mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Byzantine-Resilient Non-Convex Stochastic Gradient Descent
Authors: Faeze Ebrahimianghazani, Jerry Li, Dan Alistarh Zeyuan Allen-Zhu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study adversary-resilient stochastic distributed optimization, in which $m$ machines can independently compute stochastic gradients, and cooperate to jointly optimize over their local objective functions. However, an $\alpha$-fraction of the machines are Byzantine, in that they may behave in arbitrary, adversarial ways. We consider a variant of this procedure in the challenging non-convex case. Our main result is a new algorithm SafeguardSGD, which can provably escape saddle points and find approximate local minima of the non-convex objective. The algorithm is based on a new concentration filtering technique, and its sample and time complexity bounds match the best known theoretical bounds in the stochastic, distributed setting when no Byzantine machines are present. 

Our algorithm is very practical: it improves upon the performance of all prior methods when training deep neural networks, it is relatively lightweight, and it is the first method to withstand two recently-proposed Byzantine attacks.
Discovering a set of policies for the worst case reward
Authors: Andre Barreto, Daniel J Mankowitz, Shaobo Hou, Brendan O'Donoghue, Iurii Kemaev, Satinder Singh Tom Zahavy
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study the problem of how to construct a set of policies that can be composed together to solve a collection of reinforcement learning tasks. Each task is a different reward function defined as a linear combination of  known features. We consider a specific class of policy compositions which we call set improving policies (SIPs): given a set of policies and a set of tasks, a SIP is any composition of the former whose performance is at least as good as that of its constituents across all the tasks. We focus on the most conservative instantiation of SIPs, set-max policies (SMPs), so our analysis extends to any SIP. This includes known policy-composition operators like generalized policy improvement. Our main contribution is an algorithm that builds a set of policies in order to maximize the worst-case performance of the resulting SMP on the set of tasks. The algorithm works by successively adding new policies to the set. We show that the worst-case performance of the resulting SMP strictly improves at each iteration, and the algorithm only stops when there does not exist a policy that leads to improved performance. We empirically evaluate our algorithm on a grid world and also on a set of domains from the DeepMind control suite. We confirm our theoretical results regarding the monotonically improving performance of our algorithm. Interestingly, we also show empirically that the sets of policies computed by the algorithm are diverse, leading to different trajectories in the grid world and very distinct locomotion skills in the control suite.
Optimal Rates for Averaged Stochastic Gradient Descent under Neural Tangent Kernel Regime
Authors: Taiji Suzuki Atsushi Nitanda
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We analyze the convergence of the averaged stochastic gradient descent for overparameterized two-layer neural networks for regression problems. It was recently found that a neural tangent kernel (NTK) plays an important role in showing the global convergence of gradient-based methods under the NTK regime, where the learning dynamics for overparameterized neural networks can be almost characterized by that for the associated reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). However, there is still room for a convergence rate analysis in the NTK regime. In this study, we show that the averaged stochastic gradient descent can achieve the minimax optimal convergence rate, with the global convergence guarantee, by exploiting the complexities of the target function and the RKHS associated with the NTK. Moreover, we show that the target function specified by the NTK of a ReLU network can be learned at the optimal convergence rate through a smooth approximation of a ReLU network under certain conditions.
Learning to Recombine and Resample Data For Compositional Generalization
Authors: Afra Feyza Akyürek, Jacob Andreas Ekin Akyürek
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Flexible neural sequence models outperform grammar- and automaton-based counterparts on a variety of tasks. However, neural models perform poorly in settings requiring compositional generalization beyond the training data—particularly to rare or unseen subsequences. Past work has found symbolic scaffolding (e.g. grammars or automata) essential in these settings. We describe R&R, a learned data augmentation scheme that enables a large category of compositional generalizations without appeal to latent symbolic structure. R&R has two components: recombination of original training examples via a prototype-based generative model and resampling of generated examples to encourage extrapolation. Training an ordinary neural sequence model on a dataset augmented with recombined and resampled examples significantly improves generalization in two language processing problems—instruction following (SCAN) and morphological analysis (SIGMORPHON 2018)—where R&R enables learning of new constructions and tenses from as few as eight initial examples.
Is Label Smoothing Truly Incompatible with Knowledge Distillation: An Empirical Study
Authors: Zechun Liu, Dejia Xu, Zitian Chen, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Marios Savvides Zhiqiang Shen
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This work aims to empirically clarify a recently discovered perspective that label smoothing is incompatible with knowledge distillation. We begin by introducing the motivation behind on how this incompatibility is raised, i.e., label smoothing erases relative information between teacher logits. We provide a novel connection on how label smoothing affects distributions of semantically similar and dissimilar classes. Then we propose a metric to quantitatively measure the degree of erased information in sample's representation. After that, we study its one-sidedness and imperfection of the incompatibility view through massive analyses, visualizations and comprehensive experiments on Image Classification, Binary Networks, and Neural Machine Translation. Finally, we broadly discuss several circumstances wherein label smoothing will indeed lose its effectiveness.
BRECQ: Pushing the Limit of Post-Training Quantization by Block Reconstruction
Authors: Ruihao Gong, Xu Tan, Yang Yang, Peng Hu, Qi Zhang, Fengwei Yu, Wei Wang, Shi Gu Yuhang Li
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study the challenging task of neural network quantization without end-to-end retraining, called Post-training Quantization (PTQ). PTQ usually requires a small subset of training data but produces less powerful quantized models than Quantization-Aware Training (QAT). In this work, we propose a novel PTQ framework, dubbed BRECQ, which pushes the limits of bitwidth in PTQ down to INT2 for the first time. BRECQ leverages the basic building blocks in neural networks and reconstructs them one-by-one. In a comprehensive theoretical study of the second-order error, we show that BRECQ achieves a good balance between cross-layer dependency and generalization error. To further employ the power of quantization, the mixed precision technique is incorporated in our framework by approximating the inter-layer and intra-layer sensitivity. Extensive experiments on various handcrafted and searched neural architectures are conducted for both image classification and object detection tasks. And for the first time we prove that, without bells and whistles, PTQ can attain 4-bit ResNet and MobileNetV2 comparable with QAT and enjoy 240 times faster production of quantized models.  Codes are available at https://github.com/yhhhli/BRECQ.
Rethinking Architecture Selection in Differentiable NAS
Authors: Minhao Cheng, Xiangning Chen, Xiaocheng Tang, Cho-Jui Hsieh Ruochen Wang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Differentiable Neural Architecture Search is one of the most popular Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods for its search efficiency and simplicity, accomplished by jointly optimizing the model weight and architecture parameters in a weight-sharing supernet via gradient-based algorithms. At the end of the search phase, the operations with the largest architecture parameters will be selected to form the final architecture, with the implicit assumption that the values of architecture parameters reflect the operation strength. While much has been discussed about the supernet's optimization, the architecture selection process has received little attention. We provide empirical and theoretical analysis to show that the magnitude of architecture parameters does not necessarily indicate how much the operation contributes to the supernet's performance. We propose an alternative perturbation-based architecture selection that directly measures each operation's influence on the supernet. We re-evaluate several differentiable NAS methods with the proposed architecture selection and find that it is able to extract significantly improved architectures from the underlying supernets consistently. Furthermore, we find that several failure modes of DARTS can be greatly alleviated with the proposed selection method, indicating that much of the poor generalization observed in DARTS can be attributed to the failure of magnitude-based architecture selection rather than entirely the optimization of its supernet.
Generating Adversarial Computer Programs using Optimized Obfuscations
Authors: Sijia Liu, Tamara Mitrovska, Shiyu Chang, Quanfu Fan, Gaoyuan Zhang, Una-May O'Reilly Shashank Srikant
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Machine learning (ML) models that learn and predict properties of computer programs are increasingly being adopted and deployed. 
These models have demonstrated success in applications such as auto-completing code, summarizing large programs, and detecting bugs and malware in programs. 
In this work, we investigate principled ways to adversarially perturb a computer program to fool such learned models, and thus determine their adversarial robustness. We use program obfuscations, which have conventionally been used to avoid attempts at reverse engineering programs, as adversarial perturbations. These perturbations modify programs in ways that do not alter their functionality but can be crafted to deceive an ML model when making a decision. We provide a general formulation for an adversarial program that allows applying multiple obfuscation transformations to a program in any language. We develop first-order optimization algorithms to  efficiently determine two key aspects -- which parts of the program to transform, and what transformations to use. We show that it is important to optimize both these aspects to generate the best adversarially perturbed program. Due to the discrete nature of this problem, we also propose using randomized smoothing to improve the attack loss landscape to ease optimization. 
We evaluate our work on Python and Java programs on the problem of program summarization. 
We show that our best attack proposal achieves a $52\%$ improvement over a state-of-the-art attack generation approach for programs trained on a \textsc{seq2seq} model.
We further show that our formulation is better at training models that are robust to adversarial attacks.
Learning Safe Multi-agent Control with Decentralized Neural Barrier Certificates
Authors: Kaiqing Zhang, Yuxiao Chen, Jingkai Chen, Chuchu Fan Zengyi Qin
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study the multi-agent safe control problem where agents should avoid collisions to static obstacles and collisions with each other while reaching their goals. Our core idea is to learn the multi-agent control policy jointly with  learning the control barrier functions as safety certificates. We propose a new joint-learning framework that can be implemented in a decentralized fashion, which can adapt to an arbitrarily large number of agents. Building upon this framework, we further improve the scalability by  incorporating neural network architectures  that are invariant to the quantity and permutation of neighboring agents. In addition, we propose a new spontaneous policy refinement method to further enforce the certificate condition during testing. We provide extensive experiments to demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms other leading multi-agent control approaches in terms of maintaining safety and completing original tasks. Our approach also shows substantial generalization capability in that the control policy can be trained with 8 agents in one scenario, while being used on other scenarios with up to 1024 agents in complex multi-agent environments and dynamics. Videos and source code can be found at https://realm.mit.edu/blog/learning-safe-multi-agent-control-decentralized-neural-barrier-certificates.
Variational Intrinsic Control Revisited
Authors: Taehwan Kwon
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we revisit variational intrinsic control (VIC), an unsupervised reinforcement learning method for finding the largest set of intrinsic options available to an agent. In the original work by Gregor et al. (2016), two VIC algorithms were proposed: one that represents the options explicitly, and the other that does it implicitly. We show that the intrinsic reward used in the latter is subject to bias in stochastic environments, causing convergence to suboptimal solutions. To correct this behavior, we propose two methods respectively based on the transitional probability model and Gaussian Mixture Model. We substantiate our claims through rigorous mathematical derivations and experimental analyses.
CoDA: Contrast-enhanced and Diversity-promoting Data Augmentation for Natural Language Understanding
Authors: Dinghan Shen, Yelong Shen, Sandra Sajeev, Weizhu Chen, Jiawei Han Yanru Qu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Data augmentation has been demonstrated as an effective strategy for improving model generalization and data efficiency.  However, due to the discrete nature of natural language, designing label-preserving transformations for text data tends to be more challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation frame-work dubbed CoDA, which synthesizes diverse and informative augmented examples by integrating multiple transformations organically.  Moreover, a contrastive regularization is introduced to capture the global relationship among all the data samples.  A momentum encoder along with a memory bank is further leveraged to better estimate the contrastive loss. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we apply CoDA to Transformer-based models on a wide range of natural language understanding tasks. On the GLUE benchmark, CoDA gives rise to an average improvement of 2.2%while applied to the Roberta-large model. More importantly, it consistently exhibits stronger results relative to several competitive data augmentation and adversarial training baselines (including the low-resource settings). Extensive experiments show that the proposed contrastive objective can be flexibly combined with various data augmentation approaches to further boost their performance, highlighting the wide applicability of the CoDA framework.
Negative Data Augmentation 
Authors: Kumar Ayush, Jiaming Song, Burak Uzkent, Hongxia Jin, Stefano Ermon Abhishek Sinha
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Data augmentation is often used to enlarge datasets with synthetic samples generated in accordance with the underlying data distribution. To enable a wider range of augmentations, we explore negative data augmentation strategies (NDA) that intentionally create out-of-distribution samples. We show that such negative out-of-distribution samples provide information on the support of the data distribution,  and can be leveraged for generative modeling and representation learning. We introduce a new GAN training objective where we use NDA as an additional source of synthetic data for the discriminator. We prove that under suitable conditions, optimizing the resulting objective still recovers the true data distribution but can directly bias the generator towards avoiding samples that lack the desired structure. Empirically, models trained with our method achieve improved conditional/unconditional image generation along with improved anomaly detection capabilities. Further, we incorporate the same negative data augmentation strategy in a contrastive learning framework for self-supervised representation learning on images and videos, achieving improved performance on downstream image classification, object detection, and action recognition tasks. These results suggest that prior knowledge on what does not constitute valid data is an effective form of weak supervision across a range of unsupervised learning tasks.
Semantic Re-tuning with Contrastive Tension
Authors: Amaru Cuba Gyllensten, Evangelia Gogoulou, Erik Ylipää Hellqvist, Magnus Sahlgren Fredrik Carlsson
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Extracting semantically useful natural language sentence representations from pre-trained deep neural networks such as Transformers remains a challenge. We first demonstrate that pre-training objectives impose a significant task bias onto the final layers of models with a layer-wise survey of the Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) correlations for multiple common Transformer language models. We then propose a new self-supervised method called Contrastive Tension (CT) to counter such biases. CT frames the training objective as a noise-contrastive task between the final layer representations of two independent models, in turn making the final layer representations suitable for feature extraction. Results from multiple common unsupervised and supervised STS tasks indicate that CT outperforms previous State Of The Art (SOTA), and when combining CT with supervised data we improve upon previous SOTA results with large margins.
Mutual Information State Intrinsic Control
Authors: Yang Gao, Pieter Abbeel, Volker Tresp, Wei Xu Rui Zhao
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Reinforcement learning has been shown to be highly successful at many challenging tasks. However, success heavily relies on well-shaped rewards. Intrinsically motivated RL attempts to remove this constraint by defining an intrinsic reward function. Motivated by the self-consciousness concept in psychology, we make a natural assumption that the agent knows what constitutes itself, and propose a new intrinsic objective that encourages the agent to have maximum control on the environment. We mathematically formalize this reward as the mutual information between the agent state and the surrounding state under the current agent policy. With this new intrinsic motivation, we are able to outperform previous methods, including being able to complete the pick-and-place task for the first time without using any task reward. A video showing experimental results is available at https://youtu.be/AUCwc9RThpk.
Exploring Balanced Feature Spaces for Representation Learning
Authors: Yu Li, Sa Xie, Zehuan Yuan, Jiashi Feng Bingyi Kang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Existing self-supervised learning (SSL) methods are mostly applied for training representation models from artificially balanced datasets (e.g., ImageNet). It is unclear how well they will perform in the practical scenarios where datasets are often imbalanced w.r.t. the classes. Motivated by this question, we conduct a series of studies on the performance of self-supervised contrastive learning and supervised learning methods over multiple datasets where training instance distributions vary from a balanced one to a long-tailed one. Our findings are quite intriguing. Different from supervised methods with large performance drop, the self-supervised contrastive learning methods perform stably well even when the datasets are heavily imbalanced. This motivates us to explore the balanced feature spaces learned by contrastive learning, where the feature representations present similar linear separability w.r.t. all the classes. Our further experiments reveal that a representation model generating a balanced feature space can generalize better than that yielding an imbalanced one across multiple settings. Inspired by these insights, we develop a novel representation learning method, called $k$-positive contrastive learning. It effectively combines strengths of the supervised method and the contrastive learning method to learn representations that are both discriminative and balanced. Extensive experiments demonstrate its superiority on multiple recognition tasks. Remarkably, it achieves new state-of-the-art on challenging long-tailed recognition benchmarks. Code and models will be released.
Neural Topic Model via Optimal Transport
Authors: Dinh Phung, Viet Huynh, Trung Le, Wray Buntine He Zhao
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recently, Neural Topic Models (NTMs) inspired by variational autoencoders have obtained increasingly research interest due to their promising results on text analysis. However, it is usually hard for existing NTMs to achieve good document representation and coherent/diverse topics at the same time. Moreover, they often degrade their performance severely on short documents. The requirement of reparameterisation could also comprise their training quality and model flexibility. To address these shortcomings, we present a new neural topic model via the theory of optimal transport (OT). Specifically, we propose to learn the topic distribution of a document by directly minimising its OT distance to the document's word distributions. Importantly, the cost matrix of the OT distance models the weights between topics and words, which is constructed by the distances between topics and words in an embedding space. Our proposed model can be trained efficiently with a differentiable loss. Extensive experiments show that our framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art NTMs on discovering more coherent and diverse topics and deriving better document representations for both regular and short texts.
Multiplicative Filter Networks
Authors: Anit Kumar Sahu, Devin Willmott, J Zico Kolter Rizal Fathony
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Although deep networks are typically used to approximate functions over high dimensional inputs, recent work has increased interest in neural networks as function approximators for low-dimensional-but-complex functions, such as representing images as a function of pixel coordinates, solving differential equations, or representing signed distance fields or neural radiance fields.  Key to these recent successes has been the use of new elements such as sinusoidal nonlinearities, or Fourier features in positional encodings, which vastly outperform simple ReLU networks.  In this paper, we propose and empirically demonstrate that an arguably simpler class of function approximators can work just as well for such problems: multiplicative filter networks.  In these networks, we avoid traditional compositional depth altogether, and simply multiply together (linear functions of) sinusoidal or Gabor wavelet functions applied to the input.  This representation has the notable advantage that the entire function can simply be viewed as a linear function approximator over an exponential number of Fourier or Gabor basis functions, respectively.  Despite this simplicity, when compared to recent approaches that use Fourier features with ReLU networks or sinusoidal activation networks, we show that these multiplicative filter networks largely outperform or match the performance of these recent approaches on the domains highlighted in these past works.
FedMix: Approximation of Mixup under Mean Augmented Federated Learning
Authors: Sumin Shin, Sung Ju Hwang, Eunho Yang Tehrim Yoon
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) allows edge devices to collectively learn a model without directly sharing data within each device, thus preserving privacy and eliminating the need to store data globally. While there are promising results under the assumption of independent and identically distributed (iid) local data, current state-of-the-art algorithms suffer a performance degradation as the heterogeneity of local data across clients increases. To resolve this issue, we propose a simple framework, \emph{Mean Augmented Federated Learning (MAFL)}, where clients send and receive \emph{averaged} local data, subject to the privacy requirements of target applications. Under our framework, we propose a new augmentation algorithm, named \emph{FedMix}, which is inspired by a phenomenal yet simple data augmentation method, Mixup, but does not require local raw data to be directly shared among devices. Our method shows greatly improved performance in the standard benchmark datasets of FL, under highly non-iid federated settings, compared to conventional algorithms.
Better Fine-Tuning by Reducing Representational Collapse
Authors: Akshat Shrivastava, Anchit Gupta, Naman Goyal, Luke Zettlemoyer, Sonal Gupta Armen Aghajanyan
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Although widely adopted, existing approaches for fine-tuning pre-trained language models have been shown to be unstable across hyper-parameter settings, motivating recent work on trust region methods. In this paper, we present a simplified and efficient method rooted in trust region theory that replaces previously used adversarial objectives with parametric noise (sampling from either a normal or uniform distribution), thereby discouraging representation change during fine-tuning when possible without hurting performance. We also introduce a new analysis to motivate the use of trust region methods more generally, by studying representational collapse; the degradation of generalizable representations from pre-trained models as they are fine-tuned for a specific end task. Extensive experiments show that our fine-tuning method matches or exceeds the performance of previous trust region methods on a range of understanding and generation tasks (including DailyMail/CNN, Gigaword, Reddit TIFU, and the GLUE benchmark), while also being much faster. We also show that it is less prone to representation collapse; the pre-trained models maintain more generalizable representations every time they are fine-tuned.
Shapley explainability on the data manifold
Authors: Damien de Mijolla, Tom Begley, Laurence Cowton, Megan Stanley, Ilya Feige Christopher Frye
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Explainability in AI is crucial for model development, compliance with regulation, and providing operational nuance to predictions. The Shapley framework for explainability attributes a model’s predictions to its input features in a mathematically principled and model-agnostic way. However, general implementations of Shapley explainability make an untenable assumption: that the model’s features are uncorrelated. In this work, we demonstrate unambiguous drawbacks of this assumption and develop two solutions to Shapley explainability that respect the data manifold. One solution, based on generative modelling, provides flexible access to data imputations; the other directly learns the Shapley value-function, providing performance and stability at the cost of flexibility. While “off-manifold” Shapley values can (i) give rise to incorrect explanations, (ii) hide implicit model dependence on sensitive attributes, and (iii) lead to unintelligible explanations in higher-dimensional data, on-manifold explainability overcomes these problems.
Trusted Multi-View Classification
Authors: Changqing Zhang, Huazhu Fu, Joey Tianyi Zhou Zongbo Han
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Multi-view classification (MVC) generally focuses on improving classification accuracy by using information from different views, typically integrating them into a unified comprehensive representation for downstream tasks. However, it is also crucial to dynamically assess the quality of a view for different samples in order to provide reliable uncertainty estimations, which indicate whether predictions can be trusted. To this end, we propose a novel multi-view classification method, termed trusted multi-view classification, which provides a new paradigm for multi-view learning by dynamically integrating different views at an evidence level. The algorithm jointly utilizes multiple views to promote both classification reliability (uncertainty estimation during testing) and robustness (out-of-distribution-awareness during training) by integrating evidence from each view. To achieve this, the Dirichlet distribution is used to model the distribution of the class probabilities, parameterized with evidence from different views and integrated with the Dempster-Shafer theory. The unified learning framework induces accurate uncertainty and accordingly endows the model with both reliability and robustness for out-of-distribution samples. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed model in accuracy, reliability and robustness.
Temporally-Extended ε-Greedy Exploration
Authors: Georg Ostrovski, Andre Barreto Will Dabney
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent work on exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) has led to a series of increasingly complex solutions to the problem. This increase in complexity often comes at the expense of generality. Recent empirical studies suggest that, when applied to a broader set of domains, some sophisticated exploration methods are outperformed by simpler counterparts, such as ε-greedy. In this paper we propose an exploration algorithm that retains the simplicity of ε-greedy while reducing dithering. We build on a simple hypothesis: the main limitation of ε-greedy exploration is its lack of temporal persistence, which limits its ability to escape local optima. We propose a temporally extended form of ε-greedy that simply repeats the sampled action for a random duration. It turns out that, for many duration distributions, this suffices to improve exploration on a large set of domains. Interestingly, a class of distributions inspired by ecological models of animal foraging behaviour yields particularly strong performance.
Active Contrastive Learning of Audio-Visual Video Representations
Authors: Zhaoyang Zeng, Daniel McDuff, Yale Song Shuang Ma
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Contrastive learning has been shown to produce generalizable representations of audio and visual data by maximizing the lower bound on the mutual information (MI) between different views of an instance. However, obtaining a tight lower bound requires a sample size exponential in MI and thus a large set of negative samples. We can incorporate more samples by building a large queue-based dictionary, but there are theoretical limits to performance improvements even with a large number of negative samples. We hypothesize that random negative sampling leads to a highly redundant dictionary that results in suboptimal representations for downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose an active contrastive learning approach that builds an actively sampled dictionary with diverse and informative items, which improves the quality of negative samples and improves performances on tasks where there is high mutual information in the data, e.g., video classification. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging audio and visual downstream benchmarks including UCF101, HMDB51 and ESC50.
Model-Based Offline Planning
Authors: Gabriel Dulac-Arnold Arthur Argenson
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Offline learning is a key part of making reinforcement learning (RL) useable in real systems. Offline RL looks at scenarios where there is data from a system's operation, but no direct access to the system when learning a policy. Recent work on training RL policies from offline data has shown results both with model-free policies learned directly from the data, or with planning on top of learnt models of the data. Model-free policies tend to be more performant, but are more opaque, harder to command externally, and less easy to integrate into larger systems. We propose an offline learner that generates a model that can be used to control the system directly through planning. This allows us to have easily controllable policies directly from data, without ever interacting with the system. We show the performance of our algorithm, Model-Based Offline Planning (MBOP) on a series of robotics-inspired tasks, and demonstrate its ability leverage planning to respect environmental constraints. We are able to find near-optimal polices for certain simulated systems from as little as 50 seconds of real-time system interaction, and create zero-shot goal-conditioned policies on a series of environments.
Efficient Wasserstein Natural Gradients for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Michael Arbel, Ferenc Huszar, Arthur Gretton Ted Moskovitz
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: A novel optimization approach is proposed for application to policy gradient methods and evolution strategies for reinforcement learning (RL). The procedure uses a computationally efficient \emph{Wasserstein natural gradient} (WNG) descent that takes advantage of the geometry induced by a Wasserstein penalty to speed optimization. This method follows the recent theme in RL of including divergence penalties in the objective to establish trust regions. Experiments on challenging tasks demonstrate improvements in both computational cost and performance over advanced baselines.
Training independent subnetworks for robust prediction
Authors: Rodolphe Jenatton, Stanislav Fort, Jeremiah Zhe Liu, Jasper Snoek, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Andrew Mingbo Dai, Dustin Tran Marton Havasi
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent approaches to efficiently ensemble neural networks have shown that strong robustness and uncertainty performance  can be achieved with a negligible gain in parameters over the original network. However, these methods still require multiple forward passes for prediction, leading to a significant runtime cost. In this work, we show a surprising result:
the benefits of using multiple predictions can be achieved 'for free' under a single model's forward pass. In particular, we show that, using a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) configuration, one can utilize a single model's capacity to train multiple subnetworks that independently learn the task at hand. By ensembling the predictions made by the subnetworks, we improve model robustness without increasing compute. We observe a significant improvement in negative log-likelihood, accuracy, and calibration error on CIFAR10, CIFAR100,  ImageNet, and their out-of-distribution variants compared to previous methods.
Implicit Under-Parameterization Inhibits Data-Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Rishabh Agarwal, Dibya Ghosh, Sergey Levine Aviral Kumar
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We identify an implicit under-parameterization phenomenon in value-based deep RL methods that use bootstrapping: when value functions, approximated using deep neural networks, are trained with gradient descent using iterated regression onto target values generated by previous instances of the value network, more gradient updates decrease the expressivity of the current value network. We char- acterize this loss of expressivity via a drop in the rank of the learned value net- work features, and show that this typically corresponds to a performance drop. We demonstrate this phenomenon on Atari and Gym benchmarks, in both offline and online RL settings. We formally analyze this phenomenon and show that it results from a pathological interaction between bootstrapping and gradient-based optimization. We further show that mitigating implicit under-parameterization by controlling rank collapse can improve performance.
Disentangled Recurrent Wasserstein Autoencoder 
Authors: Martin Renqiang Min, Ligong Han, Li Erran Li, Xuan Zhang Jun Han
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learning disentangled representations leads to interpretable models and facilitates data generation with style transfer, which has been extensively studied on static data such as images in an unsupervised learning framework. However, only a few works have explored unsupervised disentangled sequential representation learning due to challenges of generating sequential data. In this paper, we propose recurrent Wasserstein Autoencoder (R-WAE), a new framework for generative modeling of sequential data. R-WAE disentangles the representation of an input sequence into static and dynamic factors (i.e., time-invariant and time-varying parts). Our theoretical analysis shows that, R-WAE minimizes an upper bound of a penalized form of the Wasserstein distance between model distribution and sequential data distribution, and simultaneously maximizes the mutual information between input data and different disentangled latent factors, respectively. This is superior to (recurrent) VAE which does not explicitly enforce mutual information maximization between input data and disentangled latent representations. When the number of actions in sequential data is available as weak supervision information, R-WAE is extended to learn a categorical latent representation of actions to improve its disentanglement. Experiments on a variety of datasets show that our models outperform other baselines with the same settings in terms of disentanglement and unconditional video generation both quantitatively and qualitatively.
INT: An Inequality Benchmark for Evaluating Generalization in Theorem Proving
Authors: Albert Jiang, Jimmy Ba, Roger Baker Grosse Yuhuai Wu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In learning-assisted theorem proving, one of the most critical challenges is to generalize to theorems unlike those seen at training time. In this paper, we introduce INT, an INequality Theorem proving benchmark designed to test agents’ generalization ability. INT is based on a theorem generator, which provides theoretically infinite data and allows us to measure 6 different types of generalization, each reflecting a distinct challenge, characteristic of automated theorem proving. In addition, provides a fast theorem proving environment with sequence-based and graph-based interfaces, conducive to performing learning-based research. We introduce base-lines with architectures including transformers and graph neural networks (GNNs)for INT. Using INT, we find that transformer-based agents achieve stronger test performance for most of the generalization tasks, despite having much larger out-of-distribution generalization gaps than GNNs. We further find that the addition of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) at test time helps to prove new theorems.
PSTNet: Point Spatio-Temporal Convolution on Point Cloud Sequences
Authors: Xin Yu, Yuhang Ding, Yi Yang, Mohan Kankanhalli Hehe Fan
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Point cloud sequences are irregular and unordered in the spatial dimension while exhibiting regularities and order in the temporal dimension. Therefore, existing grid based convolutions for conventional video processing cannot be directly applied to spatio-temporal modeling of raw point cloud sequences. In this paper, we propose a point spatio-temporal (PST) convolution to achieve informative representations of point cloud sequences. The proposed PST convolution first disentangles space and time in point cloud sequences.  Then, a spatial convolution is employed to capture the local structure of points in the 3D space, and a temporal convolution is used to model the dynamics of the spatial regions along the time dimension.  Furthermore, we incorporate the proposed PST convolution into a deep network, namely PSTNet, to extract features of point cloud sequences in a hierarchical manner.  Extensive experiments on widely-used 3D action recognition and 4D semantic segmentation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PSTNet to model point cloud sequences.
Self-training For Few-shot Transfer Across Extreme Task Differences
Authors: Bharath Hariharan Cheng Perng Phoo
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Most few-shot learning techniques are pre-trained on a large, labeled “base dataset”. In problem domains where such large labeled datasets are not available for pre-training (e.g., X-ray, satellite images), one must resort to pre-training in a different “source” problem domain (e.g., ImageNet), which can be very different from the desired target task. Traditional few-shot and transfer learning techniques fail in the presence of such extreme differences between the source and target tasks. In this paper, we present a simple and effective solution to tackle this extreme domain gap: self-training a source domain representation on unlabeled data from the target domain. We show that this improves one-shot performance on the target domain by 2.9 points on average on the challenging BSCD-FSL benchmark consisting of datasets from multiple domains.
Minimum Width for Universal Approximation
Authors: Chulhee Yun, Jaeho Lee, Jinwoo Shin Sejun Park
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The universal approximation property of width-bounded networks has been studied as a dual of classical universal approximation results on depth-bounded networks. However, the critical width enabling the universal approximation has not been exactly characterized in terms of the input dimension $d_x$ and the output dimension $d_y$. In this work, we provide the first definitive result in this direction for networks using the ReLU activation functions: The minimum width required for the universal approximation of the $L^p$ functions is exactly $\max\{d_x+1,d_y\}$. We also prove that the same conclusion does not hold for the uniform approximation with ReLU, but does hold with an additional threshold activation function. Our proof technique can be also used to derive a tighter upper bound on the minimum width required for the universal approximation using networks with general activation functions.
Deep Networks and the Multiple Manifold Problem
Authors: Dar Gilboa, John Wright Sam Buchanan
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study the multiple manifold problem, a binary classification task modeled on applications in machine vision, in which a deep fully-connected neural network is trained to separate two low-dimensional submanifolds of the unit sphere. We provide an analysis of the one-dimensional case, proving for a simple manifold configuration that when the network depth $L$ is large relative to certain geometric and statistical properties of the data, the network width $n$ grows as a sufficiently large polynomial in $L$, and the number of i.i.d. samples from the manifolds is polynomial in $L$, randomly-initialized gradient descent rapidly learns to classify the two manifolds perfectly with high probability. Our analysis demonstrates concrete benefits of depth and width in the context of a practically-motivated model problem: the depth acts as a fitting resource, with larger depths corresponding to smoother networks that can more readily separate the class manifolds, and the width acts as a statistical resource, enabling concentration of the randomly-initialized network and its gradients. The argument centers around the "neural tangent kernel" of Jacot et al. and its role in the nonasymptotic analysis of training overparameterized neural networks; to this literature, we contribute essentially optimal rates of concentration for the neural tangent kernel of deep fully-connected ReLU networks, requiring width $n \geq L\,\mathrm{poly}(d_0)$ to achieve uniform concentration of the initial kernel over a $d_0$-dimensional submanifold of the unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^{n_0-1}$, and a nonasymptotic framework for establishing generalization of networks trained in the "NTK regime" with structured data. The proof makes heavy use of martingale concentration to optimally treat statistical dependencies across layers of the initial random network. This approach should be of use in establishing similar results for other network architectures.
EigenGame: PCA as a Nash Equilibrium
Authors: Brian McWilliams, Claire Vernade, Thore Graepel Ian Gemp
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a novel view on principal components analysis as a competitive game in which each approximate eigenvector is controlled by a player whose goal is to maximize their own utility function. We analyze the properties of this PCA game and the behavior of its gradient based updates. The resulting algorithm---which combines elements from Oja's rule with a  generalized Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization---is naturally decentralized and hence parallelizable through message passing. We demonstrate the scalability of the algorithm with experiments on large image datasets and neural network activations. We discuss how this new view of PCA as a differentiable game can lead to further algorithmic developments and insights.
WaveGrad: Estimating Gradients for Waveform Generation
Authors: Yu Zhang, Heiga Zen, Ron J Weiss, Mohammad Norouzi, William Chan Nanxin Chen
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper introduces WaveGrad, a conditional model for waveform generation which estimates gradients of the data density. The model is built on prior work on score matching and diffusion probabilistic models. It starts from a Gaussian white noise signal and iteratively refines the signal via a gradient-based sampler conditioned on the mel-spectrogram.
WaveGrad offers a natural way to trade inference speed for sample quality by adjusting the number of refinement steps, and bridges the gap between non-autoregressive and autoregressive models in terms of audio quality.
We find that it can generate high fidelity audio samples using as few as six iterations.
Experiments reveal WaveGrad to generate high fidelity audio, outperforming adversarial non-autoregressive baselines and matching a strong likelihood-based autoregressive baseline using fewer sequential operations.  Audio samples are available at https://wavegrad.github.io/.