mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
On Self-Supervised Image Representations for GAN Evaluation
Authors: Stanislav Morozov, Andrey Voynov, Artem Babenko
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The embeddings from CNNs pretrained on Imagenet classification are de-facto standard image representations for assessing GANs via FID, Precision and Recall measures. Despite broad previous criticism of their usage for non-Imagenet domains, these embeddings are still the top choice in most of the GAN literature.

In this paper, we advocate the usage of the state-of-the-art self-supervised representations to evaluate GANs on the established non-Imagenet benchmarks. These representations, typically obtained via contrastive learning, are shown to provide better transfer to new tasks and domains, therefore, can serve as more universal embeddings of natural images. With extensive comparison of the recent GANs on the common datasets, we show that self-supervised representations produce a more reasonable ranking of models in terms of FID/Precision/Recall, while the ranking with classification-pretrained embeddings often can be misleading.
Shape or Texture: Understanding Discriminative Features in CNNs
Authors: Md Amirul Islam, Matthew Kowal, Patrick Esser, Sen Jia, Björn Ommer, Konstantinos G. Derpanis, Neil Bruce
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Contrasting the previous evidence that neurons in the later layers of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) respond to complex object shapes, recent studies have shown that CNNs actually exhibit a 'texture bias': given an image with both texture and shape cues (e.g., a stylized image), a CNN is biased towards predicting the category corresponding to the texture. However, these previous studies conduct experiments on the final classification output of the network, and fail to robustly evaluate the bias contained (i) in the latent representations, and (ii) on a per-pixel level. In this paper, we design a series of experiments that overcome these issues. We do this with the goal of better understanding what type of shape information contained in the network is discriminative, where shape information is encoded, as well as when the network learns about object shape during training. We show that a network learns the majority of overall shape information at the first few epochs of training and that this information is largely encoded in the last few layers of a CNN. Finally, we show that the encoding of shape does not imply the encoding of localized per-pixel semantic information. The experimental results and findings provide a more accurate understanding of the behaviour of current CNNs, thus helping to inform future design choices.
Extracting Strong Policies for Robotics Tasks from Zero-Order Trajectory Optimizers
Authors: Cristina Pinneri, Shambhuraj Sawant, Sebastian Blaes, Georg Martius
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Solving high-dimensional, continuous robotic tasks is a challenging optimization problem. Model-based methods that rely on zero-order optimizers like the cross-entropy method (CEM) have so far shown strong performance and are considered state-of-the-art in the model-based reinforcement learning community. However, this success comes at the cost of high computational complexity, being therefore not suitable for real-time control. In this paper, we propose a technique to jointly optimize the trajectory and distill a policy, which is essential for fast execution in real robotic systems. Our method builds upon standard approaches, like guidance cost and dataset aggregation, and introduces a novel adaptive factor which prevents the optimizer from collapsing to the learner's behavior at the beginning of the training. The extracted policies reach unprecedented performance on challenging tasks as making a humanoid stand up and opening a door without reward shaping
Representation Learning for Sequence Data with Deep Autoencoding Predictive Components
Authors: Junwen Bai, Weiran Wang, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose Deep Autoencoding Predictive Components (DAPC) -- a self-supervised representation learning method for sequence data, based on the intuition that useful representations of sequence data should exhibit a simple structure in the latent space. We encourage this latent structure by maximizing an estimate of \emph{predictive information} of latent feature sequences, which is the mutual information between the past and future windows at each time step. In contrast to the mutual information lower bound commonly used by contrastive learning, the estimate of predictive information we adopt is exact under a Gaussian assumption. Additionally, it can be computed without negative sampling. To reduce the degeneracy of the latent space extracted by powerful encoders and keep useful information from the inputs, we regularize predictive information learning with a challenging masked reconstruction loss. We demonstrate that our method recovers the latent space of noisy dynamical systems, extracts predictive features for forecasting tasks, and improves automatic speech recognition when used to pretrain the encoder on large amounts of unlabeled data.
Learning Value Functions in Deep Policy Gradients using Residual Variance
Authors: Yannis Flet-Berliac, reda ouhamma, odalric-ambrym maillard, Philippe Preux
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Policy gradient algorithms have proven to be successful in diverse decision making and control tasks. However, these methods suffer from high sample complexity and instability issues. In this paper, we address these challenges by providing a different approach for training the critic in the actor-critic framework. Our work builds on recent studies indicating that traditional actor-critic algorithms do not succeed in fitting the true value function, calling for the need to identify a better objective for the critic. In our method, the critic uses a new state-value (resp. state-action-value) function approximation that learns the value of the states (resp. state-action pairs) relative to their mean value rather than the absolute value as in conventional actor-critic. We prove the theoretical consistency of the new gradient estimator and observe dramatic empirical improvement across a variety of continuous control tasks and algorithms. Furthermore, we validate our method in tasks with sparse rewards, where we provide experimental evidence and theoretical insights.
Distilling Knowledge from Reader to Retriever for Question Answering
Authors: Gautier Izacard, Edouard Grave
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The task of information retrieval is an important component of many natural language processing systems, such as open domain question answering. While traditional methods were based on hand-crafted features, continuous representations based on neural networks recently obtained competitive results. A challenge of using such methods is to obtain supervised data to train the retriever model, corresponding to pairs of query and support documents. In this paper, we propose a technique to learn retriever models for downstream tasks, inspired by knowledge distillation, and which does not require annotated pairs of query and documents. Our approach leverages attention scores of a reader model, used to solve the task based on retrieved documents, to obtain synthetic labels for the retriever. We evaluate our method on question answering, obtaining state-of-the-art results.
Degree-Quant: Quantization-Aware Training for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Shyam Anil Tailor, Javier Fernandez-Marques, Nicholas Donald Lane
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated strong performance on a wide variety of tasks due to their ability to model non-uniform structured data. Despite their promise, there exists little research exploring methods to make them more efficient at inference time. In this work, we explore the viability of training quantized GNNs, enabling the usage of low precision integer arithmetic during inference. For GNNs seemingly unimportant choices in quantization implementation cause dramatic changes in performance. We identify the sources of error that uniquely arise when attempting to quantize GNNs, and propose an architecturally-agnostic and stable method, Degree-Quant, to improve performance over existing quantization-aware training baselines commonly used on other architectures, such as CNNs. We validate our method on six datasets and show, unlike previous quantization attempts, that models generalize to unseen graphs. Models trained with Degree-Quant for INT8 quantization perform as well as FP32 models in most cases; for INT4 models, we obtain up to 26% gains over the baselines. Our work enables up to 4.7x speedups on CPU when using INT8 arithmetic.
Fidelity-based Deep Adiabatic Scheduling
Authors: Eli Ovits, Lior Wolf
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Adiabatic quantum computation is a form of computation that acts by slowly interpolating a quantum system between an easy to prepare initial state and a final state that represents a solution to a given computational problem. The choice of the interpolation schedule is critical to the performance: if at a certain time point, the evolution is too rapid, the system has a high probability to transfer to a higher energy state, which does not represent a solution to the problem. On the other hand, an evolution that is too slow leads to a loss of computation time and increases the probability of failure due to decoherence. In this work, we train deep neural models to produce optimal schedules that are conditioned on the problem at hand.  We consider two types of problem representation: the Hamiltonian form, and the Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) form. A novel loss function that scores schedules according to their approximated success probability is introduced. We benchmark our approach on random QUBO problems, Grover search, 3-SAT, and MAX-CUT problems and show that our approach outperforms, by a sizable margin, the linear schedules as well as alternative approaches that were very recently proposed.
FairFil: Contrastive Neural Debiasing Method for Pretrained Text Encoders
Authors: Pengyu Cheng, Weituo Hao, Siyang Yuan, Shijing Si, Lawrence Carin
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Pretrained text encoders, such as BERT, have been applied increasingly in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, and have recently demonstrated significant performance gains. However, recent studies have demonstrated the existence of social bias in these pretrained NLP models. Although prior works have made progress on word-level debiasing, improved sentence-level fairness of pretrained encoders still lacks exploration. In this paper, we proposed the first neural debiasing method for a pretrained sentence encoder, which transforms the pretrained encoder outputs into debiased representations via a fair filter (FairFil) network. To learn the FairFil, we introduce a contrastive learning framework that not only minimizes the correlation between filtered embeddings and bias words but also preserves rich semantic information of the original sentences. On real-world datasets, our FairFil effectively reduces the bias degree of pretrained text encoders, while continuously showing desirable performance on downstream tasks. Moreover, our post hoc method does not require any retraining of the text encoders, further enlarging FairFil's application space.
My Body is a Cage: the Role of Morphology in Graph-Based Incompatible Control
Authors: Vitaly Kurin, Maximilian Igl, Tim Rocktäschel, Wendelin Boehmer, Shimon Whiteson
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Multitask Reinforcement Learning is a promising way to obtain models with better performance, generalisation, data efficiency, and robustness. Most existing work is limited to compatible settings, where the state and action space dimensions are the same across tasks. Graph Neural Networks (GNN) are one way to address incompatible environments, because they can process graphs of arbitrary size. They also allow practitioners to inject biases encoded in the structure of the input graph. Existing work in graph-based continuous control uses the physical morphology of the agent to construct the input graph, i.e., encoding limb features as node labels and using edges to connect the nodes if their corresponded limbs are physically connected.
In this work, we present a series of ablations on existing methods that show that morphological information encoded in the graph does not improve their performance. Motivated by the hypothesis that any benefits GNNs extract from the graph structure are outweighed by difficulties they create for message passing, we also propose Amorpheus, a transformer-based approach. Further results show that, while Amorpheus ignores the morphological information that GNNs encode, it nonetheless substantially outperforms GNN-based methods.
Universal Weakly Supervised Segmentation by Pixel-to-Segment Contrastive Learning
Authors: Tsung-Wei Ke, Jyh-Jing Hwang, Stella Yu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Weakly supervised segmentation requires assigning a label to every pixel based on training instances with partial annotations such as image-level tags, object bounding boxes, labeled points and scribbles. This task is challenging, as coarse annotations (tags, boxes) lack precise pixel localization whereas sparse annotations (points, scribbles) lack broad region coverage. Existing methods tackle these two types of weak supervision differently: Class activation maps are used to localize coarse labels and iteratively refine the segmentation model, whereas conditional random fields are used to propagate sparse labels to the entire image.

We formulate weakly supervised segmentation as a semi-supervised metric learning problem, where pixels of the same (different) semantics need to be mapped to the same (distinctive) features. We propose 4 types of contrastive relationships between pixels and segments in the feature space, capturing low-level image similarity, semantic annotation, co-occurrence, and feature affinity They act as priors; the pixel-wise feature can be learned from training images with any partial annotations in a data-driven fashion. In particular, unlabeled pixels in training images participate not only in data-driven grouping within each image, but also in discriminative feature learning within and across images. We deliver a universal weakly supervised segmenter with significant gains on Pascal VOC and DensePose. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/twke18/SPML.
Selective Classification Can Magnify Disparities Across Groups
Authors: Erik Jones, Shiori Sagawa, Pang Wei Koh, Ananya Kumar, Percy Liang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Selective classification, in which models can abstain on uncertain predictions, is a natural approach to improving accuracy in settings where errors are costly but abstentions are manageable. In this paper, we find that while selective classification can improve average accuracies, it can simultaneously magnify existing accuracy disparities between various groups within a population, especially in the presence of spurious correlations. We observe this behavior consistently across five vision and NLP datasets. Surprisingly, increasing abstentions can even decrease accuracies on some groups. To better understand this phenomenon, we study the margin distribution, which captures the model’s confidences over all predictions. For symmetric margin distributions, we prove that whether selective classification monotonically improves or worsens accuracy is fully determined by the accuracy at full coverage (i.e., without any abstentions) and whether the distribution satisfies a property we call left-log-concavity. Our analysis also shows that selective classification tends to magnify full-coverage accuracy disparities. Motivated by our analysis, we train distributionally-robust models that achieve similar full-coverage accuracies across groups and show that selective classification uniformly improves each group on these models. Altogether, our results suggest that selective classification should be used with care and underscore the importance of training models to perform equally well across groups at full coverage.
Beyond Categorical Label Representations for Image Classification
Authors: Boyuan Chen, Yu Li, Sunand Raghupathi, Hod Lipson
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We find that the way we choose to represent data labels can have a profound effect on the quality of trained models. For example, training an image classifier to regress audio labels rather than traditional categorical probabilities produces a more reliable classification. This result is surprising, considering that audio labels are more complex than simpler numerical probabilities or text. We hypothesize that high dimensional, high entropy label representations are generally more useful because they provide a stronger error signal. We support this hypothesis with evidence from various label representations including constant matrices, spectrograms, shuffled spectrograms, Gaussian mixtures, and uniform random matrices of various dimensionalities. Our experiments reveal that high dimensional, high entropy labels achieve comparable accuracy to text (categorical) labels on standard image classification tasks, but features learned through our label representations exhibit more robustness under various adversarial attacks and better effectiveness with a limited amount of training data. These results suggest that label representation may play a more important role than previously thought.
High-Capacity Expert Binary Networks
Authors: Adrian Bulat, Brais Martinez, Georgios Tzimiropoulos
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Network binarization is a promising hardware-aware direction for creating efficient deep models. Despite its memory and computational advantages, reducing the accuracy gap between binary models and their real-valued counterparts remains an unsolved challenging research problem. To this end, we make the following 3 contributions: (a) To increase model capacity, we propose Expert Binary Convolution, which, for the first time, tailors conditional computing to binary networks by learning to select one data-specific expert binary filter at a time conditioned on input features. (b) To increase representation capacity, we propose to address the inherent information bottleneck in binary networks by introducing an efficient width expansion mechanism which keeps the binary operations within the same budget. (c) To improve network design, we propose a principled binary network growth mechanism that unveils a set of network topologies of favorable properties. Overall, our method improves upon prior work, with no increase in computational cost, by $\sim6 \%$, reaching a groundbreaking $\sim 71\%$ on ImageNet classification. Code will be made available $\href{https://www.adrianbulat.com/binary-networks}{here}$.
Geometry-Aware Gradient Algorithms for Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Liam Li, Mikhail Khodak, Nina Balcan, Ameet Talwalkar
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent state-of-the-art methods for neural architecture search (NAS) exploit gradient-based optimization by relaxing the problem into continuous optimization over architectures and shared-weights, a noisy process that remains poorly understood. We argue for the study of single-level empirical risk minimization to understand NAS with weight-sharing, reducing the design of NAS methods to devising optimizers and regularizers that can quickly obtain high-quality solutions to this problem. Invoking the theory of mirror descent, we present a geometry-aware framework that exploits the underlying structure of this optimization to return sparse architectural parameters, leading to simple yet novel algorithms that enjoy fast convergence guarantees and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the latest NAS benchmarks in computer vision. Notably, we exceed the best published results for both CIFAR and ImageNet on both the DARTS search space and NAS-Bench-201; on the latter we achieve near-oracle-optimal performance on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. Together, our theory and experiments demonstrate a principled way to co-design optimizers and continuous relaxations of discrete NAS search spaces.
Uncertainty-aware Active Learning for Optimal Bayesian Classifier
Authors: Guang Zhao, Edward Dougherty, Byung-Jun Yoon, Francis Alexander, Xiaoning Qian
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: For pool-based active learning, in each iteration a candidate training sample is chosen for labeling by optimizing an acquisition function. In Bayesian classification, expected Loss Reduction~(ELR) methods maximize the expected reduction in the classification error given a new labeled candidate based on a one-step-look-ahead strategy. ELR is the optimal strategy with a single query; however, since such myopic strategies cannot identify the long-term effect of a query on the classification error, ELR may get stuck before reaching the optimal classifier.  In this paper, inspired by the mean objective cost of uncertainty (MOCU), a metric quantifying the uncertainty directly affecting the classification error, we propose an acquisition function based on a weighted form of MOCU. Similar to ELR, the proposed method focuses on the reduction of the uncertainty that pertains to the classification error. But unlike any other existing scheme, it provides the critical advantage that the resulting Bayesian active learning algorithm guarantees convergence to the optimal classifier of the true model. We demonstrate its performance with both synthetic and real-world datasets.
Rank the Episodes: A Simple Approach for Exploration in Procedurally-Generated Environments
Authors: Daochen Zha, Wenye Ma, Lei Yuan, Xia Hu, Ji Liu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Exploration under sparse reward is a long-standing challenge of model-free reinforcement learning. The state-of-the-art methods address this challenge by introducing intrinsic rewards to encourage exploration in novel states or uncertain environment dynamics. Unfortunately, methods based on intrinsic rewards often fall short in procedurally-generated environments, where a different environment is generated in each episode so that the agent is not likely to visit the same state more than once. Motivated by how humans distinguish good exploration behaviors by looking into the entire episode, we introduce RAPID, a simple yet effective episode-level exploration method for procedurally-generated environments. RAPID regards each episode as a whole and gives an episodic exploration score from both per-episode and long-term views. Those highly scored episodes are treated as good exploration behaviors and are stored in a small ranking buffer. The agent then imitates the episodes in the buffer to reproduce the past good exploration behaviors. We demonstrate our method on several procedurally-generated MiniGrid environments, a first-person-view 3D Maze navigation task from MiniWorld, and several sparse MuJoCo tasks. The results show that RAPID significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art intrinsic reward strategies in terms of sample efficiency and final performance. The code is available at https://github.com/daochenzha/rapid
Complex Query Answering with Neural Link Predictors
Authors: Erik Arakelyan, Daniel Daza, Pasquale Minervini, Michael Cochez
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Neural link predictors are immensely useful for identifying missing edges in large scale Knowledge Graphs. However, it is still not clear how to use these models for answering more complex queries that arise in a number of domains, such as queries using logical conjunctions ($\land$), disjunctions ($\lor$) and existential quantifiers ($\exists$), while accounting for missing edges. In this work, we propose a framework for efficiently answering complex queries on incomplete Knowledge Graphs. We translate each query into an end-to-end differentiable objective, where the truth value of each atom is computed by a pre-trained neural link predictor. We then analyse two solutions to the optimisation problem, including gradient-based and combinatorial search. In our experiments, the proposed approach produces more accurate results than state-of-the-art methods --- black-box neural models trained on millions of generated queries --- without the need of training on a large and diverse set of complex queries. Using orders of magnitude less training data, we obtain relative improvements ranging from 8% up to 40% in Hits@3 across different knowledge graphs containing factual information. Finally, we demonstrate that it is possible to explain the outcome of our model in terms of the intermediate solutions identified for each of the complex query atoms. All our source code and datasets are available online, at https://github.com/uclnlp/cqd.
Open Question Answering over Tables and Text
Authors: Wenhu Chen, Ming-Wei Chang, Eva Schlinger, William Yang Wang, William W. Cohen
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In open question answering (QA), the answer to a question is produced by retrieving and then analyzing documents that might contain answers to the question.  Most open QA systems have considered only retrieving information from unstructured text.  Here we consider for the first time open QA over {\em both} tabular and textual data and present a new large-scale dataset \emph{Open Table-and-Text Question Answering} (OTT-QA) to evaluate performance on this task. Most questions in OTT-QA require multi-hop inference across tabular data and unstructured text, and the evidence required to answer a question can be distributed in different ways over these two types of input, making evidence retrieval challenging---our baseline model using an iterative retriever and BERT-based reader achieves an exact match score less than 10\%. We then propose two novel techniques to address the challenge of retrieving and aggregating evidence for OTT-QA. The first technique is to use ``early fusion'' to group multiple highly relevant tabular and textual units into a fused block, which provides more context for the retriever to search for.  The second technique is to use a cross-block reader to model the cross-dependency between multiple retrieved evidence with global-local sparse attention. Combining these two techniques improves the score significantly, to above 27\%.
Rao-Blackwellizing the Straight-Through Gumbel-Softmax Gradient Estimator
Authors: Max B Paulus, Chris J. Maddison, Andreas Krause
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Gradient estimation in models with discrete latent variables is a challenging problem, because the simplest unbiased estimators tend to have high variance. To counteract this, modern estimators either introduce bias, rely on multiple function evaluations, or use learned, input-dependent baselines. Thus, there is a need for estimators that require minimal tuning, are computationally cheap, and have low mean squared error. In this paper, we show that the variance of the straight-through variant of the popular Gumbel-Softmax estimator can be reduced through Rao-Blackwellization without increasing the number of function evaluations. This provably reduces the mean squared error. We empirically demonstrate that this leads to variance reduction, faster convergence, and generally improved performance in two unsupervised latent variable models.
Exploring the Uncertainty Properties of Neural Networks’ Implicit Priors in the Infinite-Width Limit
Authors: Ben Adlam, Jaehoon Lee, Lechao Xiao, Jeffrey Pennington, Jasper Snoek
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Modern deep learning models have achieved great success in predictive accuracy for many data modalities. However, their application to many real-world tasks is restricted by poor uncertainty estimates, such as overconfidence on out-of-distribution (OOD) data and ungraceful failing under distributional shift. Previous benchmarks have found that ensembles of neural networks (NNs) are typically the best calibrated models on OOD data. Inspired by this, we leverage recent theoretical advances that characterize the function-space prior of an infinitely-wide NN as a Gaussian process, termed the neural network Gaussian process (NNGP). We use the NNGP with a softmax link function to build a probabilistic model for multi-class classification and marginalize over the latent Gaussian outputs to sample from the posterior. This gives us a better understanding of the implicit prior NNs place on function space and allows a direct comparison of the calibration of the NNGP and its finite-width analogue. We also examine the calibration of previous approaches to classification with the NNGP, which treat classification problems as regression to the one-hot labels. In this case the Bayesian posterior is exact, and we compare several heuristics to generate a categorical distribution over classes. We find these methods are well calibrated under distributional shift. Finally, we consider an infinite-width final layer in conjunction with a pre-trained embedding. This replicates the important practical use case of transfer learning and allows scaling to significantly larger datasets. As well as achieving competitive predictive accuracy, this approach is better calibrated than its finite width analogue.
Hopper: Multi-hop Transformer for Spatiotemporal Reasoning
Authors: Honglu Zhou, Asim Kadav, Farley Lai, Alexandru Niculescu-Mizil, Martin Renqiang Min, Mubbasir Kapadia, Hans Peter Graf
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper considers the problem of spatiotemporal object-centric reasoning in videos. Central to our approach is the notion of object permanence, i.e., the ability to reason about the location of objects as they move through the video while being occluded, contained or carried by other objects. Existing deep learning based approaches often suffer from spatiotemporal biases when applied to video reasoning problems. We propose Hopper, which uses a Multi-hop Transformer for reasoning object permanence in videos. Given a video and a localization query, Hopper reasons over image and object tracks to automatically hop over critical frames in an iterative fashion to predict the final position of the object of interest. We demonstrate the effectiveness of using a contrastive loss to reduce spatiotemporal biases. We evaluate over CATER dataset and find that Hopper achieves 73.2% Top-1 accuracy using just 1 FPS by hopping through just a few critical frames. We also demonstrate Hopper can perform long-term reasoning by building a CATER-h dataset that requires multi-step reasoning to localize objects of interest correctly.
Contrastive Divergence Learning is a Time Reversal Adversarial Game
Authors: Omer Yair, Tomer Michaeli
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Contrastive divergence (CD) learning is a classical method for fitting unnormalized statistical models to data samples. Despite its wide-spread use, the convergence properties of this algorithm are still not well understood. The main source of difficulty is an unjustified approximation which has been used to derive the gradient of the loss. In this paper, we present an alternative derivation of CD that does not require any approximation and sheds new light on the objective that is actually being optimized by the algorithm. Specifically, we show that CD is an adversarial learning procedure, where a discriminator attempts to classify whether a Markov chain generated from the model has been time-reversed. Thus, although predating generative adversarial networks (GANs) by more than a decade, CD is, in fact, closely related to these techniques. Our derivation settles well with previous observations, which have concluded that CD's update steps cannot be expressed as the gradients of any fixed objective function. In addition, as a byproduct, our derivation reveals a simple correction that can be used as an alternative to Metropolis-Hastings rejection, which is required when the underlying Markov chain is inexact (e.g., when using Langevin dynamics with a large step).
Unbiased Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection
Authors: Yen-Cheng Liu, Chih-Yao Ma, Zijian He, Chia-Wen Kuo, Kan Chen, Peizhao Zhang, Bichen Wu, Zsolt Kira, Peter Vajda
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Semi-supervised learning, i.e., training networks with both labeled and unlabeled data, has made significant progress recently. However, existing works have primarily focused on image classification tasks and neglected object detection which requires more annotation effort. In this work, we revisit the Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SS-OD) and identify the pseudo-labeling bias issue in SS-OD. To address this, we introduce Unbiased Teacher, a simple yet effective approach that jointly trains a student and a gradually progressing teacher in a mutually-beneficial manner. Together with a class-balance loss to downweight overly confident pseudo-labels, Unbiased Teacher consistently improved state-of-the-art methods by significant margins on COCO-standard, COCO-additional, and VOC datasets. Specifically, Unbiased Teacher achieves 6.8 absolute mAP improvements against state-of-the-art method when using 1% of labeled data on MS-COCO, achieves around 10 mAP improvements against the supervised baseline when using only 0.5, 1, 2% of labeled data on MS-COCO.
Auto Seg-Loss: Searching Metric Surrogates for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Hao Li, Chenxin Tao, Xizhou Zhu, Xiaogang Wang, Gao Huang, Jifeng Dai
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Designing proper loss functions is essential in training deep networks. Especially in the field of semantic segmentation, various evaluation metrics have been proposed for diverse scenarios. Despite the success of the widely adopted cross-entropy loss and its variants, the mis-alignment between the loss functions and evaluation metrics degrades the network performance. Meanwhile, manually designing loss functions for each specific metric requires expertise and significant manpower. In this paper, we propose to automate the design of metric-specific loss functions by searching differentiable surrogate losses for each metric. We substitute the non-differentiable operations in the metrics with parameterized functions, and conduct parameter search to optimize the shape of loss surfaces. Two constraints are introduced to regularize the search space and make the search efficient. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and Cityscapes demonstrate that the searched surrogate losses outperform the manually designed loss functions consistently. The searched losses can generalize well to other datasets and networks. Code shall be released at https://github.com/fundamentalvision/Auto-Seg-Loss.
Learning perturbation sets for robust machine learning
Authors: Eric Wong, J Zico Kolter
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Although much progress has been made towards robust deep learning, a significant gap in robustness remains between real-world perturbations and more narrowly defined sets typically studied in adversarial defenses. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by learning perturbation sets from data, in order to characterize real-world effects for robust training and evaluation. Specifically, we use a conditional generator that defines the perturbation set over a constrained region of the latent space. We formulate desirable properties that measure the quality of a learned perturbation set, and theoretically prove that a conditional variational autoencoder naturally satisfies these criteria. Using this framework, our approach can generate a variety of perturbations at different complexities and scales, ranging from baseline spatial transformations, through common image corruptions, to lighting variations. We measure the quality of our learned perturbation sets both quantitatively and qualitatively, finding that our models are capable of producing a diverse set of meaningful perturbations beyond the limited data seen during training. Finally, we leverage our learned perturbation sets to train models which are empirically and certifiably robust to adversarial image corruptions and adversarial lighting variations, while improving generalization on non-adversarial data. All code and configuration files for reproducing the experiments as well as pretrained model weights can be found at https://github.com/locuslab/perturbation_learning.
Into the Wild with AudioScope: Unsupervised Audio-Visual Separation of On-Screen Sounds
Authors: Efthymios Tzinis, Scott Wisdom, Aren Jansen, Shawn Hershey, Tal Remez, Dan Ellis, John R. Hershey
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent progress in deep learning has enabled many advances in sound separation and visual scene understanding. However, extracting sound sources which are apparent in natural videos remains an open problem. In this work, we present AudioScope, a novel audio-visual sound separation framework that can be trained without supervision to isolate on-screen sound sources from real in-the-wild videos. Prior audio-visual separation work assumed artificial limitations on the domain of sound classes (e.g., to speech or music), constrained the number of sources, and required strong sound separation or visual segmentation labels. AudioScope overcomes these limitations, operating on an open domain of sounds, with variable numbers of sources, and without labels or prior visual segmentation.  The training procedure for AudioScope uses mixture invariant training (MixIT) to separate synthetic mixtures of mixtures (MoMs) into individual sources, where noisy labels for mixtures are provided by an unsupervised audio-visual coincidence model. Using the noisy labels, along with attention between video and audio features, AudioScope learns to identify audio-visual similarity and to suppress off-screen sounds. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using a dataset of video clips extracted from open-domain YFCC100m video data. This dataset contains a wide diversity of sound classes recorded in unconstrained conditions, making the application of previous methods unsuitable. For evaluation and semi-supervised experiments, we collected human labels for presence of on-screen and off-screen sounds on a small subset of clips.
Projected Latent Markov Chain Monte Carlo: Conditional Sampling of Normalizing Flows
Authors: Chris Cannella, Mohammadreza Soltani, Vahid Tarokh
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We introduce Projected Latent Markov Chain Monte Carlo (PL-MCMC), a technique for sampling from the exact conditional distributions learned by normalizing flows. As a conditional sampling method, PL-MCMC enables Monte Carlo Expectation Maximization (MC-EM) training of normalizing flows from incomplete data. Through experimental tests applying normalizing flows to missing data tasks for a variety of data sets, we demonstrate the efficacy of PL-MCMC for conditional sampling from normalizing flows.
IDF++: Analyzing and Improving Integer Discrete Flows for Lossless Compression
Authors: Rianne van den Berg, Alexey A. Gritsenko, Mostafa Dehghani, Casper Kaae Sønderby, Tim Salimans
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper we analyse and improve integer discrete flows for lossless compression. Integer discrete flows are a recently proposed class of models that learn invertible transformations for integer-valued random variables. Their discrete nature makes them particularly suitable for lossless compression with entropy coding schemes. We start by investigating a recent theoretical claim that states that invertible flows for discrete random variables are less flexible than their continuous counterparts. We demonstrate with a proof that this claim does not hold for integer discrete flows due to the embedding of data with finite support into the countably infinite integer lattice. Furthermore, we zoom in on the effect of gradient bias due to the straight-through estimator in integer discrete flows, and demonstrate that its influence is highly dependent on architecture choices and less prominent than previously thought. Finally, we show how different architecture modifications improve the performance of this model class for lossless compression, and that they also enable more efficient compression: a model with half the number of flow layers performs on par with or better than the original integer discrete flow model.
Generating Furry Cars: Disentangling Object Shape and Appearance across Multiple Domains
Authors: Utkarsh Ojha, Krishna Kumar Singh, Yong Jae Lee
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We consider the novel task of learning disentangled representations of object shape and appearance across multiple domains (e.g., dogs and cars).  The goal is to learn a generative model that learns an intermediate distribution, which borrows a subset of properties from each domain, enabling the generation of images that did not exist in any domain exclusively.  This challenging problem requires an accurate disentanglement of object shape, appearance, and background from each domain, so that the appearance and shape factors from the two domains can be interchanged. We augment an existing approach that can disentangle factors within a single domain but struggles to do so across domains.  Our key technical contribution is to represent object appearance with a differentiable histogram of visual features, and to optimize the generator so that two images with the same latent appearance factor but different latent shape factors produce similar histograms. On multiple multi-domain datasets, we demonstrate our method leads to accurate and consistent appearance and shape transfer across domains.
Quantifying Differences in Reward Functions
Authors: Adam Gleave, Michael D Dennis, Shane Legg, Stuart Russell, Jan Leike
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: For many tasks, the reward function is inaccessible to introspection or too complex to be specified procedurally, and must instead be learned from user data. Prior work has evaluated learned reward functions by evaluating policies optimized for the learned reward. However, this method cannot distinguish between the learned reward function failing to reflect user preferences and the policy optimization process failing to optimize the learned reward. Moreover, this method can only tell us about behavior in the evaluation environment, but the reward may incentivize very different behavior in even a slightly different deployment environment. To address these problems, we introduce the Equivalent-Policy Invariant Comparison (EPIC) distance to quantify the difference between two reward functions directly, without a policy optimization step. We prove EPIC is invariant on an equivalence class of reward functions that always induce the same optimal policy. Furthermore, we find EPIC can be efficiently approximated and is more robust than baselines to the choice of coverage distribution. Finally, we show that EPIC distance bounds the regret of optimal policies even under different transition dynamics, and we confirm empirically that it predicts policy training success. Our source code is available at https://github.com/HumanCompatibleAI/evaluating-rewards.
Protecting DNNs from Theft using an Ensemble of Diverse Models
Authors: Sanjay Kariyappa, Atul Prakash, Moinuddin K Qureshi
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Several recent works have demonstrated highly effective model stealing (MS) attacks on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in black-box settings, even when the training data is unavailable. These attacks typically use some form of Out of Distribution (OOD) data to query the target model and use the predictions obtained to train a clone model. Such a clone model learns to approximate the decision boundary of the target model, achieving high accuracy on in-distribution examples. We propose Ensemble of Diverse Models (EDM) to defend against such MS attacks. EDM is made up of models that are trained to produce dissimilar predictions for OOD inputs. By using a different member of the ensemble to service different queries, our defense produces predictions that are highly discontinuous in the input space for the adversary's OOD queries. Such discontinuities cause the clone model trained on these predictions to have poor generalization on in-distribution examples. Our evaluations on several image classification tasks demonstrate that EDM defense can severely degrade the accuracy of clone models (up to $39.7\%$). Our defense has minimal impact on the target accuracy, negligible computational costs during inference, and is compatible with existing defenses for MS attacks.
Winning the L2RPN Challenge: Power Grid Management via Semi-Markov Afterstate Actor-Critic
Authors: Deunsol Yoon, Sunghoon Hong, Byung-Jun Lee, Kee-Eung Kim
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Safe and reliable electricity transmission in power grids is crucial for modern society. It is thus quite natural that there has been a growing interest in the automatic management of power grids, exempliﬁed by the Learning to Run a Power Network Challenge (L2RPN), modeling the problem as a reinforcement learning (RL) task. However, it is highly challenging to manage a real-world scale power grid, mostly due to the massive scale of its state and action space. In this paper, we present an off-policy actor-critic approach that effectively tackles the unique challenges in power grid management by RL, adopting the hierarchical policy together with the afterstate representation. Our agent ranked ﬁrst in the latest challenge (L2RPN WCCI 2020), being able to avoid disastrous situations while maintaining the highest level of operational efﬁciency in every test scenarios. This paper provides a formal description of the algorithmic aspect of our approach, as well as further experimental studies on diverse power grids.