OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Iterative energy-based projection on a normal data manifold for anomaly localization
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

Autoencoder reconstructions are widely used for the task of unsupervised anomaly localization. Indeed, an autoencoder trained on normal data is expected to only be able to reconstruct normal features of the data, allowing the segmentation of anomalous pixels in an image via a simple comparison between the image and its autoencoder reconstruction. In practice however, local defects added to a normal image can deteriorate the whole reconstruction, making this segmentation challenging. To tackle the issue, we propose in this paper a new approach for projecting anomalous data on a autoencoder-learned normal data manifold, by using gradient descent on an energy derived from the autoencoder's loss function. This energy can be augmented with regularization terms that model priors on what constitutes the user-defined optimal projection. By iteratively updating the input of the autoencoder, we bypass the loss of high-frequency information caused by the autoencoder bottleneck. This allows to produce images of higher quality than classic reconstructions. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on various anomaly localization datasets. It also shows promising results at an inpainting task on the CelebA dataset.
Residual Energy-Based Models for Text Generation
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

Text generation is ubiquitous in many NLP tasks, from summarization, to dialogue and machine translation. The dominant parametric approach is based on locally normalized models which predict one word at a time. While these work remarkably well, they are plagued by exposure bias due to the greedy nature of the generation process. In this work, we investigate un-normalized energy-based models (EBMs) which operate not at the token but at the sequence level. In order to make training tractable, we first work in the residual of a pretrained locally normalized language model and second we train using noise contrastive estimation. Furthermore, since the EBM works at the sequence level, we can leverage pretrained bi-directional contextual representations, such as BERT and RoBERTa. Our experiments on two large language modeling datasets show that residual EBMs yield lower perplexity compared to locally normalized baselines. Moreover, generation via importance sampling is very efficient and of higher quality than the baseline models according to human evaluation.
GraphZoom: A Multi-level Spectral Approach for Accurate and Scalable Graph Embedding
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

Graph embedding techniques have been increasingly deployed in a multitude of different applications that involve learning on non-Euclidean data. However, existing graph embedding models either fail to incorporate node attribute information during training or suffer from node attribute noise, which compromises the accuracy. Moreover, very few of them scale to large graphs due to their high computational complexity and memory usage. In this paper we propose GraphZoom, a multi-level framework for improving both accuracy and scalability of unsupervised graph embedding algorithms. GraphZoom first performs graph fusion to generate a new graph that effectively encodes the topology of the original graph and the node attribute information. This fused graph is then repeatedly coarsened into much smaller graphs by merging nodes with high spectral similarities. GraphZoom allows any existing embedding methods to be applied to the coarsened graph, before it progressively refine the embeddings obtained at the coarsest level to increasingly finer graphs. We have evaluated our approach on a number of popular graph datasets for both transductive and inductive tasks. Our experiments show that GraphZoom can substantially increase the classification accuracy and significantly accelerate the entire graph embedding process by up to 40.8x, when compared to the state-of-the-art unsupervised embedding methods.
A Baseline for Few-Shot Image Classification
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

Fine-tuning a deep network trained with the standard cross-entropy loss is a strong baseline for few-shot learning. When fine-tuned transductively, this outperforms the current state-of-the-art on standard datasets such as Mini-ImageNet, Tiered-ImageNet, CIFAR-FS and FC-100 with the same hyper-parameters. The simplicity of this approach enables us to demonstrate the first few-shot learning results on the ImageNet-21k dataset. We find that using a large number of meta-training classes results in high few-shot accuracies even for a large number of few-shot classes. We do not advocate our approach as the solution for few-shot learning, but simply use the results to highlight limitations of current benchmarks and few-shot protocols. We perform extensive studies on benchmark datasets to propose a metric that quantifies the "hardness" of a few-shot episode. This metric can be used to report the performance of few-shot algorithms in a more systematic way.
Differentiable Reasoning over a Virtual Knowledge Base
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

We consider the task of answering complex multi-hop questions using a corpus as a virtual knowledge base (KB). In particular, we describe a neural module, DrKIT, that traverses textual data like a KB, softly following paths of relations between mentions of entities in the corpus. At each step the module uses a combination of sparse-matrix TFIDF indices and a maximum inner product search (MIPS) on a special index of contextual representations of the mentions. This module is differentiable, so the full system can be trained end-to-end using gradient based methods, starting from natural language inputs. We also describe a pretraining scheme for the contextual representation encoder by generating hard negative examples using existing knowledge bases. We show that DrKIT improves accuracy by 9 points on 3-hop questions in the MetaQA dataset, cutting the gap between text-based and KB-based state-of-the-art by 70%. On HotpotQA, DrKIT leads to a 10% improvement over a BERT-based re-ranking approach to retrieving the relevant passages required to answer a question. DrKIT is also very efficient, processing 10-100x more queries per second than existing multi-hop systems.
MMA Training: Direct Input Space Margin Maximization through Adversarial Training
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

We study adversarial robustness of neural networks from a margin maximization perspective, where margins are defined as the distances from inputs to a classifier's decision boundary. Our study shows that maximizing margins can be achieved by minimizing the adversarial loss on the decision boundary at the "shortest successful perturbation", demonstrating a close connection between adversarial losses and the margins. We propose Max-Margin Adversarial (MMA) training to directly maximize the margins to achieve adversarial robustness. Instead of adversarial training with a fixed $ε$, MMA offers an improvement by enabling adaptive selection of the "correct" $ε$ as the margin individually for each datapoint. In addition, we rigorously analyze adversarial training with the perspective of margin maximization, and provide an alternative interpretation for adversarial training, maximizing either a lower or an upper bound of the margins. Our experiments empirically confirm our theory and demonstrate MMA training's efficacy on the MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets w.r.t. $\ell_\infty$ and $\ell_2$ robustness. Code and models are available at https://github.com/BorealisAI/mma_training.
NAS-Bench-201: Extending the Scope of Reproducible Neural Architecture Search
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

Neural architecture search (NAS) has achieved breakthrough success in a great number of applications in the past few years. It could be time to take a step back and analyze the good and bad aspects in the field of NAS. A variety of algorithms search architectures under different search space. These searched architectures are trained using different setups, e.g., hyper-parameters, data augmentation, regularization. This raises a comparability problem when comparing the performance of various NAS algorithms. NAS-Bench-101 has shown success to alleviate this problem. In this work, we propose an extension to NAS-Bench-101: NAS-Bench-201 with a different search space, results on multiple datasets, and more diagnostic information. NAS-Bench-201 has a fixed search space and provides a unified benchmark for almost any up-to-date NAS algorithms. The design of our search space is inspired from the one used in the most popular cell-based searching algorithms, where a cell is represented as a DAG. Each edge here is associated with an operation selected from a predefined operation set. For it to be applicable for all NAS algorithms, the search space defined in NAS-Bench-201 includes all possible architectures generated by 4 nodes and 5 associated operation options, which results in 15,625 candidates in total. The training log and the performance for each architecture candidate are provided for three datasets. This allows researchers to avoid unnecessary repetitive training for selected candidate and focus solely on the search algorithm itself. The training time saved for every candidate also largely improves the efficiency of many methods. We provide additional diagnostic information such as fine-grained loss and accuracy, which can give inspirations to new designs of NAS algorithms. In further support, we have analyzed it from many aspects and benchmarked 10 recent NAS algorithms.
Energy-based models for atomic-resolution protein conformations
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

We propose an energy-based model (EBM) of protein conformations that operates at atomic scale. The model is trained solely on crystallized protein data. By contrast, existing approaches for scoring conformations use energy functions that incorporate knowledge of physical principles and features that are the complex product of several decades of research and tuning. To evaluate the model, we benchmark on the rotamer recovery task, the problem of predicting the conformation of a side chain from its context within a protein structure, which has been used to evaluate energy functions for protein design. The model achieves performance close to that of the Rosetta energy function, a state-of-the-art method widely used in protein structure prediction and design. An investigation of the model's outputs and hidden representations finds that it captures physicochemical properties relevant to protein energy.
Query-efficient Meta Attack to Deep Neural Networks
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

Black-box attack methods aim to infer suitable attack patterns to targeted DNN models by only using output feedback of the models and the corresponding input queries. However, due to lack of prior and inefficiency in leveraging the query and feedback information, existing methods are mostly query-intensive for obtaining effective attack patterns. In this work, we propose a meta attack approach that is capable of attacking a targeted model with much fewer queries. Its high queryefficiency stems from effective utilization of meta learning approaches in learning generalizable prior abstraction from the previously observed attack patterns and exploiting such prior to help infer attack patterns from only a few queries and outputs. Extensive experiments on MNIST, CIFAR10 and tiny-Imagenet demonstrate that our meta-attack method can remarkably reduce the number of model queries without sacrificing the attack performance. Besides, the obtained meta attacker is not restricted to a particular model but can be used easily with a fast adaptive ability to attack a variety of models.The code of our work is available at https://github.com/dydjw9/MetaAttack_ICLR2020/.
Unsupervised Model Selection for Variational Disentangled Representation Learning
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

Disentangled representations have recently been shown to improve fairness, data efficiency and generalisation in simple supervised and reinforcement learning tasks. To extend the benefits of disentangled representations to more complex domains and practical applications, it is important to enable hyperparameter tuning and model selection of existing unsupervised approaches without requiring access to ground truth attribute labels, which are not available for most datasets. This paper addresses this problem by introducing a simple yet robust and reliable method for unsupervised disentangled model selection. Our approach, Unsupervised Disentanglement Ranking (UDR), leverages the recent theoretical results that explain why variational autoencoders disentangle (Rolinek et al, 2019), to quantify the quality of disentanglement by performing pairwise comparisons between trained model representations. We show that our approach performs comparably to the existing supervised alternatives across 5,400 models from six state of the art unsupervised disentangled representation learning model classes. Furthermore, we show that the ranking produced by our approach correlates well with the final task performance on two different domains.
Variance Reduction With Sparse Gradients
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

Variance reduction methods such as SVRG and SpiderBoost use a mixture of large and small batch gradients to reduce the variance of stochastic gradients. Compared to SGD, these methods require at least double the number of operations per update to model parameters. To reduce the computational cost of these methods, we introduce a new sparsity operator: The random-top-k operator. Our operator reduces computational complexity by estimating gradient sparsity exhibited in a variety of applications by combining the top-k operator and the randomized coordinate descent operator. With this operator, large batch gradients offer an extra benefit beyond variance reduction: A reliable estimate of gradient sparsity. Theoretically, our algorithm is at least as good as the best algorithm (SpiderBoost), and further excels in performance whenever the random-top-k operator captures gradient sparsity. Empirically, our algorithm consistently outperforms SpiderBoost using various models on various tasks including image classification, natural language processing, and sparse matrix factorization. We also provide empirical evidence to support the intuition behind our algorithm via a simple gradient entropy computation, which serves to quantify gradient sparsity at every iteration.
SEED RL: Scalable and Efficient Deep-RL with Accelerated Central Inference
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

We present a modern scalable reinforcement learning agent called SEED (Scalable, Efficient Deep-RL). By effectively utilizing modern accelerators, we show that it is not only possible to train on millions of frames per second but also to lower the cost of experiments compared to current methods. We achieve this with a simple architecture that features centralized inference and an optimized communication layer. SEED adopts two state of the art distributed algorithms, IMPALA/V-trace (policy gradients) and R2D2 (Q-learning), and is evaluated on Atari-57, DeepMind Lab and Google Research Football. We improve the state of the art on Football and are able to reach state of the art on Atari-57 three times faster in wall-time. For the scenarios we consider, a 40% to 80% cost reduction for running experiments is achieved. The implementation along with experiments is open-sourced so results can be reproduced and novel ideas tried out.
Learning Robust Representations via Multi-View Information Bottleneck
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

The information bottleneck principle provides an information-theoretic method for representation learning, by training an encoder to retain all information which is relevant for predicting the label while minimizing the amount of other, excess information in the representation. The original formulation, however, requires labeled data to identify the superfluous information. In this work, we extend this ability to the multi-view unsupervised setting, where two views of the same underlying entity are provided but the label is unknown. This enables us to identify superfluous information as that not shared by both views. A theoretical analysis leads to the definition of a new multi-view model that produces state-of-the-art results on the Sketchy dataset and label-limited versions of the MIR-Flickr dataset. We also extend our theory to the single-view setting by taking advantage of standard data augmentation techniques, empirically showing better generalization capabilities when compared to common unsupervised approaches for representation learning.
Understanding the Limitations of Conditional Generative Models
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

Class-conditional generative models hold promise to overcome the shortcomings of their discriminative counterparts. They are a natural choice to solve discriminative tasks in a robust manner as they jointly optimize for predictive performance and accurate modeling of the input distribution. In this work, we investigate robust classification with likelihood-based generative models from a theoretical and practical perspective to investigate if they can deliver on their promises. Our analysis focuses on a spectrum of robustness properties: (1) Detection of worst-case outliers in the form of adversarial examples; (2) Detection of average-case outliers in the form of ambiguous inputs and (3) Detection of incorrectly labeled in-distribution inputs. Our theoretical result reveals that it is impossible to guarantee detectability of adversarially-perturbed inputs even for near-optimal generative classifiers. Experimentally, we find that while we are able to train robust models for MNIST, robustness completely breaks down on CIFAR10. We relate this failure to various undesirable model properties that can be traced to the maximum likelihood training objective. Despite being a common choice in the literature, our results indicate that likelihood-based conditional generative models may are surprisingly ineffective for robust classification.
Deep Graph Matching Consensus
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

This work presents a two-stage neural architecture for learning and refining structural correspondences between graphs. First, we use localized node embeddings computed by a graph neural network to obtain an initial ranking of soft correspondences between nodes. Secondly, we employ synchronous message passing networks to iteratively re-rank the soft correspondences to reach a matching consensus in local neighborhoods between graphs. We show, theoretically and empirically, that our message passing scheme computes a well-founded measure of consensus for corresponding neighborhoods, which is then used to guide the iterative re-ranking process. Our purely local and sparsity-aware architecture scales well to large, real-world inputs while still being able to recover global correspondences consistently. We demonstrate the practical effectiveness of our method on real-world tasks from the fields of computer vision and entity alignment between knowledge graphs, on which we improve upon the current state-of-the-art. Our source code is available under https://github.com/rusty1s/ deep-graph-matching-consensus.
Meta-Learning with Warped Gradient Descent
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

Learning an efficient update rule from data that promotes rapid learning of new tasks from the same distribution remains an open problem in meta-learning. Typically, previous works have approached this issue either by attempting to train a neural network that directly produces updates or by attempting to learn better initialisations or scaling factors for a gradient-based update rule. Both of these approaches pose challenges. On one hand, directly producing an update forgoes a useful inductive bias and can easily lead to non-converging behaviour. On the other hand, approaches that try to control a gradient-based update rule typically resort to computing gradients through the learning process to obtain their meta-gradients, leading to methods that can not scale beyond few-shot task adaptation. In this work, we propose Warped Gradient Descent (WarpGrad), a method that intersects these approaches to mitigate their limitations. WarpGrad meta-learns an efficiently parameterised preconditioning matrix that facilitates gradient descent across the task distribution. Preconditioning arises by interleaving non-linear layers, referred to as warp-layers, between the layers of a task-learner. Warp-layers are meta-learned without backpropagating through the task training process in a manner similar to methods that learn to directly produce updates. WarpGrad is computationally efficient, easy to implement, and can scale to arbitrarily large meta-learning problems. We provide a geometrical interpretation of the approach and evaluate its effectiveness in a variety of settings, including few-shot, standard supervised, continual and reinforcement learning.
The Early Phase of Neural Network Training
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

Recent studies have shown that many important aspects of neural network learning take place within the very earliest iterations or epochs of training. For example, sparse, trainable sub-networks emerge (Frankle et al., 2019), gradient descent moves into a small subspace (Gur-Ari et al., 2018), and the network undergoes a critical period (Achille et al., 2019). Here, we examine the changes that deep neural networks undergo during this early phase of training. We perform extensive measurements of the network state during these early iterations of training and leverage the framework of Frankle et al. (2019) to quantitatively probe the weight distribution and its reliance on various aspects of the dataset. We find that, within this framework, deep networks are not robust to reinitializing with random weights while maintaining signs, and that weight distributions are highly non-independent even after only a few hundred iterations. Despite this behavior, pre-training with blurred inputs or an auxiliary self-supervised task can approximate the changes in supervised networks, suggesting that these changes are not inherently label-dependent, though labels significantly accelerate this process. Together, these results help to elucidate the network changes occurring during this pivotal initial period of learning.
Demystifying Inter-Class Disentanglement
Venue: Conference ICLR 2020
Year: 2020

Learning to disentangle the hidden factors of variations within a set of observations is a key task for artificial intelligence. We present a unified formulation for class and content disentanglement and use it to illustrate the limitations of current methods. We therefore introduce LORD, a novel method based on Latent Optimization for Representation Disentanglement. We find that latent optimization, along with an asymmetric noise regularization, is superior to amortized inference for achieving disentangled representations. In extensive experiments, our method is shown to achieve better disentanglement performance than both adversarial and non-adversarial methods that use the same level of supervision. We further introduce a clustering-based approach for extending our method for settings that exhibit in-class variation with promising results on the task of domain translation.