mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
PMI-Masking: Principled masking of correlated spans
Authors: Yoav Levine, Barak Lenz, Opher Lieber, Omri Abend, Kevin Leyton-Brown, Moshe Tennenholtz, Yoav Shoham
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Masking tokens uniformly at random constitutes a common flaw in the pretraining of Masked Language Models (MLMs) such as BERT. We show that such uniform masking allows an MLM to minimize its training objective by latching onto shallow local signals, leading to pretraining inefficiency and suboptimal downstream performance. To address this flaw, we propose PMI-Masking, a principled masking strategy based on the concept of Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI), which jointly masks a token n-gram if it exhibits high collocation over the corpus. PMI-Masking motivates, unifies, and improves upon prior more heuristic approaches that attempt to address the drawback of random uniform token masking, such as whole-word masking, entity/phrase masking, and random-span masking. Specifically, we show experimentally that PMI-Masking reaches the performance of prior masking approaches in half the training time, and consistently improves performance at the end of pretraining.
Gradient Projection Memory for Continual Learning
Authors: Gobinda Saha, Isha Garg, Kaushik Roy
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The ability to learn continually without forgetting the past tasks is a desired attribute for artificial learning systems. Existing approaches to enable such learning in artificial neural networks usually rely on network growth, importance based weight update or replay of old data from the memory. In contrast, we propose a novel approach where a neural network learns new tasks by taking gradient steps in the orthogonal direction to the gradient subspaces deemed important for the past tasks. We find the bases of these subspaces by analyzing network representations (activations) after learning each task with Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) in a single shot manner and store them in the memory as Gradient Projection Memory (GPM). With qualitative and quantitative analyses, we show that such orthogonal gradient descent induces minimum to no interference with the past tasks, thereby mitigates forgetting. We evaluate our algorithm on diverse image classification datasets with short and long sequences of tasks and report better or on-par performance compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.
Long-tail learning via logit adjustment
Authors: Aditya Krishna Menon, Sadeep Jayasumana, Ankit Singh Rawat, Himanshu Jain, Andreas Veit, Sanjiv Kumar
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Real-world classification problems typically exhibit an imbalanced or long-tailed label distribution, wherein many labels have only a few associated samples. This poses a challenge for generalisation on such labels, and also  makes naive learning biased towards dominant labels. In this paper,  we present a statistical framework that unifies and generalises several recent proposals to cope with these challenges. Our framework revisits the classic idea of logit adjustment based on the label frequencies, which encourages a large relative margin between logits of rare positive versus dominant negative labels. This yields two techniques  for long-tail learning, where such adjustment is either applied post-hoc to a trained model, or enforced in the loss during training. These techniques are statistically grounded, and practically effective on four real-world datasets with long-tailed label distributions.
Effective and Efficient Vote Attack on Capsule Networks
Authors: Jindong Gu, Baoyuan Wu, Volker Tresp
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Standard Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can be easily fooled by images with small quasi-imperceptible artificial perturbations. As alternatives to CNNs, the recently proposed Capsule Networks (CapsNets) are shown to be more robust to white-box attack than CNNs under popular attack protocols. Besides, the class-conditional reconstruction part of CapsNets is also used to detect adversarial examples. In this work, we investigate the adversarial robustness of CapsNets, especially how the inner workings of CapsNets change when the output capsules are attacked. The first observation is that adversarial examples misled CapsNets by manipulating the votes from primary capsules. Another observation is the high computational cost, when we directly apply multi-step attack methods designed for CNNs to attack CapsNets, due to the computationally expensive routing mechanism. Motivated by these two observations, we propose a novel vote attack where we attack votes of CapsNets directly. Our vote attack is not only effective, but also efficient by circumventing the routing process. Furthermore, we integrate our vote attack into the detection-aware attack paradigm, which can successfully bypass the class-conditional reconstruction based detection method. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior attack performance of our vote attack on CapsNets.
What are the Statistical Limits of Offline RL with Linear Function Approximation?
Authors: Ruosong Wang, Dean Foster, Sham M. Kakade
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning seeks to utilize offline (observational) data to guide the learning of (causal) sequential decision making strategies. The hope is that offline reinforcement learning coupled with function approximation methods (to deal with the curse of dimensionality) can provide a means to help alleviate the excessive sample complexity burden in modern sequential decision making problems. However, the extent to which this broader approach can be effective is not well understood, where the literature largely consists of sufficient conditions.

This work focuses on the basic question of what are necessary representational and distributional conditions that permit provable sample-efficient offline reinforcement learning. Perhaps surprisingly, our main result shows that even if: i) we have realizability in that the true value function of \emph{every} policy is linear in a given set of features and 2) our off-policy data has good  coverage over all features (under a strong spectral condition), any algorithm still (information-theoretically) requires a number of offline samples that is exponential in the problem horizon to non-trivially estimate the value of \emph{any} given policy. Our results highlight that sample-efficient offline policy evaluation is not possible unless significantly stronger conditions hold; such conditions include either having low distribution shift (where the offline data distribution is close to the distribution of the policy to be evaluated) or significantly stronger representational conditions (beyond realizability).
Benefit of deep learning with non-convex noisy gradient descent: Provable excess risk bound and superiority to kernel methods
Authors: Taiji Suzuki, Shunta Akiyama
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Establishing a theoretical analysis that explains why deep learning can outperform shallow learning such as kernel methods is one of the biggest issues in the deep learning literature. Towards answering this question, we evaluate excess risk of a deep learning estimator trained by a noisy gradient descent with ridge regularization on a mildly overparameterized neural network, 
and discuss its superiority to a class of linear estimators that includes neural tangent kernel approach, random feature model, other kernel methods, $k$-NN estimator and so on. We consider a teacher-student regression model, and eventually show that {\it any} linear estimator can be outperformed by deep learning in a sense of the minimax optimal rate especially for a high dimension setting. The obtained excess bounds are so-called fast learning rate which is faster than $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ that is obtained by usual Rademacher complexity analysis. This discrepancy is induced by the non-convex geometry of the model and the noisy gradient descent used for neural network training provably reaches a near global optimal solution even though the loss landscape is highly non-convex. Although the noisy gradient descent does not employ any explicit or implicit sparsity inducing regularization, it shows a preferable generalization performance that dominates linear estimators.
Learning with Instance-Dependent Label Noise: A Sample Sieve Approach
Authors: Hao Cheng, Zhaowei Zhu, Xingyu Li, Yifei Gong, Xing Sun, Yang Liu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Human-annotated labels are often prone to noise, and the presence of such noise will degrade the performance of the resulting deep neural network (DNN) models. Much of the literature (with several recent exceptions) of learning with noisy labels focuses on the case when the label noise is independent of features. Practically, annotations errors tend to be instance-dependent and often depend on the difficulty levels of recognizing a certain task. Applying existing results from instance-independent settings would require a significant amount of estimation of noise rates. Therefore, providing theoretically rigorous solutions for learning with instance-dependent label noise remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose CORES$^{2}$ (COnfidence REgularized Sample Sieve), which progressively sieves out corrupted examples. The implementation of CORES$^{2}$  does not require specifying noise rates and yet we are able to provide theoretical guarantees of CORES$^{2}$ in filtering out the corrupted examples. This high-quality sample sieve allows us to treat clean examples and the corrupted ones separately in training a DNN solution, and such a separation is shown to be advantageous in the instance-dependent noise setting. We demonstrate the performance of CORES$^{2}$ on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 datasets with synthetic instance-dependent label noise and Clothing1M with real-world human noise. As of independent interests, our sample sieve provides a generic machinery for anatomizing noisy datasets and provides a flexible interface for various robust training techniques to further improve the performance. Code is available at https://github.com/UCSC-REAL/cores.
SkipW: Resource Adaptable RNN with Strict Upper Computational Limit
Authors: Tsiry Mayet, Anne Lambert, Pascal Leguyadec, Francoise Le Bolzer, François Schnitzler
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We introduce Skip-Window, a method to allow recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to trade off accuracy for computational cost during the analysis of a sequence. Similarly to existing approaches, Skip-Window extends existing RNN cells by adding a mechanism to encourage the model to process fewer inputs. Unlike existing approaches, Skip-Window is able to respect a strict computational budget, making this model more suitable for limited hardware. We evaluate this approach on two datasets: a human activity recognition task and adding task. Our results show that Skip-Window is able to exceed the accuracy of existing approaches for a lower computational cost while strictly limiting said cost.
Towards Robust Neural Networks via Close-loop Control
Authors: Zhuotong Chen, Qianxiao Li, Zheng Zhang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Despite their success in massive engineering applications, deep neural networks are vulnerable to various perturbations due to their black-box nature. Recent study has shown that a deep neural network can misclassify the data even if the input data is perturbed by an imperceptible amount. In this paper, we address the robustness issue of neural networks by a novel close-loop control method from the perspective of dynamic systems. Instead of modifying the parameters in a fixed neural network architecture, a close-loop control process is added to generate control signals adaptively for the perturbed or corrupted data. We connect the robustness of neural networks with optimal control using the geometrical information of underlying data to design the control objective. The detailed analysis shows how the embedding manifolds of state trajectory affect error estimation of the proposed method. Our approach can simultaneously maintain the performance on clean data and improve the robustness against many types of data perturbations. It can also further improve the performance of robustly trained neural networks against different perturbations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that improves the robustness of neural networks with close-loop control.
Neural ODE Processes
Authors: Alexander Norcliffe, Cristian Bodnar, Ben Day, Jacob Moss, Pietro Liò
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) use a neural network to model the instantaneous rate of change in the state of a system. However, despite their apparent suitability for dynamics-governed time-series, NODEs present a few disadvantages. First, they are unable to adapt to incoming data-points, a fundamental requirement for real-time applications imposed by the natural direction of time. Second, time-series are often composed of a sparse set of measurements that could be explained by many possible underlying dynamics. NODEs do not capture this uncertainty. In contrast, Neural Processes (NPs) are a new class of stochastic processes providing uncertainty estimation and fast data-adaptation, but lack an explicit treatment of the flow of time. To address these problems, we introduce Neural ODE Processes (NDPs), a new class of stochastic processes determined by a distribution over Neural ODEs. By maintaining an adaptive data-dependent distribution over the underlying ODE, we show that our model can successfully capture the dynamics of low-dimensional systems from just a few data-points. At the same time, we demonstrate that NDPs scale up to challenging high-dimensional time-series with unknown latent dynamics such as rotating MNIST digits.
Scalable Transfer Learning with Expert Models
Authors: Joan Puigcerver, Carlos Riquelme Ruiz, Basil Mustafa, Cedric Renggli, André Susano Pinto, Sylvain Gelly, Daniel Keysers, Neil Houlsby
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Transfer of pre-trained representations can improve sample efficiency and reduce computational requirements for new tasks. However, representations used for transfer are usually generic, and are not tailored to a particular distribution of downstream tasks. We explore the use of expert representations for transfer with a simple, yet effective, strategy. We train a diverse set of experts by exploiting existing label structures, and use cheap-to-compute performance proxies to select the relevant expert for each target task. This strategy scales the process of transferring to new tasks, since it does not revisit the pre-training data during transfer. Accordingly, it requires little extra compute per target task, and results in a speed-up of 2-3 orders of magnitude compared to competing approaches. Further, we provide an adapter-based architecture able to compress many experts into a single model. We evaluate our approach on two different data sources and demonstrate that it outperforms baselines on over 20 diverse vision tasks in both cases.
Drop-Bottleneck: Learning Discrete Compressed Representation for Noise-Robust Exploration
Authors: Jaekyeom Kim, Minjung Kim, Dongyeon Woo, Gunhee Kim
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a novel information bottleneck (IB) method named Drop-Bottleneck, which discretely drops features that are irrelevant to the target variable. Drop-Bottleneck not only enjoys a simple and tractable compression objective but also additionally provides a deterministic compressed representation of the input variable, which is useful for inference tasks that require consistent representation. Moreover, it can jointly learn a feature extractor and select features considering each feature dimension's relevance to the target task, which is unattainable by most neural network-based IB methods. We propose an exploration method based on Drop-Bottleneck for reinforcement learning tasks. In a multitude of noisy and reward sparse maze navigation tasks in VizDoom (Kempka et al., 2016) and DMLab (Beattie et al., 2016), our exploration method achieves state-of-the-art performance. As a new IB framework, we demonstrate that Drop-Bottleneck outperforms Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) (Alemi et al., 2017) in multiple aspects including adversarial robustness and dimensionality reduction.
Learning from Protein Structure with Geometric Vector Perceptrons
Authors: Bowen Jing, Stephan Eismann, Patricia Suriana, Raphael John Lamarre Townshend, Ron Dror
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learning on 3D structures of large biomolecules is emerging as a distinct area in machine learning, but there has yet to emerge a unifying network architecture that simultaneously leverages the geometric and relational aspects of the problem domain. To address this gap, we introduce geometric vector perceptrons, which extend standard dense layers to operate on collections of Euclidean vectors. Graph neural networks equipped with such layers are able to perform both geometric and relational reasoning on efficient representations of macromolecules. We demonstrate our approach on two important problems in learning from protein structure: model quality assessment and computational protein design. Our approach improves over existing classes of architectures on both problems, including state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks and graph neural networks. We release our code at https://github.com/drorlab/gvp.
On the Dynamics of Training Attention Models
Authors: Haoye Lu, Yongyi Mao, Amiya Nayak
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The attention mechanism has been widely used in deep neural networks as a model component. By now, it has become a critical building block in many state-of-the-art natural language models. Despite its great success established empirically, the working mechanism of attention has not been investigated at a sufficient theoretical depth to date. In this paper, we set up a simple text classification task and study the dynamics of training a simple attention-based classification model using gradient descent. In this setting, we show that, for the discriminative words that the model should attend to, a persisting identity exists relating its embedding and the inner product of its key and the query. This allows us to prove that training must converge to attending to the discriminative words when the attention output is classified by a linear classifier. Experiments are performed, which validate our theoretical analysis and provide further insights.
Uncertainty in Gradient Boosting via Ensembles
Authors: Andrey Malinin, Liudmila Prokhorenkova, Aleksei Ustimenko
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: For many practical, high-risk applications, it is essential to quantify uncertainty in a model's predictions to avoid costly mistakes. While predictive uncertainty is widely studied for neural networks, the topic seems to be under-explored for models based on gradient boosting. However, gradient boosting often achieves state-of-the-art results on tabular data. This work examines a probabilistic ensemble-based framework for deriving uncertainty estimates in the predictions of gradient boosting classification and regression models. We conducted experiments on a range of synthetic and real datasets and investigated the applicability of ensemble approaches to gradient boosting models that are themselves ensembles of decision trees. Our analysis shows that ensembles of gradient boosting models successfully detect anomalous inputs while having limited ability to improve the predicted total uncertainty. Importantly, we also propose a concept of a virtual ensemble to get the benefits of an ensemble via only one gradient boosting model, which significantly reduces complexity.
AUXILIARY TASK UPDATE DECOMPOSITION: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE NEUTRAL
Authors: Lucio M. Dery, Yann Dauphin, David Grangier
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: While deep learning has been very beneficial in data-rich settings, tasks with smaller training set
often resort to pre-training or multitask learning to leverage data from other tasks. In this case,
careful consideration is needed to select tasks and model parameterizations such that updates from
the auxiliary tasks actually help the primary task. We seek to alleviate this burden by formulating a model-agnostic framework that performs fine-grained manipulation of the auxiliary task gradients. We propose to decompose auxiliary updates into directions which help, damage or leave the primary task loss unchanged. This allows weighting the update directions 
differently depending on their impact on the problem of interest. We present a novel and efficient algorithm for that
purpose and show its advantage in practice. Our method leverages efficient automatic differentiation 
procedures and randomized singular value decomposition for scalability. We show that our framework is 
generic and encompasses some prior work as particular cases. Our approach consistently outperforms strong and widely used baselines when leveraging out-of-distribution data for Text and Image classification tasks.
Is Attention Better Than Matrix Decomposition?
Authors: Zhengyang Geng, Meng-Hao Guo, Hongxu Chen, Xia Li, Ke Wei, Zhouchen Lin
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: As an essential ingredient of modern deep learning, attention mechanism, especially self-attention, plays a vital role in the global correlation discovery. However, is hand-crafted attention irreplaceable when modeling the global context? Our intriguing finding is that self-attention is not better than the matrix decomposition~(MD) model developed 20 years ago regarding the performance and computational cost for encoding the long-distance dependencies. We model the global context issue as a low-rank completion problem and show that its optimization algorithms can help design global information blocks. This paper then proposes a series of Hamburgers, in which we employ the optimization algorithms for solving MDs to factorize the input representations into sub-matrices and reconstruct a low-rank embedding. Hamburgers with different MDs can perform favorably against the popular global context module self-attention when carefully coping with gradients back-propagated through MDs. Comprehensive experiments are conducted in the vision tasks where it is crucial to learn the global context, including semantic segmentation and image generation, demonstrating significant improvements over self-attention and its variants. Code is available at https://github.com/Gsunshine/Enjoy-Hamburger.
Towards Faster and Stabilized GAN Training for High-fidelity Few-shot Image Synthesis
Authors: Bingchen Liu, Yizhe Zhu, Kunpeng Song, Ahmed Elgammal
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Training Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) on high-fidelity images usually requires large-scale GPU-clusters and a vast number of training images. In this paper, we study the few-shot image synthesis task for GAN with minimum computing cost. We propose a light-weight GAN structure that gains superior quality on 1024^2 resolution. Notably, the model converges from scratch with just a few hours of training on a single RTX-2080 GPU, and has a consistent performance, even with less than 100 training samples. Two technique designs constitute our work, a skip-layer channel-wise excitation module and a self-supervised discriminator trained as a feature-encoder. With thirteen datasets covering a wide variety of image domains (The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/odegeasslbc/FastGAN-pytorch), we show our model's superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art StyleGAN2, when data and computing budget are limited.
GANs Can Play Lottery Tickets Too
Authors: Xuxi Chen, Zhenyu Zhang, Yongduo Sui, Tianlong Chen
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deep generative adversarial networks (GANs) have gained growing popularity in numerous scenarios, while usually suffer from high parameter complexities for resource-constrained real-world applications. However, the compression of GANs has less been explored. A few works show that heuristically applying compression techniques normally leads to unsatisfactory results, due to the notorious training instability of GANs. In parallel, the lottery ticket hypothesis shows prevailing success on discriminative models, in locating sparse matching subnetworks capable of training in isolation to full model performance. In this work, we for the first time study the existence of such trainable matching subnetworks in deep GANs. For a range of GANs, we certainly find matching subnetworks at $67\%$-$74\%$ sparsity. We observe that with or without pruning discriminator has a minor effect on the existence and quality of matching subnetworks, while the initialization weights used in the discriminator plays a significant role. We then show the powerful transferability of these subnetworks to unseen tasks. Furthermore, extensive experimental results demonstrate that our found subnetworks substantially outperform previous state-of-the-art GAN compression approaches in both image generation (e.g. SNGAN) and image-to-image translation GANs (e.g. CycleGAN). Codes available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/GAN-LTH.
No Cost Likelihood Manipulation at Test Time for Making Better Mistakes in Deep Networks
Authors: Shyamgopal Karthik, Ameya Prabhu, Puneet K. Dokania, Vineet Gandhi
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: There has been increasing interest in building deep hierarchy-aware classifiers that aim to quantify and reduce the severity of mistakes, and not just reduce the number of errors. The idea is to exploit the label hierarchy (e.g., the WordNet ontology) and consider graph distances as a proxy for mistake severity. Surprisingly, on examining mistake-severity distributions of the top-1 prediction, we find that current state-of-the-art hierarchy-aware deep classifiers do not always show practical improvement over the standard cross-entropy baseline in making better mistakes. The reason for the reduction in average mistake-severity can be attributed to the increase in low-severity mistakes, which may also explain the noticeable drop in their accuracy. To this end, we use the classical Conditional Risk Minimization (CRM) framework for hierarchy-aware classification. Given a cost matrix and a reliable estimate of likelihoods (obtained from a trained network), CRM simply amends mistakes at inference time; it needs no extra hyperparameters and requires adding just a few lines of code to the standard cross-entropy baseline. It significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art and consistently obtains large reductions in the average hierarchical distance of top-$k$ predictions across datasets, with very little loss in accuracy. CRM, because of its simplicity, can be used with any off-the-shelf trained model that provides reliable likelihood estimates.
Probing BERT in Hyperbolic Spaces
Authors: Boli Chen, Yao Fu, Guangwei Xu, Pengjun Xie, Chuanqi Tan, Mosha Chen, Liping Jing
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recently, a variety of probing tasks are proposed to discover linguistic properties learned in contextualized word embeddings. Many of these works implicitly assume these embeddings lay in certain metric spaces, typically the Euclidean space. This work considers a family of geometrically special spaces, the hyperbolic spaces, that exhibit better inductive biases for hierarchical structures and may better reveal linguistic hierarchies encoded in contextualized representations. We introduce a $\textit{Poincaré probe}$, a structural probe projecting these embeddings into a Poincaré subspace with explicitly defined hierarchies. We focus on two probing objectives: (a) dependency trees where the hierarchy is defined as head-dependent structures; (b) lexical sentiments where the hierarchy is defined as the polarity of words (positivity and negativity). We argue that a key desideratum of a probe is its sensitivity to the existence of linguistic structures. We apply our probes on BERT, a typical contextualized embedding model. In a syntactic subspace, our probe better recovers tree structures than Euclidean probes, revealing the possibility that the geometry of BERT syntax may not necessarily be Euclidean. In a sentiment subspace, we reveal two possible meta-embeddings for positive and negative sentiments and show how lexically-controlled contextualization would change the geometric localization of embeddings. We demonstrate the findings with our Poincaré probe via extensive experiments and visualization. Our results can be reproduced at https://github.com/FranxYao/PoincareProbe
Undistillable: Making A Nasty Teacher That CANNOT teach students
Authors: Haoyu Ma, Tianlong Chen, Ting-Kuei Hu, Chenyu You, Xiaohui Xie, Zhangyang Wang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a widely used technique to transfer knowledge from pre-trained teacher models to  (usually more lightweight) student models. However, in certain situations, this technique is more of a curse than a blessing. For instance, KD poses a potential risk of exposing intellectual properties (IPs): even if a trained machine learning model is released in ``black boxes'' (e.g., as executable software or APIs without open-sourcing code), it can still be replicated by KD through imitating input-output behaviors. To prevent this unwanted effect of KD, this paper introduces and investigates a concept called $\textit{Nasty Teacher}$: a specially trained teacher network that yields nearly the same performance as a normal one, but would significantly degrade the performance of student models learned by imitating it. We propose a simple yet effective algorithm to build the nasty teacher, called $\textit{self-undermining knowledge distillation}$. Specifically, we aim to maximize the difference between the output of the nasty teacher and a normal pre-trained network. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate that our method is effective on both standard KD and data-free KD, providing the desirable KD-immunity to model owners for the first time. We hope our preliminary study can draw more awareness and interest in this new practical problem of both social and legal importance. Our codes and pre-trained models can be found at: $\url{https://github.com/VITA-Group/Nasty-Teacher}$.
Monotonic Kronecker-Factored Lattice
Authors: William Taylor Bakst, Nobuyuki Morioka, Erez Louidor
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: It is computationally challenging to learn flexible monotonic functions that guarantee model behavior and provide interpretability beyond a few input features, and in a time where minimizing resource use is increasingly important, we must be able to learn such models that are still efficient. In this paper we show how to effectively and efficiently learn such functions using Kronecker-Factored Lattice ($\mathrm{KFL}$), an efficient reparameterization of flexible monotonic lattice regression via Kronecker product. Both computational and storage costs scale linearly in the number of input features, which is a significant improvement over existing methods that grow exponentially. We also show that we can still properly enforce monotonicity and other shape constraints. The $\mathrm{KFL}$ function class consists of products of piecewise-linear functions, and the size of the function class can be further increased through ensembling. We prove that the function class of an ensemble of $M$ base $\mathrm{KFL}$ models strictly increases as $M$ increases up to a certain threshold. Beyond this threshold, every multilinear interpolated lattice function can be expressed. Our experimental results demonstrate that $\mathrm{KFL}$ trains faster with fewer parameters while still achieving accuracy and evaluation speeds comparable to or better than the baseline methods and preserving monotonicity guarantees on the learned model.
Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models
Authors: Danijar Hafner, Timothy P Lillicrap, Mohammad Norouzi, Jimmy Ba
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Intelligent agents need to generalize from past experience to achieve goals in complex environments. World models facilitate such generalization and allow learning behaviors from imagined outcomes to increase sample-efficiency. While learning world models from image inputs has recently become feasible for some tasks, modeling Atari games accurately enough to derive successful behaviors has remained an open challenge for many years. We introduce DreamerV2, a reinforcement learning agent that learns behaviors purely from predictions in the compact latent space of a powerful world model. The world model uses discrete representations and is trained separately from the policy. DreamerV2 constitutes the first agent that achieves human-level performance on the Atari benchmark of 55 tasks by learning behaviors inside a separately trained world model. With the same computational budget and wall-clock time, Dreamer V2 reaches 200M frames and surpasses the final performance of the top single-GPU agents IQN and Rainbow. DreamerV2 is also applicable to tasks with continuous actions, where it learns an accurate world model of a complex humanoid robot and solves stand-up and walking from only pixel inputs.
Zero-Cost Proxies for Lightweight NAS
Authors: Mohamed S Abdelfattah, Abhinav Mehrotra, Łukasz Dudziak, Nicholas Donald Lane
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is quickly becoming the standard methodology to design neural network models. However, NAS is typically compute-intensive because multiple models need to be evaluated before choosing the best one. To reduce the computational power and time needed, a proxy task is often used for evaluating each model instead of full training. In this paper, we evaluate conventional reduced-training proxies and quantify how well they preserve ranking between neural network models during search when compared with the rankings produced by final trained accuracy. We propose a series of zero-cost proxies, based on recent pruning literature, that use just a single minibatch of training data to compute a model's score. Our zero-cost proxies use 3 orders of magnitude less computation but can match and even outperform conventional proxies. For example, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient between final validation accuracy and our best zero-cost proxy on NAS-Bench-201 is 0.82, compared to 0.61 for EcoNAS (a recently proposed reduced-training proxy). Finally, we use these zero-cost proxies to enhance existing NAS search algorithms such as random search, reinforcement learning, evolutionary search and predictor-based search. For all search methodologies and across three different NAS datasets, we are able to significantly improve sample efficiency, and thereby decrease computation, by using our zero-cost proxies. For example on NAS-Bench-101, we achieved the same accuracy 4$\times$ quicker than the best previous result. Our code is made public at: https://github.com/mohsaied/zero-cost-nas.
Large-width functional asymptotics for deep Gaussian neural networks
Authors: Daniele Bracale, Stefano Favaro, Sandra Fortini, Stefano Peluchetti
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we consider fully connected feed-forward deep neural networks where weights and biases are independent and identically distributed according to Gaussian distributions. Extending previous results (Matthews et al., 2018a;b;Yang, 2019)  we adopt a function-space perspective, i.e. we look at neural networks as infinite-dimensional random elements on the input space $\mathbb{R}^I$. Under suitable assumptions on the activation function we show that: i) a network defines a continuous Gaussian process on the input space $\mathbb{R}^I$; ii) a network with re-scaled weights converges weakly to a continuous Gaussian process in the large-width limit; iii) the limiting Gaussian process has almost surely locally $\gamma$-Hölder continuous paths, for $0 < \gamma <1$. Our results contribute to recent theoretical studies on the interplay between infinitely wide deep neural networks and Gaussian processes by establishing weak convergence in function-space with respect to a stronger metric.
Evolving Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
Authors: John D Co-Reyes, Yingjie Miao, Daiyi Peng, Esteban Real, Quoc V Le, Sergey Levine, Honglak Lee, Aleksandra Faust
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a method for meta-learning reinforcement learning algorithms by searching over the space of computational graphs which compute the loss function for a value-based model-free RL agent to optimize. The learned algorithms are domain-agnostic and can generalize to new environments not seen during training. Our method can both learn from scratch and bootstrap off known existing algorithms, like DQN, enabling interpretable modifications which improve performance. Learning from scratch on simple classical control and gridworld tasks, our method rediscovers the temporal-difference (TD) algorithm. Bootstrapped from DQN, we highlight two learned algorithms which obtain good generalization performance over other classical control tasks, gridworld type tasks, and Atari games. The analysis of the learned algorithm behavior shows resemblance to recently proposed RL algorithms that address overestimation in value-based methods.
Generalized Energy Based Models
Authors: Michael Arbel, Liang Zhou, Arthur Gretton
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We introduce the Generalized Energy Based Model (GEBM) for generative modelling. These models combine two  trained components: a base distribution (generally an implicit model), which can learn the support of data with low intrinsic dimension in a high dimensional space; and an energy function, to refine the probability mass on the learned support. 
Both the energy function and base jointly constitute the final model, unlike GANs, which retain only the base distribution (the "generator").  
GEBMs are trained by alternating between learning the energy and the base. 
We show that both training stages are well-defined: the energy is learned by maximising a generalized likelihood, and the resulting energy-based loss provides informative gradients for learning the base.
Samples from the posterior on the latent space of the trained model can be obtained via MCMC, thus finding regions in this space that produce better quality samples.
Empirically, the GEBM samples on image-generation tasks are of much better quality than those from the learned generator alone, indicating that all else being equal, the GEBM will outperform a GAN of the same complexity. When using normalizing flows as base measures, GEBMs succeed on density modelling tasks returning comparable performance to direct maximum likelihood of the same networks.
Learning Parametrised Graph Shift Operators
Authors: George Dasoulas, Johannes F. Lutzeyer, Michalis Vazirgiannis
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In many domains data is currently represented as graphs and therefore, the graph representation of this data becomes increasingly important in machine learning. Network data is, implicitly or explicitly, always represented using a graph shift operator (GSO) with the most common choices being the adjacency, Laplacian matrices and their normalisations. In this paper, a novel parametrised GSO (PGSO) is proposed, where specific parameter values result in the most commonly used GSOs and message-passing operators in graph neural network (GNN) frameworks. The PGSO is suggested as a replacement of the standard GSOs that are used in state-of-the-art GNN architectures and the optimisation of the PGSO parameters is seamlessly included in the model training. It is proved that the PGSO has real eigenvalues and a set of real eigenvectors independent of the parameter values and spectral bounds on the PGSO are derived. PGSO parameters are shown to adapt to the sparsity of the graph structure in a study on stochastic blockmodel networks, where they are found to automatically replicate the GSO regularisation found in the literature. On several real-world datasets the accuracy of state-of-the-art GNN architectures is improved by the inclusion of the PGSO in both node- and graph-classification tasks.
Gradient Origin Networks
Authors: Sam Bond-Taylor, Chris G. Willcocks
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper proposes a new type of generative model that is able to quickly learn a latent representation without an encoder. This is achieved using empirical Bayes to calculate the expectation of the posterior, which is implemented by initialising a latent vector with zeros, then using the gradient of the log-likelihood of the data with respect to this zero vector as new latent points. The approach has similar characteristics to autoencoders, but with a simpler architecture, and is demonstrated in a variational autoencoder equivalent that permits sampling. This also allows implicit representation networks to learn a space of implicit functions without requiring a hypernetwork, retaining their representation advantages across datasets. The experiments show that the proposed method converges faster, with significantly lower reconstruction error than autoencoders, while requiring half the parameters.
Implicit Convex Regularizers of CNN Architectures: Convex Optimization of Two- and Three-Layer Networks in Polynomial Time
Authors: Tolga Ergen, Mert Pilanci
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study training of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with ReLU activations and introduce exact convex optimization formulations with a polynomial complexity with respect to the number of data samples, the number of neurons, and data dimension. More specifically, we develop a convex analytic framework utilizing semi-infinite duality to obtain equivalent convex optimization problems for several two- and three-layer CNN architectures. We first prove that two-layer CNNs can be globally optimized via an $\ell_2$ norm regularized convex program. We then show that multi-layer circular CNN training problems with a single ReLU layer are equivalent to an $\ell_1$ regularized convex program that encourages sparsity in the spectral domain. We also extend these results to three-layer CNNs with two ReLU layers. Furthermore, we present extensions of our approach to different pooling methods, which elucidates the implicit architectural bias as convex regularizers.
ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learning
Authors: Mohit Shridhar, Xingdi Yuan, Marc-Alexandre Cote, Yonatan Bisk, Adam Trischler, Matthew Hausknecht
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Given a simple request like Put a washed apple in the kitchen fridge, humans can reason in purely abstract terms by imagining action sequences and scoring their likelihood of success, prototypicality, and efficiency, all without moving a muscle. Once we see the kitchen in question, we can update our abstract plans to fit the scene. Embodied agents require the same abilities, but existing work does not yet provide the infrastructure necessary for both reasoning abstractly and executing concretely. We address this limitation by introducing ALFWorld, a simulator that enables agents to learn abstract, text-based policies in TextWorld (Côté et al., 2018) and then execute goals from the ALFRED benchmark (Shridhar et al., 2020) in a rich visual environment. ALFWorld enables the creation of a new BUTLER agent whose abstract knowledge, learned in TextWorld, corresponds directly to concrete, visually grounded actions. In turn, as we demonstrate empirically, this fosters better agent generalization than training only in the visually grounded environment. BUTLER’s simple, modular design factors the problem to allow researchers to focus on models for improving every piece of the pipeline (language understanding, planning, navigation, and visual scene understanding).
Rethinking Positional Encoding in Language Pre-training
Authors: Guolin Ke, Di He, Tie-Yan Liu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this work, we investigate the positional encoding methods used in language pre-training (e.g., BERT) and identify several problems in the existing formulations. First, we show that in the absolute positional encoding, the addition operation applied on positional embeddings and word embeddings brings mixed correlations between the two heterogeneous information resources. It may bring unnecessary randomness in the attention and further limit the expressiveness of the model.  Second, we question whether treating the position of the symbol \texttt{[CLS]} the same as other words is a reasonable design, considering its special role (the representation of the entire sentence) in the downstream tasks. Motivated from above analysis, we propose a new positional encoding method called \textbf{T}ransformer with \textbf{U}ntied \textbf{P}ositional \textbf{E}ncoding (TUPE). In the self-attention module, TUPE computes the word contextual correlation and positional correlation separately with different parameterizations and then adds them together. This design removes the mixed and noisy correlations over heterogeneous embeddings and offers more expressiveness by using different projection matrices. Furthermore, TUPE unties the \texttt{[CLS]} symbol from other positions, making it easier to capture information from all positions. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on GLUE benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Codes and models are released at \url{https://github.com/guolinke/TUPE}.