Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Reinforcement Learning with Sparse Rewards using Guidance from Offline Demonstration

A major challenge in real-world reinforcement learning (RL) is the sparsity of reward feedback. Often, what is available is an intuitive but sparse reward function that only indicates whether the task is completed partially or fully. However, the lack of carefully designed, fine grain feedback implies that most existing RL algorithms fail to learn an acceptable policy in a reasonable time frame. This is because of the large number of exploration actions that the policy has to perform before it gets any useful feedback that it can learn from. In this work, we address this challenging problem by developing an algorithm that exploits the offline demonstration data generated by a sub-optimal behavior policy for faster and efficient online RL in such sparse reward settings. The proposed algorithm, which we call the Learning Online with Guidance Offline (LOGO) algorithm, merges a policy improvement step with an additional policy guidance step by using the offline demonstration data. The key idea is that by obtaining guidance from - not imitating - the offline data, LOGO orients its policy in the manner of the sub-optimal policy, while yet being able to learn beyond and approach optimality. We provide a theoretical analysis of our algorithm, and provide a lower bound on the performance improvement in each learning episode. We also extend our algorithm to the even more challenging incomplete observation setting, where the demonstration data contains only a censored version of the true state observation. We demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithm over state-of-the-art approaches on a number of benchmark environments with sparse rewards and censored state. Further, we demonstrate the value of our approach via implementing LOGO on a mobile robot for trajectory tracking and obstacle avoidance, where it shows excellent performance.
Relaxed virtual memory in Armv8-A (extended version)

Virtual memory is an essential mechanism for enforcing security boundaries, but its relaxed-memory concurrency semantics has not previously been investigated in detail. The concurrent systems code managing virtual memory has been left on an entirely informal basis, and OS and hypervisor verification has had to make major simplifying assumptions. We explore the design space for relaxed virtual memory semantics in the Armv8-A architecture, to support future system-software verification. We identify many design questions, in discussion with Arm; develop a test suite, including use cases from the pKVM production hypervisor under development by Google; delimit the design space with axiomatic-style concurrency models; prove that under simple stable configurations our architectural model collapses to previous "user" models; develop tooling to compute allowed behaviours in the model integrated with the full Armv8-A ISA semantics; and develop a hardware test harness. This lays out some of the main issues in relaxed virtual memory bringing these security-critical systems phenomena into the domain of programming-language semantics and verification with foundational architecture semantics. This document is an extended version of a paper in ESOP 2022, with additional explanation and examples in the main body, and appendices detailing our litmus tests, models, proofs, and test results.
Remember to correct the bias when using deep learning for regression!

When training deep learning models for least-squares regression, we cannot expect that the training error residuals of the final model, selected after a fixed training time or based on performance on a hold-out data set, sum to zero. This can introduce a systematic error that accumulates if we are interested in the total aggregated performance over many data points. We suggest to adjust the bias of the machine learning model after training as a default postprocessing step, which efficiently solves the problem. The severeness of the error accumulation and the effectiveness of the bias correction is demonstrated in exemplary experiments.
Reproducing BowNet: Learning Representations by Predicting Bags of Visual Words

This work aims to reproduce results from the CVPR 2020 paper by Gidaris et al. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is used to learn feature representations of an image using an unlabeled dataset. This work proposes to use bag-of-words (BoW) deep feature descriptors as a self-supervised learning target to learn robust, deep representations. BowNet is trained to reconstruct the histogram of visual words (ie. the deep BoW descriptor) of a reference image when presented a perturbed version of the image as input. Thus, this method aims to learn perturbation-invariant and context-aware image features that can be useful for few-shot tasks or supervised downstream tasks. In the paper, the author describes BowNet as a network consisting of a convolutional feature extractor $\Phi(\cdot)$ and a Dense-softmax layer $\Omega(\cdot)$ trained to predict BoW features from images. After BoW training, the features of $\Phi$ are used in downstream tasks. For this challenge we were trying to build and train a network that could reproduce the CIFAR-100 accuracy improvements reported in the original paper. However, we were unsuccessful in reproducing an accuracy improvement comparable to what the authors mentioned. This could be for a variety of factors and we believe that time constraints were the primary bottleneck.
Resource-Efficient Invariant Networks: Exponential Gains by Unrolled Optimization

Achieving invariance to nuisance transformations is a fundamental challenge in the construction of robust and reliable vision systems. Existing approaches to invariance scale exponentially with the dimension of the family of transformations, making them unable to cope with natural variabilities in visual data such as changes in pose and perspective. We identify a common limitation of these approaches--they rely on sampling to traverse the high-dimensional space of transformations--and propose a new computational primitive for building invariant networks based instead on optimization, which in many scenarios provides a provably more efficient method for high-dimensional exploration than sampling. We provide empirical and theoretical corroboration of the efficiency gains and soundness of our proposed method, and demonstrate its utility in constructing an efficient invariant network for a simple hierarchical object detection task when combined with unrolled optimization. Code for our networks and experiments is available at https://github.com/sdbuch/refine.
REST: Integrating Term Rewriting with Program Verification (Extended Version)

We introduce REST, a novel term rewriting technique for theorem proving that uses online termination checking and can be integrated with existing program verifiers. REST enables flexible but terminating term rewriting for theorem proving by: (1) exploiting newly-introduced term orderings that are more permissive than standard rewrite simplification orderings; (2) dynamically and iteratively selecting orderings based on the path of rewrites taken so far; and (3) integrating external oracles that allow steps that cannot be justified with rewrite rules. Our REST approach is designed around an easily implementable core algorithm, parameterizable by choices of term orderings and their implementations; in this way our approach can be easily integrated into existing tools. We implemented REST as a Haskell library and incorporated it into Liquid Haskell's evaluation strategy, extending Liquid Haskell with rewriting rules. We evaluated our REST implementation by comparing it against both existing rewriting techniques and E-matching and by showing that it can be used to supplant manual lemma application in many existing Liquid Haskell proofs.
Retraction based Direct Search Methods for Derivative Free Riemannian Optimization

Direct search methods represent a robust and reliable class of algorithms for solving black-box optimization problems. In this paper, we explore the application of those strategies to Riemannian optimization, wherein minimization is to be performed with respect to variables restricted to lie on a manifold. More specifically, we consider classic and line search extrapolated variants of direct search, and, by making use of retractions, we devise tailored strategies for the minimization of both smooth and nonsmooth functions. As such we analyze, for the first time in the literature, a class of retraction based algorithms for minimizing nonsmooth objectives on a Riemannian manifold without having access to (sub)derivatives. Along with convergence guarantees we provide a set of numerical performance illustrations on a standard set of problems.
Reverse Back Propagation to Make Full Use of Derivative

The development of the back-propagation algorithm represents a landmark in neural networks. We provide an approach that conducts the back-propagation again to reverse the traditional back-propagation process to optimize the input loss at the input end of a neural network for better effects without extra costs during the inference time. Then we further analyzed its principles and advantages and disadvantages, reformulated the weight initialization strategy for our method. And experiments on MNIST, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100 convinced our approaches could adapt to a larger range of learning rate and learn better than vanilla back-propagation.
Reverse Engineering of Imperceptible Adversarial Image Perturbations

It has been well recognized that neural network based image classifiers are easily fooled by images with tiny perturbations crafted by an adversary. There has been a vast volume of research to generate and defend such adversarial attacks. However, the following problem is left unexplored: How to reverse-engineer adversarial perturbations from an adversarial image? This leads to a new adversarial learning paradigm--Reverse Engineering of Deceptions (RED). If successful, RED allows us to estimate adversarial perturbations and recover the original images. However, carefully crafted, tiny adversarial perturbations are difficult to recover by optimizing a unilateral RED objective. For example, the pure image denoising method may overfit to minimizing the reconstruction error but hardly preserve the classification properties of the true adversarial perturbations. To tackle this challenge, we formalize the RED problem and identify a set of principles crucial to the RED approach design. Particularly, we find that prediction alignment and proper data augmentation (in terms of spatial transformations) are two criteria to achieve a generalizable RED approach. By integrating these RED principles with image denoising, we propose a new Class-Discriminative Denoising based RED framework, termed CDD-RED. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CDD-RED under different evaluation metrics (ranging from the pixel-level, prediction-level to the attribution-level alignment) and a variety of attack generation methods (e.g., FGSM, PGD, CW, AutoAttack, and adaptive attacks).
Revisiting Deep Subspace Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer and adapt knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Traditionally, subspace-based methods form an important class of solutions to this problem. Despite their mathematical elegance and tractability, these methods are often found to be ineffective at producing domain-invariant features with complex, real-world datasets. Motivated by the recent advances in representation learning with deep networks, this paper revisits the use of subspace alignment for UDA and proposes a novel adaptation algorithm that consistently leads to improved generalization. In contrast to existing adversarial training-based DA methods, our approach isolates feature learning and distribution alignment steps, and utilizes a primary-auxiliary optimization strategy to effectively balance the objectives of domain invariance and model fidelity. While providing a significant reduction in target data and computational requirements, our subspace-based DA performs competitively and sometimes even outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on several standard UDA benchmarks. Furthermore, subspace alignment leads to intrinsically well-regularized models that demonstrate strong generalization even in the challenging partial DA setting. Finally, the design of our UDA framework inherently supports progressive adaptation to new target domains at test-time, without requiring retraining of the model from scratch. In summary, powered by powerful feature learners and an effective optimization strategy, we establish subspace-based DA as a highly effective approach for visual recognition.
Revisiting Over-smoothing in BERT from the Perspective of Graph

Recently over-smoothing phenomenon of Transformer-based models is observed in both vision and language fields. However, no existing work has delved deeper to further investigate the main cause of this phenomenon. In this work, we make the attempt to analyze the over-smoothing problem from the perspective of graph, where such problem was first discovered and explored. Intuitively, the self-attention matrix can be seen as a normalized adjacent matrix of a corresponding graph. Based on the above connection, we provide some theoretical analysis and find that layer normalization plays a key role in the over-smoothing issue of Transformer-based models. Specifically, if the standard deviation of layer normalization is sufficiently large, the output of Transformer stacks will converge to a specific low-rank subspace and result in over-smoothing. To alleviate the over-smoothing problem, we consider hierarchical fusion strategies, which combine the representations from different layers adaptively to make the output more diverse. Extensive experiment results on various data sets illustrate the effect of our fusion method.
Reward-Free RL is No Harder Than Reward-Aware RL in Linear Markov Decision Processes

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after exploring. In the the tabular setting, it is well known that this is a more difficult problem than reward-aware (PAC) RL -- where the agent has access to the reward function during exploration -- with optimal sample complexities in the two settings differing by a factor of $|\mathcal{S}|$, the size of the state space. We show that this separation does not exist in the setting of linear MDPs. We first develop a computationally efficient algorithm for reward-free RL in a $d$-dimensional linear MDP with sample complexity scaling as $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(d^2 H^5/\epsilon^2)$. We then show a lower bound with matching dimension-dependence of $\Omega(d^2 H^2/\epsilon^2)$, which holds for the reward-aware RL setting. To our knowledge, our approach is the first computationally efficient algorithm to achieve optimal $d$ dependence in linear MDPs, even in the single-reward PAC setting. Our algorithm relies on a novel procedure which efficiently traverses a linear MDP, collecting samples in any given ``feature direction'', and enjoys a sample complexity scaling optimally in the (linear MDP equivalent of the) maximal state visitation probability. We show that this exploration procedure can also be applied to solve the problem of obtaining ``well-conditioned'' covariates in linear MDPs.
Right for the Right Latent Factors: Debiasing Generative Models via Disentanglement

A key assumption of most statistical machine learning methods is that they have access to independent samples from the distribution of data they encounter at test time. As such, these methods often perform poorly in the face of biased data, which breaks this assumption. In particular, machine learning models have been shown to exhibit Clever-Hans-like behaviour, meaning that spurious correlations in the training set are inadvertently learnt. A number of works have been proposed to revise deep classifiers to learn the right correlations. However, generative models have been overlooked so far. We observe that generative models are also prone to Clever-Hans-like behaviour. To counteract this issue, we propose to debias generative models by disentangling their internal representations, which is achieved via human feedback. Our experiments show that this is effective at removing bias even when human feedback covers only a small fraction of the desired distribution. In addition, we achieve strong disentanglement results in a quantitative comparison with recent methods.
Robotic Telekinesis: Learning a Robotic Hand Imitator by Watching Humans on Youtube

We build a system that enables any human to control a robot hand and arm, simply by demonstrating motions with their own hand. The robot observes the human operator via a single RGB camera and imitates their actions in real-time. Human hands and robot hands differ in shape, size, and joint structure, and performing this translation from a single uncalibrated camera is a highly underconstrained problem. Moreover, the retargeted trajectories must effectively execute tasks on a physical robot, which requires them to be temporally smooth and free of self-collisions. Our key insight is that while paired human-robot correspondence data is expensive to collect, the internet contains a massive corpus of rich and diverse human hand videos. We leverage this data to train a system that understands human hands and retargets a human video stream into a robot hand-arm trajectory that is smooth, swift, safe, and semantically similar to the guiding demonstration. We demonstrate that it enables previously untrained people to teleoperate a robot on various dexterous manipulation tasks. Our low-cost, glove-free, marker-free remote teleoperation system makes robot teaching more accessible and we hope that it can aid robots in learning to act autonomously in the real world. Videos at https://robotic-telekinesis.github.io/
Robots Autonomously Detecting People: A Multimodal Deep Contrastive Learning Method Robust to Intraclass Variations

Robotic detection of people in crowded and/or cluttered human-centered environments including hospitals, long-term care, stores and airports is challenging as people can become occluded by other people or objects, and deform due to variations in clothing or pose. There can also be loss of discriminative visual features due to poor lighting. In this paper, we present a novel multimodal person detection architecture to address the mobile robot problem of person detection under intraclass variations. We present a two-stage training approach using 1) a unique pretraining method we define as Temporal Invariant Multimodal Contrastive Learning (TimCLR), and 2) a Multimodal Faster R-CNN (MFRCNN) detector. TimCLR learns person representations that are invariant under intraclass variations through unsupervised learning. Our approach is unique in that it generates image pairs from natural variations within multimodal image sequences, in addition to synthetic data augmentation, and contrasts crossmodal features to transfer invariances between different modalities. These pretrained features are used by the MFRCNN detector for finetuning and person detection from RGB-D images. Extensive experiments validate the performance of our DL architecture in both human-centered crowded and cluttered environments. Results show that our method outperforms existing unimodal and multimodal person detection approaches in terms of detection accuracy in detecting people with body occlusions and pose deformations in different lighting conditions.
Robustness of negativity of the Wigner function to dissipation

Non-Gaussian quantum states, described by negative valued Wigner functions, are important both for fundamental tests of quantum physics and for emerging quantum information technologies. However, they are vulnerable to dissipation. It is known, that the Wigner functions negativity could exist only if the overall quantum efficiency $\eta$ of the setup is higher than 1/2. Here we prove that this condition is not only necessary but also a sufficient one: the negativity always persists while this condition is fulfilled. At the same time, in the case of bright (multi-photon) non-Gaussian quantum states, the negativity dependence on $\eta$ is highly non-linear. With the loss of several photons, it drops by orders of magnitude, hampering its experimental detection.
Robust Speaker Recognition with Transformers Using wav2vec 2.0

Recent advances in unsupervised speech representation learning discover new approaches and provide new state-of-the-art for diverse types of speech processing tasks. This paper presents an investigation of using wav2vec 2.0 deep speech representations for the speaker recognition task. The proposed fine-tuning procedure of wav2vec 2.0 with simple TDNN and statistic pooling back-end using additive angular margin loss allows to obtain deep speaker embedding extractor that is well-generalized across different domains. It is concluded that Contrastive Predictive Coding pretraining scheme efficiently utilizes the power of unlabeled data, and thus opens the door to powerful transformer-based speaker recognition systems. The experimental results obtained in this study demonstrate that fine-tuning can be done on relatively small sets and a clean version of data. Using data augmentation during fine-tuning provides additional performance gains in speaker verification. In this study speaker recognition systems were analyzed on a wide range of well-known verification protocols: VoxCeleb1 cleaned test set, NIST SRE 18 development set, NIST SRE 2016 and NIST SRE 2019 evaluation set, VOiCES evaluation set, NIST 2021 SRE, and CTS challenges sets.
Robust Time-Varying Graph Signal Recovery for Dynamic Physical Sensor Network Data

We propose a time-varying graph signal recovery method for estimating the true time-varying graph signal from observations that are corrupted by missing values, unknown position outliers, and some random noise. Most existing studies on time-varying graph signal recovery focus on online estimation and graph learning based on the assumption that the entire dynamic graphs are not available, and robust recovery formulations and algorithms that fully exploit the entire dynamically changing graph structure have not been well studied. On the other hand, there are many situations, especially when dealing with timevarying data obtained from physical sensor networks, where the appropriate dynamic graphs can be easily generated using simple algorithms such as k-nearest neighbor by exploiting information on time-varying spatial sensor locations. In this paper, we focus on such cases and formulate dynamic graph signal recovery as a constrained convex optimization problem that simultaneously estimates both time-varying graph signals and sparsely modeled outliers. In our formulation, we use two types of regularizations, time-varying graph Laplacian-based and temporal differencebased, and also separately modeled missing values with known positions and unknown outliers, to achieve robust estimation from highly degraded data. In addition, an algorithm is developed to efficiently solve the optimization problem based on a primaldual splitting method. Extensive experiments on simulated drone remote sensing data and real sea surface temperature distribution data demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method over existing methods.