mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Encoding word order in complex embeddings
Authors: Donghao Zhao, Christina Lioma, Qiuchi Li, Peng Zhang, Jakob Grue Simonsen Benyou Wang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Sequential word order is important when processing text. Currently, neural networks (NNs) address this by modeling word position using position embeddings. The problem is that position embeddings capture the position of individual words, but not the ordered relationship (e.g., adjacency or precedence) between individual word positions. We present a novel and principled solution for modeling both the global absolute positions of words and their order relationships. Our solution generalizes word embeddings, previously defined as independent vectors, to continuous word functions over a variable (position). The benefit of continuous functions over variable positions is that word representations shift smoothly with increasing positions. Hence, word representations in different positions can correlate with each other in a continuous function. The general solution of these functions can be extended to complex-valued variants. We extend CNN, RNN and Transformer NNs to complex-valued versions to incorporate our complex embedding (we make all code available). Experiments on text classification, machine translation and language modeling show gains over both classical word embeddings and position-enriched word embeddings. To our knowledge, this is the first work in NLP to link imaginary numbers in complex-valued representations to concrete meanings (i.e., word order).
NAS-Bench-201: Extending the Scope of Reproducible Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Yi Yang Xuanyi Dong
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Neural architecture search (NAS) has achieved breakthrough success in a great number of applications in the past few years.
It could be time to take a step back and analyze the good and bad aspects in the field of NAS. A variety of algorithms search architectures under different search space. These searched architectures are trained using different setups, e.g., hyper-parameters, data augmentation, regularization. This raises a comparability problem when comparing the performance of various NAS algorithms. NAS-Bench-101 has shown success to alleviate this problem. In this work, we propose an extension to NAS-Bench-101: NAS-Bench-201 with a different search space, results on multiple datasets, and more diagnostic information. NAS-Bench-201 has a fixed search space and provides a unified benchmark for almost any up-to-date NAS algorithms. The design of our search space is inspired by the one used in the most popular cell-based searching algorithms, where a cell is represented as a directed acyclic graph. Each edge here is associated with an operation selected from a predefined operation set. For it to be applicable for all NAS algorithms, the search space defined in NAS-Bench-201 includes all possible architectures generated by 4 nodes and 5 associated operation options, which results in 15,625 neural cell candidates in total. The training log using the same setup and the performance for each architecture candidate are provided for three datasets. This allows researchers to avoid unnecessary repetitive training for selected architecture and focus solely on the search algorithm itself. The training time saved for every architecture also largely improves the efficiency of most NAS algorithms and presents a more computational cost friendly NAS community for a broader range of researchers. We provide additional diagnostic information such as fine-grained loss and accuracy, which can give inspirations to new designs of NAS algorithms. In further support of the proposed NAS-Bench-102, we have analyzed it from many aspects and benchmarked 10 recent NAS algorithms, which verify its applicability.
Disentangling neural mechanisms for perceptual grouping
Authors: Drew Linsley*, Kalpit Thakkar, Thomas Serre Junkyung Kim*
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Forming perceptual groups and individuating objects in visual scenes is an essential step towards visual intelligence. This ability is thought to arise in the brain from computations implemented by bottom-up, horizontal, and top-down connections between neurons. However, the relative contributions of these connections to perceptual grouping are poorly understood. We address this question by systematically evaluating neural network architectures featuring combinations bottom-up, horizontal, and top-down connections on two synthetic visual tasks, which stress low-level "Gestalt" vs. high-level object cues for perceptual grouping. We show that increasing the difficulty of either task strains learning for networks that rely solely on bottom-up connections. Horizontal connections resolve straining on tasks with Gestalt cues by supporting incremental grouping, whereas top-down connections rescue learning on tasks with high-level object cues by modifying coarse predictions about the position of the target object. Our findings dissociate the computational roles of bottom-up, horizontal and top-down connectivity, and demonstrate how a model featuring all of these interactions can more flexibly learn to form perceptual groups.
BREAKING  CERTIFIED  DEFENSES:  SEMANTIC  ADVERSARIAL  EXAMPLES  WITH  SPOOFED  ROBUSTNESS  CERTIFICATES
Authors: Ali Shafahi, Tom Goldstein Amin Ghiasi
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Defenses against adversarial attacks can be classified into certified and non-certified. Certifiable defenses make networks robust within a certain $\ell_p$-bounded radius, so that it is impossible for the adversary to make adversarial examples in the certificate bound. We present an attack that maintains the imperceptibility property of adversarial examples while being outside of the certified radius. Furthermore, the proposed "Shadow Attack" can fool certifiably robust networks by producing an imperceptible adversarial example that gets misclassified and produces a strong ``spoofed'' certificate.
Efficient Riemannian Optimization on the Stiefel Manifold via the Cayley Transform
Authors: Fuxin Li, Sinisa Todorovic Jun Li
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Strictly enforcing orthonormality constraints on parameter matrices has been shown advantageous in deep learning. This amounts to Riemannian optimization on the Stiefel manifold, which, however, is computationally expensive. To address this challenge, we present two main contributions: (1) A new efficient retraction map based on an iterative Cayley transform for optimization updates, and (2) An implicit vector transport mechanism based on the combination of a projection of the momentum and the Cayley transform on the Stiefel manifold. We specify two new optimization algorithms: Cayley SGD with momentum, and Cayley ADAM on the Stiefel manifold. Convergence of Cayley SGD is theoretically analyzed. Our experiments for CNN training demonstrate that both algorithms: (a) Use less running time per iteration relative to existing approaches that enforce orthonormality of CNN parameters; and (b) Achieve faster convergence rates than the baseline SGD and ADAM algorithms without compromising the performance of the CNN. Cayley SGD and Cayley ADAM are also shown to reduce the training time for optimizing the unitary transition matrices in RNNs.
RaCT: Toward Amortized Ranking-Critical Training For Collaborative Filtering 
Authors: Chunyuan Li*, Jianfeng Gao, Lawrence Carin Sam Lobel*
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We investigate new methods for training collaborative filtering models based on actor-critic reinforcement learning, to more directly maximize ranking-based objective functions. Specifically, we train a critic network to approximate ranking-based metrics, and then update the actor network to directly optimize against the learned metrics. In contrast to traditional learning-to-rank methods that require re-running the optimization procedure for new lists, our critic-based method amortizes the scoring process with a neural network, and can directly provide the (approximate) ranking scores for new lists.

We demonstrate the actor-critic's ability to significantly improve the performance of a variety of prediction models, and achieve better or comparable performance to a variety of strong baselines on three large-scale datasets.
On the Convergence of FedAvg on Non-IID Data
Authors: Kaixuan Huang, Wenhao Yang, Shusen Wang, Zhihua Zhang Xiang Li
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Federated learning enables a large amount of edge computing devices to jointly learn a model without data sharing. As a leading algorithm in this setting, Federated Averaging (\texttt{FedAvg}) runs Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in parallel on a small subset of the total devices and averages the sequences only once in a while. Despite its simplicity, it lacks theoretical guarantees under realistic settings. In this paper, we analyze the convergence of \texttt{FedAvg} on non-iid data and establish a convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{T})$ for strongly convex and smooth problems, where $T$ is the number of SGDs. Importantly, our bound demonstrates a trade-off between communication-efficiency and convergence rate. As user devices may be disconnected from the server, we relax the assumption of full device participation to partial device participation and study different averaging schemes; low device participation rate can be achieved without severely slowing down the learning.  Our results indicate that heterogeneity of data slows down the convergence, which matches empirical observations. Furthermore, we provide a necessary condition for \texttt{FedAvg} on non-iid data: the learning rate $\eta$ must decay, even if full-gradient is used; otherwise, the solution will be $\Omega (\eta)$ away from the optimal.
The Local Elasticity of Neural Networks
Authors: Weijie Su Hangfeng He
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: This paper presents a phenomenon in neural networks that we refer to as local elasticity. Roughly speaking, a classifier is said to be locally elastic if its prediction at a feature vector x' is not significantly perturbed, after the classifier is updated via stochastic gradient descent at a (labeled) feature vector x that is dissimilar to x' in a certain sense. This phenomenon is shown to persist for neural networks with nonlinear activation functions through extensive simulations on real-life and synthetic datasets, whereas this is not observed in linear classifiers. In addition, we offer a geometric interpretation of local elasticity using the neural tangent kernel (Jacot et al., 2018). Building on top of local elasticity, we obtain pairwise similarity measures between feature vectors, which can be used for clustering in conjunction with K-means. The effectiveness of the clustering algorithm on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets in turn corroborates the hypothesis of local elasticity of neural networks on real-life data. Finally, we discuss some implications of local elasticity to shed light on several intriguing aspects of deep neural networks.
Tree-Structured Attention with Hierarchical Accumulation
Authors: Shafiq Joty, Steven Hoi, Richard Socher Xuan-Phi Nguyen
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Incorporating hierarchical structures like constituency trees has been shown to be effective for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, it is evident that state-of-the-art (SOTA) sequence-based models like the Transformer struggle to encode such structures inherently. On the other hand, dedicated models like the Tree-LSTM, while explicitly modeling hierarchical structures, do not perform as efficiently as the Transformer. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this gap with Hierarchical Accumulation to encode parse tree structures into self-attention at constant time complexity. Our approach outperforms SOTA methods in four IWSLT translation tasks and the WMT'14 English-German task. It also yields improvements over Transformer and Tree-LSTM on three text classification tasks. We further demonstrate that using hierarchical priors can compensate for data shortage, and that our model prefers phrase-level attentions over token-level attentions.
On the Global Convergence  of Training Deep Linear ResNets
Authors: Philip M. Long, Quanquan Gu Difan Zou
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We study the convergence of gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for training $L$-hidden-layer linear residual networks (ResNets). We prove that for training deep residual networks with certain linear transformations at input and output layers, which are fixed throughout training, both GD and SGD with zero initialization on all hidden weights can converge to the global minimum of the training loss. Moreover, when specializing to appropriate Gaussian random linear transformations, GD and SGD provably optimize wide enough deep linear ResNets. Compared with the global convergence result of GD for training standard deep linear networks \citep{du2019width}, our condition on the neural network width is sharper by a factor of $O(\kappa L)$, where $\kappa$ denotes the condition number of the covariance matrix of the training data. We further propose a modified identity input and output transformations, and show that a $(d+k)$-wide neural network is sufficient to guarantee the global convergence of GD/SGD, where $d,k$ are the input and output dimensions respectively.
Four Things Everyone Should Know to Improve Batch Normalization
Authors: Michael J. Dinneen Cecilia Summers
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: A key component of most neural network architectures is the use of normalization layers, such as Batch Normalization. Despite its common use and large utility in optimizing deep architectures, it has been challenging both to generically improve upon Batch Normalization and to understand the circumstances that lend themselves to other enhancements. In this paper, we identify four improvements to the generic form of Batch Normalization and the circumstances under which they work, yielding performance gains across all batch sizes while requiring no additional computation during training. These contributions include proposing a method for reasoning about the current example in inference normalization statistics, fixing a training vs. inference discrepancy; recognizing and validating the powerful regularization effect of Ghost Batch Normalization for small and medium batch sizes; examining the effect of weight decay regularization on the scaling and shifting parameters γ and β; and identifying a new normalization algorithm for very small batch sizes by combining the strengths of Batch and Group Normalization. We validate our results empirically on six datasets: CIFAR-100, SVHN, Caltech-256, Oxford Flowers-102, CUB-2011, and ImageNet.
Iterative energy-based projection on a normal data manifold for anomaly localization
Authors: Oriel Frigo, Sébastien Combrexelle, Pierre Eline David Dehaene
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Autoencoder reconstructions are widely used for the task of unsupervised anomaly localization. Indeed, an autoencoder trained on normal data is expected to only be able to reconstruct normal features of the data, allowing the segmentation of anomalous pixels in an image via a simple comparison between the image and its autoencoder reconstruction. In practice however, local defects added to a normal image can deteriorate the whole reconstruction, making this segmentation challenging. To tackle the issue, we propose in this paper a new approach for projecting anomalous data on a autoencoder-learned normal data manifold, by using gradient descent on an energy derived from the autoencoder's loss function. This energy can be augmented with regularization terms that model priors on what constitutes the user-defined optimal projection. By iteratively updating the input of the autoencoder, we bypass the loss of high-frequency information caused by the autoencoder bottleneck. This allows to produce images of higher quality than classic reconstructions. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on various anomaly localization datasets. It also shows promising results at an inpainting task on the CelebA dataset.
Learning Nearly Decomposable Value Functions Via Communication Minimization
Authors: Jianhao Wang*, Chongyi Zheng, Chongjie Zhang Tonghan Wang*
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Reinforcement learning encounters major challenges in multi-agent settings, such as scalability and non-stationarity. Recently, value function factorization learning emerges as a promising way to address these challenges in collaborative multi-agent systems. However, existing methods have been focusing on learning fully decentralized value functions, which are not efficient for tasks requiring communication. To address this limitation, this paper presents a novel framework for learning nearly decomposable Q-functions (NDQ) via communication minimization, with which agents act on their own most of the time but occasionally send messages to other agents in order for effective coordination. This framework hybridizes value function factorization learning and communication learning by introducing two information-theoretic regularizers. These regularizers are maximizing mutual information between agents' action selection and communication messages while minimizing the entropy of messages between agents. We show how to optimize these regularizers in a way that is easily integrated with existing value function factorization methods such as QMIX. Finally, we demonstrate that, on the StarCraft unit micromanagement benchmark, our framework significantly outperforms baseline methods and allows us to cut off more than $80\%$ of communication without sacrificing the performance. The videos of our experiments are available at https://sites.google.com/view/ndq.
Sample Efficient Policy Gradient Methods with Recursive Variance Reduction
Authors: Felicia Gao, Quanquan Gu Pan Xu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Improving the sample efficiency in reinforcement learning has been a long-standing research problem. In this work, we aim to reduce the sample complexity of existing policy gradient methods. We propose a novel policy gradient algorithm called SRVR-PG, which only requires $O(1/\epsilon^{3/2})$\footnote{$O(\cdot)$ notation hides constant factors.} episodes to find an $\epsilon$-approximate stationary point of the nonconcave performance function $J(\boldsymbol{\theta})$ (i.e., $\boldsymbol{\theta}$ such that $\|\nabla J(\boldsymbol{\theta})\|_2^2\leq\epsilon$). This sample complexity improves the existing result $O(1/\epsilon^{5/3})$ for stochastic variance reduced policy gradient algorithms by a factor of $O(1/\epsilon^{1/6})$. In addition, we also propose a variant of SRVR-PG with parameter exploration, which explores the initial policy parameter from a prior probability distribution. We conduct numerical experiments on classic control problems in reinforcement learning to validate the performance of our proposed algorithms.
Phase Transitions for the Information Bottleneck in Representation Learning
Authors: Ian Fischer Tailin Wu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In the Information Bottleneck (IB), when tuning the relative strength between compression and prediction terms, how do the two terms behave, and what's their relationship with the dataset and the learned representation? In this paper, we set out to answer these questions by studying multiple phase transitions in the IB objective: IB_β[p(z|x)] = I(X; Z) − βI(Y; Z) defined on the encoding distribution p(z|x) for input X, target Y and representation Z, where sudden jumps of dI(Y; Z)/dβ and prediction accuracy are observed with increasing β. We introduce a definition for IB phase transitions as a qualitative change of the IB loss landscape, and show that the transitions correspond to the onset of learning new classes. Using second-order calculus of variations, we derive a formula that provides a practical condition for IB phase transitions, and draw its connection with the Fisher information matrix for parameterized models. We provide two perspectives to understand the formula, revealing that each IB phase transition is finding a component of maximum (nonlinear) correlation between X and Y orthogonal to the learned representation, in close analogy with canonical-correlation analysis (CCA) in linear settings. Based on the theory, we present an algorithm for discovering phase transition points. Finally, we verify that our theory and algorithm accurately predict phase transitions in categorical datasets, predict the onset of learning new classes and class difficulty in MNIST, and predict prominent phase transitions in CIFAR10.
On the Relationship between Self-Attention and Convolutional Layers
Authors: Andreas Loukas, Martin Jaggi Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Recent trends of incorporating attention mechanisms in vision have led researchers to reconsider the supremacy of convolutional layers as a primary building block. Beyond helping CNNs to handle long-range dependencies, Ramachandran et al. (2019) showed that attention can completely replace convolution and achieve state-of-the-art performance on vision tasks. This raises the question: do learned attention layers operate similarly to convolutional layers? This work provides evidence that attention layers can perform convolution and, indeed, they often learn to do so in practice. Specifically, we prove that a multi-head self-attention layer with sufficient number of heads is at least as expressive as any convolutional layer. Our numerical experiments then show that self-attention layers attend to pixel-grid patterns similarly to CNN layers, corroborating our analysis. Our code is publicly available.
Observational Overfitting in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yiding Jiang, Stephen Tu, Yilun Du, Behnam Neyshabur Xingyou Song
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: A major component of overfitting in model-free reinforcement learning (RL) involves the case where the agent may mistakenly correlate reward with certain spurious features from the observations generated by the Markov Decision Process (MDP). We provide a general framework for analyzing this scenario, which we use to design multiple synthetic benchmarks from only modifying the observation space of an MDP. When an agent overfits to different observation spaces even if the underlying MDP dynamics is fixed, we term this observational overfitting. Our experiments expose intriguing properties especially with regards to implicit regularization, and also corroborate results from previous works in RL generalization and supervised learning (SL).
CLN2INV: Learning Loop Invariants with Continuous Logic Networks
Authors: Justin Wong, Jianan Yao, Ronghui Gu, Suman Jana Gabriel Ryan
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Program verification offers a framework for ensuring program correctness and therefore systematically eliminating different classes of bugs. Inferring loop invariants is one of the main challenges behind automated verification of real-world programs which often contain many loops. In this paper, we present the Continuous Logic Network (CLN), a novel neural architecture for automatically learning loop invariants directly from program execution traces. Unlike existing neural networks, CLNs can learn precise and explicit representations of formulas in Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT)  for loop invariants from program execution traces. We develop a new sound and complete semantic mapping for assigning SMT formulas to continuous truth values that allows CLNs to be trained efficiently. We use CLNs to implement a new inference system for loop invariants, CLN2INV, that significantly outperforms existing approaches on the popular Code2Inv dataset. CLN2INV is the first tool to solve all 124 theoretically solvable problems in the Code2Inv dataset. Moreover, CLN2INV takes only 1.1 second on average for each problem, which is 40 times faster than existing approaches. We further demonstrate that CLN2INV can even learn 12 significantly more complex loop invariants than the ones required for the Code2Inv dataset.
Strategies for Pre-training Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Bowen Liu*, Joseph Gomes, Marinka Zitnik, Percy Liang, Vijay Pande, Jure Leskovec Weihua Hu*
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Many applications of machine learning require a model to make accurate pre-dictions on test examples that are distributionally different from training ones, while task-specific labels are scarce during training. An effective approach to this challenge is to pre-train a model on related tasks where data is abundant, and then fine-tune it on a downstream task of interest. While pre-training has been effective in many language and vision domains, it remains an open question how to effectively use pre-training on graph datasets. In this paper, we develop a new strategy and self-supervised methods for pre-training Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The key to the success of our strategy is to pre-train an expressive GNN at the level of individual nodes as well as entire graphs so that the GNN can learn useful local and global representations simultaneously. We systematically study pre-training on multiple graph classification datasets. We find that naïve strategies, which pre-train GNNs at the level of either entire graphs or individual nodes, give limited improvement and can even lead to negative transfer on many downstream tasks. In contrast, our strategy avoids negative transfer and improves generalization significantly across downstream tasks, leading up to 9.4% absolute improvements in ROC-AUC over non-pre-trained models and achieving state-of-the-art performance for molecular property prediction and protein function prediction.
Robust And Interpretable Blind Image Denoising Via Bias-Free Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Zahra Kadkhodaie, Eero P. Simoncelli, Carlos Fernandez-Granda Sreyas Mohan
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We study the generalization properties of deep convolutional neural networks for image denoising in the presence of varying noise levels. We provide extensive empirical evidence that current state-of-the-art architectures systematically overfit to the noise levels in the training set, performing very poorly at new noise levels. We show that strong generalization can be achieved through a simple architectural modification: removing all additive constants. The resulting "bias-free" networks attain state-of-the-art performance over a broad range of noise levels, even when trained over a limited range. They are also locally linear, which enables direct analysis with linear-algebraic tools.  We show that the denoising map can be visualized locally as a filter that adapts to both image structure and noise level. In addition, our analysis reveals that deep networks implicitly perform a projection onto an adaptively-selected low-dimensional subspace, with dimensionality inversely proportional to noise level, that captures features of natural images.
A Probabilistic Formulation of Unsupervised Text Style Transfer
Authors: Xinyi Wang, Graham Neubig, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick Junxian He
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We present a deep generative model for unsupervised text style transfer that unifies previously proposed non-generative techniques. Our probabilistic approach models non-parallel data from two domains as a partially observed parallel corpus. By hypothesizing a parallel latent sequence that generates each observed sequence, our model learns to transform sequences from one domain to another in a completely unsupervised fashion. In contrast with traditional generative sequence models (e.g. the HMM), our model makes few assumptions about the data it generates: it uses a recurrent language model as a prior and an encoder-decoder as a transduction distribution. While computation of marginal data likelihood is intractable in this model class, we show that amortized variational inference admits a practical surrogate. Further, by drawing connections between our variational objective and other recent unsupervised style transfer and machine translation techniques, we show how our probabilistic view can unify some known non-generative objectives such as backtranslation and adversarial loss. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a wide range of unsupervised style transfer tasks, including sentiment transfer, formality transfer, word decipherment, author imitation, and related language translation. Across all style transfer tasks, our approach yields substantial gains over state-of-the-art non-generative baselines, including the state-of-the-art unsupervised machine translation techniques that our approach generalizes. Further, we conduct experiments on a standard unsupervised machine translation task and find that our unified approach matches the current state-of-the-art.
Discriminative Particle Filter Reinforcement Learning for Complex Partial observations
Authors: Peter Karkus, David Hsu, Wee Sun Lee, Nan Ye Xiao Ma
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning is successful in decision making for sophisticated games, such as Atari, Go, etc. 
However, real-world decision making often requires reasoning with partial information extracted from complex visual observations. This paper presents  Discriminative Particle Filter Reinforcement Learning (DPFRL), a new reinforcement learning framework for complex partial observations. DPFRL encodes a differentiable particle filter in the neural network policy for explicit reasoning with partial observations over time. The particle filter maintains a belief using learned discriminative update, which is trained end-to-end for decision making. We show that using the discriminative update instead of standard generative models results in significantly improved performance, especially for tasks with complex visual observations, because they circumvent the difficulty of modeling complex observations that are irrelevant to decision making.
In addition, to extract features from the particle belief, we propose a new type of belief feature based on the moment generating function. DPFRL outperforms state-of-the-art POMDP RL models in Flickering Atari Games, an existing POMDP RL benchmark, and in Natural Flickering Atari Games, a new, more challenging POMDP RL benchmark introduced in this paper.  Further,  DPFRL performs well for visual navigation with real-world data in the Habitat environment.
CATER: A diagnostic dataset for Compositional Actions & TEmporal Reasoning
Authors: Deva Ramanan Rohit Girdhar
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Computer vision has undergone a dramatic revolution in performance, driven in large part through deep features trained on large-scale supervised datasets. However, much of these improvements have focused on static image analysis; video understanding has seen rather modest improvements. Even though new datasets and spatiotemporal models have been proposed, simple frame-by-frame classification methods often still remain competitive. We posit that current video datasets are plagued with implicit biases over scene and object structure that can dwarf variations in temporal structure. In this work, we build a video dataset with fully observable and controllable object and scene bias, and which truly requires spatiotemporal understanding in order to be solved. Our dataset, named CATER, is rendered synthetically using a library of standard 3D objects, and tests the ability to recognize compositions of object movements that require long-term reasoning. In addition to being a challenging dataset, CATER also provides a plethora of diagnostic tools to analyze modern spatiotemporal video architectures by being completely observable and controllable. Using CATER, we provide insights into some of the most recent state of the art deep video architectures.
Scale-Equivariant Steerable Networks
Authors: Michał Szmaja, Arnold Smeulders Ivan Sosnovik
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: The effectiveness of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has been substantially attributed to their built-in property of translation equivariance. However, CNNs do not have embedded mechanisms to handle other types of transformations. In this work, we pay attention to scale changes, which regularly appear in various tasks due to the changing distances between the objects and the camera. First, we introduce the general theory for building scale-equivariant convolutional networks with steerable filters. We develop scale-convolution and generalize other common blocks to be scale-equivariant. We demonstrate the computational efficiency and numerical stability of the proposed method. We compare the proposed models to the previously developed methods for scale equivariance and local scale invariance. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on the MNIST-scale dataset and on the STL-10 dataset in the supervised learning setting.
Higher-Order Function Networks for Learning Composable 3D Object Representations
Authors: Selim Engin, Volkan Isler, Daniel D Lee Eric Mitchell
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We present a new approach to 3D object representation where a neural network encodes the geometry of an object directly into the weights and biases of a second 'mapping' network. This mapping network can be used to reconstruct an object by applying its encoded transformation to points randomly sampled from a simple geometric space, such as the unit sphere. We study the effectiveness of our method through various experiments on subsets of the ShapeNet dataset. We find that the proposed approach can reconstruct encoded objects with accuracy equal to or exceeding state-of-the-art methods with orders of magnitude fewer parameters. Our smallest mapping network has only about 7000 parameters and shows reconstruction quality on par with state-of-the-art object decoder architectures with millions of parameters. Further experiments on feature mixing through the composition of learned functions show that the encoding captures a meaningful subspace of objects.
Network Randomization: A Simple Technique for Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Kibok Lee, Jinwoo Shin, Honglak Lee Kimin Lee
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents often fail to generalize to unseen environments (yet semantically similar to trained agents), particularly when they are trained on high-dimensional state spaces, such as images. In this paper, we propose a simple technique to improve a generalization ability of deep RL agents by introducing a randomized (convolutional) neural network that randomly perturbs input observations. It enables trained agents to adapt to new domains by learning robust features invariant across varied and randomized environments. Furthermore, we consider an inference method based on the Monte Carlo approximation to reduce the variance induced by this randomization. We demonstrate the superiority of our method across 2D CoinRun, 3D DeepMind Lab exploration and 3D robotics control tasks: it significantly outperforms various regularization and data augmentation methods for the same purpose.
Weakly Supervised Disentanglement with Guarantees
Authors: Yining Chen, Abhishek Kumar, Stefano Ermon, Ben Poole Rui Shu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Learning disentangled representations that correspond to factors of variation in real-world data is critical to interpretable and human-controllable machine learning. Recently, concerns about the viability of learning disentangled representations in a purely unsupervised manner has spurred a shift toward the incorporation of weak supervision. However, there is currently no formalism that identifies when and how weak supervision will guarantee disentanglement. To address this issue, we provide a theoretical framework to assist in analyzing the disentanglement guarantees (or lack thereof) conferred by weak supervision when coupled with learning algorithms based on distribution matching. We empirically verify the guarantees and limitations of several weak supervision methods (restricted labeling, match-pairing, and rank-pairing), demonstrating the predictive power and usefulness of our theoretical framework.
Dynamics-Aware Unsupervised Discovery of Skills
Authors: Shixiang Gu, Sergey Levine, Vikash Kumar, Karol Hausman Archit Sharma
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Conventionally, model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) aims to learn a global model for the dynamics of the environment. A good model can potentially enable planning algorithms to generate a large variety of behaviors and solve diverse tasks. However, learning an accurate model for complex dynamical systems is difficult, and even then, the model might not generalize well outside the distribution of states on which it was trained. In this work, we combine model-based learning with model-free learning of primitives that make model-based planning easy. To that end, we aim to answer the question: how can we discover skills whose outcomes are easy to predict? We propose an unsupervised learning algorithm, Dynamics-Aware Discovery of Skills (DADS), which simultaneously discovers predictable behaviors and learns their dynamics. Our method can leverage continuous skill spaces, theoretically, allowing us to learn infinitely many behaviors even for high-dimensional state-spaces. We demonstrate that zero-shot planning in the learned latent space significantly outperforms standard MBRL and model-free goal-conditioned RL, can handle sparse-reward tasks, and substantially improves over prior hierarchical RL methods for unsupervised skill discovery.
State-only Imitation with Transition Dynamics Mismatch
Authors: Jian Peng Tanmay Gangwani
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Imitation Learning (IL) is a popular paradigm for training agents to achieve complicated goals by leveraging expert behavior, rather than dealing with the hardships of designing a correct reward function. With the environment modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), most of the existing IL algorithms are contingent on the availability of expert demonstrations in the same MDP as the one in which a new imitator policy is to be learned. This is uncharacteristic of many real-life scenarios where discrepancies between the expert and the imitator MDPs are common, especially in the transition dynamics function. Furthermore, obtaining expert actions may be costly or infeasible, making the recent trend towards state-only IL (where expert demonstrations constitute only states or observations) ever so promising. Building on recent adversarial imitation approaches that are motivated by the idea of divergence minimization, we present a new state-only IL algorithm in this paper. It divides the overall optimization objective into two subproblems by introducing an indirection step and solves the subproblems iteratively. We show that our algorithm is particularly effective when there is a transition dynamics mismatch between the expert and imitator MDPs, while the baseline IL methods suffer from performance degradation. To analyze this, we construct several interesting MDPs by modifying the configuration parameters for the MuJoCo locomotion tasks from OpenAI Gym.
Theory and Evaluation Metrics for Learning Disentangled Representations
Authors: Truyen Tran Kien Do
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We make two theoretical contributions to disentanglement learning by (a) defining precise semantics of disentangled representations, and (b) establishing robust metrics for evaluation. First, we characterize the concept “disentangled representations” used in supervised and unsupervised methods along three dimensions–informativeness, separability and interpretability–which can be expressed and quantified explicitly using information-theoretic constructs. This helps explain the behaviors of several well-known disentanglement learning models. We then propose robust metrics for measuring informativeness, separability and interpretability. Through a comprehensive suite of experiments, we show that our metrics correctly characterize the representations learned by different methods and are consistent with qualitative (visual) results. Thus, the metrics allow disentanglement learning methods to be compared on a fair ground. We also empirically uncovered new interesting properties of VAE-based methods and interpreted them with our formulation. These findings are promising and hopefully will encourage the design of more theoretically driven models for learning disentangled representations.
ReClor: A Reading Comprehension Dataset Requiring Logical Reasoning
Authors: Zihang Jiang, Yanfei Dong, Jiashi Feng Weihao Yu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Recent powerful pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable performance on most of the popular datasets for reading comprehension. It is time to introduce more challenging datasets to push the development of this field towards more comprehensive reasoning of text. In this paper, we introduce a new Reading Comprehension dataset requiring logical reasoning (ReClor) extracted from standardized graduate admission examinations. As earlier studies suggest, human-annotated datasets usually contain biases, which are often exploited by models to achieve high accuracy without truly understanding the text. In order to comprehensively evaluate the logical reasoning ability of models on ReClor, we propose to identify biased data points and separate them into EASY set while the rest as HARD set. Empirical results show that state-of-the-art models have an outstanding ability to capture biases contained in the dataset with high accuracy on EASY set. However, they struggle on HARD set with poor performance near that of random guess, indicating more research is needed to essentially enhance the logical reasoning ability of current models.
DivideMix: Learning with Noisy Labels as Semi-supervised Learning
Authors: Richard Socher, Steven C.H. Hoi Junnan Li
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deep neural networks are known to be annotation-hungry. Numerous efforts have been devoted to reducing the annotation cost when learning with deep networks. Two prominent directions include learning with noisy labels and semi-supervised learning by exploiting unlabeled data. In this work, we propose DivideMix, a novel framework for learning with noisy labels by leveraging semi-supervised learning techniques. In particular, DivideMix models the per-sample loss distribution with a mixture model to dynamically divide the training data into a labeled set with clean samples and an unlabeled set with noisy samples, and trains the model on both the labeled and unlabeled data in a semi-supervised manner. To avoid confirmation bias, we simultaneously train two diverged networks where each network uses the dataset division from the other network. During the semi-supervised training phase, we improve the MixMatch strategy by performing label co-refinement and label co-guessing on labeled and unlabeled samples, respectively. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/LiJunnan1992/DivideMix .
Adversarial Policies: Attacking Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Michael Dennis, Cody Wild, Neel Kant, Sergey Levine, Stuart Russell Adam Gleave
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (RL) policies are known to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations to their observations, similar to adversarial examples for classifiers. However, an attacker is not usually able to directly modify another agent's observations. This might lead one to wonder: is it possible to attack an RL agent simply by choosing an adversarial policy acting in a multi-agent environment so as to create natural observations that are adversarial? We demonstrate the existence of adversarial policies in zero-sum games between simulated humanoid robots with proprioceptive observations, against state-of-the-art victims trained via self-play to be robust to opponents. The adversarial policies reliably win against the victims but generate seemingly random and uncoordinated behavior. We find that these policies are more successful in high-dimensional environments, and induce substantially different activations in the victim policy network than when the victim plays against a normal opponent. Videos are available at https://adversarialpolicies.github.io/.
Probabilistic Connection Importance Inference and Lossless Compression of Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Long Sha, Pengyu Hong, Zuofeng Shang, Jun S. Liu Xin Xing
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) can be huge in size, requiring a considerable a mount of energy and computational resources to operate, which limits their applications in numerous scenarios. It is thus of interest to compress DNNs while maintaining their performance levels.  We here propose a probabilistic importance inference approach for pruning DNNs. Specifically, we test the significance of the relevance of a connection in a DNN to the DNN’s outputs using a nonparemtric scoring testand keep only those significant ones. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves better lossless compression rates than existing techniques