mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Walking in the Shadow: A New Perspective on Descent Directions for Constrained Minimization
Authors: Swati Gupta, Sebastian Pokutta Hassan Mortagy
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Descent directions such as movement towards Frank-Wolfe vertices, away steps, in-face away steps and pairwise directions have been an important design consideration in conditional gradient descent (CGD) variants. In this work, we attempt to demystify the impact of movement in these directions towards attaining constrained minimizers. The best local direction of descent is the directional derivative of the projection of the gradient, which we refer to as the "shadow" of the gradient. We show that the continuous-time dynamics of moving in the shadow are equivalent to those of PGD however non-trivial to discretize. By projecting gradients in PGD, one not only ensures feasibility but also is able to "wrap" around the convex region. We show that Frank-Wolfe (FW) vertices in fact recover the maximal wrap one can obtain by projecting gradients, thus providing a new perspective to these steps. We also claim that the shadow steps give the best direction of descent emanating from the convex hull of all possible away-vertices. Opening up the PGD movements in terms of shadow steps gives linear convergence, dependent on the number of faces. We combine these insights into a novel Shadow-CG method that uses FW steps (i.e., wrap around the polytope) and shadow steps (i.e., optimal local descent direction), while enjoying linear convergence. Our analysis develops properties of directional derivatives of projections (which may be of independent interest), while providing a unifying view of various descent directions in the CGD literature.
Path Sample-Analytic Gradient Estimators for Stochastic Binary Networks
Authors: Viktor Yanush, Boris Flach Alexander Shekhovtsov
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In neural networks with binary activations and or binary weights the training by gradient descent is complicated as the model has piecewise constant response.
We consider stochastic binary networks, obtained by adding noises in front of activations.
The expected model response becomes a smooth function of parameters, its gradient is well defined but it is challenging to estimate it accurately.
We propose a new method for this estimation problem combining sampling and analytic approximation steps. The method has a significantly reduced variance at the price of a small bias which gives a very practical tradeoff in comparison with existing unbiased and biased estimators.
We further show that one extra linearization step leads to a deep straight-through estimator previously known only as an ad-hoc heuristic. 
We experimentally show higher accuracy in gradient estimation and demonstrate a more stable and better performing training in deep convolutional models with both proposed methods.
Reward Propagation Using Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Doina Precup Martin Klissarov
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Potential-based reward shaping provides an approach for designing good reward functions, with the purpose of speeding up learning. However, automatically finding potential functions for complex environments is a difficult problem (in fact, of the same difficulty as learning a value function from scratch). We propose a new framework for learning potential functions by leveraging ideas from graph representation learning. Our approach relies on Graph Convolutional Networks which we use as a key ingredient in combination with the probabilistic inference view of reinforcement learning. More precisely, we leverage Graph Convolutional Networks to perform message passing from rewarding states. The propagated messages can then be used as potential functions for reward shaping to accelerate learning. We verify empirically that our approach can achieve considerable improvements in both small and high-dimensional control problems.
LoopReg: Self-supervised Learning of Implicit Surface Correspondences, Pose and Shape for 3D Human Mesh Registration
Authors: Cristian Sminchisescu, Christian Theobalt, Gerard Pons-Moll Bharat Lal Bhatnagar
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We address the problem of fitting 3D human models to 3D scans of dressed humans. Classical methods optimize both the data-to-model correspondences and the human model parameters (pose and shape), but are reliable only when initialised close to the solution. Some methods initialize the optimization based on fully supervised correspondence predictors, which is not differentiable end-to-end, and can only process a single scan at a time.  Our main contribution is LoopReg, an end-to-end learning framework to register a corpus of scans to a common 3D human model.  The key idea is to create a self-supervised loop.  A backward map, parameterized by a Neural Network, predicts the correspondence from every scan point to the surface of the human model. A forward map, parameterized by a human model, transforms the  corresponding points back to the scan based on the model parameters (pose and shape), thus closing the loop. Formulating this closed loop is not straightforward because it is not trivial to force the output of the NN to be on the surface of the human model -- outside this surface the human model is not even defined. To this end, we propose two key innovations. First, we define the canonical surface implicitly as the zero level set of a distance field in R3, which in contrast to more common UV parameterizations does not require cutting the surface, does not have discontinuities, and does not induce distortion.  Second, we diffuse the human model to the 3D domain. This allows to map the NN predictions forward, even when they slightly deviate from the zero level set.  Results demonstrate that we can train LoopReg mainly self-supervised -- following a supervised warm-start, the model becomes increasingly more accurate as additional unlabelled raw scans are processed. Our code and pre-trained models can be downloaded for research.
Fully Dynamic Algorithm for Constrained Submodular Optimization
Authors: Slobodan Mitrović, Ashkan Norouzi-Fard, Jakub M Tarnawski, Morteza Zadimoghaddam Silvio Lattanzi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: The task of maximizing a monotone submodular function under a cardinality constraint is at the core of many machine learning and data mining applications, including data summarization, sparse regression and coverage problems. We study this classic problem in the fully dynamic setting, where elements can be both inserted and removed. Our main result is a randomized algorithm that maintains an efficient data structure with a poly-logarithmic amortized update time  and yields a $(1/2-epsilon)$-approximate solution.  We complement our theoretical analysis with an empirical study of the performance of our algorithm.
Robust Optimal Transport with Applications in Generative Modeling and Domain Adaptation
Authors: Rama Chellappa, Soheil Feizi Yogesh Balaji
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Optimal Transport (OT) distances such as Wasserstein have been used in several areas such as GANs and domain adaptation. OT, however, is very sensitive to outliers (samples with large noise) in the data since in its objective function, every sample, including outliers, is weighed similarly due to the marginal constraints. To remedy this issue, robust formulations of OT with unbalanced marginal constraints have previously been proposed. However, employing these methods in deep learning problems such as GANs and domain adaptation is challenging due to the instability of their dual optimization solvers. In this paper, we resolve these issues by deriving a computationally-efficient dual form of the robust OT optimization that is amenable to modern deep learning applications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our formulation in two applications of GANs and domain adaptation. Our approach can train state-of-the-art GAN models on noisy datasets corrupted with outlier distributions. In particular, the proposed optimization method computes weights for training samples reflecting how difficult it is for those samples to be generated in the model. In domain adaptation, our robust OT formulation leads to improved accuracy compared to the standard adversarial adaptation methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/yogeshbalaji/robustOT.
Autofocused oracles for model-based design
Authors: Jennifer Listgarten Clara Fannjiang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Data-driven design is making headway into a number of application areas, including protein, small-molecule, and materials engineering. The design goal is to construct an object with desired properties, such as a protein that binds to a therapeutic target, or a superconducting material with a higher critical temperature than previously observed. To that end, costly experimental measurements are being replaced with calls to high-capacity regression models trained on labeled data, which can be leveraged in an in silico search for design candidates. However, the design goal necessitates moving into regions of the design space beyond where such models were trained. Therefore, one can ask: should the regression model be altered as the design algorithm explores the design space, in the absence of new data? Herein, we answer this question in the affirmative. In particular, we (i) formalize the data-driven design problem as a non-zero-sum game, (ii) develop a principled strategy for retraining the regression model as the design algorithm proceeds---what we refer to as autofocusing, and (iii) demonstrate the promise of autofocusing empirically.
Debiasing Averaged Stochastic Gradient Descent to handle missing values
Authors: Claire Boyer, Aymeric Dieuleveut, Julie Josse Aude Sportisse
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Stochastic gradient algorithm is a key ingredient of many machine learning methods, particularly appropriate for large-scale learning. However, a major caveat of large data is their incompleteness. We propose an averaged stochastic gradient algorithm handling missing values in linear models. This approach has the merit to be free from the need of any data distribution modeling and to account for heterogeneous missing proportion.
In both streaming and finite-sample settings, we prove that this algorithm achieves convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{n})$ at the iteration $n$, the same as without missing values. 
We show the convergence behavior and the relevance of the algorithm not only on synthetic data but also on real data sets, including those collected from medical register.
Trajectory-wise Multiple Choice Learning for Dynamics Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Kimin Lee, Ignasi Clavera Gilaberte, Thanard Kurutach, Jinwoo Shin, Pieter Abbeel Younggyo Seo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great potential in various control tasks in terms of both sample-efficiency and final performance. However, learning a generalizable dynamics model robust to changes in dynamics remains a challenge since the target transition dynamics follow a multi-modal distribution. In this paper, we present a new model-based RL algorithm, coined trajectory-wise multiple choice learning, that learns a multi-headed dynamics model for dynamics generalization. The main idea is updating the most accurate prediction head to specialize each head in certain environments with similar dynamics, i.e., clustering environments. Moreover, we incorporate context learning, which encodes dynamics-specific information from past experiences into the context latent vector, enabling the model to perform online adaptation to unseen environments. Finally, to utilize the specialized prediction heads more effectively, we propose an adaptive planning method, which selects the most accurate prediction head over a recent experience. Our method exhibits superior zero-shot generalization performance across a variety of control tasks, compared to state-of-the-art RL methods. Source code and videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/trajectory-mcl.
CompRess: Self-Supervised Learning by Compressing Representations
Authors: Ajinkya Tejankar, Hamed Pirsiavash Soroush Abbasi Koohpayegani
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Self-supervised learning aims to learn good representations with unlabeled data. Recent works have shown that larger models benefit more from self-supervised learning than smaller models. As a result, the gap between supervised and self-supervised learning has been greatly reduced for larger models. In this work, instead of designing a new pseudo task for self-supervised learning, we develop a model compression method to compress an already learned, deep self-supervised model (teacher) to a smaller one (student). We train the student model so that it mimics the relative similarity between the datapoints in the teacher's embedding space. For AlexNet, our method outperforms all previous methods including the fully supervised model on ImageNet linear evaluation (59.0% compared to 56.5%) and on nearest neighbor evaluation (50.7% compared to 41.4%). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a self-supervised AlexNet has outperformed supervised one on ImageNet classification. Our code is available here: https://github.com/UMBCvision/CompRess
Sample complexity and effective dimension for regression on manifolds
Authors: Justin Romberg, Mark Davenport Andrew McRae
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We consider the theory of regression on a manifold using reproducing kernel Hilbert space methods. Manifold models arise in a wide variety of modern machine learning problems, and our goal is to help understand the effectiveness of various implicit and explicit dimensionality-reduction methods that exploit manifold structure. Our first key contribution is to establish a novel nonasymptotic version of the Weyl law from differential geometry. From this we are able to show that certain spaces of smooth functions on a manifold are effectively finite-dimensional, with a complexity that scales according to the manifold dimension rather than any ambient data dimension. Finally, we show that given (potentially noisy) function values taken uniformly at random over a manifold, a kernel regression estimator (derived from the spectral decomposition of the manifold) yields minimax-optimal error bounds that are controlled by the effective dimension.
The phase diagram of approximation rates for deep neural networks
Authors: Anton Zhevnerchuk Dmitry Yarotsky
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We explore the phase diagram of approximation rates for deep neural networks and prove several new theoretical results. In particular, we generalize the existing result on the existence of deep discontinuous phase in ReLU networks to functional classes of arbitrary positive smoothness, and identify the boundary between the feasible and infeasible rates. Moreover, we show that all networks with a piecewise polynomial activation function have the same phase diagram. Next, we demonstrate that standard fully-connected architectures with a fixed width independent of smoothness can adapt to smoothness and achieve almost optimal rates. Finally, we consider deep networks with periodic activations ("deep Fourier expansion") and prove that they have very fast, nearly exponential approximation rates, thanks to the emerging capability of the network to implement efficient lookup operations.
Timeseries Anomaly Detection using Temporal Hierarchical One-Class Network
Authors: Zhuocong Li, James T. Kwok Lifeng Shen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Real-world timeseries have complex underlying temporal dynamics and the detection of anomalies is challenging. In this paper, we propose the Temporal Hierarchical One-Class (THOC) network, a temporal one-class classification model for timeseries anomaly detection. It captures temporal dynamics in multiple scales by using a dilated recurrent neural network with skip connections. Using multiple hyperspheres obtained with a hierarchical clustering process, a one-class objective called Multiscale Vector Data Description is defined. This allows the temporal dynamics to be well captured by a set of multi-resolution temporal clusters. To further facilitate representation learning, the hypersphere centers are encouraged to be orthogonal to each other, and a self-supervision task in the temporal domain is added. The whole model can be trained end-to-end. Extensive empirical studies on various real-world timeseries demonstrate that the proposed THOC network outperforms recent strong deep learning baselines on timeseries anomaly detection.
EcoLight: Intersection Control in Developing Regions Under Extreme Budget and Network Constraints
Authors: Kashish Bansal, Rijurekha Sen Sachin Chauhan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Effective intersection control can play an important role in reducing traffic congestion and associated vehicular emissions. This is vitally needed in developing countries, where air pollution is reaching life threatening levels. This paper presents EcoLight intersection control for developing regions, where budget is constrained and network connectivity is very poor. EcoLight learns effective control offline using state-of-the-art Deep Reinforcement Learning methods, but deploys highly efficient runtime control algorithms on low cost embedded devices that work stand-alone on road without server connectivity. EcoLight optimizes both average case and worst case values of throughput, travel time and other metrics, as evaluated on open-source datasets from New York and on a custom developing region dataset.
Reconstructing Perceptive Images from Brain Activity by Shape-Semantic GAN
Authors: Yu Qi, Gang Pan Tao Fang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Reconstructing seeing images from fMRI recordings is an absorbing research area in neuroscience and provides a potential brain-reading technology. The challenge lies in that visual encoding in brain is highly complex and not fully revealed.
Inspired by the theory that visual features are hierarchically represented in cortex, we propose to break the complex visual signals into multi-level components and decode each component separately. Specifically, we decode shape and semantic representations from the lower and higher visual cortex respectively, and merge the shape and semantic information to images by a generative adversarial network (Shape-Semantic GAN). This 'divide and conquer' strategy captures visual information more accurately. Experiments demonstrate that Shape-Semantic GAN improves the reconstruction similarity and image quality, and achieves the state-of-the-art image reconstruction performance.
Emergent Complexity and Zero-shot Transfer via Unsupervised Environment Design
Authors: Natasha Jaques, Eugene Vinitsky, Alexandre Bayen, Stuart J. Russell, Andrew Critch, Sergey Levine Michael Dennis
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: A wide range of reinforcement learning (RL) problems --- including robustness, transfer learning, unsupervised RL, and emergent complexity --- require specifying a distribution of tasks or environments in which a policy will be trained.  However, creating a useful distribution of environments is error prone, and takes a significant amount of developer time and effort. We propose Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) as an alternative paradigm, where developers provide environments with unknown parameters, and these parameters are used to automatically produce a distribution over valid, solvable environments. Existing approaches to automatically generating environments suffer from common failure modes: domain randomization cannot generate structure or adapt the difficulty of the environment to the agent's learning progress, and minimax adversarial training leads to worst-case environments that are often unsolvable. To generate structured, solvable environments for our protagonist agent, we introduce a second, antagonist agent that is allied with the environment-generating adversary. The adversary is motivated to generate environments which maximize regret, defined as the difference between the protagonist and antagonist agent's return. We call our technique Protagonist Antagonist Induced Regret Environment Design (PAIRED).  Our experiments demonstrate that PAIRED produces a natural curriculum of increasingly complex environments, and PAIRED agents achieve higher zero-shot transfer performance when tested in highly novel environments.
A Spectral Energy Distance for Parallel Speech Synthesis
Authors: Tim Salimans, Rianne van den Berg, Jasper Snoek, Nal Kalchbrenner Alexey Gritsenko
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Speech synthesis is an important practical generative modeling problem that has seen great progress over the last few years, with likelihood-based autoregressive neural models now outperforming traditional concatenative systems. A downside of such autoregressive models is that they require executing tens of thousands of sequential operations per second of generated audio, making them ill-suited for deployment on specialized deep learning hardware. Here, we propose a new learning method that allows us to train highly parallel models of speech, without requiring access to an analytical likelihood function. Our approach is based on a generalized energy distance between the distributions of the generated and real audio. This spectral energy distance is a proper scoring rule with respect to the distribution over magnitude-spectrograms of the generated waveform audio and offers statistical consistency guarantees. The distance can be calculated from minibatches without bias, and does not involve adversarial learning, yielding a stable and consistent method for training implicit generative models. Empirically, we achieve state-of-the-art generation quality among implicit generative models, as judged by the recently-proposed cFDSD metric. When combining our method with adversarial techniques, we also improve upon the recently-proposed GAN-TTS model in terms of Mean Opinion Score as judged by trained human evaluators.
Simulating a Primary Visual Cortex at the Front of CNNs Improves Robustness to Image Perturbations
Authors: Tiago Marques, Martin Schrimpf, Franziska Geiger, David Cox, James J DiCarlo Joel Dapello
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Current state-of-the-art object recognition models are largely based on convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, which are loosely inspired by the primate visual system. However, these CNNs can be fooled by imperceptibly small, explicitly crafted perturbations, and struggle to recognize objects in corrupted images that are easily recognized by humans. Here, by making comparisons with primate neural data, we first observed that CNN models with a neural hidden layer that better matches primate primary visual cortex (V1) are also more robust to adversarial attacks. Inspired by this observation, we developed VOneNets, a new class of hybrid CNN vision models. Each VOneNet contains a fixed weight neural network front-end that simulates primate V1, called the VOneBlock, followed by a neural network back-end adapted from current CNN vision models. The VOneBlock is based on a classical neuroscientific model of V1: the linear-nonlinear-Poisson model, consisting of a biologically-constrained Gabor filter bank, simple and complex cell nonlinearities, and a V1 neuronal stochasticity generator. After training, VOneNets retain high ImageNet performance, but each is substantially more robust, outperforming the base CNNs and state-of-the-art methods by 18% and 3%, respectively, on a conglomerate benchmark of perturbations comprised of white box adversarial attacks and common image corruptions. Finally, we show that all components of the VOneBlock work in synergy to improve robustness. While current CNN architectures are arguably brain-inspired, the results presented here demonstrate that more precisely mimicking just one stage of the primate visual system leads to new gains in ImageNet-level computer vision applications.
Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data with Arbitrary Positive Shift
Authors: Daniel Lowd Zayd Hammoudeh
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Positive-unlabeled (PU) learning trains a binary classifier using only positive and unlabeled data. A common simplifying assumption is that the positive data is representative of the target positive class. This assumption rarely holds in practice due to temporal drift, domain shift, and/or adversarial manipulation.  This paper shows that PU learning is possible even with arbitrarily non-representative positive data given unlabeled data from the source and target distributions. Our key insight is that only the negative class's distribution need be fixed.  We integrate this into two statistically consistent methods to address arbitrary positive bias - one approach combines negative-unlabeled learning with unlabeled-unlabeled learning while the other uses a novel, recursive risk estimator. Experimental results demonstrate our methods' effectiveness across numerous real-world datasets and forms of positive bias, including disjoint positive class-conditional supports. Additionally, we propose a general, simplified approach to address PU risk estimation overfitting.
Deep Energy-based Modeling of Discrete-Time Physics
Authors: Ai Ishikawa, Takaharu Yaguchi Takashi Matsubara
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Physical phenomena in the real world are often described by energy-based modeling theories, such as Hamiltonian mechanics or the Landau theory, which yield various physical laws. Recent developments in neural networks have enabled the mimicking of the energy conservation law by learning the underlying continuous-time differential equations. However, this may not be possible in discrete time, which is often the case in practical learning and computation. Moreover, other physical laws have been overlooked in the previous neural network models. In this study, we propose a deep energy-based physical model that admits a specific differential geometric structure. From this structure, the conservation or dissipation law of energy and the mass conservation law follow naturally. To ensure the energetic behavior in discrete time, we also propose an automatic discrete differentiation algorithm that enables neural networks to employ the discrete gradient method.
Quantifying Learnability and Describability of Visual Concepts Emerging in Representation Learning
Authors: Ruth Fong, Andrea Vedaldi Iro Laina
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: The increasing impact of black box models, and particularly of unsupervised ones, comes with an increasing interest in tools to understand and interpret them. In this paper, we consider in particular how to characterise visual groupings discovered automatically by deep neural networks, starting with state-of-the-art clustering methods. In some cases, clusters readily correspond to an existing labelled dataset. However, often they do not, yet they still maintain an "intuitive interpretability''. We introduce two concepts, visual learnability and describability, that can be used to quantify the interpretability of arbitrary image groupings, including unsupervised ones. The idea is to measure (1) how well humans can learn to reproduce a grouping by measuring their ability to generalise from a small set of visual examples (learnability) and (2) whether the set of visual examples can be replaced by a succinct, textual description (describability). By assessing human annotators as classifiers, we remove the subjective quality of existing evaluation metrics. For better scalability, we finally propose a class-level captioning system to generate descriptions for visual groupings automatically and compare it to human annotators using the describability metric.
Self-Learning Transformations for Improving Gaze and Head Redirection
Authors: Seonwook Park, Xucong Zhang, Shalini De Mello, Otmar Hilliges Yufeng Zheng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Many computer vision tasks rely on labeled data. Rapid progress in generative modeling has led to the ability to synthesize photorealistic images. However, controlling specific aspects of the generation process such that the data can be used for supervision of downstream tasks remains challenging. In this paper we propose a novel generative model for images of faces, that is capable of producing high-quality images under fine-grained control over eye gaze and head orientation angles. This requires the disentangling of many appearance related factors including gaze and head orientation but also lighting, hue etc. We propose a novel architecture which learns to discover, disentangle and encode these extraneous variations in a self-learned manner. We further show that explicitly disentangling task-irrelevant factors results in more accurate modelling of gaze and head orientation. A novel evaluation scheme shows that our method improves upon the state-of-the-art in redirection accuracy and disentanglement between gaze direction and head orientation changes. Furthermore, we show that in the presence of limited amounts of real-world training data, our method allows for improvements in the downstream task of semi-supervised cross-dataset gaze estimation. Please check our project page at: https://ait.ethz.ch/projects/2020/STED-gaze/
Language-Conditioned Imitation Learning for Robot Manipulation Tasks
Authors: Joseph P. Campbell, Mariano Phielipp, Stefan Lee, Chitta Baral, Heni Ben Amor Simon Stepputtis
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Imitation learning is a popular approach for teaching motor skills to robots. However, most approaches focus on extracting policy parameters from execution traces alone (i.e., motion trajectories and perceptual data). No adequate communication channel exists between the human expert and the robot to describe critical aspects of the task, such as the properties of the target object or the intended shape of the motion. Motivated by insights into the human teaching process, we introduce a method for incorporating unstructured natural language into imitation learning. At training time, the expert can provide demonstrations along with verbal descriptions in order to describe the underlying intent (e.g., "go to the large green bowl"). The training process then interrelates these two modalities to encode the correlations between language, perception, and motion. The resulting language-conditioned visuomotor policies can be conditioned at runtime on new human commands and instructions, which allows for more fine-grained control over the trained policies while also reducing situational ambiguity. We demonstrate in a set of simulation experiments how our approach can learn language-conditioned manipulation policies for a seven-degree-of-freedom robot arm and compare the results to a variety of alternative methods.
POMDPs in Continuous Time and Discrete Spaces
Authors: Matthias Schultheis, Heinz Koeppl Bastian Alt
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Many processes, such as discrete event systems in engineering or population dynamics in biology, evolve in discrete space and continuous time. We consider the problem of optimal decision making in such discrete state and action space systems under partial observability. This places our work at the intersection of optimal filtering and optimal control. At the current state of research, a mathematical description for simultaneous decision making and filtering in continuous time with finite state and action spaces is still missing. In this paper, we give a mathematical description of a continuous-time partial observable Markov decision process (POMDP). By leveraging optimal filtering theory we derive a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) type equation that characterizes the optimal solution. Using techniques from deep learning we approximately solve the resulting partial integro-differential equation. We present (i) an approach solving the decision problem offline by learning an approximation of the value function and (ii) an online algorithm which provides a solution in belief space using deep reinforcement learning. We show the applicability on a set of toy examples which pave the way for future methods providing solutions for high dimensional problems.
Exemplar Guided Active Learning
Authors: Kevin Leyton-Brown, Hadas Raviv, Dan Padnos, Shahar Lev, Barak Lenz Jason S Hartford
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We consider the problem of wisely using a limited budget to label a small subset of a large unlabeled dataset. For example, consider the NLP problem of word sense disambiguation. For any word, we have a set of candidate labels from a knowledge base, but the label set is not necessarily representative of what occurs in the data: there may exist labels in the knowledge base that very rarely occur in the corpus because the sense is rare in modern English; and conversely there may exist true labels that do not exist in our knowledge base. Our aim is to obtain a classifier that performs as well as possible on examples of each “common class” that occurs with frequency above a given threshold in the unlabeled set while annotating as few examples as possible from “rare classes” whose labels occur with less than this frequency. The challenge is that we are not informed which labels are common and which are rare, and the true label distribution may exhibit extreme skew. We describe an active learning approach that (1) explicitly searches for rare classes by leveraging the contextual embedding spaces provided by modern language models, and (2) incorporates a stopping rule that ignores classes once we prove that they occur below our target threshold with high probability. We prove that our algorithm only costs logarithmically more than a hypothetical approach that knows all true label frequencies and show experimentally that incorporating automated search can significantly reduce the number of samples needed to reach target accuracy levels.
Grasp Proposal Networks: An End-to-End Solution for Visual Learning of Robotic Grasps
Authors: Jian Chen, Qiaoyu Cao, Jianchi Zhang, Yunxin Tai, Lin Sun, Kui Jia Chaozheng Wu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Learning robotic grasps from visual observations is a promising yet challenging task. Recent research shows its great potential by preparing and learning from large-scale synthetic datasets. For the popular, 6 degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) grasp setting of parallel-jaw gripper, most of existing methods take the strategy of heuristically sampling grasp candidates and then evaluating them using learned scoring functions. This strategy is limited in terms of the conflict between sampling efficiency and coverage of optimal grasps. To this end, we propose in this work a novel, end-to-end \emph{Grasp Proposal Network (GPNet)}, to predict a diverse set of 6-DOF grasps for an unseen object observed from a single and unknown camera view. GPNet builds on a key design of grasp proposal module that defines \emph{anchors of grasp centers} at discrete but regular 3D grid corners, which is flexible to support either more precise or more diverse grasp predictions. To test GPNet, we contribute a synthetic dataset of 6-DOF object grasps; evaluation is conducted using rule-based criteria, simulation test, and real test. Comparative results show the advantage of our methods over existing ones. Notably, GPNet gains better simulation results via the specified coverage, which helps achieve a ready translation in real test. Our code and dataset are available on \url{https://github.com/CZ-Wu/GPNet}.
Node Embeddings and Exact Low-Rank Representations of Complex Networks
Authors: Cameron Musco, Konstantinos Sotiropoulos, Charalampos Tsourakakis Sudhanshu Chanpuriya
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Low-dimensional embeddings, from classical spectral embeddings to modern neural-net-inspired methods, are a cornerstone in the modeling and analysis of complex networks. Recent work by Seshadhri et al. (PNAS 2020) suggests that such embeddings cannot capture local structure arising in complex networks. In particular, they show that any network generated from a natural low-dimensional model cannot be both sparse and have high triangle density (high clustering coefficient), two hallmark properties of many real-world networks.
In this work we show that the results of Seshadhri et al. are intimately connected to the model they use rather than the low-dimensional structure of complex networks. Specifically, we prove that a minor relaxation of their model can generate sparse graphs with high triangle density. Surprisingly, we show that this same model leads to exact low-dimensional factorizations of many real-world networks. 
We give a simple algorithm based on logistic principal component analysis (LPCA) that succeeds in finding such exact embeddings. Finally, we perform a large number of experiments that verify the ability of very low-dimensional embeddings to capture local structure in real-world networks.
Fictitious Play for Mean Field Games: Continuous Time Analysis and Applications
Authors: Julien Perolat, Mathieu Lauriere, Matthieu Geist, Romuald Elie, Olivier Pietquin Sarah Perrin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper, we deepen the analysis of continuous time Fictitious Play learning algorithm to the consideration of various finite state Mean Field Game settings (finite horizon, $\gamma$-discounted), allowing in particular for the introduction of an additional common noise. 
  We first present a theoretical convergence analysis of the continuous time Fictitious Play process and prove that the induced exploitability decreases at a rate $O(\frac{1}{t})$. Such analysis emphasizes the use of exploitability as a relevant metric for evaluating the convergence towards a Nash equilibrium in the context of Mean Field Games. These theoretical contributions are supported by numerical experiments provided in either model-based or model-free settings. We provide hereby for the first time converging learning dynamics for Mean Field Games in the presence of common noise.
Steering Distortions to Preserve Classes and Neighbors in Supervised Dimensionality Reduction
Authors: Jaakko Peltonen, Michael Aupetit, Denys Dutykh, Sylvain Lespinats Benoît Colange
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Nonlinear dimensionality reduction of high-dimensional data is challenging as the low-dimensional embedding will necessarily contain distortions, and it can be hard to determine which distortions are the most important to avoid. When annotation of data into known relevant classes is available, it can be used to guide the embedding to avoid distortions that worsen class separation. The supervised mapping method introduced in the present paper, called ClassNeRV, proposes an original stress function that takes class annotation into account and evaluates embedding quality both in terms of false neighbors and missed neighbors. ClassNeRV shares the theoretical framework of a family of methods descended from Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (SNE). Our approach has a key advantage over previous ones: in the literature supervised methods often emphasize class separation at the price of distorting the data neighbors' structure; conversely, unsupervised methods provide better preservation of structure at the price of often mixing classes. Experiments show that ClassNeRV can preserve both neighbor structure and class separation, outperforming nine state of the art alternatives.
On Infinite-Width Hypernetworks
Authors: Tomer Galanti, Lior Wolf, Greg Yang Etai Littwin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: {\em Hypernetworks} are architectures that produce the weights of a task-specific {\em primary network}. A notable application of hypernetworks in the recent literature involves learning to output functional representations. In these scenarios, the hypernetwork learns a representation corresponding to the weights of a shallow MLP, which typically encodes shape or image information. While such representations have seen considerable success in practice, they remain lacking in the theoretical guarantees in the wide regime of the standard architectures. In this work, we study wide over-parameterized hypernetworks. We show that unlike typical architectures, infinitely wide hypernetworks do not guarantee convergence to a global minima under gradient descent. We further show that convexity can be achieved by increasing the dimensionality of the hypernetwork's output, to represent wide MLPs. In the dually infinite-width regime, we identify the functional priors of these architectures by deriving their corresponding GP and NTK kernels, the latter of which we refer to as the {\em hyperkernel}. As part of this study, we make a mathematical contribution by deriving tight bounds on high order Taylor expansion terms of standard fully connected ReLU networks.
Interferobot: aligning an optical interferometer by a reinforcement learning agent
Authors: Alexander Ulanov, Ekaterina Sazhina, Alexander Lvovsky Dmitry Sorokin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Limitations in acquiring training data restrict potential applications of deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods to the training of real-world robots. Here we train an RL agent to align a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, which is an essential part of many optical experiments, based on images of interference fringes acquired by a monocular camera. The agent is trained in a simulated environment, without any hand-coded features or a priori information about the physics, and subsequently transferred to a physical interferometer. Thanks to a set of domain randomizations simulating uncertainties in physical measurements, the agent successfully aligns this interferometer without any fine-tuning, achieving a performance level of a human expert.
Program Synthesis with Pragmatic Communication
Authors: Kevin Ellis, Marta Kryven, Josh Tenenbaum, Armando Solar-Lezama Yewen Pu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Program synthesis techniques construct or infer programs from user-provided specifications, such as input-output examples. Yet most specifications, especially those given by end-users, leave the synthesis problem radically ill-posed, because many programs may simultaneously satisfy the specification. Prior work resolves this ambiguity by using various inductive biases, such as a preference for simpler programs. This work introduces a new inductive bias derived by modeling the program synthesis task as rational communication, drawing insights from recursive reasoning models of pragmatics. Given a specification, we score a candidate program both on its consistency with the specification, and also whether a rational speaker would chose this particular specification to communicate that program. We develop efficient algorithms for such an approach when learning from input-output examples, and build a pragmatic program synthesizer over a simple grid-like layout domain. A user study finds that end-user participants communicate more effectively with the pragmatic program synthesizer over a non-pragmatic one.
Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation for Graph Nets
Authors: Luca Cavalleri, Dominique Beaini, Pietro Liò, Petar Veličković Gabriele Corso
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to be effective models for different predictive tasks on graph-structured data. Recent work on their expressive power has focused on isomorphism tasks and countable feature spaces. We extend this theoretical framework to include continuous features---which occur regularly in real-world input domains and within the hidden layers of GNNs---and we demonstrate the requirement for multiple aggregation functions in this context. Accordingly, we propose Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation (PNA), a novel architecture combining multiple aggregators with degree-scalers (which generalize the sum aggregator). Finally, we compare the capacity of different models to capture and exploit the graph structure via a novel benchmark containing multiple tasks taken from classical graph theory, alongside existing benchmarks from real-world domains, all of which demonstrate the strength of our model. With this work we hope to steer some of the GNN research towards new aggregation methods which we believe are essential in the search for powerful and robust models.
Reliable Graph Neural Networks via Robust Aggregation
Authors: Daniel Zügner, Stephan Günnemann Simon Geisler
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Perturbations targeting the graph structure have proven to be extremely effective in reducing the performance of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and traditional defenses such as adversarial training do not seem to be able to improve robustness. This work is motivated by the observation that adversarially injected edges effectively can be viewed as additional samples to a node's neighborhood aggregation function, which results in distorted aggregations accumulating over the layers. Conventional GNN aggregation functions, such as a sum or mean, can be distorted arbitrarily by a single outlier. We propose a robust aggregation function motivated by the field of robust statistics. Our approach exhibits the largest possible breakdown point of 0.5, which means that the bias of the aggregation is bounded as long as the fraction of adversarial edges of a node is less than 50%. Our novel aggregation function, Soft Medoid, is a fully differentiable generalization of the Medoid and therefore lends itself well for end-to-end deep learning. Equipping a GNN with our aggregation improves the robustness with respect to structure perturbations on Cora ML by a factor of 3 (and 5.5 on Citeseer) and by a factor of 8 for low-degree nodes.