methods by 1.26x.
The Boltzmann Policy Distribution: Accounting for Systematic Suboptimality in Human Models
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Models of human behavior for prediction and collaboration tend to fall into two categories: ones that learn from large amounts of data via imitation learning, and ones that assume human behavior to be noisily-optimal for some reward function. The former are very useful, but only when it is possible to gather a lot of human data in the target environment and distribution. The advantage of the latter type, which includes Boltzmann rationality, is the ability to make accurate predictions in new environments without extensive data when humans are actually close to optimal. However, these models fail when humans exhibit systematic suboptimality, i.e. when their deviations from optimal behavior are not independent, but instead consistent over time. Our key insight is that systematic suboptimality can be modeled by predicting policies, which couple action choices over time, instead of trajectories. We introduce the Boltzmann policy distribution (BPD), which serves as a prior over human policies and adapts via Bayesian inference to capture systematic deviations by observing human actions during a single episode. The BPD is difficult to compute and represent because policies lie in a high-dimensional continuous space, but we leverage tools from generative and sequence models to enable efficient sampling and inference. We show that the BPD enables prediction of human behavior and human-AI collaboration equally as well as imitation learning-based human models while using far less data.
How many degrees of freedom do we need to train deep networks: a loss landscape perspective
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

A variety of recent works, spanning pruning, lottery tickets, and training within random subspaces, have shown that deep neural networks can be trained using far fewer degrees of freedom than the total number of parameters. We analyze this phenomenon for random subspaces by first examining the success probability of hitting a training loss sub-level set when training within a random subspace of a given training dimensionality. We find a sharp phase transition in the success probability from $0$ to $1$ as the training dimension surpasses a threshold. This threshold training dimension increases as the desired final loss decreases, but decreases as the initial loss decreases. We then theoretically explain the origin of this phase transition, and its dependence on initialization and final desired loss, in terms of properties of the high-dimensional geometry of the loss landscape. In particular, we show via Gordon's escape theorem, that the training dimension plus the Gaussian width of the desired loss sub-level set, projected onto a unit sphere surrounding the initialization, must exceed the total number of parameters for the success probability to be large. In several architectures and datasets, we measure the threshold training dimension as a function of initialization and demonstrate that it is a small fraction of the total parameters, implying by our theory that successful training with so few dimensions is possible precisely because the Gaussian width of low loss sub-level sets is very large. Moreover, we compare this threshold training dimension to more sophisticated ways of reducing training degrees of freedom, including lottery tickets as well as a new, analogous method: lottery subspaces. Code is available at https://github.com/ganguli-lab/degrees-of-freedom.
Evaluating Distributional Distortion in Neural Language Modeling
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

A fundamental characteristic of natural language is the high rate at which speakers produce novel expressions. Because of this novelty, a heavy-tail of rare events accounts for a significant amount of the total probability mass of distributions in language (Baayen, 2001). Standard language modeling metrics such as perplexity quantify the performance of language models (LM) in aggregate. As a result, we have relatively little understanding of whether neural LMs accurately estimate the probability of sequences in this heavy-tail of rare events. To address this gap, we develop a controlled evaluation scheme which uses generative models trained on natural data as artificial languages from which we can exactly compute sequence probabilities. Training LMs on generations from these artificial languages, we compare the sequence-level probability estimates given by LMs to the true probabilities in the target language. Our experiments reveal that LSTM and Transformer language models (i) systematically underestimate the probability of sequences drawn from the target language, and (ii) do so more severely for less-probable sequences. Investigating where this probability mass went, (iii) we find that LMs tend to overestimate the probability of ill formed (perturbed) sequences. In addition, we find that this underestimation behaviour (iv) is weakened, but not eliminated by greater amounts of training data, and (v) is exacerbated for target distributions with lower entropy.
Training invariances and the low-rank phenomenon: beyond linear networks
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

The implicit bias induced by the training of neural networks has become a topic of rigorous study. In the limit of gradient flow and gradient descent with appropriate step size, it has been shown that when one trains a deep linear network with logistic or exponential loss on linearly separable data, the weights converge to rank-1 matrices. In this paper, we extend this theoretical result to the last few linear layers of the much wider class of nonlinear ReLU-activated feedforward networks containing fully-connected layers and skip connections. Similar to the linear case, the proof relies on specific local training invariances, sometimes referred to as alignment, which we show to hold for submatrices where neurons are stably-activated in all training examples, and it reflects empirical results in the literature. We also show this is not true in general for the full matrix of ReLU fully-connected layers. Our proof relies on a specific decomposition of the network into a multilinear function and another ReLU network whose weights are constant under a certain parameter directional convergence.
Learning to Remember Patterns: Pattern Matching Memory Networks for Traffic Forecasting
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Traffic forecasting is a challenging problem due to complex road networks and sudden speed changes caused by various events on roads. A number of models have been proposed to solve this challenging problem with a focus on learning spatio-temporal dependencies of roads. In this work, we propose a new perspective of converting the forecasting problem into a pattern matching task, assuming that large data can be represented by a set of patterns. To evaluate the validness of the new perspective, we design a novel traffic forecasting model, called Pattern-Matching Memory Networks (PM-MemNet), which learns to match input data to the representative patterns with a key-value memory structure. We first extract and cluster representative traffic patterns, which serve as keys in the memory. Then via matching the extracted keys and inputs, PM-MemNet acquires necessary information of existing traffic patterns from the memory and uses it for forecasting. To model spatio-temporal correlation of traffic, we proposed novel memory architecture GCMem, which integrates attention and graph convolution for memory enhancement. The experiment results indicate that PM-MemNet is more accurate than state-of-the-art models, such as Graph WaveNet with higher responsiveness. We also present a qualitative analysis result, describing how PM-MemNet works and achieves its higher accuracy when road speed rapidly changes.
Sequential Reptile: Inter-Task Gradient Alignment for Multilingual Learning
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Multilingual models jointly pretrained on multiple languages have achieved remarkable performance on various multilingual downstream tasks. Moreover, models finetuned on a single monolingual downstream task have shown to generalize to unseen languages. In this paper, we first show that it is crucial for those tasks to align gradients between them in order to maximize knowledge transfer while minimizing negative transfer. Despite its importance, the existing methods for gradient alignment either have a completely different purpose, ignore inter-task alignment, or aim to solve continual learning problems in rather inefficient ways. As a result of the misaligned gradients between tasks, the model suffers from severe negative transfer in the form of catastrophic forgetting of the knowledge acquired from the pretraining. To overcome the limitations, we propose a simple yet effective method that can efficiently align gradients between tasks. Specifically, we perform each inner-optimization by sequentially sampling batches from all the tasks, followed by a Reptile outer update. Thanks to the gradients aligned between tasks by our method, the model becomes less vulnerable to negative transfer and catastrophic forgetting. We extensively validate our method on various multi-task learning and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer tasks, where our method largely outperforms all the relevant baselines we consider.
Online Hyperparameter Meta-Learning with Hypergradient Distillation
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Many gradient-based meta-learning methods assume a set of parameters that do not participate in inner-optimization, which can be considered as hyperparameters. Although such hyperparameters can be optimized using the existing gradient-based hyperparameter optimization (HO) methods, they suffer from the following issues. Unrolled differentiation methods do not scale well to high-dimensional hyperparameters or horizon length, Implicit Function Theorem (IFT) based methods are restrictive for online optimization, and short horizon approximations suffer from short horizon bias. In this work, we propose a novel HO method that can overcome these limitations, by approximating the second-order term with knowledge distillation. Specifically, we parameterize a single Jacobian-vector product (JVP) for each HO step and minimize the distance from the true second-order term. Our method allows online optimization and also is scalable to the hyperparameter dimension and the horizon length. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on two different meta-learning methods and three benchmark datasets.
Language-biased image classification: evaluation based on semantic representations
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Humans show language-biased image recognition for a word-embedded image, known as picture-word interference. Such interference depends on hierarchical semantic categories and reflects that human language processing highly interacts with visual processing. Similar to humans, recent artificial models jointly trained on texts and images, e.g., OpenAI CLIP, show language-biased image classification. Exploring whether the bias leads to interference similar to those observed in humans can contribute to understanding how much the model acquires hierarchical semantic representations from joint learning of language and vision. The present study introduces methodological tools from the cognitive science literature to assess the biases of artificial models. Specifically, we introduce a benchmark task to test whether words superimposed on images can distort the image classification across different category levels and, if it can, whether the perturbation is due to the shared semantic representation between language and vision. Our dataset is a set of word-embedded images and consists of a mixture of natural image datasets and hierarchical word labels with superordinate/basic category levels. Using this benchmark test, we evaluate the CLIP model. We show that presenting words distorts the image classification by the model across different category levels, but the effect does not depend on the semantic relationship between images and embedded words. This suggests that the semantic word representation in the CLIP visual processing is not shared with the image representation, although the word representation strongly dominates for word-embedded images.
In a Nutshell, the Human Asked for This: Latent Goals for Following Temporal Specifications
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

We address the problem of building agents whose goal is to learn to execute out-of distribution (OOD) multi-task instructions expressed in temporal logic (TL) by using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Recent works provided evidence that the agent's neural architecture is a key feature when DRL agents are learning to solve OOD tasks in TL. Yet, the studies on this topic are still in their infancy. In this work, we propose a new deep learning configuration with inductive biases that lead agents to generate latent representations of their current goal, yielding a stronger generalization performance. We use these latent-goal networks within a neuro-symbolic framework that executes multi-task formally-defined instructions and contrast the performance of the proposed neural networks against employing different state-of-the-art (SOTA) architectures when generalizing to unseen instructions in OOD environments.
The Inductive Bias of In-Context Learning: Rethinking Pretraining Example Design
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Pretraining Neural Language Models (NLMs) over a large corpus involves chunking the text into training examples, which are contiguous text segments of sizes processable by the neural architecture. We highlight a bias introduced by this common practice: we prove that the pretrained NLM can model much stronger dependencies between text segments that appeared in the same training example, than it can between text segments that appeared in different training examples. This intuitive result has a twofold role. First, it formalizes the motivation behind a broad line of recent successful NLM training heuristics, proposed for the pretraining and fine-tuning stages, which do not necessarily appear related at first glance. Second, our result clearly indicates further improvements to be made in NLM pretraining for the benefit of Natural Language Understanding tasks. As an example, we propose "kNN-Pretraining": we show that including semantically related non-neighboring sentences in the same pretraining example yields improved sentence representations and open domain question answering abilities. This theoretically motivated degree of freedom for pretraining example design indicates new training schemes for self-improving representations.
R4D: Utilizing Reference Objects for Long-Range Distance Estimation
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Estimating the distance of objects is a safety-critical task for autonomous driving. Focusing on short-range objects, existing methods and datasets neglect the equally important long-range objects. In this paper, we introduce a challenging and under-explored task, which we refer to as Long-Range Distance Estimation, as well as two datasets to validate new methods developed for this task. We then proposeR4D, the first framework to accurately estimate the distance of long-range objects by using references with known distances in the scene. Drawing inspiration from human perception, R4D builds a graph by connecting a target object to all references. An edge in the graph encodes the relative distance information between a pair of target and reference objects. An attention module is then used to weigh the importance of reference objects and combine them into one target object distance prediction. Experiments on the two proposed datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of R4D by showing significant improvements compared to existing baselines. We are looking to make the proposed dataset, Waymo OpenDataset - Long-Range Labels, available publicly at waymo.com/open/download.
Learning Transferable Reward for Query Object Localization with Policy Adaptation
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a reinforcement learning based approach to query object localization, for which an agent is trained to localize objects of interest specified by a small exemplary set. We learn a transferable reward signal formulated using the exemplary set by ordinal metric learning. Our proposed method enables test-time policy adaptation to new environments where the reward signals are not readily available, and outperforms fine-tuning approaches that are limited to annotated images. In addition, the transferable reward allows repurposing the trained agent from one specific class to another class. Experiments on corrupted MNIST, CU-Birds, and COCO datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Supervision Exists Everywhere: A Data Efficient Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training Paradigm
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Recently, large-scale Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has attracted unprecedented attention for its impressive zero-shot recognition ability and excellent transferability to downstream tasks. However, CLIP is quite data-hungry and requires 400M image-text pairs for pre-training, thereby restricting its adoption. This work proposes a novel training paradigm, Data efficient CLIP (DeCLIP), to alleviate this limitation. We demonstrate that by carefully utilizing the widespread supervision among the image-text pairs, our De-CLIP can learn generic visual features more efficiently. Instead of using the single image-text contrastive supervision, we fully exploit data potential through the use of (1) self-supervision within each modality; (2) multi-view supervision across modalities; (3) nearest-neighbor supervision from other similar pairs. Benefiting from intrinsic supervision, our DeCLIP-ResNet50 can achieve 60.4% zero-shot top1 accuracy on ImageNet, which is 0.8% above the CLIP-ResNet50 while using 7.1 x fewer data. Our DeCLIP-ResNet50 outperforms its counterpart in 8 out of 11 visual datasets when transferred to downstream tasks. Moreover, Scaling up the model and computing also works well in our framework.Our code, dataset and models are released at: https://github.com/Sense-GVT/DeCLIP