mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Decoupled Neural Interfaces using Synthetic Gradients
Authors: Max Jaderberg and Wojciech Marian Czarnecki and Simon Osindero and Oriol Vinyals and Alex Graves and David Silver and Koray Kavukcuoglu
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Training directed neural networks typically requires forward-propagating data through a computation graph, followed by backpropagating error signal, to produce weight updates. All layers, or more generally, modules, of the network are therefore locked, in the sense that they must wait for the remainder of the network to execute forwards and propagate error backwards before they can be updated. In this work we break this constraint by decoupling modules by introducing a model of the future computation of the network graph. These models predict what the result of the modelled subgraph will produce using only local information. In particular we focus on modelling error gradients: by using the modelled <em>synthetic gradient</em> in place of true backpropagated error gradients we decouple subgraphs, and can update them independently and asynchronously i.e. we realise <em>decoupled neural interfaces</em>. We show results for feed-forward models, where every layer is trained asynchronously, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) where predicting one’s future gradient extends the time over which the RNN can effectively model, and also a hierarchical RNN system with ticking at different timescales. Finally, we demonstrate that in addition to predicting gradients, the same framework can be used to predict inputs, resulting in models which are decoupled in both the forward and backwards pass – amounting to independent networks which co-learn such that they can be composed into a single functioning corporation.
Scalable Generative Models for Multi-label Learning with Missing Labels
Authors: Vikas Jain and Nirbhay Modhe and Piyush Rai
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We present a scalable, generative framework for multi-label learning with missing labels. Our framework consists of a latent factor model for the binary label matrix, which is coupled with an exposure model to account for label missingness (i.e., whether a zero in the label matrix is indeed a zero or denotes a missing observation). The underlying latent factor model also assumes that the low-dimensional embeddings of each label vector are directly conditioned on the respective feature vector of that example. Our generative framework admits a simple inference procedure, such that the parameter estimation reduces to a sequence of simple weighted least-square regression problems, each of which can be solved easily, efficiently, and in parallel. Moreover, inference can also be performed in an online fashion using mini-batches of training examples, which makes our framework scalable for large data sets, even when using moderate computational resources. We report both quantitative and qualitative results for our framework on several benchmark data sets, comparing it with a number of state-of-the-art methods.
Sequence Tutor: Conservative Fine-Tuning of Sequence Generation Models with KL-control
Authors: Natasha Jaques and Shixiang Gu and Dzmitry Bahdanau and José Miguel Hernández-Lobato and Richard E. Turner and Douglas Eck
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: This paper proposes a general method for improving the structure and quality of sequences generated by a recurrent neural network (RNN), while maintaining information originally learned from data, as well as sample diversity. An RNN is first pre-trained on data using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), and the probability distribution over the next token in the sequence learned by this model is treated as a prior policy. Another RNN is then trained using reinforcement learning (RL) to generate higher-quality outputs that account for domain-specific incentives while retaining proximity to the prior policy of the MLE RNN. To formalize this objective, we derive novel off-policy RL methods for RNNs from KL-control. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated on two applications; 1) generating novel musical melodies, and 2) computational molecular generation. For both problems, we show that the proposed method improves the desired properties and structure of the generated sequences, while maintaining information learned from data.
Bayesian Optimization with Tree-structured Dependencies
Authors: Rodolphe Jenatton and Cedric Archambeau and Javier González and Matthias Seeger
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Bayesian optimization has been successfully used to optimize complex black-box functions whose evaluations are expensive. In many applications, like in deep learning and predictive analytics, the optimization domain is itself complex and structured. In this work, we focus on use cases where this domain exhibits a known dependency structure. The benefit of leveraging this structure is twofold: we explore the search space more efficiently and posterior inference scales more favorably with the number of observations than Gaussian Process-based approaches published in the literature. We introduce a novel surrogate model for Bayesian optimization which combines independent Gaussian Processes with a linear model that encodes a tree-based dependency structure and can transfer information between overlapping decision sequences. We also design a specialized two-step acquisition function that explores the search space more effectively. Our experiments on synthetic tree-structured functions and the tuning of feedforward neural networks trained on a range of binary classification datasets show that our method compares favorably with competing approaches.
Simultaneous Learning of Trees and Representations for Extreme Classification and Density Estimation
Authors: Yacine Jernite and Anna Choromanska and David Sontag
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We consider multi-class classification where the predictor has a hierarchical structure that allows for a very large number of labels both at train and test time. The predictive power of such models can heavily depend on the structure of the tree, and although past work showed how to learn the tree structure, it expected that the feature vectors remained static. We provide a novel algorithm to simultaneously perform representation learning for the input data and learning of the hierarchical predictor. Our approach optimizes an objective function which favors balanced and easily-separable multi-way node partitions. We theoretically analyze this objective, showing that it gives rise to a boosting style property and a bound on classification error. We next show how to extend the algorithm to conditional density estimation. We empirically validate both variants of the algorithm on text classification and language modeling, respectively, and show that they compare favorably to common baselines in terms of accuracy and running time.
From Patches to Images: A Nonparametric Generative Model
Authors: Geng Ji and Michael C. Hughes and Erik B. Sudderth
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We propose a hierarchical generative model that captures the self-similar structure of image regions as well as how this structure is shared across image collections. Our model is based on a novel, variational interpretation of the popular expected patch log-likelihood (EPLL) method as a model for randomly positioned grids of image patches. While previous EPLL methods modeled image patches with finite Gaussian mixtures, we use nonparametric Dirichlet process (DP) mixtures to create models whose complexity grows as additional images are observed. An extension based on the hierarchical DP then captures repetitive and self-similar structure via image-specific variations in cluster frequencies. We derive a structured variational inference algorithm that adaptively creates new patch clusters to more accurately model novel image textures. Our denoising performance on standard benchmarks is superior to EPLL and comparable to the state-of-the-art, and provides novel statistical justifications for common image processing heuristics. We also show accurate image inpainting results.
Contextual Decision Processes with low Bellman rank are PAC-Learnable
Authors: Nan Jiang and Akshay Krishnamurthy and Alekh Agarwal and John Langford and Robert E. Schapire
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: This paper studies systematic exploration for reinforcement learning (RL) with rich observations and function approximation. We introduce contextual decision processes (CDPs), that unify most prior RL settings. Our first contribution is a complexity measure, the Bellman rank, that we show enables tractable learning of near-optimal behavior in CDPs and is naturally small for many well-studied RL models. Our second contribution is a new RL algorithm that does systematic exploration to learn near-optimal behavior in CDPs with low Bellman rank. The algorithm requires a number of samples that is polynomial in all relevant parameters but independent of the number of unique contexts. Our approach uses Bellman error minimization with optimistic exploration and provides new insights into efficient exploration for RL with function approximation.
Efficient Nonmyopic Active Search
Authors: Shali Jiang and Gustavo Malkomes and Geoff Converse and Alyssa Shofner and Benjamin Moseley and Roman Garnett
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Active search is an active learning setting with the goal of identifying as many members of a given class as possible under a labeling budget. In this work, we first establish a theoretical hardness of active search, proving that no polynomial-time policy can achieve a constant factor approximation ratio with respect to the expected utility of the optimal policy. We also propose a novel, computationally efficient active search policy achieving exceptional performance on several real-world tasks. Our policy is nonmyopic, always considering the entire remaining search budget. It also automatically and dynamically balances exploration and exploitation consistent with the remaining budget, without relying on a parameter to control this tradeoff. We conduct experiments on diverse datasets from several domains: drug discovery, materials science, and a citation network. Our efficient nonmyopic policy recovers significantly more valuable points with the same budget than several alternatives from the literature, including myopic approximations to the optimal policy.
How to Escape Saddle Points Efficiently
Authors: Chi Jin and Rong Ge and Praneeth Netrapalli and Sham M. Kakade and Michael I. Jordan
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: This paper shows that a perturbed form of gradient descent converges to a second-order stationary point in a number iterations which depends only poly-logarithmically on dimension (i.e., it is almost “dimension-free”). The convergence rate of this procedure matches the well-known convergence rate of gradient descent to first-order stationary points, up to log factors. When all saddle points are non-degenerate, all second-order stationary points are local minima, and our result thus shows that perturbed gradient descent can escape saddle points almost for free. Our results can be directly applied to many machine learning applications, including deep learning. As a particular concrete example of such an application, we show that our results can be used directly to establish sharp global convergence rates for matrix factorization. Our results rely on a novel characterization of the geometry around saddle points, which may be of independent interest to the non-convex optimization community.
Tunable Efficient Unitary Neural Networks (EUNN) and their application to RNNs
Authors: Li Jing and Yichen Shen and Tena Dubcek and John Peurifoy and Scott Skirlo and Yann LeCun and Max Tegmark and Marin Soljačić
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Using unitary (instead of general) matrices in artificial neural networks (ANNs) is a promising way to solve the gradient explosion/vanishing problem, as well as to enable ANNs to learn long-term correlations in the data. This approach appears particularly promising for Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). In this work, we present a new architecture for implementing an Efficient Unitary Neural Network (EUNNs); its main advantages can be summarized as follows. Firstly, the representation capacity of the unitary space in an EUNN is fully tunable, ranging from a subspace of SU(N) to the entire unitary space. Secondly, the computational complexity for training an EUNN is merely $\mathcalO(1)$ per parameter. Finally, we test the performance of EUNNs on the standard copying task, the pixel-permuted MNIST digit recognition benchmark as well as the Speech Prediction Test (TIMIT). We find that our architecture significantly outperforms both other state-of-the-art unitary RNNs and the LSTM architecture, in terms of the final performance and/or the wall-clock training speed. EUNNs are thus promising alternatives to RNNs and LSTMs for a wide variety of applications.
An Adaptive Test of Independence with Analytic Kernel Embeddings
Authors: Wittawat Jitkrittum and Zoltán Szabó and Arthur Gretton
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: A new computationally efficient dependence measure, and an adaptive statistical test of independence, are proposed. The dependence measure is the difference between analytic embeddings of the joint distribution and the product of the marginals, evaluated at a finite set of locations (features). These features are chosen so as to maximize a lower bound on the test power, resulting in a test that is data-efficient, and that runs in linear time (with respect to the sample size n). The optimized features can be interpreted as evidence to reject the null hypothesis, indicating regions in the joint domain where the joint distribution and the product of the marginals differ most. Consistency of the independence test is established, for an appropriate choice of features. In real-world benchmarks, independence tests using the optimized features perform comparably to the state-of-the-art quadratic-time HSIC test, and outperform competing O(n) and O(n log n) tests.
StingyCD: Safely Avoiding Wasteful Updates in Coordinate Descent
Authors: Tyler B. Johnson and Carlos Guestrin
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Coordinate descent (CD) is a scalable and simple algorithm for solving many optimization problems in machine learning. Despite this fact, CD can also be very computationally wasteful. Due to sparsity in sparse regression problems, for example, the majority of CD updates often result in no progress toward the solution. To address this inefficiency, we propose a modified CD algorithm named “StingyCD.” By skipping over many updates that are guaranteed to not decrease the objective value, StingyCD significantly reduces convergence times. Since StingyCD only skips updates with this guarantee, however, StingyCD does not fully exploit the problem’s sparsity. For this reason, we also propose StingyCD+, an algorithm that achieves further speed-ups by skipping updates more aggressively. Since StingyCD and StingyCD+ rely on simple modifications to CD, it is also straightforward to use these algorithms with other approaches to scaling optimization. In empirical comparisons, StingyCD and StingyCD+ improve convergence times considerably for several L1-regularized optimization problems.
Differentially Private Chi-squared Test by Unit Circle Mechanism
Authors: Kazuya Kakizaki and Kazuto Fukuchi and Jun Sakuma
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: This paper develops differentially private mechanisms for $χ^2$ test of independence. While existing works put their effort into properly controlling the type-I error, in addition to that, we investigate the type-II error of differentially private mechanisms. Based on the analysis, we present unit circle mechanism: a novel differentially private mechanism based on the geometrical property of the test statistics. Compared to existing output perturbation mechanisms, our mechanism improves the dominated term of the type-II error from $O(1)$ to $O(\exp(-\sqrtN))$ where $N$ is the sample size. Furthermore, we introduce novel procedures for multiple $χ^2$ tests by incorporating the unit circle mechanism into the sparse vector technique and the exponential mechanism. These procedures can control the family-wise error rate (FWER) properly, which has never been attained by existing mechanisms.
Video Pixel Networks
Authors: Nal Kalchbrenner and Aäron van den Oord and Karen Simonyan and Ivo Danihelka and Oriol Vinyals and Alex Graves and Koray Kavukcuoglu
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We propose a probabilistic video model, the Video Pixel Network (VPN), that estimates the discrete joint distribution of the raw pixel values in a video. The model and the neural architecture reflect the time, space and color structure of video tensors and encode it as a four-dimensional dependency chain. The VPN approaches the best possible performance on the Moving MNIST benchmark, a leap over the previous state of the art, and the generated videos show only minor deviations from the ground truth. The VPN also produces detailed samples on the action-conditional Robotic Pushing benchmark and generalizes to the motion of novel objects.
Adaptive Feature Selection: Computationally Efficient Online Sparse Linear Regression under RIP
Authors: Satyen Kale and Zohar Karnin and Tengyuan Liang and Dávid Pál
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Online sparse linear regression is an online problem where an algorithm repeatedly chooses a subset of coordinates to observe in an adversarially chosen feature vector, makes a real-valued prediction, receives the true label, and incurs the squared loss. The goal is to design an online learning algorithm with sublinear regret to the best sparse linear predictor in hindsight. Without any assumptions, this problem is known to be computationally intractable. In this paper, we make the assumption that data matrix satisfies restricted isometry property, and show that this assumption leads to computationally efficient algorithms with sublinear regret for two variants of the problem. In the first variant, the true label is generated according to a sparse linear model with additive Gaussian noise. In the second, the true label is chosen adversarially.
Multi-fidelity Bayesian Optimisation with Continuous Approximations
Authors: Kirthevasan Kandasamy and Gautam Dasarathy and Jeff Schneider and Barnabás Póczos
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Bandit methods for black-box optimisation, such as Bayesian optimisation, are used in a variety of applications including hyper-parameter tuning and experiment design. Recently, <em>multi-fidelity</em> methods have garnered considerable attention since function evaluations have become increasingly expensive in such applications. Multi-fidelity methods use cheap approximations to the function of interest to speed up the overall optimisation process. However, most multi-fidelity methods assume only a finite number of approximations. On the other hand, in many practical applications, a continuous spectrum of approximations might be available. For instance, when tuning an expensive neural network, one might choose to approximate the cross validation performance using less data $N$ and/or few training iterations $T$. Here, the approximations are best viewed as arising out of a continuous two dimensional space $(N,T)$. In this work, we develop a Bayesian optimisation method, BOCA, for this setting. We characterise its theoretical properties and show that it achieves better regret than than strategies which ignore the approximations. BOCA outperforms several other baselines in synthetic and real experiments.
Schema Networks: Zero-shot Transfer with a Generative Causal Model of Intuitive Physics
Authors: Ken Kansky and Tom Silver and David A. Mély and Mohamed Eldawy and Miguel Lázaro-Gredilla and Xinghua Lou and Nimrod Dorfman and Szymon Sidor and Scott Phoenix and Dileep George
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: The recent adaptation of deep neural network-based methods to reinforcement learning and planning domains has yielded remarkable progress on individual tasks. Nonetheless, progress on task-to-task transfer remains limited. In pursuit of efficient and robust generalization, we introduce the Schema Network, an object-oriented generative physics simulator capable of disentangling multiple causes of events and reasoning backward through causes to achieve goals. The richly structured architecture of the Schema Network can learn the dynamics of an environment directly from data. We compare Schema Networks with Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic and Progressive Networks on a suite of Breakout variations, reporting results on training efficiency and zero-shot generalization, consistently demonstrating faster, more robust learning and better transfer. We argue that generalizing from limited data and learning causal relationships are essential abilities on the path toward generally intelligent systems.
Learning in POMDPs with Monte Carlo Tree Search
Authors: Sammie Katt and Frans A. Oliehoek and Christopher Amato
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: The POMDP is a powerful framework for reasoning under outcome and information uncertainty, but constructing an accurate POMDP model is difficult. Bayes-Adaptive Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (BA-POMDPs) extend POMDPs to allow the model to be learned during execution. BA-POMDPs are a Bayesian RL approach that, in principle, allows for an optimal trade-off between exploitation and exploration. Unfortunately, BA-POMDPs are currently impractical to solve for any non-trivial domain. In this paper, we extend the Monte-Carlo Tree Search method POMCP to BA-POMDPs and show that the resulting method, which we call BA-POMCP, is able to tackle problems that previous solution methods have been unable to solve. Additionally, we introduce several techniques that exploit the BA-POMDP structure to improve the efficiency of BA-POMCP along with proof of their convergence.
Meritocratic Fairness for Cross-Population Selection
Authors: Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth and Zhiwei Steven Wu
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We consider the problem of selecting a strong pool of individuals from several populations with incomparable skills (e.g. soccer players, mathematicians, and singers) in a fair manner. The quality of an individual is defined to be their relative rank (by cumulative distribution value) within their own population, which permits cross-population comparisons. We study algorithms which attempt to select the highest quality subset despite the fact that true CDF values are not known, and can only be estimated from the finite pool of candidates. Specifically, we quantify the regret in quality imposed by “meritocratic” notions of fairness, which require that individuals are selected with probability that is monotonically increasing in their true quality. We give algorithms with provable fairness and regret guarantees, as well as lower bounds, and provide empirical results which suggest that our algorithms perform better than the theory suggests. We extend our results to a sequential batch setting, in which an algorithm must repeatedly select subsets of individuals from new pools of applicants, but has the benefit of being able to compare them to the accumulated data from previous rounds.
On Approximation Guarantees for Greedy Low Rank Optimization
Authors: Rajiv Khanna and Ethan R. Elenberg and Alexandros G. Dimakis and Joydeep Ghosh and Sahand Negahban
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We provide new approximation guarantees for greedy low rank matrix estimation under standard assumptions of restricted strong convexity and smoothness. Our novel analysis also uncovers previously unknown connections between the low rank estimation and combinatorial optimization, so much so that our bounds are reminiscent of corresponding approximation bounds in submodular maximization. Additionally, we provide also provide statistical recovery guarantees. Finally, we present empirical comparison of greedy estimation with established baselines on two important real-world problems.
Graph-based Isometry Invariant Representation Learning
Authors: Renata Khasanova and Pascal Frossard
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Learning transformation invariant representations of visual data is an important problem in computer vision. Deep convolutional networks have demonstrated remarkable results for image and video classification tasks. However, they have achieved only limited success in the classification of images that undergo geometric transformations. In this work we present a novel Transformation Invariant Graph-based Network (TIGraNet), which learns graph-based features that are inherently invariant to isometric transformations such as rotation and translation of input images. In particular, images are represented as signals on graphs, which permits to replace classical convolution and pooling layers in deep networks with graph spectral convolution and dynamic graph pooling layers that together contribute to invariance to isometric transformation. Our experiments show high performance on rotated and translated images from the test set compared to classical architectures that are very sensitive to transformations in the data. The inherent invariance properties of our framework provide key advantages, such as increased resiliency to data variability and sustained performance with limited training sets.
Learning to Discover Cross-Domain Relations with Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Taeksoo Kim and Moonsu Cha and Hyunsoo Kim and Jung Kwon Lee and Jiwon Kim
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: While humans easily recognize relations between data from different domains without any supervision, learning to automatically discover them is in general very challenging and needs many ground-truth pairs that illustrate the relations. To avoid costly pairing, we address the task of discovering cross-domain relations given unpaired data. We propose a method based on a generative adversarial network that learns to discover relations between different domains (DiscoGAN). Using the discovered relations, our proposed network successfully transfers style from one domain to another while preserving key attributes such as orientation and face identity.
SplitNet: Learning to Semantically Split Deep Networks for Parameter Reduction and Model Parallelization
Authors: Juyong Kim and Yookoon Park and Gunhee Kim and Sung Ju Hwang
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We propose a novel deep neural network that is both lightweight and effectively structured for model parallelization. Our network, which we name as SplitNet, automatically learns to split the network weights into either a set or a hierarchy of multiple groups that use disjoint sets of features, by learning both the class-to-group and feature-to-group assignment matrices along with the network weights. This produces a tree-structured network that involves no connection between branched subtrees of semantically disparate class groups. SplitNet thus greatly reduces the number of parameters and requires significantly less computations, and is also embarrassingly model parallelizable at test time, since the network evaluation for each subnetwork is completely independent except for the shared lower layer weights that can be duplicated over multiple processors. We validate our method with two deep network models (ResNet and AlexNet) on two different datasets (CIFAR-100 and ILSVRC 2012) for image classification, on which our method obtains networks with significantly reduced number of parameters while achieving comparable or superior classification accuracies over original full deep networks, and accelerated test speed with multiple GPUs.
Cost-Optimal Learning of Causal Graphs
Authors: Murat Kocaoglu and Alex Dimakis and Sriram Vishwanath
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We consider the problem of learning a causal graph over a set of variables with interventions. We study the cost-optimal causal graph learning problem: For a given skeleton (undirected version of the causal graph), design the set of interventions with minimum total cost, that can uniquely identify any causal graph with the given skeleton. We show that this problem is solvable in polynomial time. Later, we consider the case when the number of interventions is limited. For this case, we provide polynomial time algorithms when the skeleton is a tree or a clique tree. For a general chordal skeleton, we develop an efficient greedy algorithm, which can be improved when the causal graph skeleton is an interval graph.
Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions
Authors: Pang Wei Koh and Percy Liang
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: How can we explain the predictions of a black-box model? In this paper, we use influence functions — a classic technique from robust statistics — to trace a model’s prediction through the learning algorithm and back to its training data, thereby identifying training points most responsible for a given prediction. To scale up influence functions to modern machine learning settings, we develop a simple, efficient implementation that requires only oracle access to gradients and Hessian-vector products. We show that even on non-convex and non-differentiable models where the theory breaks down, approximations to influence functions can still provide valuable information. On linear models and convolutional neural networks, we demonstrate that influence functions are useful for multiple purposes: understanding model behavior, debugging models, detecting dataset errors, and even creating visually-indistinguishable training-set attacks.
Sub-sampled Cubic Regularization for Non-convex Optimization
Authors: Jonas Moritz Kohler and Aurelien Lucchi
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We consider the minimization of non-convex functions that typically arise in machine learning. Specifically, we focus our attention on a variant of trust region methods known as cubic regularization. This approach is particularly attractive because it escapes strict saddle points and it provides stronger convergence guarantees than first- and second-order as well as classical trust region methods. However, it suffers from a high computational complexity that makes it impractical for large-scale learning. Here, we propose a novel method that uses sub-sampling to lower this computational cost. By the use of concentration inequalities we provide a sampling scheme that gives sufficiently accurate gradient and Hessian approximations to retain the strong global and local convergence guarantees of cubically regularized methods. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work that gives global convergence guarantees for a sub-sampled variant of cubic regularization on non-convex functions. Furthermore, we provide experimental results supporting our theory.
PixelCNN Models with Auxiliary Variables for Natural Image Modeling
Authors: Alexander Kolesnikov and Christoph H. Lampert
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We study probabilistic models of natural images and extend the autoregressive family of PixelCNN models by incorporating auxiliary variables. Subsequently, we describe two new generative image models that exploit different image transformations as auxiliary variables: a quantized grayscale view of the image or a multi-resolution image pyramid. The proposed models tackle two known shortcomings of existing PixelCNN models: 1) their tendency to focus on low-level image details, while largely ignoring high-level image information, such as object shapes, and 2) their computationally costly procedure for image sampling. We experimentally demonstrate benefits of our models, in particular showing that they produce much more realistically looking image samples than previous state-of-the-art probabilistic models.
Active Learning for Cost-Sensitive Classification
Authors: Akshay Krishnamurthy and Alekh Agarwal and Tzu-Kuo Huang and Daumé, III, Hal and John Langford
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We design an active learning algorithm for cost-sensitive multiclass classification: problems where different errors have different costs. Our algorithm, COAL, makes predictions by regressing to each label’s cost and predicting the smallest. On a new example, it uses a set of regressors that perform well on past data to estimate possible costs for each label. It queries only the labels that could be the best, ignoring the sure losers. We prove COAL can be efficiently implemented for any regression family that admits squared loss optimization; it also enjoys strong guarantees with respect to predictive performance and labeling effort. Our experiment with COAL show significant improvements in labeling effort and test cost over passive and active baselines.
Evaluating Bayesian Models with Posterior Dispersion Indices
Authors: Alp Kucukelbir and Yixin Wang and David M. Blei
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Probabilistic modeling is cyclical: we specify a model, infer its posterior, and evaluate its performance. Evaluation drives the cycle, as we revise our model based on how it performs. This requires a metric. Traditionally, predictive accuracy prevails. Yet, predictive accuracy does not tell the whole story. We propose to evaluate a model through posterior dispersion. The idea is to analyze how each datapoint fares in relation to posterior uncertainty around the hidden structure. This highlights datapoints the model struggles to explain and provides complimentary insight to datapoints with low predictive accuracy. We present a family of posterior dispersion indices (PDI) that capture this idea. We show how a PDI identifies patterns of model mismatch in three real data examples: voting preferences, supermarket shopping, and population genetics.
Resource-efficient Machine Learning in 2 KB RAM for the Internet of Things
Authors: Ashish Kumar and Saurabh Goyal and Manik Varma
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: This paper develops a novel tree-based algorithm, called Bonsai, for efficient prediction on IoT devices – such as those based on the Arduino Uno board having an 8 bit ATmega328P microcontroller operating at 16 MHz with no native floating point support, 2 KB RAM and 32 KB read-only flash. Bonsai maintains prediction accuracy while minimizing model size and prediction costs by: (a) developing a tree model which learns a single, shallow, sparse tree with powerful nodes; (b) sparsely projecting all data into a low-dimensional space in which the tree is learnt; and (c) jointly learning all tree and projection parameters. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that Bonsai can make predictions in milliseconds even on slow microcontrollers, can fit in KB of memory, has lower battery consumption than all other algorithms while achieving prediction accuracies that can be as much as 30% higher than state-of-the-art methods for resource-efficient machine learning. Bonsai is also shown to generalize to other resource constrained settings beyond IoT by generating significantly better search results as compared to Bing’s L3 ranker when the model size is restricted to 300 bytes. Bonsai’s code can be downloaded from (http://www.manikvarma.org/code/Bonsai/download.html).
Grammar Variational Autoencoder
Authors: Matt J. Kusner and Brooks Paige and José Miguel Hernández-Lobato
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Deep generative models have been wildly successful at learning coherent latent representations for continuous data such as natural images, artwork, and audio. However, generative modeling of discrete data such as arithmetic expressions and molecular structures still poses significant challenges. Crucially, state-of-the-art methods often produce outputs that are not valid. We make the key observation that frequently, discrete data can be represented as a parse tree from a context-free grammar. We propose a variational autoencoder which directly encodes from and decodes to these parse trees, ensuring the generated outputs are always syntactically valid. Surprisingly, we show that not only does our model more often generate valid outputs, it also learns a more coherent latent space in which nearby points decode to similar discrete outputs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our learned models by showing their improved performance in Bayesian optimization for symbolic regression and molecule generation.
Co-clustering through Optimal Transport
Authors: Charlotte Laclau and Ievgen Redko and Basarab Matei and Younès Bennani and Vincent Brault
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel method for co-clustering, an unsupervised learning approach that aims at discovering homogeneous groups of data instances and features by grouping them simultaneously. The proposed method uses the entropy regularized optimal transport between empirical measures defined on data instances and features in order to obtain an estimated joint probability density function represented by the optimal coupling matrix. This matrix is further factorized to obtain the induced row and columns partitions using multiscale representations approach. To justify our method theoretically, we show how the solution of the regularized optimal transport can be seen from the variational inference perspective thus motivating its use for co-clustering. The algorithm derived for the proposed method and its kernelized version based on the notion of Gromov-Wasserstein distance are fast, accurate and can determine automatically the number of both row and column clusters. These features are vividly demonstrated through extensive experimental evaluations.
Conditional Accelerated Lazy Stochastic Gradient Descent
Authors: Guanghui Lan and Sebastian Pokutta and Yi Zhou and Daniel Zink
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: In this work we introduce a conditional accelerated lazy stochastic gradient descent algorithm with optimal number of calls to a stochastic first-order oracle and convergence rate $O(1/ε^2)$ improving over the projection-free, Online Frank-Wolfe based stochastic gradient descent of (Hazan and Kale, 2012) with convergence rate $O(1/ε^4)$.
Consistent k-Clustering
Authors: Silvio Lattanzi and Sergei Vassilvitskii
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: The study of online algorithms and competitive analysis provides a solid foundation for studying the quality of irrevocable decision making when the data arrives in an online manner. While in some scenarios the decisions are indeed irrevocable, there are many practical situations when changing a previous decision is not impossible, but simply expensive. In this work we formalize this notion and introduce the consistent k-clustering problem. With points arriving online, the goal is to maintain a constant approximate solution, while minimizing the number of reclusterings necessary. We prove a lower bound, showing that $Ømega(k łog n)$ changes are necessary in the worst case for a wide range of objective functions. On the positive side, we give an algorithm that needs only $O(k^2 łog^4n)$ changes to maintain a constant competitive solution, an exponential improvement on the naive solution of reclustering at every time step. Finally, we show experimentally that our approach performs much better than the theoretical bound, with the number of changes growing approximately as $O(łog n)$.
Deep Spectral Clustering Learning
Authors: Marc T. Law and Raquel Urtasun and Richard S. Zemel
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Clustering is the task of grouping a set of examples so that similar examples are grouped into the same cluster while dissimilar examples are in different clusters. The quality of a clustering depends on two problem-dependent factors which are i) the chosen similarity metric and ii) the data representation. Supervised clustering approaches, which exploit labeled partitioned datasets have thus been proposed, for instance to learn a metric optimized to perform clustering. However, most of these approaches assume that the representation of the data is fixed and then learn an appropriate linear transformation. Some deep supervised clustering learning approaches have also been proposed. However, they rely on iterative methods to compute gradients resulting in high algorithmic complexity. In this paper, we propose a deep supervised clustering metric learning method that formulates a novel loss function. We derive a closed-form expression for the gradient that is efficient to compute: the complexity to compute the gradient is linear in the size of the training mini-batch and quadratic in the representation dimensionality. We further reveal how our approach can be seen as learning spectral clustering. Experiments on standard real-world datasets confirm state-of-the-art Recall@K performance.
Coordinated Multi-Agent Imitation Learning
Authors: Hoang M. Le and Yisong Yue and Peter Carr and Patrick Lucey
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We study the problem of imitation learning from demonstrations of multiple coordinating agents. One key challenge in this setting is that learning a good model of coordination can be difficult, since coordination is often implicit in the demonstrations and must be inferred as a latent variable. We propose a joint approach that simultaneously learns a latent coordination model along with the individual policies. In particular, our method integrates unsupervised structure learning with conventional imitation learning. We illustrate the power of our approach on a difficult problem of learning multiple policies for fine-grained behavior modeling in team sports, where different players occupy different roles in the coordinated team strategy. We show that having a coordination model to infer the roles of players yields substantially improved imitation loss compared to conventional baselines.
Bayesian inference on random simple graphs with power law degree distributions
Authors: Juho Lee and Creighton Heaukulani and Zoubin Ghahramani and Lancelot F. James and Seungjin Choi
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We present a model for random simple graphs with power law (i.e., heavy-tailed) degree distributions. To attain this behavior, the edge probabilities in the graph are constructed from Bertoin–Fujita–Roynette–Yor (BFRY) random variables, which have been recently utilized in Bayesian statistics for the construction of power law models in several applications. Our construction readily extends to capture the structure of latent factors, similarly to stochastic block-models, while maintaining its power law degree distribution. The BFRY random variables are well approximated by gamma random variables in a variational Bayesian inference routine, which we apply to several network datasets for which power law degree distributions are a natural assumption. By learning the parameters of the BFRY distribution via probabilistic inference, we are able to automatically select the appropriate power law behavior from the data. In order to further scale our inference procedure, we adopt stochastic gradient ascent routines where the gradients are computed on minibatches (i.e., subsets) of the edges in the graph.
Confident Multiple Choice Learning
Authors: Kimin Lee and Changho Hwang and KyoungSoo Park and Jinwoo Shin
Published in: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Ensemble methods are arguably the most trustworthy techniques for boosting the performance of machine learning models. Popular independent ensembles (IE) relying on naive averaging/voting scheme have been of typical choice for most applications involving deep neural networks, but they do not consider advanced collaboration among ensemble models. In this paper, we propose new ensemble methods specialized for deep neural networks, called confident multiple choice learning (CMCL): it is a variant of multiple choice learning (MCL) via addressing its overconfidence issue.In particular, the proposed major components of CMCL beyond the original MCL scheme are (i) new loss, i.e., confident oracle loss, (ii) new architecture, i.e., feature sharing and (iii) new training method, i.e., stochastic labeling. We demonstrate the effect of CMCL via experiments on the image classification on CIFAR and SVHN, and the foreground-background segmentation on the iCoseg. In particular, CMCL using 5 residual networks provides 14.05% and 6.60% relative reductions in the top-1 error rates from the corresponding IE scheme for the classification task on CIFAR and SVHN, respectively.