mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
One-Shot Object Detection with Co-Attention and Co-Excitation
Authors: Ting-I Hsieh, Yi-Chen Lo, Hwann-Tzong Chen, Tyng-Luh Liu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: This paper aims to tackle the challenging problem of one-shot object detection. Given a query image patch whose class label is not included in the training data, the goal of the task is to detect all instances of the same class in a target image. To this end, we develop a novel {\em co-attention and co-excitation} (CoAE) framework that makes contributions in three key technical aspects. First, we propose to use the non-local operation to explore the co-attention embodied in each query-target pair and yield region proposals accounting for the one-shot situation. Second, we formulate a squeeze-and-co-excitation scheme that can adaptively emphasize correlated feature channels to help uncover relevant proposals and eventually the target objects. Third, we design a margin-based ranking loss for implicitly learning a metric to predict the similarity of a region proposal to the underlying query, no matter its class label is seen or unseen in training. The resulting model is therefore a two-stage detector that yields a strong baseline on both VOC and MS-COCO under one-shot setting of detecting objects from both seen and never-seen classes.
Connections Between Mirror Descent, Thompson Sampling and the Information Ratio
Authors: Julian Zimmert, Tor Lattimore
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: The information-theoretic analysis by Russo and Van Roy [2014] in combination with minimax duality has proved a powerful tool for the analysis of online learning algorithms in full and partial information settings. In most applications there is a tantalising similarity to the classical analysis based on mirror descent. We make a formal connection, showing that the information-theoretic bounds in most applications are derived from existing techniques from online convex optimisation. Besides this, we improve best known regret guarantees for $k$-armed adversarial bandits, online linear optimisation on $\ell_p$-balls and bandits with graph feedback.
Are Anchor Points Really Indispensable in Label-Noise Learning?
Authors: Xiaobo Xia, Tongliang Liu, Nannan Wang, Bo Han, Chen Gong, Gang Niu, Masashi Sugiyama
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: In label-noise learning, the \textit{noise transition matrix}, denoting the probabilities that clean labels flip into noisy labels, plays a central role in building \textit{statistically consistent classifiers}. Existing theories have shown that the transition matrix can be learned by exploiting \textit{anchor points} (i.e., data points that belong to a specific class almost surely). However, when there are no anchor points, the transition matrix will be poorly learned, and those previously consistent classifiers will significantly degenerate. In this paper, without employing anchor points, we propose a \textit{transition-revision} ($T$-Revision) method to effectively learn transition matrices, leading to better classifiers. Specifically, to learn a transition matrix, we first initialize it by exploiting data points that are similar to anchor points, having high \textit{noisy class posterior probabilities}. Then, we modify the initialized matrix by adding a \textit{slack variable}, which can be learned and validated together with the classifier by using noisy data. Empirical results on benchmark-simulated and real-world label-noise datasets demonstrate that without using exact anchor points, the proposed method is superior to state-of-the-art label-noise learning methods.
SCAN: A Scalable Neural Networks Framework Towards Compact and Efficient Models
Authors: Linfeng Zhang, Zhanhong Tan, Jiebo Song, Jingwei Chen, Chenglong Bao, Kaisheng Ma
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Remarkable achievements have been attained by deep neural networks in various applications. However, the increasing depth and width of such models also lead to explosive growth in both storage and computation, which has restricted the deployment of deep neural networks on resource-limited edge devices. To address this problem, we propose the so-called SCAN framework for networks training and inference, which is orthogonal and complementary to existing acceleration and compression methods. The proposed SCAN firstly divides neural networks into multiple sections according to their depth and constructs shallow classifiers upon the intermediate features of different sections. Moreover, attention modules and knowledge distillation are utilized to enhance the accuracy of shallow classifiers. Based on this architecture, we further propose a threshold controlled scalable inference mechanism to approach human-like sample-specific inference. Experimental results show that SCAN can be easily equipped on various neural networks without any adjustment on hyper-parameters or neural networks architectures, yielding significant performance gain on CIFAR100 and ImageNet. Codes will be released on github soon.
Multi-Resolution Weak Supervision for Sequential Data
Authors: Paroma Varma, Frederic Sala, Shiori Sagawa, Jason Fries, Daniel Fu, Saelig Khattar, Ashwini Ramamoorthy, Ke Xiao, Kayvon Fatahalian, James Priest, Christopher Ré
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Since manually labeling training data is slow and expensive, recent industrial and scientific research efforts have turned to weaker or noisier forms of supervision sources. However, existing weak supervision approaches fail to model multi-resolution sources for sequential data, like video, that can assign labels to individual elements or collections of elements in a sequence. A key challenge in weak supervision is estimating the unknown accuracies and correlations of these sources without using labeled data. Multi-resolution sources exacerbate this challenge due to complex correlations and sample complexity that scales in the length of the sequence. We propose Dugong, the first framework to model multi-resolution weak supervision sources with complex correlations to assign probabilistic labels to training data. Theoretically, we prove that Dugong, under mild conditions, can uniquely recover the unobserved accuracy and correlation parameters and use parameter sharing to improve sample complexity. Our method assigns clinician-validated labels to population-scale biomedical video repositories, helping outperform traditional supervision by 36.8 F1 points and addressing a key use case where machine learning has been severely limited by the lack of expert labeled data. On average, Dugong improves over traditional supervision by 16.0 F1 points and existing weak supervision approaches by 24.2 F1 points across several video and sensor classification tasks.
Smoothing Structured Decomposable Circuits
Authors: Andy Shih, Guy Van den Broeck, Paul Beame, Antoine Amarilli
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We study the task of smoothing a circuit, i.e., ensuring that all children of a plus-gate mention the same variables. Circuits serve as the building blocks of state-of-the-art inference algorithms on discrete probabilistic graphical models and probabilistic programs. They are also important for discrete density estimation algorithms. Many of these tasks require the input circuit to be smooth. However, smoothing has not been studied in its own right yet, and only a trivial quadratic algorithm is known. This paper studies efficient smoothing for structured decomposable circuits. We propose a near-linear time algorithm for this task and explore lower bounds for smoothing decomposable circuits, using existing results on range-sum queries. Further, for the important case of All-Marginals, we show a more efficient linear-time algorithm. We validate experimentally the performance of our methods.
Bayesian Joint Estimation of Multiple Graphical Models
Authors: Lingrui Gan, Xinming Yang, Naveen Narisetty, Feng Liang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel Bayesian group regularization method based on the spike and slab Lasso priors for jointly estimating multiple graphical models. The proposed method can be used to estimate the common sparsity structure underlying the graphical models while capturing potential heterogeneity of the precision matrices corresponding to those models. Our theoretical results show that the proposed method enjoys the optimal rate of convergence in $\ell_\infty$ norm for estimation consistency and has a strong structure recovery guarantee even when the signal strengths over different graphs are heterogeneous. Through  simulation studies and an application to the capital bike-sharing network data, we demonstrate the competitive performance of our method compared to existing alternatives.
Blow: a single-scale hyperconditioned flow for non-parallel raw-audio voice conversion
Authors: Joan Serrà, Santiago Pascual, Carlos Segura Perales
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: End-to-end models for raw audio generation are a challenge, specially if they have to work with non-parallel data, which is a desirable setup in many situations. Voice conversion, in which a model has to impersonate a speaker in a recording, is one of those situations. In this paper, we propose Blow, a single-scale normalizing flow using hypernetwork conditioning to perform many-to-many voice conversion between raw audio. Blow is trained end-to-end, with non-parallel data, on a frame-by-frame basis using a single speaker identifier. We show that Blow compares favorably to existing flow-based architectures and other competitive baselines, obtaining equal or better performance in both objective and subjective evaluations. We further assess the impact of its main components with an ablation study, and quantify a number of properties such as the necessary amount of training data or the preference for source or target speakers.
Maximum Mean Discrepancy Gradient Flow
Authors: Michael Arbel, Anna Korba, Adil SALIM, Arthur Gretton
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We construct a Wasserstein gradient flow of the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and study its convergence properties.
  The MMD is an integral probability metric defined for a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), and serves as a metric on probability measures for a sufficiently rich RKHS.  We obtain conditions for convergence of the gradient flow towards a global optimum, that can be related to particle transport when optimizing neural networks.
  We also propose a way to regularize this MMD flow, based on an injection of noise in the gradient. This algorithmic fix comes with theoretical and empirical evidence.
The practical implementation of the flow is straightforward, since both the MMD and its gradient have simple closed-form expressions, which can be easily estimated with samples.
Causal Confusion in Imitation Learning
Authors: Pim de Haan, Dinesh Jayaraman, Sergey Levine
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Behavioral cloning reduces policy learning to supervised learning by training a discriminative model to predict expert actions given observations. Such discriminative models are non-causal: the training procedure is unaware of the causal structure of the interaction between the expert and the environment. We point out that ignoring causality is particularly damaging because of the distributional shift in imitation learning. In particular, it leads to a counter-intuitive "causal misidentification" phenomenon: access to more information can yield worse performance. We investigate how this problem arises, and propose a solution to combat it through targeted interventions---either environment interaction or expert queries---to determine the correct causal model. We show that causal misidentification occurs in several benchmark control domains as well as realistic driving settings, and validate our solution against DAgger and other baselines and ablations.
Dimensionality reduction: theoretical perspective on practical measures
Authors: Yair Bartal, Nova Fandina, Ofer Neiman
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Dimensionality reduction plays a central role in real-world applications for Machine Learning, among many fields. In particular,  metric dimensionality reduction where data from a general metric is mapped into low dimensional space, is often used as a first step before applying machine learning algorithms. In almost all these applications the quality of the embedding is measured by various average case criteria. Metric dimensionality reduction has also been studied in Math and TCS, within the extremely fruitful and influential field of metric embedding. Yet, the vast majority of theoretical research has been devoted to analyzing the worst case behavior of embeddings and therefore has little relevance to practical settings. The goal of this paper is to bridge the gap between theory and practice view-points of metric dimensionality reduction, laying the foundation for a theoretical study of more practically oriented analysis. This paper can be viewed as providing a comprehensive theoretical framework addressing a line of research initiated by VL [NeuroIPS' 18] who have set the goal of analyzing different distortion measurement criteria, with the lens of Machine Learning applicability, from both theoretical and practical perspectives.
We complement their work by considering some important and vastly used average case criteria, some of which originated within the well-known Multi-Dimensional Scaling framework.  While often studied in practice, no theoretical studies have thus far attempted at providing rigorous analysis of these criteria. In this paper we provide the first analysis of these, as well as the new distortion measure developed by [VL18] designed to possess Machine Learning desired properties. Moreover, we show that all measures considered can be adapted to possess similar qualities. The main consequences of our work are nearly tight bounds on the absolute values of all distortion criteria, as well as first approximation algorithms with provable guarantees.
MCP: Learning Composable Hierarchical Control with Multiplicative Compositional Policies
Authors: Xue Bin Peng, Michael Chang, Grace Zhang, Pieter Abbeel, Sergey Levine
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Humans are able to perform a myriad of sophisticated tasks by drawing upon skills acquired through prior experience. For autonomous agents to have this capability, they must be able to extract reusable skills from past experience that can be recombined in new ways for subsequent tasks. Furthermore, when controlling complex high-dimensional morphologies, such as humanoid bodies, tasks often require coordination of multiple skills simultaneously. Learning discrete primitives for every combination of skills quickly becomes prohibitive. Composable primitives that can be recombined to create a large variety of behaviors can be more suitable for modeling this combinatorial explosion. In this work, we propose multiplicative compositional policies (MCP), a method for learning reusable motor skills that can be composed to produce a range of complex behaviors. Our method factorizes an agent's skills into a collection of primitives, where multiple primitives can be activated simultaneously via multiplicative composition. This flexibility allows the primitives to be transferred and recombined to elicit new behaviors as necessary for novel tasks. We demonstrate that MCP is able to extract composable skills for highly complex simulated characters from pre-training tasks, such as motion imitation, and then reuse these skills to solve challenging continuous control tasks, such as dribbling a soccer ball to a goal, and picking up an object and transporting it to a target location.
Legendre Memory Units: Continuous-Time Representation in Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Aaron Voelker, Ivana Kajić, Chris Eliasmith
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We propose a novel memory cell for recurrent neural networks that dynamically maintains information across long windows of time using relatively few resources. The Legendre Memory Unit~(LMU) is mathematically derived to orthogonalize its continuous-time history -- doing so by solving $d$ coupled ordinary differential equations~(ODEs), whose phase space linearly maps onto sliding windows of time via the Legendre polynomials up to degree $d - 1$. Backpropagation across LMUs outperforms equivalently-sized LSTMs on a chaotic time-series prediction task, improves memory capacity by two orders of magnitude, and significantly reduces training and inference times. LMUs can efficiently handle temporal dependencies spanning $100\text{,}000$ time-steps, converge rapidly, and use few internal state-variables to learn complex functions spanning long windows of time -- exceeding state-of-the-art performance among RNNs on permuted sequential MNIST. These results are due to the network's disposition to learn scale-invariant features independently of step size. Backpropagation through the ODE solver allows each layer to adapt its internal time-step, enabling the network to learn task-relevant time-scales. We demonstrate that LMU memory cells can be implemented using $m$ recurrently-connected Poisson spiking neurons, $\mathcal{O}( m )$ time and memory, with error scaling as $\mathcal{O}( d / \sqrt{m} )$. We discuss implementations of LMUs on analog and digital neuromorphic hardware.
BatchBALD: Efficient and Diverse Batch Acquisition for Deep Bayesian Active Learning
Authors: Andreas Kirsch, Joost van Amersfoort, Yarin Gal
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We develop BatchBALD, a tractable approximation to the mutual information between a batch of points and model parameters, which we use as an acquisition function to select multiple informative points jointly for the task of deep Bayesian active learning. BatchBALD is a greedy linear-time $1 - \nicefrac{1}{e}$-approximate algorithm amenable to dynamic programming and efficient caching. We compare BatchBALD to the commonly used approach for batch data acquisition and find that the current approach acquires similar and redundant points, sometimes performing worse than randomly acquiring data. We finish by showing that, using BatchBALD to consider dependencies within an acquisition batch, we achieve new state of the art performance on standard benchmarks, providing substantial data efficiency improvements in batch acquisition.
Generalized Matrix Means for Semi-Supervised Learning with Multilayer Graphs
Authors: Pedro Mercado, Francesco Tudisco, Matthias Hein
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We study the task of semi-supervised learning on multilayer graphs by taking into account both labeled and unlabeled observations together with the information encoded by each individual graph layer. We propose a regularizer based on the generalized matrix mean, which is a one-parameter family of matrix means that includes the arithmetic, geometric and harmonic means as particular cases. We analyze it in expectation under a Multilayer Stochastic Block Model and verify numerically that it outperforms state of the art methods. Moreover, we introduce a matrix-free numerical scheme based on contour integral quadratures and Krylov subspace solvers that scales to large sparse multilayer graphs.
Efficiently Estimating Erdos-Renyi Graphs with Node Differential Privacy
Authors: Jonathan Ullman, Adam Sealfon
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We give a simple, computationally efficient, and node-differentially-private algorithm for estimating the parameter of an Erdos-Renyi graph---that is, estimating p in a G(n,p)---with near-optimal accuracy.  Our algorithm nearly matches the information-theoretically optimal exponential-time algorithm for the same problem due to Borgs et al. (FOCS 2018).  More generally, we give an optimal, computationally efficient, private algorithm for estimating the edge-density of any graph whose degree distribution is concentrated in a small interval.
Screening Sinkhorn Algorithm for Regularized Optimal Transport
Authors: Mokhtar Z. Alaya, Maxime Berar, Gilles Gasso, Alain Rakotomamonjy
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We introduce in this paper a novel strategy for efficiently approximating the Sinkhorn distance between two discrete measures. After identifying neglectable components of the dual solution of the regularized Sinkhorn problem, we propose to screen those components by directly setting them at that value before entering the Sinkhorn problem. This allows us to solve a smaller Sinkhorn problem while ensuring approximation with provable guarantees. More formally, the approach is based on a new formulation of dual of Sinkhorn divergence problem and on the KKT optimality conditions of this problem, which enable identification of dual components to be screened. This new analysis leads to the Screenkhorn algorithm. We illustrate the efficiency of Screenkhorn on complex tasks such as dimensionality reduction and domain adaptation involving regularized optimal transport.
Adaptive Density Estimation for Generative Models
Authors: Thomas Lucas, Konstantin Shmelkov, Karteek Alahari, Cordelia Schmid, Jakob Verbeek
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Unsupervised learning of generative models has seen tremendous progress over recent years, in particular due to generative adversarial networks (GANs), variational autoencoders, and flow-based models.  GANs have dramatically improved sample quality, but suffer from two drawbacks: (i) they mode-drop, \ie,  do not cover the full support of the train data, and (ii) they do not allow for likelihood evaluations on held-out data.  In contrast likelihood-based training encourages models to cover the full support of the train data, but yields poorer samples.  These mutual shortcomings can in principle be addressed by training generative latent variable models in a hybrid adversarial-likelihood manner.  However, we show that commonly made parametric assumptions create a conflict between them, making successful hybrid models non trivial.  As a solution, we propose the use of deep invertible transformations in the latent variable decoder.  This approach allows for likelihood computations in image space, is more efficient than fully invertible models, and can take full advantage of adversarial training.  We show that our model significantly improves over existing hybrid models: offering GAN-like samples, IS and FID scores that are competitive with fully adversarial models and improved likelihood scores.
Learning Deep Bilinear Transformation for Fine-grained Image Representation
Authors: Heliang Zheng, Jianlong Fu, Zheng-Jun Zha, Jiebo Luo
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Bilinear feature transformation has shown the state-of-the-art performance in learning fine-grained image representations. However, the computational cost to learn pairwise interactions between deep feature channels is prohibitively expensive, which restricts this powerful transformation to be used in deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose a deep bilinear transformation (DBT) block, which can be deeply stacked in convolutional neural networks to learn fine-grained image representations. The DBT block can uniformly divide input channels into several semantic groups. As bilinear transformation can be represented by calculating pairwise interactions within each group, the computational cost can be heavily relieved. The output of each block is further obtained by aggregating intra-group bilinear features, with residuals from the entire input features. We found that the proposed network achieves new state-of-the-art in several fine-grained image recognition benchmarks, including CUB-Bird, Stanford-Car, and FGVC-Aircraft.
Learning Compositional Neural Programs with Recursive Tree Search and Planning
Authors: Thomas PIERROT, Guillaume Ligner, Scott E Reed, Olivier Sigaud, Nicolas Perrin, Alexandre Laterre, David Kas, Karim Beguir, Nando de Freitas
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We propose a novel reinforcement learning algorithm, AlphaNPI, that incorpo-
rates the strengths of Neural Programmer-Interpreters (NPI) and AlphaZero. NPI
contributes structural biases in the form of modularity, hierarchy and recursion,
which are helpful to reduce sample complexity, improve generalization and in-
crease interpretability. AlphaZero contributes powerful neural network guided
search algorithms, which we augment with recursion. AlphaNPI only assumes
a hierarchical program specification with sparse rewards: 1 when the program
execution satisfies the specification, and 0 otherwise. This specification enables
us to overcome the need for strong supervision in the form of execution traces
and consequently train NPI models effectively with reinforcement learning. The
experiments show that AlphaNPI can sort as well as previous strongly supervised
NPI variants. The AlphaNPI agent is also trained on a Tower of Hanoi puzzle with
two disks and is shown to generalize to puzzles with an arbitrary number of disks.
The experiments also show that when deploying our neural network policies, it is
advantageous to do planning with guided Monte Carlo tree search.
Efficient and Accurate Estimation of Lipschitz Constants for Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Mahyar Fazlyab, Alexander Robey, Hamed Hassani, Manfred Morari, George Pappas
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Tight estimation of the Lipschitz constant for deep neural networks (DNNs) is useful in many applications ranging from robustness certification of classifiers to stability analysis of closed-loop systems with reinforcement learning controllers. Existing methods in the literature for estimating the Lipschitz constant suffer from either lack of accuracy or poor scalability. In this paper, we present a convex optimization framework to compute guaranteed upper bounds on the Lipschitz constant of DNNs both accurately and efficiently. Our main idea is to interpret activation functions as gradients of convex potential functions. Hence, they satisfy certain properties that can be described by quadratic constraints. This particular description allows us to pose the Lipschitz constant estimation problem as a semidefinite program (SDP). The resulting SDP can be adapted to increase either the estimation accuracy (by capturing the interaction between activation functions of different layers) or scalability (by decomposition and parallel implementation).  We illustrate the utility of our approach with a variety of experiments on randomly generated networks and on classifiers trained on the MNIST and Iris datasets. In particular, we experimentally demonstrate that our Lipschitz bounds are the most accurate compared to those in the literature. We also study the impact of adversarial training methods on the Lipschitz bounds of the resulting classifiers and show that our bounds can be used to efficiently provide robustness guarantees.
Mo' States Mo' Problems: Emergency Stop Mechanisms from Observation
Authors: Samuel Ainsworth, Matt Barnes, Siddhartha Srinivasa
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: In many environments, only a relatively small subset of the complete state space is necessary in order to accomplish a given task. We develop a simple technique using emergency stops (e-stops) to exploit this phenomenon. Using e-stops significantly improves sample complexity by reducing the amount of required exploration, while retaining a performance bound that efficiently trades off the rate of convergence with a small asymptotic sub-optimality gap. We analyze the regret behavior of e-stops and present empirical results in discrete and continuous settings demonstrating that our reset mechanism can provide order-of-magnitude speedups on top of existing reinforcement learning methods.
Kernelized Bayesian Softmax for Text Generation
Authors: Ning Miao, Hao Zhou, Chengqi Zhao, Wenxian Shi, Lei Li
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Neural models for text generation require a softmax layer with proper token embeddings during the decoding phase.
Most existing approaches adopt single point embedding for each token. 
However, a word may have multiple senses according to different context, some of which might be distinct. 
In this paper, we propose KerBS, a novel approach for learning better embeddings for text generation. 
KerBS embodies two advantages: 
(a) it employs a Bayesian composition of embeddings for words with multiple senses;
(b) it is adaptive to semantic variances of words and robust to rare sentence context by imposing learned kernels to capture the closeness of words (senses) in the embedding space.
Empirical studies show that KerBS significantly boosts the performance of several text generation tasks.
Bipartite expander Hopfield networks as self-decoding high-capacity error correcting codes
Authors: Rishidev Chaudhuri, Ila Fiete
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Neural network models of memory and error correction famously include the Hopfield network, which can directly store---and error-correct through its dynamics---arbitrary N-bit patterns, but only for ~N such patterns. On the other end of the spectrum, Shannon's coding theory established that it is possible to represent exponentially many states (~e^N) using N symbols in such a way that an optimal decoder could correct all noise upto a threshold. We prove that it is possible to construct an associative content-addressable network that combines the properties of strong error correcting codes and Hopfield networks: it simultaneously possesses exponentially many stable states, these states are robust enough, with large enough basins of attraction that they can be correctly recovered despite errors in a finite fraction of all nodes, and the errors are intrinsically corrected by the network’s own dynamics. The network is a two-layer Boltzmann machine with simple neural dynamics, low dynamic-range (binary) pairwise synaptic connections, and sparse expander graph connectivity. Thus, quasi-random sparse structures---characteristic of important error-correcting codes---may provide for high-performance computation in artificial neural networks and the brain.
Distributional Reward Decomposition for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zichuan Lin, Li Zhao, Derek Yang, Tao Qin, Tie-Yan Liu, Guangwen Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Many reinforcement learning (RL) tasks have specific properties that can be leveraged to modify existing RL algorithms to adapt to those tasks and further improve performance, and a general class of such properties is the multiple reward channel. In those environments the full reward can be decomposed into sub-rewards obtained from different channels. Existing work on reward decomposition either requires prior knowledge of the environment to decompose the full reward, or decomposes reward without prior knowledge but with degraded performance. In this paper, we propose Distributional Reward Decomposition for Reinforcement Learning (DRDRL), a novel reward decomposition algorithm which captures the multiple reward channel structure under distributional setting. Empirically, our method captures the multi-channel structure and discovers meaningful reward decomposition, without any requirements on prior knowledge. Consequently, our agent achieves better performance than existing methods on environments with multiple reward channels.
Provably Global Convergence of Actor-Critic: A Case for Linear Quadratic Regulator with Ergodic Cost
Authors: Zhuoran Yang, Yongxin Chen, Mingyi Hong, Zhaoran Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Despite the empirical success of the actor-critic algorithm, its theoretical understanding lags behind. In a broader context, actor-critic can be viewed as an online alternating update algorithm for bilevel optimization, whose convergence is known to be fragile. To understand the instability of actor-critic, we focus on its application to linear quadratic regulators, a simple yet fundamental setting of reinforcement learning. We establish a nonasymptotic convergence analysis of actor- critic in this setting. In particular, we prove that actor-critic finds a globally optimal pair of actor (policy) and critic (action-value function) at a linear rate of convergence. Our analysis may serve as a preliminary step towards a complete theoretical understanding of bilevel optimization with nonconvex subproblems, which is NP-hard in the worst case and is often solved using heuristics.
Fast-rate PAC-Bayes Generalization Bounds via Shifted Rademacher Processes
Authors: Jun Yang, Shengyang Sun, Daniel M. Roy
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: The developments of Rademacher complexity and PAC-Bayesian theory have been largely independent. One exception is the PAC-Bayes theorem of Kakade, Sridharan, and Tewari (2008), which is established via Rademacher complexity theory by viewing Gibbs classifiers as linear operators. The goal of this paper is to extend this bridge between Rademacher complexity and state-of-the-art PAC-Bayesian theory. We first demonstrate that one can match the fast rate of Catoni's PAC-Bayes bounds (Catoni, 2007) using shifted Rademacher processes (Wegkamp, 2003; Lecué and Mitchell, 2012; Zhivotovskiy and Hanneke, 2018). We then derive a new fast-rate PAC-Bayes bound in terms of the "flatness" of the empirical risk surface on which the posterior concentrates. Our analysis establishes a new framework for deriving fast-rate PAC-Bayes bounds and yields new insights on PAC-Bayesian theory.
DINGO: Distributed Newton-Type Method for Gradient-Norm Optimization
Authors: Rixon Crane, Fred Roosta
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: For optimization of a large sum of functions in a distributed computing environment, we present a novel communication efficient Newton-type algorithm that enjoys a variety of advantages over similar existing methods. Our algorithm, DINGO, is derived by optimization of the gradient's norm as a surrogate function. DINGO does not impose any specific form on the underlying functions and its application range extends far beyond convexity and smoothness. The underlying sub-problems of DINGO are simple linear least-squares, for which a plethora of efficient algorithms exist. DINGO involves a few hyper-parameters that are easy to tune and we theoretically show that a strict reduction in the surrogate objective is guaranteed, regardless of the selected hyper-parameters.
Deep ReLU Networks Have Surprisingly Few Activation Patterns
Authors: Boris Hanin, David Rolnick
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: The success of deep networks has been attributed in part to their expressivity: per parameter, deep networks can approximate a richer class of functions than shallow networks. In ReLU networks, the number of activation patterns is one measure of expressivity; and the maximum number of patterns grows exponentially with the depth. However, recent work has showed that the practical expressivity of deep networks - the functions they can learn rather than express - is often far from the theoretical maximum. In this paper, we show that the average number of activation patterns for ReLU networks at initialization is bounded by the total number of neurons raised to the input dimension. We show empirically that this bound, which is independent of the depth, is tight both at initialization and during training, even on memorization tasks that should maximize the number of activation patterns. Our work suggests that realizing the full expressivity of deep networks may not be possible in practice, at least with current methods.
Private Hypothesis Selection
Authors: Mark Bun, Gautam Kamath, Thomas Steinke, Steven Z. Wu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We provide a differentially private algorithm for hypothesis selection. 
  Given samples from an unknown probability distribution $P$ and a set of $m$ probability distributions $\mathcal{H}$, the goal is to output, in a $\varepsilon$-differentially private manner, a distribution from $\mathcal{H}$ whose total variation distance to $P$ is comparable to that of the best such distribution (which we denote by $\alpha$).
  The sample complexity of our basic algorithm is $O\left(\frac{\log m}{\alpha^2} + \frac{\log m}{\alpha \varepsilon}\right)$, representing a minimal cost for privacy when compared to the non-private algorithm. We also can handle infinite hypothesis classes $\mathcal{H}$ by relaxing to $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy.

  We apply our hypothesis selection algorithm to give learning algorithms for a number of natural distribution classes, including Gaussians, product distributions, sums of independent random variables, piecewise polynomials, and mixture classes.
  Our hypothesis selection procedure allows us to generically convert a cover for a class to a learning algorithm, complementing known learning lower bounds which are in terms of the size of the packing number of the class.
  As the covering and packing numbers are often closely  related, for constant $\alpha$, our algorithms achieve the optimal sample complexity for many classes of interest.
  Finally, we describe an application to private distribution-free PAC learning.
ObjectNet: A large-scale bias-controlled dataset for pushing the limits of object recognition models
Authors: Andrei Barbu, David Mayo, Julian Alverio, William Luo, Christopher Wang, Dan Gutfreund, Josh Tenenbaum, Boris Katz
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We collect a large real-world test set, ObjectNet, for object recognition with controls where object backgrounds, rotations, and imaging viewpoints are random. Most scientific experiments have controls, confounds which are removed from the data, to ensure that subjects cannot perform a task by exploiting trivial correlations in the data. Historically, large machine learning and computer vision datasets have lacked such controls. This has resulted in models that must be fine-tuned for new datasets and perform better on datasets than in real-world applications. When tested on ObjectNet, object detectors show a 40-45% drop in performance, with respect to their performance on other benchmarks, due to the controls for biases. Controls make ObjectNet robust to fine-tuning showing only small performance increases. We develop a highly automated platform that enables gathering datasets with controls by crowdsourcing image capturing and annotation. ObjectNet is the same size as the ImageNet test set (50,000 images), and by design does not come paired with a training set in order to encourage generalization. The dataset is both easier than ImageNet (objects are largely centered and unoccluded) and harder (due to the controls). Although we focus on object recognition here, data with controls can be gathered at scale using automated tools throughout machine learning to generate datasets that exercise models in new ways thus providing valuable feedback to researchers. This work opens up new avenues for research in generalizable, robust, and more human-like computer vision and in creating datasets where results are predictive of real-world performance.
Object landmark discovery through unsupervised adaptation
Authors: Enrique Sanchez, Georgios Tzimiropoulos
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: This paper proposes a method to ease the unsupervised learning of object landmark detectors. Similarly to previous methods, our approach is fully unsupervised in a sense that it does not require or make any use of annotated landmarks for the target object category. Contrary to previous works, we do however assume that a landmark detector, which has already learned a structured representation for a given object category in a fully supervised manner, is available. Under this setting, our main idea boils down to adapting the given pre-trained network to the target object categories in a fully unsupervised manner. To this end, our method uses the pre-trained network as a core which remains frozen and does not get updated during training, and learns, in an unsupervised manner, only a projection matrix to perform the adaptation to the target categories. By building upon an existing structured representation learned in a supervised manner, the optimization problem solved by our method is much more constrained with significantly less parameters to learn which seems to be important for the case of unsupervised learning. We show that our method surpasses fully unsupervised techniques trained from scratch as well as a strong baseline based on fine-tuning, and produces state-of-the-art results on several datasets. Code can be found at tiny.cc/GitHub-Unsupervised
Block Coordinate Regularization by Denoising
Authors: Yu Sun, Jiaming Liu, Ulugbek Kamilov
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We consider the problem of estimating a vector from its noisy measurements using a prior specified only through a denoising function. Recent work on plug-and-play priors (PnP) and regularization-by-denoising (RED) has shown the state-of-the-art performance of estimators under such priors in a range of imaging tasks. In this work, we develop a new block coordinate RED algorithm that decomposes a large-scale estimation problem into a sequence of updates over a small subset of the unknown variables. We theoretically analyze the convergence of the algorithm and discuss its relationship to the traditional proximal optimization. Our analysis complements and extends recent theoretical results for RED-based estimation methods. We numerically validate our method using several denoiser priors, including those based on convolutional neural network (CNN) denoisers.
Neural Temporal-Difference Learning Converges to Global Optima
Authors: Qi Cai, Zhuoran Yang, Jason Lee, Zhaoran Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Temporal-difference learning (TD), coupled with neural networks, is among the most fundamental building blocks of deep reinforcement learning. However, due to the nonlinearity in value function approximation, such a coupling leads to nonconvexity and even divergence in optimization. As a result, the global convergence of neural TD remains unclear. In this paper, we prove for the first time that neural TD converges at a sublinear rate to the global optimum of the mean-squared projected Bellman error for policy evaluation. In particular, we show how such global convergence is enabled by the overparametrization of neural networks, which also plays a vital role in the empirical success of neural TD. Beyond policy evaluation, we establish the global convergence of neural (soft) Q-learning, which is further connected to that of policy gradient algorithms.
Learning Nearest Neighbor Graphs from Noisy Distance Samples
Authors: Blake Mason, Ardhendu Tripathy, Robert Nowak
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We consider the problem of learning the nearest neighbor graph of a dataset of n items. The metric is unknown, but we can query an oracle to obtain a noisy estimate of the distance between any pair of items. This framework applies to problem domains where one wants to learn people's preferences from responses commonly modeled as noisy distance judgments. In this paper, we propose an active algorithm to find the graph with high probability and analyze its query complexity. In contrast to existing work that forces Euclidean structure, our method is valid for general metrics, assuming only symmetry and the triangle inequality. Furthermore, we demonstrate efficiency of our method empirically and theoretically, needing only O(n\log(n)\Delta^{-2}) queries in favorable settings, where \Delta^{-2} accounts for the effect of noise. Using crowd-sourced data collected for a subset of the UT~Zappos50K dataset, we apply our algorithm to learn which shoes people believe are most similar and show that it beats both an active baseline and ordinal embedding.
Visual Concept-Metaconcept Learning
Authors: Chi Han, Jiayuan Mao, Chuang Gan, Josh Tenenbaum, Jiajun Wu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32  (NeurIPS 2019) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Humans reason with concepts and metaconcepts: we recognize red and blue from visual input; we also understand that they are colors, i.e., red is an instance of color. In this paper, we propose the visual concept-metaconcept learner (VCML) for joint learning of concepts and metaconcepts from images and associated question-answer pairs. The key is to exploit the bidirectional connection between visual concepts and metaconcepts. Visual representations provide grounding cues for predicting relations between unseen pairs of concepts. Knowing that red and blue are instances of color, we generalize to the fact that green is also an instance of color since they all categorize the hue of objects. Meanwhile, knowledge about metaconcepts empowers visual concept learning from limited, noisy, and even biased data. From just a few examples of purple cubes we can understand a new color purple, which resembles the hue of the cubes instead of the shape of them. Evaluation on both synthetic and real-world datasets validates our claims.