huashen218/convxai-cia-dataset huggingface dataset:
Actor-Critic Policy Optimization in a Large-Scale Imperfect-Information Game
Keywords: Policy Optimization, Nash Equilibrium, Mahjong AI

The deep policy gradient method has demonstrated promising results in many large-scale games, where the agent learns purely from its own experience. Yet, policy gradient methods with self-play suffer convergence problems to a Nash Equilibrium (NE) in multi-agent situations. Counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) has a convergence guarantee to a NE in 2-player zero-sum games, but it usually needs domain-specific abstractions to deal with large-scale games.  Inheriting merits from both methods, in this paper we extend the actor-critic algorithm framework in deep reinforcement learning to tackle a large-scale 2-player zero-sum imperfect-information game, 1-on-1 Mahjong, whose information set size and game length are much larger than poker. The proposed algorithm, named Actor-Critic Hedge (ACH), modifies the policy optimization objective from originally maximizing the discounted returns to minimizing a type of weighted cumulative counterfactual regret. This modification is achieved by approximating the regret via a deep neural network and minimizing the regret via generating self-play policies using Hedge. ACH is theoretically justified as it is derived from a neural-based weighted CFR, for which we prove the convergence to a NE under certain conditions. Experimental results on the proposed 1-on-1 Mahjong benchmark and benchmarks from the literature demonstrate that ACH outperforms related state-of-the-art methods. Also, the agent obtained by ACH defeats a human champion in 1-on-1 Mahjong.
Policy Gradients Incorporating the Future

Reasoning about the future -- understanding how decisions in the present time affect outcomes in the future -- is one of the central challenges for reinforcement learning (RL), especially in highly-stochastic or partially observable environments. While predicting the future directly is hard, in this work we introduce a method that allows an agent to ``look into the future'' without explicitly predicting it. Namely, we propose to allow an agent, during its training on past experience, to observe what \emph{actually} happened in the future at that time, while enforcing an information bottleneck to avoid the agent overly relying on this privileged information. Coupled with recent advances in variational inference and a latent-variable autoregressive model, this gives our agent the ability to utilize rich and \emph{useful} information about the future trajectory dynamics in addition to the present. Our method, Policy Gradients Incorporating the Future (PGIF), is easy to implement and versatile, being applicable to virtually any policy gradient algorithm. We apply our proposed method to a number of off-the-shelf RL algorithms and show that PGIF is able to achieve higher reward faster in a variety of online and offline RL domains, as well as sparse-reward and partially observable environments.
Gradient Information Matters in Policy Optimization by Back-propagating through Model
Keywords: Model-based RL, Policy Optimization

Model-based reinforcement learning provides an efficient mechanism to find the optimal policy by interacting with the learned environment. In addition to treating the learned environment like a black-box simulator, a more effective way to use the model is to exploit its differentiability. Such methods require the gradient information of the learned environment model when calculating the policy gradient. However, since the error of gradient is not considered in the model learning phase, there is no guarantee for the model's accuracy. To address this problem, we first analyze the convergence rate for the policy optimization methods when the policy gradient is calculated using the learned environment model. The theoretical results show that the model gradient error matters in the policy optimization phrase. Then we propose a two-model-based learning method to control the prediction error and the gradient error. We separate the different roles of these two models at the model learning phase and coordinate them at the policy optimization phase. After proposing the method, we introduce the directional derivative projection policy optimization (DDPPO) algorithm as a practical implementation to find the optimal policy. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the proposed algorithm has better sample efficiency when achieving a comparable or better performance on benchmark continuous control tasks.
VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning
Keywords: self-supervised learning, representation learning, computer vision

Recent self-supervised methods for image representation learning maximize the agreement between embedding vectors produced by encoders fed with different views of the same image.  The main challenge is to prevent a collapse in which the encoders produce constant or non-informative vectors. We introduce VICReg (Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization), a method that explicitly avoids the collapse problem with two regularizations terms applied to both embeddings separately: (1) a term that maintains the variance of each embedding dimension above a threshold,  (2) a term that decorrelates each pair of variables. Unlike most other approaches to the same problem, VICReg does not require techniques such as: weight sharing between the branches, batch normalization, feature-wise normalization, output quantization, stop gradient, memory banks, etc., and achieves results on par with the state of the art on several downstream tasks. In addition, we show that our variance regularization term stabilizes the training of other methods and leads to performance improvements.
High Probability Generalization Bounds with Fast Rates for Minimax Problems

Minimax problems are receiving an increasing amount of attention in a wide range of applications in machine learning (ML), for instance, reinforcement learning, robust optimization, adversarial learning, and distributed computing, to mention but a few. Current studies focus on the fundamental understanding of general minimax problems with an emphasis on convergence behavior. As a comparison, there is far less work to study the generalization performance. Additionally, existing generalization bounds are almost all derived in expectation, and the high probability bounds are all presented in the slow order $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{n})$, where $n$ is the sample size. In this paper, we provide improved generalization analyses and obtain sharper high probability generalization bounds for most existing generalization measures of minimax problems. We then use the improved learning bounds to establish high probability generalization bounds with fast rates for classical empirical saddle point (ESP) solution and several popular gradient-based optimization algorithms, including gradient descent ascent (GDA), stochastic gradient descent ascent (SGDA), proximal point method (PPM), extra-gradient (EG), and optimistic gradient descent ascent (OGDA). In summary, we provide a systematical analysis of sharper generalization bounds of minimax problems.
SUMNAS: Supernet with Unbiased Meta-Features for Neural Architecture Search
Keywords: Neural architecture search

One-shot Neural Architecture Search (NAS) usually constructs an over-parameterized network, which we call a supernet, and typically adopts sharing parameters among the sub-models to improve computational efficiency. One-shot NAS often repeatedly samples sub-models from the supernet and trains them to optimize the shared parameters. However, this training strategy suffers from multi-model forgetting. Training a sampled sub-model overrides the previous knowledge learned by the other sub-models, resulting in an unfair performance evaluation between the sub-models. We propose Supernet with Unbiased Meta-Features for Neural Architecture Search (SUMNAS), a supernet learning strategy based on meta-learning to tackle the knowledge forgetting issue. During the training phase, we explicitly address the multi-model forgetting problem and help the supernet learn unbiased meta-features, independent from the sampled sub-models. Once training is over, sub-models can be instantly compared to get the overall ranking or the best sub-model. Our evaluation on the NAS-Bench-201 and MobileNet-based search space demonstrate that SUMNAS shows improved ranking ability and finds architectures whose performance is on par with existing state-of-the-art NAS algorithms.
Temporal Efficient Training of Spiking Neural Network via Gradient Re-weighting
Keywords: Spiking Neural Networks, Direct Training, Surrogate Gradient, Generalizability

Recently, brain-inspired spiking neuron networks (SNNs) have attracted widespread research interest because of their event-driven and energy-efficient characteristics. It is difficult to efficiently train deep SNNs due to the non-differentiability of its activation function, which disables the typically used gradient descent approaches for traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs). Although the adoption of surrogate gradient (SG) formally allows for the back-propagation of losses, the discrete spiking mechanism actually differentiates the loss landscape of SNNs from that of ANNs, failing the surrogate gradient methods to achieve comparable accuracy as for ANNs. In this paper, we first analyze why the current direct training approach with surrogate gradient results in SNNs with poor generalizability. Then we introduce the temporal efficient training (TET) approach to compensate for the loss of momentum in the gradient descent with SG so that the training process can converge into flatter minima with better generalizability. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that TET improves the temporal scalability of SNN and induces a temporal inheritable training for acceleration. Our method consistently outperforms the SOTA on all reported mainstream datasets, including CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet. Remarkably on DVS-CIFAR10, we obtained  83% top-1 accuracy, over 10% improvement compared to existing state of the art.
Reliable Adversarial Distillation with Unreliable Teachers

In ordinary distillation, student networks are trained with soft labels (SLs) given by pretrained teacher networks, and students are expected to improve upon teachers since SLs are stronger supervision than the original hard labels. However, when considering adversarial robustness, teachers may become unreliable and adversarial distillation may not work: teachers are pretrained on their own adversarial data, and it is too demanding to require that teachers are also good at every adversarial data queried by students. Therefore, in this paper, we propose reliable introspective adversarial distillation (IAD) where students partially instead of fully trust their teachers. Specifically, IAD distinguishes between three cases given a query of a natural data (ND) and the corresponding adversarial data (AD): (a) if a teacher is good at AD, its SL is fully trusted; (b) if a teacher is good at ND but not AD, its SL is partially trusted and the student also takes its own SL into account; (c) otherwise, the student only relies on its own SL. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of IAD for improving upon teachers in terms of adversarial robustness.
Neural Program Synthesis with Query

Aiming to find a program satisfying the user intent given input-output examples, program synthesis has attracted increasing interest in the area of machine learning. Despite the promising performance of existing methods, most of their success comes from the privileged information of well-designed input-output examples. However, providing such input-output examples is unrealistic because it requires the users to have the ability to describe the underlying program with a few input-output examples under the training distribution. In this work, we propose a query-based framework that trains a query neural network to generate informative input-output examples automatically and interactively from a large query space. The quality of the query depends on the amount of the mutual information between the query and the corresponding program, which can guide the optimization of the query framework. To estimate the mutual information more accurately, we introduce the functional space (F-space) which models the relevance between the input-output examples and the programs in a differentiable way. We evaluate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed query-based framework on the Karel task and the list processing task. Experimental results show that the query-based framework can generate informative input-output examples which achieve
        and even outperform well-designed input-output examples.
Delaunay Component Analysis for Evaluation of Data Representations
Keywords: Interpretation and Evaluation of Learned Representations, Generative Models, Contrastive Learning

Advanced representation learning techniques require reliable and general evaluation methods. Recently, several algorithms based on the common idea of geometric and topological analysis of a manifold approximated from the learned data representations have been proposed. In this work, we introduce Delaunay Component Analysis (DCA) -- an evaluation algorithm which approximates the data manifold using a more suitable neighbourhood graph called Delaunay graph. This provides a reliable manifold estimation even for challenging geometric arrangements of representations such as clusters with varying shape and density as well as outliers, which is where existing methods often fail. Furthermore, we exploit the nature of Delaunay graphs and introduce a framework for assessing the quality of individual novel data representations.  We experimentally validate the proposed DCA method on representations obtained from neural networks trained with contrastive objective, supervised and generative models, and demonstrate various use cases of our extended single point evaluation framework.
Visual hyperacuity with moving sensor and recurrent neural computations
Keywords: visual system, convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, active vision, active sensing, ocular drift

Dynamical phenomena, such as recurrent neuronal activity  and perpetual motion of the eye, are typically overlooked in models of bottom-up visual perception. Recent experiments suggest that tiny inter-saccadic eye motion ("fixational drift") enhances visual  acuity beyond the limit imposed by the density of retinal photoreceptors. Here we hypothesize that such an enhancement is enabled by recurrent neuronal computations in early visual areas. Specifically, we explore a setting involving a low-resolution dynamical sensor that moves with respect to a static scene, with drift-like tiny steps. This setting mimics a dynamical eye viewing objects in perceptually-challenging conditions. The dynamical sensory input is classified by a convolutional neural network with recurrent connectivity added to its lower layers, in analogy to recurrent connectivity in early visual areas.  Applying our system to CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets down-sampled via 8x8 sensor, we found that (i) classification accuracy, which is drastically reduced by this down-sampling, is mostly restored to its 32x32 baseline level when using a moving sensor and recurrent connectivity, (ii) in this setting, neurons in the early layers exhibit a wide repertoire of selectivity patterns, spanning the spatiotemporal selectivity space, with neurons preferring different combinations of spatial and temporal patterning, and (iii) curved sensor's trajectories improve  visual acuity compared to straight trajectories, echoing recent experimental findings involving eye-tracking in challenging conditions. Our work sheds light on the possible role of recurrent connectivity in early vision as well as the roles of fixational drift and temporal-frequency selective cells in the visual system. It also proposes a solution for artificial image recognition in settings with limited resolution and multiple time samples, such as in edge AI applications.
Partial Wasserstein Adversarial Network for Non-rigid Point Set Registration
Keywords: partial Wasserstein discrepancy, partial distribution matching, point set registration

Given two point sets, the problem of registration is to recover a transformation that matches one set to the other. This task is challenging due to the presence of large number of outliers, the unknown non-rigid deformations and the large sizes of point sets. To obtain strong robustness against outliers, we formulate the registration problem as a partial distribution matching (PDM) problem, where the goal is to partially match the distributions represented by point sets in a metric space. To handle large point sets, we propose a scalable PDM algorithm by utilizing the efficient partial Wasserstein-1 (PW) discrepancy. Specifically, we derive the Kantorovich-Rubinstein duality for the PW discrepancy, and show its gradient can be explicitly computed. Based on these results, we propose a partial Wasserstein adversarial network (PWAN),  which is able to approximate the PW discrepancy by a neural network, and minimize it by gradient descent. In addition,
        it also incorporates an efficient coherence regularizer for non-rigid transformations to avoid unrealistic deformations. We evaluate PWAN on practical point set registration tasks, and show that the proposed PWAN is robust, scalable and performs more favorably than the state-of-the-art methods.
Quantitative Performance Assessment of CNN Units via Topological Entropy Calculation
Keywords: interpretation of neural network units, computational topology, convolutional neural networks, entropy

Identifying the status of individual network units is critical for understanding the mechanism of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, it is still challenging to reliably give a general indication of unit status, especially for units in different network models. To this end, we propose a novel method for quantitatively clarifying the status of single unit in CNN using algebraic topological tools. Unit status is indicated via the calculation of a defined topological-based entropy, called feature entropy, which measures the degree of chaos of the global spatial pattern hidden in the unit for a category. In this way, feature entropy could provide an accurate indication of status for units in different networks with diverse situations like weight-rescaling operation. Further, we show that feature entropy decreases as the layer goes deeper and shares almost simultaneous trend with loss during training. We show that by investigating the feature entropy of units on only training data, it could give discrimination between networks with different generalization ability from the view of the effectiveness of feature representations.
Imitation Learning by Reinforcement Learning
Keywords: reinforcement learning, imitation learning, Markov Decision Process, continuous control

Imitation learning algorithms learn a policy from demonstrations of expert behavior. We show that, for deterministic experts, imitation learning can be done by reduction to reinforcement learning with a stationary reward. Our theoretical analysis both certifies the recovery of expert reward and bounds the total variation distance between the expert and the imitation learner, showing a link to adversarial imitation learning. We conduct experiments which confirm that our reduction works well in practice for continuous control tasks.
On-Policy Model Errors in Reinforcement Learning
Keywords: Model-based reinforcement learning, reinforcement learning, model learning

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms can compute policy gradients given sampled environment transitions, but require large amounts of data. In contrast, model-based methods can use the learned model to generate new data, but model errors and bias can render learning unstable or suboptimal. In this paper, we present a novel method that combines real-world data and a learned model in order to get the best of both worlds. The core idea is to exploit the real-world data for on-policy predictions and use the learned model only to generalize to different actions. Specifically, we use the data as time-dependent on-policy correction terms on top of a learned model, to retain the ability to generate data without accumulating errors over long prediction horizons. We motivate this method theoretically and show that it counteracts an error term for model-based policy improvement. Experiments on MuJoCo- and PyBullet-benchmarks show that our method can drastically improve existing model-based approaches without introducing additional tuning parameters.
TAPEX: Table Pre-training via Learning a Neural SQL Executor
Keywords: table pre-training, sythetic pre-training, SQL execution, table-based question answering, table-based fact verification

Recent progress in language model pre-training has achieved a great success via leveraging large-scale unstructured textual data. However, it is still a challenge to apply pre-training on structured tabular data due to the absence of large-scale high-quality tabular data. In this paper, we propose TAPEX to show that table pre-training can be achieved by learning a neural SQL executor over a synthetic corpus, which is obtained by automatically synthesizing executable SQL queries and their execution outputs. TAPEX addresses the data scarcity challenge via guiding the language model to mimic a SQL executor on the diverse, large-scale and high-quality synthetic corpus. We evaluate TAPEX on four benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that TAPEX outperforms previous table pre-training approaches by a large margin and achieves new state-of-the-art results on all of them. This includes the improvements on the weakly-supervised WikiSQL denotation accuracy to 89.5% (+2.3%), the WikiTableQuestions denotation accuracy to 57.5% (+4.8%), the SQA denotation accuracy to 74.5% (+3.5%), and the TabFact accuracy to 84.2% (+3.2%). To our knowledge, this is the first work to exploit table pre-training via synthetic executable programs and to achieve new state-of-the-art results on various downstream tasks. Our code can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/Table-Pretraining.
DARA: Dynamics-Aware Reward Augmentation in Offline Reinforcement Learning

Offline reinforcement learning algorithms promise to be applicable in settings where a fixed dataset is available and no new experience can be acquired. However, such formulation is inevitably offline-data-hungry and, in practice, collecting a large offline dataset for one specific task over one specific environment is also costly and laborious. In this paper, we thus 1) formulate the offline dynamics adaptation by using (source) offline data collected from another dynamics to relax the requirement for the extensive (target) offline data, 2) characterize the dynamics shift problem in which prior offline methods do not scale well, and 3) derive a simple dynamics-aware reward augmentation (DARA) framework from both model-free and model-based offline settings. Specifically, DARA emphasizes learning from those source transition pairs that are adaptive for the target environment and mitigates the offline dynamics shift by characterizing state-action-next-state pairs instead of the typical state-action distribution sketched by prior offline RL methods. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that DARA, by augmenting rewards in the source offline dataset, can acquire an adaptive policy for the target environment and yet significantly reduce the requirement of target offline data. With only modest amounts of target offline data, our performance consistently outperforms the prior offline RL methods in both simulated and real-world tasks.