mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
A New Method of Region Embedding for Text Classification
Authors: bo huang, guocheng niu, daren li, daxiang dong, wei he, dianhai yu, hua wu chao qiao
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: To represent a text as a bag of properly identified “phrases” and use the representation for processing the text is proved to be useful. The key question here is how to identify the phrases and represent them. The traditional method of utilizing n-grams can be regarded as an approximation of the approach. Such a method can suffer from data sparsity, however, particularly when the length of n-gram is large. In this paper, we propose a new method of learning and utilizing task-specific distributed representations of n-grams, referred to as “region embeddings”. Without loss of generality we address text classification. We specifically propose two models for region embeddings. In our models, the representation of a word has two parts, the embedding of the word itself, and a weighting matrix to interact with the local context, referred to as local context unit. The region embeddings are learned and used in the classification task, as parameters of the neural network classifier. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms existing methods in text classification on several benchmark datasets. The results also indicate that our method can indeed capture the salient phrasal expressions in the texts.
Variational Continual Learning
Authors: Yingzhen Li, Thang D. Bui, Richard E. Turner Cuong V. Nguyen
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: This paper develops variational continual learning (VCL), a simple but general framework for continual learning that fuses online variational inference (VI) and recent advances in Monte Carlo VI for neural networks. The framework can successfully train both deep discriminative models and deep generative models in complex continual learning settings where existing tasks evolve over time and entirely new tasks emerge. Experimental results show that VCL outperforms state-of-the-art continual learning methods on a variety of tasks, avoiding catastrophic forgetting in a fully automatic way.
Identifying Analogies Across Domains
Authors: Lior Wolf Yedid Hoshen
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Identifying analogies across domains without supervision is a key task for artificial intelligence. Recent advances in cross domain image mapping have concentrated on translating images across domains. Although the progress made is impressive, the visual fidelity many times does not suffice for identifying the matching sample from the other domain. In this paper, we tackle this very task of finding exact analogies between datasets i.e. for every image from domain A find an analogous image in domain B. We present a matching-by-synthesis approach: AN-GAN, and show that it outperforms current techniques. We further show that the cross-domain mapping task can be broken into two parts: domain alignment and learning the mapping function. The tasks can be iteratively solved, and as the alignment is improved, the unsupervised translation function reaches quality comparable to full supervision.
Improving GAN Training via Binarized Representation Entropy (BRE) Regularization
Authors: Gavin Weiguang Ding, Kry Yik-Chau Lui, Ruitong Huang Yanshuai Cao
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We propose a novel regularizer to improve the training of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The motivation is that when the discriminator D spreads out its model capacity in the right way, the learning signals given to the generator G are more informative and diverse, which helps G to explore better and discover the real data manifold while avoiding large unstable jumps due to the erroneous extrapolation made by D . Our regularizer guides the rectifier discriminator D to better allocate its model capacity, by encouraging the binary activation patterns on selected internal layers of D to have a high joint entropy. Experimental results on both synthetic data and real datasets demonstrate improvements in stability and convergence speed of the GAN training, as well as higher sample quality. The approach also leads to higher classification accuracies in semi-supervised learning.
Defense-GAN: Protecting Classifiers Against Adversarial Attacks Using Generative Models
Authors: Maya Kabkab, Rama Chellappa Pouya Samangouei
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: In recent years, deep neural network approaches have been widely adopted for machine learning tasks, including classification. However, they were shown to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations: carefully crafted small perturbations can cause misclassification of legitimate images. We propose Defense-GAN, a new framework leveraging the expressive capability of generative models to defend deep neural networks against such attacks. Defense-GAN is trained to model the distribution of unperturbed images. At inference time, it finds a close output to a given image which does not contain the adversarial changes. This output is then fed to the classifier. Our proposed method can be used with any classification model and does not modify the classifier structure or training procedure. It can also be used as a defense against any attack as it does not assume knowledge of the process for generating the adversarial examples. We empirically show that Defense-GAN is consistently effective against different attack methods and improves on existing defense strategies.
Neural Map: Structured Memory for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ruslan Salakhutdinov Emilio Parisotto
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: A critical component to enabling intelligent reasoning in partially observable environments is memory. Despite this importance, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents have so far used relatively simple memory architectures, with the main methods to overcome partial observability being either a temporal convolution over the past k frames or an LSTM layer. More recent work (Oh et al., 2016) has went beyond these architectures by using memory networks which can allow more sophisticated addressing schemes over the past k frames. But even these architectures are unsatisfactory due to the reason that they are limited to only remembering information from the last k frames. In this paper, we develop a memory system with an adaptable write operator that is customized to the sorts of 3D environments that DRL agents typically interact with. This architecture, called the Neural Map, uses a spatially structured 2D memory image to learn to store arbitrary information about the environment over long time lags. We demonstrate empirically that the Neural Map surpasses previous DRL memories on a set of challenging 2D and 3D maze environments and show that it is capable of generalizing to environments that were not seen during training.
Eigenoption Discovery through the Deep Successor Representation
Authors: Clemens Rosenbaum, Xiaoxiao Guo, Miao Liu, Gerald Tesauro, Murray Campbell Marlos C. Machado
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Options in reinforcement learning allow agents to hierarchically decompose a task into subtasks, having the potential to speed up learning and planning. However, autonomously learning effective sets of options is still a major challenge in the field. In this paper we focus on the recently introduced idea of using representation learning methods to guide the option discovery process. Specifically, we look at eigenoptions, options obtained from representations that encode diffusive information flow in the environment. We extend the existing algorithms for eigenoption discovery to settings with stochastic transitions and in which handcrafted features are not available.  We propose an algorithm that discovers eigenoptions while learning non-linear state representations from raw pixels. It exploits recent successes in the deep reinforcement learning literature and the equivalence between proto-value functions and the successor representation. We use traditional tabular domains to provide intuition about our approach and Atari 2600 games to demonstrate its potential.
Dynamic Neural Program Embeddings for Program Repair
Authors: Rishabh Singh, Zhendong Su Ke Wang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Neural program embeddings have shown much promise recently for a variety of program analysis tasks, including program synthesis, program repair, code completion, and fault localization. However, most existing program embeddings are based on syntactic features of programs, such as token sequences or abstract syntax trees. Unlike images and text, a program has well-deﬁned semantics that can be difﬁcult to capture by only considering its syntax (i.e. syntactically similar programs can exhibit vastly different run-time behavior), which makes syntax-based program embeddings fundamentally limited. We propose a novel semantic program embedding that is learned from program execution traces. Our key insight is that program states expressed as sequential tuples of live variable values not only capture program semantics more precisely, but also offer a more natural ﬁt for Recurrent Neural Networks to model. We evaluate different syntactic and semantic program embeddings on the task of classifying the types of errors that students make in their submissions to an introductory programming class and on the CodeHunt education platform. Our evaluation results show that the semantic program embeddings signiﬁcantly outperform the syntactic program embeddings based on token sequences and abstract syntax trees. In addition, we augment a search-based program repair system with predictions made from our semantic embedding and demonstrate signiﬁcantly improved search efﬁciency.
Global Optimality Conditions for Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Suvrit Sra, Ali Jadbabaie Chulhee Yun
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We study the error landscape of deep linear and nonlinear neural networks with the squared error loss. Minimizing the loss of a deep linear neural network is a nonconvex problem, and despite recent progress, our understanding of this loss surface is still incomplete. For deep linear networks, we present necessary and sufficient conditions for a critical point of the risk function to be a global minimum. Surprisingly, our conditions provide an efficiently checkable test for global optimality, while such tests are typically intractable in nonconvex optimization. We further extend these results to deep nonlinear neural networks and prove similar sufficient conditions for global optimality, albeit in a more limited function space setting.
Guide Actor-Critic for Continuous Control
Authors: Abbas Abdolmaleki, Masashi Sugiyama Voot Tangkaratt
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Actor-critic methods solve reinforcement learning problems by updating a parameterized policy known as an actor in a direction that increases an estimate of the expected return known as a critic. However, existing actor-critic methods only use values or gradients of the critic to update the policy parameter. In this paper, we propose a novel actor-critic method called the guide actor-critic (GAC). GAC firstly learns a guide actor that locally maximizes the critic and then it updates the policy parameter based on the guide actor by supervised learning. Our main theoretical contributions are two folds. First, we show that GAC updates the guide actor by performing second-order optimization in the action space where the curvature matrix is based on the Hessians of the critic. Second, we show that the deterministic policy gradient method is a special case of GAC when the Hessians are ignored. Through experiments, we show that our method is a promising reinforcement learning method for continuous controls.
Few-Shot Learning with Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Joan Bruna Estrach Victor Garcia Satorras
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We propose to study the problem of few-shot learning with the prism of inference on a partially observed graphical model, constructed from a collection of input images whose label can be either observed or not. By assimilating generic message-passing inference algorithms with their neural-network counterparts, we define a graph neural network architecture that generalizes several of the recently proposed few-shot learning models. Besides providing improved numerical performance, our framework is easily extended to variants of few-shot learning, such as semi-supervised or active learning, demonstrating the ability of graph-based models to operate well on ‘relational’ tasks.
A Bayesian Perspective on Generalization and Stochastic Gradient Descent
Authors: Samuel L. Smith, Quoc V. Le
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We consider two questions at the heart of machine learning; how can we predict if a minimum will generalize to the test set, and why does stochastic gradient descent find minima that generalize well? Our work responds to \citet{zhang2016understanding}, who showed deep neural networks can easily memorize randomly labeled training data, despite generalizing well on real labels of the same inputs. We show that the same phenomenon occurs in small linear models. These observations are explained by the Bayesian evidence, which penalizes sharp minima but is invariant to model parameterization. We also demonstrate that, when one holds the learning rate fixed, there is an optimum batch size which maximizes the test set accuracy. We propose that the noise introduced by small mini-batches drives the parameters towards minima whose evidence is large. Interpreting stochastic gradient descent as a stochastic differential equation, we identify the ``noise scale" $g = \epsilon (\frac{N}{B} - 1) \approx \epsilon N/B$, where $\epsilon$ is the learning rate, $N$ the training set size and $B$ the batch size. Consequently the optimum batch size is proportional to both the learning rate and the size of the training set, $B_{opt} \propto \epsilon N$. We verify these predictions empirically.
Do GANs learn the distribution? Some Theory and Empirics
Authors: Andrej Risteski, Yi Zhang Sanjeev Arora
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Do GANS (Generative Adversarial Nets) actually learn the target distribution? The foundational paper of Goodfellow et al. (2014) suggested they do, if they were given sufficiently large deep nets, sample size, and computation time. A recent theoretical analysis in Arora et al. (2017) raised doubts whether the same holds when discriminator has bounded size. It showed that the training objective can approach its optimum value even if the generated distribution has very low support. In other words, the training objective is unable to prevent mode collapse. The current paper makes two contributions. (1) It proposes a novel test for estimating support size using the birthday paradox of discrete probability. Using this  evidence is presented that well-known GANs approaches do learn distributions of fairly low support.  (2) It theoretically studies encoder-decoder GANs architectures (e.g., BiGAN/ALI), which were proposed to learn more meaningful features via GANs, and consequently to also solve the mode-collapse issue. Our result shows that such encoder-decoder training objectives also cannot guarantee learning of the full distribution because they cannot prevent serious mode collapse. More seriously, they cannot prevent learning meaningless codes for data, contrary to usual intuition.
Deep Rewiring: Training very sparse deep networks
Authors: David Kappel, Wolfgang Maass, Robert Legenstein Guillaume Bellec
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Neuromorphic hardware tends to pose limits on the connectivity of deep networks that one can run on them. But also generic hardware and software implementations of deep learning run more efficiently for sparse networks. Several methods exist for pruning connections of a neural network after it was trained without connectivity constraints. We present an algorithm, DEEP R, that enables us to train directly a sparsely connected neural network. DEEP R automatically rewires the network during supervised training so that connections are there where they are most needed for the task, while its total number is all the time strictly bounded. We demonstrate that DEEP R can be used to train very sparse feedforward and recurrent neural networks on standard benchmark tasks with just a minor loss in performance. DEEP R is based on a rigorous theoretical foundation that views rewiring as stochastic sampling of network configurations from a posterior.
Recasting Gradient-Based Meta-Learning as Hierarchical Bayes
Authors: Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine, Trevor Darrell, Thomas Griffiths Erin Grant
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Meta-learning allows an intelligent agent to leverage prior learning episodes as a basis for quickly improving performance on a novel task. Bayesian hierarchical modeling provides a theoretical framework for formalizing meta-learning as inference for a set of parameters that are shared across tasks. Here, we reformulate the model-agnostic meta-learning algorithm (MAML) of Finn et al. (2017) as a method for probabilistic inference in a hierarchical Bayesian model. In contrast to prior methods for meta-learning via hierarchical Bayes, MAML is naturally applicable to complex function approximators through its use of a scalable gradient descent procedure for posterior inference. Furthermore, the identification of MAML as hierarchical Bayes provides a way to understand the algorithm’s operation as a meta-learning procedure, as well as an opportunity to make use of computational strategies for efficient inference. We use this opportunity to propose an improvement to the MAML algorithm that makes use of techniques from approximate inference and curvature estimation.
Compressing Word Embeddings via Deep Compositional Code Learning
Authors: Hideki Nakayama Raphael Shu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Natural language processing (NLP) models often require a massive number of parameters for word embeddings, resulting in a large storage or memory footprint. Deploying neural NLP models to mobile devices requires compressing the word embeddings without any significant sacrifices in performance. For this purpose, we propose to construct the embeddings with few basis vectors. For each word, the composition of basis vectors is determined by a hash code. To maximize the compression rate, we adopt the multi-codebook quantization approach instead of binary coding scheme. Each code is composed of multiple discrete numbers, such as (3, 2, 1, 8), where the value of each component is limited to a fixed range. We propose to directly learn the discrete codes in an end-to-end neural network by applying the Gumbel-softmax trick. Experiments show the compression rate achieves 98% in a sentiment analysis task and 94% ~ 99% in machine translation tasks without performance loss. In both tasks, the proposed method can improve the model performance by slightly lowering the compression rate. Compared to other approaches such as character-level segmentation, the proposed method is language-independent and does not require modifications to the network architecture.
Hierarchical Representations for Efficient Architecture Search
Authors: Karen Simonyan, Oriol Vinyals, Chrisantha Fernando, Koray Kavukcuoglu Hanxiao Liu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We explore efficient neural architecture search methods and show that a simple yet powerful evolutionary algorithm can discover new architectures with excellent performance. Our approach combines a novel hierarchical genetic representation scheme that imitates the modularized design pattern commonly adopted by human experts, and an expressive search space that supports complex topologies. Our algorithm efficiently discovers architectures that outperform a large number of manually designed models for image classification, obtaining top-1 error of 3.6% on CIFAR-10 and 20.3% when transferred to ImageNet, which is competitive with the best existing neural architecture search approaches. We also present results using random search, achieving 0.3% less top-1 accuracy on CIFAR-10 and 0.1% less on ImageNet whilst reducing the search time from 36 hours down to 1 hour.
Learning to Represent Programs with Graphs
Authors: Marc Brockschmidt, Mahmoud Khademi Miltiadis Allamanis
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Learning tasks on source code (i.e., formal languages) have been considered recently, but most work has tried to transfer natural language methods and does not capitalize on the unique opportunities offered by code's known syntax. For example, long-range dependencies induced by using the same variable or function in distant locations are often not considered. We propose to use graphs to represent both the syntactic and semantic structure of code and use graph-based deep learning methods to learn to reason over program structures.

In this work, we present how to construct graphs from source code and how to scale Gated Graph Neural Networks training to such large graphs. We evaluate our method on two tasks: VarNaming, in which a network attempts to predict the name of a variable given its usage, and VarMisuse, in which the network learns to reason about selecting the correct variable that should be used at a given program location. Our comparison to methods that use less structured program representations shows the advantages of modeling known structure, and suggests that our models learn to infer meaningful names and to solve the VarMisuse task in many cases. Additionally, our testing showed that VarMisuse identifies a number of bugs in mature open-source projects.
TRAINING GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORKS VIA PRIMAL-DUAL SUBGRADIENT METHODS: A LAGRANGIAN PERSPECTIVE ON GAN
Authors: Jiang Wang, Hao Ge Xu Chen
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We relate the minimax game of generative adversarial networks (GANs) to finding the saddle points of the Lagrangian function for a convex optimization problem, where the discriminator outputs and the distribution of generator outputs play the roles of primal variables and dual variables, respectively. This formulation shows the connection between the standard GAN training process and the primal-dual subgradient methods for convex optimization. The inherent connection does not only provide a theoretical convergence proof for training GANs in the function space, but also inspires a novel objective function for training. The modified objective function forces the distribution of generator outputs to be updated along the direction according to the primal-dual subgradient methods. A toy example shows that the proposed method is able to resolve mode collapse, which in this case cannot be avoided by the standard GAN or Wasserstein GAN. Experiments on both Gaussian mixture synthetic data and real-world image datasets demonstrate the performance of the proposed method on generating diverse samples.
Deep Autoencoding Gaussian Mixture Model for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection
Authors: Qi Song, Martin Renqiang Min, Wei Cheng, Cristian Lumezanu, Daeki Cho, Haifeng Chen Bo Zong
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Unsupervised anomaly detection on multi- or high-dimensional data is of great importance in both fundamental machine learning research and industrial applications, for which density estimation lies at the core. Although previous approaches based on dimensionality reduction followed by density estimation have made fruitful progress, they mainly suffer from decoupled model learning with inconsistent optimization goals and incapability of preserving essential information in the low-dimensional space. In this paper, we present a Deep Autoencoding Gaussian Mixture Model (DAGMM) for unsupervised anomaly detection. Our model utilizes a deep autoencoder to generate a low-dimensional representation and reconstruction error for each input data point, which is further fed into a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). Instead of using decoupled two-stage training and the standard Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, DAGMM jointly optimizes the parameters of the deep autoencoder and the mixture model simultaneously in an end-to-end fashion, leveraging a separate estimation network to facilitate the parameter learning of the mixture model. The joint optimization, which well balances autoencoding reconstruction, density estimation of latent representation, and regularization, helps the autoencoder escape from less attractive local optima and further reduce reconstruction errors, avoiding the need of pre-training. Experimental results on several public benchmark datasets show that, DAGMM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art anomaly detection techniques, and achieves up to 14% improvement based on the standard F1 score.
FusionNet: Fusing via Fully-aware Attention with Application to Machine Comprehension
Authors: Chenguang Zhu, Yelong Shen, Weizhu Chen Hsin-Yuan Huang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: This paper introduces a new neural structure called FusionNet, which extends existing attention approaches from three perspectives. First, it puts forward a novel concept of "History of Word" to characterize attention information from the lowest word-level embedding up to the highest semantic-level representation. Second, it identifies an attention scoring function that better utilizes the "history of word" concept. Third, it proposes a fully-aware multi-level attention mechanism to capture the complete information in one text (such as a question) and exploit it in its counterpart (such as context or passage) layer by layer. We apply FusionNet to the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) and it achieves the first position for both single and ensemble model on the official SQuAD leaderboard at the time of writing (Oct. 4th, 2017). Meanwhile, we verify the generalization of FusionNet with two adversarial SQuAD datasets and it sets up the new state-of-the-art on both datasets: on AddSent, FusionNet increases the best F1 metric from 46.6% to 51.4%; on AddOneSent, FusionNet boosts the best F1 metric from 56.0% to 60.7%.
Critical Percolation as a Framework to Analyze the Training of Deep Networks
Authors: Rodrigo Andrade de Bem Zohar Ringel
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: In this paper we approach two relevant deep learning topics: i) tackling of graph structured input data and ii) a better understanding and analysis of deep networks and related learning algorithms. With this in mind we focus on the topological classification of reachability in a particular subset of planar graphs (Mazes). Doing so, we are able to model the topology of data while staying in Euclidean space, thus allowing its processing with standard CNN architectures. We suggest a suitable architecture for this problem and show that it can express a perfect solution to the classification task. The shape of the cost function around this solution is also derived and, remarkably, does not depend on the size of the maze in the large maze limit. Responsible for this behavior are rare events in the dataset which strongly regulate the shape of the cost function near this global minimum. We further identify an obstacle to learning in the form of poorly performing local minima in which the network chooses to ignore some of the inputs. We further support our claims with training experiments and numerical analysis of the cost function on networks with up to $128$ layers.
CausalGAN: Learning Causal Implicit Generative Models with Adversarial Training
Authors: Christopher Snyder, Alexandros G. Dimakis, Sriram Vishwanath Murat Kocaoglu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We introduce causal implicit generative models (CiGMs): models that allow sampling from not only the true observational but also the true interventional distributions. We show that adversarial training can be used to learn a CiGM, if the generator architecture is structured based on a given causal graph. We consider the application of conditional and interventional sampling of face images with binary feature labels, such as mustache, young. We preserve the dependency structure between the labels with a given causal graph. We devise a two-stage procedure for learning a CiGM over the labels and the image. First we train a CiGM over the binary labels using a  Wasserstein GAN where the generator neural network is consistent with the causal graph between the labels. Later, we combine this with a conditional GAN to generate images conditioned on the binary labels. We propose two new conditional GAN architectures: CausalGAN and CausalBEGAN. We show that the optimal generator of the CausalGAN, given the labels, samples from the image distributions conditioned on these labels. The conditional GAN combined with a trained CiGM for the labels is then a CiGM over the labels and the generated image. We show that the proposed architectures can be used to sample from observational and interventional image distributions, even for interventions which do not naturally occur in the dataset.
Synthetic and Natural Noise Both Break Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Yonatan Bisk Yonatan Belinkov
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Character-based neural machine translation (NMT) models alleviate out-of-vocabulary issues, learn morphology, and move us closer to completely end-to-end translation systems.  Unfortunately, they are also very brittle and easily falter when presented with noisy data. In this paper, we confront NMT models with synthetic and natural sources of noise. We find that state-of-the-art models fail to translate even moderately noisy texts that humans have no trouble comprehending. We explore two approaches to increase model robustness: structure-invariant word representations and robust training on noisy texts. We find that a model based on a character convolutional neural network is able to simultaneously learn representations robust to multiple kinds of noise.
Auto-Encoding Sequential Monte Carlo
Authors: Maximilian Igl, Tom Rainforth, Tom Jin, Frank Wood Tuan Anh Le
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We build on auto-encoding sequential Monte Carlo (AESMC): a method for model and proposal learning based on maximizing the lower bound to the log marginal likelihood in a broad family of structured probabilistic models. Our approach relies on the efficiency of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) for performing inference in structured probabilistic models and the flexibility of deep neural networks to model complex conditional probability distributions. We develop additional theoretical insights and introduce a new training procedure which improves both model and proposal learning. We demonstrate that our approach provides a fast, easy-to-implement and scalable means for simultaneous model learning and proposal adaptation in deep generative models.
Learning Differentially Private Recurrent Language Models
Authors: Daniel Ramage, Kunal Talwar, Li Zhang H. Brendan McMahan
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We demonstrate that it is possible to train large recurrent language models with user-level differential privacy guarantees with only a negligible cost in predictive accuracy.  Our work builds on recent advances in the training of deep networks on user-partitioned data and privacy accounting for stochastic gradient descent. In particular, we add user-level privacy protection to the federated averaging algorithm, which makes large step updates from user-level data. Our work demonstrates that given a dataset with a sufficiently large number of users (a requirement easily met by even small internet-scale datasets), achieving differential privacy comes at the cost of increased computation, rather than in decreased utility as in most prior work. We find that our private LSTM language models are quantitatively and qualitatively similar to un-noised models when trained on a large dataset.
Large Scale Optimal Transport and Mapping Estimation
Authors: Bharath Bhushan Damodaran, Remi Flamary, Nicolas Courty, Antoine Rolet, Mathieu Blondel Vivien Seguy
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: This paper presents a novel two-step approach for the fundamental problem of learning an optimal map from one distribution to another. First, we learn an optimal transport (OT) plan, which can be thought as a one-to-many map between the two distributions. To that end, we propose a stochastic dual approach of regularized OT, and show empirically that it scales better than a recent related approach when the amount of samples is very large. Second, we estimate a Monge map as a deep neural network learned by approximating the barycentric projection of the previously-obtained OT plan. This parameterization allows generalization of the mapping outside the support of the input measure. We prove two theoretical stability results of regularized OT which show that our estimations converge to the OT and Monge map between the underlying continuous measures. We showcase our proposed approach on two applications: domain adaptation and generative modeling.
Learning to Multi-Task by Active Sampling
Authors: Ashutosh Kumar Jha*, Parikshit S Hegde, Balaraman Ravindran Sahil Sharma*
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: One of the long-standing challenges in Artificial Intelligence for learning goal-directed behavior is to build a single agent which can solve multiple tasks. Recent progress in multi-task learning for goal-directed sequential problems has been in the form of distillation based learning wherein a student network learns from multiple task-specific expert networks by mimicking the task-specific policies of the expert networks. While such approaches offer a promising solution to the multi-task learning problem, they require supervision from large expert networks which require extensive data and computation time for training.
In this work, we propose an efficient multi-task learning framework which solves multiple goal-directed tasks in an on-line setup without the need for expert supervision. Our work uses active learning principles to achieve multi-task learning by sampling the harder tasks more than the easier ones. We propose three distinct models under our active sampling framework. An adaptive method with extremely competitive multi-tasking performance. A UCB-based meta-learner which casts the problem of picking the next task to train on as a multi-armed bandit problem. A meta-learning method that casts the next-task picking problem as a full Reinforcement Learning problem and uses actor-critic methods for optimizing the multi-tasking performance directly. We demonstrate results in the Atari 2600 domain on seven multi-tasking instances: three 6-task instances, one 8-task instance, two 12-task instances and one 21-task instance.
Generalizing Hamiltonian Monte Carlo with Neural Networks
Authors: Matt D. Hoffman, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein Daniel Levy
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We present a general-purpose method to train Markov chain Monte Carlo kernels, parameterized by deep neural networks, that converge and mix quickly to their target distribution. Our method generalizes Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and is trained to maximize expected squared jumped distance, a proxy for mixing speed. We demonstrate large empirical gains on a collection of simple but challenging distributions, for instance achieving a 106x improvement in effective sample size in one case, and mixing when standard HMC makes no measurable progress in a second. Finally, we show quantitative and qualitative gains on a real-world task: latent-variable generative modeling. Python source code will be open-sourced with the camera-ready paper.
Universal Agent for Disentangling Environments and Tasks
Authors: Honghua Dong, Joseph J. Lim Jiayuan Mao
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Recent state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms are trained under the goal of excelling in one specific task. Hence, both environment and task specific knowledge are entangled into one framework. However, there are often scenarios where the environment (e.g. the physical world) is fixed while only the target task changes. Hence, borrowing the idea from hierarchical reinforcement learning, we propose a framework that disentangles task and environment specific knowledge by separating them into two units. The environment-specific unit handles how to move from one state to the target state; and the task-specific unit plans for the next target state given a specific task. The extensive results in simulators indicate that our method can efficiently separate and learn two independent units, and also adapt to a new task more efficiently than the state-of-the-art methods.
Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation
Authors: James Bradbury, Caiming Xiong, Victor O.K. Li, Richard Socher Jiatao Gu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Existing approaches to neural machine translation condition each output word on previously generated outputs. We introduce a model that avoids this autoregressive property and produces its outputs in parallel, allowing an order of magnitude lower latency during inference. Through knowledge distillation, the use of input token fertilities as a latent variable, and policy gradient fine-tuning, we achieve this at a cost of as little as 2.0 BLEU points relative to the autoregressive Transformer network used as a teacher. We demonstrate substantial cumulative improvements associated with each of the three aspects of our training strategy, and validate our approach on IWSLT 2016 English–German and two WMT language pairs. By sampling fertilities in parallel at inference time, our non-autoregressive model achieves near-state-of-the-art performance of 29.8 BLEU on WMT 2016 English–Romanian.
Divide and Conquer Networks
Authors: David Folqué, Joan Bruna Alex Nowak
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We consider the learning of algorithmic tasks by mere observation of input-output
pairs. Rather than studying this as a black-box discrete regression problem with
no assumption whatsoever on the input-output mapping, we concentrate on tasks
that are amenable to the principle of divide and conquer, and study what are its
implications in terms of learning.
This principle creates a powerful inductive bias that we leverage with neural
architectures that are defined recursively and dynamically, by learning two scale-
invariant atomic operations: how to split a given input into smaller sets, and how
to merge two partially solved tasks into a larger partial solution. Our model can be
trained in weakly supervised environments, namely by just observing input-output
pairs, and in even weaker environments, using a non-differentiable reward signal.
Moreover, thanks to the dynamic aspect of our architecture, we can incorporate
the computational complexity as a regularization term that can be optimized by
backpropagation. We demonstrate the flexibility and efficiency of the Divide-
and-Conquer Network on several combinatorial and geometric tasks: convex hull,
clustering, knapsack and euclidean TSP. Thanks to the dynamic programming
nature of our model, we show significant improvements in terms of generalization
error and computational complexity.
N2N learning: Network to Network Compression via Policy Gradient Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Nicholas Rhinehart, Fares Beainy, Kris M. Kitani Anubhav Ashok
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: While bigger and deeper neural network architectures continue to advance the state-of-the-art for many computer vision tasks, real-world adoption of these networks is impeded by hardware and speed constraints. Conventional model compression methods attempt to address this problem by modifying the architecture manually or using pre-defined heuristics. Since the space of all reduced architectures is very large, modifying the architecture of a deep neural network in this way is a difficult task. In this paper, we tackle this issue by introducing a principled method for learning reduced network architectures in a data-driven way using reinforcement learning. Our approach takes a larger 'teacher' network as input and outputs a compressed 'student' network derived from the 'teacher' network. In the first stage of our method, a recurrent policy network aggressively removes layers from the large 'teacher' model. In the second stage, another  recurrent policy network carefully reduces the size of each remaining layer. The resulting network is then evaluated to obtain a reward -- a score based on the accuracy and compression of the network. Our approach uses this reward signal with policy gradients to train the policies to find a locally optimal student network. Our experiments show that we can achieve compression rates of more than 10x for models such as ResNet-34 while maintaining similar performance to the input 'teacher' network. We also present a valuable transfer learning result which shows that policies which are pre-trained on smaller 'teacher' networks can be used to rapidly speed up training on larger 'teacher' networks.
On the regularization of Wasserstein GANs
Authors: Asja Fischer, Denis Lukovnikov Henning Petzka
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Since their invention, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have become a popular approach for learning to model a distribution of real (unlabeled) data. Convergence problems during training are overcome by Wasserstein GANs which minimize the distance between the model and the empirical distribution in terms of a different metric, but thereby introduce a Lipschitz constraint into the optimization problem. A simple way to enforce the Lipschitz constraint on the class of functions, which can be modeled by the neural network, is weight clipping. Augmenting the loss by a regularization term that penalizes the deviation of the gradient norm of the critic (as a function of the network's input) from one, was proposed as an alternative that improves training. We present theoretical arguments why using a weaker regularization term enforcing the Lipschitz constraint is preferable. These arguments are supported by experimental results on several data sets.
Characterizing Adversarial Subspaces Using Local Intrinsic Dimensionality
Authors: Bo Li, Yisen Wang, Sarah M. Erfani, Sudanthi Wijewickrema, Grant Schoenebeck, Dawn Song, Michael E. Houle, James Bailey Xingjun Ma
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have recently been shown to be vulnerable against adversarial examples, which are carefully crafted instances that can mislead DNNs to make errors during prediction. To better understand such attacks, a characterization is needed of the properties of regions (the so-called `adversarial subspaces') in which adversarial examples lie. We tackle this challenge by characterizing the dimensional properties of adversarial regions, via the use of Local Intrinsic Dimensionality (LID). LID assesses the space-filling capability of the region surrounding a reference example, based on the distance distribution of the example to its neighbors. We first provide explanations about how adversarial perturbation can affect the LID characteristic of adversarial regions, and then show empirically that LID characteristics can facilitate the distinction of adversarial examples generated using state-of-the-art attacks. As a proof-of-concept, we show that a potential application of LID is to distinguish adversarial examples, and the preliminary results show that it can outperform several state-of-the-art detection measures by large margins for five attack strategies considered in this paper across three benchmark datasets. Our analysis of the LID characteristic for adversarial regions not only motivates new directions of effective adversarial defense, but also opens up more challenges for developing new attacks to better understand the vulnerabilities of DNNs.
A Compressed Sensing View of Unsupervised Text Embeddings, Bag-of-n-Grams, and LSTMs
Authors: Mikhail Khodak, Nikunj Saunshi, Kiran Vodrahalli Sanjeev Arora
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Low-dimensional vector embeddings, computed using LSTMs or simpler techniques, are a popular approach for capturing the “meaning” of text and a form of unsupervised learning useful for downstream tasks. However, their power is not theoretically understood. The current paper derives formal understanding by looking at the subcase of linear embedding schemes. Using the theory of compressed sensing we show that representations combining the constituent word vectors are essentially information-preserving linear measurements of Bag-of-n-Grams (BonG) representations of text. This leads to a new theoretical result about LSTMs: low-dimensional embeddings derived from a low-memory LSTM are provably at least as powerful on classification tasks, up to small error, as a linear classifier over BonG vectors, a result that extensive empirical work has thus far been unable to show. Our experiments support these theoretical findings and establish strong, simple, and unsupervised baselines on standard benchmarks that in some cases are state of the art among word-level methods. We also show a surprising new property of embeddings such as GloVe and word2vec: they form a good sensing matrix for text that is more efficient than random matrices, the standard sparse recovery tool, which may explain why they lead to better representations in practice.