mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Neural Architecture Generator Optimization
Authors: Robin Ru, Pedro Esperança, Fabio Maria Carlucci
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Neural Architecture Search (NAS) was first proposed to achieve state-of-the-art performance through the discovery of new architecture patterns, without human intervention. An over-reliance on expert knowledge in the search space design has however led to increased performance (local optima) without significant architectural breakthroughs, thus preventing truly novel solutions from being reached. In this work we 1) are the first to investigate casting NAS as a problem of finding the optimal network generator and 2) we propose a new, hierarchical and graph-based search space capable of representing an extremely large variety of network types, yet only requiring few continuous hyper-parameters. This greatly reduces the dimensionality of the problem, enabling the effective use of Bayesian Optimisation as a search strategy. At the same time, we expand the range of valid architectures, motivating a multi-objective learning approach. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy on six benchmark datasets and show that our search space generates extremely lightweight yet highly competitive models.
MetaPoison: Practical General-purpose Clean-label Data Poisoning
Authors: W. Ronny Huang, Jonas Geiping, Liam Fowl, Gavin Taylor, Tom Goldstein
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Data poisoning---the process by which an attacker takes control of a model by making imperceptible changes to a subset of the training data---is an emerging threat in the context of neural networks. Existing attacks for data poisoning neural networks have relied on hand-crafted heuristics, because solving the poisoning problem directly via bilevel optimization is generally thought of as intractable for deep models. We propose MetaPoison, a first-order method that approximates the bilevel problem via meta-learning and crafts poisons that fool neural networks. MetaPoison is effective: it outperforms previous clean-label poisoning methods by a large margin. MetaPoison is robust: poisoned data made for one model transfer to a variety of victim models with unknown training settings and architectures. MetaPoison is general-purpose, it works not only in fine-tuning scenarios, but also for end-to-end training from scratch, which till now hasn't been feasible for clean-label attacks with deep nets. MetaPoison can achieve arbitrary adversary goals---like using poisons of one class to make a target image don the label of another arbitrarily chosen class. Finally, MetaPoison works in the real-world. We demonstrate for the first time successful data poisoning of models trained on the black-box Google Cloud AutoML API.
Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning via Low-Rank Matrix Estimation
Authors: Devavrat Shah, Dogyoon Song, Zhi Xu, Yuzhe Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We consider the question of learning $Q$-function in a sample efficient manner for reinforcement learning with continuous state and action spaces under a generative model. If $Q$-function is Lipschitz continuous, then the minimal sample complexity for estimating $\epsilon$-optimal $Q$-function is known to scale as $\Omega(\frac{1}{\epsilon^{d_1+d_2+2}})$ per classical non-parametric learning theory, where $d_1$ and $d_2$ denote the dimensions of the state and action spaces respectively. The $Q$-function, when viewed as a kernel, induces a Hilbert-Schmidt operator and hence possesses square-summable spectrum. This motivates us to consider a parametric class of $Q$-functions parameterized by its "rank" $r$, which contains all Lipschitz $Q$-functions  as $r\to\infty$. As our key contribution, we develop a simple, iterative learning algorithm that finds $\epsilon$-optimal $Q$-function with sample complexity of $\widetilde{O}(\frac{1}{\epsilon^{\max(d_1, d_2)+2}})$ when the optimal $Q$-function has low rank $r$ and the discounting factor $\gamma$ is below a certain threshold. Thus, this provides an exponential improvement in sample complexity. To enable our result, we develop a novel Matrix Estimation algorithm that faithfully estimates an unknown low-rank matrix in the  $\ell_\infty$ sense even in the presence of arbitrary bounded noise, which might be of interest in its own right. Empirical results on several stochastic control tasks confirm the efficacy of our "low-rank" algorithms.
Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data
Authors: Tero Karras, Miika Aittala, Janne Hellsten, Samuli Laine, Jaakko Lehtinen, Timo Aila
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Training generative adversarial networks (GAN) using too little data typically leads to discriminator overfitting, causing training to diverge. We propose an adaptive discriminator augmentation mechanism that significantly stabilizes training in limited data regimes. The approach does not require changes to loss functions or network architectures, and is applicable both when training from scratch and when fine-tuning an existing GAN on another dataset. We demonstrate, on several datasets, that good results are now possible using only a few thousand training images, often matching StyleGAN2 results with an order of magnitude fewer images. We expect this to open up new application domains for GANs. We also find that the widely used CIFAR-10 is, in fact, a limited data benchmark, and improve the record FID from 5.59 to 2.42.
Deeply Learned Spectral Total Variation Decomposition
Authors: Tamara G. Grossmann, Yury Korolev, Guy Gilboa, Carola Schoenlieb
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Non-linear spectral decompositions of images based on one-homogeneous functionals such as total variation have gained considerable attention in the last few years. Due to their ability to extract spectral components corresponding to objects of different size and contrast, such decompositions enable filtering, feature transfer, image fusion and other applications. However, obtaining this decomposition involves solving multiple non-smooth optimisation problems and is therefore computationally highly intensive. In this paper, we present a neural network approximation of a non-linear spectral decomposition. We report up to four orders of magnitude (×10,000) speedup in processing of mega-pixel size images, compared to classical GPU implementations. Our proposed network, TVspecNET, is able to implicitly learn the underlying PDE and, despite being entirely data driven, inherits invariances of the model based transform. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach towards learning a non-linear spectral decomposition of images. Not only do we gain a staggering computational advantage, but this approach can also be seen as a step towards studying neural networks that can decompose an image into spectral components defined by a user rather than a handcrafted functional.
FracTrain: Fractionally Squeezing Bit Savings Both Temporally and Spatially for Efficient DNN Training
Authors: Yonggan Fu, Haoran You, Yang Zhao, Yue Wang, Chaojian Li, Kailash Gopalakrishnan, Zhangyang Wang, Yingyan Lin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in deep neural networks (DNNs) have fueled a tremendous demand for intelligent edge devices featuring on-site learning, while the practical realization of such systems remains a challenge due to the limited resources available at the edge and the required massive training costs for state-of-the-art (SOTA) DNNs. As reducing precision is one of the most effective knobs for boosting training time/energy efficiency, there has been a growing interest in low-precision DNN training. In this paper, we explore from an orthogonal direction: how to fractionally squeeze out more training cost savings from the most redundant bit level, progressively along the training trajectory and dynamically per input. Specifically, we propose FracTrain that integrates (i) progressive fractional quantization which gradually increases the precision of activations, weights, and gradients that will not reach the precision of SOTA static quantized DNN training until the final training stage, and (ii) dynamic fractional quantization which assigns precisions to both the activations and gradients of each layer in an input-adaptive manner, for only "fractionally" updating layer parameters. Extensive simulations and ablation studies (six models, four datasets, and three training settings including standard, adaptation, and fine-tuning) validate the effectiveness of FracTrain in reducing computational cost and hardware-quantified energy/latency of DNN training while achieving a comparable or better (-0.12%~+1.87%) accuracy. For example, when training ResNet-74 on CIFAR-10, FracTrain achieves 77.6% and 53.5% computational cost and training latency savings, respectively, compared with the best SOTA baseline, while achieving a comparable (-0.07%) accuracy. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/RICE-EIC/FracTrain.
Improving Neural Network Training in Low Dimensional Random Bases
Authors: Frithjof Gressmann, Zach Eaton-Rosen, Carlo Luschi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has proven to be remarkably effective in optimizing deep neural networks that employ ever-larger numbers of parameters. Yet, improving the efficiency of large-scale optimization remains a vital and highly active area of research. Recent work has shown that deep neural networks can be optimized in randomly-projected subspaces of much smaller dimensionality than their native parameter space. While such training is promising for more efficient and scalable optimization schemes, its practical application is limited by inferior optimization performance.
Here, we improve on recent random subspace approaches as follows. We show that keeping the random projection fixed throughout training is detrimental to optimization. We propose re-drawing the random subspace at each step, which yields significantly better performance. We realize further improvements by applying independent projections to different parts of the network, making the approximation more efficient as network dimensionality grows.
To implement these experiments, we leverage hardware-accelerated pseudo-random number generation to construct the random projections on-demand at every optimization step, allowing us to distribute the computation of independent random directions across multiple workers with shared random seeds. This yields significant reductions in memory and is up to 10x faster for the workloads in question.
Safe Reinforcement Learning via Curriculum Induction
Authors: Matteo Turchetta, Andrey Kolobov, Shital Shah, Andreas Krause, Alekh Agarwal
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In safety-critical applications, autonomous agents may need to learn in an environment where mistakes can be very costly. In such settings, the agent needs to behave safely not only after but also while learning. To achieve this, existing safe reinforcement learning methods make an agent rely on priors that let it avoid dangerous situations during exploration with high probability, but both the probabilistic guarantees and the smoothness assumptions inherent in the priors are not viable in many scenarios of interest such as autonomous driving. This paper presents an alternative approach inspired by human teaching, where an agent learns under the supervision of an automatic instructor that saves the agent from violating constraints during learning. In this model, we introduce the monitor that neither needs to know how to do well at the task the agent is learning nor needs to know how the environment works. Instead, it has a library of reset controllers that it activates when the agent starts behaving dangerously, preventing it from doing damage. Crucially, the choices of which reset controller to apply in which situation affect the speed of agent learning. Based on observing agents' progress the teacher itself learns a policy for choosing the reset controllers, a curriculum, to optimize the agent's final policy reward. Our experiments use this framework in two environments to induce curricula for safe and efficient learning.
Leverage the Average: an Analysis of KL Regularization in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Nino Vieillard, Tadashi Kozuno, Bruno Scherrer, Olivier Pietquin, Remi Munos, Matthieu Geist
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms making use of  Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization as a core component have shown outstanding performance. Yet, only little is understood theoretically about why KL regularization helps, so far. We study KL regularization within an approximate value iteration scheme and show that it implicitly averages q-values. Leveraging this insight, we provide a very strong performance bound, the very first to combine two desirable aspects: a linear dependency to the horizon (instead of quadratic) and an error propagation term involving an averaging effect of the estimation errors (instead of an accumulation effect). We also study the more general case of an additional entropy regularizer. The resulting abstract scheme encompasses many existing RL algorithms. Some of our assumptions do not hold with neural networks, so we complement this theoretical analysis with an extensive empirical study.
How Robust are the Estimated Effects of Nonpharmaceutical Interventions against COVID-19?
Authors: Mrinank Sharma, Sören Mindermann, Jan Brauner, Gavin Leech, Anna Stephenson, Tomáš Gavenčiak, Jan Kulveit, Yee Whye Teh, Leonid Chindelevitch, Yarin Gal
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: To what extent are effectiveness estimates of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) against COVID-19 influenced by the assumptions our models make? To answer this question, we investigate 2 state-of-the-art NPI effectiveness models and propose 6 variants that make different structural assumptions. In particular, we investigate how well NPI effectiveness estimates generalise to unseen countries, and their sensitivity to unobserved factors. Models which account for noise in disease transmission compare favourably. We further evaluate how robust estimates are to different choices of epidemiological parameters and data. Focusing on models that assume transmission noise, we find that previously published results are robust across these choices and across different models. Finally, we mathematically ground the interpretation of NPI effectiveness estimates when certain common assumptions do not hold.
Beyond Individualized Recourse: Interpretable and Interactive Summaries of Actionable Recourses
Authors: Kaivalya Rawal, Himabindu Lakkaraju
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: As predictive models are increasingly being deployed in high-stakes decision-making, there has been a lot of interest in developing algorithms which can provide recourses to affected individuals. While developing such tools is important, it is even more critical to analyze and interpret a predictive model, and vet it thoroughly to ensure that the recourses it offers are meaningful and non-discriminatory before it is deployed in the real world. To this end, we propose a novel model agnostic framework called Actionable Recourse Summaries (AReS) to construct global counterfactual explanations which provide an interpretable and accurate summary of recourses for the entire population.  We formulate a novel objective which simultaneously optimizes for correctness of the recourses and interpretability of the explanations, while minimizing overall recourse costs across the entire population. More specifically, our objective enables us to learn, with optimality guarantees on recourse correctness, a small number of compact rule sets each of which capture recourses for well defined subpopulations within the data. We also demonstrate theoretically that several of the prior approaches proposed to generate recourses for individuals are special cases of our framework. Experimental evaluation with real world datasets and user studies demonstrate that our framework can provide decision makers with a comprehensive overview of recourses corresponding to any black box model, and consequently help detect undesirable model biases and discrimination.
Generalization error in high-dimensional perceptrons: Approaching Bayes error with convex optimization
Authors: Benjamin Aubin, Florent Krzakala, Yue Lu, Lenka Zdeborová
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We consider a commonly studied supervised classification of a synthetic dataset whose labels are generated by feeding a one-layer non-linear neural network with random iid inputs. We study the generalization performances of standard classifiers in the high-dimensional regime where $\alpha=\frac{n}{d}$ is kept finite in the limit of a high dimension $d$ and number of samples $n$. Our contribution is three-fold: First, we prove a formula for the generalization error achieved by $\ell_2$ regularized classifiers that minimize a convex loss. This formula was first obtained by the heuristic replica method of statistical physics. Secondly, focussing on commonly used loss functions and optimizing the $\ell_2$ regularization strength, we observe that while ridge regression performance is poor, logistic and hinge regression are surprisingly able to approach the Bayes-optimal generalization error extremely closely. As $\alpha \to \infty$ they lead to Bayes-optimal rates, a fact that does not follow from predictions of margin-based generalization error bounds. Third, we design an optimal loss and regularizer that provably leads to Bayes-optimal generalization error.
Projection Efficient Subgradient Method and Optimal Nonsmooth Frank-Wolfe Method
Authors: Kiran K Thekumparampil, Prateek Jain, Praneeth Netrapalli, Sewoong Oh
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We consider the classical setting of optimizing a nonsmooth Lipschitz continuous convex function over a convex constraint set, when having access to a (stochastic) first-order oracle (FO) for the function and a projection oracle (PO) for the constraint set. It is well known that to achieve $\epsilon$-suboptimality in high-dimensions, $\Theta(\epsilon^{-2})$ FO calls are necessary. This is achieved by the projected subgradient method (PGD). However, PGD also entails $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ PO calls, which may be computationally costlier than FO calls (e.g. nuclear norm constraints). Improving this PO calls complexity of PGD is largely unexplored, despite the fundamental nature of this problem and extensive literature. We present first such improvement. This only requires a mild assumption that the objective function, when extended to a slightly larger neighborhood of the constraint set, still remains Lipschitz and accessible via FO. In particular, we introduce MOPES method, which carefully combines Moreau-Yosida smoothing and accelerated first-order schemes. This is guaranteed to find a feasible $\epsilon$-suboptimal solution using only $O(\epsilon^{-1})$ PO calls and optimal $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ FO calls. Further, instead of a PO if we only have a linear minimization oracle (LMO, a la Frank-Wolfe) to access the constraint set, an extension of our method, MOLES, finds a feasible $\epsilon$-suboptimal solution using $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ LMO calls and FO calls---both match known lower bounds, resolving a question left open since White (1993). Our experiments confirm that these methods achieve significant speedups over the state-of-the-art, for a problem with costly PO and LMO calls.
PGM-Explainer: Probabilistic Graphical Model Explanations for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Minh Vu, My T. Thai
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), the graph structure is incorporated into the learning of node representations. This complex structure makes explaining GNNs' predictions become much more challenging. In this paper, we propose PGM-Explainer, a Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM) model-agnostic explainer for GNNs. Given a prediction to be explained, PGM-Explainer identifies crucial graph components and generates an explanation in form of a PGM approximating that prediction. Different from existing explainers for GNNs where the explanations are drawn from a set of linear functions of explained features, PGM-Explainer is able to demonstrate the dependencies of explained features in form of conditional probabilities. Our theoretical analysis shows that the PGM generated by PGM-Explainer includes the Markov-blanket of the target prediction, i.e. including all its statistical information. We also show that the explanation returned by PGM-Explainer contains the same set of independence statements in the perfect map. Our experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that PGM-Explainer achieves better performance than existing explainers in many benchmark tasks.
Few-Cost Salient Object Detection with Adversarial-Paced Learning
Authors: Dingwen Zhang, HaiBin Tian, Jungong Han
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Detecting and segmenting salient objects from given image scenes has received great attention in recent years. A fundamental challenge in training the existing deep saliency detection models is the requirement of large amounts of annotated data. While gathering large quantities of training data becomes cheap and easy, annotating the data is an expensive process in terms of time, labor and human expertise. To address this problem, this paper proposes to learn the effective salient object detection model based on the manual annotation on a few training images only, thus dramatically alleviating human labor in training models. To this end, we name this new task as the few-cost salient object detection and propose an adversarial-paced learning (APL)-based framework to facilitate the few-cost learning scenario. Essentially, APL is derived from the self-paced learning (SPL) regime but it infers the robust learning pace through the data-driven adversarial learning mechanism rather than the heuristic design of the learning regularizer. Comprehensive experiments on four widely-used benchmark datasets have demonstrated that the proposed approach can effectively approach to the existing supervised deep salient object detection models with only 1k human-annotated training images.
Minimax Estimation of Conditional Moment Models
Authors: Nishanth Dikkala, Greg Lewis, Lester W. Mackey, Vasilis Syrgkanis
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We develop an approach for estimating models described via conditional moment restrictions, with a prototypical application being non-parametric instrumental variable regression. We introduce a min-max criterion function, under which the estimation problem can be thought of as solving a zero-sum game between a modeler who is optimizing over the hypothesis space of the target model and an adversary who identifies violating moments over a test function space. We analyze the statistical estimation rate of the resulting estimator for arbitrary hypothesis spaces, with respect to an appropriate analogue of the mean squared error metric, for ill-posed inverse problems. We show that when the minimax criterion is regularized with a second moment penalty on the test function and the test function space is sufficiently rich, then the estimation rate scales with the critical radius of the hypothesis and test function spaces, a quantity which typically gives tight fast rates. Our main result follows from a novel localized Rademacher analysis of statistical learning problems defined via minimax objectives. We provide applications of our main results for several hypothesis spaces used in practice such as: reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, high dimensional sparse linear functions, spaces defined via shape constraints, ensemble estimators such as random forests, and neural networks. For each of these applications we provide computationally efficient optimization methods for solving the corresponding minimax problem (e.g. stochastic first-order heuristics for neural networks). In several applications, we show how our modified mean squared error rate, combined with conditions that bound the ill-posedness of the inverse problem, lead to mean squared error rates. We conclude with an extensive experimental analysis of the proposed methods.
Causal Imitation Learning With Unobserved Confounders
Authors: Junzhe Zhang, Daniel Kumor, Elias Bareinboim
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: One of the common ways children learn is by mimicking adults. Imitation learning focuses on learning policies with suitable performance from demonstrations generated by an expert, with an unspecified performance measure, and unobserved reward signal. Popular methods for imitation learning start by either directly mimicking the behavior policy of an expert (behavior cloning) or by learning a reward function that prioritizes observed expert trajectories (inverse reinforcement learning). However, these methods rely on the assumption that covariates used by the expert to determine her/his actions are fully observed. In this paper, we relax this assumption and study imitation learning when sensory inputs of the learner and the expert differ. First, we provide a non-parametric, graphical criterion that is complete (both necessary and sufficient) for determining the feasibility of imitation from the combinations of demonstration data and qualitative assumptions about the underlying environment, represented in the form of a causal model. We then show that when such a criterion does not hold, imitation could still be feasible by exploiting quantitative knowledge of the expert trajectories. Finally, we develop an efficient procedure for learning the imitating policy from experts' trajectories.
Your GAN is Secretly an Energy-based Model and You Should Use Discriminator Driven Latent Sampling
Authors: Tong Che, Ruixiang ZHANG, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Hugo Larochelle, Liam Paull, Yuan Cao, Yoshua Bengio
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We show that the sum of the implicit generator log-density $\log p_g$ of a GAN with the logit score of the discriminator defines an energy function which yields the true data density when the generator is imperfect but the discriminator is optimal, thus making it possible to improve on the typical generator (with implicit density $p_g$). To make that practical, we show that sampling from this modified density can be achieved by sampling in latent space according to an energy-based model induced by the sum of the latent prior log-density and the discriminator output score. This can be achieved by running a Langevin MCMC in latent space and then applying the generator function, which we call Discriminator Driven Latent Sampling~(DDLS). We show that DDLS is highly efficient compared to previous methods which work in the high-dimensional pixel space and can be applied to improve on previously trained GANs of many types. We evaluate DDLS on both synthetic and real-world datasets qualitatively and quantitatively. On CIFAR-10, DDLS substantially improves the Inception Score of an off-the-shelf pre-trained SN-GAN~\citep{sngan} from $8.22$ to $9.09$ which is even comparable to the class-conditional BigGAN~\citep{biggan} model. This achieves a new state-of-the-art in unconditional image synthesis setting without introducing extra parameters or additional training.
Learning Black-Box Attackers with Transferable Priors and Query Feedback
Authors: Jiancheng YANG, Yangzhou Jiang, Xiaoyang Huang, Bingbing Ni, Chenglong Zhao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: This paper addresses the challenging black-box adversarial attack problem, where only classification confidence of a victim model is available. Inspired by consistency of visual saliency between different vision models, a surrogate model is expected to improve the attack performance via transferability. By combining transferability-based and query-based black-box attack, we propose a surprisingly simple baseline approach (named SimBA++) using the surrogate model, which significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, to efficiently utilize the query feedback, we update the surrogate model in a novel learning scheme, named High-Order Gradient Approximation (HOGA). By constructing a high-order gradient computation graph, we update the surrogate model to approximate the victim model in both forward and backward pass. The SimBA++ and HOGA result in Learnable Black-Box Attack (LeBA), which surpasses previous state of the art by considerable margins: the proposed LeBA significantly reduces queries, while keeping higher attack success rates close to 100% in extensive ImageNet experiments, including attacking vision benchmarks and defensive models. Code is open source at https://github.com/TrustworthyDL/LeBA.
Locally Differentially Private (Contextual) Bandits Learning
Authors: Kai Zheng, Tianle Cai, Weiran Huang, Zhenguo Li, Liwei Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We study locally differentially private (LDP) bandits learning in this paper. First, we propose simple black-box reduction frameworks that can solve a large family of context-free bandits learning problems with LDP guarantee. Based on our frameworks, we can improve previous best results for private bandits learning with one-point feedback, such as private Bandits Convex Optimization etc, and obtain the first results for Bandits Convex Optimization (BCO) with multi-point feedback under LDP. LDP guarantee and black-box nature make our frameworks more attractive in real applications compared with previous specifically designed and relatively weaker differentially private (DP) algorithms. Further, we also extend our algorithm to Generalized Linear Bandits with regret bound $\tilde{\mc{O}}(T^{3/4}/\varepsilon)$ under $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-LDP and it is conjectured to be optimal. Note given existing $\Omega(T)$ lower bound for DP contextual linear bandits (Shariff & Sheffet, NeurIPS 2018), our result shows a fundamental difference between LDP and DP for contextual bandits.
Invertible Gaussian Reparameterization: Revisiting the Gumbel-Softmax
Authors: Andres Potapczynski, Gabriel Loaiza-Ganem, John P. Cunningham
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: The Gumbel-Softmax is a continuous distribution over the simplex that is often used as a relaxation of discrete distributions. Because it can be readily interpreted and easily reparameterized, it enjoys widespread use. We propose a modular and more flexible family of reparameterizable distributions where Gaussian noise is transformed into a one-hot approximation through an invertible function. This invertible function is composed of a modified softmax and can incorporate diverse transformations that serve different specific purposes. For example, the stick-breaking procedure allows us to extend the reparameterization trick to distributions with countably infinite support, thus enabling the use of our distribution along nonparametric models, or normalizing flows let us increase the flexibility of the distribution. Our construction enjoys theoretical advantages over the Gumbel-Softmax, such as closed form KL, and significantly outperforms it in a variety of experiments. Our code is available at https://github.com/cunningham-lab/igr.
Kernel Based Progressive Distillation for Adder Neural Networks
Authors: Yixing Xu, Chang Xu, Xinghao Chen, Wei Zhang, Chunjing XU, Yunhe Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Adder Neural Networks (ANNs) which only contain additions bring us a new way of developing deep neural networks with low energy consumption. Unfortunately, there is an accuracy drop when replacing all convolution filters by adder filters. The main reason here is the optimization difficulty of ANNs using $\ell_1$-norm, in which the estimation of gradient in back propagation is inaccurate. In this paper, we present a novel method for further improving the performance of ANNs without increasing the trainable parameters via a progressive kernel based knowledge distillation (PKKD) method. A convolutional neural network (CNN) with the same architecture is simultaneously initialized and trained as a teacher network, features and weights of ANN and CNN will be transformed to a new space to eliminate the accuracy drop. The similarity is conducted in a higher-dimensional space to disentangle the difference of their distributions using a kernel based method. Finally, the desired ANN is learned based on the information from both the ground-truth and teacher, progressively. The effectiveness of the proposed method for learning ANN with higher performance is then well-verified on several benchmarks. For instance, the ANN-50 trained using the proposed PKKD method obtains a 76.8\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet dataset, which is 0.6\% higher than that of the ResNet-50.
Adversarial Soft Advantage Fitting: Imitation Learning without Policy Optimization
Authors: Paul Barde, Julien Roy, Wonseok Jeon, Joelle Pineau, Chris Pal, Derek Nowrouzezahrai
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Adversarial Imitation Learning alternates between learning a discriminator -- which tells apart expert's demonstrations from generated ones -- and a generator's policy to produce trajectories that can fool this discriminator. This alternated optimization is known to be delicate in practice since it compounds unstable adversarial training with brittle and sample-inefficient reinforcement learning. We propose to remove the burden of the policy optimization steps by leveraging a novel discriminator formulation. Specifically, our discriminator is explicitly conditioned on two policies: the one from the previous generator's iteration and a learnable policy. When optimized, this discriminator directly learns the optimal generator's policy. Consequently, our discriminator's update solves the generator's optimization problem for free: learning a policy that imitates the expert does not require an additional optimization loop. This formulation effectively cuts by half the implementation and computational burden of Adversarial Imitation Learning algorithms by removing the Reinforcement Learning phase altogether. We show on a variety of tasks that our simpler approach is competitive to prevalent Imitation Learning methods.
Agree to Disagree: Adaptive Ensemble Knowledge Distillation in Gradient Space
Authors: Shangchen Du, Shan You, Xiaojie Li, Jianlong Wu, Fei Wang, Chen Qian, Changshui Zhang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Distilling knowledge from an ensemble of teacher models is expected to have a more promising performance than that from a single one. Current methods mainly adopt a vanilla average rule, i.e., to simply take the average of all teacher losses for training the student network. However, this approach treats teachers equally and ignores the diversity among them. When conflicts or competitions exist among teachers, which is common, the inner compromise might hurt the distillation performance. In this paper, we examine the diversity of teacher models in the gradient space and regard the ensemble knowledge distillation as a multi-objective optimization problem so that we can determine a better optimization direction for the training of student network. Besides, we also introduce a tolerance parameter to accommodate disagreement among teachers. In this way, our method can be seen as a dynamic weighting method for each teacher in the ensemble. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method for both logits-based and feature-based cases.
The Wasserstein Proximal Gradient Algorithm
Authors: Adil Salim, Anna Korba, Giulia Luise
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Wasserstein gradient flows are continuous time dynamics that define curves of steepest descent to minimize an objective function over the space of probability measures (i.e., the Wasserstein space). This objective is typically a divergence w.r.t. a fixed target distribution. In recent years, these continuous time dynamics have been used to study the convergence of machine learning algorithms aiming at approximating a probability distribution. However, the discrete-time behavior of these algorithms might differ from the continuous time dynamics. Besides, although discretized gradient flows have been proposed in the literature, little is known about their minimization power. In this work, we propose a Forward Backward (FB) discretization scheme that can tackle the case where the objective function is the sum of a smooth and a nonsmooth geodesically convex terms. Using techniques from convex optimization and optimal transport, we analyze the FB scheme as a minimization algorithm on the Wasserstein space. More precisely, we show under mild assumptions that the FB scheme has convergence guarantees similar to the proximal gradient algorithm in Euclidean spaces (resp. similar to the associated Wasserstein gradient flow).
Universally Quantized Neural Compression
Authors: Eirikur Agustsson, Lucas Theis
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: A popular approach to learning encoders for lossy compression is to use additive uniform noise during training as a differentiable approximation to test-time quantization. We demonstrate that a uniform noise channel can also be implemented at test time using universal quantization (Ziv, 1985). This allows us to eliminate the mismatch between training and test phases while maintaining a completely differentiable loss function. Implementing the uniform noise channel is a special case of the more general problem of communicating a sample, which we prove is computationally hard if we do not make assumptions about its distribution. However, the uniform special case is efficient as well as easy to implement and thus of great interest from a practical point of view. Finally, we show that quantization can be obtained as a limiting case of a soft quantizer applied to the uniform noise channel, bridging compression with and without quantization.
Temporal Variability in Implicit Online Learning
Authors: Nicolò Campolongo, Francesco Orabona
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In the setting of online learning, Implicit algorithms turn out to be highly successful from a practical standpoint. However, the tightest regret analyses only show marginal improvements over Online Mirror Descent. In this work, we shed light on this behavior carrying out a careful regret analysis. We prove a novel static regret bound that depends on the temporal variability of the sequence of loss functions, a quantity which is often encountered when considering dynamic competitors. We show, for example, that the regret can be constant if the temporal variability is constant and the learning rate is tuned appropriately, without the need of smooth losses. Moreover, we present an adaptive algorithm that achieves this regret bound without prior knowledge of the temporal variability and prove a matching lower bound. Finally, we validate our theoretical findings on classification and regression datasets.
Investigating Gender Bias in Language Models Using Causal Mediation Analysis
Authors: Jesse Vig, Sebastian Gehrmann, Yonatan Belinkov, Sharon Qian, Daniel Nevo, Yaron Singer, Stuart Shieber
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Many interpretation methods for neural models in natural language processing investigate how information is encoded inside hidden representations. However, these methods can only measure whether the information exists, not whether it is actually used by the model.  We propose a methodology grounded in the theory of causal mediation analysis for interpreting which parts of a model are causally implicated in its behavior. The approach enables us to analyze the mechanisms that facilitate the flow of information from input to output through various model components, known as mediators. As a case study, we apply this methodology to analyzing gender bias in pre-trained Transformer language models. We study the role of individual neurons and attention heads in mediating gender bias across three datasets designed to gauge a model's sensitivity to gender bias. Our mediation analysis reveals that gender bias effects are concentrated in specific components of the model that may exhibit highly specialized behavior.
Off-Policy Imitation Learning from Observations
Authors: Zhuangdi Zhu, Kaixiang Lin, Bo Dai, Jiayu Zhou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Learning from Observations (LfO) is a practical reinforcement learning scenario from which many applications can benefit through the reuse of incomplete resources. Compared to conventional imitation learning (IL), LfO is more challenging because of the lack of expert action guidance. 
In both conventional IL and LfO, distribution matching is at the heart of their foundation. Traditional distribution matching approaches are sample-costly which depend on on-policy transitions for policy learning. Towards sample-efficiency, some off-policy solutions have been proposed, which, however, either lack comprehensive theoretical justifications or depend on the guidance of expert actions.
In this work, we propose a sample-efficient LfO approach which enables off-policy optimization in a principled manner. To further accelerate the learning procedure, we regulate the policy update with an inverse action model, which assists distribution matching from the perspective of mode-covering. Extensive empirical results on challenging locomotion tasks indicate that our approach is comparable with state-of-the-art in terms of both sample-efficiency and asymptotic performance.
Escaping Saddle-Point Faster under Interpolation-like Conditions
Authors: Abhishek Roy, Krishnakumar Balasubramanian, Saeed Ghadimi, Prasant Mohapatra
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper, we show that under over-parametrization several standard stochastic optimization algorithms escape saddle-points and converge to local-minimizers much faster. One of the fundamental aspects of over-parametrized models is that they are capable of interpolating the training data. We show that, under interpolation-like assumptions satisfied by the stochastic gradients in an over-parametrization setting, the first-order oracle complexity of Perturbed Stochastic Gradient Descent (PSGD) algorithm to reach an $\epsilon$-local-minimizer, matches the corresponding deterministic rate of $O(1/\epsilon^{2})$. We next analyze Stochastic Cubic-Regularized Newton (SCRN) algorithm under interpolation-like conditions, and show that the oracle complexity to reach an $\epsilon$-local-minimizer under interpolation-like conditions, is $O(1/\epsilon^{2.5})$. While this obtained complexity is better than the corresponding complexity of either PSGD, or SCRN without interpolation-like assumptions, it does not match the rate of $O(1/\epsilon^{1.5})$ corresponding to deterministic Cubic-Regularized Newton method. It seems further Hessian-based interpolation-like assumptions are necessary to bridge this gap. We also discuss the corresponding improved complexities in the zeroth-order settings.
Matérn Gaussian Processes on Riemannian Manifolds
Authors: Viacheslav Borovitskiy, Alexander Terenin, Peter Mostowsky, Marc Deisenroth (he/him)
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Gaussian processes are an effective model class for learning unknown functions, particularly in settings where accurately representing predictive uncertainty is of key importance. Motivated by applications in the physical sciences, the widely-used Matérn class of Gaussian processes has recently been generalized to model functions whose domains are Riemannian manifolds, by re-expressing said processes as solutions of stochastic partial differential equations. In this work, we propose techniques for computing the kernels of these processes on compact Riemannian manifolds via spectral theory of the Laplace-Beltrami operator in a fully constructive manner, thereby allowing them to be trained via standard scalable techniques such as inducing point methods. We also extend the generalization from the Matérn to the widely-used squared exponential Gaussian process. By allowing Riemannian Matérn Gaussian processes to be trained using well-understood techniques, our work enables their use in mini-batch, online, and non-conjugate settings, and makes them more accessible to machine learning practitioners.
Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models
Authors: Yang Song, Stefano Ermon
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Score-based generative models can produce high quality image samples comparable to GANs, without requiring adversarial optimization. However, existing training procedures are limited to images of low resolution (typically below 32 x 32), and can be unstable under some settings. We provide a new theoretical analysis of learning and sampling from score models in high dimensional spaces, explaining existing failure modes and motivating new solutions that generalize across datasets. 
To enhance stability, we also propose to maintain an exponential moving average of model weights. With these improvements, we can effortlessly scale score-based generative models to images with unprecedented resolutions ranging from 64 x 64 to 256 x 256. Our score-based models can generate high-fidelity samples that rival best-in-class GANs on various image datasets, including CelebA, FFHQ, and multiple LSUN categories.