huashen218/convxai-cia-dataset huggingface dataset:
Factorizing Declarative and Procedural Knowledge in Structured, Dynamical Environments
Keywords: procedural knowledge, declarative knowledge, Systematicity

Modeling a structured, dynamic environment like a video game requires keeping track of the objects and their states (declarative knowledge) as well as predicting how objects behave (procedural knowledge). Black-box models with a monolithic hidden state often fail to apply procedural knowledge consistently and uniformly, i.e., they lack systematicity. For example, in a video game, correct prediction of one enemy's trajectory does not ensure correct prediction of another's. We address this issue via an architecture that factorizes declarative and procedural knowledge and that imposes modularity within each form of knowledge. The architecture consists of active modules called object files that maintain the state of a single object and invoke passive external knowledge sources called schemata that prescribe state updates. To use a video game as an illustration, two enemies of the same type will share schemata but will have separate object files to encode their distinct state (e.g., health, position). We propose to use attention to determine which object files to update, the selection of schemata, and the propagation of information between object files. The resulting architecture is a drop-in replacement conforming to the same input-output interface as normal recurrent networks (e.g., LSTM, GRU) yet achieves substantially better generalization on environments that have multiple object tokens of the same type, including a challenging intuitive physics benchmark.
Provable Rich Observation Reinforcement Learning with Combinatorial Latent States
Keywords: Reinforcement learning theory, Rich observation, Noise-contrastive learning, State abstraction, Factored MDP

We propose a novel setting for reinforcement learning that combines two common real-world difficulties: presence of observations (such as camera images) and factored states (such as location of objects). In our setting, the agent receives observations generated stochastically from a "latent" factored state. These observations are "rich enough" to enable decoding of the latent state and remove partial observability concerns. Since the latent state is combinatorial, the size of state space is exponential in the number of latent factors. We create a learning algorithm FactoRL (Fact-o-Rel) for this setting,  which uses noise-contrastive learning to identify latent structures in emission processes and discover a factorized state space. We derive polynomial sample complexity guarantees for FactoRL which polynomially depend upon the number factors, and very weakly depend on the size of the observation space.  We also provide a guarantee of polynomial time complexity when given access to an efficient planning algorithm.
LowKey: Leveraging Adversarial Attacks to Protect Social Media Users from Facial Recognition
Keywords: facial recognition, adversarial attacks

Facial recognition systems are increasingly deployed by private corporations, government agencies, and contractors for consumer services and mass surveillance programs alike.  These systems are typically built by scraping social media profiles for user images.  Adversarial perturbations have been proposed for bypassing facial recognition systems.  However, existing methods fail on full-scale systems and commercial APIs.  We develop our own adversarial filter that accounts for the entire image processing pipeline and is demonstrably effective against industrial-grade pipelines that include face detection and large scale databases.  Additionally, we release an easy-to-use webtool that significantly degrades the accuracy of Amazon Rekognition and the Microsoft Azure Face Recognition API, reducing the accuracy of each to below 1%.
Neural Networks for Learning Counterfactual G-Invariances from Single Environments
Keywords: Extrapolation, G-invariance regularization, Counterfactual inference, Invariant subspaces

Despite —or maybe because of— their astonishing capacity to fit data, neural networks are believed to have difficulties extrapolating beyond training data distribution. This work shows that, for extrapolations based on finite transformation groups, a model’s inability to extrapolate is unrelated to its capacity. Rather, the shortcoming is inherited from a learning hypothesis: Examples not explicitly observed with infinitely many training examples have underspecified outcomes in the learner’s model. In order to endow neural networks with the ability to extrapolate over group transformations, we introduce a learning framework counterfactually-guided by the learning hypothesis that any group invariance to (known) transformation groups is mandatory even without evidence, unless the learner deems it inconsistent with the training data. Unlike existing invariance-driven methods for (counterfactual) extrapolations, this framework allows extrapolations from a single environment. Finally, we introduce sequence and image extrapolation tasks that validate our framework and showcase the shortcomings of traditional approaches.
Simple Spectral Graph Convolution
Keywords: Graph Convolutional Network, Oversmoothing

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are leading methods for learning graph representations. However, without specially designed architectures, the performance of GCNs degrades quickly with increased depth. As the aggregated neighborhood size and neural network depth are two completely orthogonal aspects of graph representation, several methods focus on summarizing the neighborhood by aggregating K-hop neighborhoods of nodes while using shallow neural networks. However, these methods still encounter oversmoothing, and suffer from high computation and storage costs. In this paper, we use a modified Markov Diffusion Kernel to derive a variant of GCN called Simple Spectral Graph Convolution (SSGC). Our spectral analysis shows that our simple spectral graph convolution used in SSGC is a trade-off of low- and high-pass filter bands which capture the global and local contexts of each node. We provide two theoretical claims which demonstrate that we can aggregate over a sequence of increasingly larger neighborhoods compared to competitors while limiting severe oversmoothing.  Our experimental evaluations show that SSGC with a linear learner is competitive in text and node classification tasks. Moreover, SSGC is comparable to other state-of-the-art methods for node clustering and community prediction tasks.
Anatomy of Catastrophic Forgetting: Hidden Representations and Task Semantics
Keywords: Catastrophic forgetting, continual learning, representation analysis, representation learning

Catastrophic forgetting is a recurring challenge to developing versatile deep learning models. Despite its ubiquity, there is limited understanding of its connections to neural network (hidden) representations and task semantics. In this paper, we address this important knowledge gap. Through quantitative analysis of neural representations, we find that deeper layers are disproportionately responsible for forgetting, with sequential training resulting in an erasure of earlier task representational subspaces. Methods to mitigate forgetting stabilize these deeper layers, but show diversity on precise effects, with some increasing feature reuse while others store task representations orthogonally, preventing interference. These insights also enable the development of an analytic argument and empirical picture relating forgetting to task semantic similarity, where we find that maximal forgetting occurs for task sequences with intermediate similarity.
On Fast Adversarial Robustness Adaptation in Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning

Model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) has emerged as one of the most successful meta-learning techniques in few-shot learning. It enables us to learn a meta-initialization of model parameters (that we call meta-model) to rapidly adapt to new tasks using a small amount of labeled training data. Despite the generalization power of the meta-model, it remains elusive that how adversarial robustness can be maintained by MAML in few-shot learning. In addition to generalization, robustness is also desired for a meta-model to defend adversarial examples (attacks). Toward promoting adversarial robustness in MAML, we first study when a robustness-promoting regularization should be incorporated, given the fact that MAML adopts a bi-level (fine-tuning vs. meta-update) learning procedure. We show that robustifying the meta-update stage is sufficient to make robustness adapted to the task-specific fine-tuning stage even if the latter uses a standard training protocol. We also make additional justification on the acquired robustness adaptation by peering into the interpretability of neurons' activation maps. Furthermore, we investigate how robust regularization can efficiently be designed in MAML. We propose a general but easily-optimized robustness-regularized meta-learning framework, which allows the use of unlabeled data augmentation, fast adversarial attack generation, and computationally-light fine-tuning. In particular, we for the first time show that the auxiliary contrastive learning task can enhance the adversarial robustness of MAML. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods in robust few-shot learning.
The geometry of integration in text classification RNNs
Keywords: Recurrent neural networks, dynamical systems, interpretability, document classification, reverse engineering

Despite the widespread application of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), a unified understanding of how RNNs solve particular tasks remains elusive.  In particular, it is unclear what dynamical patterns arise in trained RNNs, and how those pat-terns depend on the training dataset or task.  This work addresses these questions in the context of text classification, building on earlier work studying the dynamics of binary sentiment-classification networks (Maheswaranathan et al., 2019).  We study text-classification tasks beyond the binary case, exploring the dynamics ofRNNs trained on both natural and synthetic datasets.  These dynamics, which we find to be both interpretable and low-dimensional, share a common mechanism across architectures and datasets:  specifically, these text-classification networks use low-dimensional attractor manifolds to accumulate evidence for each class as they process the text.  The dimensionality and geometry of the attractor manifold are determined by the structure of the training dataset, with the dimensionality reflecting the number of scalar quantities the network remembers in order to classify.In categorical classification, for example, we show that this dimensionality is one less than the number of classes. Correlations in the dataset, such as those induced by ordering, can further reduce the dimensionality of the attractor manifold; we show how to predict this reduction using simple word-count statistics computed on the training dataset. To the degree that integration of evidence towards a decision is a common computational primitive, this work continues to lay the foundation for using dynamical systems techniques to study the inner workings of RNNs.
Towards Robust Neural Networks via Close-loop Control
Keywords: neural network robustness, optimal control, dynamical system

Despite their success in massive engineering applications, deep neural networks are vulnerable to various perturbations due to their black-box nature. Recent study has shown that a deep neural network can misclassify the data even if the input data is perturbed by an imperceptible amount. In this paper, we address the robustness issue of neural networks by a novel close-loop control method from the perspective of dynamic systems. Instead of modifying the parameters in a fixed neural network architecture, a close-loop control process is added to generate control signals adaptively for the perturbed or corrupted data. We connect the robustness of neural networks with optimal control using the geometrical information of underlying data to design the control objective. The detailed analysis shows how the embedding manifolds of state trajectory affect error estimation of the proposed method. Our approach can simultaneously maintain the performance on clean data and improve the robustness against many types of data perturbations. It can also further improve the performance of robustly trained neural networks against different perturbations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that improves the robustness of neural networks with close-loop control.
Projected Latent Markov Chain Monte Carlo: Conditional Sampling of Normalizing Flows
Keywords: Conditional Sampling, Normalizing Flows, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Missing Data Inference

We introduce Projected Latent Markov Chain Monte Carlo (PL-MCMC), a technique for sampling from the exact conditional distributions learned by normalizing flows. As a conditional sampling method, PL-MCMC enables Monte Carlo Expectation Maximization (MC-EM) training of normalizing flows from incomplete data. Through experimental tests applying normalizing flows to missing data tasks for a variety of data sets, we demonstrate the efficacy of PL-MCMC for conditional sampling from normalizing flows.
Understanding the failure modes of out-of-distribution generalization
Keywords: out-of-distribution generalization, spurious correlations, empirical risk minimization, theoretical study

Empirical studies suggest that machine learning models often rely on features, such as the background, that may be spuriously correlated with the label only during training time, resulting in poor accuracy during test-time. In this work, we identify the fundamental factors that give rise to this behavior, by explaining why models fail this way even in easy-to-learn tasks where one would expect these models to succeed. In particular, through a theoretical study of gradient-descent-trained linear classifiers on some easy-to-learn tasks, we uncover two complementary failure modes. These modes arise from how spurious correlations induce two kinds of skews in the data: one geometric in nature and another, statistical. Finally, we construct natural modifications of image classification datasets to understand when these failure modes can arise in practice. We also design experiments to isolate the two failure modes when training modern neural networks on these datasets.
Usable Information and Evolution of Optimal Representations During Training
Keywords: Usable Information, Representation Learning, Learning Dynamics, Initialization, SGD

We introduce a notion of usable information contained in the representation learned by a deep network, and use it to study how optimal representations for the task emerge during training. We show that the implicit regularization coming from training with Stochastic Gradient Descent with a high learning-rate and small batch size plays an important role in learning minimal sufficient representations for the task. In the process of arriving at a minimal sufficient representation, we find that the content of the representation changes dynamically during training. In particular, we find that semantically meaningful but ultimately irrelevant information is encoded in the early transient dynamics of training, before being later discarded. In addition, we evaluate how perturbing the initial part of training impacts the learning dynamics and the resulting representations. We show these effects on both perceptual decision-making tasks inspired by neuroscience literature, as well as on standard image classification tasks.
Adaptive Extra-Gradient Methods for Min-Max Optimization and Games
Keywords: min-max optimization, games, mirror-prox, adaptive methods, regime agnostic methods

We present a new family of min-max optimization algorithms that automatically exploit the geometry of the gradient data observed at earlier iterations to perform more informative extra-gradient steps in later ones.
        Thanks to this adaptation mechanism, the proposed method automatically detects whether the problem is smooth or not, without requiring any prior tuning by the optimizer.
        As a result, the algorithm simultaneously achieves order-optimal convergence rates, \ie it  converges to an ε-optimal solution within O(1/ε) iterations in smooth problems, and within O(1/ε2) iterations in non-smooth ones. Importantly, these guarantees do not require any of the standard boundedness or Lipschitz continuity conditions that are typically assumed in the literature; in particular, they apply even to problems with singularities (such as resource allocation problems and the like). This adaptation is achieved through the use of a geometric apparatus based on Finsler metrics and a suitably chosen mirror-prox template that allows us to derive sharp convergence rates for the methods at hand.
Reinforcement Learning with Random Delays
Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning

Action and observation delays commonly occur in many Reinforcement Learning applications, such as remote control scenarios. We study the anatomy of randomly delayed environments, and show that partially resampling trajectory fragments in hindsight allows for off-policy multi-step value estimation. We apply this principle to derive Delay-Correcting Actor-Critic (DCAC), an algorithm based on Soft Actor-Critic with significantly better performance in environments with delays. This is shown theoretically and also demonstrated practically on a delay-augmented version of the MuJoCo continuous control benchmark.
Shape or Texture: Understanding Discriminative Features in CNNs
Keywords: Shape, Texture, Shape Bias, Texture Bias, Shape Encoding, Mutual Information

Contrasting the previous evidence that neurons in the later layers of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) respond to complex object shapes, recent studies have shown that CNNs actually exhibit a 'texture bias': given an image with both texture and shape cues (e.g., a stylized image), a CNN is biased towards predicting the category corresponding to the texture. However, these previous studies conduct experiments on the final classification output of the network, and fail to robustly evaluate the bias contained (i) in the latent representations, and (ii) on a per-pixel level. In this paper, we design a series of experiments that overcome these issues. We do this with the goal of better understanding what type of shape information contained in the network is discriminative, where shape information is encoded, as well as when the network learns about object shape during training. We show that a network learns the majority of overall shape information at the first few epochs of training and that this information is largely encoded in the last few layers of a CNN. Finally, we show that the encoding of shape does not imply the encoding of localized per-pixel semantic information. The experimental results and findings provide a more accurate understanding of the behaviour of current CNNs, thus helping to inform future design choices.
NOVAS: Non-convex Optimization via Adaptive Stochastic Search for End-to-end Learning and Control
Keywords: deep neural networks, nested optimization, stochastic control, deep FBSDEs

In this work we propose the use of adaptive stochastic search as a building block for general, non-convex optimization operations within deep neural network architectures. Specifically, for an objective function located at some layer in the network and parameterized by some network parameters, we employ adaptive stochastic search to perform optimization over its output. This operation is differentiable and does not obstruct the passing of gradients during backpropagation, thus enabling us to incorporate it as a component in end-to-end learning. We study the proposed optimization module's properties and benchmark it against two existing alternatives on a synthetic energy-based structured prediction task, and further showcase its use in stochastic optimal control applications.
Negative Data Augmentation
Keywords: generative models, self-supervised learning, data augmentation, anomaly detection

Data augmentation is often used to enlarge datasets with synthetic samples generated in accordance with the underlying data distribution. To enable a wider range of augmentations, we explore negative data augmentation strategies (NDA) that intentionally create out-of-distribution samples. We show that such negative out-of-distribution samples provide information on the support of the data distribution,  and can be leveraged for generative modeling and representation learning. We introduce a new GAN training objective where we use NDA as an additional source of synthetic data for the discriminator. We prove that under suitable conditions, optimizing the resulting objective still recovers the true data distribution but can directly bias the generator towards avoiding samples that lack the desired structure. Empirically, models trained with our method achieve improved conditional/unconditional image generation along with improved anomaly detection capabilities. Further, we incorporate the same negative data augmentation strategy in a contrastive learning framework for self-supervised representation learning on images and videos, achieving improved performance on downstream image classification, object detection, and action recognition tasks. These results suggest that prior knowledge on what does not constitute valid data is an effective form of weak supervision across a range of unsupervised learning tasks.
Molecule Optimization by Explainable Evolution
Keywords: Molecule Design, Explainable Model, Evolutionary Algorithm, Reinforcement Learning, Graph Generative Model

Optimizing molecules for desired properties is a fundamental yet challenging task in chemistry, material science, and drug discovery. This paper develops a novel algorithm for optimizing molecular properties via an Expectation-Maximization (EM) like explainable evolutionary process. The algorithm is designed to mimic human experts in the process of searching for desirable molecules and alternate between two stages: the first stage on explainable local search which identifies rationales, i.e., critical subgraph patterns accounting for desired molecular properties, and the second stage on molecule completion which explores the larger space of molecules containing good rationales. We test our approach against various baselines on a real-world multi-property optimization task where each method is given the same number of queries to the property oracle. We show that our evolution-by-explanation algorithm is 79% better than the best baseline in terms of a generic metric combining aspects such as success rate, novelty, and diversity. Human expert evaluation on optimized molecules shows that 60% of top molecules obtained from our methods are deemed successful.