mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Towards Resolving the Implicit Bias of Gradient Descent for Matrix Factorization: Greedy Low-Rank Learning
Authors: Zhiyuan Li, Yuping Luo, Kaifeng Lyu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Matrix factorization is a simple and natural test-bed to investigate the implicit regularization of gradient descent. Gunasekar et al. (2017) conjectured that gradient flow with infinitesimal initialization converges to the solution that minimizes the nuclear norm, but a series of recent papers argued that the language of norm minimization is not sufficient to give a full characterization for the implicit regularization. In this work, we provide theoretical and empirical evidence that for depth-2 matrix factorization, gradient flow with infinitesimal initialization is mathematically equivalent to a simple heuristic rank minimization algorithm, Greedy Low-Rank Learning, under some reasonable assumptions. This generalizes the rank minimization view from previous works to a much broader setting and enables us to construct counter-examples to refute the conjecture from Gunasekar et al. (2017). We also extend the results to the case where depth >= 3, and we show that the benefit of being deeper is that the above convergence has a much weaker dependence over initialization magnitude so that this rank minimization is more likely to take effect for initialization with practical scale.
Lifelong Learning of Compositional Structures
Authors: Jorge A Mendez, ERIC EATON
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to construct self-contained chunks of knowledge and adequately reuse them in novel combinations for solving different yet structurally related problems. Learning such compositional structures has been a significant challenge for artificial systems, due to the combinatorial nature of the underlying search problem. To date, research into compositional learning has largely proceeded separately from work on lifelong or continual learning. We integrate these two lines of work to present a general-purpose framework for lifelong learning of compositional structures that can be used for solving a stream of related tasks. Our framework separates the learning process into two broad stages: learning how to best combine existing components in order to assimilate a novel problem, and learning how to adapt the set of existing components to accommodate the new problem. This separation explicitly handles the trade-off between the stability required to remember how to solve earlier tasks and the flexibility required to solve new tasks, as we show empirically in an extensive evaluation.
Wasserstein Embedding for Graph Learning
Authors: Soheil Kolouri, Navid Naderializadeh, Gustavo K. Rohde, Heiko Hoffmann
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present Wasserstein Embedding for Graph Learning (WEGL), a novel and fast framework for embedding entire graphs in a vector space, in which various machine learning models are applicable for graph-level prediction tasks. We leverage new insights on defining similarity between graphs as a function of the similarity between their node embedding distributions. Specifically, we use the Wasserstein distance to measure the dissimilarity between node embeddings of different graphs. Unlike prior work, we avoid pairwise calculation of distances between graphs and reduce the computational complexity from quadratic to linear in the number of graphs. WEGL calculates Monge maps from a reference distribution to each node embedding and, based on these maps, creates a fixed-sized vector representation of the graph. We evaluate our new graph embedding approach on various benchmark graph-property prediction tasks, showing state-of-the-art classification performance while having superior computational efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/navid-naderi/WEGL.
Explainable Deep One-Class Classification
Authors: Philipp Liznerski, Lukas Ruff, Robert A. Vandermeulen, Billy Joe Franks, Marius Kloft, Klaus Robert Muller
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deep one-class classification variants for anomaly detection learn a mapping that concentrates nominal samples in feature space causing anomalies to be mapped away. Because this transformation is highly non-linear, finding interpretations poses a significant challenge. In this paper we present an explainable deep one-class classification method, Fully Convolutional Data Description (FCDD), where the mapped samples are themselves also an explanation heatmap. FCDD yields competitive detection performance and provides reasonable explanations on common anomaly detection benchmarks with CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. On MVTec-AD, a recent manufacturing dataset offering ground-truth anomaly maps, FCDD sets a new state of the art in the unsupervised setting. Our method can incorporate ground-truth anomaly maps during training and using even a few of these (~5) improves performance significantly. Finally, using FCDD's explanations we demonstrate the vulnerability of deep one-class classification models to spurious image features such as image watermarks.
Filtered Inner Product Projection for Crosslingual Embedding Alignment
Authors: Vin Sachidananda, Ziyi Yang, Chenguang Zhu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Due to widespread interest in machine translation and transfer learning, there are numerous algorithms for mapping multiple embeddings to a shared representation space. Recently, these algorithms have been studied in the setting of bilingual lexicon induction where one seeks to align the embeddings of a source and a target language such that translated word pairs lie close to one another in a common representation space. In this paper, we propose a method, Filtered Inner Product Projection (FIPP), for mapping embeddings to a common representation space. As semantic shifts are pervasive across languages and domains, FIPP first identifies the common geometric structure in both embeddings and then, only on the common structure, aligns the Gram matrices of these embeddings. FIPP is applicable even when the source and target embeddings are of differing dimensionalities. Additionally, FIPP provides computational benefits in ease of implementation and is faster to compute than current approaches. Following the baselines in Glavas et al. 2019, we evaluate FIPP both in the context of bilingual lexicon induction and downstream language tasks. We show that FIPP outperforms existing methods on the XLING BLI dataset for most language pairs while also providing robust performance across downstream tasks.
MetaNorm: Learning to Normalize Few-Shot Batches Across Domains
Authors: Yingjun Du, Xiantong Zhen, Ling Shao, Cees G. M. Snoek
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Batch normalization plays a crucial role when training deep neural networks. However, batch statistics become unstable with small batch sizes and are unreliable in the presence of distribution shifts. We propose MetaNorm, a simple yet effective meta-learning normalization. It tackles the aforementioned issues in a unified way by leveraging the meta-learning setting and learns to infer adaptive statistics for batch normalization. MetaNorm is generic, flexible and model-agnostic, making it a simple plug-and-play module that is seamlessly embedded into existing meta-learning approaches. It can be efficiently implemented by lightweight hypernetworks with low computational cost. We verify its effectiveness by extensive evaluation on representative tasks suffering from the small batch and domain shift problems: few-shot learning and domain generalization. We further introduce an even more challenging setting: few-shot domain generalization. Results demonstrate that MetaNorm consistently achieves better, or at least competitive, accuracy compared to existing batch normalization methods.
A Panda? No, It's a Sloth: Slowdown Attacks on Adaptive Multi-Exit Neural Network Inference
Authors: Sanghyun Hong, Yigitcan Kaya, Ionuț-Vlad Modoranu, Tudor Dumitras
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent increases in the computational demands of deep neural networks (DNNs), combined with the observation that most input samples require only simple models, have sparked interest in input-adaptive multi-exit architectures, such as MSDNets or Shallow-Deep Networks. These architectures enable faster inferences and could bring DNNs to low-power devices, e.g., in the Internet of Things (IoT). However, it is unknown if the computational savings provided by this approach are robust against adversarial pressure. In particular, an adversary may aim to slowdown adaptive DNNs by increasing their average inference time—a threat analogous to the denial-of-service attacks from the Internet. In this paper, we conduct a systematic evaluation of this threat by experimenting with three generic multi-exit DNNs (based on VGG16, MobileNet, and ResNet56) and a custom multi-exit architecture, on two popular image classification benchmarks (CIFAR-10 and Tiny ImageNet). To this end, we show that adversarial example-crafting techniques can be modified to cause slowdown, and we propose a metric for comparing their impact on different architectures. We show that a slowdown attack reduces the efficacy of multi-exit DNNs by 90–100%, and it amplifies the latency by 1.5–5× in a typical IoT deployment. We also show that it is possible to craft universal, reusable perturbations and that the attack can be effective in realistic black-box scenarios, where the attacker has limited knowledge about the victim. Finally, we show that adversarial training provides limited protection against slowdowns. These results suggest that further research is needed for defending multi-exit architectures against this emerging threat. Our code is available at https://github.com/sanghyun-hong/deepsloth.
Evaluation of Similarity-based Explanations
Authors: Kazuaki Hanawa, Sho Yokoi, Satoshi Hara, Kentaro Inui
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Explaining the predictions made by complex machine learning models helps users to understand and accept the predicted outputs with confidence. One promising way is to use similarity-based explanation that provides similar instances as evidence to support model predictions. Several relevance metrics are used for this purpose. In this study, we investigated relevance metrics that can provide reasonable explanations to users. Specifically, we adopted three tests to evaluate whether the relevance metrics satisfy the minimal requirements for similarity-based explanation. Our experiments revealed that the cosine similarity of the gradients of the loss performs best, which would be a recommended choice in practice. In addition, we showed that some metrics perform poorly in our tests and analyzed the reasons of their failure. We expect our insights to help practitioners in selecting appropriate relevance metrics and also aid further researches for designing better relevance metrics for explanations.
Vulnerability-Aware Poisoning Mechanism for Online RL with Unknown Dynamics
Authors: Yanchao Sun, Da Huo, Furong Huang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Poisoning attacks on Reinforcement Learning (RL) systems could take advantage of RL algorithm’s vulnerabilities and cause failure of the learning. However, prior works on poisoning RL usually either unrealistically assume the attacker knows the underlying Markov Decision Process (MDP), or directly apply the poisoning methods in supervised learning to RL. In this work, we build a generic poisoning framework for online RL via a comprehensive investigation of heterogeneous poisoning models in RL. Without any prior knowledge of the MDP, we propose a strategic poisoning algorithm called Vulnerability-Aware Adversarial Critic Poison (VA2C-P), which works for on-policy deep RL agents, closing the gap that no poisoning method exists for policy-based RL agents. VA2C-P uses a novel metric, stability radius in RL, that measures the vulnerability of RL algorithms. Experiments on multiple deep RL agents and multiple environments show that our poisoning algorithm successfully prevents agents from learning a good policy or teaches the agents to converge to a target policy, with a limited attacking budget.
Representation Learning via Invariant Causal Mechanisms
Authors: Jovana Mitrovic, Brian McWilliams, Jacob C Walker, Lars Holger Buesing, Charles Blundell
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Self-supervised learning has emerged as a strategy to reduce the reliance on costly supervised signal by pretraining representations only using unlabeled data. These methods combine heuristic proxy classification tasks with data augmentations and have achieved significant success, but our theoretical understanding of this success remains limited. In this paper we analyze self-supervised representation learning using a causal framework.  We show how data augmentations can be more effectively utilized through explicit invariance constraints on the proxy classifiers employed during pretraining. Based on this, we propose a novel self-supervised objective, Representation Learning via Invariant Causal Mechanisms (ReLIC), that enforces invariant prediction of proxy targets across augmentations through an invariance regularizer which yields improved generalization guarantees. Further, using causality we generalize contrastive learning, a particular kind of self-supervised method,  and provide an alternative theoretical explanation for the  success  of  these  methods. Empirically, ReLIC significantly outperforms competing methods in terms of robustness and out-of-distribution generalization on ImageNet, while also significantly outperforming these methods on Atari achieving above human-level performance on 51 out of 57 games.
Neural Attention Distillation: Erasing Backdoor Triggers from Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Yige Li, Xixiang Lyu, Nodens Koren, Lingjuan Lyu, Bo Li, Xingjun Ma
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known vulnerable to backdoor attacks, a training time attack that injects a trigger pattern into a small proportion of training data so as to control the model's prediction at the test time. Backdoor attacks are notably dangerous since they do not affect the model's performance on clean examples, yet can fool the model to make the incorrect prediction whenever the trigger pattern appears during testing. In this paper, we propose a novel defense framework Neural Attention Distillation (NAD) to erase backdoor triggers from backdoored DNNs. NAD utilizes a teacher network to guide the finetuning of the backdoored student network on a small clean subset of data such that the intermediate-layer attention of the student network aligns with that of the teacher network. The teacher network can be obtained by an independent finetuning process on the same clean subset. We empirically show, against 6 state-of-the-art backdoor attacks,  NAD can effectively erase the backdoor triggers using only 5\% clean training data without causing obvious performance degradation on clean examples. Our code is available at https://github.com/bboylyg/NAD.
Model Patching: Closing the Subgroup Performance Gap with Data Augmentation
Authors: Karan Goel, Albert Gu, Yixuan Li, Christopher Re
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Classifiers in machine learning are often brittle when deployed. Particularly concerning are models with inconsistent performance on specific subgroups of a class, e.g., exhibiting disparities in skin cancer classification in the presence or absence of a spurious bandage. To mitigate these performance differences, we introduce model patching, a two-stage framework for improving robustness that encourages the model to be invariant to subgroup differences, and focus on class information shared by subgroups. Model patching first models subgroup features within a class and learns semantic transformations between them, and then trains a classifier with data augmentations that deliberately manipulate subgroup features. We instantiate model patching with CAMEL, which (1) uses a CycleGAN to learn the intra-class, inter-subgroup augmentations, and (2) balances subgroup performance using a theoretically-motivated subgroup consistency regularizer, accompanied by a new robust objective. We demonstrate CAMEL’s effectiveness on 3 benchmark datasets, with reductions in robust error of up to 33% relative to the best baseline. Lastly, CAMEL successfully patches a model that fails due to spurious features on a real-world skin cancer dataset.
Solving Compositional Reinforcement Learning Problems via Task Reduction
Authors: Yunfei Li, Yilin Wu, Huazhe Xu, Xiaolong Wang, Yi Wu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a novel learning paradigm, Self-Imitation via Reduction (SIR), for solving compositional reinforcement learning problems. SIR is based on two core ideas: task reduction and self-imitation. Task reduction tackles a hard-to-solve task by actively reducing it to an easier task whose solution is known by the RL agent. Once the original hard task is successfully solved by task reduction, the agent naturally obtains a self-generated solution trajectory to imitate. By continuously collecting and imitating such demonstrations, the agent is able to progressively expand the solved subspace in the entire task space. Experiment results show that SIR can significantly accelerate and improve learning on a variety of challenging sparse-reward continuous-control problems with compositional structures. Code and videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/sir-compositional.
BiPointNet: Binary Neural Network for Point Clouds
Authors: Haotong Qin, Zhongang Cai, Mingyuan Zhang, Yifu Ding, Haiyu Zhao, Shuai Yi, Xianglong Liu, Hao Su
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: To alleviate the resource constraint for real-time point cloud applications that run on edge devices, in this paper we present BiPointNet, the first model binarization approach for efficient deep learning on point clouds. We discover that the immense performance drop of binarized models for point clouds mainly stems from two challenges: aggregation-induced feature homogenization that leads to a degradation of information entropy, and scale distortion that hinders optimization and invalidates scale-sensitive structures. With theoretical justifications and in-depth analysis, our BiPointNet introduces Entropy-Maximizing Aggregation (EMA) to modulate the distribution before aggregation for the maximum information entropy, and Layer-wise Scale Recovery (LSR) to efficiently restore feature representation capacity. Extensive experiments show that BiPointNet outperforms existing binarization methods by convincing margins, at the level even comparable with the full precision counterpart. We highlight that our techniques are generic, guaranteeing significant improvements on various fundamental tasks and mainstream backbones. Moreover, BiPointNet gives an impressive 14.7× speedup and 18.9× storage saving on real-world resource-constrained devices.
Graph Convolution with Low-rank Learnable Local Filters
Authors: Xiuyuan Cheng, Zichen Miao, Qiang Qiu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Geometric variations like rotation, scaling, and viewpoint changes pose a significant challenge to visual understanding. One common solution is to directly model certain intrinsic structures, e.g., using landmarks. However, it then becomes non-trivial to build effective deep models, especially when the underlying non-Euclidean grid is irregular and coarse. Recent deep models using graph convolutions provide an appropriate framework to handle such non-Euclidean data, but many of them, particularly those based on global graph Laplacians, lack expressiveness to capture local features required for representation of signals lying on the non-Euclidean grid. The current paper introduces a new type of graph convolution with learnable low-rank local filters, which is provably more expressive than previous spectral graph convolution methods. The model also provides a unified framework for both spectral and spatial graph convolutions. To improve model robustness, regularization by local graph Laplacians is introduced. The representation stability against input graph data perturbation is theoretically proved, making use of the graph filter locality and the local graph regularization. Experiments on spherical mesh data, real-world facial expression recognition/skeleton-based action recognition data, and data with simulated graph noise show the empirical advantage of the proposed model.
Multi-timescale Representation Learning in LSTM Language Models
Authors: Shivangi Mahto, Vy Ai Vo, Javier S. Turek, Alexander Huth
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Language models must capture statistical dependencies between words at timescales ranging from very short to very long. Earlier work has demonstrated that dependencies in natural language tend to decay with distance between words according to a power law. However, it is unclear how this knowledge can be used for analyzing or designing neural network language models. In this work, we derived a theory for how the memory gating mechanism in long short-term memory (LSTM) language models can capture power law decay. We found that unit timescales within an LSTM, which are determined by the forget gate bias, should follow an Inverse Gamma distribution. Experiments then showed that LSTM language models trained on natural English text learn to approximate this theoretical distribution. Further, we found that explicitly imposing the theoretical distribution upon the model during training yielded better language model perplexity overall, with particular improvements for predicting low-frequency (rare) words. Moreover, the explicit multi-timescale model selectively routes information about different types of words through units with different timescales, potentially improving model interpretability. These results demonstrate the importance of careful, theoretically-motivated analysis of memory and timescale in language models.
Progressive Skeletonization: Trimming more fat from a network at initialization
Authors: Pau de Jorge, Amartya Sanyal, Harkirat Behl, Philip Torr, Grégory Rogez, Puneet K. Dokania
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent studies have shown that skeletonization (pruning parameters) of networks at initialization provides all the practical benefits of sparsity both at inference and training time, while only marginally degrading their performance. However, we observe that beyond a certain level of sparsity (approx 95%), these approaches fail to preserve the network performance, and to our surprise, in many cases perform even worse than trivial random pruning. To this end, we propose an objective to find a skeletonized network with maximum foresight connection sensitivity (FORCE) whereby the trainability, in terms of connection sensitivity, of a pruned network is taken into consideration. We then propose two approximate procedures to maximize our objective (1) Iterative SNIP: allows parameters that were unimportant at earlier stages of skeletonization to become important at later stages; and (2) FORCE: iterative process that allows exploration by allowing already pruned parameters to resurrect at later stages of skeletonization. Empirical analysis on a large suite of experiments show that our approach, while providing at least as good performance as other recent approaches on moderate pruning levels, provide remarkably improved performance on high pruning levels (could remove up to 99.5% parameters while keeping the networks trainable).
HalentNet: Multimodal Trajectory Forecasting with Hallucinative Intents
Authors: Deyao Zhu, Mohamed Zahran, Li Erran Li, Mohamed Elhoseiny
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Motion forecasting is essential for making intelligent decisions in robotic navigation. As a result, the multi-agent behavioral prediction has become a core component of modern human-robot interaction applications such as autonomous driving. Due to various intentions and interactions among agents, agent trajectories can have multiple possible futures. Hence, the motion forecasting model's ability to cover possible modes becomes essential to enable accurate prediction. Towards this goal, we introduce HalentNet to better model the future motion distribution in addition to a traditional trajectory regression learning objective by incorporating generative augmentation losses. We model intents with unsupervised discrete random variables whose training is guided by a collaboration between two key signals: A discriminative loss that encourages intents' diversity and a hallucinative loss that explores intent transitions (i.e., mixed intents) and encourages their smoothness. This regulates the neural network behavior to be more accurately predictive on uncertain scenarios due to the active yet careful exploration of possible future agent behavior. Our model's learned representation leads to better and more semantically meaningful coverage of the trajectory distribution. Our experiments show that our method can improve over the state-of-the-art trajectory forecasting benchmarks, including vehicles and pedestrians, for about 20% on average FDE and 50% on road boundary violation rate when predicting 6 seconds future. We also conducted human experiments to show that our predicted trajectories received 39.6% more votes than the runner-up approach and 32.2% more votes than our variant without hallucinative mixed intent loss. The code will be released soon.
Reweighting Augmented Samples by Minimizing the Maximal Expected Loss
Authors: Mingyang Yi, Lu Hou, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Zhi-Ming Ma
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Data augmentation is an effective technique to improve the generalization of deep neural networks. However, previous data augmentation methods usually treat the augmented samples equally without considering their individual impacts on the model. To address this, for the augmented samples from the same training example, we propose to assign different weights to them. We construct the maximal expected loss which is the supremum over any reweighted loss on augmented samples. Inspired by adversarial training, we minimize this maximal expected loss (MMEL) and obtain a simple and interpretable closed-form solution: more attention should be paid to augmented samples with large loss values (i.e., harder examples). Minimizing this maximal expected loss enables the model to perform well under any reweighting strategy. The proposed method can generally be applied on top of any data augmentation methods. Experiments are conducted on both natural language understanding tasks with token-level data augmentation, and image classification tasks with commonly-used image augmentation techniques like random crop and horizontal flip. Empirical results show that the proposed method improves the generalization performance of the model.
DrNAS: Dirichlet Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Xiangning Chen, Ruochen Wang, Minhao Cheng, Xiaocheng Tang, Cho-Jui Hsieh
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel differentiable architecture search method by formulating it into a distribution learning problem. We treat the continuously relaxed architecture mixing weight as random variables, modeled by Dirichlet distribution. With recently developed pathwise derivatives, the Dirichlet parameters can be easily optimized with gradient-based optimizer in an end-to-end manner. This formulation improves the generalization ability and induces stochasticity that naturally encourages exploration in the search space. Furthermore, to alleviate the large memory consumption of differentiable NAS, we propose a simple yet effective progressive learning scheme that enables searching directly on large-scale tasks, eliminating the gap between search and evaluation phases. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Specifically, we obtain a test error of 2.46\% for CIFAR-10, 23.7\% for ImageNet under the mobile setting. On NAS-Bench-201, we also achieve state-of-the-art results on all three datasets and provide insights for the effective design of neural architecture search algorithms.
Async-RED: A Provably Convergent Asynchronous Block Parallel Stochastic Method using Deep Denoising Priors
Authors: Yu Sun, Jiaming Liu, Yiran Sun, Brendt Wohlberg, Ulugbek Kamilov
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Regularization by denoising (RED) is a recently developed framework for solving inverse problems by integrating advanced denoisers as image priors. Recent work has shown its state-of-the-art performance when combined with pre-trained deep denoisers. However, current RED algorithms are inadequate for parallel processing on multicore systems. We address this issue by proposing a new{asynchronous RED (Async-RED) algorithm that enables asynchronous parallel processing of data, making it significantly faster than its serial counterparts for large-scale inverse problems. The computational complexity of Async-RED is further reduced by using a random subset of measurements at every iteration. We present a complete theoretical analysis of the algorithm by establishing its convergence under explicit assumptions on the data-fidelity and the denoiser. We validate Async-RED on image recovery using pre-trained deep denoisers as priors.
Uncertainty Estimation and Calibration with Finite-State Probabilistic RNNs
Authors: Cheng Wang, Carolin Lawrence, Mathias Niepert
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Uncertainty quantification is crucial for building reliable and trustable machine learning systems. We propose to estimate uncertainty in recurrent neural networks (RNNs) via stochastic discrete state transitions over recurrent timesteps. The uncertainty of the model can be quantified by running a prediction several times, each time sampling from the recurrent state transition distribution, leading to potentially different results if the model is uncertain. Alongside uncertainty quantification, our proposed method offers several advantages in different settings. The proposed method can (1) learn deterministic and probabilistic automata from data, (2) learn well-calibrated models on real-world classification tasks, (3) improve the performance of out-of-distribution detection, and (4) control the exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning. An implementation is available.
Learning a Latent Search Space for Routing Problems using Variational Autoencoders
Authors: André Hottung, Bhanu Bhandari, Kevin Tierney
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Methods for automatically learning to solve routing problems are rapidly improving in performance. While most of these methods excel at generating solutions quickly, they are unable to effectively utilize longer run times because they lack a sophisticated search component. We present a learning-based optimization approach that allows a guided search in the distribution of high-quality solutions for a problem instance. More precisely, our method uses a conditional variational autoencoder that learns to map points in a continuous (latent) search space to high-quality, instance-specific routing problem solutions. The learned space can then be searched by any unconstrained continuous optimization method. We show that even using a standard differential evolution search strategy our approach is able to outperform existing purely machine learning based approaches.
How Does Mixup Help With Robustness and Generalization?
Authors: Linjun Zhang, Zhun Deng, Kenji Kawaguchi, Amirata Ghorbani, James Zou
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Mixup is a popular data augmentation technique based on on convex combinations of pairs of examples and their labels. This simple technique has shown to substantially improve both the model's robustness as well as the generalization of the trained model. However,  it is not well-understood why such improvement occurs. In this paper, we provide theoretical analysis to demonstrate how using Mixup in training helps model robustness and generalization. For robustness, we show that minimizing the Mixup loss corresponds to approximately minimizing an upper bound of the adversarial loss. This explains why models obtained by Mixup training exhibits robustness to several kinds of adversarial attacks such as Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM). For generalization, we prove that Mixup augmentation corresponds to a specific type of data-adaptive regularization which reduces overfitting. Our analysis provides new insights and a framework to understand Mixup.
Continual learning in recurrent neural networks
Authors: Benjamin Ehret, Christian Henning, Maria Cervera, Alexander Meulemans, Johannes Von Oswald, Benjamin F Grewe
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: While a diverse collection of continual learning (CL) methods has been proposed to prevent catastrophic forgetting, a thorough investigation of their effectiveness for processing sequential data with recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is lacking. Here, we provide the first comprehensive evaluation of established CL methods on a variety of sequential data benchmarks. Specifically, we shed light on the particularities that arise when applying weight-importance methods, such as elastic weight consolidation, to RNNs. In contrast to feedforward networks, RNNs iteratively reuse a shared set of weights and require working memory to process input samples. We show that the performance of weight-importance methods is not directly affected by the length of the processed sequences, but rather by high working memory requirements, which lead to an increased need for stability at the cost of decreased plasticity for learning subsequent tasks. We additionally provide theoretical arguments supporting this interpretation by studying linear RNNs. Our study shows that established CL methods can be successfully ported to the recurrent case, and that a recent regularization approach based on hypernetworks outperforms weight-importance methods, thus emerging as a promising candidate for CL in RNNs. Overall, we provide insights on the differences between CL in feedforward networks and RNNs, while guiding towards effective solutions to tackle CL on sequential data.
Adaptive Procedural Task Generation for Hard-Exploration Problems
Authors: Kuan Fang, Yuke Zhu, Silvio Savarese, L. Fei-Fei
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We introduce Adaptive Procedural Task Generation (APT-Gen), an approach to progressively generate a sequence of tasks as curricula to facilitate reinforcement learning in hard-exploration problems. At the heart of our approach, a task generator learns to create tasks from a parameterized task space via a black-box procedural generation module. To enable curriculum learning in the absence of a direct indicator of learning progress, we propose to train the task generator by balancing the agent's performance in the generated tasks and the similarity to the target tasks. Through adversarial training, the task similarity is adaptively estimated by a task discriminator defined on the agent's experiences, allowing the generated tasks to approximate target tasks of unknown parameterization or outside of the predefined task space. Our experiments on the grid world and robotic manipulation task domains show that APT-Gen achieves substantially better performance than various existing baselines by generating suitable tasks of rich variations.
Zero-shot Synthesis with Group-Supervised Learning
Authors: Yunhao Ge, Sami Abu-El-Haija, Gan Xin, Laurent Itti
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Visual cognition of primates is superior to that of artificial neural networks in its ability to “envision” a visual object, even a newly-introduced one, in different attributes including pose, position, color, texture, etc.  To aid neural networks to envision objects with different attributes,  we propose a family of objective functions, expressed on groups of examples, as a novel learning framework that we term Group-Supervised Learning (GSL). GSL allows us to decompose inputs into a disentangled representation with swappable components, that can be recombined to synthesize new samples.  For instance, images of red boats & blue cars can be decomposed and recombined to synthesize novel images of red cars.   We propose an implementation based on auto-encoder, termed group-supervised zero-shot synthesis network (GZS-Net) trained with our learning framework, that can produce a high-quality red car even if no such example is witnessed during training. We test our model and learning framework on existing benchmarks, in addition to a new dataset that we open-source. We qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate that GZS-Net trained with GSL outperforms state-of-the-art methods
Unsupervised Representation Learning for Time Series with Temporal Neighborhood Coding
Authors: Sana Tonekaboni, Danny Eytan, Anna Goldenberg
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Time series are often complex and rich in information but sparsely labeled and therefore challenging to model. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised framework for learning robust and generalizable representations for time series. Our approach, called Temporal Neighborhood Coding (TNC), takes advantage of the local smoothness of a signal's generative process to define neighborhoods in time with stationary properties. Using a debiased contrastive objective, our framework learns time series representations by ensuring that in the encoding space, the distribution of signals from within a neighborhood is distinguishable from the distribution of non-neighboring signals. Our motivation stems from the medical field, where the ability to model the dynamic nature of time series data is especially valuable for identifying, tracking, and predicting the underlying patients' latent states in settings where labeling data is practically impossible. We compare our method to recently developed unsupervised representation learning approaches and demonstrate superior performance on clustering and classification tasks for multiple datasets.
Selectivity considered harmful: evaluating the causal impact of class selectivity in DNNs
Authors: Matthew L Leavitt, Ari S. Morcos
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The properties of individual neurons are often analyzed in order to understand the biological and artificial neural networks in which they're embedded. Class selectivity—typically defined as how different a neuron's responses are across different classes of stimuli or data samples—is commonly used for this purpose. However, it remains an open question whether it is necessary and/or sufficient for deep neural networks (DNNs) to learn class selectivity in individual units. We investigated the causal impact of class selectivity on network function by directly regularizing for or against class selectivity. Using this regularizer to reduce class selectivity across units in convolutional neural networks increased test accuracy by over 2% in ResNet18 and 1% in ResNet50 trained on Tiny ImageNet. For ResNet20 trained on CIFAR10 we could reduce class selectivity by a factor of 2.5 with no impact on test accuracy, and reduce it nearly to zero with only a small (~2%) drop in test accuracy. In contrast, regularizing to increase class selectivity significantly decreased test accuracy across all models and datasets. These results indicate that class selectivity in individual units is neither sufficient nor strictly necessary, and can even impair DNN performance. They also encourage caution when focusing on the properties of single units as representative of the mechanisms by which DNNs function.
MoVie: Revisiting Modulated Convolutions for Visual Counting and Beyond
Authors: Duy Kien Nguyen, Vedanuj Goswami, Xinlei Chen
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper focuses on visual counting, which aims to predict the number of occurrences given a natural image and a query (e.g. a question or a category). Unlike most prior works that use explicit, symbolic models which can be computationally expensive and limited in generalization, we propose a simple and effective alternative by revisiting modulated convolutions that fuse the query and the image locally. Following the design of residual bottleneck, we call our method MoVie, short for Modulated conVolutional bottlenecks. Notably, MoVie reasons implicitly and holistically and only needs a single forward-pass during inference. Nevertheless, MoVie showcases strong performance for counting: 1) advancing the state-of-the-art on counting-specific VQA tasks while being more efficient; 2) outperforming prior-art on difficult benchmarks like COCO for common object counting; 3) helped us secure the first place of 2020 VQA challenge when integrated as a module for ‘number’ related questions in generic VQA models. Finally, we show evidence that modulated convolutions such as MoVie can serve as a general mechanism for reasoning tasks beyond counting.
FOCAL: Efficient Fully-Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning via Distance Metric Learning and Behavior Regularization
Authors: Lanqing Li, Rui Yang, Dijun Luo
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study the offline meta-reinforcement learning (OMRL) problem, a paradigm which enables reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to quickly adapt to unseen tasks without any interactions with the environments, making RL truly practical in many real-world applications. This problem is still not fully understood, for which two major challenges need to be addressed. First, offline RL usually suffers from bootstrapping errors of out-of-distribution state-actions which leads to divergence of value functions. Second, meta-RL requires efficient and robust task inference learned jointly with control policy. In this work, we enforce behavior regularization on learned policy as a general approach to offline RL, combined with a deterministic context encoder for efficient task inference. We propose a novel negative-power distance metric on bounded context embedding space, whose gradients propagation is detached from the Bellman backup. We provide analysis and insight showing that some simple design choices can yield substantial improvements over recent approaches involving meta-RL and distance metric learning. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first model-free and end-to-end OMRL algorithm, which is computationally efficient and demonstrated to outperform prior algorithms on several meta-RL benchmarks.
PC2WF: 3D Wireframe Reconstruction from Raw Point Clouds
Authors: Yujia Liu, Stefano D'Aronco, Konrad Schindler, Jan Dirk Wegner
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We introduce PC2WF, the first end-to-end trainable deep network architecture to convert a 3D point cloud into a wireframe model. The network takes as input an unordered set of 3D points sampled from the surface of some object, and outputs a wireframe of that object, i.e., a sparse set of corner points linked by line segments. Recovering the wireframe is a challenging task, where the numbers of both vertices and edges are different for every instance, and a-priori unknown. Our architecture gradually builds up the model: It starts by encoding the points into feature vectors. Based on those features, it identifies a pool of candidate vertices, then prunes those candidates to a final set of corner vertices and refines their locations. Next, the corners are linked with an exhaustive set of candidate edges, which is again pruned to obtain the final wireframe. All steps are trainable, and errors can be backpropagated through the entire sequence. We validate the proposed model on a publicly available synthetic dataset, for which the ground truth wireframes are accessible, as well as on a new real-world dataset. Our model produces wireframe abstractions of good quality and outperforms several baselines.
On the Transfer of Disentangled Representations in Realistic Settings
Authors: Andrea Dittadi, Frederik Träuble, Francesco Locatello, Manuel Wuthrich, Vaibhav Agrawal, Ole Winther, Stefan Bauer, Bernhard Schölkopf
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learning meaningful representations that disentangle the underlying structure of the data generating process is considered to be of key importance in machine learning. While disentangled representations were found to be useful for diverse tasks such as abstract reasoning and fair classification, their scalability and real-world impact remain questionable.
We introduce a new high-resolution dataset with 1M simulated images and over 1,800 annotated real-world images of the same setup. In contrast to previous work, this new dataset exhibits correlations, a complex underlying structure, and allows to evaluate transfer to unseen simulated and real-world settings where the encoder i) remains in distribution or ii) is out of distribution.
We propose new architectures in order to scale disentangled representation learning to realistic high-resolution settings and conduct a large-scale empirical study of disentangled representations on this dataset. We observe that disentanglement is a good predictor for out-of-distribution (OOD) task performance.