OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Instance Based Approximations to Profile Maximum Likelihood
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper we provide a new efficient algorithm for approximately computing the profile maximum likelihood (PML) distribution, a prominent quantity in symmetric property estimation. We provide an algorithm which matches the previous best known efficient algorithms for computing approximate PML distributions and improves when the number of distinct observed frequencies in the given instance is small. We achieve this result by exploiting new sparsity structure in approximate PML distributions and providing a new matrix rounding algorithm, of independent interest. Leveraging this result, we obtain the first provable computationally efficient implementation of PseudoPML, a general framework for estimating a broad class of symmetric properties. Additionally, we obtain efficient PML-based estimators for distributions with small profile entropy, a natural instance-based complexity measure. Further, we provide a simpler and more practical PseudoPML implementation that matches the best-known theoretical guarantees of such an estimator and evaluate this method empirically.
Factorizable Graph Convolutional Networks
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

Graphs have been widely adopted to denote structural connections between entities. The relations are in many cases heterogeneous, but entangled together and denoted merely as a single edge between a pair of nodes. For example, in a social network graph, users in different latent relationships like friends and colleagues, are usually connected via a bare edge that conceals such intrinsic connections. In this paper, we introduce a novel graph convolutional network (GCN), termed as factorizable graph convolutional network(FactorGCN), that explicitly disentangles such intertwined relations encoded in a graph. FactorGCN takes a simple graph as input, and disentangles it into several factorized graphs, each of which represents a latent and disentangled relation among nodes. The features of the nodes are then aggregated separately in each factorized latent space to produce disentangled features, which further leads to better performances for downstream tasks. We evaluate the proposed FactorGCN both qualitatively and quantitatively on the synthetic and real-world datasets, and demonstrate that it yields truly encouraging results in terms of both disentangling and feature aggregation. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ihollywhy/FactorGCN.PyTorch.
Guided Adversarial Attack for Evaluating and Enhancing Adversarial Defenses
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

Advances in the development of adversarial attacks have been fundamental to the progress of adversarial defense research. Efficient and effective attacks are crucial for reliable evaluation of defenses, and also for developing robust models. Adversarial attacks are often generated by maximizing standard losses such as the cross-entropy loss or maximum-margin loss within a constraint set using Projected Gradient Descent (PGD). In this work, we introduce a relaxation term to the standard loss, that finds more suitable gradient-directions, increases attack efficacy and leads to more efficient adversarial training. We propose Guided Adversarial Margin Attack (GAMA), which utilizes function mapping of the clean image to guide the generation of adversaries, thereby resulting in stronger attacks. We evaluate our attack against multiple defenses and show improved performance when compared to existing attacks. Further, we propose Guided Adversarial Training (GAT), which achieves state-of-the-art performance amongst single-step defenses by utilizing the proposed relaxation term for both attack generation and training.
Noise2Same: Optimizing A Self-Supervised Bound for Image Denoising
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

Self-supervised frameworks that learn denoising models with merely individual noisy images have shown strong capability and promising performance in various image denoising tasks. Existing self-supervised denoising frameworks are mostly built upon the same theoretical foundation, where the denoising models are required to be J-invariant. However, our analyses indicate that the current theory and the J-invariance may lead to denoising models with reduced performance. In this work, we introduce Noise2Same, a novel self-supervised denoising framework. In Noise2Same, a new self-supervised loss is proposed by deriving a self-supervised upper bound of the typical supervised loss. In particular, Noise2Same requires neither J-invariance nor extra information about the noise model and can be used in a wider range of denoising applications. We analyze our proposed Noise2Same both theoretically and experimentally. The experimental results show that our Noise2Same remarkably outperforms previous self-supervised denoising methods in terms of denoising performance and training efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/divelab/Noise2Same.
Early-Learning Regularization Prevents Memorization of Noisy Labels
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

We propose a novel framework to perform classification via deep learning in the presence of noisy annotations. When trained on noisy labels, deep neural networks have been observed to first fit the training data with clean labels during an "early learning" phase, before eventually memorizing the examples with false labels. We prove that early learning and memorization are fundamental phenomena in high-dimensional classification tasks, even in simple linear models, and give a theoretical explanation in this setting. Motivated by these findings, we develop a new technique for noisy classification tasks, which exploits the progress of the early learning phase. In contrast with existing approaches, which use the model output during early learning to detect the examples with clean labels, and either ignore or attempt to correct the false labels, we take a different route and instead capitalize on early learning via regularization. There are two key elements to our approach. First, we leverage semi-supervised learning techniques to produce target probabilities based on the model outputs. Second, we design a regularization term that steers the model towards these targets, implicitly preventing memorization of the false labels. The resulting framework is shown to provide robustness to noisy annotations on several standard benchmarks and real-world datasets, where it achieves results comparable to the state of the art.
Learning Parities with Neural Networks
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

In recent years we see a rapidly growing line of research which shows learnability of various models via common neural network algorithms. Yet, besides a very few outliers, these results show learnability of models that can be learned using linear methods. Namely, such results show that learning neural-networks with gradient-descent is competitive with learning a linear classifier on top of a data-independent representation of the examples. This leaves much to be desired, as neural networks are far more successful than linear methods. Furthermore, on the more conceptual level, linear models don't seem to capture the "deepness" of deep networks. In this paper we make a step towards showing leanability of models that are inherently non-linear. We show that under certain distributions, sparse parities are learnable via gradient decent on depth-two network. On the other hand, under the same distributions, these parities cannot be learned efficiently by linear methods.
Movement Pruning: Adaptive Sparsity by Fine-Tuning
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

Magnitude pruning is a widely used strategy for reducing model size in pure supervised learning; however, it is less effective in the transfer learning regime that has become standard for state-of-the-art natural language processing applications. We propose the use of movement pruning, a simple, deterministic first-order weight pruning method that is more adaptive to pretrained model fine-tuning. We give mathematical foundations to the method and compare it to existing zeroth- and first-order pruning methods. Experiments show that when pruning large pretrained language models, movement pruning shows significant improvements in high-sparsity regimes. When combined with distillation, the approach achieves minimal accuracy loss with down to only 3% of the model parameters.
Sanity-Checking Pruning Methods: Random Tickets can Win the Jackpot
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

Network pruning is a method for reducing test-time computational resource requirements with minimal performance degradation. Conventional wisdom of pruning algorithms suggests that: (1) Pruning methods exploit information from training data to find good subnetworks; (2) The architecture of the pruned network is crucial for good performance. In this paper, we conduct sanity checks for the above beliefs on several recent unstructured pruning methods and surprisingly find that: (1) A set of methods which aims to find good subnetworks of the randomly-initialized network (which we call "initial tickets"), hardly exploits any information from the training data; (2) For the pruned networks obtained by these methods, randomly changing the preserved weights in each layer, while keeping the total number of preserved weights unchanged per layer, does not affect the final performance. These findings inspire us to choose a series of simple \emph{data-independent} prune ratios for each layer, and randomly prune each layer accordingly to get a subnetwork (which we call "random tickets"). Experimental results show that our zero-shot random tickets outperform or attain a similar performance compared to existing "initial tickets". In addition, we identify one existing pruning method that passes our sanity checks. We hybridize the ratios in our random ticket with this method and propose a new method called "hybrid tickets", which achieves further improvement. (Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/JingtongSu/sanity-checking-pruning)
Online Matrix Completion with Side Information
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

We give an online algorithm and prove novel mistake and regret bounds for online binary matrix completion with side information. The mistake bounds we prove are of the form $\tilde{O}(D/γ^2)$. The term $1/γ^2$ is analogous to the usual margin term in SVM (perceptron) bounds. More specifically, if we assume that there is some factorization of the underlying $m \times n$ matrix into $P Q^\intercal$ where the rows of $P$ are interpreted as "classifiers" in $\mathcal{R}^d$ and the rows of $Q$ as "instances" in $\mathcal{R}^d$, then $γ$ is the maximum (normalized) margin over all factorizations $P Q^\intercal$ consistent with the observed matrix. The quasi-dimension term $D$ measures the quality of side information. In the presence of vacuous side information, $D= m+n$. However, if the side information is predictive of the underlying factorization of the matrix, then in an ideal case, $D \in O(k + \ell)$ where $k$ is the number of distinct row factors and $\ell$ is the number of distinct column factors. We additionally provide a generalization of our algorithm to the inductive setting. In this setting, we provide an example where the side information is not directly specified in advance. For this example, the quasi-dimension $D$ is now bounded by $O(k^2 + \ell^2)$.
Position-based Scaled Gradient for Model Quantization and Pruning
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

We propose the position-based scaled gradient (PSG) that scales the gradient depending on the position of a weight vector to make it more compression-friendly. First, we theoretically show that applying PSG to the standard gradient descent (GD), which is called PSGD, is equivalent to the GD in the warped weight space, a space made by warping the original weight space via an appropriately designed invertible function. Second, we empirically show that PSG acting as a regularizer to a weight vector is favorable for model compression domains such as quantization and pruning. PSG reduces the gap between the weight distributions of a full-precision model and its compressed counterpart. This enables the versatile deployment of a model either as an uncompressed mode or as a compressed mode depending on the availability of resources. The experimental results on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed PSG in both domains of pruning and quantization even for extremely low bits. The code is released in Github.
Online Learning with Primary and Secondary Losses
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

We study the problem of online learning with primary and secondary losses. For example, a recruiter making decisions of which job applicants to hire might weigh false positives and false negatives equally (the primary loss) but the applicants might weigh false negatives much higher (the secondary loss). We consider the following question: Can we combine "expert advice" to achieve low regret with respect to the primary loss, while at the same time performing {\em not much worse than the worst expert} with respect to the secondary loss? Unfortunately, we show that this goal is unachievable without any bounded variance assumption on the secondary loss. More generally, we consider the goal of minimizing the regret with respect to the primary loss and bounding the secondary loss by a linear threshold. On the positive side, we show that running any switching-limited algorithm can achieve this goal if all experts satisfy the assumption that the secondary loss does not exceed the linear threshold by $o(T)$ for any time interval. If not all experts satisfy this assumption, our algorithms can achieve this goal given access to some external oracles which determine when to deactivate and reactivate experts.
The Complexity of Adversarially Robust Proper Learning of Halfspaces with Agnostic Noise
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

We study the computational complexity of adversarially robust proper learning of halfspaces in the distribution-independent agnostic PAC model, with a focus on $L_p$ perturbations. We give a computationally efficient learning algorithm and a nearly matching computational hardness result for this problem. An interesting implication of our findings is that the $L_{\infty}$ perturbations case is provably computationally harder than the case $2 \leq p < \infty$.
Adaptive Online Estimation of Piecewise Polynomial Trends
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

We consider the framework of non-stationary stochastic optimization [Besbes et al, 2015] with squared error losses and noisy gradient feedback where the dynamic regret of an online learner against a time varying comparator sequence is studied. Motivated from the theory of non-parametric regression, we introduce a new variational constraint that enforces the comparator sequence to belong to a discrete $k^{th}$ order Total Variation ball of radius $C_n$. This variational constraint models comparators that have piece-wise polynomial structure which has many relevant practical applications [Tibshirani, 2014]. By establishing connections to the theory of wavelet based non-parametric regression, we design a polynomial time algorithm that achieves the nearly optimal dynamic regret of $\tilde{O}(n^{\frac{1}{2k+3}}C_n^{\frac{2}{2k+3}})$. The proposed policy is adaptive to the unknown radius $C_n$. Further, we show that the same policy is minimax optimal for several other non-parametric families of interest.
RNNPool: Efficient Non-linear Pooling for RAM Constrained Inference
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

Standard Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) designed for computer vision tasks tend to have large intermediate activation maps. These require large working memory and are thus unsuitable for deployment on resource-constrained devices typically used for inference on the edge. Aggressively downsampling the images via pooling or strided convolutions can address the problem but leads to a significant decrease in accuracy due to gross aggregation of the feature map by standard pooling operators. In this paper, we introduce RNNPool, a novel pooling operator based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), that efficiently aggregates features over large patches of an image and rapidly downsamples activation maps. Empirical evaluation indicates that an RNNPool layer can effectively replace multiple blocks in a variety of architectures such as MobileNets, DenseNet when applied to standard vision tasks like image classification and face detection. That is, RNNPool can significantly decrease computational complexity and peak memory usage for inference while retaining comparable accuracy. We use RNNPool with the standard S3FD architecture to construct a face detection method that achieves state-of-the-art MAP for tiny ARM Cortex-M4 class microcontrollers with under 256 KB of RAM. Code is released at https://github.com/Microsoft/EdgeML.
3D Multi-bodies: Fitting Sets of Plausible 3D Human Models to Ambiguous Image Data
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

We consider the problem of obtaining dense 3D reconstructions of humans from single and partially occluded views. In such cases, the visual evidence is usually insufficient to identify a 3D reconstruction uniquely, so we aim at recovering several plausible reconstructions compatible with the input data. We suggest that ambiguities can be modelled more effectively by parametrizing the possible body shapes and poses via a suitable 3D model, such as SMPL for humans. We propose to learn a multi-hypothesis neural network regressor using a best-of-M loss, where each of the M hypotheses is constrained to lie on a manifold of plausible human poses by means of a generative model. We show that our method outperforms alternative approaches in ambiguous pose recovery on standard benchmarks for 3D humans, and in heavily occluded versions of these benchmarks.
Auto-Panoptic: Cooperative Multi-Component Architecture Search for Panoptic Segmentation
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

Panoptic segmentation is posed as a new popular test-bed for the state-of-the-art holistic scene understanding methods with the requirement of simultaneously segmenting both foreground things and background stuff. The state-of-the-art panoptic segmentation network exhibits high structural complexity in different network components, i.e. backbone, proposal-based foreground branch, segmentation-based background branch, and feature fusion module across branches, which heavily relies on expert knowledge and tedious trials. In this work, we propose an efficient, cooperative and highly automated framework to simultaneously search for all main components including backbone, segmentation branches, and feature fusion module in a unified panoptic segmentation pipeline based on the prevailing one-shot Network Architecture Search (NAS) paradigm. Notably, we extend the common single-task NAS into the multi-component scenario by taking the advantage of the newly proposed intra-modular search space and problem-oriented inter-modular search space, which helps us to obtain an optimal network architecture that not only performs well in both instance segmentation and semantic segmentation tasks but also be aware of the reciprocal relations between foreground things and background stuff classes. To relieve the vast computation burden incurred by applying NAS to complicated network architectures, we present a novel path-priority greedy search policy to find a robust, transferrable architecture with significantly reduced searching overhead. Our searched architecture, namely Auto-Panoptic, achieves the new state-of-the-art on the challenging COCO and ADE20K benchmarks. Moreover, extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of path-priority policy and transferability of Auto-Panoptic across different datasets. Codes and models are available at: https://github.com/Jacobew/AutoPanoptic.
Stochastic Recursive Gradient Descent Ascent for Stochastic Nonconvex-Strongly-Concave Minimax Problems
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

We consider nonconvex-concave minimax optimization problems of the form $\min_{\bf x}\max_{\bf y\in{\mathcal Y}} f({\bf x},{\bf y})$, where $f$ is strongly-concave in $\bf y$ but possibly nonconvex in $\bf x$ and ${\mathcal Y}$ is a convex and compact set. We focus on the stochastic setting, where we can only access an unbiased stochastic gradient estimate of $f$ at each iteration. This formulation includes many machine learning applications as special cases such as robust optimization and adversary training. We are interested in finding an ${\mathcal O}(\varepsilon)$-stationary point of the function $Φ(\cdot)=\max_{\bf y\in{\mathcal Y}} f(\cdot, {\bf y})$. The most popular algorithm to solve this problem is stochastic gradient decent ascent, which requires $\mathcal O(κ^3\varepsilon^{-4})$ stochastic gradient evaluations, where $κ$ is the condition number. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Stochastic Recursive gradiEnt Descent Ascent (SREDA), which estimates gradients more efficiently using variance reduction. This method achieves the best known stochastic gradient complexity of ${\mathcal O}(κ^3\varepsilon^{-3})$, and its dependency on $\varepsilon$ is optimal for this problem.
Explaining Naive Bayes and Other Linear Classifiers with Polynomial Time and Delay
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

Recent work proposed the computation of so-called PI-explanations of Naive Bayes Classifiers (NBCs). PI-explanations are subset-minimal sets of feature-value pairs that are sufficient for the prediction, and have been computed with state-of-the-art exact algorithms that are worst-case exponential in time and space. In contrast, we show that the computation of one PI-explanation for an NBC can be achieved in log-linear time, and that the same result also applies to the more general class of linear classifiers. Furthermore, we show that the enumeration of PI-explanations can be obtained with polynomial delay. Experimental results demonstrate the performance gains of the new algorithms when compared with earlier work. The experimental results also investigate ways to measure the quality of heuristic explanations
Unsupervised Translation of Programming Languages
Venue: Conference NeurIPS 2020
Year: 2020

A transcompiler, also known as source-to-source translator, is a system that converts source code from a high-level programming language (such as C++ or Python) to another. Transcompilers are primarily used for interoperability, and to port codebases written in an obsolete or deprecated language (e.g. COBOL, Python 2) to a modern one. They typically rely on handcrafted rewrite rules, applied to the source code abstract syntax tree. Unfortunately, the resulting translations often lack readability, fail to respect the target language conventions, and require manual modifications in order to work properly. The overall translation process is timeconsuming and requires expertise in both the source and target languages, making code-translation projects expensive. Although neural models significantly outperform their rule-based counterparts in the context of natural language translation, their applications to transcompilation have been limited due to the scarcity of parallel data in this domain. In this paper, we propose to leverage recent approaches in unsupervised machine translation to train a fully unsupervised neural transcompiler. We train our model on source code from open source GitHub projects, and show that it can translate functions between C++, Java, and Python with high accuracy. Our method relies exclusively on monolingual source code, requires no expertise in the source or target languages, and can easily be generalized to other programming languages. We also build and release a test set composed of 852 parallel functions, along with unit tests to check the correctness of translations. We show that our model outperforms rule-based commercial baselines by a significant margin.