mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Offline Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Q-Learning
Authors: Ilya Kostrikov, Ashvin Nair, Sergey Levine
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning requires reconciling two conflicting aims: learning a policy that improves over the behavior policy that collected the dataset, while at the same time minimizing the deviation from the behavior policy so as to avoid errors due to distributional shift. This tradeoff is critical, because most current offline reinforcement learning methods need to query the value of unseen actions during training to improve the policy, and therefore need to either constrain these actions to be in-distribution, or else regularize their values. We propose a new offline RL method that never needs to evaluate actions outside of the dataset, but still enables the learned policy to improve substantially over the best behavior in the data through generalization. The main insight in our work is that, instead of evaluating unseen actions from the latest policy, we can approximate the policy improvement step implicitly by treating the state value function as a random variable, with randomness determined by the action (while still integrating over the dynamics to avoid excessive optimism), and then taking a state conditional upper expectile of this random variable to estimate the value of the best actions in that state. This leverages the generalization capacity of the function approximator to estimate the value of the best available action at a given state without ever directly querying a Q-function with this unseen action. Our algorithm alternates between fitting this upper expectile value function and backing it up into a Q-function, without any explicit policy. Then, we extract the policy via advantage-weighted behavioral cloning, which also avoids querying out-of-sample actions. We dub our method Implicit Q-learning (IQL).  IQL is easy to implement, computationally efficient, and only requires fitting an additional critic with an asymmetric L2 loss. IQL demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance on D4RL, a standard benchmark for offline reinforcement learning. We also demonstrate that IQL achieves strong performance fine-tuning using online interaction after offline initialization.
HyAR: Addressing Discrete-Continuous Action Reinforcement Learning via Hybrid Action Representation
Authors: Boyan Li, Hongyao Tang, YAN ZHENG, Jianye HAO, Pengyi Li, Zhen Wang, Zhaopeng Meng, LI Wang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Discrete-continuous hybrid action space is a natural setting in many practical problems, such as robot control and game AI. However, most previous Reinforcement Learning (RL) works only demonstrate the success in controlling with either discrete or continuous action space, while seldom take into account the hybrid action space. One naive way to address hybrid action RL is to convert the hybrid action space into a unified homogeneous action space by discretization or continualization, so that conventional RL algorithms can be applied. However, this ignores the underlying structure of hybrid action space and also induces the scalability issue and additional approximation difficulties, thus leading to degenerated results. In this paper, we propose Hybrid Action Representation (HyAR) to learn a compact and decodable latent representation space for the original hybrid action space. HyAR constructs the latent space and embeds the dependence between discrete action and continuous parameter via an embedding table and conditional Variantional Auto-Encoder (VAE). To further improve the effectiveness, the action representation is trained to be semantically smooth through unsupervised environmental dynamics prediction. Finally, the agent then learns its policy with conventional DRL algorithms in the learned representation space and interacts with the environment by decoding the hybrid action embeddings to the original action space. We evaluate HyAR in a variety of environments with discrete-continuous action space. The results demonstrate the superiority of HyAR when compared with previous baselines, especially for high-dimensional action spaces.
BiBERT: Accurate Fully Binarized BERT
Authors: Haotong Qin, Yifu Ding, Mingyuan Zhang, Qinghua YAN, Aishan Liu, Qingqing Dang, Ziwei Liu, Xianglong Liu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The large pre-trained BERT has achieved remarkable performance on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks but is also computation and memory expensive. As one of the powerful compression approaches, binarization extremely reduces the computation and memory consumption by utilizing 1-bit parameters and bitwise operations. Unfortunately, the full binarization of BERT (i.e., 1-bit weight, embedding, and activation) usually suffer a significant performance drop, and there is rare study addressing this problem. In this paper, with the theoretical justification and empirical analysis, we identify that the severe performance drop can be mainly attributed to the information degradation and optimization direction mismatch respectively in the forward and backward propagation, and propose BiBERT, an accurate fully binarized BERT, to eliminate the performance bottlenecks. Specifically, BiBERT introduces an efficient Bi-Attention structure for maximizing representation information statistically and a Direction-Matching Distillation (DMD) scheme to optimize the full binarized BERT accurately. Extensive experiments show that BiBERT outperforms both the straightforward baseline and existing state-of-the-art quantized BERTs with ultra-low bit activations by convincing margins on the NLP benchmark. As the first fully binarized BERT, our method yields impressive 56.3 times and 31.2 times saving on FLOPs and model size, demonstrating the vast advantages and potential of the fully binarized BERT model in real-world resource-constrained scenarios.
IGLU: Efficient GCN Training via Lazy Updates
Authors: S Deepak Narayanan, Aditya Sinha, Prateek Jain, Purushottam Kar, SUNDARARAJAN SELLAMANICKAM
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Training multi-layer Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) using standard SGD techniques scales poorly as each descent step ends up updating node embeddings for a large portion of the graph. Recent attempts to remedy this sub-sample the graph that reduces compute but introduce additional variance and may offer suboptimal performance. This paper develops the IGLU method that caches intermediate computations at various GCN layers thus enabling lazy updates that significantly reduce the compute cost of descent. IGLU introduces bounded bias into the gradients but nevertheless converges to a first-order saddle point under standard assumptions such as objective smoothness. Benchmark experiments show that IGLU offers up to 1.2% better accuracy despite requiring up to 88% less compute.
Learning by Directional Gradient Descent
Authors: David Silver, Anirudh Goyal, Ivo Danihelka, Matteo Hessel, Hado van Hasselt
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: How should state be constructed from a sequence of observations, so as to best achieve some objective? Most deep learning methods update the parameters of the state representation by gradient descent. However, no prior method for computing the gradient is fully satisfactory, for example consuming too much memory, introducing too much variance, or adding too much bias. In this work, we propose a new learning algorithm that addresses these limitations. The basic idea is to update the parameters of the representation by using the directional derivative along a candidate direction, a quantity that may be computed online with the same computational cost as the representation itself. We consider several different choices of candidate direction, including random selection and approximations to the true gradient, and investigate their performance on several synthetic tasks.
Privacy Implications of Shuffling
Authors: Casey Meehan, Amrita Roy Chowdhury, Kamalika Chaudhuri, Somesh Jha
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: \ldp deployments are vulnerable to inference attacks as an adversary can link the noisy responses to their identity and subsequently, auxiliary information using the \textit{order} of the data. An alternative model, shuffle \textsf{DP}, prevents this by shuffling the noisy responses uniformly at random.  However, this limits the data learnability -- only symmetric functions (input order agnostic) can be learned. In this paper, we strike a balance and show that systematic shuffling of the noisy responses can thwart specific inference attacks while retaining some meaningful data learnability. To this end, we propose a novel privacy guarantee, \name-privacy, that captures the privacy of the order of a data sequence. \name-privacy allows tuning the granularity at which the ordinal information is maintained, which formalizes the degree the resistance to inference attacks trading it off with data learnability.  Additionally, we propose a novel shuffling mechanism that can achieve \name-privacy and demonstrate the practicality of our mechanism via evaluation on real-world datasets.
Open-Set Recognition: A Good Closed-Set Classifier is All You Need
Authors: Sagar Vaze, Kai Han, Andrea Vedaldi, Andrew Zisserman
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The ability to identify whether or not a test sample belongs to one of the semantic classes in a classifier's training set is critical to practical deployment of the model. This task is termed open-set recognition (OSR) and has received significant attention in recent years. In this paper, we first demonstrate that the ability of a classifier to make the 'none-of-above' decision is highly correlated with its accuracy on the closed-set classes. We find that this relationship holds across loss objectives and architectures, and further demonstrate the trend both on the standard OSR benchmarks as well as on a large-scale ImageNet evaluation. Second, we use this correlation to boost the performance of the maximum softmax probability OSR 'baseline' by improving its closed-set accuracy, and with this strong baseline achieve state-of-the-art on a number of OSR benchmarks. Similarly, we boost the performance of the existing state-of-the-art method by improving its closed-set accuracy, but the resulting discrepancy with the strong baseline is marginal. Our third contribution is to present the 'Semantic Shift Benchmark' (SSB), which better respects the task of detecting semantic novelty, as opposed to low-level distributional shifts as tackled by neighbouring machine learning fields. On this new evaluation, we again demonstrate that there is negligible difference between the strong baseline and the existing state-of-the-art. Code available at: https://github.com/sgvaze/osr_closed_set_all_you_need.
Modular Lifelong Reinforcement Learning via Neural Composition
Authors: Jorge A Mendez, Harm van Seijen, ERIC EATON
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Humans commonly solve complex problems by decomposing them into easier subproblems and then combining the subproblem solutions. This type of compositional reasoning permits reuse of the subproblem solutions when tackling future tasks that share part of the underlying compositional structure. In a continual or lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) setting, this ability to decompose knowledge into reusable components would enable agents to quickly learn new RL tasks by leveraging accumulated compositional structures. We explore a particular form of composition based on neural modules and present a set of RL problems that intuitively admit compositional solutions. Empirically, we demonstrate that neural composition indeed captures the underlying structure of this space of problems. We further propose a compositional lifelong RL method that leverages accumulated neural components to accelerate the learning of future tasks while retaining performance on previous tasks via off-line RL over replayed experiences.
On the role of population heterogeneity in emergent communication
Authors: Mathieu Rita, Florian Strub, Jean-Bastien Grill, Olivier Pietquin, Emmanuel Dupoux
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Populations have often been perceived as a structuring component for language to emerge and evolve: the larger the population, the more systematic the language. While this observation is widespread in the sociolinguistic literature, it has not been reproduced in computer simulations with neural agents. In this paper, we thus aim to clarify this apparent contradiction. We explore emergent language properties by varying agent population size in the speaker-listener Lewis Game. After reproducing the experimental paradox, we challenge the simulation assumption that the agent community is homogeneous. We first investigate how speaker-listener asymmetry alters language structure to examine two potential diversity factors: training speed and network capacity. We find out that emergent language properties are only altered by the relative difference of factors between speaker and listener, and not by their absolute values. From then, we leverage this observation to control population heterogeneity without introducing confounding factors. We finally show that introducing such training speed heterogeneities naturally sort out the initial paradox: larger simulated communities start developing more systematic and structured languages.
The Convex Geometry of Backpropagation: Neural Network Gradient Flows Converge to Extreme Points of the Dual Convex Program
Authors: Yifei Wang, Mert Pilanci
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We study non-convex subgradient flows for training two-layer ReLU neural networks from a convex geometry and duality perspective. We characterize the implicit bias of unregularized non-convex gradient flow as convex regularization of an equivalent convex model. We then show that the limit points of non-convex subgradient flows can be identified via primal-dual correspondence in this convex optimization problem.  Moreover, we derive a sufficient condition on the dual variables which ensures that the stationary points of the non-convex objective are the KKT points of the convex objective, thus proving convergence of non-convex gradient flows to the global optimum. For a class of regular training data distributions such as orthogonal separable data, we show that this sufficient condition holds. Therefore, non-convex gradient flows in fact converge to optimal solutions of a convex optimization problem. We present numerical results verifying the predictions of our theory for non-convex subgradient descent.
Adaptive Wavelet Transformer Network for 3D Shape Representation Learning
Authors: Hao Huang, Yi Fang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We present a novel method for 3D shape representation learning using multi-scale wavelet decomposition. Previous works often decompose 3D shapes into complementary components in spatial domain at a single scale. In this work, we study to decompose 3D shapes into sub-bands components in frequency domain at multiple scales, resulting in a hierarchical decomposition tree in a principled manner rooted in multi-resolution wavelet analysis. Specifically, we propose Adaptive Wavelet Transformer Network (AWT-Net) that firstly generates approximation or detail wavelet coefficients per point, classifying each point into high or low sub-bands components, using lifting scheme at multiple scales recursively and hierarchically. Then, AWT-Net exploits Transformer to enhance the original shape features by querying and fusing features from different but integrated sub-bands. The wavelet coefficients can be learned without direct supervision on coefficients, and AWT-Net is fully differentiable and can be learned in an end-to-end fashion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AWT-Net achieves competitive performance on 3D shape classification and segmentation benchmarks.
Learning Hierarchical Structures with Differentiable Nondeterministic Stacks
Authors: Brian DuSell, David Chiang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Learning hierarchical structures in sequential data -- from simple algorithmic patterns to natural language -- in a reliable, generalizable way remains a challenging problem for neural language models. Past work has shown that recurrent neural networks (RNNs) struggle to generalize on held-out algorithmic or syntactic patterns without supervision or some inductive bias. To remedy this, many papers have explored augmenting RNNs with various differentiable stacks, by analogy with finite automata and pushdown automata (PDAs). In this paper, we improve the performance of our recently proposed Nondeterministic Stack RNN (NS-RNN), which uses a differentiable data structure that simulates a nondeterministic PDA, with two important changes. First, the model now assigns unnormalized positive weights instead of probabilities to stack actions, and we provide an analysis of why this improves training. Second, the model can directly observe the state of the underlying PDA. Our model achieves lower cross-entropy than all previous stack RNNs on five context-free language modeling tasks (within 0.05 nats of the information-theoretic lower bound), including a task on which the NS-RNN previously failed to outperform a deterministic stack RNN baseline. Finally, we propose a restricted version of the NS-RNN that incrementally processes infinitely long sequences, and we present language modeling results on the Penn Treebank.
Multiset-Equivariant Set Prediction with Approximate Implicit Differentiation
Authors: Yan Zhang, David W Zhang, Simon Lacoste-Julien, Gertjan J. Burghouts, Cees G. M. Snoek
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Most set prediction models in deep learning use set-equivariant operations, but they actually operate on multisets. We show that set-equivariant functions cannot represent certain functions on multisets, so we introduce the more appropriate notion of multiset-equivariance. We identify that the existing Deep Set Prediction Network (DSPN) can be multiset-equivariant without being hindered by set-equivariance and improve it with approximate implicit differentiation, allowing for better optimization while being faster and saving memory. In a range of toy experiments, we show that the perspective of multiset-equivariance is beneficial and that our changes to DSPN achieve better results in most cases. On CLEVR object property prediction, we substantially improve over the state-of-the-art Slot Attention from 8% to 77% in one of the strictest evaluation metrics because of the benefits made possible by implicit differentiation.
Generative Modeling with Optimal Transport Maps
Authors: Litu Rout, Alexander Korotin, Evgeny Burnaev
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: With the discovery of Wasserstein GANs, Optimal Transport (OT) has become a powerful tool for large-scale generative modeling tasks. In these tasks, OT cost is typically used as the loss for training GANs. In contrast to this approach, we show that the OT map itself can be used as a generative model, providing comparable performance. Previous analogous approaches consider OT maps as generative models only in the latent spaces due to their poor performance in the original high-dimensional ambient space. In contrast, we apply OT maps directly in the ambient space, e.g., a space of high-dimensional images. First, we derive a min-max optimization algorithm to efficiently compute OT maps for the quadratic cost (Wasserstein-2 distance). Next, we extend the approach to the case when the input and output distributions are located in the spaces of different dimensions and derive error bounds for the computed OT map. We evaluate the algorithm on image generation and unpaired image restoration tasks. In particular, we consider denoising, colorization, and inpainting, where the optimality of the restoration map is a desired attribute, since the output (restored) image is expected to be close to the input (degraded) one.
switch-GLAT: Multilingual Parallel Machine Translation Via Code-Switch Decoder
Authors: Zhenqiao Song, Hao Zhou, Lihua Qian, Jingjing Xu, Shanbo Cheng, Mingxuan Wang, Lei Li
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Multilingual machine translation aims to develop a single model for multiple language directions. However, existing multilingual models based on Transformer are limited in terms of both translation performance and inference speed. In this paper, we propose switch-GLAT, a non-autoregressive multilingual machine translation model with a code-switch decoder. It can generate contextual code-switched translations for a given source sentence, and perform code-switch back-translation, greatly boosting multilingual translation performance. In addition, its inference is highly efficient thanks to its parallel decoder. Experiments show that our proposed switch-GLAT outperform the multilingual Transformer with as much as 0.74 BLEU improvement and 6.2x faster decoding speed in inference.
Understanding Latent Correlation-Based Multiview Learning and Self-Supervision: An Identifiability Perspective
Authors: Qi Lyu, Xiao Fu, Weiran Wang, Songtao Lu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Multiple views of data, both naturally acquired (e.g., image and audio) and artificially produced (e.g., via adding different noise to data samples), have proven useful in enhancing representation learning. Natural views are often handled by multiview analysis tools, e.g., (deep) canonical correlation analysis [(D)CCA], while the artificial ones are frequently used in self-supervised learning (SSL) paradigms, e.g., BYOL and Barlow Twins. Both types of approaches often involve learning neural feature extractors such that the embeddings of data exhibit high cross-view correlations. Although intuitive, the effectiveness of correlation-based neural embedding is mostly empirically validated. 
This work aims to understand latent correlation maximization-based deep multiview learning from a latent component identification viewpoint. An intuitive generative model of multiview data is adopted, where the views are different nonlinear mixtures of shared and private components. Since the shared components are view/distortion-invariant, representing the data using such components is believed to reveal the identity of the samples effectively and robustly. Under this model, latent correlation maximization is shown to guarantee the extraction of the shared components across views (up to certain ambiguities). In addition, it is further shown that the private information in each view can be provably disentangled from the shared using proper regularization design. A finite sample analysis, which has been rare in nonlinear mixture identifiability study, is also presented. The theoretical results and newly designed regularization are tested on a series of tasks.
Resonance in Weight Space: Covariate Shift Can Drive Divergence of SGD with Momentum
Authors: Kirby Banman, Garnet Liam Peet-Pare, Nidhi Hegde, Alona Fyshe, Martha White
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Most convergence guarantees for stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDm) rely on iid  sampling. Yet, SGDm is often used outside this regime, in settings with temporally correlated input samples such as continual learning and reinforcement learning. Existing work has shown that SGDm with a decaying step-size can converge under Markovian temporal correlation. In this work, we show that SGDm under covariate shift with a fixed step-size can be unstable and diverge. In particular, we show SGDm under covariate shift is a parametric oscillator, and so can suffer from a phenomenon known as resonance. We approximate the learning system as a time varying system of ordinary differential equations, and leverage existing theory to characterize the system's divergence/convergence as resonant/nonresonant modes. The theoretical result is limited to the linear setting with periodic covariate shift, so we empirically supplement this result to show that resonance phenomena persist even under non-periodic covariate shift, nonlinear dynamics with neural networks, and optimizers other than SGDm.
Continuous-Time Meta-Learning with Forward Mode Differentiation
Authors: Tristan Deleu, David Kanaa, Leo Feng, Giancarlo Kerg, Yoshua Bengio, Guillaume Lajoie, Pierre-Luc Bacon
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Drawing inspiration from gradient-based meta-learning methods with infinitely small gradient steps, we introduce Continuous-Time Meta-Learning (COMLN), a meta-learning algorithm where adaptation follows the dynamics of a gradient vector field. Specifically, representations of the inputs are meta-learned such that a task-specific linear classifier is obtained as a solution of an ordinary differential equation (ODE). Treating the learning process as an ODE offers the notable advantage that the length of the trajectory is now continuous, as opposed to a fixed and discrete number of gradient steps. As a consequence, we can optimize the amount of adaptation necessary to solve a new task using stochastic gradient descent, in addition to learning the initial conditions as is standard practice in gradient-based meta-learning. Importantly, in order to compute the exact meta-gradients required for the outer-loop updates, we  devise an efficient algorithm based on forward mode differentiation, whose memory requirements do not scale with the length of the learning trajectory, thus allowing longer adaptation in constant memory. We provide analytical guarantees for the stability of COMLN, we show empirically its efficiency in terms of runtime and memory usage, and we illustrate its effectiveness on a range of few-shot image classification problems.
Acceleration of Federated Learning with Alleviated Forgetting in Local Training
Authors: Chencheng Xu, Zhiwei Hong, Minlie Huang, Tao Jiang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables distributed optimization of machine learning models while protecting privacy by independently training local models on each client and then aggregating parameters on a central server, thereby producing an effective global model. Although a variety of FL algorithms have been proposed, their training efficiency remains low when the data are not independently and identically distributed (non-i.i.d.) across different clients. We observe that the slow convergence rates of the existing methods are (at least partially) caused by the catastrophic forgetting issue during the local training stage on each individual client, which leads to a large increase in the loss function concerning the previous training data provided at other clients. Here, we propose FedReg, an algorithm to accelerate FL with alleviated knowledge forgetting in the local training stage by regularizing locally trained parameters with the loss on generated pseudo data, which encode the knowledge of previous training data learned by the global model. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FedReg not only significantly improves the convergence rate of FL, especially when the neural network architecture is deep and the clients' data are extremely non-i.i.d., but is also able to protect privacy better in classification problems and more robust against gradient inversion attacks.
Sqrt(d) Dimension Dependence of Langevin Monte Carlo
Authors: Ruilin Li, Hongyuan Zha, Molei Tao
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: This article considers the popular MCMC method of unadjusted Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) and provides a non-asymptotic analysis of its sampling error in 2-Wasserstein distance. The proof is based on a refinement of mean-square analysis in Li et al. (2019), and this refined framework automates the analysis of a large class of sampling algorithms based on discretizations of contractive SDEs. Using this framework, we establish an $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{d}/\epsilon)$ mixing time bound for LMC, without warm start, under the common log-smooth and log-strongly-convex conditions, plus a growth condition on the 3rd-order derivative of the potential of target measures. This bound improves the best previously known $\tilde{O}(d/\epsilon)$ result and is optimal (in terms of order) in both dimension $d$ and accuracy tolerance $\epsilon$ for target measures satisfying the aforementioned assumptions. Our theoretical analysis is further validated by numerical experiments.
Query Embedding on Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Dimitrios Alivanistos, Max Berrendorf, Michael Cochez, Mikhail Galkin
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Multi-hop logical reasoning is an established problem in the field of representation learning on knowledge graphs (KGs). It subsumes both one-hop link prediction as well as other more complex types of logical queries. Existing algorithms operate only on classical, triple-based graphs, whereas modern KGs often employ a hyper-relational modeling paradigm. In this paradigm, typed edges may have several key-value pairs known as qualifiers that provide fine-grained context for facts. In queries, this context modifies the meaning of relations, and usually reduces the answer set. Hyper-relational queries are often observed in real-world KG applications, and existing approaches for approximate query answering cannot make use of qualifier pairs. In this work, we bridge this gap and extend the multi-hop reasoning problem to hyper-relational KGs allowing to tackle this new type of complex queries. Building upon recent advancements in Graph Neural Networks and query embedding techniques, we study how to embed and answer hyper-relational conjunctive queries. Besides that, we propose a method to answer such queries and demonstrate in our experiments that qualifiers improve query answering on a diverse set of query patterns.
Graph-less Neural Networks: Teaching Old MLPs New Tricks Via Distillation
Authors: Shichang Zhang, Yozen Liu, Yizhou Sun, Neil Shah
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are popular for graph machine learning and have shown great results on wide node classification tasks. Yet, they are less popular for practical deployments in the industry owing to their scalability challenges incurred by data dependency. Namely, GNN inference depends on neighbor nodes multiple hops away from the target, and fetching them burdens latency-constrained applications. Existing inference acceleration methods like pruning and quantization can speed up GNNs by reducing Multiplication-and-ACcumulation (MAC) operations, but the improvements are limited given the data dependency is not resolved. Conversely, multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) have no graph dependency and infer much faster than GNNs, even though they are less accurate than GNNs for node classification in general. Motivated by these complementary strengths and weaknesses, we bring GNNs and MLPs together via knowledge distillation (KD). Our work shows that the performance of MLPs can be improved by large margins with GNN KD. We call the distilled MLPs Graph-less Neural Networks (GLNNs) as they have no inference graph dependency. We show that GLNNs with competitive accuracy infer faster than GNNs by 146X-273X and faster than other acceleration methods by 14X-27X. Under a production setting involving both transductive and inductive predictions across 7 datasets, GLNN accuracies improve over stand-alone MLPs by 12.36% on average and match GNNs on 6/7 datasets. Comprehensive analysis shows when and why GLNNs can achieve competitive accuracies to GNNs and suggests GLNN as a handy choice for latency-constrained applications.
When, Why, and Which Pretrained GANs Are Useful?
Authors: Timofey Grigoryev, Andrey Voynov, Artem Babenko
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The literature has proposed several methods to finetune pretrained GANs on new datasets, which typically results in higher performance compared to training from scratch, especially in the limited-data regime. However, despite the apparent empirical benefits of GAN pretraining, its inner mechanisms were not analyzed in-depth, and understanding of its role is not entirely clear. Moreover, the essential practical details, e.g., selecting a proper pretrained GAN checkpoint, currently do not have rigorous grounding and are typically determined by trial and error. 

This work aims to dissect the process of GAN finetuning. First, we show that initializing the GAN training process by a pretrained checkpoint primarily affects the model's coverage rather than the fidelity of individual samples. Second, we explicitly describe how pretrained generators and discriminators contribute to the finetuning process and explain the previous evidence on the importance of pretraining both of them. Finally, as an immediate practical benefit of our analysis, we describe a simple recipe to choose an appropriate GAN checkpoint that is the most suitable for finetuning to a particular target task. Importantly, for most of the target tasks, Imagenet-pretrained GAN, despite having poor visual quality, appears to be an excellent starting point for finetuning, resembling the typical pretraining scenario of discriminative computer vision models.
Associated Learning: an Alternative to End-to-End Backpropagation that Works on CNN, RNN, and Transformer
Authors: Dennis Y.H. Wu, Dinan Lin, Vincent Chen, Hung-Hsuan Chen
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: This paper studies Associate Learning (AL), an alternative methodology to the end-to-end backpropagation (BP).  We introduce the workflow to convert a neural network into a proper structure such that AL can be used to learn the weights for various types of neural networks.  We compared AL and BP on some of the most successful types of neural networks -- Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and Transformer.  Experimental results show that AL consistently outperforms BP on various open datasets.  We discuss possible reasons for AL's success and its limitations.
Learning a subspace of policies for online adaptation in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jean-Baptiste Gaya, Laure Soulier, Ludovic Denoyer
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is mainly studied in a setting where the training and the testing environments are similar. But in many practical applications, these environments may differ. For instance, in control systems, the robot(s) on which a policy is learned might differ from the robot(s) on which a policy will run. It can be caused by different internal factors (e.g., calibration issues, system attrition, defective modules) or also by external changes (e.g., weather conditions). There is  a need to develop RL methods that generalize well to variations of the training conditions. In this article, we consider the simplest yet hard to tackle generalization setting where the test environment is unknown at train time, forcing the agent to adapt to the system's new dynamics. This online adaptation process can be computationally expensive (e.g., fine-tuning) and cannot rely on meta-RL techniques since there is just a single train environment. To do so, we propose an approach where we learn a subspace of policies within the parameter space. This subspace contains an infinite number of policies that are trained to solve the training environment while having different parameter values. As a consequence, two policies in that subspace process information differently and exhibit different behaviors when facing variations of the train environment. Our experiments carried out over a large variety of benchmarks compare our approach with baselines, including diversity-based methods. In comparison, our approach is simple to tune, does not need any extra component  (e.g., discriminator) and learns policies able to gather a high reward on unseen environments.
MCMC Should Mix: Learning Energy-Based Model with Neural Transport Latent Space MCMC
Authors: Erik Nijkamp, Ruiqi Gao, Pavel Sountsov, Srinivas Vasudevan, Bo Pang, Song-Chun Zhu, Ying Nian Wu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Learning energy-based model (EBM) requires MCMC sampling of the learned model as an inner loop of the learning algorithm. However, MCMC sampling of EBMs in high-dimensional data space is generally not mixing, because the energy function, which is usually parametrized by deep network, is highly multi-modal in the data space. This is a serious handicap for both theory and practice of EBMs. In this paper, we propose to learn EBM with a flow-based model (or in general latent variable model) serving as a backbone, so that the EBM is a correction or an exponential tilting of the flow-based model. We show that the model has a particularly simple form in the space of the latent variables of the generative model, and MCMC sampling of the EBM in the latent space mixes well and traverses modes in the data space. This enables proper sampling and learning of EBMs.
Self-supervised Learning is More Robust to Dataset Imbalance
Authors: Hong Liu, Jeff Z. HaoChen, Adrien Gaidon, Tengyu Ma
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a scalable way to learn general visual representations since it learns without labels. However, large-scale unlabeled datasets in the wild often have long-tailed label distributions, where we know little about the behavior of SSL. In this work, we systematically investigate self-supervised learning under dataset imbalance. First, we find via extensive experiments that off-the-shelf self-supervised representations are already more robust to class imbalance than supervised representations. The performance gap between balanced and imbalanced pre-training with SSL is significantly smaller than the gap with supervised learning, across sample sizes, for both in-domain and, especially, out-of-domain evaluation. Second, towards understanding the robustness of SSL, we hypothesize that SSL learns richer features from frequent data: it may learn label-irrelevant-but-transferable features that help classify the rare classes and downstream tasks. In contrast, supervised learning has no incentive to learn features irrelevant to the labels from frequent examples. We validate this hypothesis with semi-synthetic experiments as well as rigorous mathematical analyses on a simplified setting. Third, inspired by the theoretical insights, we devise a re-weighted regularization technique that  consistently improves the SSL representation quality on imbalanced datasets with several evaluation criteria, closing the small gap between balanced and imbalanced datasets with the same number of examples.
How to Train Your MAML to Excel in Few-Shot Classification
Authors: Han-Jia Ye, Wei-Lun Chao
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) is arguably one of the most popular meta-learning algorithms nowadays.
Nevertheless, its performance on few-shot classification is far behind many recent algorithms dedicated to the problem. In this paper, we point out several key facets of how to train MAML to excel in few-shot classification. First, we find that MAML needs a large number of gradient steps in its inner loop update, which contradicts its common usage in few-shot classification. Second, we find that MAML is sensitive to the class label assignments during meta-testing. Concretely, MAML meta-trains the initialization of an $N$-way classifier. These $N$ ways, during meta-testing, then have "$N!$" different permutations to be paired with a few-shot task of $N$ novel classes. We find that these permutations lead to a huge variance of accuracy, making MAML unstable in few-shot classification. Third, we investigate several approaches to make MAML permutation-invariant, among which meta-training a single vector to initialize all the $N$ weight vectors in the classification head performs the best. On benchmark datasets like MiniImageNet and TieredImageNet, our approach, which we name UNICORN-MAML, performs on a par with or even outperforms many recent few-shot classification algorithms, without sacrificing MAML's simplicity.
Linking Emergent and Natural Languages via Corpus Transfer
Authors: Shunyu Yao, Mo Yu, Yang Zhang, Karthik R Narasimhan, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Chuang Gan
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: The study of language emergence aims to understand how human languages are shaped by perceptual grounding and communicative intent. Computational approaches to emergent communication (EC) predominantly consider referential games in limited domains and analyze the learned protocol within the game framework. As a result, it remains unclear how the emergent languages from these settings connect to natural languages or provide benefits in real-world language processing tasks, where statistical models trained on large text corpora dominate. In this work, we propose a novel way to establish such a link by corpus transfer, i.e. pretraining on a corpus of emergent language for downstream natural language tasks, which is in contrast to prior work that directly transfers speaker and listener parameters. Our approach showcases non-trivial transfer benefits for two different tasks – language modeling and image captioning. For example, in a low-resource setup (modeling 2 million natural language tokens), pre-training on an emergent language corpus with just 2 million tokens reduces model perplexity by 24.6% on average across ten natural languages. We also introduce a novel metric to predict the transferability of an emergent language by translating emergent messages to natural language captions grounded on the same images. We find that our translation-based metric highly correlates with the downstream performance on modeling natural languages (for instance $\rho = 0.83$ on Hebrew), while topographic similarity, a popular metric in previous works, shows surprisingly low correlation ($\rho = 0.003$), hinting that simple properties like attribute disentanglement from synthetic domains might not capture the full complexities of natural language. Our findings also indicate potential benefits of moving language emergence forward with natural language resources and models.
CrossMatch: Cross-Classifier Consistency Regularization for Open-Set Single Domain Generalization
Authors: Ronghang Zhu, Sheng Li
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Single domain generalization (SDG) is a challenging scenario of domain generalization, where only one source domain is available to train the model. Typical SDG methods are based on the adversarial data augmentation strategy, which complements the diversity of source domain to learn a robust model. Existing SDG methods require the source and target domains to have the same label space. However, as target domains may contain novel categories unseen in source label space, this assumption is not practical in many real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a challenging and untouched problem: \textit{Open-Set Single Domain Generalization} (OS-SDG), where target domains include unseen categories out of source label space. The goal of OS-SDG is to learn a model, with only one source domain, to classify a target sample with correct class if it belongs to source label space, or assign it to unknown classes. We design a \textit{CrossMatch} approach to improve the performance of SDG methods on identifying unknown classes by leveraging a multi-binary classifier. CrossMatch generates auxiliary samples out of source label space by using an adversarial data augmentation strategy. We also adopt a consistency regularization on generated auxiliary samples between multi-binary classifiers and the model trained by SDG methods, to improve the model’s capability on unknown class identification. Experimental results on benchmark datasets prove the effectiveness of CrossMatch on enhancing the performance of SDG methods in the OS-SDG setting.
Explanations of Black-Box Models based on Directional Feature Interactions
Authors: Aria Masoomi, Davin Hill, Zhonghui Xu, Craig P Hersh, Edwin K. Silverman, Peter J. Castaldi, Stratis Ioannidis, Jennifer Dy
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: As machine learning algorithms are deployed ubiquitously to a variety of domains, it is imperative to make these often black-box models transparent.  Several recent works explain black-box models by capturing the most influential features for prediction per instance; such explanation methods are univariate, as they characterize importance per feature.  We extend univariate explanation to a higher-order; this enhances explainability, as bivariate methods can capture feature interactions in black-box models, represented as a directed graph.  Analyzing this graph enables us to discover groups of features that are equally important (i.e., interchangeable), while the notion of directionality allows us to identify the most influential features.  We apply our bivariate method on Shapley value explanations, and experimentally demonstrate the ability of directional explanations to discover feature interactions. We show the superiority of our method against state-of-the-art on CIFAR10, IMDB, Census, Divorce, Drug, and gene data.
Graph-Augmented Normalizing Flows for Anomaly Detection of Multiple Time Series
Authors: Enyan Dai, Jie Chen
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: Anomaly detection is a widely studied task for a broad variety of data types; among them, multiple time series appear frequently in applications, including for example, power grids and traffic networks. Detecting anomalies for multiple time series, however, is a challenging subject, owing to the intricate interdependencies among the constituent series. We hypothesize that anomalies occur in low density regions of a distribution and explore the use of normalizing flows for unsupervised anomaly detection, because of their superior quality in density estimation. Moreover, we propose a novel flow model by imposing a Bayesian network among constituent series. A Bayesian network is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) that models causal relationships; it factorizes the joint probability of the series into the product of easy-to-evaluate conditional probabilities. We call such a graph-augmented normalizing flow approach GANF and propose joint estimation of the DAG with flow parameters. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of GANF for density estimation, anomaly detection, and identification of time series distribution drift.