OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
HolStep: A Machine Learning Dataset for Higher-order Logic Theorem Proving
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

Large computer-understandable proofs consist of millions of intermediate logical steps. The vast majority of such steps originate from manually selected and manually guided heuristics applied to intermediate goals. So far, machine learning has generally not been used to filter or generate these steps. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset based on Higher-Order Logic (HOL) proofs, for the purpose of developing new machine learning-based theorem-proving strategies. We make this dataset publicly available under the BSD license. We propose various machine learning tasks that can be performed on this dataset, and discuss their significance for theorem proving. We also benchmark a set of simple baseline machine learning models suited for the tasks (including logistic regression, convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks). The results of our baseline models show the promise of applying machine learning to HOL theorem proving.
On Large-Batch Training for Deep Learning: Generalization Gap and Sharp Minima
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants are algorithms of choice for many Deep Learning tasks. These methods operate in a small-batch regime wherein a fraction of the training data, say $32$-$512$ data points, is sampled to compute an approximation to the gradient. It has been observed in practice that when using a larger batch there is a degradation in the quality of the model, as measured by its ability to generalize. We investigate the cause for this generalization drop in the large-batch regime and present numerical evidence that supports the view that large-batch methods tend to converge to sharp minimizers of the training and testing functions - and as is well known, sharp minima lead to poorer generalization. In contrast, small-batch methods consistently converge to flat minimizers, and our experiments support a commonly held view that this is due to the inherent noise in the gradient estimation. We discuss several strategies to attempt to help large-batch methods eliminate this generalization gap.
Hadamard Product for Low-rank Bilinear Pooling
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

Bilinear models provide rich representations compared with linear models. They have been applied in various visual tasks, such as object recognition, segmentation, and visual question-answering, to get state-of-the-art performances taking advantage of the expanded representations. However, bilinear representations tend to be high-dimensional, limiting the applicability to computationally complex tasks. We propose low-rank bilinear pooling using Hadamard product for an efficient attention mechanism of multimodal learning. We show that our model outperforms compact bilinear pooling in visual question-answering tasks with the state-of-the-art results on the VQA dataset, having a better parsimonious property.
Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

We present a scalable approach for semi-supervised learning on graph-structured data that is based on an efficient variant of convolutional neural networks which operate directly on graphs. We motivate the choice of our convolutional architecture via a localized first-order approximation of spectral graph convolutions. Our model scales linearly in the number of graph edges and learns hidden layer representations that encode both local graph structure and features of nodes. In a number of experiments on citation networks and on a knowledge graph dataset we demonstrate that our approach outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
Multiplicative LSTM for sequence modelling
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

We introduce multiplicative LSTM (mLSTM), a recurrent neural network architecture for sequence modelling that combines the long short-term memory (LSTM) and multiplicative recurrent neural network architectures. mLSTM is characterised by its ability to have different recurrent transition functions for each possible input, which we argue makes it more expressive for autoregressive density estimation. We demonstrate empirically that mLSTM outperforms standard LSTM and its deep variants for a range of character level language modelling tasks. In this version of the paper, we regularise mLSTM to achieve 1.27 bits/char on text8 and 1.24 bits/char on Hutter Prize. We also apply a purely byte-level mLSTM on the WikiText-2 dataset to achieve a character level entropy of 1.26 bits/char, corresponding to a word level perplexity of 88.8, which is comparable to word level LSTMs regularised in similar ways on the same task.
Zoneout: Regularizing RNNs by Randomly Preserving Hidden Activations
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

We propose zoneout, a novel method for regularizing RNNs. At each timestep, zoneout stochastically forces some hidden units to maintain their previous values. Like dropout, zoneout uses random noise to train a pseudo-ensemble, improving generalization. But by preserving instead of dropping hidden units, gradient information and state information are more readily propagated through time, as in feedforward stochastic depth networks. We perform an empirical investigation of various RNN regularizers, and find that zoneout gives significant performance improvements across tasks. We achieve competitive results with relatively simple models in character- and word-level language modelling on the Penn Treebank and Text8 datasets, and combining with recurrent batch normalization yields state-of-the-art results on permuted sequential MNIST.
Audio Super-Resolution using Neural Networks
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

We introduce a new audio processing technique that increases the sampling rate of signals such as speech or music using deep convolutional neural networks. Our model is trained on pairs of low and high-quality audio examples; at test-time, it predicts missing samples within a low-resolution signal in an interpolation process similar to image super-resolution. Our method is simple and does not involve specialized audio processing techniques; in our experiments, it outperforms baselines on standard speech and music benchmarks at upscaling ratios of 2x, 4x, and 6x. The method has practical applications in telephony, compression, and text-to-speech generation; it demonstrates the effectiveness of feed-forward convolutional architectures on an audio generation task.
Adversarial Machine Learning at Scale
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

Adversarial examples are malicious inputs designed to fool machine learning models. They often transfer from one model to another, allowing attackers to mount black box attacks without knowledge of the target model's parameters. Adversarial training is the process of explicitly training a model on adversarial examples, in order to make it more robust to attack or to reduce its test error on clean inputs. So far, adversarial training has primarily been applied to small problems. In this research, we apply adversarial training to ImageNet. Our contributions include: (1) recommendations for how to succesfully scale adversarial training to large models and datasets, (2) the observation that adversarial training confers robustness to single-step attack methods, (3) the finding that multi-step attack methods are somewhat less transferable than single-step attack methods, so single-step attacks are the best for mounting black-box attacks, and (4) resolution of a "label leaking" effect that causes adversarially trained models to perform better on adversarial examples than on clean examples, because the adversarial example construction process uses the true label and the model can learn to exploit regularities in the construction process.
Adversarial examples in the physical world
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

Most existing machine learning classifiers are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples. An adversarial example is a sample of input data which has been modified very slightly in a way that is intended to cause a machine learning classifier to misclassify it. In many cases, these modifications can be so subtle that a human observer does not even notice the modification at all, yet the classifier still makes a mistake. Adversarial examples pose security concerns because they could be used to perform an attack on machine learning systems, even if the adversary has no access to the underlying model. Up to now, all previous work have assumed a threat model in which the adversary can feed data directly into the machine learning classifier. This is not always the case for systems operating in the physical world, for example those which are using signals from cameras and other sensors as an input. This paper shows that even in such physical world scenarios, machine learning systems are vulnerable to adversarial examples. We demonstrate this by feeding adversarial images obtained from cell-phone camera to an ImageNet Inception classifier and measuring the classification accuracy of the system. We find that a large fraction of adversarial examples are classified incorrectly even when perceived through the camera.
Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we present a simple and efficient method for training deep neural networks in a semi-supervised setting where only a small portion of training data is labeled. We introduce self-ensembling, where we form a consensus prediction of the unknown labels using the outputs of the network-in-training on different epochs, and most importantly, under different regularization and input augmentation conditions. This ensemble prediction can be expected to be a better predictor for the unknown labels than the output of the network at the most recent training epoch, and can thus be used as a target for training. Using our method, we set new records for two standard semi-supervised learning benchmarks, reducing the (non-augmented) classification error rate from 18.44% to 7.05% in SVHN with 500 labels and from 18.63% to 16.55% in CIFAR-10 with 4000 labels, and further to 5.12% and 12.16% by enabling the standard augmentations. We additionally obtain a clear improvement in CIFAR-100 classification accuracy by using random images from the Tiny Images dataset as unlabeled extra inputs during training. Finally, we demonstrate good tolerance to incorrect labels.
Memory Matching Networks for Genomic Sequence Classification
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

When analyzing the genome, researchers have discovered that proteins bind to DNA based on certain patterns of the DNA sequence known as "motifs". However, it is difficult to manually construct motifs due to their complexity. Recently, externally learned memory models have proven to be effective methods for reasoning over inputs and supporting sets. In this work, we present memory matching networks (MMN) for classifying DNA sequences as protein binding sites. Our model learns a memory bank of encoded motifs, which are dynamic memory modules, and then matches a new test sequence to each of the motifs to classify the sequence as a binding or nonbinding site.
FractalNet: Ultra-Deep Neural Networks without Residuals
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

We introduce a design strategy for neural network macro-architecture based on self-similarity. Repeated application of a simple expansion rule generates deep networks whose structural layouts are precisely truncated fractals. These networks contain interacting subpaths of different lengths, but do not include any pass-through or residual connections; every internal signal is transformed by a filter and nonlinearity before being seen by subsequent layers. In experiments, fractal networks match the excellent performance of standard residual networks on both CIFAR and ImageNet classification tasks, thereby demonstrating that residual representations may not be fundamental to the success of extremely deep convolutional neural networks. Rather, the key may be the ability to transition, during training, from effectively shallow to deep. We note similarities with student-teacher behavior and develop drop-path, a natural extension of dropout, to regularize co-adaptation of subpaths in fractal architectures. Such regularization allows extraction of high-performance fixed-depth subnetworks. Additionally, fractal networks exhibit an anytime property: shallow subnetworks provide a quick answer, while deeper subnetworks, with higher latency, provide a more accurate answer.
Learning Visual Servoing with Deep Features and Fitted Q-Iteration
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

Visual servoing involves choosing actions that move a robot in response to observations from a camera, in order to reach a goal configuration in the world. Standard visual servoing approaches typically rely on manually designed features and analytical dynamics models, which limits their generalization capability and often requires extensive application-specific feature and model engineering. In this work, we study how learned visual features, learned predictive dynamics models, and reinforcement learning can be combined to learn visual servoing mechanisms. We focus on target following, with the goal of designing algorithms that can learn a visual servo using low amounts of data of the target in question, to enable quick adaptation to new targets. Our approach is based on servoing the camera in the space of learned visual features, rather than image pixels or manually-designed keypoints. We demonstrate that standard deep features, in our case taken from a model trained for object classification, can be used together with a bilinear predictive model to learn an effective visual servo that is robust to visual variation, changes in viewing angle and appearance, and occlusions. A key component of our approach is to use a sample-efficient fitted Q-iteration algorithm to learn which features are best suited for the task at hand. We show that we can learn an effective visual servo on a complex synthetic car following benchmark using just 20 training trajectory samples for reinforcement learning. We demonstrate substantial improvement over a conventional approach based on image pixels or hand-designed keypoints, and we show an improvement in sample-efficiency of more than two orders of magnitude over standard model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Videos are available at http://rll.berkeley.edu/visual_servoing .
Dialogue Learning With Human-in-the-Loop
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

An important aspect of developing conversational agents is to give a bot the ability to improve through communicating with humans and to learn from the mistakes that it makes. Most research has focused on learning from fixed training sets of labeled data rather than interacting with a dialogue partner in an online fashion. In this paper we explore this direction in a reinforcement learning setting where the bot improves its question-answering ability from feedback a teacher gives following its generated responses. We build a simulator that tests various aspects of such learning in a synthetic environment, and introduce models that work in this regime. Finally, real experiments with Mechanical Turk validate the approach.
Learning through Dialogue Interactions by Asking Questions
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

A good dialogue agent should have the ability to interact with users by both responding to questions and by asking questions, and importantly to learn from both types of interaction. In this work, we explore this direction by designing a simulator and a set of synthetic tasks in the movie domain that allow such interactions between a learner and a teacher. We investigate how a learner can benefit from asking questions in both offline and online reinforcement learning settings, and demonstrate that the learner improves when asking questions. Finally, real experiments with Mechanical Turk validate the approach. Our work represents a first step in developing such end-to-end learned interactive dialogue agents.
Why Deep Neural Networks for Function Approximation?
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

Recently there has been much interest in understanding why deep neural networks are preferred to shallow networks. We show that, for a large class of piecewise smooth functions, the number of neurons needed by a shallow network to approximate a function is exponentially larger than the corresponding number of neurons needed by a deep network for a given degree of function approximation. First, we consider univariate functions on a bounded interval and require a neural network to achieve an approximation error of $\varepsilon$ uniformly over the interval. We show that shallow networks (i.e., networks whose depth does not depend on $\varepsilon$) require $Ω(\text{poly}(1/\varepsilon))$ neurons while deep networks (i.e., networks whose depth grows with $1/\varepsilon$) require $\mathcal{O}(\text{polylog}(1/\varepsilon))$ neurons. We then extend these results to certain classes of important multivariate functions. Our results are derived for neural networks which use a combination of rectifier linear units (ReLUs) and binary step units, two of the most popular type of activation functions. Our analysis builds on a simple observation: the multiplication of two bits can be represented by a ReLU.
A Structured Self-Attentive Sentence Embedding
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

This paper proposes a new model for extracting an interpretable sentence embedding by introducing self-attention. Instead of using a vector, we use a 2-D matrix to represent the embedding, with each row of the matrix attending on a different part of the sentence. We also propose a self-attention mechanism and a special regularization term for the model. As a side effect, the embedding comes with an easy way of visualizing what specific parts of the sentence are encoded into the embedding. We evaluate our model on 3 different tasks: author profiling, sentiment classification, and textual entailment. Results show that our model yields a significant performance gain compared to other sentence embedding methods in all of the 3 tasks.
Transfer of View-manifold Learning to Similarity Perception of Novel Objects
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

We develop a model of perceptual similarity judgment based on re-training a deep convolution neural network (DCNN) that learns to associate different views of each 3D object to capture the notion of object persistence and continuity in our visual experience. The re-training process effectively performs distance metric learning under the object persistency constraints, to modify the view-manifold of object representations. It reduces the effective distance between the representations of different views of the same object without compromising the distance between those of the views of different objects, resulting in the untangling of the view-manifolds between individual objects within the same category and across categories. This untangling enables the model to discriminate and recognize objects within the same category, independent of viewpoints. We found that this ability is not limited to the trained objects, but transfers to novel objects in both trained and untrained categories, as well as to a variety of completely novel artificial synthetic objects. This transfer in learning suggests the modification of distance metrics in view- manifolds is more general and abstract, likely at the levels of parts, and independent of the specific objects or categories experienced during training. Interestingly, the resulting transformation of feature representation in the deep networks is found to significantly better match human perceptual similarity judgment than AlexNet, suggesting that object persistence could be an important constraint in the development of perceptual similarity judgment in biological neural networks.
Precise Recovery of Latent Vectors from Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) transform latent vectors into visually plausible images. It is generally thought that the original GAN formulation gives no out-of-the-box method to reverse the mapping, projecting images back into latent space. We introduce a simple, gradient-based technique called stochastic clipping. In experiments, for images generated by the GAN, we precisely recover their latent vector pre-images 100% of the time. Additional experiments demonstrate that this method is robust to noise. Finally, we show that even for unseen images, our method appears to recover unique encodings.
Delving into Transferable Adversarial Examples and Black-box Attacks
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

An intriguing property of deep neural networks is the existence of adversarial examples, which can transfer among different architectures. These transferable adversarial examples may severely hinder deep neural network-based applications. Previous works mostly study the transferability using small scale datasets. In this work, we are the first to conduct an extensive study of the transferability over large models and a large scale dataset, and we are also the first to study the transferability of targeted adversarial examples with their target labels. We study both non-targeted and targeted adversarial examples, and show that while transferable non-targeted adversarial examples are easy to find, targeted adversarial examples generated using existing approaches almost never transfer with their target labels. Therefore, we propose novel ensemble-based approaches to generating transferable adversarial examples. Using such approaches, we observe a large proportion of targeted adversarial examples that are able to transfer with their target labels for the first time. We also present some geometric studies to help understanding the transferable adversarial examples. Finally, we show that the adversarial examples generated using ensemble-based approaches can successfully attack Clarifai.com, which is a black-box image classification system.
Deep Learning with Dynamic Computation Graphs
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

Neural networks that compute over graph structures are a natural fit for problems in a variety of domains, including natural language (parse trees) and cheminformatics (molecular graphs). However, since the computation graph has a different shape and size for every input, such networks do not directly support batched training or inference. They are also difficult to implement in popular deep learning libraries, which are based on static data-flow graphs. We introduce a technique called dynamic batching, which not only batches together operations between different input graphs of dissimilar shape, but also between different nodes within a single input graph. The technique allows us to create static graphs, using popular libraries, that emulate dynamic computation graphs of arbitrary shape and size. We further present a high-level library of compositional blocks that simplifies the creation of dynamic graph models. Using the library, we demonstrate concise and batch-wise parallel implementations for a variety of models from the literature.
SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts
Venue: Conference ICLR 2017
Year: 2017

Restart techniques are common in gradient-free optimization to deal with multimodal functions. Partial warm restarts are also gaining popularity in gradient-based optimization to improve the rate of convergence in accelerated gradient schemes to deal with ill-conditioned functions. In this paper, we propose a simple warm restart technique for stochastic gradient descent to improve its anytime performance when training deep neural networks. We empirically study its performance on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, where we demonstrate new state-of-the-art results at 3.14% and 16.21%, respectively. We also demonstrate its advantages on a dataset of EEG recordings and on a downsampled version of the ImageNet dataset. Our source code is available at https://github.com/loshchil/SGDR