bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
CAG: A Real-Time Low-Cost Enhanced-Robustness High-Transferability Content-Aware Adversarial Attack Generator
Authors: Phan Huy , Xie Yi , Liao Siyu , Chen Jie , Yuan Bo
Published: June 2020

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attack despite their tremendous success in many artificial intelligence fields. Adversarial attack is a method that causes the intended misclassfication by adding imperceptible perturbations to legitimate inputs. To date, researchers have developed numerous types of adversarial attack methods. However, from the perspective of practical deployment, these methods suffer from several drawbacks such as long attack generating time, high memory cost, insufficient robustness and low transferability. To address the drawbacks, we propose a Content-aware Adversarial Attack Generator (CAG) to achieve real-time, low-cost, enhanced-robustness and high-transferability adversarial attack. First, as a type of generative model-based attack, CAG shows significant speedup (at least 500 times) in generating adversarial examples compared to the state-of-the-art attacks such as PGD and C&W. Furthermore, CAG only needs a single generative model to perform targeted attack to any targeted class. Because CAG encodes the label information into a trainable embedding layer, it differs from prior generative model-based adversarial attacks that use n different copies of generative models for n different targeted classes. As a result, CAG significantly reduces the required memory cost for generating adversarial examples. Moreover, CAG can generate adversarial perturbations that focus on the critical areas of input by integrating the class activation maps information in the training process, and hence improve the robustness of CAG attack against the state-of-art adversarial defenses. In addition, CAG exhibits high transferability across different DNN classifier models in black-box attack scenario by introducing random dropout in the process of generating perturbations. Extensive experiments on different datasets and DNN models have verified the real-time, low-cost, enhanced-robustness, and high-transferability benefits of CAG.
Ensembles of Locally Independent Prediction Models
Authors: Ross Andrew , Pan Weiwei , Celi Leo , Doshi-Velez Finale
Published: June 2020

Ensembles depend on diversity for improved performance. Many ensemble training methods, therefore, attempt to optimize for diversity, which they almost always define in terms of differences in training set predictions. In this paper, however, we demonstrate the diversity of predictions on the training set does not necessarily imply diversity under mild covariate shift, which can harm generalization in practical settings. To address this issue, we introduce a new diversity metric and associated method of training ensembles of models that extrapolate differently on local patches of the data manifold. Across a variety of synthetic and real-world tasks, we find that our method improves generalization and diversity in qualitatively novel ways, especially under data limits and covariate shift.
Linear Context Transform Block
Authors: Ruan Dongsheng , Wen Jun , Zheng Nenggan , Zheng Min
Published: June 2020

Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) block presents a channel attention mechanism for modeling global context via explicitly capturing dependencies across channels. However, we are still far from understanding how the SE block works. In this work, we first revisit the SE block, and then present a detailed empirical study of the relationship between global context and attention distribution, based on which we propose a simple yet effective module, called Linear Context Transform (LCT) block. We divide all channels into different groups and normalize the globally aggregated context features within each channel group, reducing the disturbance from irrelevant channels. Through linear transform of the normalized context features, we model global context for each channel independently. The LCT block is extremely lightweight and easy to be plugged into different backbone models while with negligible parameters and computational burden increase. Extensive experiments show that the LCT block outperforms the SE block in image classification task on the ImageNet and object detection/segmentation on the COCO dataset with different backbone models. Moreover, LCT yields consistent performance gains over existing state-of-the-art detection architectures, e.g., 1.5∼1.7% APbbox and 1.0%∼1.2% APmask improvements on the COCO benchmark, irrespective of different baseline models of varied capacities. We hope our simple yet effective approach will shed some light on future research of attention-based models.
Sequential Mode Estimation with Oracle Queries
Authors: Shah Dhruti , Choudhury Tuhinangshu , Karamchandani Nikhil , Gopalan Aditya
Published: June 2020

We consider the problem of adaptively PAC-learning a probability distribution
Block Hankel Tensor ARIMA for Multiple Short Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Shi Qiquan , Yin Jiaming , Cai Jiajun , Cichocki Andrzej , Yokota Tatsuya , Chen Lei , Yuan Mingxuan , Zeng Jia
Published: June 2020

This work proposes a novel approach for multiple time series forecasting. At first, multi-way delay embedding transform (MDT) is employed to represent time series as low-rank block Hankel tensors (BHT). Then, the higher-order tensors are projected to compressed core tensors by applying Tucker decomposition. At the same time, the generalized tensor Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) is explicitly used on consecutive core tensors to predict future samples. In this manner, the proposed approach tactically incorporates the unique advantages of MDT tensorization (to exploit mutual correlations) and tensor ARIMA coupled with low-rank Tucker decomposition into a unified framework. This framework exploits the low-rank structure of block Hankel tensors in the embedded space and captures the intrinsic correlations among multiple TS, which thus can improve the forecasting results, especially for multiple short time series. Experiments conducted on three public datasets and two industrial datasets verify that the proposed BHT-ARIMA effectively improves forecasting accuracy and reduces computational cost compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
Hierarchically Clustered Representation Learning
Authors: Shin Su-Jin , Song Kyungwoo , Moon Il-Chul
Published: June 2020

The joint optimization of representation learning and clustering in the embedding space has experienced a breakthrough in recent years. In spite of the advance, clustering with representation learning has been limited to flat-level categories, which often involves cohesive clustering with a focus on instance relations. To overcome the limitations of flat clustering, we introduce hierarchically-clustered representation learning (HCRL), which simultaneously optimizes representation learning and hierarchical clustering in the embedding space. Compared with a few prior works, HCRL firstly attempts to consider a generation of deep embeddings from every component of the hierarchy, not just leaf components. In addition to obtaining hierarchically clustered embeddings, we can reconstruct data by the various abstraction levels, infer the intrinsic hierarchical structure, and learn the level-proportion features. We conducted evaluations with image and text domains, and our quantitative analyses showed competent likelihoods and the best accuracies compared with the baselines.
HLHLp: Quantized Neural Networks Training for Reaching Flat Minima in Loss Surface
Authors: Shin Sungho , Park Jinhwan , Boo Yoonho , Sung Wonyong
Published: June 2020

Quantization of deep neural networks is extremely essential for efficient implementations. Low-precision networks are typically designed to represent original floating-point counterparts with high fidelity, and several elaborate quantization algorithms have been developed. We propose a novel training scheme for quantized neural networks to reach flat minima in the loss surface with the aid of quantization noise. The proposed training scheme employs high-low-high-low precision in an alternating manner for network training. The learning rate is also abruptly changed at each stage for coarse- or fine-tuning. With the proposed training technique, we show quite good performance improvements for convolutional neural networks when compared to the previous fine-tuning based quantization scheme. We achieve the state-of-the-art results for recurrent neural network based language modeling with 2-bit weight and activation.
Aggregated Learning: A Vector-Quantization Approach to Learning Neural Network Classifiers
Authors: Soflaei Masoumeh , Guo Hongyu , Al-Bashabsheh Ali , Mao Yongyi , Zhang Richong
Published: June 2020

We consider the problem of learning a neural network classifier. Under the information bottleneck (IB) principle, we associate with this classification problem a representation learning problem, which we call “IB learning”. We show that IB learning is, in fact, equivalent to a special class of the quantization problem. The classical results in rate-distortion theory then suggest that IB learning can benefit from a “vector quantization” approach, namely, simultaneously learning the representations of multiple input objects. Such an approach assisted with some variational techniques, result in a novel learning framework, “Aggregated Learning”, for classification with neural network models. In this framework, several objects are jointly classified by a single neural network. The effectiveness of this framework is verified through extensive experiments on standard image recognition and text classification tasks.
Infomax Neural Joint Source-Channel Coding via Adversarial Bit Flip
Authors: Song Yuxuan , Xu Minkai , Yu Lantao , Zhou Hao , Shao Shuo , Yu Yong
Published: June 2020

Although Shannon theory states that it is asymptotically optimal to separate the source and channel coding as two independent processes, in many practical communication scenarios this decomposition is limited by the finite bit-length and computational power for decoding. Recently, neural joint source-channel coding (NECST) (Choi et al. 2018) is proposed to sidestep this problem. While it leverages the advancements of amortized inference and deep learning (Kingma and Welling 2013; Grover and Ermon 2018) to improve the encoding and decoding process, it still cannot always achieve compelling results in terms of compression and error correction performance due to the limited robustness of its learned coding networks. In this paper, motivated by the inherent connections between neural joint source-channel coding and discrete representation learning, we propose a novel regularization method called Infomax Adversarial-Bit-Flip (IABF) to improve the stability and robustness of the neural joint source-channel coding scheme. More specifically, on the encoder side, we propose to explicitly maximize the mutual information between the codeword and data; while on the decoder side, the amortized reconstruction is regularized within an adversarial framework. Extensive experiments conducted on various real-world datasets evidence that our IABF can achieve state-of-the-art performances on both compression and error correction benchmarks and outperform the baselines by a significant margin.
Discriminative Adversarial Domain Adaptation
Authors: Tang Hui , Jia Kui
Published: June 2020

Given labeled instances on a source domain and unlabeled ones on a target domain, unsupervised domain adaptation aims to learn a task classifier that can well classify target instances. Recent advances rely on domain-adversarial training of deep networks to learn domain-invariant features. However, due to an issue of mode collapse induced by the separate design of task and domain classifiers, these methods are limited in aligning the joint distributions of feature and category across domains. To overcome it, we propose a novel adversarial learning method termed Discriminative Adversarial Domain Adaptation (DADA). Based on an integrated category and domain classifier, DADA has a novel adversarial objective that encourages a mutually inhibitory relation between category and domain predictions for any input instance. We show that under practical conditions, it defines a minimax game that can promote the joint distribution alignment. Except for the traditional closed set domain adaptation, we also extend DADA for extremely challenging problem settings of partial and open set domain adaptation. Experiments show the efficacy of our proposed methods and we achieve the new state of the art for all the three settings on benchmark datasets.
Joint Modeling of Local and Global Temporal Dynamics for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Missing Values
Authors: Tang Xianfeng , Yao Huaxiu , Sun Yiwei , Aggarwal Charu , Mitra Prasenjit , Wang Suhang
Published: June 2020

Multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting is widely used in various domains, such as meteorology and traffic. Due to limitations on data collection, transmission, and storage, real-world MTS data usually contains missing values, making it infeasible to apply existing MTS forecasting models such as linear regression and recurrent neural networks. Though many efforts have been devoted to this problem, most of them solely rely on local dependencies for imputing missing values, which ignores global temporal dynamics. Local dependencies/patterns would become less useful when the missing ratio is high, or the data have consecutive missing values; while exploring global patterns can alleviate such problem. Thus, jointly modeling local and global temporal dynamics is very promising for MTS forecasting with missing values. However, work in this direction is rather limited. Therefore, we study a novel problem of MTS forecasting with missing values by jointly exploring local and global temporal dynamics. We propose a new framework øurs, which leverages memory network to explore global patterns given estimations from local perspectives. We further introduce adversarial training to enhance the modeling of global temporal distribution. Experimental results on real-world datasets show the effectiveness of øurs for MTS forecasting with missing values and its robustness under various missing ratios.
Bi-Objective Continual Learning: Learning ‘New’ While Consolidating ‘Known’
Authors: Tao Xiaoyu , Hong Xiaopeng , Chang Xinyuan , Gong Yihong
Published: June 2020

In this paper, we propose a novel single-task continual learning framework named Bi-Objective Continual Learning (BOCL). BOCL aims at both consolidating historical knowledge and learning from new data. On one hand, we propose to preserve the old knowledge using a small set of pillars, and develop the pillar consolidation (PLC) loss to preserve the old knowledge and to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting problem. On the other hand, we develop the contrastive pillar (CPL) loss term to improve the classification performance, and examine several data sampling strategies for efficient onsite learning from ‘new’ with a reasonable amount of computational resources. Comprehensive experiments on CIFAR10/100, CORe50 and a subset of ImageNet validate the BOCL framework. We also reveal the performance accuracy of different sampling strategies when used to finetune a given CNN model. The code will be released.
Scalable Variational Bayesian Kernel Selection for Sparse Gaussian Process Regression
Authors: Teng Tong , Chen Jie , Zhang Yehong , Low Bryan Kian Hsiang
Published: June 2020

This paper presents a variational Bayesian kernel selection (VBKS) algorithm for sparse Gaussian process regression (SGPR) models. In contrast to existing GP kernel selection algorithms that aim to select only one kernel with the highest model evidence, our VBKS algorithm considers the kernel as a random variable and learns its belief from data such that the uncertainty of the kernel can be interpreted and exploited to avoid overconfident GP predictions. To achieve this, we represent the probabilistic kernel as an additional variational variable in a variational inference (VI) framework for SGPR models where its posterior belief is learned together with that of the other variational variables (i.e., inducing variables and kernel hyperparameters). In particular, we transform the discrete kernel belief into a continuous parametric distribution via reparameterization in order to apply VI. Though it is computationally challenging to jointly optimize a large number of hyperparameters due to many kernels being evaluated simultaneously by our VBKS algorithm, we show that the variational lower bound of the log-marginal likelihood can be decomposed into an additive form such that each additive term depends only on a disjoint subset of the variational variables and can thus be optimized independently. Stochastic optimization is then used to maximize the variational lower bound by iteratively improving the variational approximation of the exact posterior belief via stochastic gradient ascent, which incurs constant time per iteration and hence scales to big data. We empirically evaluate the performance of our VBKS algorithm on synthetic and massive real-world datasets.
Meta-Learning for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning
Authors: Verma Vinay Kumar , Brahma Dhanajit , Rai Piyush
Published: June 2020

Learning to classify unseen class samples at test time is popularly referred to as zero-shot learning (ZSL). If test samples can be from training (seen) as well as unseen classes, it is a more challenging problem due to the existence of strong bias towards seen classes. This problem is generally known as generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL). Thanks to the recent advances in generative models such as VAEs and GANs, sample synthesis based approaches have gained considerable attention for solving this problem. These approaches are able to handle the problem of class bias by synthesizing unseen class samples. However, these ZSL/GZSL models suffer due to the following key limitations: (i) Their training stage learns a class-conditioned generator using only seen class data and the training stage does not explicitly learn to generate the unseen class samples; (ii) They do not learn a generic optimal parameter which can easily generalize for both seen and unseen class generation; and (iii) If we only have access to a very few samples per seen class, these models tend to perform poorly. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning based generative model that naturally handles these limitations. The proposed model is based on integrating model-agnostic meta learning with a Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) to handle (i) and (iii), and uses a novel task distribution to handle (ii). Our proposed model yields significant improvements on standard ZSL as well as more challenging GZSL setting. In ZSL setting, our model yields 4.5%, 6.0%, 9.8%, and 27.9% relative improvements over the current state-of-the-art on CUB, AWA1, AWA2, and aPY datasets, respectively.
Compact Autoregressive Network
Authors: Wang Di , Huang Feiqing , Zhao Jingyu , Li Guodong , Tian Guangjian
Published: June 2020

Autoregressive networks can achieve promising performance in many sequence modeling tasks with short-range dependence. However, when handling high-dimensional inputs and outputs, the massive amount of parameters in the network leads to expensive computational cost and low learning efficiency. The problem can be alleviated slightly by introducing one more narrow hidden layer to the network, but the sample size required to achieve a certain training error is still substantial. To address this challenge, we rearrange the weight matrices of a linear autoregressive network into a tensor form, and then make use of Tucker decomposition to represent low-rank structures. This leads to a novel compact autoregressive network, called Tucker AutoRegressive (TAR) net. Interestingly, the TAR net can be applied to sequences with long-range dependence since the dimension along the sequential order is reduced. Theoretical studies show that the TAR net improves the learning efficiency, and requires much fewer samples for model training. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed compact network.
Logo-2K+: A Large-Scale Logo Dataset for Scalable Logo Classification
Authors: Wang Jing , Min Weiqing , Hou Sujuan , Ma Shengnan , Zheng Yuanjie , Wang Haishuai , Jiang Shuqiang
Published: June 2020

Logo classification has gained increasing attention for its various applications, such as copyright infringement detection, product recommendation and contextual advertising. Compared with other types of object images, the real-world logo images have larger variety in logo appearance and more complexity in their background. Therefore, recognizing the logo from images is challenging. To support efforts towards scalable logo classification task, we have curated a dataset, Logo-2K+, a new large-scale publicly available real-world logo dataset with 2,341 categories and 167,140 images. Compared with existing popular logo datasets, such as FlickrLogos-32 and LOGO-Net, Logo-2K+ has more comprehensive coverage of logo categories and larger quantity of logo images. Moreover, we propose a Discriminative Region Navigation and Augmentation Network (DRNA-Net), which is capable of discovering more informative logo regions and augmenting these image regions for logo classification. DRNA-Net consists of four sub-networks: the navigator sub-network first selected informative logo-relevant regions guided by the teacher sub-network, which can evaluate its confidence belonging to the ground-truth logo class. The data augmentation sub-network then augments the selected regions via both region cropping and region dropping. Finally, the scrutinizer sub-network fuses features from augmented regions and the whole image for logo classification. Comprehensive experiments on Logo-2K+ and other three existing benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method. Logo-2K+ and the proposed strong baseline DRNA-Net are expected to further the development of scalable logo image recognition, and the Logo-2K+ dataset can be found at https://github.com/msn199959/Logo-2k-plus-Dataset.
Crowdfunding Dynamics Tracking: A Reinforcement Learning Approach
Authors: Wang Jun , Zhang Hefu , Liu Qi , Pan Zhen , Tao Hanqing
Published: June 2020

Recent years have witnessed the increasing interests in research of crowdfunding mechanism. In this area, dynamics tracking is a significant issue but is still under exploration. Existing studies either fit the fluctuations of time-series or employ regularization terms to constrain learned tendencies. However, few of them take into account the inherent decision-making process between investors and crowdfunding dynamics. To address the problem, in this paper, we propose a Trajectory-based Continuous Control for Crowdfunding (TC3) algorithm to predict the funding progress in crowdfunding. Specifically, actor-critic frameworks are employed to model the relationship between investors and campaigns, where all of the investors are viewed as an agent that could interact with the environment derived from the real dynamics of campaigns. Then, to further explore the in-depth implications of patterns (i.e., typical characters) in funding series, we propose to subdivide them into fast-growing and slow-growing ones. Moreover, for the purpose of switching from different kinds of patterns, the actor component of TC3 is extended with a structure of options, which comes to the TC3-Options. Finally, extensive experiments on the Indiegogo dataset not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, but also validate our assumption that the entire pattern learned by TC3-Options is indeed the U-shaped one.
Dual Relation Semi-Supervised Multi-Label Learning
Authors: Wang Lichen , Liu Yunyu , Qin Can , Sun Gan , Fu Yun
Published: June 2020

Multi-label learning (MLL) solves the problem that one single sample corresponds to multiple labels. It is a challenging task due to the long-tail label distribution and the sophisticated label relations. Semi-supervised MLL methods utilize a small-scale labeled samples and large-scale unlabeled samples to enhance the performance. However, these approaches mainly focus on exploring the data distribution in feature space while ignoring mining the label relation inside of each instance. To this end, we proposed a Dual Relation Semi-supervised Multi-label Learning (DRML) approach which jointly explores the feature distribution and the label relation simultaneously. A dual-classifier domain adaptation strategy is proposed to align features while generating pseudo labels to improve learning performance. A relation network is proposed to explore the relation knowledge. As a result, DRML effectively explores the feature-label and label-label relations in both labeled and unlabeled samples. It is an end-to-end model without any extra knowledge. Extensive experiments illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method1.
A Knowledge Transfer Framework for Differentially Private Sparse Learning
Authors: Wang Lingxiao , Gu Quanquan
Published: June 2020

We study the problem of estimating high dimensional models with underlying sparse structures while preserving the privacy of each training example. We develop a differentially private high-dimensional sparse learning framework using the idea of knowledge transfer. More specifically, we propose to distill the knowledge from a “teacher” estimator trained on a private dataset, by creating a new dataset from auxiliary features, and then train a differentially private “student” estimator using this new dataset. In addition, we establish the linear convergence rate as well as the utility guarantee for our proposed method. For sparse linear regression and sparse logistic regression, our method achieves improved utility guarantees compared with the best known results (Kifer, Smith and Thakurta 2012; Wang and Gu 2019). We further demonstrate the superiority of our framework through both synthetic and real-world data experiments.
Learning from Weak-Label Data: A Deep Forest Expedition
Authors: Wang Qian-Wei , Yang Liang , Li Yu-Feng
Published: June 2020

Weak-label learning deals with the problem where each training example is associated with multiple ground-truth labels simultaneously but only partially provided. This circumstance is frequently encountered when the number of classes is very large or when there exists a large ambiguity between class labels, and significantly influences the performance of multi-label learning. In this paper, we propose LCForest, which is the first tree ensemble based deep learning method for weak-label learning. Rather than formulating the problem as a regularized framework, we employ the recently proposed cascade forest structure, which processes information layer-by-layer, and endow it with the ability of exploiting from weak-label data by a concise and highly efficient label complement structure. Specifically, in each layer, the label vector of each instance from testing-fold is modified with the predictions of random forests trained with the corresponding training-fold. Since the ground-truth label matrix is inaccessible, we can not estimate the performance via cross-validation directly. In order to control the growth of cascade forest, we adopt label frequency estimation and the complement flag mechanism. Experiments show that the proposed LCForest method compares favorably against the existing state-of-the-art multi-label and weak-label learning methods.
ODIN: ODE-Informed Regression for Parameter and State Inference in Time-Continuous Dynamical Systems
Authors: Wenk Philippe , Abbati Gabriele , Osborne Michael A. , Schölkopf Bernhard , Krause Andreas , Bauer Stefan
Published: June 2020

Parameter inference in ordinary differential equations is an important problem in many applied sciences and in engineering, especially in a data-scarce setting. In this work, we introduce a novel generative modeling approach based on constrained Gaussian processes and leverage it to build a computationally and data efficient algorithm for state and parameter inference. In an extensive set of experiments, our approach outperforms the current state of the art for parameter inference both in terms of accuracy and computational cost. It also shows promising results for the much more challenging problem of model selection.
Multi-Label Causal Feature Selection
Authors: Wu Xingyu , Jiang Bingbing , Yu Kui , Chen Huanhuan , Miao Chunyan
Published: June 2020

Multi-label feature selection has received considerable attentions during the past decade. However, existing algorithms do not attempt to uncover the underlying causal mechanism, and individually solve different types of variable relationships, ignoring the mutual effects between them. Furthermore, these algorithms lack of interpretability, which can only select features for all labels, but cannot explain the correlation between a selected feature and a certain label. To address these problems, in this paper, we theoretically study the causal relationships in multi-label data, and propose a novel Markov blanket based multi-label causal feature selection (MB-MCF) algorithm. MB-MCF mines the causal mechanism of labels and features first, to obtain a complete representation of information about labels. Based on the causal relationships, MB-MCF then selects predictive features and simultaneously distinguishes common features shared by multiple labels and label-specific features owned by single labels. Experiments on real-world data sets validate that MB-MCF could automatically determine the number of selected features and simultaneously achieve the best performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. An experiment in Emotions data set further demonstrates the interpretability of MB-MCF.
Efficient Projection-Free Online Methods with Stochastic Recursive Gradient
Authors: Xie Jiahao , Shen Zebang , Zhang Chao , Wang Boyu , Qian Hui
Published: June 2020

This paper focuses on projection-free methods for solving smooth Online Convex Optimization (OCO) problems. Existing projection-free methods either achieve suboptimal regret bounds or have high per-round computational costs. To fill this gap, two efficient projection-free online methods called ORGFW and MORGFW are proposed for solving stochastic and adversarial OCO problems, respectively. By employing a recursive gradient estimator, our methods achieve optimal regret bounds (up to a logarithmic factor) while possessing low per-round computational costs. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methods compared to state-of-the-arts.
Not All Attention Is Needed: Gated Attention Network for Sequence Data
Authors: Xue Lanqing , Li Xiaopeng , Zhang Nevin L.
Published: June 2020

Although deep neural networks generally have fixed network structures, the concept of dynamic mechanism has drawn more and more attention in recent years. Attention mechanisms compute input-dependent dynamic attention weights for aggregating a sequence of hidden states. Dynamic network configuration in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) selectively activates only part of the network at a time for different inputs. In this paper, we combine the two dynamic mechanisms for text classification tasks. Traditional attention mechanisms attend to the whole sequence of hidden states for an input sentence, while in most cases not all attention is needed especially for long sequences. We propose a novel method called Gated Attention Network (GA-Net) to dynamically select a subset of elements to attend to using an auxiliary network, and compute attention weights to aggregate the selected elements. It avoids a significant amount of unnecessary computation on unattended elements, and allows the model to pay attention to important parts of the sequence. Experiments in various datasets show that the proposed method achieves better performance compared with all baseline models with global or local attention while requiring less computation and achieving better interpretability. It is also promising to extend the idea to more complex attention-based models, such as transformers and seq-to-seq models.
Distributed Primal-Dual Optimization for Online Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Yang Peng , Li Ping
Published: June 2020

Conventional online multi-task learning algorithms suffer from two critical limitations: 1) Heavy communication caused by delivering high velocity of sequential data to a central machine; 2) Expensive runtime complexity for building task relatedness. To address these issues, in this paper we consider a setting where multiple tasks are geographically located in different places, where one task can synchronize data with others to leverage knowledge of related tasks. Specifically, we propose an adaptive primal-dual algorithm, which not only captures task-specific noise in adversarial learning but also carries out a projection-free update with runtime efficiency. Moreover, our model is well-suited to decentralized periodic-connected tasks as it allows the energy-starved or bandwidth-constraint tasks to postpone the update. Theoretical results demonstrate the convergence guarantee of our distributed algorithm with an optimal regret. Empirical results confirm that the proposed model is highly effective on various real-world datasets.
Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data without Explicit Estimation of Class Prior
Authors: Zhang Chenguang , Hou Yuexian , Zhang Yan
Published: June 2020

Learning a classifier from positive and unlabeled data may occur in various applications. It differs from the standard classification problems by the absence of labeled negative examples in the training set. So far, two main strategies have typically been used for this issue: the likely negative examplesbased strategy and the class prior-based strategy, in which the likely negative examples or the class prior is required to be obtained in a preprocessing step. In this paper, a new strategy based on the Bhattacharyya coefficient is put forward, which formalizes this learning problem as an optimization problem and does not need a preprocessing step. We first show that with the given positive class conditional probability density function (PDF) and the mixture PDF of both the positive class and the negative class, the class prior can be estimated by minimizing the Bhattacharyya coefficient of the positive class with respect to the negative class. We then show how to use this result in an implicit mixture model of restricted Boltzmann machines to estimate the positive class conditional PDF and the negative class conditional PDF directly to obtain a classifier without the explicit estimation of the class prior. Many experiments on real and synthetic datasets illustrated the superiority of the proposed approach.
Policy Search by Target Distribution Learning for Continuous Control
Authors: Zhang Chuheng , Li Yuanqi , Li Jian
Published: June 2020

It is known that existing policy gradient methods (such as vanilla policy gradient, PPO, A2C) may suffer from overly large gradients when the current policy is close to deterministic, leading to an unstable training process. We show that such instability can happen even in a very simple environment. To address this issue, we propose a new method, called target distribution learning (TDL), for policy improvement in reinforcement learning. TDL alternates between proposing a target distribution and training the policy network to approach the target distribution. TDL is more effective in constraining the KL divergence between updated policies, and hence leads to more stable policy improvements over iterations. Our experiments show that TDL algorithms perform comparably to (or better than) state-of-the-art algorithms for most continuous control tasks in the MuJoCo environment while being more stable in training.
Atari-HEAD: Atari Human Eye-Tracking and Demonstration Dataset
Authors: Zhang Ruohan , Walshe Calen , Liu Zhuode , Guan Lin , Muller Karl , Whritner Jake , Zhang Luxin , Hayhoe Mary , Ballard Dana
Published: June 2020

Large-scale public datasets have been shown to benefit research in multiple areas of modern artificial intelligence. For decision-making research that requires human data, high-quality datasets serve as important benchmarks to facilitate the development of new methods by providing a common reproducible standard. Many human decision-making tasks require visual attention to obtain high levels of performance. Therefore, measuring eye movements can provide a rich source of information about the strategies that humans use to solve decision-making tasks. Here, we provide a large-scale, high-quality dataset of human actions with simultaneously recorded eye movements while humans play Atari video games. The dataset consists of 117 hours of gameplay data from a diverse set of 20 games, with 8 million action demonstrations and 328 million gaze samples. We introduce a novel form of gameplay, in which the human plays in a semi-frame-by-frame manner. This leads to near-optimal game decisions and game scores that are comparable or better than known human records. We demonstrate the usefulness of the dataset through two simple applications: predicting human gaze and imitating human demonstrated actions. The quality of the data leads to promising results in both tasks. Moreover, using a learned human gaze model to inform imitation learning leads to an 115% increase in game performance. We interpret these results as highlighting the importance of incorporating human visual attention in models of decision making and demonstrating the value of the current dataset to the research community. We hope that the scale and quality of this dataset can provide more opportunities to researchers in the areas of visual attention, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning.
Self-Paced Robust Learning for Leveraging Clean Labels in Noisy Data
Authors: Zhang Xuchao , Wu Xian , Chen Fanglan , Zhao Liang , Lu Chang-Tien
Published: June 2020

The success of training accurate models strongly depends on the availability of a sufficient collection of precisely labeled data. However, real-world datasets contain erroneously labeled data samples that substantially hinder the performance of machine learning models. Meanwhile, well-labeled data is usually expensive to obtain and only a limited amount is available for training. In this paper, we consider the problem of training a robust model by using large-scale noisy data in conjunction with a small set of clean data. To leverage the information contained via the clean labels, we propose a novel self-paced robust learning algorithm (SPRL) that trains the model in a process from more reliable (clean) data instances to less reliable (noisy) ones under the supervision of well-labeled data. The self-paced learning process hedges the risk of selecting corrupted data into the training set. Moreover, theoretical analyses on the convergence of the proposed algorithm are provided under mild assumptions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach can achieve a considerable improvement in effectiveness and robustness to existing methods.
Deep Model-Based Reinforcement Learning via Estimated Uncertainty and Conservative Policy Optimization
Authors: Zhou Qi , Li HouQiang , Wang Jie
Published: June 2020

Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms tend to achieve higher sample efficiency than model-free methods. However, due to the inevitable errors of learned models, model-based methods struggle to achieve the same asymptotic performance as model-free methods. In this paper, We propose a Policy Optimization method with Model-Based Uncertainty (POMBU)—a novel model-based approach—that can effectively improve the asymptotic performance using the uncertainty in Q-values. We derive an upper bound of the uncertainty, based on which we can approximate the uncertainty accurately and efficiently for model-based methods. We further propose an uncertainty-aware policy optimization algorithm that optimizes the policy conservatively to encourage performance improvement with high probability. This can significantly alleviate the overfitting of policy to inaccurate models. Experiments show POMBU can outperform existing state-of-the-art policy optimization algorithms in terms of sample efficiency and asymptotic performance. Moreover, the experiments demonstrate the excellent robustness of POMBU compared to previous model-based approaches.
Safe Sample Screening for Robust Support Vector Machine
Authors: Zhai Zhou , Gu Bin , Li Xiang , Huang Heng
Published: June 2020

Robust support vector machine (RSVM) has been shown to perform remarkably well to improve the generalization performance of support vector machine under the noisy environment. Unfortunately, in order to handle the non-convexity induced by ramp loss in RSVM, existing RSVM solvers often adopt the DC programming framework which is computationally inefficient for running multiple outer loops. This hinders the application of RSVM to large-scale problems. Safe sample screening that allows for the exclusion of training samples prior to or early in the training process is an effective method to greatly reduce computational time. However, existing safe sample screening algorithms are limited to convex optimization problems while RSVM is a non-convex problem. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose two safe sample screening rules for RSVM based on the framework of concave-convex procedure (CCCP). Specifically, we provide screening rule for the inner solver of CCCP and another rule for propagating screened samples between two successive solvers of CCCP. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work of safe sample screening to a non-convex optimization problem. More importantly, we provide the security guarantee to our sample screening rules to RSVM. Experimental results on a variety of benchmark datasets verify that our safe sample screening rules can significantly reduce the computational time.
Scalable Decision-Theoretic Planning in Open and Typed Multiagent Systems
Authors: Eck Adam , Shah Maulik , Doshi Prashant , Soh Leen-Kiat
Published: June 2020

In open agent systems, the set of agents that are cooperating or competing changes over time and in ways that are nontrivial to predict. For example, if collaborative robots were tasked with fighting wildfires, they may run out of suppressants and be temporarily unavailable to assist their peers. We consider the problem of planning in these contexts with the additional challenges that the agents are unable to communicate with each other and that there are many of them. Because an agent's optimal action depends on the actions of others, each agent must not only predict the actions of its peers, but, before that, reason whether they are even present to perform an action. Addressing openness thus requires agents to model each other's presence, which becomes computationally intractable with high numbers of agents. We present a novel, principled, and scalable method in this context that enables an agent to reason about others' presence in its shared environment and their actions. Our method extrapolates models of a few peers to the overall behavior of the many-agent system, and combines it with a generalization of Monte Carlo tree search to perform individual agent reasoning in many-agent open environments. Theoretical analyses establish the number of agents to model in order to achieve acceptable worst case bounds on extrapolation error, as well as regret bounds on the agent's utility from modeling only some neighbors. Simulations of multiagent wildfire suppression problems demonstrate our approach's efficacy compared with alternative baselines.
Communication Learning via Backpropagation in Discrete Channels with Unknown Noise
Authors: Freed Benjamin , Sartoretti Guillaume , Hu Jiaheng , Choset Howie
Published: June 2020

This work focuses on multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) with inter-agent communication, in which communication is differentiable and optimized through backpropagation. Such differentiable approaches tend to converge more quickly to higher-quality policies compared to techniques that treat communication as actions in a traditional RL framework. However, modern communication networks (e.g., Wi-Fi or Bluetooth) rely on discrete communication channels, for which existing differentiable approaches that consider real-valued messages cannot be directly applied, or require biased gradient estimators. Some works have overcome this problem by treating the message space as an extension of the action space, and use standard RL to optimize message selection, but these methods tend to converge slower and to inferior policies. In this paper, we propose a stochastic message encoding/decoding procedure that makes a discrete communication channel mathematically equivalent to an analog channel with additive noise, through which gradients can be backpropagated. Additionally, we introduce an encryption step for use in noisy channels that forces channel noise to be message-independent, allowing us to compute unbiased derivative estimates even in the presence of unknown channel noise. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first differentiable communication learning approach that can compute unbiased derivatives through channels with unknown noise. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in two example multi-robot tasks: a path finding and a collaborative search problem. There, we show that our approach achieves learning speed and performance similar to differentiable communication learning with real-valued messages (i.e., unlimited communication bandwidth), while naturally handling more realistic real-world communication constraints. Content Areas: Multi-Agent Communication, Reinforcement Learning.
Distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent with Event-Triggered Communication
Authors: George Jemin , Gurram Prudhvi
Published: June 2020

We develop a Distributed Event-Triggered Stochastic GRAdient Descent (DETSGRAD) algorithm for solving non-convex optimization problems typically encountered in distributed deep learning. We propose a novel communication triggering mechanism that would allow the networked agents to update their model parameters aperiodically and provide sufficient conditions on the algorithm step-sizes that guarantee the asymptotic mean-square convergence. The algorithm is applied to a distributed supervised-learning problem, in which a set of networked agents collaboratively train their individual neural networks to perform image classification, while aperiodically sharing the model parameters with their one-hop neighbors. Results indicate that all agents report similar performance that is also comparable to the performance of a centrally trained neural network, while the event-triggered communication provides significant reduction in inter-agent communication. Results also show that the proposed algorithm allows the individual agents to classify the images even though the training data corresponding to all the classes are not locally available to each agent.
Clouseau: Generating Communication Protocols from Commitments
Authors: Singh Munindar , Chopra Amit
Published: June 2020

Engineering a decentralized multiagent system (MAS) requires realizing interactions modeled as a communication protocol between autonomous agents. We contribute Clouseau, an approach that takes a commitment-based specification of an interaction and generates a communication protocol amenable to decentralized enactment. We show that the generated protocol is (1) correct—realizes all and only the computations that satisfy the input specification; (2) safe—ensures the agents' local views remain consistent; and (3) live—ensures the agents can proceed to completion.