mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Supervising the Multi-Fidelity Race of Hyperparameter Configurations
Authors: Arlind Kadra, Josif Grabocka Martin Wistuba
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Multi-fidelity (gray-box) hyperparameter optimization techniques (HPO) have recently emerged as a promising direction for tuning Deep Learning methods. However, existing methods suffer from a sub-optimal allocation of the HPO budget to the hyperparameter configurations. In this work, we introduce DyHPO, a Bayesian Optimization method that learns to decide which hyperparameter configuration to train further in a dynamic race among all feasible configurations. We propose a new deep kernel for Gaussian Processes that embeds the learning curve dynamics, and an acquisition function that incorporates multi-budget information. We demonstrate the significant superiority of DyHPO against state-of-the-art hyperparameter optimization methods through large-scale experiments comprising 50 datasets (Tabular, Image, NLP) and diverse architectures (MLP, CNN/NAS, RNN).
Streaming Radiance Fields for 3D Video Synthesis
Authors: Zhen Shen, Zhongshu Wang, Li Shen, Ping Tan Lingzhi LI
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We present an explicit-grid based method for efficiently reconstructing streaming radiance fields for novel view synthesis of real world dynamic scenes. Instead of training a single model that combines all the frames, we formulate the dynamic modeling problem with an incremental learning paradigm in which per-frame model difference is trained to complement the adaption of a base model on the current frame. By exploiting the simple yet effective tuning strategy with narrow bands, the proposed method realizes a feasible framework for handling video sequences on-the-fly with high training efficiency. The storage overhead induced by using explicit grid representations can be significantly reduced through the use of model difference based compression. We also introduce an efficient strategy to further accelerate model optimization for each frame. Experiments on challenging video sequences demonstrate that our approach is capable of achieving a training speed of 15 seconds per-frame with competitive rendering quality, which attains $1000 \times$ speedup over the state-of-the-art implicit methods.
Byzantine-tolerant federated Gaussian process regression for streaming data
Authors: Zhenyuan Yuan, Minghui Zhu Xu Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: In this paper, we consider Byzantine-tolerant federated learning for streaming data using Gaussian process regression (GPR). In particular, a cloud and a group of agents aim to collaboratively learn a latent function where some agents are subject to Byzantine attacks. We develop a Byzantine-tolerant federated GPR algorithm, which includes three modules: agent-based local GPR, cloud-based aggregated GPR and agent-based fused GPR. We derive the upper bounds on prediction error between the mean from the cloud-based aggregated GPR and the target function provided that Byzantine agents are less than one quarter of all the agents. We also characterize the lower and upper bounds of the predictive variance. Experiments on a synthetic dataset and two real-world datasets are conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithm.
Neural Matching Fields: Implicit Representation of Matching Fields for Visual Correspondence
Authors: Jisu Nam, Seokju Cho, Susung Hong, Sangryul Jeon, Dongbo Min, Seungryong Kim Sunghwan Hong
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Existing pipelines of semantic correspondence commonly include extracting high-level semantic features for the invariance against intra-class variations and background clutters. This architecture, however, inevitably results in a low-resolution matching field that additionally requires an ad-hoc interpolation process as a post-processing for converting it into a high-resolution one, certainly limiting the overall performance of matching results. To overcome this, inspired by recent success of implicit neural representation, we present a novel method for semantic correspondence, called Neural Matching Field (NeMF). However, complicacy and high-dimensionality of a 4D matching field are the major hindrances, which we propose a cost embedding network to process a coarse cost volume to use as a guidance for establishing high-precision matching field through the following fully-connected network. Nevertheless, learning a high-dimensional matching field remains challenging mainly due to computational complexity, since a na\"ive exhaustive inference would require querying from all pixels in the 4D space to infer pixel-wise correspondences. To overcome this, we propose adequate training and inference procedures, which in the training phase, we randomly sample matching candidates and in the inference phase, we iteratively performs PatchMatch-based inference and coordinate optimization at test time. With these combined, competitive results are attained on several standard benchmarks for semantic correspondence. Code and pre-trained weights are available at~\url{https://ku-cvlab.github.io/NeMF/}.
Consistency of Constrained Spectral Clustering under Graph Induced Fair Planted Partitions
Authors: Ambedkar Dukkipati Shubham Gupta
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Spectral clustering is popular among practitioners and theoreticians alike. While performance guarantees for spectral clustering are well understood, recent studies have focused on enforcing "fairness" in clusters, requiring them to be "balanced" with respect to a categorical sensitive node attribute (e.g. the race distribution in clusters must match the race distribution in the population). In this paper, we consider a setting where sensitive attributes indirectly manifest in an auxiliary representation graph rather than being directly observed. This graph specifies node pairs that can represent each other with respect to sensitive attributes and is observed in addition to the usual similarity graph. Our goal is to find clusters in the similarity graph while respecting a new individual-level fairness constraint encoded by the representation graph. We develop variants of unnormalized and normalized spectral clustering for this task and analyze their performance under a fair planted partition model induced by the representation graph. This model uses both the cluster membership of the nodes and the structure of the representation graph to generate random similarity graphs. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first consistency results for constrained spectral clustering under an individual-level fairness constraint. Numerical results corroborate our theoretical findings.
Local Spatiotemporal Representation Learning for Longitudinally-consistent Neuroimage Analysis
Authors: Neel Dey, Martin Styner, Kelly Botteron, Guido Gerig Mengwei Ren
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent self-supervised advances in medical computer vision exploit the global and local anatomical self-similarity for pretraining prior to downstream tasks such as segmentation. However, current methods assume i.i.d. image acquisition, which is invalid in clinical study designs where follow-up longitudinal scans track subject-specific temporal changes. Further, existing self-supervised methods for medically-relevant image-to-image architectures exploit only spatial or temporal self-similarity and do so via a loss applied only at a single image-scale, with naive multi-scale spatiotemporal extensions collapsing to degenerate solutions. To these ends, this paper makes two contributions: (1) It presents a local and multi-scale spatiotemporal representation learning method for image-to-image architectures trained on longitudinal images. It exploits the spatiotemporal self-similarity of learned multi-scale intra-subject image features for pretraining and develops several feature-wise regularizations that avoid degenerate representations; (2) During finetuning, it proposes a surprisingly simple self-supervised segmentation consistency regularization to exploit intra-subject correlation. Benchmarked across various segmentation tasks, the proposed framework outperforms both well-tuned randomly-initialized baselines and current self-supervised techniques designed for both i.i.d. and longitudinal datasets. These improvements are demonstrated across both longitudinal neurodegenerative adult MRI and developing infant brain MRI and yield both higher performance and longitudinal consistency.
Overparameterization from Computational Constraints
Authors: Somesh Jha, Saeed Mahloujifar, Mohammad Mahmoody, Mingyuan Wang Sanjam Garg
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Overparameterized models with millions of parameters have been hugely successful. In this work, we ask:  can the need for large models be, at least in part, due to the \emph{computational} limitations of the learner? Additionally, we ask, is this situation exacerbated for \emph{robust} learning? We show that this indeed could be the case. We show learning tasks for which computationally bounded learners need \emph{significantly more} model parameters than what information-theoretic learners need. Furthermore, we show that even more model parameters could be necessary for robust learning. In particular, for computationally bounded learners, we extend the recent result of Bubeck and Sellke [NeurIPS'2021] which shows that robust models might need more parameters, to the computational regime and show that bounded learners could provably need an even larger number of parameters. Then, we address the following related question: can we hope to remedy the situation for robust computationally bounded learning by restricting \emph{adversaries} to also be computationally bounded for sake of obtaining models with fewer parameters? Here again, we show that this could be possible. Specifically, building on the work of Garg, Jha, Mahloujifar, and Mahmoody [ALT'2020], we demonstrate a learning task that can be learned efficiently and robustly against a computationally bounded attacker, while to be robust against an information-theoretic attacker requires the learner to utilize significantly more parameters.
A Unifying Framework of Off-Policy General Value Function Evaluation
Authors: Zhuoran Yang, Zhaoran Wang, Yingbin Liang Tengyu Xu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: General Value Function (GVF) is a powerful tool to represent both the {\em predictive} and {\em retrospective} knowledge in reinforcement learning (RL). In practice, often multiple interrelated GVFs need to be evaluated jointly with pre-collected off-policy samples. In the literature, the gradient temporal difference (GTD) learning method has been adopted to evaluate GVFs in the off-policy setting, but such an approach may suffer from a large estimation error even if the function approximation class is sufficiently expressive. Moreover, none of the previous work have formally established the convergence guarantee to the ground truth GVFs under the function approximation settings. In this paper, we address both issues through the lens of a class of GVFs with causal filtering, which cover a wide range of RL applications such as reward variance, value gradient, cost in anomaly detection, stationary distribution gradient, etc. We propose a new algorithm called GenTD for off-policy GVFs evaluation and show that GenTD learns multiple interrelated multi-dimensional GVFs as efficiently as a single canonical scalar value function. We further show that unlike GTD, the learned GVFs by GenTD are guaranteed to converge to the ground truth GVFs as long as the function approximation power is sufficiently large. To our best knowledge, GenTD is the first off-policy GVF evaluation algorithm that has global optimality guarantee.
Anchor-Changing Regularized Natural Policy Gradient for Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Tao Liu, Dileep Kalathil, P. R. Kumar, Chao Tian Ruida Zhou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We study policy optimization for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with multiple reward value functions, which are to be jointly optimized according to given criteria such as proportional fairness (smooth concave scalarization), hard constraints (constrained MDP), and max-min trade-off. We propose an Anchor-changing Regularized Natural Policy Gradient (ARNPG) framework, which can systematically incorporate ideas from well-performing first-order methods into the design of policy optimization algorithms for multi-objective MDP problems. Theoretically, the designed algorithms based on the ARNPG framework achieve $\tilde{O}(1/T)$ global convergence with exact gradients. Empirically, the ARNPG-guided algorithms also demonstrate superior performance compared to some existing policy gradient-based approaches in both exact gradients and sample-based scenarios.
Do Current Multi-Task Optimization Methods in Deep Learning Even Help?
Authors: Behrooz Ghorbani, Justin Gilmer, Ankush Garg, Orhan Firat Derrick Xin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent research has proposed a series of specialized optimization algorithms for deep multi-task models. It is often claimed that these multi-task optimization (MTO) methods yield solutions that are superior to the ones found by simply optimizing a weighted average of the task losses. In this paper, we perform large-scale experiments on a variety of language and vision tasks to examine the empirical validity of these claims. We show that, despite the added design and computational complexity of these algorithms, MTO methods do not yield any performance improvements beyond what is achievable via traditional optimization approaches. We highlight alternative strategies that consistently yield improvements to the performance profile and point out common training pitfalls that might cause suboptimal results. Finally, we outline challenges in reliably evaluating the performance of MTO algorithms and discuss potential solutions.
TAP-Vid: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in a Video
Authors: Ankush Gupta, Larisa Markeeva, Adria Recasens, Lucas Smaira, Yusuf Aytar, Joao Carreira, Andrew Zisserman, Yi Yang Carl Doersch
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2022

Abstract: Generic motion understanding from video involves not only tracking objects, but also perceiving how their surfaces deform and move. This information is useful to make inferences about 3D shape, physical properties and object interactions. While the problem of tracking arbitrary physical points on surfaces over longer video clips has received some attention, no dataset or benchmark for evaluation existed, until now.  In this paper, we first formalize the problem, naming it tracking any point (TAP). We introduce a companion benchmark,TAP-Vid, which is composed of both real-world videos with accurate human annotations of point tracks, and synthetic videos with perfect ground-truth point tracks. Central to the construction of our benchmark is a novel semi-automatic crowdsourced pipeline which uses optical flow estimates to compensate for easier, short-term motion like camera shake, allowing annotators to focus on harder sections of the video. We validate our pipeline on synthetic data and propose a simple end-to-end point tracking model, TAP-Net, showing that it outperforms all prior methods on our benchmark when trained on synthetic data.
Alignment-guided Temporal Attention for Video Action Recognition
Authors: Zhenyang Li, Xun Guo, Yan Lu Yizhou Zhao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Temporal modeling is crucial for various video learning tasks. Most recent approaches employ either factorized (2D+1D) or joint (3D) spatial-temporal operations to extract temporal contexts from the input frames. While the former is more efficient in computation, the latter often obtains better performance. In this paper, we attribute this to a dilemma between the sufficiency and the efficiency of interactions among various positions in different frames. These interactions affect the extraction of task-relevant information shared among frames. To resolve this issue, we prove that frame-by-frame alignments have the potential to increase the mutual information between frame representations, thereby including more task-relevant information to boost effectiveness. Then we propose Alignment-guided Temporal Attention (ATA) to extend 1-dimensional temporal attention with parameter-free patch-level alignments between neighboring frames. It can act as a general plug-in for image backbones to conduct the action recognition task without any model-specific design. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superiority and generality of our module.
Meta Reinforcement Learning with Finite Training Tasks - a Density Estimation Approach
Authors: Aviv Tamar, Gilad Adler Zohar Rimon
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: In meta reinforcement learning (meta RL), an agent learns from a set of training tasks how to quickly solve a new task, drawn from the same task distribution. The optimal meta RL policy, a.k.a.~the Bayes-optimal behavior, is well defined, and guarantees optimal reward in expectation, taken with respect to the task distribution. The question we explore in this work is how many training tasks are required to guarantee approximately optimal behavior with high probability. Recent work provided the first such PAC analysis for a model-free setting, where a history-dependent policy was learned from the training tasks. In this work, we propose a different approach: directly learn the task distribution, using density estimation techniques, and then train a policy on the learned task distribution. We show that our approach leads to bounds that depend on the dimension of the task distribution. In particular, in settings where the task distribution lies in a low-dimensional manifold, we extend our analysis to use dimensionality reduction techniques and account for such structure, obtaining significantly better bounds than previous work, which strictly depend on the number of states and actions. The key of our approach is the regularization implied by the kernel density estimation method. We further demonstrate that this regularization is useful in practice, when `plugged in' the state-of-the-art VariBAD meta RL algorithm.
TotalSelfScan: Learning Full-body Avatars from Self-Portrait Videos of Faces, Hands, and Bodies
Authors: Qi Fang, Yudong Guo, Sida Peng, Qing Shuai, Xiaowei Zhou, Hujun Bao Junting Dong
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent advances in implicit neural representations make it possible to reconstruct a human-body model from a monocular self-rotation video. While previous works present impressive results of human body reconstruction, the quality of  reconstructed face and hands are relatively low. The main reason is that the image region occupied by these parts is very small compared to the body. To solve this problem, we propose a new approach named TotalSelfScan, which reconstructs the full-body model from several monocular self-rotation videos that focus on the face, hands, and body, respectively. Compared to recording a single video, this setting has almost no additional cost but provides more details of essential parts. To learn the full-body model, instead of encoding the whole body in a single network, we propose a multi-part representation to model separate parts and then fuse the part-specific observations into a single unified human model. Once learned, the full-body model enables rendering photorealistic free-viewpoint videos under novel human poses. Experiments show that TotalSelfScan can significantly improve the reconstruction and rendering quality on the face and hands compared to the existing methods. The code is available at \url{https://zju3dv.github.io/TotalSelfScan}.
DHRL: A Graph-Based Approach for Long-Horizon and Sparse Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jigang Kim, Inkyu Jang, H. Jin Kim Seungjae Lee
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) has made notable progress in complex control tasks by leveraging temporal abstraction. However, previous HRL algorithms often suffer from serious data inefficiency as environments get large. The extended components, $i.e.$, goal space and length of episodes, impose a burden on either one or both high-level and low-level policies since both levels share the total horizon of the episode. In this paper, we present a method of Decoupling Horizons Using a Graph in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (DHRL) which can alleviate this problem by decoupling the horizons of high-level and low-level policies and bridging the gap between the length of both horizons using a graph. DHRL provides a freely stretchable high-level action interval, which facilitates longer temporal abstraction and faster training in complex tasks. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art HRL algorithms in typical HRL environments. Moreover, DHRL achieves long and complex locomotion and manipulation tasks.
A Classification of $G$-invariant Shallow Neural Networks
Authors: James Ostrowski Devanshu Agrawal
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: When trying to fit a deep neural network (DNN) to a $G$-invariant target function with $G$ a group, it only makes sense to constrain the DNN to be $G$-invariant as well. However, there can be many different ways to do this, thus raising the problem of ``$G$-invariant neural architecture design'': What is the optimal $G$-invariant architecture for a given problem? Before we can consider the optimization problem itself, we must understand the search space, the architectures in it, and how they relate to one another. In this paper, we take a first step towards this goal; we prove a theorem that gives a classification of all $G$-invariant single-hidden-layer or ``shallow'' neural network ($G$-SNN) architectures with ReLU activation for any finite orthogonal group $G$, and we prove a second theorem that characterizes the inclusion maps or ``network morphisms'' between the architectures that can be leveraged during neural architecture search (NAS). The proof is based on a correspondence of every $G$-SNN to a signed permutation representation of $G$ acting on the hidden neurons; the classification is equivalently given in terms of the first cohomology classes of $G$, thus admitting a topological interpretation. The $G$-SNN architectures corresponding to nontrivial cohomology classes have, to our knowledge, never been explicitly identified in the literature previously. Using a code implementation, we enumerate the $G$-SNN architectures for some example groups $G$ and visualize their structure. Finally, we prove that architectures corresponding to inequivalent cohomology classes coincide in function space only when their weight matrices are zero, and we discuss the implications of this for NAS.
A Conditional Randomization Test for Sparse Logistic Regression in High-Dimension
Authors: Bertrand Thirion, Sylvain Arlot Binh T. Nguyen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Identifying the relevant variables for a classification model with correct confidence levels is a central but difficult task in high-dimension. Despite the core role of sparse logistic regression in statistics and machine learning, it still lacks a good solution for accurate inference in the regime where the number of features $p$ is as large as or larger than the number of samples $n$. Here we tackle this problem by improving the Conditional Randomization Test (CRT). The original CRT algorithm shows promise as a way to output p-values while making few assumptions on the distribution of the test statistics. As it comes with a prohibitive computational cost even in mildly high-dimensional problems, faster solutions based on distillation have been proposed. Yet, they rely on unrealistic hypotheses and result in low-power solutions. To improve this, we propose \emph{CRT-logit}, an algorithm that combines a variable-distillation step and a decorrelation step that takes into account the geometry of $\ell_1$-penalized logistic regression problem. We provide a theoretical analysis of this procedure, and demonstrate its effectiveness on simulations, along with experiments on large-scale brain-imaging and genomics datasets.
Biologically-Plausible Determinant Maximization Neural Networks for Blind Separation of Correlated Sources
Authors: Cengiz Pehlevan, Alper Erdogan Bariscan Bozkurt
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Extraction of latent sources of complex stimuli is critical for making sense of the world. While the brain solves this blind source separation (BSS) problem continuously, its algorithms remain unknown. Previous work on biologically-plausible BSS algorithms assumed that observed signals are linear mixtures of statistically independent or uncorrelated sources, limiting the domain of applicability of these algorithms. To overcome this limitation, we propose novel biologically-plausible neural networks for the blind separation of potentially dependent/correlated sources. Differing from previous work, we assume some general geometric, not statistical, conditions on the source vectors allowing separation of potentially dependent/correlated sources. Concretely, we assume that the source vectors are sufficiently scattered in their domains which can be described by certain polytopes. Then, we consider recovery of these sources by the Det-Max criterion, which maximizes the determinant of the output correlation matrix to enforce a similar spread for the source estimates. Starting from this normative principle, and using a weighted similarity matching approach that enables arbitrary linear transformations adaptable by local learning rules, we derive two-layer biologically-plausible neural network algorithms that can separate mixtures into sources coming from a variety of source domains. We demonstrate that our algorithms outperform other biologically-plausible BSS algorithms on correlated source separation problems.
Generalized One-shot Domain Adaptation of Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Yinglu Liu, Congying Han, Tiande Guo, Ting Yao, Tao Mei Zicheng Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The adaptation of a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) aims to transfer a pre-trained GAN to a target domain with limited training data. In this paper, we focus on the one-shot case, which is more challenging and rarely explored in previous works. We consider that the adaptation from a source domain to a target domain can be decoupled into two parts: the transfer of global style like texture and color, and the emergence of new entities that do not belong to the source domain. While previous works mainly focus on style transfer, we propose a novel and concise framework to address the \textit{generalized one-shot adaptation} task for both style and entity transfer, in which a reference image and its binary entity mask are provided. Our core idea is to constrain the gap between the internal distributions of the reference and syntheses by sliced Wasserstein distance. To better achieve it, style fixation is used at first to roughly obtain the exemplary style, and an auxiliary network is introduced to the generator to disentangle entity and style transfer. Besides, to realize cross-domain correspondence, we propose the variational Laplacian regularization to constrain the smoothness of the adapted generator. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in various scenarios. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/zhangzc21/Generalized-One-shot-GAN-adaptation}.
Representing Spatial Trajectories as Distributions
Authors: Carl Vondrick Didac Suris Coll-Vinent
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We introduce a representation learning framework for spatial trajectories. We represent partial observations of trajectories as probability distributions in a learned latent space, which characterize the uncertainty about unobserved parts of the trajectory. Our framework allows us to obtain samples from a trajectory for any continuous point in time—both interpolating and extrapolating. Our flexible approach supports directly modifying specific attributes of a trajectory, such as its pace, as well as combining different partial observations into single representations. Experiments show our method's superiority over baselines in prediction tasks.
EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR Benchmark: VIdeo Segmentations and Object Relations
Authors: Dandan Shan, Bin Zhu, Jian Ma, Amlan Kar, Richard Higgins, Sanja Fidler, David Fouhey, Dima Damen Ahmad Darkhalil
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2022

Abstract: We introduce VISOR, a new dataset of pixel annotations and a benchmark suite for segmenting hands and active objects in egocentric video. VISOR annotates videos from EPIC-KITCHENS, which comes with a new set of challenges not encountered in current video segmentation datasets. Specifically, we need to ensure both short- and long-term consistency of pixel-level annotations as objects undergo transformative interactions, e.g. an onion is peeled, diced and cooked - where we aim to obtain accurate pixel-level annotations of the peel, onion pieces, chopping board, knife, pan, as well as the acting hands. VISOR introduces an annotation pipeline, AI-powered in parts, for scalability and quality. In total, we publicly release 272K manual semantic masks of 257 object classes, 9.9M interpolated dense masks, 67K hand-object relations, covering 36 hours of 179 untrimmed videos. Along with the annotations, we introduce three challenges in video object segmentation, interaction understanding and long-term reasoning.For data, code and leaderboards: http://epic-kitchens.github.io/VISOR
Inverse Design for Fluid-Structure Interactions using Graph Network Simulators
Authors: Tatiana Lopez-Guevara, Kimberly L Stachenfeld, Alvaro Sanchez Gonzalez, Peter Battaglia, Jessica B Hamrick, Tobias Pfaff Kelsey Allen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Designing physical artifacts that serve a purpose---such as tools and other functional structures---is central to engineering as well as everyday human behavior. Though automating design using machine learning has tremendous promise, existing methods are often limited by the task-dependent distributions they were exposed to during training. Here we showcase a task-agnostic approach to inverse design, by combining general-purpose graph network simulators with gradient-based design optimization. This constitutes a simple, fast, and reusable approach that solves high-dimensional problems with complex physical dynamics, including designing surfaces and tools to manipulate fluid flows and optimizing the shape of an airfoil to minimize drag. This framework produces high-quality designs by propagating gradients through trajectories of hundreds of steps, even when using models that were pre-trained for single-step predictions on data substantially different from the design tasks. In our fluid manipulation tasks, the resulting designs outperformed those found by sampling-based optimization techniques. In airfoil design, they matched the quality of those obtained with a specialized solver. Our results suggest that despite some remaining challenges, machine learning-based simulators are maturing to the point where they can support general-purpose design optimization across a variety of fluid-structure interaction domains.
What Makes Graph Neural Networks Miscalibrated?
Authors: Yuesong Shen, Christian Tomani, Daniel Cremers Hans Hao-Hsun Hsu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Given the importance of getting calibrated predictions and reliable uncertainty estimations, various post-hoc calibration methods have been developed for neural networks on standard multi-class classification tasks. However, these methods are not well suited for calibrating graph neural networks (GNNs), which presents unique challenges such as accounting for the graph structure and the graph-induced correlations between the nodes. In this work, we conduct a systematic study on the calibration qualities of GNN node predictions. In particular, we identify five factors which influence the calibration of GNNs: general under-confident tendency, diversity of nodewise predictive distributions, distance to training nodes, relative confidence level, and neighborhood similarity. Furthermore, based on the insights from this study, we design a novel calibration method named Graph Attention Temperature Scaling (GATS), which is tailored for calibrating graph neural networks. GATS incorporates designs that address all the identified influential factors and produces nodewise temperature scaling using an attention-based architecture. GATS is accuracy-preserving, data-efficient, and expressive at the same time. Our experiments empirically verify the effectiveness of GATS, demonstrating that it can consistently achieve state-of-the-art calibration results on various graph datasets for different GNN backbones.
Stochastic Adaptive Activation Function
Authors: Jaeseung Yang, Haeyun Lee, Jae Youn Hwang Kyungsu Lee
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The simulation of human neurons and neurotransmission mechanisms has been realized in deep neural networks based on the theoretical implementations of activation functions. However, recent studies have reported that the threshold potential of neurons exhibits different values according to the locations and types of individual neurons, and that the activation functions have limitations in terms of representing this variability. Therefore, this study proposes a simple yet effective activation function that facilitates different thresholds and adaptive activations according to the positions of units and the contexts of inputs. Furthermore, the proposed activation function mathematically exhibits a more generalized form of Swish activation function, and thus we denoted it as Adaptive SwisH (ASH). ASH highlights informative features that exhibit large values in the top percentiles in an input, whereas it rectifies low values. Most importantly, ASH exhibits trainable, adaptive, and context-aware properties compared to other activation functions. Furthermore, ASH represents general formula of the previously studied activation function and provides a reasonable mathematical background for the superior performance. To validate the effectiveness and robustness of ASH, we implemented ASH into many deep learning models for various tasks, including classification, detection, segmentation, and image generation. Experimental analysis demonstrates that our activation function can provide the benefits of more accurate prediction and earlier convergence in many deep learning applications.
ActionSense: A Multimodal Dataset and Recording Framework for Human Activities Using Wearable Sensors in a Kitchen Environment
Authors: Chao Liu, Yiyue Luo, Michael Foshey, Yunzhu Li, Antonio Torralba, Wojciech Matusik, Daniela Rus Joseph DelPreto
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2022

Abstract: This paper introduces ActionSense, a multimodal dataset and recording framework with an emphasis on wearable sensing in a kitchen environment.  It provides rich, synchronized data streams along with ground truth data to facilitate learning pipelines that could extract insights about how humans interact with the physical world during activities of daily living, and help lead to more capable and collaborative robot assistants.  The wearable sensing suite captures motion, force, and attention information; it includes eye tracking with a first-person camera, forearm muscle activity sensors, a body-tracking system using 17 inertial sensors, finger-tracking gloves, and custom tactile sensors on the hands that use a matrix of conductive threads.  This is coupled with activity labels and with externally-captured data from multiple RGB cameras, a depth camera, and microphones.  The specific tasks recorded in ActionSense are designed to highlight lower-level physical skills and higher-level scene reasoning or action planning.  They include simple object manipulations (e.g., stacking plates), dexterous actions (e.g., peeling or cutting vegetables), and complex action sequences (e.g., setting a table or loading a dishwasher).  The resulting dataset and underlying experiment framework are available at https://action-sense.csail.mit.edu. Preliminary networks and analyses explore modality subsets and cross-modal correlations.  ActionSense aims to support applications including learning from demonstrations, dexterous robot control, cross-modal predictions, and fine-grained action segmentation. It could also help inform the next generation of smart textiles that may one day unobtrusively send rich data streams to in-home collaborative or autonomous robot assistants.
Video compression dataset and benchmark of learning-based video-quality metrics
Authors: Sergey Lavrushkin, Maksim Smirnov, Aleksandr Gushchin, Dmitriy Vatolin, Dmitriy Kulikov Anastasia Antsiferova
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2022

Abstract: Video-quality measurement is a critical task in video processing. Nowadays, many implementations of new encoding standards - such as AV1, VVC, and LCEVC - use deep-learning-based decoding algorithms with perceptual metrics that serve as optimization objectives. But investigations of the performance of modern video- and image-quality metrics commonly employ videos compressed using older standards, such as AVC. In this paper, we present a new benchmark for video-quality metrics that evaluates video compression. It is based on a new dataset consisting of about 2,500 streams encoded using different standards, including AVC, HEVC, AV1, VP9, and VVC.  Subjective scores were collected using crowdsourced pairwise comparisons. The list of evaluated metrics includes recent ones based on machine learning and neural networks. The results demonstrate that new no-reference metrics exhibit high correlation with subjective quality and approach the capability of top full-reference metrics.
Scalable Distributional Robustness in a Class of Non-Convex Optimization with Guarantees
Authors: Arunesh Sinha, Tien Mai Avinandan Bose
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has shown a lot of promise in providing robustness in learning as well as sample-based optimization problems. We endeavor to provide DRO solutions for a class of sum of fractionals, non-convex optimization which is used for decision making in prominent areas such as facility location and security games. In contrast to previous work, we find it more tractable to optimize the equivalent variance regularized form of DRO rather than the minimax form. We transform the variance regularized form to a mixed-integer second-order cone program (MISOCP), which, while guaranteeing global optimality, does not scale enough to solve problems with real-world datasets. We further propose two abstraction approaches based on clustering and stratified sampling to increase scalability, which we then use for real-world datasets. Importantly, we provide global optimality guarantees for our approach and show experimentally that our solution quality is better than the locally optimal ones achieved by state-of-the-art gradient-based methods. We experimentally compare our different approaches and baselines and reveal nuanced properties of a DRO solution.
Prototypical VoteNet for Few-Shot 3D Point Cloud Object Detection
Authors: Xiaojuan Qi Shizhen Zhao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Most existing 3D point cloud object detection approaches heavily rely on large amounts of labeled training data. However, the labeling process is costly and time-consuming. This paper considers few-shot 3D point cloud object detection, where only a few annotated samples of novel classes are needed with abundant samples of base classes. To this end, we propose Prototypical VoteNet to recognize and localize novel instances, which incorporates two new modules: Prototypical Vote Module (PVM) and Prototypical Head Module (PHM). Specifically, as the 3D basic geometric structures can be shared among categories, PVM is designed to leverage class-agnostic geometric prototypes, which are learned from base classes, to refine local features of novel categories. Then PHM is proposed to utilize class prototypes to enhance the global feature of each object, facilitating subsequent object localization and classification, which is trained by the episodic training strategy. To evaluate the model in this new setting, we contribute two new benchmark datasets, FS-ScanNet and FS-SUNRGBD. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of Prototypical VoteNet, and our proposed method shows significant and consistent improvements compared to baselines on two benchmark datasets.
Learning from a Sample in Online Algorithms
Authors: Alan Frieze, Anupam Gupta, Christopher Seiler C.J. Argue
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We consider three central problems in optimization: the restricted  assignment load-balancing problem, the Steiner tree network design  problem, and facility location clustering. We consider the online  setting, where the input arrives over time, and irrevocable decisions  must be made without knowledge of the future.  For all these problems, any online algorithm must incur a cost that is  approximately $\log |I|$ times the optimal cost in the worst-case,  where $|I|$ is the length of the input. But can we go beyond the  worst-case?  In this work we give algorithms that perform substantially  better when a $p$-fraction of the input is given as a sample: the  algorithm use this sample to \emph{learn} a good strategy to use  for the rest of the input.
Robust Rent Division
Authors: Ariel D Procaccia, David Zhu Dominik Peters
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: In fair rent division, the problem is to assign rooms to roommates and fairly split the rent based on roommates' reported valuations for the rooms. Envy-free rent division is the most popular application on the fair division website Spliddit. The standard model assumes that agents can correctly report their valuations for each room. In practice, agents may be unsure about their valuations, for example because they have had only limited time to inspect the rooms. Our goal is to find a robust rent division that remains fair even if agent valuations are slightly different from the reported ones. We introduce the lexislack solution, which selects a rent division that remains envy-free for valuations within as large a radius as possible of the reported valuations. We also consider robustness notions for valuations that come from a probability distribution, and use results from learning theory to show how we can find rent divisions that (almost) maximize the probability of being envy-free, or that minimize the expected envy. We show that an almost optimal allocation can be identified based on polynomially many samples from the valuation distribution. Finding the best allocation given these samples is NP-hard, but in practice such an allocation can be found using integer linear programming.
Efficient Dataset Distillation using Random Feature Approximation
Authors: Ramin Hasani, Alexander Amini, Daniela Rus Noel Loo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Dataset distillation compresses large datasets into smaller synthetic coresets which retain performance with the aim of reducing the storage and computational burden of processing the entire dataset. Today's best performing algorithm, \textit{Kernel Inducing Points} (KIP), which makes use of the correspondence between infinite-width neural networks and kernel-ridge regression, is prohibitively slow due to the exact computation of the neural tangent kernel matrix, scaling $O(|S|^2)$, with $|S|$ being the coreset size. To improve this, we propose a novel algorithm that uses a random feature approximation (RFA) of the Neural Network Gaussian Process (NNGP) kernel which reduces the kernel matrix computation to $O(|S|)$.  Our algorithm provides at least a 100-fold speedup over KIP and can run on a single GPU. Our new method, termed an RFA Distillation (RFAD), performs competitively with KIP and other dataset condensation algorithms in accuracy over a range of large-scale datasets, both in kernel regression and finite-width network training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on tasks involving model interpretability and privacy preservation.
Scalable Sensitivity and Uncertainty Analyses for Causal-Effect Estimates of Continuous-Valued Interventions
Authors: Alyson Douglas, Peter Manshausen, Maëlys Solal, Nicolai Meinshausen, Philip Stier, Yarin Gal, Uri Shalit Andrew Jesson
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Estimating the effects of continuous-valued interventions from observational data is a critically important task for climate science, healthcare, and economics. Recent work focuses on designing neural network architectures and regularization functions to allow for scalable estimation of average and individual-level dose-response curves from high-dimensional, large-sample data. Such methodologies assume ignorability (observation of all confounding variables) and positivity (observation of all treatment levels for every covariate value describing a set of units), assumptions problematic in the continuous treatment regime. Scalable sensitivity and uncertainty analyses to understand the ignorance induced in causal estimates when these assumptions are relaxed are less studied. Here, we develop a continuous treatment-effect marginal sensitivity model (CMSM) and derive bounds that agree with the observed data and a researcher-defined level of hidden confounding. We introduce a scalable algorithm and uncertainty-aware deep models to derive and estimate these bounds for high-dimensional, large-sample observational data. We work in concert with climate scientists interested in the climatological impacts of human emissions on cloud properties using satellite observations from the past 15 years. This problem is known to be complicated by many unobserved confounders.