mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Replacing Rewards with Examples: Example-Based Policy Search via Recursive Classification
Authors: Sergey Levine, Ruslan Salakhutdinov Ben Eysenbach
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead enable users to specify tasks simply by providing examples of successful outcomes? In this paper, we derive a control algorithm that maximizes the future probability of these successful outcome examples. Prior work has approached similar problems with a two-stage process, first learning a reward function and then optimizing this reward function using another reinforcement learning algorithm. In contrast, our method directly learns a value function from transitions and successful outcomes, without learning this intermediate reward function. Our method therefore requires fewer hyperparameters to tune and lines of code to debug. We show that our method satisfies a new data-driven Bellman equation, where examples take the place of the typical reward function term. Experiments show that our approach outperforms prior methods that learn explicit reward functions.
Hierarchical Skills for Efficient Exploration
Authors: Gabriel Synnaeve, Andreas Krause, Nicolas Usunier Jonas Gehring
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In reinforcement learning, pre-trained low-level skills have the potential to greatly facilitate exploration. However, prior knowledge of the downstream task is required to strike the right balance between generality (fine-grained control) and specificity (faster learning) in skill design. In previous work on continuous control, the sensitivity of methods to this trade-off has not been addressed explicitly, as locomotion provides a suitable prior for navigation tasks, which have been of foremost interest. In this work, we analyze this trade-off for low-level policy pre-training with a new benchmark suite of  diverse, sparse-reward tasks for bipedal robots. We alleviate the need for prior knowledge by proposing a hierarchical skill learning framework that acquires skills of varying complexity in an unsupervised manner. For utilization on downstream tasks, we present a three-layered hierarchical learning algorithm to automatically trade off between general and specific skills as required by the respective task. In our experiments, we show that our approach performs this trade-off effectively and achieves better results than current state-of-the-art methods for end-to-end hierarchical reinforcement learning and unsupervised skill discovery.
Evidential Softmax for Sparse Multimodal Distributions in Deep Generative Models
Authors: Mikhal Itkina, Ransalu Senanayake, Mykel J Kochenderfer Phil Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Many applications of generative models rely on the marginalization of their high-dimensional output probability distributions. Normalization functions that yield sparse probability distributions can make exact marginalization more computationally tractable. However, sparse normalization functions usually require alternative loss functions for training since the log-likelihood is undefined for sparse probability distributions. Furthermore, many sparse normalization functions often collapse the multimodality of distributions. In this work, we present ev-softmax, a sparse normalization function that preserves the multimodality of probability distributions. We derive its properties, including its gradient in closed-form, and introduce a continuous family of approximations to ev-softmax that have full support and can be trained with probabilistic loss functions such as negative log-likelihood and Kullback-Leibler divergence. We evaluate our method on a variety of generative models, including variational autoencoders and auto-regressive architectures. Our method outperforms existing dense and sparse normalization techniques in distributional accuracy. We demonstrate that ev-softmax successfully reduces the dimensionality of probability distributions while maintaining multimodality.
Submodular + Concave
Authors: Moran Feldman, Amin Karbasi Siddharth Mitra
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: It has been well established that first order optimization methods can converge to the maximal objective value of concave functions and provide constant factor approximation guarantees for (non-convex/non-concave) continuous submodular functions. In this work, we initiate the study of the maximization of functions of the form $F(x) = G(x) +C(x)$ over a solvable convex body $P$, where $G$ is a smooth DR-submodular function and $C$ is a smooth concave function. This class of functions is a strict extension of both concave and continuous DR-submodular functions for which no theoretical guarantee is known. We provide a suite of Frank-Wolfe style algorithms, which, depending on the nature of the objective function (i.e., if $G$ and $C$ are monotone or not, and non-negative or not) and on the nature of the set $P$ (i.e., whether it is downward closed or not), provide $1-1/e$, $1/e$, or $1/2$ approximation guarantees. We then use our algorithms to get a framework to smoothly interpolate between choosing a diverse set of elements from a given ground set (corresponding to the mode of a determinantal point process) and choosing a clustered set of elements (corresponding to the maxima of a suitable concave function). Additionally, we apply our algorithms to various functions in the above class (DR-submodular + concave) in both constrained and unconstrained settings, and show that our algorithms consistently outperform natural baselines.
DeepGEM: Generalized Expectation-Maximization for Blind Inversion
Authors: Jorge Castellanos, Yisong Yue, Zachary Ross, Katherine Bouman Angela Gao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Typically, inversion algorithms assume that a forward model, which relates a source to its resulting measurements, is known and fixed. Using collected indirect measurements and the forward model, the goal becomes to recover the source. When the forward model is unknown, or imperfect, artifacts due to model mismatch occur in the recovery of the source. In this paper, we study the problem of blind inversion: solving an inverse problem with unknown or imperfect knowledge of the forward model parameters. We propose DeepGEM, a variational Expectation-Maximization (EM) framework that can be used to solve for the unknown parameters of the forward model in an unsupervised manner. DeepGEM makes use of a normalizing flow generative network to efficiently capture complex posterior distributions, which leads to more accurate evaluation of the source's posterior distribution used in EM. We showcase the effectiveness of our DeepGEM approach by achieving strong performance on the challenging problem of blind seismic tomography, where we significantly outperform the standard method used in seismology.  We also demonstrate the generality of DeepGEM by applying it to a simple case of blind deconvolution.
Learning to Generate Visual Questions with Noisy Supervision
Authors: Lingfei Wu, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang, zhen he, Zhuoye Ding, Yun Xiao, Bo Long Shen Kai
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The task of visual question generation (VQG) aims to generate human-like neural questions from an image and potentially other side information (e.g., answer type or the answer itself). Existing works often suffer from the severe one image to many questions mapping problem, which generates uninformative and non-referential questions. Recent work has demonstrated that by leveraging double visual and answer hints, a model can faithfully generate much better quality questions. However, visual hints are not available naturally. Despite they proposed a simple rule-based similarity matching method to obtain candidate visual hints, they could be very noisy practically and thus restrict the quality of generated questions. In this paper, we present a novel learning approach for double-hints based VQG, which can be cast as a weakly supervised learning problem with noises. The key rationale is that the salient visual regions of interest can be viewed as a constraint to improve the generation procedure for producing high-quality questions. As a result, given the predicted salient visual regions of interest, we can focus on estimating the probability of being ground-truth questions, which in turn implicitly measures the quality of predicted visual hints. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin on a variety of metrics, including both automatic machine metrics and human evaluation.
Pure Exploration in Kernel and Neural Bandits
Authors: Dongruo Zhou, Ruoxi Jiang, Quanquan Gu, Rebecca Willett, Robert Nowak Yinglun Zhu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study pure exploration in bandits, where the dimension of the feature representation can be much larger than the number of arms. To overcome the curse of dimensionality, we propose to adaptively embed the feature representation of each arm into a lower-dimensional space and carefully deal with the induced model misspecifications. Our approach is conceptually very different from existing works that can either only handle low-dimensional linear bandits or passively deal with model misspecifications. We showcase the application of our approach to two pure exploration settings that were previously under-studied: (1) the reward function belongs to a possibly infinite-dimensional Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space, and (2) the reward function is nonlinear and can be approximated by neural networks. Our main results provide sample complexity guarantees that only depend on the effective dimension of the feature spaces in the kernel or neural representations. Extensive experiments conducted on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our methods.
Numerical Composition of Differential Privacy
Authors: Yin Tat Lee, Lukas Wutschitz Sivakanth Gopi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We give a fast algorithm to compose privacy guarantees of differentially private (DP) algorithms to arbitrary accuracy. Our method is based on the notion of privacy loss random variables to quantify the privacy loss of DP algorithms. The running time and memory needed for our algorithm to approximate the privacy curve of a DP algorithm composed with itself $k$ times is $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{k})$. This improves over the best prior method by Koskela et al. (2020) which requires $\tilde{\Omega}(k^{1.5})$ running time. We demonstrate the utility of our algorithm by accurately computing the privacy loss of DP-SGD algorithm of Abadi et al. (2016) and showing that our algorithm speeds up the privacy computations by a few orders of magnitude compared to prior work, while maintaining similar accuracy.
Coresets for Classification – Simplified and Strengthened
Authors: Cameron Musco, Anup Rao Tung Mai
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We give relative error coresets for training linear classifiers with a broad class of loss functions, including the logistic loss and hinge loss. Our construction achieves $(1\pm \epsilon)$ relative error with $\tilde O(d \cdot \mu_y(X)^2/\epsilon^2)$ points, where $\mu_y(X)$ is a natural complexity measure of the data matrix $X \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d}$ and label vector $y \in \{-1,1\}^n$, introduced by Munteanu et al. 2018. Our result is based on subsampling data points with probabilities proportional to their  $\ell_1$ $Lewis$ $weights$. It significantly improves on existing theoretical bounds and performs  well in practice, outperforming uniform subsampling along with other importance sampling methods. Our sampling distribution does not depend on the labels, so can be used for active learning. It also does not depend on the specific loss function, so a single coreset can be used  in multiple training scenarios.
Sequential Algorithms for Testing Closeness of Distributions
Authors: Omar Fawzi, Nicolas Flammarion, Aurélien Garivier Aadil Oufkir
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: What advantage do sequential procedures provide over batch algorithms for testing properties of unknown distributions? Focusing on the problem of testing whether two distributions $\mathcal{D}_1$ and $\mathcal{D}_2$ on $\{1,\dots, n\}$ are equal or $\epsilon$-far, we give several answers to this question. We show that for a small alphabet size $n$, there is a sequential algorithm that outperforms any batch algorithm by a factor of at least $4$ in terms sample complexity. For a general alphabet size $n$, we give a sequential algorithm that uses no more samples than its batch counterpart, and possibly fewer if the actual distance between $\mathcal{D}_1$ and $\mathcal{D}_2$ is larger than $\epsilon$. As a corollary, letting $\epsilon$ go to $0$, we obtain a sequential algorithm for testing closeness (with no a priori bound on the distance between $\mathcal{D}_1$ and $\mathcal{D}_2$) with a sample complexity $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\frac{n^{2/3}}{TV(\mathcal{D}_1, \mathcal{D}_2)^{4/3}})$: this improves over the $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\frac{n/\log n}{TV(\mathcal{D}_1, \mathcal{D}_2)^{2} })$ tester of [Daskalakis and Kawase 2017]  and is optimal up to multiplicative constants. We also establish limitations of sequential algorithms for the problem of testing closeness: they can improve the worst case number of samples by at most a constant factor.
Overlapping Spaces for Compact Graph Representations
Authors: Liudmila Prokhorenkova Kirill Shevkunov
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Various non-trivial spaces are becoming popular for embedding structured data such as graphs, texts, or images. Following spherical and hyperbolic spaces, more general product spaces have been proposed. However, searching for the best configuration of a product space is a resource-intensive procedure, which reduces the practical applicability of the idea. We generalize the concept of product space and introduce an overlapping space that does not have the configuration search problem. The main idea is to allow subsets of coordinates to be shared between spaces of different types (Euclidean, hyperbolic, spherical). As a result, we often need fewer coordinates to store the objects. Additionally, we propose an optimization algorithm that automatically learns the optimal configuration. Our experiments confirm that overlapping spaces outperform the competitors in graph embedding tasks with different evaluation metrics. We also perform an empirical analysis in a realistic information retrieval setup, where we compare all spaces by incorporating them into DSSM. In this case, the proposed overlapping space consistently achieves nearly optimal results without any configuration tuning. This allows for reducing training time, which can be essential in large-scale applications.
Hyperparameter Tuning is All You Need for LISTA
Authors: Jialin Liu, Zhangyang Wang, Wotao Yin Xiaohan Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learned Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithm (LISTA) introduces the concept of unrolling an iterative algorithm and training it like a neural network. It has had great success on sparse recovery. In this paper, we show that adding momentum to intermediate variables in the LISTA network achieves a better convergence rate and, in particular, the network with instance-optimal parameters is superlinearly convergent. Moreover, our new theoretical results lead to a practical approach of automatically and adaptively calculating the parameters of a LISTA network layer based on its previous layers. Perhaps most surprisingly, such an adaptive-parameter procedure reduces the training of LISTA to tuning only three hyperparameters from data: a new record set in the context of the recent advances on trimming down LISTA complexity. We call this new ultra-light weight network HyperLISTA. Compared to state-of-the-art LISTA models, HyperLISTA achieves almost the same performance on seen data distributions and performs better when tested on unseen distributions (speciﬁcally, those with different sparsity levels and nonzero magnitudes). Code is available: https://github.com/VITA-Group/HyperLISTA.
Foundations of Symbolic Languages for Model Interpretability
Authors: Daniel Báez, Pablo Barceló, Jorge Pérez, Bernardo Subercaseaux Marcelo Arenas
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Several queries and scores have recently been proposed to explain individual predictions over ML models. Examples include queries based on “anchors”, which are parts of an instance that are sufficient to justify its classification, and “feature-perturbation” scores such as SHAP. Given the need for flexible, reliable, and easy-to-apply interpretability methods for ML models, we foresee the need for developing declarative languages to naturally specify different explainability queries. We do this in a principled way by rooting such a language in a logic called FOIL, which allows for expressing many simple but important explainability queries, and might serve as a core for more expressive interpretability languages. We study the computational complexity of FOIL queries over two classes of ML models often deemed to be easily interpretable: decision trees and more general decision diagrams. Since the number of possible inputs for an ML model is exponential in its dimension, tractability of the FOIL evaluation problem is delicate but can be achieved by either restricting the structure of the models, or the fragment of FOIL being evaluated.  We also present a prototype implementation of FOIL wrapped in a high-level declarative language and perform experiments showing that such a language can be used in practice.
Bridging Offline Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning: A Tale of Pessimism
Authors: Banghua Zhu, Cong Ma, Jiantao Jiao, Stuart J. Russell Paria Rashidinejad
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main methods are used: imitation learning which is suitable for expert datasets, and vanilla offline RL which often requires uniform coverage datasets. From a practical standpoint, datasets often deviate from these two extremes and the exact data composition is usually unknown. To bridge this gap, we present a new offline RL framework that smoothly interpolates between the two extremes of data composition, hence unifying imitation learning and vanilla offline RL. The new framework is centered around a weak version of the concentrability coefficient that measures the deviation of the behavior policy from the expert policy alone. Under this new framework, we ask: can one develop an algorithm that achieves a minimax optimal rate adaptive to unknown data composition? To address this question, we consider a lower confidence bound (LCB) algorithm developed based on pessimism in the face of uncertainty in offline RL. We study finite-sample properties of LCB as well as information-theoretic limits in multi-armed bandits, contextual bandits, and Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our analysis reveals surprising facts about optimality rates. In particular, in both contextual bandits and RL, LCB achieves a faster rate of $1/N$ for nearly-expert datasets compared to the usual rate of $1/\sqrt{N}$ in offline RL, where $N$ is the batch dataset sample size. In contextual bandits with at least two contexts, we prove that LCB is adaptively optimal for the entire data composition range, achieving a smooth transition from imitation learning to offline RL. We further show that LCB is almost adaptively optimal in MDPs.
Impression learning: Online representation learning with synaptic plasticity
Authors: Benjamin Lyo, Eero P. Simoncelli, Cristina Savin Colin Bredenberg
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Understanding how the brain constructs statistical models of the sensory world remains a longstanding challenge for computational neuroscience. Here, we derive an unsupervised local synaptic plasticity rule that trains neural circuits to infer latent structure from sensory stimuli via a novel loss function for approximate online Bayesian inference. The learning algorithm is driven by a local error signal computed between two factors that jointly contribute to neural activity: stimulus drive and internal predictions --- the network's 'impression' of the stimulus. Physiologically, we associate these two components with the basal and apical dendrites of pyramidal neurons, respectively. We show that learning can be implemented online, is capable of capturing temporal dependencies in continuous input streams, and generalizes to hierarchical architectures. Furthermore, we demonstrate both analytically and empirically that the algorithm is more data-efficient than a three-factor plasticity alternative, enabling it to learn statistics of high-dimensional, naturalistic inputs. Overall, the model provides a bridge from mechanistic accounts of synaptic plasticity to algorithmic descriptions of unsupervised probabilistic learning and inference.
How Well do Feature Visualizations Support Causal Understanding of CNN Activations?
Authors: Judy Borowski, Robert Geirhos, Matthias Bethge, Thomas Wallis, Wieland Brendel Roland S. Zimmermann
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: A precise understanding of why units in an artificial network respond to certain stimuli would constitute a big step towards explainable artificial intelligence. One widely used approach towards this goal is to visualize unit responses via activation maximization. These feature visualizations are purported to provide humans with precise information about the image features that cause a unit to be activated - an advantage over other alternatives like strongly activating dataset samples. If humans indeed gain causal insight from visualizations, this should enable them to predict the effect of an intervention, such as how occluding a certain patch of the image (say, a dog's head) changes a unit's activation. Here, we test this hypothesis by asking humans to decide which of two square occlusions causes a larger change to a unit's activation.Both a large-scale crowdsourced experiment and measurements with experts show that on average the extremely activating feature visualizations by Olah et al. (2017) indeed help humans on this task ($68 \pm 4$% accuracy; baseline performance without any visualizations is $60 \pm 3$%). However, they do not provide any substantial advantage over other visualizations (such as e.g. dataset samples), which yield similar performance ($66\pm3$% to $67 \pm3$% accuracy). Taken together, we propose an objective psychophysical task to quantify the benefit of unit-level interpretability methods for humans, and find no evidence that a widely-used feature visualization method provides humans with better "causal understanding" of unit activations than simple alternative visualizations.
Fixes That Fail: Self-Defeating Improvements in Machine-Learning Systems
Authors: Chuan Guo, Awni Hannun, Laurens van der Maaten Ruihan Wu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Machine-learning systems such as self-driving cars or virtual assistants are composed of a large number of machine-learning models that recognize image content, transcribe speech, analyze natural language, infer preferences, rank options, etc. Models in these systems are often developed and trained independently, which raises an obvious concern: Can improving a machine-learning model make the overall system worse? We answer this question affirmatively by showing that improving a model can deteriorate the performance of downstream models, even after those downstream models are retrained. Such self-defeating improvements are the result of entanglement between the models in the system. We perform an error decomposition of systems with multiple machine-learning models, which sheds light on the types of errors that can lead to self-defeating improvements. We also present the results of experiments which show that self-defeating improvements emerge in a realistic stereo-based detection system for cars and pedestrians.
Coarse-to-fine Animal Pose and Shape Estimation
Authors: Gim Hee Lee Chen Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Most existing animal pose and shape estimation approaches reconstruct animal meshes with a parametric SMAL model. This is because the low-dimensional pose and shape parameters of the SMAL model makes it easier for deep networks to learn the high-dimensional animal meshes. However, the SMAL model is learned from scans of toy animals with limited pose and shape variations, and thus may not be able to represent highly varying real animals well. This may result in poor fittings of the estimated meshes to the 2D evidences, e.g. 2D keypoints or silhouettes.  To mitigate this problem, we propose a coarse-to-fine approach to reconstruct 3D animal mesh from a single image. The coarse estimation stage first estimates the pose, shape and translation parameters of the SMAL model. The estimated meshes are then used as a starting point by a graph convolutional network (GCN) to predict a per-vertex deformation in the refinement stage. This combination of SMAL-based and vertex-based representations benefits from both parametric and non-parametric representations. We design our mesh refinement GCN (MRGCN) as an encoder-decoder structure with hierarchical feature representations to overcome the limited receptive field of traditional GCNs. Moreover, we observe that the global image feature used by existing animal mesh reconstruction works is unable to capture detailed shape information for mesh refinement. We thus introduce a local feature extractor to retrieve a vertex-level feature and use it together with the global feature as the input of the MRGCN. We test our approach on the StanfordExtra dataset and achieve state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, we test the generalization capacity of our approach on the Animal Pose and BADJA datasets. Our code is available at the project website.
Meta-Learning Sparse Implicit Neural Representations
Authors: Jihoon Tack, Namhoon Lee, Jinwoo Shin Jaeho Lee
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Implicit neural representations are a promising new avenue of representing general signals by learning a continuous function that, parameterized as a neural network, maps the domain of a signal to its codomain; the mapping from spatial coordinates of an image to its pixel values, for example. Being capable of conveying fine details in a high dimensional signal, unboundedly of its domain, implicit neural representations ensure many advantages over conventional discrete representations. However, the current approach is difficult to scale for a large number of signals or a data set, since learning a neural representation---which is parameter heavy by itself---for each signal individually requires a lot of memory and computations. To address this issue, we propose to leverage a meta-learning approach in combination with network compression under a sparsity constraint, such that it renders a well-initialized sparse parameterization that evolves quickly to represent a set of unseen signals in the subsequent training. We empirically demonstrate that meta-learned sparse neural representations achieve a much smaller loss than dense meta-learned models with the same number of parameters, when trained to fit each signal using the same number of optimization steps.
Rethinking Space-Time Networks with Improved Memory Coverage for Efficient Video Object Segmentation
Authors: Yu-Wing Tai, Chi-Keung Tang Ho Kei Cheng
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper presents a simple yet effective approach to modeling space-time correspondences in the context of video object segmentation. Unlike most existing approaches, we establish correspondences directly between frames without re-encoding the mask features for every object, leading to a highly efficient and robust framework. With the correspondences, every node in the current query frame is inferred by aggregating features from the past in an associative fashion. We cast the aggregation process as a voting problem and find that the existing inner-product affinity leads to poor use of memory with a small (fixed) subset of memory nodes dominating the votes, regardless of the query. In light of this phenomenon, we propose using the negative squared Euclidean distance instead to compute the affinities. We validated that every memory node now has a chance to contribute, and experimentally showed that such diversified voting is beneficial to both memory efficiency and inference accuracy. The synergy of correspondence networks and diversified voting works exceedingly well, achieves new state-of-the-art results on both DAVIS and YouTubeVOS datasets while running significantly faster at 20+ FPS for multiple objects without bells and whistles.
Sparse Spiking Gradient Descent
Authors: Dan Goodman Nicolas Perez-Nieves
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: There is an increasing interest in emulating Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) on neuromorphic computing devices due to their low energy consumption. Recent advances have allowed training SNNs to a point where they start to compete with traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in terms of accuracy, while at the same time being energy efficient when run on neuromorphic hardware. However, the process of training SNNs is still based on dense tensor operations originally developed for ANNs which do not leverage the spatiotemporally sparse nature of SNNs. We present here the first sparse SNN backpropagation algorithm which achieves the same or better accuracy as current state of the art methods while being significantly faster and more memory efficient. We show the effectiveness of our method on real datasets of varying complexity (Fashion-MNIST, Neuromophic-MNIST and Spiking Heidelberg Digits) achieving a speedup in the backward pass of up to $150$x, and $85\%$ more memory efficient, without losing accuracy.
Rethinking Calibration of Deep Neural Networks: Do Not Be Afraid of Overconfidence
Authors: Lei Feng, Min-Ling Zhang Deng-Bao Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Capturing accurate uncertainty quantification of the prediction from deep neural networks is important in many real-world decision-making applications. A reliable predictor is expected to be accurate when it is confident about its predictions and indicate high uncertainty when it is likely to be inaccurate. However, modern neural networks have been found to be poorly calibrated, primarily in the direction of overconfidence. In recent years, there is a surge of research on model calibration by leveraging implicit or explicit regularization techniques during training, which obtain well calibration by avoiding overconfident outputs. In our study, we empirically found that despite the predictions obtained from these regularized models are better calibrated, they suffer from not being as calibratable, namely, it is harder to further calibrate their predictions with post-hoc calibration methods like temperature scaling and histogram binning. We conduct a series of empirical studies showing that overconfidence may not hurt final calibration performance if post-hoc calibration is allowed, rather, the penalty of confident outputs will compress the room of potential improvements in post-hoc calibration phase. Our experimental findings point out a new direction to improve calibration of DNNs by considering main training and post-hoc calibration as a unified framework.
Towards Efficient and Effective Adversarial Training
Authors: Sravanti Addepalli, Arya Baburaj, Venkatesh Babu R Gaurang Sriramanan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The vulnerability of Deep Neural Networks to adversarial attacks has spurred immense interest towards improving their robustness. However, present state-of-the-art adversarial defenses involve the use of 10-step adversaries during training, which renders them computationally infeasible for application to large-scale datasets. While the recent single-step defenses show promising direction, their robustness is not on par with multi-step training methods. In this work, we bridge this performance gap by introducing a novel Nuclear-Norm regularizer on network predictions to enforce function smoothing in the vicinity of data samples.  While prior works consider each data sample independently, the proposed regularizer uses the joint statistics of adversarial samples across a training minibatch to enhance optimization during both attack generation and training, obtaining state-of-the-art results amongst efficient defenses. We achieve further gains by incorporating exponential averaging of network weights over training iterations. We finally introduce a Hybrid training approach that combines the effectiveness of a two-step variant of the proposed defense with the efficiency of a single-step defense. We demonstrate superior results when compared to multi-step defenses such as TRADES and PGD-AT as well, at a significantly lower computational cost.
Intriguing Properties of Contrastive Losses
Authors: Calvin Luo, Lala Li Ting Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study three intriguing properties of contrastive learning. First, we generalize the standard contrastive loss to a broader family of losses, and we find that various instantiations of the generalized loss perform similarly under the presence of a multi-layer non-linear projection head. Second, we study if instance-based contrastive learning (with a global image representation) can learn well on images with multiple objects present. We find that meaningful hierarchical local features can be learned despite the fact that these objectives operate on global instance-level features. Finally, we study the phenomenon of feature suppression among competing features shared across augmented views, such as "color distribution" vs "object class". We construct datasets with explicit and controllable competing features, and show that, for contrastive learning, a few bits of easy-to-learn shared features can suppress, and even fully prevent, the learning of other sets of competing features. In scenarios where there are multiple objects in an image, the dominant object would suppress the learning of smaller objects. Existing contrastive learning methods critically rely on data augmentation to favor certain sets of features over others, and could suffer from learning saturation for scenarios where existing augmentations cannot fully address the feature suppression. This poses open challenges to existing contrastive learning techniques.
Detecting Moments and Highlights in Videos via Natural Language Queries
Authors: Tamara L Berg, Mohit Bansal Jie Lei
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Detecting customized moments and highlights from videos given natural language (NL) user queries is an important but under-studied topic. One of the challenges in pursuing this direction is the lack of annotated data. To address this issue, we present the Query-based Video Highlights (QVHighlights) dataset. It consists of over 10,000 YouTube videos, covering a wide range of topics, from everyday activities and travel in lifestyle vlog videos to social and political activities in news videos. Each video in the dataset is annotated with: (1) a human-written free-form NL query, (2) relevant moments in the video w.r.t. the query, and (3) five-point scale saliency scores for all query-relevant clips. This comprehensive annotation enables us to develop and evaluate systems that detect relevant moments as well as salient highlights for diverse, flexible user queries. We also present a strong baseline for this task, Moment-DETR, a transformer encoder-decoder model that views moment retrieval as a direct set prediction problem, taking extracted video and query representations as inputs and predicting moment coordinates and saliency scores end-to-end. While our model does not utilize any human prior, we show that it performs competitively when compared to well-engineered architectures. With weakly supervised pretraining using ASR captions, Moment-DETR substantially outperforms previous methods. Lastly, we present several ablations and visualizations of Moment-DETR. Data and code is publicly available at https://github.com/jayleicn/moment_detr.
Stochastic optimization under time drift: iterate averaging, step-decay schedules, and high probability guarantees
Authors: Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy, Zaid Harchaoui Joshua Cutler
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function that is evolving in time according to unknown and possibly stochastic dynamics. Such problems abound in the machine learning and signal processing literature, under the names of concept drift and stochastic tracking. We provide novel non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for stochastic algorithms with iterate averaging, focusing on bounds valid both in expectation and with high probability. Notably, we show that the tracking efficiency of the proximal stochastic gradient method depends only logarithmically on the initialization quality when equipped with a step-decay schedule.
Learning Stable Deep Dynamics Models for Partially Observed or Delayed Dynamical Systems
Authors: Philippe Wenk, Andreas Krause, Florian Dorfler Andreas Schlaginhaufen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learning how complex dynamical systems evolve over time is a key challenge in system identification. For safety critical systems, it is often crucial that the learned model is guaranteed to converge to some equilibrium point. To this end, neural ODEs regularized with neural Lyapunov functions are a promising approach when states are fully observed. For practical applications however, {\em partial observations} are the norm. As we will demonstrate, initialization of unobserved augmented states can become a key problem for neural ODEs. To alleviate this issue, we propose to augment the system's state with its history. Inspired by state augmentation in discrete-time systems, we thus obtain {\em neural delay differential equations}. Based on classical time delay stability analysis, we then show how to ensure stability of the learned models, and theoretically analyze our approach. Our experiments demonstrate its applicability to stable system identification of partially observed systems and learning a stabilizing feedback policy in delayed feedback control.
An Uncertainty Principle is a Price of Privacy-Preserving Microdata
Authors: Robert Ashmead, Ryan Cumings-Menon, Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Kifer, Philip Leclerc, William Sexton, Ashley Simpson, Christine Task, Pavel Zhuravlev John Abowd
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Privacy-protected microdata are often the desired output of a differentially private algorithm since  microdata is familiar and convenient for downstream users. However, there is a statistical price for this kind of convenience. We show that an uncertainty principle governs the trade-off between accuracy for a population of interest (``sum query'') vs. accuracy for its component sub-populations (``point queries''). Compared to differentially private query answering systems that are not required to produce microdata, accuracy can degrade by a logarithmic factor. For example, in the case of pure differential privacy, without the microdata requirement, one can provide noisy answers to the sum query and all point queries while guaranteeing that each answer has squared error $O(1/\epsilon^2)$. With the microdata requirement, one must choose between allowing an additional $\log^2(d)$ factor ($d$ is the number of point queries) for some point queries or allowing an extra $O(d^2)$ factor for the sum query. We present lower bounds for pure, approximate, and concentrated differential privacy. We propose mitigation strategies and create a collection of benchmark datasets that can be used for public study of this problem.
Fairness in Ranking under Uncertainty
Authors: David Kempe, Thorsten Joachims Ashudeep Singh
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Fairness has emerged as an important consideration in algorithmic decision making. Unfairness occurs when an agent with higher merit obtains a worse outcome than an agent with lower merit. Our central point is that a primary cause of unfairness is uncertainty. A principal or algorithm making decisions never has access to the agents' true merit, and instead uses proxy features that only imperfectly predict merit (e.g., GPA, star ratings, recommendation letters). None of these ever fully capture an agent's merit; yet existing approaches have mostly been defining fairness notions directly based on observed features and outcomes.Our primary point is that it is more principled to acknowledge and model the uncertainty explicitly. The role of observed features is to give rise to a posterior distribution of the agents' merits. We use this viewpoint to define a notion of approximate fairness in ranking. We call an algorithm $\phi$-fair (for $\phi \in [0,1]$) if it has the following property for all agents $x$ and all $k$: if agent $x$ is among the top $k$ agents with respect to merit with probability at least $\rho$ (according to the posterior merit distribution), then the algorithm places the agent among the top $k$ agents in its ranking with probability at least $\phi \rho$.We show how to compute rankings that optimally trade off approximate fairness against utility to the principal. In addition to the theoretical characterization, we present an empirical analysis of the potential impact of the approach in simulation studies. For real-world validation, we applied the approach in the context of a paper recommendation system that we built and fielded at the KDD 2020 conference.
Generalized Proximal Policy Optimization with Sample Reuse
Authors: Yannis Paschalidis, Christos G Cassandras James Queeney
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In real-world decision making tasks, it is critical for data-driven reinforcement learning methods to be both stable and sample efficient. On-policy methods typically generate reliable policy improvement throughout training, while off-policy methods make more efficient use of data through sample reuse. In this work, we combine the theoretically supported stability benefits of on-policy algorithms with the sample efficiency of off-policy algorithms. We develop policy improvement guarantees that are suitable for the off-policy setting, and connect these bounds to the clipping mechanism used in Proximal Policy Optimization. This motivates an off-policy version of the popular algorithm that we call Generalized Proximal Policy Optimization with Sample Reuse. We demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that our algorithm delivers improved performance by effectively balancing the competing goals of stability and sample efficiency.
Mosaicking to Distill: Knowledge Distillation from Out-of-Domain Data
Authors: Yifan Bao, Jie Song, Xinchao Wang, Donglin Xie, Chengchao Shen, Mingli Song Gongfan Fang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34  (NeurIPS 2021) (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Knowledge distillation~(KD) aims to craft a compact student model that imitates the behavior of a pre-trained teacher in a target domain. Prior KD approaches, despite their gratifying results, have largely relied on the premise that \emph{in-domain} data is available to carry out the knowledge transfer. Such an assumption, unfortunately, in many cases violates the practical setting, since the original training data or even the data domain is often unreachable due to privacy or copyright reasons. In this paper, we attempt to tackle an ambitious task, termed as \emph{out-of-domain} knowledge distillation~(OOD-KD), which allows us to conduct KD using only OOD data that can be readily obtained at a very low cost. Admittedly,  OOD-KD is by nature a highly challenging task due to the agnostic domain gap. To this end, we introduce a handy yet surprisingly efficacious approach, dubbed as~\textit{MosaicKD}. The key insight behind MosaicKD lies in that, samples from various domains share common local patterns, even though their global semantic may vary significantly; these shared local patterns, in turn, can be re-assembled analogous to mosaic tiling, to approximate the in-domain data and to further alleviating the domain discrepancy. In MosaicKD, this is achieved through a four-player min-max game, in which a generator, a discriminator, a student network,  are collectively trained in an adversarial manner, partially under the guidance of a pre-trained teacher. We validate MosaicKD over {classification and semantic segmentation tasks} across various benchmarks, and demonstrate that it yields results much superior to the state-of-the-art counterparts on OOD data. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/zju-vipa/MosaicKD}.