mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Deep Wiener Deconvolution: Wiener Meets Deep Learning for Image Deblurring
Authors: Jiangxin Dong, Stefan Roth, Bernt Schiele
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We present a simple and effective approach for non-blind image deblurring, combining classical techniques and deep learning. In contrast to existing methods that deblur the image directly in the standard image space, we propose to perform an explicit deconvolution process in a feature space by integrating a classical Wiener deconvolution framework with learned deep features. A multi-scale feature refinement module then predicts the deblurred image from the deconvolved deep features, progressively recovering detail and small-scale structures. The proposed model is trained in an end-to-end manner and evaluated on scenarios with both simulated and real-world image blur. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed deep Wiener deconvolution network facilitates deblurred results with visibly fewer artifacts. Moreover, our approach quantitatively outperforms state-of-the-art non-blind image deblurring methods by a wide margin.
Discovering Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
Authors: Junhyuk Oh, Matteo Hessel, Wojciech M. Czarnecki, Zhongwen Xu, Hado P van Hasselt, Satinder P. Singh, David Silver
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms update an agent’s parameters according to one of several possible rules, discovered manually through years of research. Automating the discovery of update rules from data could lead to more efficient algorithms, or algorithms that are better adapted to specific environments. Although there have been prior attempts at addressing this significant scientific challenge, it remains an open question whether it is feasible to discover alternatives to fundamental concepts of RL such as value functions and temporal-difference learning. This paper introduces a new meta-learning approach that discovers an entire update rule which includes both what to predict' (e.g. value functions) andhow to learn from it' (e.g. bootstrapping) by interacting with a set of environments. The output of this method is an RL algorithm that we call Learned Policy Gradient (LPG). Empirical results show that our method discovers its own alternative to the concept of value functions. Furthermore it discovers a bootstrapping mechanism to maintain and use its predictions. Surprisingly, when trained solely on toy environments, LPG generalises effectively to complex Atari games and achieves non-trivial performance. This shows the potential to discover general RL algorithms from data.
Taming Discrete Integration via the Boon of Dimensionality
Authors: Jeffrey Dudek, Dror Fried, Kuldeep S Meel
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Discrete integration is a fundamental problem in computer science that concerns the computation of discrete sums over exponentially large sets. Despite intense interest from researchers for over three decades, the design of scalable techniques for computing estimates with rigorous guarantees for discrete integration remains the holy grail.  The key contribution of this work addresses this scalability challenge via an efficient reduction of discrete integration to model counting. The proposed reduction is achieved via a significant increase in the dimensionality that, contrary to conventional wisdom, leads to solving an instance of the relatively simpler problem of model counting.
Building on the promising approach proposed by Chakraborty et al, our work overcomes the key weakness of their approach: a restriction to dyadic weights. We augment our proposed reduction, called DeWeight, with a state of the art efficient approximate model counter and perform detailed empirical analysis over benchmarks arising from neural network verification domains, an emerging application area of critical importance. DeWeight, to the best of our knowledge, is the first technique to compute estimates with provable guarantees for this class of benchmarks.
Blind Video Temporal Consistency via Deep Video Prior
Authors: Chenyang Lei, Yazhou Xing, Qifeng Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Applying image processing algorithms independently to each video frame often leads to temporal inconsistency in the resulting video. To address this issue, we present a novel and general approach for blind video temporal consistency. Our method is only trained on a pair of original and processed videos directly instead of a large dataset. Unlike most previous methods that enforce temporal consistency with optical flow, we show that temporal consistency can be achieved by training a convolutional network on a video with the Deep Video Prior. Moreover, a carefully designed iteratively reweighted training strategy is proposed to address the challenging multimodal inconsistency problem. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on 7 computer vision tasks on videos. Extensive quantitative and perceptual experiments show that our approach obtains superior performance than state-of-the-art methods on blind video temporal consistency.
Simplify and Robustify Negative Sampling for Implicit Collaborative Filtering
Authors: Jingtao Ding, Yuhan Quan, Quanming Yao, Yong Li, Depeng Jin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Negative sampling approaches are prevalent in implicit collaborative ﬁltering for obtaining negative labels from massive unlabeled data. As two major concerns in negative sampling, efﬁciency and effectiveness are still not fully achieved by recent works that use complicate structures and overlook risk of false negative instances. In this paper, we ﬁrst provide a novel understanding of negative instances by empirically observing that only a few instances are potentially important for model learning, and false negatives tend to have stable predictions over many training iterations. Above ﬁndings motivate us to simplify the model by sampling from designed memory that only stores a few important candidates and, more importantly, tackle the untouched false negative problem by favouring high-variance samples stored in memory, which achieves efﬁcient sampling of true negatives with high-quality. Empirical results on two synthetic datasets and three real-world datasets demonstrate both robustness and superiorities of our negative sampling method. The implementation is available at https://github.com/dingjingtao/SRNS.
Model Selection for Production System via Automated Online Experiments
Authors: Zhenwen Dai, Praveen Chandar, Ghazal Fazelnia, Benjamin Carterette, Mounia Lalmas
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: A challenge that machine learning practitioners in the industry face is the task of selecting the best model to deploy in production. As a model is often an intermediate component of a production system, online controlled experiments such as A/B tests yield the most reliable estimation of the effectiveness of the whole system, but can only compare two or a few models due to budget constraints. We propose an automated online experimentation mechanism that can efficiently perform model selection from a large pool of models with a small number of online experiments. We derive the probability distribution of the metric of interest that contains the model uncertainty from our Bayesian surrogate model trained using historical logs. Our method efficiently identifies the best model by sequentially selecting and deploying a list of models from the candidate set that balance exploration-exploitation. Using simulations based on real data, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on two different tasks.
On the Almost Sure Convergence of Stochastic Gradient Descent in Non-Convex Problems
Authors: Panayotis Mertikopoulos, Nadav Hallak, Ali Kavis, Volkan Cevher
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper, we analyze the trajectories of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with the aim of understanding their convergence properties in non-convex problems. We first show that the sequence of iterates generated by SGD remains bounded and converges with probability $1$ under a very broad range of step-size schedules. Subsequently, we prove that the algorithm's rate of convergence to local minimizers with a positive-definite Hessian is $O(1/n^p)$ if the method is run with a $Θ(1/n^p)$ step-size. This provides an important guideline for tuning the algorithm's step-size as it suggests that a cool-down phase with a vanishing step-size could lead to significant performance gains; we demonstrate this heuristic using ResNet architectures on CIFAR. Finally, going beyond existing positive probability guarantees, we show that SGD avoids strict saddle points/manifolds with probability $1$ for the entire spectrum of step-size policies considered.
Automatic Perturbation Analysis for Scalable Certified Robustness and Beyond
Authors: Kaidi Xu, Zhouxing Shi, Huan Zhang, Yihan Wang, Kai-Wei Chang, Minlie Huang, Bhavya Kailkhura, Xue Lin, Cho-Jui Hsieh
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Linear relaxation based perturbation analysis (LiRPA) for neural networks, which computes provable linear bounds of output neurons given a certain amount of input perturbation, has become a core component in robustness verification and certified defense. The majority of LiRPA-based methods focus on simple feed-forward networks and need particular manual derivations and implementations when extended to other architectures. In this paper, we develop an automatic framework to enable perturbation analysis on any neural network structures, by generalizing existing LiRPA algorithms such as CROWN to operate on general computational graphs. The flexibility, differentiability and ease of use of our framework allow us to obtain state-of-the-art results on LiRPA based certified defense on fairly complicated networks like DenseNet, ResNeXt and Transformer that are not supported by prior works. Our framework also enables loss fusion, a technique that significantly reduces the computational complexity of LiRPA for certified defense. For the first time, we demonstrate LiRPA based certified defense on Tiny ImageNet and Downscaled ImageNet where previous approaches cannot scale to due to the relatively large number of classes. Our work also yields an open-source library for the community to apply LiRPA to areas beyond certified defense without much LiRPA expertise, e.g., we create a neural network with a provably flat optimization landscape by applying LiRPA to network parameters. Our open source library is available at https://github.com/KaidiXu/auto_LiRPA.
Adaptation Properties Allow Identification of Optimized Neural Codes
Authors: Luke Rast, Jan Drugowitsch
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: The adaptation of neural codes to the statistics of their environment is well captured by efficient coding approaches. Here we solve an inverse problem: characterizing the objective and constraint functions that efficient codes appear to be optimal for, on the basis of how they adapt to different stimulus distributions. We formulate a general efficient coding problem, with flexible objective and constraint functions and minimal parametric assumptions. Solving special cases of this model, we provide solutions to broad classes of Fisher information-based efficient coding problems, generalizing a wide range of previous results. We show that different objective function types impose qualitatively different adaptation behaviors, while constraints enforce characteristic deviations from classic efficient coding signatures. Despite interaction between these effects, clear signatures emerge for both unconstrained optimization problems and information-maximizing objective functions. Asking for a fixed-point of the neural code adaptation, we find an objective-independent characterization of constraints on the neural code. We use this result to propose an experimental paradigm that can characterize both the objective and constraint functions that an observed code appears to be optimized for.
Global Convergence and Variance Reduction for a Class of Nonconvex-Nonconcave Minimax Problems
Authors: Junchi Yang, Negar Kiyavash, Niao He
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Nonconvex minimax problems appear frequently in emerging machine learning applications, such as generative adversarial networks and adversarial learning. Simple algorithms such as the gradient descent ascent (GDA) are the common practice for solving these nonconvex games and receive lots of empirical success. Yet, it is known that these vanilla GDA algorithms with constant stepsize can potentially diverge even in the convex setting. In this work, we show that for a subclass of nonconvex-nonconcave objectives satisfying a so-called two-sided Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz inequality, the alternating gradient descent ascent (AGDA) algorithm converges globally at a linear rate and the stochastic AGDA achieves a sublinear rate. We further develop a variance reduced algorithm that attains a provably faster rate than AGDA when the problem has the finite-sum structure.
Model-Based Multi-Agent RL in Zero-Sum Markov Games with Near-Optimal Sample Complexity
Authors: Kaiqing Zhang, Sham Kakade, Tamer Basar, Lin Yang
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Model-based reinforcement learning (RL), which finds an optimal policy using an empirical model, has long been recognized as one of the cornerstones of RL. It is especially suitable for multi-agent RL (MARL), as it naturally decouples the learning and the planning phases, and avoids the non-stationarity problem when all agents are improving their policies simultaneously using samples. Though intuitive and widely-used, the sample complexity of model-based MARL algorithms has been investigated relatively much less often. In this paper, we aim to address the fundamental open question about the sample complexity of model-based MARL. We study arguably the most basic MARL setting: two-player discounted zero-sum Markov games, given only access to a generative model of state transition. We show that model-based MARL achieves a sample complexity of  $\tilde \cO(|\cS||\cA||\cB|(1-\gamma)^{-3}\epsilon^{-2})$ for finding the Nash equilibrium (NE) \emph{value} up to some $\epsilon$ error, and the $\epsilon$-NE \emph{policies}, where $\gamma$ is the discount factor, and $\cS,\cA,\cB$ denote the state space, and the action spaces for the two agents. We also show that this method is near-minimax optimal with a tight dependence on $1-\gamma$ and $|\cS|$ by providing a lower bound of $\Omega(|\cS|(|\cA|+|\cB|)(1-\gamma)^{-3}\epsilon^{-2})$. Our results justify the efficiency of this simple model-based approach in the multi-agent RL setting.
Conservative Q-Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Aviral Kumar, Aurick Zhou, George Tucker, Sergey Levine
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Effectively leveraging large, previously collected datasets in reinforcement learn- ing (RL) is a key challenge for large-scale real-world applications. Offline RL algorithms promise to learn effective policies from previously-collected, static datasets without further interaction. However, in practice, offline RL presents a major challenge, and standard off-policy RL methods can fail due to overestimation of values induced by the distributional shift between the dataset and the learned policy, especially when training on complex and multi-modal data distributions. In this paper, we propose conservative Q-learning (CQL), which aims to address these limitations by learning a conservative Q-function such that the expected value of a policy under this Q-function lower-bounds its true value. We theoretically show that CQL produces a lower bound on the value of the current policy and that it can be incorporated into a policy learning procedure with theoretical improvement guarantees. In practice, CQL augments the standard Bellman error objective with a simple Q-value regularizer which is straightforward to implement on top of existing deep Q-learning and actor-critic implementations. On both discrete and continuous control domains, we show that CQL substantially outperforms existing offline RL methods, often learning policies that attain 2-5 times higher final return, especially when learning from complex and multi-modal data distributions.
Online Influence Maximization under Linear Threshold Model
Authors: Shuai Li, Fang Kong, Kejie Tang, Qizhi Li, Wei Chen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Online influence maximization (OIM) is a popular problem in social networks to learn influence propagation model parameters and maximize the influence spread at the same time. Most previous studies focus on the independent cascade (IC) model under the edge-level feedback. In this paper, we address OIM in the linear threshold (LT) model. Because node activations in the LT model are due to the aggregated effect of all active neighbors, it is more natural to model OIM with the nodel-level feedback. And this brings new challenge in online learning since we only observe aggregated effect from groups of nodes and the groups are also random. Based on the linear structure in node activations, we incorporate ideas from linear bandits and design an algorithm $\ltlinucb$ that is consistent with the observed feedback. By proving group observation modulated (GOM) bounded smoothness property, a novel result of the influence difference in terms of the random observations, we provide a regret of order $\tilde{O}(\mathrm{poly}(m)\sqrt{T})$, where $m$ is the number of edges and $T$ is the number of rounds. This is the first theoretical result in such order for OIM under the LT model. In the end, we also provide an algorithm $\oimetc$ with regret bound $O(\mathrm{poly}(m)\ T^{2/3})$, which is model-independent, simple and has less requirement on online feedback and offline computation.
Ensembling geophysical models with Bayesian Neural Networks
Authors: Ushnish Sengupta, Matt Amos, Scott Hosking, Carl Edward Rasmussen, Matthew Juniper, Paul Young
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Ensembles of geophysical models improve projection accuracy and express uncertainties. We develop a novel data-driven ensembling strategy for combining geophysical models using Bayesian Neural Networks, which infers spatiotemporally varying model weights and bias while accounting for heteroscedastic uncertainties in the observations. This produces more accurate and uncertainty-aware projections without sacrificing interpretability. Applied to the prediction of total column ozone from an ensemble of 15 chemistry-climate models, we find that the Bayesian neural network ensemble (BayNNE) outperforms existing ensembling methods, achieving a 49.4% reduction in RMSE for temporal extrapolation, and a 67.4% reduction in RMSE for polar data voids, compared to a weighted mean. Uncertainty is also well-characterized, with 90.6% of the data points in our extrapolation validation dataset lying within 2 standard deviations and 98.5% within 3 standard deviations.
Delving into the Cyclic Mechanism in Semi-supervised Video Object Segmentation
Authors: Yuxi Li, Ning Xu, Jinlong Peng, John See, Weiyao Lin
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper, we take attempt to incorporate the cyclic mechanism with the vision task of semi-supervised video object segmentation. By resorting to the accurate reference mask of the first frame, we try to mitigate the error propagation problem in most of current video object segmentation pipelines. Firstly, we propose a cyclic scheme for offline training of segmentation networks. Then, we extend the offline pipeline to an online method by introducing a simple gradient correction module while keeping high efficiency as other offline methods. Finally we develop cycle effective receptive field (cycle-ERF) from gradient correction to provide a new perspective for analyzing object-specific regions of interests. We conduct comprehensive experiments on benchmarks of DAVIS17 and Youtube-VOS, demonstrating that our introduced cyclic mechanism is helpful to boost the segmentation quality.
Asymmetric Shapley values: incorporating causal knowledge into model-agnostic explainability
Authors: Christopher Frye, Colin Rowat, Ilya Feige
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Explaining AI systems is fundamental both to the development of high performing models and to the trust placed in them by their users. The Shapley framework for explainability has strength in its general applicability combined with its precise, rigorous foundation: it provides a common, model-agnostic language for AI explainability and uniquely satisfies a set of intuitive mathematical axioms. However, Shapley values are too restrictive in one significant regard: they ignore all causal structure in the data. We introduce a less restrictive framework, Asymmetric Shapley values (ASVs), which are rigorously founded on a set of axioms, applicable to any AI system, and can flexibly incorporate any causal structure known to be respected by the data. We demonstrate that ASVs can (i) improve model explanations by incorporating causal information, (ii) provide an unambiguous test for unfair discrimination in model predictions, (iii) enable sequentially incremental explanations in time-series models, and (iv) support feature-selection studies without the need for model retraining.
Understanding Deep Architecture with Reasoning Layer
Authors: Xinshi Chen, Yufei Zhang, Christoph Reisinger, Le Song
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Recently, there is a surge of interest in combining deep learning models with reasoning in order to handle more sophisticated learning tasks. In many cases, a reasoning task can be solved by an iterative algorithm. This algorithm is often unrolled, truncated, and used as a specialized layer in the deep architecture, which can be trained end-to-end with other neural components. Although such hybrid deep architectures have led to many empirical successes, theoretical understandings of such architectures, especially the interplay between algorithm layers and other neural layers, remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we take an initial step toward an understanding of such hybrid deep architectures by showing that properties of the algorithm layers, such as convergence, stability and sensitivity, are intimately related to the approximation and generalization abilities of the end-to-end model. Furthermore, our analysis matches nicely with experimental observations under various conditions, suggesting that our theory can provide useful guidelines for designing deep architectures with reasoning layers.
Planning in Markov Decision Processes with Gap-Dependent Sample Complexity
Authors: Anders Jonsson, Emilie Kaufmann, Pierre Menard, Omar Darwiche Domingues, Edouard Leurent, Michal Valko
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We propose MDP-GapE, a new trajectory-based Monte-Carlo Tree Search algorithm for planning in a Markov Decision Process in which transitions have a finite support. We prove an upper bound on the number of sampled trajectories needed for MDP-GapE to identify a near-optimal action with high probability. This problem-dependent result is expressed in terms of the sub-optimality gaps of the state-action pairs that are visited during exploration. Our experiments reveal that MDP-GapE is also effective in practice, in contrast with other algorithms with sample complexity guarantees in the fixed-confidence setting, that are mostly theoretical.
Provably Good Batch Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning Without Great Exploration
Authors: Yao Liu, Adith Swaminathan, Alekh Agarwal, Emma Brunskill
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Batch reinforcement learning (RL) is important to apply RL algorithms to many high stakes tasks. Doing batch RL in a way that yields a reliable new policy in large domains is challenging: a new decision policy may visit states and actions outside the support of the batch data, and function approximation and optimization with limited samples can further increase the potential of learning policies with overly optimistic estimates of their future performance. Some recent approaches to address these concerns have shown promise, but can still be overly optimistic in their expected outcomes. Theoretical work that provides strong guarantees on the performance of the output policy relies on a strong concentrability assumption, which makes it unsuitable for cases where the ratio between state-action distributions of behavior policy and some candidate policies is large. This is because, in the traditional analysis, the error bound scales up with this ratio. 
We show that using \emph{pessimistic value estimates} in the low-data regions in Bellman optimality and evaluation back-up can yield more adaptive and stronger guarantees when the concentrability assumption does not hold. In certain settings, they can find the approximately best policy within the state-action space explored by the batch data, without requiring a priori assumptions of concentrability. We highlight the necessity of our pessimistic update and the limitations of previous algorithms and analyses by illustrative MDP examples and demonstrate an empirical comparison of our algorithm and other state-of-the-art batch RL baselines in standard benchmarks.
Detection as Regression: Certified Object Detection with Median Smoothing
Authors: Ping-yeh Chiang, Michael Curry, Ahmed Abdelkader, Aounon Kumar, John Dickerson, Tom Goldstein
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Despite the vulnerability of object detectors to adversarial attacks, very few defenses are known to date. While adversarial training can improve the empirical robustness of image classifiers, a direct extension to object detection is very expensive. This work is motivated by recent progress on certified classification by randomized smoothing. We start by presenting a reduction from object detection to a regression problem. Then, to enable certified regression, where standard mean smoothing fails, we propose median smoothing, which is of independent interest. We obtain the first model-agnostic, training-free, and certified defense for object detection against $\ell_2$-bounded attacks.
Contextual Reserve Price Optimization in Auctions via Mixed Integer Programming
Authors: Joey Huchette, Haihao Lu, Hossein Esfandiari, Vahab Mirrokni
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We study the problem of learning a linear model to set the reserve price in an auction, given contextual information, in order to maximize expected revenue from the seller side. First, we show that it is not possible to solve this problem in polynomial time unless the Exponential Time Hypothesis fails. Second, we present a strong mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulation for this problem, which is capable of exactly modeling the nonconvex and discontinuous expected reward function. Moreover, we show that this MIP formulation is ideal (i.e. the strongest possible formulation) for the revenue function of a single impression. Since it can be computationally expensive to exactly solve the MIP formulation in practice, we also study the performance of its linear programming (LP) relaxation. Though it may work well in practice, we show that, unfortunately, in the worst case the optimal objective of the LP relaxation can be O(number of samples) times larger than the optimal objective of the true problem. Finally, we present computational results, showcasing that the MIP formulation, along with its LP relaxation, are able to achieve superior in- and out-of-sample performance, as compared to state-of-the-art algorithms on both real and synthetic datasets. More broadly, we believe this work offers an indication of the strength of optimization methodologies like MIP to exactly model intrinsic discontinuities in machine learning problems.
ExpandNets: Linear Over-parameterization to Train Compact Convolutional Networks
Authors: Shuxuan Guo, Jose M. Alvarez, Mathieu Salzmann
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We introduce an approach to training a given compact network. To this end, we leverage over-parameterization, which typically improves both neural network optimization and generalization. Specifically, we propose to expand each linear layer of the compact network into multiple consecutive linear layers, without adding any nonlinearity. As such, the resulting expanded network, or ExpandNet, can be contracted back to the compact one algebraically at inference. In particular, we introduce two convolutional expansion strategies and demonstrate their benefits on several tasks, including image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. As evidenced by our experiments, our approach outperforms both training the compact network from scratch and performing knowledge distillation from a teacher. Furthermore, our linear over-parameterization empirically reduces gradient confusion during training and improves the network generalization.
FleXOR: Trainable Fractional Quantization
Authors: Dongsoo Lee, Se Jung Kwon, Byeongwook Kim, Yongkweon Jeon, Baeseong Park, Jeongin Yun
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Quantization based on the binary codes is gaining attention because each quantized bit can be directly utilized for computations without dequantization using look-up tables. Previous attempts, however, only allow for integer numbers of quantization bits, which ends up restricting the search space for compression ratio and accuracy. In this paper, we propose an encryption algorithm/architecture to compress quantized weights so as to achieve fractional numbers of bits per weight. Decryption during inference is implemented by digital XOR-gate networks added into the neural network model while XOR gates are described by utilizing $\tanh(x)$ for backward propagation to enable gradient calculations. We perform experiments using MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet to show that inserting XOR gates learns quantization/encrypted bit decisions through training and obtains high accuracy even for fractional sub 1-bit weights. As a result, our proposed method yields smaller size and higher model accuracy compared to binary neural networks.
The Implications of Local Correlation on Learning Some Deep Functions
Authors: Eran Malach, Shai Shalev-Shwartz
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: It is known that learning deep neural-networks is computationally hard in the worst-case. In fact, the proofs of such hardness results show that even weakly learning deep networks is hard. In other words, no efficient algorithm can find a predictor that is slightly better than a random guess. However, we observe that on natural distributions of images, small patches of the input image are corre- lated to the target label, which implies that on such natural data, efficient weak learning is trivial. While in the distribution-free setting, the celebrated boosting results show that weak learning implies strong learning, in the distribution-specific setting this is not necessarily the case. We introduce a property of distributions, denoted “local correlation”, which requires that small patches of the input image and of intermediate layers of the target function are correlated to the target label. We empirically demonstrate that this property holds for the CIFAR and ImageNet data sets. The main technical results of the paper is proving that, for some classes of deep functions, weak learning implies efficient strong learning under the “local correlation” assumption.
Learning to search efficiently for causally near-optimal treatments
Authors: Samuel Håkansson, Viktor Lindblom, Omer Gottesman, Fredrik D Johansson
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Finding an effective medical treatment often requires a search by trial and error. Making this search more efficient by minimizing the number of unnecessary trials could lower both costs and patient suffering. We formalize this problem as learning a policy for finding a near-optimal treatment in a minimum number of trials using a causal inference framework. We give a model-based dynamic programming algorithm which learns from observational data while being robust to unmeasured confounding. To reduce time complexity, we suggest a greedy algorithm which bounds the near-optimality constraint. The methods are evaluated on synthetic and real-world healthcare data and compared to model-free reinforcement learning. We find that our methods compare favorably to the model-free baseline while offering a more transparent trade-off between search time and treatment efficacy.
A Game Theoretic Analysis of Additive Adversarial Attacks and Defenses
Authors: Ambar Pal, Rene Vidal
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Research in adversarial learning follows a cat and mouse game between attackers and defenders where attacks are proposed, they are mitigated by new defenses, and subsequently new attacks are proposed that break earlier defenses, and so on. However, it has remained unclear as to whether there are conditions under which no better attacks or defenses can be proposed. In this paper, we propose a game-theoretic framework for studying attacks and defenses which exist in equilibrium. Under a locally linear decision boundary model for the underlying binary classifier, we prove that the Fast Gradient Method attack and a Randomized Smoothing defense form a Nash Equilibrium. We then show how this equilibrium defense can be approximated given finitely many samples from a data-generating distribution, and derive a generalization bound for the performance of our approximation.
Posterior Network: Uncertainty Estimation without OOD Samples via Density-Based Pseudo-Counts
Authors: Bertrand Charpentier, Daniel Zügner, Stephan Günnemann
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Accurate estimation of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty is crucial to build safe and reliable systems. Traditional approaches, such as dropout and ensemble methods, estimate uncertainty by sampling probability predictions from different submodels, which leads to slow uncertainty estimation at inference time. Recent works address this drawback by directly predicting parameters of prior distributions over the probability predictions with a neural network. While this approach has demonstrated accurate uncertainty estimation, it requires defining arbitrary target parameters for in-distribution data and makes the unrealistic assumption that out-of-distribution (OOD) data is known at training time. 
In this work we propose the Posterior Network (PostNet), which uses Normalizing Flows to predict an individual closed-form posterior distribution over predicted probabilites for any input sample. The posterior distributions learned by PostNet accurately reflect uncertainty for in- and out-of-distribution data -- without requiring access to OOD data at training time. PostNet achieves state-of-the art results in OOD detection and in uncertainty calibration under dataset shifts.
No-Regret Learning and Mixed Nash Equilibria: They Do Not Mix
Authors: Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis, Lampros Flokas, Thanasis Lianeas, Panayotis Mertikopoulos, Georgios Piliouras
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Understanding the behavior of no-regret dynamics in general N-player games is
a fundamental question in online learning and game theory. A folk result in the
field states that, in finite games, the empirical frequency of play under no-regret
learning converges to the game’s set of coarse correlated equilibria. By contrast,
our understanding of how the day-to-day behavior of the dynamics correlates to the game’s Nash equilibria is much more limited, and only partial results are known
for certain classes of games (such as zero-sum or congestion games). In this paper, we study the dynamics of follow the regularized leader (FTRL), arguably the most well-studied class of no-regret dynamics, and we establish a sweeping negative result showing that the notion of mixed Nash equilibrium is antithetical to no-regret learning. Specifically, we show that any Nash equilibrium which is not strict (in that every player has a unique best response) cannot be stable and attracting under the dynamics of FTRL. This result has significant implications for predicting the outcome of a learning process as it shows unequivocally that only strict (and hence, pure) Nash equilibria can emerge as stable limit points thereof.
A Unifying View of Optimism in Episodic Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Gergely Neu, Ciara Pike-Burke
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: The principle of ``optimism in the face of uncertainty'' underpins many theoretically successful reinforcement learning algorithms. In this paper we provide a general framework for designing, analyzing and implementing such algorithms in the episodic reinforcement learning problem. This framework is built upon Lagrangian duality, and demonstrates that every model-optimistic algorithm that constructs an optimistic MDP has an equivalent representation as a value-optimistic dynamic programming algorithm. Typically, it was thought that these two classes of algorithms were distinct, with model-optimistic algorithms benefiting from a cleaner probabilistic analysis while value-optimistic algorithms are easier to implement and thus more practical. With the framework developed in this paper, we show that it is possible to get the best of both worlds by providing a class of algorithms which have a computationally efficient dynamic-programming implementation and also a simple probabilistic analysis. Besides being able to capture many existing algorithms in the tabular setting, our framework can also address large-scale problems under realizable function approximation, where it enables a simple model-based analysis of some recently proposed methods.
Continuous Submodular Maximization: Beyond DR-Submodularity
Authors: Moran Feldman, Amin Karbasi
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper, we propose the first continuous optimization algorithms that achieve a constant factor approximation guarantee for the problem of monotone continuous submodular maximization subject to a linear constraint. We first prove that a simple variant of the vanilla coordinate ascent, called \COORDINATE-ASCENT+, achieves a $(\frac{e-1}{2e-1}-\eps)$-approximation guarantee while performing $O(n/\epsilon)$ iterations, where the computational complexity of each iteration is roughly $O(n/\sqrt{\epsilon}+n\log n)$ (here, $n$ denotes the dimension of the optimization problem). We then propose \COORDINATE-ASCENT++, that achieves the tight $(1-1/e-\eps)$-approximation guarantee while performing the same number of iterations, but at a higher computational complexity of roughly $O(n^3/\eps^{2.5} + n^3 \log n / \eps^2)$ per iteration. However,   the computation of each round of \COORDINATE-ASCENT++ can be easily parallelized so that the computational cost per machine scales as $O(n/\sqrt{\epsilon}+n\log n)$.
An Asymptotically Optimal Primal-Dual Incremental Algorithm for Contextual Linear Bandits
Authors: Andrea Tirinzoni, Matteo Pirotta, Marcello Restelli, Alessandro Lazaric
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In the contextual linear bandit setting, algorithms built on the optimism principle fail to exploit the structure of the problem and have been shown to be asymptotically suboptimal. In this paper, we follow recent approaches of deriving asymptotically optimal algorithms from problem-dependent regret lower bounds and we introduce a novel algorithm improving over the state-of-the-art along multiple dimensions. We build on a reformulation of the lower bound, where context distribution and exploration policy are decoupled, and we obtain an algorithm robust to unbalanced context distributions. Then, using an incremental primal-dual approach to solve the Lagrangian relaxation of the lower bound, we obtain a scalable and computationally efficient algorithm. Finally, we remove forced exploration and build on confidence intervals of the optimization problem to encourage a minimum level of exploration that is better adapted to the problem structure. We demonstrate the asymptotic optimality of our algorithm, while providing both problem-dependent and worst-case finite-time regret guarantees. Our bounds scale with the logarithm of the number of arms, thus avoiding the linear dependence common in all related prior works. Notably, we establish minimax optimality for any learning horizon in the special case of non-contextual linear bandits. Finally, we verify that our algorithm obtains better empirical performance than state-of-the-art baselines.
Assessing SATNet's Ability to Solve the Symbol Grounding Problem
Authors: Oscar Chang, Lampros Flokas, Hod Lipson, Michael Spranger
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: SATNet is an award-winning MAXSAT solver that can be used to infer logical rules and integrated as a differentiable layer in a deep neural network. It had been shown to solve Sudoku puzzles visually from examples of puzzle digit images, and was heralded as an impressive achievement towards the longstanding AI goal of combining pattern recognition with logical reasoning. In this paper, we clarify SATNet's capabilities by showing that in the absence of intermediate labels that identify individual Sudoku digit images with their logical representations, SATNet completely fails at visual Sudoku (0% test accuracy). More generally, the failure can be pinpointed to its inability to learn to assign symbols to perceptual phenomena, also known as the symbol grounding problem, which has long been thought to be a prerequisite for intelligent agents to perform real-world logical reasoning. We propose an MNIST based test as an easy instance of the symbol grounding problem that can serve as a sanity check for differentiable symbolic solvers in general. Naive applications of SATNet on this test lead to performance worse than that of models without logical reasoning capabilities. We report on the causes of SATNet’s failure and how to prevent them.
A Bayesian Nonparametrics View into Deep Representations
Authors: Michał Jamroż, Marcin Kurdziel, Mateusz Opala
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We investigate neural network representations from a probabilistic perspective. Specifically, we leverage Bayesian nonparametrics to construct models of neural activations in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and latent representations in Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). This allows us to formulate a tractable complexity measure for distributions of neural activations and to explore global structure of latent spaces learned by VAEs. We use this machinery to uncover how memorization and two common forms of regularization, i.e. dropout and input augmentation, influence representational complexity in CNNs. We demonstrate that networks that can exploit patterns in data learn vastly less complex representations than networks forced to memorize. We also show marked differences between effects of input augmentation and dropout, with the latter strongly depending on network width. Next, we investigate latent representations learned by standard $\beta$-VAEs and Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) $\beta$-VAEs. We show that aggregated posterior in standard VAEs quickly collapses to the diagonal prior when regularization strength increases. MMD-VAEs, on the other hand, learn more complex posterior distributions, even with strong regularization. While this gives a richer sample space, MMD-VAEs do not exhibit independence of latent dimensions. Finally, we leverage our probabilistic models as an effective sampling strategy for latent codes, improving quality of samples in VAEs with rich posteriors.
On the Similarity between the Laplace and Neural Tangent Kernels
Authors: Amnon Geifman, Abhay Yadav, Yoni Kasten, Meirav Galun, David Jacobs, Basri Ronen
Published in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33  (NeurIPS 2020) (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Recent theoretical work has shown that massively overparameterized neural networks are equivalent to kernel regressors that use Neural Tangent Kernels (NTKs).  Experiments show that these kernel methods perform similarly to real neural networks.  Here we show that NTK for fully connected networks with ReLU activation is closely related to the standard Laplace kernel.  We show theoretically that for normalized data on the hypersphere both kernels have the same eigenfunctions and their eigenvalues decay polynomially at the same rate, implying that their Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS) include the same sets of functions.  This means that both kernels give rise to classes of functions with the same smoothness properties. The two kernels differ for data off the hypersphere,  but experiments indicate that when data is properly normalized these differences are not significant. Finally, we provide experiments on real data comparing NTK and the Laplace kernel, along with a larger class of $\gamma$-exponential kernels.  We show that these  perform almost identically.  Our  results suggest that much insight about neural networks can be obtained from analysis of the well-known Laplace kernel, which has a simple closed form.