mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
E-MAPP: Efficient Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Parallel Program Guidance
Authors: Can Chang, Ni Mu, Jiajun Wu, Ling Pan, Huazhe Xu
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: A critical challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning(MARL) is for multiple agents to efficiently accomplish complex, long-horizon tasks. The agents often have difficulties in cooperating on common goals, dividing complex tasks, and planning through several stages to make progress. We propose to address these challenges by guiding agents with programs designed for parallelization, since programs as a representation contain rich structural and semantic information, and are widely used as abstractions for long-horizon tasks. Specifically, we introduce Efficient Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Parallel Program Guidance(E-MAPP), a novel framework that leverages parallel programs to guide multiple agents to efficiently accomplish goals that require planning over $10+$ stages. E-MAPP integrates the structural information from a parallel program, promotes the cooperative behaviors grounded in program semantics, and improves the time efficiency via a task allocator. We conduct extensive experiments on a series of challenging, long-horizon cooperative tasks in the Overcooked environment. Results show that E-MAPP outperforms strong baselines in terms of the completion rate, time efficiency, and zero-shot generalization ability by a large margin.
In Defense of the Unitary Scalarization for Deep Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Vitaly Kurin, Alessandro De Palma, Ilya Kostrikov, Shimon Whiteson, Pawan K Mudigonda
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent multi-task learning research argues against unitary scalarization, where training simply minimizes the sum of the task losses. Several ad-hoc multi-task optimization algorithms have instead been proposed, inspired by various hypotheses about what makes multi-task settings difficult.  The majority of these optimizers require per-task gradients, and introduce significant memory, runtime, and implementation overhead. We show that unitary scalarization, coupled with standard regularization and stabilization techniques from single-task learning, matches or improves upon the performance of complex multi-task optimizers in popular supervised and reinforcement learning settings. We then present an analysis suggesting that many specialized multi-task optimizers can be partly interpreted as forms of regularization, potentially explaining our surprising results. We believe our results call for a critical reevaluation of recent research in the area.
Flexible Neural Image Compression via Code Editing
Authors: Chenjian Gao, Tongda Xu, Dailan He, Yan Wang, Hongwei Qin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Neural image compression (NIC) has outperformed traditional image codecs in rate-distortion (R-D) performance. However, it usually requires a dedicated encoder-decoder pair for each point on R-D curve, which greatly hinders its practical deployment. While some recent works have enabled bitrate control via conditional coding, they impose strong prior during training and provide limited flexibility. In this paper we propose Code Editing, a highly flexible coding method for NIC based on semi-amortized inference and adaptive quantization. Our work is a new paradigm for variable bitrate NIC, and experimental results show that our method surpasses existing variable-rate methods. Furthermore, our approach is so flexible that it can also achieves ROI coding and multi-distortion trade-off with a single decoder. Our approach is compatible to all NIC methods with differentiable decoder NIC, and it can be even directly adopted on existing pre-trained models.
Homomorphic Matrix Completion
Authors: Xiao-Yang Liu, Zechu (Steven) Li, Xiaodong Wang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: In recommendation systems, global positioning, system identification and mobile social networks, it is a fundamental routine that a server completes a low-rank matrix from an observed subset of its entries. However, sending data to a cloud server raises up the data privacy concern due to eavesdropping attacks and the single-point failure problem, e.g., the Netflix prize contest was canceled after a privacy lawsuit. In this paper, we propose a homomorphic matrix completion algorithm for privacy-preserving data completion. First, we formulate a \textit{homomorphic matrix completion} problem where a server performs matrix completion on cyphertexts, and propose an encryption scheme that is fast and easy to implement. Secondly, we prove that the proposed scheme satisfies the \textit{homomorphism property} that decrypting the recovered matrix on cyphertexts will obtain the target complete matrix in plaintext. Thirdly, we prove that the proposed scheme satisfies an $(\epsilon, \delta)$-differential privacy property. While with similar level of privacy guarantee, we reduce the best-known error bound $O(\sqrt[10]{n_1^3n_2})$ to EXACT recovery at a price of more samples. Finally, on numerical data and real-world data, we show that both homomorphic nuclear-norm minimization and alternating minimization algorithms achieve accurate recoveries on cyphertexts, verifying the homomorphism property.
Spending Thinking Time Wisely: Accelerating MCTS with Virtual Expansions
Authors: Weirui Ye, Pieter Abbeel, Yang Gao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: One of the most important AI research questions is to trade off computation versus performance since ``perfect rationality" exists in theory but is impossible to achieve in practice. Recently, Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) has attracted considerable attention due to the significant performance improvement in various challenging domains. However, the expensive time cost during search severely restricts its scope for applications. This paper proposes the Virtual MCTS (V-MCTS), a variant of MCTS that spends more search time on harder states and less search time on simpler states adaptively. We give theoretical bounds of the proposed method and evaluate the performance and computations on $9 \times 9$ Go board games and Atari games. Experiments show that our method can achieve comparable performances to the original search algorithm while requiring less than $50\%$ search time on average. We believe that this approach is a viable alternative for tasks under limited time and resources. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/YeWR/V-MCTS.git}.
Intrinsic dimensionality estimation using Normalizing Flows
Authors: Christian Horvat, Jean-Pascal Pfister
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: How many degrees of freedom are there in a dataset consisting of $M$ samples embedded in $\mathbb{R}^D$? This number, formally known as \textsl{intrinsic dimensionality}, can be estimated using nearest neighbor statistics. However, nearest neighbor statistics do not scale to large datasets as their complexity scales quadratically in $M$, $\mathcal{O}(M^2)$. Additionally, methods based on nearest neighbor statistics perform poorly on datasets embedded in high dimensions where $D\gg 1$. In this paper, we propose a novel method to estimate the intrinsic dimensionality using Normalizing Flows that scale to large datasets and high dimensions. The method is based on some simple back-of-the-envelope calculations predicting how the singular values of the flow's Jacobian change when inflating the dataset with different noise magnitudes. Singular values associated with directions normal to the manifold evolve differently than singular values associated with directions tangent to the manifold. We test our method on various datasets, including 64x64 RGB images, where we achieve state-of-the-art results.
Moment Distributionally Robust Tree Structured Prediction
Authors: Yeshu Li, Danyal Saeed, Xinhua Zhang, Brian Ziebart, Kevin Gimpel
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Structured prediction of tree-shaped objects is heavily studied under the name of syntactic dependency parsing. Current practice based on maximum likelihood or margin is either agnostic to or inconsistent with the evaluation loss. Risk minimization alleviates the discrepancy between training and test objectives but typically induces a non-convex problem. These approaches adopt explicit regularization to combat overfitting without probabilistic interpretation. We propose a moment-based distributionally robust optimization approach for tree structured prediction, where the worst-case expected loss over a set of distributions within bounded moment divergence from the empirical distribution is minimized. We develop efficient algorithms for arborescences and other variants of trees. We derive Fisher consistency, convergence rates and generalization bounds for our proposed method. We evaluate its empirical effectiveness on dependency parsing benchmarks.
Minimax Optimal Fixed-Budget Best Arm Identification in Linear Bandits
Authors: Junwen Yang, Vincent Tan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We study the problem of best arm identification in linear bandits in the fixed-budget setting. By leveraging properties of the G-optimal design and incorporating it into the arm allocation rule, we design a parameter-free algorithm, Optimal Design-based Linear Best Arm Identification (OD-LinBAI). We provide a theoretical analysis of the failure probability of OD-LinBAI. Instead of all the optimality gaps, the performance of OD-LinBAI depends only on the gaps of the top $d$ arms, where $d$ is the effective dimension of the linear bandit instance. Complementarily, we present a minimax lower bound for this problem. The upper and lower bounds show that OD-LinBAI is minimax optimal up to constant multiplicative factors in the exponent, which is a significant theoretical improvement over existing methods (e.g., BayesGap, Peace, LinearExploration and GSE), and settles the question of ascertaining the difficulty of learning the best arm in the fixed-budget setting. Finally, numerical experiments  demonstrate considerable empirical improvements over existing algorithms on a variety of real and synthetic datasets.
Tempo: Accelerating Transformer-Based Model Training through Memory Footprint Reduction
Authors: Muralidhar Andoorveedu, Zhanda Zhu, Bojian Zheng, Gennady Pekhimenko
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Training deep learning models can be computationally expensive. Prior works have shown that increasing the batch size can potentially lead to better overall throughput. However, the batch size is frequently limited by the accelerator memory capacity due to the activations/feature maps stored for the training backward pass, as larger batch sizes require larger feature maps to be stored. Transformer-based models, which have recently seen a surge in popularity due to their good performance and applicability to a variety of tasks, have a similar problem. To remedy this issue, we propose Tempo, a new approach to efficiently use accelerator (e.g., GPU) memory resources for training Transformer-based models. Our approach provides drop-in replacements for the GELU, LayerNorm, and Attention layers, reducing the memory usage and ultimately leading to more efficient training. We implement Tempo and evaluate the throughput, memory usage, and accuracy/loss on the BERT Large pre-training task. We demonstrate that Tempo enables up to 2× higher batch sizes and 16% higher training throughput over the state-of-the-art baseline. We also evaluate Tempo on GPT2 and RoBERTa models, showing 19% and 26% speedup over the baseline.
I2DFormer: Learning Image to Document Attention for Zero-Shot Image Classification
Authors: Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Yongqin Xian, Luc V Gool, Federico Tombari
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Despite the tremendous progress in zero-shot learning (ZSL), the majority of existing methods still rely on human-annotated attributes, which are difficult to annotate and scale. An unsupervised alternative is to represent each class using the word embedding associated with its semantic class name. However, word embeddings extracted from pre-trained language models do not necessarily capture visual similarities, resulting in poor zero-shot performance.  In this work, we argue that online textual documents e.g., Wikipedia, contain rich visual descriptions about object classes, therefore can be used as powerful unsupervised side information for ZSL. To this end, we propose I2DFormer, a novel transformer-based ZSL framework that jointly learns to encode images and documents by aligning both modalities in a shared embedding space. In order to distill discriminative visual words from noisy documents, we introduce a new cross-modal attention module that learns fine-grained interactions between image patches and document words. Consequently, our I2DFormer not only learns highly discriminative document embeddings that capture visual similarities but also gains the ability to localize visually relevant words in image regions. Quantitatively, we demonstrate that our I2DFormer significantly outperforms previous unsupervised semantic embeddings under both zero-shot and generalized zero-shot learning settings on three public datasets. Qualitatively, we show that our method leads to highly interpretable results where document words can be grounded in the image regions.
Benchmarking Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Models through the Lens of Interpretability
Authors: Jonathan Crabbé, Alicia Curth, Ioana Bica, Mihaela van der Schaar
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2022

Abstract: Estimating personalized effects of treatments is a complex, yet pervasive problem. To tackle it, recent developments in the machine learning (ML) literature on heterogeneous treatment effect estimation gave rise to many sophisticated, but opaque, tools: due to their flexibility, modularity and ability to learn constrained representations, neural networks in particular have become central to this literature. Unfortunately, the assets of such black boxes come at a cost: models typically involve countless nontrivial operations, making it difficult to understand what they have learned. Yet, understanding these models can be crucial -- in a medical context, for example, discovered knowledge on treatment effect heterogeneity could inform treatment prescription in clinical practice. In this work, we therefore use post-hoc feature importance methods to identify features that influence the model's predictions. This allows us to evaluate treatment effect estimators along a new and important dimension that has been overlooked in previous work: We construct a benchmarking environment to empirically investigate the ability of personalized treatment effect models to identify predictive covariates -- covariates that determine differential responses to treatment. Our benchmarking environment then enables us to provide new insight into the strengths and weaknesses of different types of treatment effects models as we modulate different challenges specific to treatment effect estimation -- e.g. the ratio of prognostic to predictive information, the possible nonlinearity of potential outcomes and the presence and type of confounding.
AD-DROP: Attribution-Driven Dropout for Robust Language Model Fine-Tuning
Authors: Tao Yang, JInghao Deng, Xiaojun Quan, Qifan Wang, Shaoliang Nie
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on downstream tasks is apt to suffer from overfitting when limited training data is available. While dropout proves to be an effective antidote by randomly dropping a proportion of units, existing research has not examined its effect on the self-attention mechanism. In this paper, we investigate this problem through self-attention attribution and find that dropping attention positions with low attribution scores can accelerate training and increase the risk of overfitting. Motivated by this observation, we propose Attribution-Driven Dropout (AD-DROP), which randomly discards some high-attribution positions to encourage the model to make predictions by relying more on low-attribution positions to reduce overfitting. We also develop a cross-tuning strategy to alternate fine-tuning and AD-DROP to avoid dropping high-attribution positions excessively. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks show that AD-DROP yields consistent improvements over baselines. Analysis further confirms that AD-DROP serves as a strategic regularizer to prevent overfitting during fine-tuning.
Reinforced Genetic Algorithm for Structure-based Drug Design
Authors: Tianfan Fu, Wenhao Gao, Connor Coley, Jimeng Sun
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Structure-based drug design (SBDD) aims to discover drug candidates by finding molecules (ligands) that bind tightly to a disease-related protein (targets), which is the primary approach to computer-aided drug discovery. Recently, applying deep generative models for three-dimensional (3D) molecular design conditioned on protein pockets to solve SBDD has attracted much attention, but their formulation as probabilistic modeling often leads to unsatisfactory optimization performance. On the other hand, traditional combinatorial optimization methods such as genetic algorithms (GA) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in various molecular optimization tasks. However, they do not utilize protein target structure to inform design steps but rely on a random-walk-like exploration, which leads to unstable performance and no knowledge transfer between different tasks despite the similar binding physics. To achieve a more stable and efficient SBDD, we propose Reinforced Genetic Algorithm (RGA) that uses neural models to prioritize the profitable design steps and suppress random-walk behavior. The neural models take the 3D structure of the targets and ligands as inputs and are pre-trained using native complex structures to utilize the knowledge of the shared binding physics from different targets and then fine-tuned during optimization. We conduct thorough empirical studies on optimizing binding affinity to various disease targets and show that RGA outperforms the baselines in terms of docking scores and is more robust to random initializations. The ablation study also indicates that the training on different targets helps improve the performance by leveraging the shared underlying physics of the binding processes. The code is available at https://github.com/futianfan/reinforced-genetic-algorithm.
A Variational Edge Partition Model for Supervised Graph Representation Learning
Authors: Yilin He, Chaojie Wang, Hao Zhang, Bo Chen, Mingyuan Zhou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs), which propagate the node features through the edges and learn how to transform the aggregated features under label supervision, have achieved great success in supervised feature extraction for both node-level and graph-level  classification tasks. However, GNNs typically treat the graph structure as given and ignore how the edges are formed. This paper introduces a graph generative process to model how the observed edges are generated by aggregating the node interactions over a set of overlapping node communities, each of which contributes to the edges via a logical OR mechanism. Based on this generative model, we partition each edge into the summation of multiple community-specific weighted edges and use them to define community-specific GNNs. A variational inference framework is proposed to jointly learn a GNN-based inference network  that partitions the edges into different communities, these community-specific GNNs, and a GNN-based predictor that combines community-specific GNNs for the end classification task. Extensive evaluations on real-world graph datasets have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method in learning discriminative representations for both node-level and graph-level classification tasks.
Learning Optimal Flows for Non-Equilibrium Importance Sampling
Authors: Yu Cao, Eric Vanden-Eijnden
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Many applications in computational sciences and statistical inference require the computation of expectations with respect to complex high-dimensional distributions with unknown normalization constants, as well as the estimation of these constants. Here we develop a method to perform these calculations based on generating samples from a simple base distribution, transporting them by the flow generated by a velocity field, and performing averages along these flowlines. This non-equilibrium importance sampling (NEIS) strategy is straightforward to implement and can be used for calculations with arbitrary target distributions. On the theory side, we discuss how to tailor the velocity field to the target and establish general conditions under which the proposed estimator is a perfect estimator with zero-variance. We also draw connections between NEIS and approaches based on mapping a base distribution onto a target via a transport map. On the computational side, we show how to use deep learning to represent the velocity field by a neural network and train it towards the zero variance optimum. These results are illustrated numerically on benchmark examples (with dimension up to $10$), where after training the velocity field, the variance of the NEIS estimator is reduced by up to $6$ orders of magnitude than that of a vanilla estimator. We also compare the performances of NEIS with those of Neal's annealed importance sampling (AIS).
Decision Trees with Short Explainable Rules
Authors: Victor Feitosa Souza, Ferdinando Cicalese, Eduardo Laber, Marco Molinaro
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Decision trees are widely used in many settings where interpretable models are preferred or required. As confirmed by recent empirical studies,  the interpretability/explanability of a decision tree critically depends on some of its structural parameters, like size and the  average/maximum depth of its leaves. There is indeed a vast literature on the design and analysis of decision tree algorithms that aim at optimizing these parameters.This paper contributes to this important line of research: we propose as a novel criterion of measuring the interpretability of a decision tree, the sparsity of the set of attributes that are (on average) required to explain the classification of the examples. We give a tight characterization of the best possible guarantees achievable by a decision tree built to optimize both our newmeasure (which we call the {\em explanation size})  and the more classical measures of worst-case and average depth. In particular, we give an algorithm that guarantees $O(\ln n )$-approximation (hence optimal if $P \neq NP$) for the minimization of both the average/worst-case explanation size and the average/worst-case depth. In addition to our theoretical contributions, experiments with 20 real datasets show that our algorithm has accuracy competitive with CART while producing trees that allow for much simpler explanations.
NAS-Bench-360: Benchmarking Neural Architecture Search on Diverse Tasks
Authors: Renbo Tu, Nicholas Roberts, Misha Khodak, Junhong Shen, Frederic Sala, Ameet Talwalkar
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2022

Abstract: Most existing neural architecture search (NAS) benchmarks and algorithms prioritize well-studied tasks, e.g. image classification on CIFAR or ImageNet. This makes the performance of NAS approaches in more diverse areas poorly understood. In this paper, we present NAS-Bench-360, a benchmark suite to evaluate methods on domains beyond those traditionally studied in architecture search, and use it to address the following question: do state-of-the-art NAS methods perform well on diverse tasks? To construct the benchmark, we curate ten tasks spanning a diverse array of application domains, dataset sizes, problem dimensionalities, and learning objectives. Each task is carefully chosen to interoperate with modern CNN-based search methods while possibly being far-afield from its original development domain. To speed up and reduce the cost of NAS research, for two of the tasks we release the precomputed performance of 15,625 architectures comprising a standard CNN search space. Experimentally, we show the need for more robust NAS evaluation of the kind NAS-Bench-360 enables by showing that several modern NAS procedures perform inconsistently across the ten tasks, with many catastrophically poor results. We also demonstrate how NAS-Bench-360 and its associated precomputed results will enable future scientific discoveries by testing whether several recent hypotheses promoted in the NAS literature hold on diverse tasks. NAS-Bench-360 is hosted at https://nb360.ml.cmu.edu.
Sparse Fourier Backpropagation in Cryo-EM Reconstruction
Authors: Dari Kimanius, Kiarash Jamali, Sjors Scheres
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Electron cryo-microscopy (cryo-EM) is a powerful method for investigating the structures of protein molecules, with important implications for understanding the molecular processes of life and drug development. In this technique, many noisy, two-dimensional projection images of protein molecules in unknown poses are combined into one or more three-dimensional reconstructions. The presence of multiple structural states in the data represents a major bottleneck in existing processing pipelines, often requiring expert user supervision. Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) have recently been proposed as an attractive means for learning the data manifold of data sets with a large number of different states. These methods are based on a coordinate-based approach, similar to Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), to make volumetric reconstructions from 2D image data in Fourier-space. Although NeRF is a powerful method for real-space reconstruction, many of the benefits of the method do not transfer to Fourier-space, e.g. inductive bias for spatial locality. We present an approach where the VAE reconstruction is expressed on a volumetric grid, and demonstrate how this model can be trained efficiently through a novel backpropagation method that exploits the sparsity of the projection operation in Fourier-space. We achieve improved results on a simulated data set and at least equivalent results on an experimental data set when compared to the coordinate-based approach, while also substantially lowering computational cost. Our approach is computationally more efficient, especially in inference, enabling interactive analysis of the latent space by the user.
Modular Flows: Differential Molecular Generation
Authors: Yogesh Verma, Samuel Kaski, Markus Heinonen, Vikas Garg
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Generating new molecules is fundamental to advancing critical applications such as drug discovery and material synthesis. Flows can generate molecules effectively by inverting the encoding process, however, existing flow models either require artifactual dequantization or specific node/edge orderings, lack desiderata such as permutation invariance, or induce discrepancy between encoding and decoding steps that necessitates post hoc validity correction. Inspired by graph PDEs, we circumvent these issues with novel continuous normalizing E(3)-equivariant flows, based on a system of coupled node ODEs, that repeatedly reconcile locally toward globally aligned densities. Our models can be cast as message passing temporal networks, and result in superlative density estimation and  molecular generation. In particular, our generated samples achieve state of the art on both the standard QM9 and ZINC250K benchmarks.
Anonymous Bandits for Multi-User Systems
Authors: Hossein Esfandiari, Vahab Mirrokni, Jon Schneider
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: In this work, we present and study a new framework for online learning in systems with multiple users that provide user anonymity. Specifically, we extend the notion of bandits to obey the standard $k$-anonymity constraint by requiring each observation to be an aggregation of rewards for at least $k$ users. This provides a simple yet effective framework where one can learn a clustering of users in an online fashion without observing any user's individual decision. We initiate the study of anonymous bandits and provide the first sublinear regret algorithms and lower bounds for this setting.
Unsupervised Object Detection Pretraining with Joint Object Priors Generation and Detector Learning
Authors: Yizhou Wang, Meilin Chen, SHIXIANG TANG, Feng Zhu, Haiyang Yang, LEI BAI, Rui Zhao, Yunfeng Yan, Donglian Qi, Wanli Ouyang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Unsupervised pretraining methods for object detection aim to learn object discrimination and localization ability from large amounts of images. Typically, recent works design pretext tasks that supervise the detector to predict the defined object priors. They normally leverage heuristic methods to produce object priors, \emph{e.g.,} selective search, which separates the prior generation and detector learning and leads to sub-optimal solutions. In this work, we propose a novel object detection pretraining framework that could generate object priors and learn detectors jointly by generating accurate object priors from the model itself. Specifically, region priors are extracted by attention maps from the encoder, which highlights foregrounds. Instance priors are the selected high-quality output bounding boxes of the detection decoder. By assuming objects as instances in the foreground, we can generate object priors with both region and instance priors. Moreover, our object priors are jointly refined along with the detector optimization. With better object priors as supervision, the model could achieve better detection capability, which in turn promotes the object priors generation. Our method improves the competitive approaches by \textbf{+1.3 AP}, \textbf{+1.7 AP} in 1\% and 10\% COCO low-data regimes object detection.
Invariance Learning in Deep Neural Networks with Differentiable Laplace Approximations
Authors: Alexander Immer, Tycho van der Ouderaa, Gunnar Rätsch, Vincent Fortuin, Mark van der Wilk
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Data augmentation is commonly applied to improve performance of deep learning by enforcing the knowledge that certain transformations on the input preserve the output. Currently, the data augmentation parameters are chosen by human effort and costly cross-validation, which makes it cumbersome to apply to new datasets. We develop a convenient gradient-based method for selecting the data augmentation without validation data during training of a deep neural network. Our approach relies on phrasing data augmentation as an invariance in the prior distribution on the functions of a neural network, which allows us to learn it using Bayesian model selection. This has been shown to work in Gaussian processes, but not yet for deep neural networks. We propose a differentiable Kronecker-factored Laplace approximation to the marginal likelihood as our objective, which can be optimised without human supervision or validation data. We show that our method can successfully recover invariances present in the data, and that this improves generalisation and data efficiency on image datasets.
QueryPose: Sparse Multi-Person Pose Regression via Spatial-Aware Part-Level Query
Authors: Yabo Xiao, Kai Su, Xiaojuan Wang, Dongdong Yu, Lei Jin, Mingshu He, Zehuan Yuan
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We propose a sparse end-to-end multi-person pose regression framework, termed QueryPose, which can directly predict multi-person keypoint sequences from the input image. The existing end-to-end methods rely on dense representations to preserve the spatial detail and structure for precise keypoint localization. However, the dense paradigm introduces complex and redundant post-processes during inference. In our framework, each human instance is encoded by several learnable spatial-aware part-level queries associated with an instance-level query. First, we propose the Spatial Part Embedding Generation Module (SPEGM) that considers the local spatial attention mechanism to generate several spatial-sensitive part embeddings, which contain spatial details and structural information for enhancing the part-level queries. Second, we introduce the Selective Iteration Module (SIM) to adaptively update the sparse part-level queries via the generated spatial-sensitive part embeddings stage-by-stage. Based on the two proposed modules, the part-level queries are able to fully encode the spatial details and structural information for precise keypoint regression. With the bipartite matching, QueryPose avoids the hand-designed post-processes. Without bells and whistles, QueryPose surpasses the existing dense end-to-end methods with 73.6 AP on MS COCO mini-val set and 72.7 AP on CrowdPose test set. Code is available at https://github.com/buptxyb666/QueryPose.
EAGER: Asking and Answering Questions for Automatic Reward Shaping in Language-guided RL
Authors: Thomas Carta, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Olivier Sigaud, Sylvain Lamprier
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) in long horizon and sparse reward tasks is notoriously difficult and requires a lot of training steps. A standard solution to speed up the process is to leverage additional reward signals, shaping it to better guide the learning process.In the context of language-conditioned RL, the abstraction and generalisation properties of the language input provide opportunities for more efficient ways of shaping the reward.In this paper, we leverage this idea and propose an automated reward shaping method where the agent extracts auxiliary objectives from the general language goal. These auxiliary objectives use a question generation (QG) and a question answering (QA) system: they consist of questions leading the agent to try to reconstruct partial information about the global goal using its own trajectory.When it succeeds, it receives an intrinsic reward proportional to its confidence in its answer. This incentivizes the agent to generate trajectories which unambiguously explain various aspects of the general language goal.Our experimental study using various BabyAI environments shows that this approach, which does not require engineer intervention to design the auxiliary objectives, improves sample efficiency by effectively directing the exploration.
OpenFilter: A Framework to Democratize Research Access to Social Media AR Filters
Authors: Piera Riccio, Bill Psomas, Francesco Galati, Francisco Escolano, Thomas Hofmann, Nuria Oliver
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2022

Abstract: Augmented Reality or AR filters on selfies have become very popular on social media platforms for a variety of applications, including marketing, entertainment and aesthetics. Given the wide adoption of AR face filters and the importance of faces in our social structures and relations, there is increased interest by the scientific community to analyze the impact of such filters from a psychological, artistic and sociological perspective. However, there are few quantitative analyses in this area mainly due to a lack of publicly available datasets of facial images with applied AR filters. The proprietary, close nature of most social media platforms does not allow users, scientists and practitioners to access the code and the details of the available AR face filters. Scraping faces from these platforms to collect data is ethically unacceptable and should, therefore, be avoided in research. In this paper, we present OpenFilter, a flexible framework to apply AR filters available in social media platforms on existing large collections of human faces. Moreover, we share FairBeauty and B-LFW, two beautified versions of the publicly available FairFace and LFW datasets and we outline insights derived from the analysis of these beautified datasets.
Improving Policy Learning via Language Dynamics Distillation
Authors: Victor Zhong, Jesse Mu, Luke Zettlemoyer, Edward Grefenstette, Tim Rocktäschel
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Recent work has shown that augmenting environments with language descriptions improves policy learning. However, for environments with complex language abstractions, learning how to ground language to observations is difficult due to sparse, delayed rewards. We propose Language Dynamics Distillation (LDD), which pretrains a model to predict environment dynamics given demonstrations with language descriptions, and then fine-tunes these language-aware pretrained representations via reinforcement learning (RL). In this way, the model is trained to both maximize expected reward and retain knowledge about how language relates to environment dynamics. On SILG, a benchmark of five tasks with language descriptions that evaluate distinct generalization challenges on unseen environments (NetHack, ALFWorld, RTFM, Messenger, and Touchdown), LDD outperforms tabula-rasa RL, VAE pretraining, and methods that learn from unlabeled demonstrations in inverse RL and reward shaping with pretrained experts. In our analyses, we show that language descriptions in demonstrations improve sample-efficiency and generalization across environments, and that dynamics modeling with expert demonstrations is more effective than with non-experts.
Learning Energy Networks with Generalized Fenchel-Young Losses
Authors: Mathieu Blondel, Felipe Llinares-Lopez, Robert Dadashi, Leonard Hussenot, Matthieu Geist
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Energy-based models, a.k.a. energy networks, perform inference by optimizing an energy function, typically parametrized by a neural network. This allows one to capture potentially complex relationships between inputs andoutputs.To learn the parameters of the energy function, the solution to thatoptimization problem is typically fed into a loss function.The key challenge for training energy networks lies in computing loss gradients,as this typically requires argmin/argmax differentiation.In this paper, building upon a generalized notion of conjugate function,which replaces the usual bilinear pairing with a general energy function,we propose generalized Fenchel-Young losses, a natural loss construction forlearning energy networks. Our losses enjoy many desirable properties and theirgradients can be computed efficiently without argmin/argmax differentiation.We also prove the calibration of their excess risk in the case of linear-concaveenergies. We demonstrate our losses on multilabel classification and imitation learning tasks.
Interaction-Grounded Learning with Action-Inclusive Feedback
Authors: Tengyang Xie, Akanksha Saran, Dylan J Foster, Lekan Molu, Ida Momennejad, Nan Jiang, Paul Mineiro, John Langford
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Consider the problem setting of Interaction-Grounded Learning (IGL), in which a learner's goal is to optimally interact with the environment with no explicit reward to ground its policies. The agent observes a context vector, takes an action, and receives a feedback vector, using this information to effectively optimize a policy with respect to a latent reward function. Prior analyzed approaches fail when the feedback vector contains the action, which significantly limits IGL’s success in many potential scenarios such as Brain-computer interface (BCI) or Human-computer interface (HCI) applications. We address this by creating an algorithm and analysis which allows IGL to work even when the feedback vector contains the action, encoded in any fashion. We provide theoretical guarantees and large-scale experiments based on supervised datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new approach.
Making Look-Ahead Active Learning Strategies Feasible with Neural Tangent Kernels
Authors: Mohamad Amin Mohamadi, Wonho Bae, Danica J. Sutherland
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We propose a new method for approximating active learning acquisition strategies that are based on retraining with hypothetically-labeled candidate data points. Although this is usually infeasible with deep networks, we use the neural tangent kernel to approximate the result of retraining, and prove that this approximation works asymptotically even in an active learning setup -- approximating look-ahead'' selection criteria with far less computation required. This also enables us to conduct sequential active learning, i.e.\ updating the model in a streaming regime, without needing to retrain the model with SGD after adding each new data point. Moreover, our querying strategy, which better understands how the model's predictions will change by adding new data points in comparison to the standard (myopic'') criteria, beats other look-ahead strategies by large margins, and achieves equal or better performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on several benchmark datasets in pool-based active learning.
The Neural Testbed: Evaluating Joint Predictions
Authors: Ian Osband, Zheng Wen, Seyed Mohammad Asghari, Vikranth Dwaracherla, Xiuyuan Lu, MORTEZA IBRAHIMI, Dieterich Lawson, Botao Hao, Brendan O'Donoghue, Benjamin Van Roy
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Predictive distributions quantify uncertainties ignored by point estimates. This paper introduces The Neural Testbed: an open source benchmark for controlled and principled evaluation of agents that generate such predictions. Crucially, the testbed assesses agents not only on the quality of their marginal predictions per input, but also on their joint predictions across many inputs. We evaluate a range of agents using a simple neural network data generating process.Our results indicate that some popular Bayesian deep learning agents do not fare well with joint predictions, even when they can produce accurate marginal predictions. We also show that the quality of joint predictions drives performance in downstream decision tasks. We find these results are robust across choice a wide range of generative models, and highlight the practical importance of joint predictions to the community.
Learning Dense Object Descriptors from Multiple Views for Low-shot Category Generalization
Authors: Stefan Stojanov, Anh Thai, Zixuan Huang, James M. Rehg
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: A hallmark of the deep learning era for computer vision is the successful use of large-scale labeled datasets to train feature representations. This has been done for tasks ranging from object recognition and semantic segmentation to optical flow estimation and novel view synthesis of 3D scenes. In this work, we aim to learn dense discriminative object representations for low-shot category recognition without requiring any category labels. To this end, we propose Deep Object Patch Encodings (DOPE), which can be trained from multiple views of object instances without any category or semantic object part labels. To train DOPE, we assume access to sparse depths, foreground masks and known cameras, to obtain pixel-level correspondences between views of an object, and use this to formulate a self-supervised learning task to learn discriminative object patches. We find that DOPE can directly be used for low-shot classification of novel categories using local-part matching, and is competitive with and outperforms supervised and self-supervised learning baselines.
Monte Carlo Tree Descent for Black-Box Optimization
Authors: Yaoguang Zhai, Sicun Gao
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The key to Black-Box Optimization is to efficiently search through input regions with potentially widely-varying numerical properties, to achieve low-regret descent and fast progress toward the optima. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) methods have recently been introduced to improve Bayesian optimization by computing better partitioning of the search space that balances exploration and exploitation. Extending this promising framework, we study how to further integrate sample-based descent for faster optimization.  We design novel ways of expanding Monte Carlo search trees, with new descent methods at vertices that incorporate stochastic search and Gaussian Processes. We propose the corresponding rules for balancing progress and uncertainty, branch selection, tree expansion, and backpropagation. The designed search process puts more emphasis on sampling for faster descent and uses localized Gaussian Processes as auxiliary metrics for both exploitation and exploration. We show empirically that the proposed algorithms can outperform state-of-the-art methods on many challenging benchmark problems.
Teacher Forcing Recovers Reward Functions for Text Generation
Authors: Yongchang Hao, Yuxin Liu, Lili Mou
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35  (NeurIPS 2022) (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in text generation to alleviate the exposure bias issue or to utilize non-parallel datasets. The reward function plays an important role in making RL training successful. However, previous reward functions are typically task-specific and sparse, restricting the use of RL. In our work, we propose a task-agnostic approach that derives a step-wise reward function directly from a model trained with teacher forcing. We additionally propose a simple modification to stabilize the RL training on non-parallel datasets with our induced reward function. Empirical results show that our method outperforms self-training and reward regression methods on several text generation tasks, confirming the effectiveness of our reward function.