huashen218/convxai-cia-dataset huggingface dataset:
Multi-Prize Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Accurate Binary Neural Networks by Pruning A Randomly Weighted Network
Keywords: Binary Neural Networks, Pruning, Lottery Ticket Hypothesis

Recently, Frankle & Carbin (2019) demonstrated that randomly-initialized dense networks contain subnetworks that once found can be trained to reach test accuracy comparable to the trained dense network. However, finding these high performing trainable subnetworks is expensive, requiring iterative process of training and pruning weights. In this paper, we propose (and prove) a stronger Multi-Prize Lottery Ticket Hypothesis:
        
        A sufficiently over-parameterized neural network with random weights contains several subnetworks (winning tickets) that (a) have comparable accuracy to a dense target network with learned weights (prize 1), (b) do not require any further training to achieve prize 1 (prize 2), and (c) is robust to extreme forms of quantization (i.e., binary weights and/or activation) (prize 3).
        
        This provides a new paradigm for learning compact yet highly accurate binary neural networks simply by pruning and quantizing randomly weighted full precision neural networks. We also propose an algorithm for finding multi-prize tickets (MPTs) and test it by performing a series of experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. Empirical results indicate that as models grow deeper and wider, multi-prize tickets start to reach similar (and sometimes even higher) test accuracy compared to their significantly larger and full-precision counterparts that have been weight-trained. Without ever updating the weight values, our MPTs-1/32 not only set new binary weight network state-of-the-art (SOTA) Top-1 accuracy -- 94.8% on CIFAR-10 and 74.03% on ImageNet -- but also outperform their full-precision counterparts by 1.78% and 0.76%, respectively. Further, our MPT-1/1 achieves SOTA Top-1 accuracy (91.9%) for binary neural networks on CIFAR-10. Code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/chrundle/biprop.
Learning Accurate Entropy Model with Global Reference for Image Compression
Keywords: Image compression, Entropy Model, Global Reference

In recent deep image compression neural networks, the entropy model plays a critical role in estimating the prior distribution of deep image encodings. Existing methods combine hyperprior with local context in the entropy estimation function. This greatly limits their performance due to the absence of a global vision. In this work, we propose a novel Global Reference Model for image compression to effectively leverage both the local and the global context information, leading to an enhanced compression rate. The proposed method scans decoded latents and then finds the most relevant latent to assist the distribution estimating of the current latent. A by-product of this work is the innovation of a mean-shifting GDN module that further improves the performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the rate-distortion performance of most of the state-of-the-art methods in the industry.
Convex Potential Flows: Universal Probability Distributions with Optimal Transport and Convex Optimization
Keywords: Normalizing flows, generative models, variational inference, invertible neural networks, universal approximation, optimal transport, convex optimization

Flow-based models are powerful tools for designing probabilistic models with tractable density. This paper introduces Convex Potential Flows (CP-Flow), a natural and efficient parameterization of invertible models inspired by the optimal transport (OT) theory. CP-Flows are the gradient map of a strongly convex neural potential function. The convexity implies invertibility and allows us to resort to convex optimization to solve the convex conjugate for efficient inversion. To enable maximum likelihood training, we derive a new gradient estimator of the log-determinant of the Jacobian, which involves solving an inverse-Hessian vector product using the conjugate gradient method. The gradient estimator has constant-memory cost, and can be made effectively unbiased by reducing the error tolerance level of the convex optimization routine. Theoretically, we prove that CP-Flows are universal density approximators and are optimal in the OT sense. Our empirical results show that CP-Flow performs competitively on standard benchmarks of density estimation and variational inference.
Greedy-GQ with Variance Reduction: Finite-time Analysis and Improved Complexity
Keywords: Optimization, Reinforcement Learning, Machine Learning

Greedy-GQ is a value-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for optimal control. Recently, the finite-time analysis of Greedy-GQ has been developed under linear function approximation and Markovian sampling, and the algorithm is shown to achieve an ϵ-stationary point with a sample complexity in the order of O(ϵ−3). Such a high sample complexity is due to the large variance induced by the Markovian samples. In this paper, we propose a variance-reduced Greedy-GQ (VR-Greedy-GQ) algorithm for off-policy optimal control. In particular, the algorithm applies the SVRG-based variance reduction scheme to reduce the stochastic variance of the two time-scale updates. We study the finite-time convergence of VR-Greedy-GQ under linear function approximation and Markovian sampling and show that the algorithm achieves a much smaller bias and variance error than the original Greedy-GQ. In particular, we prove that VR-Greedy-GQ achieves an improved sample complexity that is in the order of O(ϵ−2). We further compare the performance of VR-Greedy-GQ with that of Greedy-GQ in various RL experiments to corroborate our theoretical findings.
Large Batch Simulation for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Keywords: reinforcement learning, simulation

We accelerate deep reinforcement learning-based training in visually complex 3D environments by two orders of magnitude over prior work, realizing end-to-end training speeds of over 19,000 frames of experience per second on a single GPU and up to 72,000 frames per second on a single eight-GPU machine. The key idea of our approach is to design a 3D renderer and embodied navigation simulator around the principle of “batch simulation”: accepting and executing large batches of requests simultaneously.  Beyond exposing large amounts of work at once, batch simulation allows implementations to amortize in-memory storage of scene assets, rendering work, data loading, and synchronization costs across many simulation requests, dramatically improving the number of simulated agents per GPU and overall simulation throughput.  To balance DNN inference and training costs with faster simulation, we also build a computationally efficient policy DNN that maintains high task performance, and modify training algorithms to maintain sample efficiency when training with large mini-batches. By combining batch simulation and DNN performance optimizations, we demonstrate that PointGoal navigation agents can be trained in complex 3D environments on a single GPU in 1.5 days to 97% of the accuracy of agents trained on a prior state-of-the-art system using a 64-GPU cluster over three days.  We provide open-source reference implementations of our batch 3D renderer and simulator to facilitate incorporation of these ideas into RL systems.
Hopper: Multi-hop Transformer for Spatiotemporal Reasoning
Keywords: Multi-hop Reasoning, Object Permanence, Spatiotemporal Understanding, Video Recognition, Transformer

This paper considers the problem of spatiotemporal object-centric reasoning in videos. Central to our approach is the notion of object permanence, i.e., the ability to reason about the location of objects as they move through the video while being occluded, contained or carried by other objects. Existing deep learning based approaches often suffer from spatiotemporal biases when applied to video reasoning problems. We propose Hopper, which uses a Multi-hop Transformer for reasoning object permanence in videos. Given a video and a localization query, Hopper reasons over image and object tracks to automatically hop over critical frames in an iterative fashion to predict the final position of the object of interest. We demonstrate the effectiveness of using a contrastive loss to reduce spatiotemporal biases. We evaluate over CATER dataset and find that Hopper achieves 73.2% Top-1 accuracy using just 1 FPS by hopping through just a few critical frames. We also demonstrate Hopper can perform long-term reasoning by building a CATER-h dataset that requires multi-step reasoning to localize objects of interest correctly.
Efficient Reinforcement Learning in Factored MDPs with Application to Constrained RL
Keywords: reinforcement learning, factored MDP, constrained RL, learning theory

Reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic, factored Markov decision processes (FMDPs) is studied. We propose an algorithm called FMDP-BF, which leverages the factorization structure of FMDP.  The regret of FMDP-BF is shown to be exponentially smaller than that of optimal algorithms designed for non-factored MDPs, and improves on the best previous result for FMDPs~\citep{osband2014near} by a factor of nH|Si|, where |Si| is the cardinality of the factored state subspace, H is the planning horizon and n is the number of factored transition. To show the optimality of our bounds, we also provide a lower bound for FMDP, which indicates that our algorithm is near-optimal w.r.t. timestep T, horizon H and factored state-action subspace cardinality. Finally, as an application, we study a new formulation of constrained RL, known as RL with knapsack constraints (RLwK), and provides the first sample-efficient algorithm based on FMDP-BF.
Unbiased Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection
Keywords: Object Detection

Semi-supervised learning, i.e., training networks with both labeled and unlabeled data, has made significant progress recently. However, existing works have primarily focused on image classification tasks and neglected object detection which requires more annotation effort. In this work, we revisit the Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SS-OD) and identify the pseudo-labeling bias issue in SS-OD. To address this, we introduce Unbiased Teacher, a simple yet effective approach that jointly trains a student and a gradually progressing teacher in a mutually-beneficial manner. Together with a class-balance loss to downweight overly confident pseudo-labels, Unbiased Teacher consistently improved state-of-the-art methods by significant margins on COCO-standard, COCO-additional, and VOC datasets. Specifically, Unbiased Teacher achieves 6.8 absolute mAP improvements against state-of-the-art method when using 1% of labeled data on MS-COCO, achieves around 10 mAP improvements against the supervised baseline when using only 0.5, 1, 2% of labeled data on MS-COCO.
MELR: Meta-Learning via Modeling Episode-Level Relationships for Few-Shot Learning
Keywords: few-shot learning, episodic training, cross-episode attention

Most recent few-shot learning (FSL) approaches are based on episodic training whereby each episode samples few training instances (shots) per class to imitate the test condition. However, this strict adhering to test condition has a negative side effect, that is, the trained model is susceptible to the poor sampling of few shots. In this work, for the first time, this problem is addressed by exploiting inter-episode relationships. Specifically, a novel meta-learning via modeling episode-level relationships (MELR) framework is proposed. By sampling two episodes containing the same set of classes for meta-training, MELR is designed to ensure that the meta-learned model is robust against the presence of poorly-sampled shots in the meta-test stage. This is achieved through two key components: (1) a Cross-Episode Attention Module (CEAM) to improve the ability of alleviating the effects of poorly-sampled shots, and (2) a Cross-Episode Consistency Regularization (CECR) to enforce that the two classifiers learned from the two episodes are consistent even when there are unrepresentative instances. Extensive experiments for non-transductive standard FSL on two benchmarks show that our MELR achieves 1.0%-5.0% improvements over the baseline (i.e., ProtoNet) used for FSL in our model and outperforms the latest competitors under the same settings.
Partitioned Learned Bloom Filters
Keywords: optimization, data structures, algorithms, theory, learned algorithms

Bloom filters are space-efficient probabilistic data structures that are used to test whether an element is a member of a set, and may return false positives.  Recently, variations referred to as learned Bloom filters were developed that can provide improved performance in terms of the rate of false positives, by using a learned model for the represented set.  However, previous methods for learned Bloom filters do not take full advantage of the learned model.  Here we show how to frame the problem of optimal model utilization as an optimization problem, and using our framework derive algorithms that can achieve near-optimal performance in many cases.
Wasserstein Embedding for Graph Learning
Keywords: Wasserstein, graph embedding, graph-level prediction

We present Wasserstein Embedding for Graph Learning (WEGL), a novel and fast framework for embedding entire graphs in a vector space, in which various machine learning models are applicable for graph-level prediction tasks. We leverage new insights on defining similarity between graphs as a function of the similarity between their node embedding distributions. Specifically, we use the Wasserstein distance to measure the dissimilarity between node embeddings of different graphs. Unlike prior work, we avoid pairwise calculation of distances between graphs and reduce the computational complexity from quadratic to linear in the number of graphs. WEGL calculates Monge maps from a reference distribution to each node embedding and, based on these maps, creates a fixed-sized vector representation of the graph. We evaluate our new graph embedding approach on various benchmark graph-property prediction tasks, showing state-of-the-art classification performance while having superior computational efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/navid-naderi/WEGL.
High-Capacity Expert Binary Networks

Network binarization is a promising hardware-aware direction for creating efficient deep models. Despite its memory and computational advantages, reducing the accuracy gap between binary models and their real-valued counterparts remains an unsolved challenging research problem. To this end, we make the following 3 contributions: (a) To increase model capacity, we propose Expert Binary Convolution, which, for the first time, tailors conditional computing to binary networks by learning to select one data-specific expert binary filter at a time conditioned on input features. (b) To increase representation capacity, we propose to address the inherent information bottleneck in binary networks by introducing an efficient width expansion mechanism which keeps the binary operations within the same budget. (c) To improve network design, we propose a principled binary network growth mechanism that unveils a set of network topologies of favorable properties. Overall, our method improves upon prior work, with no increase in computational cost, by ∼6%, reaching a groundbreaking ∼71% on ImageNet classification. Code will be made available here.
SAFENet: A Secure, Accurate and Fast Neural Network Inference
Keywords: Cryptographic inference, Channel-Wise Approximated Activation, Hyper-Parameter Optimization, Garbled Circuits

The advances in neural networks have driven many companies to provide prediction services to users in a wide range of applications. However, current prediction systems raise privacy concerns regarding the user's private data. A cryptographic neural network inference service is an efficient way to allow two parties to execute neural network inference without revealing either party’s data or model. Nevertheless, existing cryptographic neural network inference services suffer from huge running latency; in particular, the latency of communication-expensive cryptographic activation function is 3 orders of magnitude higher than plaintext-domain activation function. And activations are the necessary components of the modern neural networks. Therefore, slow cryptographic activation has become the primary obstacle of efficient cryptographic inference. 
        
        In this paper, we propose a new technique, called SAFENet, to enable a Secure, Accurate and Fast nEural Network inference service. To speedup secure inference and guarantee inference accuracy, SAFENet includes channel-wise activation approximation with multiple-degree options. This is implemented by keeping the most useful activation channels and replacing the remaining, less useful, channels with various-degree polynomials. SAFENet also supports mixed-precision activation approximation by automatically assigning different replacement ratios to various layer; further increasing the approximation ratio and reducing inference latency. Our experimental results show SAFENet obtains the state-of-the-art inference latency and performance, reducing latency by 38%∼61% or improving accuracy by 1.8%∼4% over prior techniques on various encrypted datasets.
Learning Manifold Patch-Based Representations of Man-Made Shapes
Keywords: 3D shape representations, CAD modeling, sketch-based modeling, computer graphics, computer vision, deep learning

Choosing the right representation for geometry is crucial for making 3D models compatible with existing applications. Focusing on piecewise-smooth man-made shapes, we propose a new representation that is usable in conventional CAD modeling pipelines and can also be learned by deep neural networks. We demonstrate its benefits by applying it to the task of sketch-based modeling. Given a raster image, our system infers a set of parametric surfaces that realize the input in 3D. To capture piecewise smooth geometry, we learn a special shape representation: a deformable parametric template composed of Coons patches. Naively training such a system, however, is hampered by non-manifold artifacts in the parametric shapes and by a lack of data. To address this, we introduce loss functions that bias the network to output non-self-intersecting shapes and implement them as part of a fully self-supervised system, automatically generating both shape templates and synthetic training data. We develop a testbed for sketch-based modeling, demonstrate shape interpolation, and provide comparison to related work.
Universal approximation power of deep residual neural networks via nonlinear control theory
Keywords: Deep residual neural networks, universal approximation, nonlinear control theory

In this paper, we explain the universal approximation capabilities of deep residual neural networks through geometric nonlinear control. Inspired by recent work establishing links between residual networks and control systems, we provide a general sufficient condition for a residual network to have the power of universal approximation by asking the activation function, or one of its derivatives, to satisfy a quadratic differential equation. Many activation functions used in practice satisfy this assumption, exactly or approximately, and we show this property to be sufficient for an adequately deep neural network with n+1 neurons per
        layer to approximate arbitrarily well, on a compact set and with respect to the supremum norm, any continuous function from Rn to Rn. We further show this result to hold for very simple architectures for which the weights only need to assume two values. The first key technical contribution consists of relating the universal approximation problem to controllability of an ensemble of control systems corresponding to a residual network and to leverage classical Lie algebraic techniques to characterize controllability. The second technical contribution is to identify monotonicity as the bridge between controllability of finite ensembles and uniform approximability on compact sets.
Learning Neural Event Functions for Ordinary Differential Equations
Keywords: differential equations, implicit differentiation, point processes

The existing Neural ODE formulation relies on an explicit knowledge of the termination time. We extend Neural ODEs to implicitly defined termination criteria modeled by neural event functions, which can be chained together and differentiated through. Neural Event ODEs are capable of modeling discrete and instantaneous changes in a continuous-time system, without prior knowledge of when these changes should occur or how many such changes should exist. We test our approach in modeling hybrid discrete- and continuous- systems such as switching dynamical systems and collision in multi-body systems, and we propose simulation-based training of point processes with applications in discrete control.
Neural Spatio-Temporal Point Processes
Keywords: point processes, normalizing flows, differential equations

We propose a new class of parameterizations for spatio-temporal point processes which leverage Neural ODEs as a computational method and enable flexible, high-fidelity models of discrete events that are localized in continuous time and space. Central to our approach is a combination of continuous-time neural networks with two novel neural architectures, \ie, Jump and Attentive Continuous-time Normalizing Flows. This approach allows us to learn complex distributions for both the spatial and temporal domain and to condition non-trivially on the observed event history. We validate our models on data sets from a wide variety of contexts such as seismology, epidemiology, urban mobility, and neuroscience.
Proximal Gradient Descent-Ascent: Variable Convergence under KŁ Geometry
Keywords: Kurdyka-Łojasiewicz geometry, minimax, nonconvex, proximal gradient descent-ascent, variable convergence

The gradient descent-ascent (GDA) algorithm has been widely applied to solve minimax optimization problems. In order to achieve convergent policy parameters for minimax optimization, it is important that GDA generates convergent variable sequences rather than convergent sequences of function value or gradient norm. However, the variable convergence of GDA has been proved only under convexity geometries, and it is lack of understanding in general nonconvex minimax optimization. This paper fills such a gap by studying the convergence of a more general proximal-GDA for regularized nonconvex-strongly-concave minimax optimization. Specifically, we show that proximal-GDA admits a novel Lyapunov function, which monotonically decreases in the minimax optimization process and drives the variable sequences to a critical point. By leveraging this Lyapunov function and the KL geometry that parameterizes the local geometries of general nonconvex functions, we formally establish the variable convergence of proximal-GDA to a certain critical point x∗, i.e., xt→x∗,yt→y∗(x∗). Furthermore, over the full spectrum of the KL-parameterized geometry, we show that proximal-GDA achieves different types of convergence rates ranging from sublinear convergence up to finite-step convergence, depending on the geometry associated with the KL parameter. This is the first theoretical result on the variable convergence for nonconvex minimax optimization.