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Title: The Variational Bandwidth Bottleneck: Stochastic Evaluation on an Information Budget

Paper content:
In many applications, it is desirable to extract only the relevant information from complex input data, which involves making a decision about which input features are relevant.
The information bottleneck method formalizes this as an information-theoretic optimization problem by maintaining an optimal tradeoff between compression (throwing away irrelevant input information), and predicting the target.
In many problem settings, including the reinforcement learning problems we consider in this work, we might prefer to compress only part of the input.
This is typically the case when we have a standard conditioning input, such as a state observation, and a ``privileged'' input, which might correspond to the goal of a task, the output of a costly planning algorithm, or communication with another agent.
In such cases, we might prefer to compress the privileged input, either to achieve better generalization (e.g., with respect to goals) or to minimize access to costly information (e.g., in the case of communication).
Practical implementations of the information bottleneck based on variational inference require access to the privileged input in order to compute the bottleneck variable, so although they perform compression, this compression operation itself needs unrestricted, lossless access.
In this work, we propose the variational bandwidth bottleneck, which decides for each example on the estimated value of the privileged information before seeing it, i.e., only based on the standard input, and then accordingly chooses stochastically, whether to access the privileged input or not.
We formulate a tractable approximation to this framework and demonstrate in a series of reinforcement learning experiments that it can improve generalization and reduce access to computationally costly information.
A model that generalizes effectively should be able to pick up on relevant cues in the input while ignoring irrelevant distractors.
For example, if one want to cross the street, one should only pay attention to the positions and velocities of the cars, disregarding their color.
The information bottleneck (Tishby et al., 2000) formalizes this in terms of minimizing the mutual information between the bottleneck representation layer with the input, while maximizing its mutual information with the correct output.
This type of input compression can improve generalization (Tishby et al., 2000) , and has recently been extended to deep parametric models, such as neural networks where it has been shown to improve generalization (Achille & Soatto, 2016; Alemi et al., 2016) .
The information bottleneck is generally intractable, but can be approximated using variational inference (Alemi et al., 2016) .
This variational approach parameterizes the information bottleneck model using a neural network (i.e., an encoder).
While the variational bound makes it feasible to train (approximate) information bottleneck layers with deep neural networks, the encoder in these networks -the layer that predicts the bottleneck variable distribution conditioned on the input -must still process the full input, before it is compressed and irrelevant information is removed.
The encoder itself can therefore fail to generalize, and although the information bottleneck minimizes mutual information with the input on the training data, it might not compress successfully on new inputs.
To
We demonstrated how the proposed variational bandwidth bottleneck (VBB) helps in generalization over the standard variational information bottleneck, in the case where the input is divided into a standard and privileged component.
Unlike the VIB, the VBB does not actually access the privileged input before deciding how much information about it is needed.
Our experiments show that the VBB improves generalization and can achieve similar or better performance while accessing the privileged input less often.
Hence, the VBB provides a framework for adaptive computation in deep network models, and further study applying it to domains where reasoning about access to data and computation is an exciting direction for future work.
Current limitation of the proposed method is that it assumes independence between standard input and the privileged input but we observe in practice assuming independence does not seem to hurt the results.
Future work would be to investigate how we can remove this assumption.

assistant: text: Training agents with adaptive computation based on information bottleneck can promote generalization.