mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Off-Dynamics Reinforcement Learning: Training for Transfer with Domain Classifiers
Authors: Benjamin Eysenbach, Shreyas Chaudhari, Swapnil Asawa, Sergey Levine, Ruslan Salakhutdinov
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a simple, practical, and intuitive approach for domain adaptation in reinforcement learning. Our approach stems from the idea that the agent's experience in the source domain should look similar to its experience in the target domain. Building off of a probabilistic view of RL, we achieve this goal by compensating for the difference in dynamics by modifying the reward function. This modified reward function is simple to estimate by learning auxiliary classifiers that distinguish source-domain transitions from target-domain transitions. Intuitively, the agent is penalized for transitions that would indicate that the agent is interacting with the source domain, rather than the target domain. Formally, we prove that applying our method in the source domain is guaranteed to obtain a near-optimal policy for the target domain, provided that the source and target domains satisfy a lightweight assumption. Our approach is applicable to domains with continuous states and actions and does not require learning an explicit model of the dynamics. On discrete and continuous control tasks, we illustrate the mechanics of our approach and demonstrate its scalability to high-dimensional~tasks.
CoCo: Controllable Counterfactuals for Evaluating Dialogue State Trackers
Authors: SHIYANG LI, Semih Yavuz, Kazuma Hashimoto, Jia Li, Tong Niu, Nazneen Rajani, Xifeng Yan, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Dialogue state trackers have made significant progress on benchmark datasets, but their generalization capability to novel and realistic scenarios beyond the held- out conversations is less understood. We propose controllable counterfactuals (COCO) to bridge this gap and evaluate dialogue state tracking (DST) models on novel scenarios, i.e., would the system successfully tackle the request if the user responded differently but still consistently with the dialogue flow? COCO leverages turn-level belief states as counterfactual conditionals to produce novel conversation scenarios in two steps: (i) counterfactual goal generation at turn- level by dropping and adding slots followed by replacing slot values, (ii) counterfactual conversation generation that is conditioned on (i) and consistent with the dialogue flow. Evaluating state-of-the-art DST models on MultiWOZ dataset with COCO-generated counterfactuals results in a significant performance drop of up to 30.8% (from 49.4% to 18.6%) in absolute joint goal accuracy. In comparison, widely used techniques like paraphrasing only affect the accuracy by at most 2%. Human evaluations show that COCO-generated conversations perfectly reflect the underlying user goal with more than 95% accuracy and are as human-like as the original conversations, further strengthening its reliability and promise to be adopted as part of the robustness evaluation of DST models.
Training GANs with Stronger Augmentations via Contrastive Discriminator
Authors: Jongheon Jeong, Jinwoo Shin
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent works in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are actively revisiting various data augmentation techniques as an effective way to prevent discriminator overfitting. It is still unclear, however, that which augmentations could actually improve GANs, and in particular, how to apply a wider range of augmentations in training. In this paper, we propose a novel way to address these questions by incorporating a recent contrastive representation learning scheme into the GAN discriminator, coined ContraD. This "fusion" enables the discriminators to work with much stronger augmentations without increasing their training instability, thereby preventing the discriminator overfitting issue in GANs more effectively. Even better, we observe that the contrastive learning itself also benefits from our GAN training, i.e., by maintaining discriminative features between real and fake samples, suggesting a strong coherence between the two worlds: good contrastive representations are also good for GAN discriminators, and vice versa. Our experimental results show that GANs with ContraD consistently improve FID and IS compared to other recent techniques incorporating data augmentations, still maintaining highly discriminative features in the discriminator in terms of the linear evaluation. Finally, as a byproduct, we also show that our GANs trained in an unsupervised manner (without labels) can induce many conditional generative models via a simple latent sampling, leveraging the learned features of ContraD. Code is available at https://github.com/jh-jeong/ContraD.
Viewmaker Networks: Learning Views for Unsupervised Representation Learning
Authors: Alex Tamkin, Mike Wu, Noah Goodman
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Many recent methods for unsupervised representation learning train models to be invariant to different "views," or distorted versions of an input. However, designing these views requires considerable trial and error by human experts, hindering widespread adoption of unsupervised representation learning methods across domains and modalities. To address this, we propose viewmaker networks: generative models that learn to produce useful views from a given input. Viewmakers are stochastic bounded adversaries: they produce views by generating and then adding an $\ell_p$-bounded perturbation to the input, and are trained adversarially with respect to the main encoder network. Remarkably, when pretraining on CIFAR-10, our learned views enable comparable transfer accuracy to the well-tuned SimCLR augmentations---despite not including transformations like cropping or color jitter. Furthermore, our learned views significantly outperform baseline augmentations on speech recordings (+9 points on average) and wearable sensor data (+17 points on average). Viewmaker views can also be combined with handcrafted views: they improve robustness to common image corruptions and can increase transfer performance in cases where handcrafted views are less explored. These results suggest that viewmakers may provide a path towards more general representation learning algorithms---reducing the domain expertise and effort needed to pretrain on a much wider set of domains. Code is available at https://github.com/alextamkin/viewmaker.
Personalized Federated Learning with First Order Model Optimization
Authors: Michael Zhang, Karan Sapra, Sanja Fidler, Serena Yeung, Jose M. Alvarez
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: While federated learning traditionally aims to train a single global model across decentralized local datasets, one model may not always be ideal for all participating clients. Here we propose an alternative, where each client only federates with other relevant clients to obtain a stronger model per client-specific objectives. To achieve this personalization, rather than computing a single model average with constant weights for the entire federation as in traditional FL, we efficiently calculate optimal weighted model combinations for each client, based on figuring out how much a client can benefit from another's model. We do not assume knowledge of any underlying data distributions or client similarities, and allow each client to optimize for arbitrary target distributions of interest, enabling greater flexibility for personalization. We evaluate and characterize our method on a variety of federated settings, datasets, and degrees of local data heterogeneity. Our method outperforms existing alternatives, while also enabling new features for personalized FL such as transfer outside of local data distributions.
MultiModalQA: complex question answering over text, tables and images
Authors: Alon Talmor, Ori Yoran, Amnon Catav, Dan Lahav, Yizhong Wang, Akari Asai, Gabriel Ilharco, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Jonathan Berant
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: When answering complex questions, people can seamlessly combine information from visual, textual and tabular sources. 
While interest in models that reason over multiple pieces of evidence has surged in recent years, there has been relatively little work on question answering models that reason across multiple modalities.
In this paper, we present MultiModalQA (MMQA): a challenging question answering dataset that requires joint reasoning over text, tables and images. 
We create MMQA using a new framework for generating complex multi-modal questions at scale, harvesting tables from Wikipedia, and attaching images and text paragraphs using entities that appear in each table. We then define a formal language that allows us to take questions that can be answered from a single modality, and combine them to generate cross-modal questions. Last, crowdsourcing workers take these automatically generated questions and rephrase them into more fluent language.
We create 29,918 questions through this procedure, and empirically demonstrate the necessity of a multi-modal multi-hop approach to solve our task: our multi-hop model, ImplicitDecomp, achieves an average F1 of 51.7  over cross-modal questions, substantially outperforming a strong baseline that achieves 38.2 F1, but still lags significantly behind human performance, which is at 90.1 F1.
Impact of Representation Learning in Linear Bandits
Authors: Jiaqi Yang, Wei Hu, Jason D. Lee, Simon Shaolei Du
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study how representation learning can improve the efficiency of bandit problems. We study the setting where we play $T$ linear bandits with dimension $d$ concurrently, and these $T$ bandit tasks share a common $k (\ll d)$ dimensional linear representation. For the finite-action setting, we present a new algorithm which achieves $\widetilde{O}(T\sqrt{kN} + \sqrt{dkNT})$ regret, where $N$ is the number of rounds we play for each bandit. When $T$ is sufficiently large, our algorithm significantly outperforms the naive algorithm (playing $T$ bandits independently) that achieves $\widetilde{O}(T\sqrt{d N})$ regret. We also provide an $\Omega(T\sqrt{kN} + \sqrt{dkNT})$ regret lower bound, showing that our algorithm is minimax-optimal up to poly-logarithmic factors.  Furthermore, we extend our algorithm to the infinite-action setting and obtain a corresponding regret bound which demonstrates the benefit of representation learning in certain regimes. We also present experiments on synthetic and real-world data to illustrate our theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.
Boost then Convolve: Gradient Boosting Meets Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Sergei Ivanov, Liudmila Prokhorenkova
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) are powerful models that have been successful in various graph representation learning tasks. Whereas gradient boosted decision trees (GBDT) often outperform other machine learning methods when faced with heterogeneous tabular data. But what approach should be used for graphs with tabular node features? Previous GNN models have mostly focused on networks with homogeneous sparse features and, as we show, are suboptimal in the heterogeneous setting. In this work, we propose a novel architecture that trains GBDT and GNN jointly to get the best of both worlds: the GBDT model deals with heterogeneous features, while GNN accounts for the graph structure. Our model benefits from end-to-end optimization by allowing new trees to fit the gradient updates of GNN. With an extensive experimental comparison to the leading GBDT and GNN models, we demonstrate a significant increase in performance on a variety of graphs with tabular features. The code is available: https://github.com/nd7141/bgnn.
Learning to live with Dale's principle: ANNs with separate excitatory and inhibitory units
Authors: Jonathan Cornford, Damjan Kalajdzievski, Marco Leite, Amélie Lamarquette, Dimitri Michael Kullmann, Blake Aaron Richards
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract:  The units in artificial neural networks (ANNs) can be thought of as abstractions of biological neurons, and ANNs are increasingly used in neuroscience research. However, there are many important differences between ANN units and real neurons. One of the most notable is the absence of Dale's principle, which ensures that biological neurons are either exclusively excitatory or inhibitory. Dale's principle is typically left out of ANNs because its inclusion impairs learning. This is problematic, because one of the great advantages of ANNs for neuroscience research is their ability to learn complicated, realistic tasks. Here, by taking inspiration from feedforward inhibitory interneurons in the brain we show that we can develop ANNs with separate populations of excitatory and inhibitory units that learn just as well as standard ANNs. We call these networks Dale's ANNs (DANNs). We present two insights that enable DANNs to learn well: (1) DANNs are related to normalization schemes, and can be initialized such that the inhibition centres and standardizes the excitatory activity, (2) updates to inhibitory neuron parameters should be scaled using corrections based on the Fisher Information matrix. These results demonstrate how ANNs that respect Dale's principle can be built without sacrificing learning performance, which is important for future work using ANNs as models of the brain. The results may also have interesting implications for how inhibitory plasticity in the real brain operates.
Calibration of Neural Networks using Splines
Authors: Kartik Gupta, Amir Rahimi, Thalaiyasingam Ajanthan, Thomas Mensink, Cristian Sminchisescu, Richard Hartley
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Calibrating neural networks is of utmost importance when employing them in safety-critical applications where the downstream decision making depends on the predicted probabilities. Measuring calibration error amounts to comparing two empirical distributions. In this work, we introduce a binning-free calibration measure inspired by the classical Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) statistical test in which the main idea is to compare the respective cumulative probability distributions. From this, by approximating the empirical cumulative distribution using a differentiable function via splines, we obtain a recalibration function, which maps the network outputs to actual (calibrated) class assignment probabilities. The spline-fitting is performed using a held-out calibration set and the obtained recalibration function is evaluated on an unseen test set. We tested our method against existing calibration approaches on various image classification datasets and our spline-based recalibration approach consistently outperforms existing methods on KS error as well as other commonly used calibration measures. Code is available online at https://github.com/kartikgupta-at-anu/spline-calibration.
Uncertainty Sets for Image Classifiers using Conformal Prediction
Authors: Anastasios Nikolas Angelopoulos, Stephen Bates, Michael Jordan, Jitendra Malik
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Convolutional image classifiers can achieve high predictive accuracy, but quantifying their uncertainty remains an unresolved challenge, hindering their deployment in consequential settings. Existing uncertainty quantification techniques, such as Platt scaling, attempt to calibrate the network’s probability estimates, but they do not have formal guarantees. We present an algorithm that modifies any classifier to output a predictive set containing the true label with a user-specified probability, such as 90%. The algorithm is simple and fast like Platt scaling, but provides a formal finite-sample coverage guarantee for every model and dataset. Our method modifies an existing conformal prediction algorithm to give more stable predictive sets by regularizing the small scores of unlikely classes after Platt scaling. In experiments on both Imagenet and Imagenet-V2 with ResNet-152 and other classifiers, our scheme outperforms existing approaches, achieving coverage with sets that are often factors of 5 to 10 smaller than a stand-alone Platt scaling baseline.
DeepAveragers: Offline Reinforcement Learning By Solving Derived Non-Parametric MDPs
Authors: Aayam Kumar Shrestha, Stefan Lee, Prasad Tadepalli, Alan Fern
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study an approach to offline reinforcement learning (RL) based on optimally solving  finitely-represented  MDPs  derived  from  a  static  dataset  of  experience. This approach can be applied on top of any learned representation and has the potential to easily support multiple solution objectives as well as zero-shot adjustment to changing environments and goals.  Our main contribution is to introduce the Deep Averagers with Costs MDP (DAC-MDP) and to investigate its solutions for offline RL.  DAC-MDPs are a non-parametric model that can leverage deep representations and account for limited data by introducing costs for exploiting under-represented parts of the model.  In theory, we show conditions that allow for lower-bounding the performance of DAC-MDP solutions. We also investigate the empirical behavior in a number of environments, including those with image-based observations. Overall, the experiments demonstrate that the framework can work in practice and scale to large complex offline RL problems.
Adversarial score matching and improved sampling for image generation
Authors: Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau, Rémi Piché-Taillefer, Ioannis Mitliagkas, Remi Tachet des Combes
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Denoising Score Matching with Annealed Langevin Sampling (DSM-ALS) has recently found success in generative modeling. The approach works by first training a neural network to estimate the score of a distribution, and then using Langevin dynamics to sample from the data distribution assumed by the score network. Despite the convincing visual quality of samples, this method appears to perform worse than Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) under the Fréchet Inception Distance, a standard metric for generative models. We show that this apparent gap vanishes when denoising the final Langevin samples using the score network.
In addition, we propose two improvements to DSM-ALS:  1) Consistent Annealed Sampling as a more stable alternative to Annealed Langevin Sampling, and 2) a hybrid training formulation, composed of both Denoising Score Matching and adversarial objectives. By combining these two techniques and exploring different network architectures, we elevate score matching methods and obtain results competitive with state-of-the-art image generation on CIFAR-10.
Concept Learners for Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Kaidi Cao, Maria Brbic, Jure Leskovec
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Developing algorithms that are able to generalize to a novel task given only a few labeled examples represents a fundamental challenge in closing the gap between machine- and human-level performance. The core of human cognition lies in the structured, reusable concepts that help us to rapidly adapt to new tasks and provide reasoning behind our decisions. However, existing meta-learning methods learn complex representations across prior labeled tasks without imposing any structure on the learned representations. Here we propose COMET, a meta-learning method that improves generalization ability by learning to learn along human-interpretable concept dimensions. Instead of learning a joint unstructured metric space, COMET learns mappings of high-level concepts into semi-structured metric spaces, and effectively combines the outputs of independent concept learners. We evaluate our model on few-shot tasks from diverse domains, including fine-grained image classification, document categorization  and cell type annotation on a novel dataset from a biological domain developed in our work. COMET significantly outperforms strong meta-learning baselines, achieving 6-15% relative improvement on the most challenging 1-shot learning tasks, while unlike existing methods providing interpretations behind the model's predictions.
Removing Undesirable Feature Contributions Using Out-of-Distribution Data
Authors: Saehyung Lee, Changhwa Park, Hyungyu Lee, Jihun Yi, Jonghyun Lee, Sungroh Yoon
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Several data augmentation methods deploy unlabeled-in-distribution (UID) data to bridge the gap between the training and inference of neural networks. However, these methods have clear limitations in terms of availability of UID data and dependence of algorithms on pseudo-labels. Herein, we propose a data augmentation method to improve generalization in both adversarial and standard learning by using out-of-distribution (OOD) data that are devoid of the abovementioned issues. We show how to improve generalization theoretically using OOD data in each learning scenario and complement our theoretical analysis with experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and a subset of ImageNet. The results indicate that undesirable features are shared even among image data that seem to have little correlation from a human point of view. We also present the advantages of the proposed method through comparison with other data augmentation methods, which can be used in the absence of UID data. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed method can further improve the existing state-of-the-art adversarial training.
WaNet - Imperceptible Warping-based Backdoor Attack
Authors: Tuan Anh Nguyen, Anh Tuan Tran
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: With the thriving of deep learning and the widespread practice of using pre-trained networks, backdoor attacks have become an increasing security threat drawing many research interests in recent years. A third-party model can be poisoned in training to work well in normal conditions but behave maliciously when a trigger pattern appears. However, the existing backdoor attacks are all built on noise perturbation triggers, making them noticeable to humans. In this paper, we instead propose using warping-based triggers. The proposed backdoor outperforms the previous methods in a human inspection test by a wide margin, proving its stealthiness. To make such models undetectable by machine defenders, we propose a novel training mode, called the ``noise mode. The trained networks successfully attack and bypass the state-ofthe art defense methods on standard classification datasets, including MNIST, CIFAR-10, GTSRB, and CelebA. Behavior analyses show that our backdoors are transparent to network inspection, further proving this novel attack mechanism's efficiency.
Group Equivariant Conditional Neural Processes
Authors: Makoto Kawano, Wataru Kumagai, Akiyoshi Sannai, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present the group equivariant conditional neural process (EquivCNP), a meta-learning method with permutation invariance in a data set as in conventional conditional neural processes (CNPs), and it also has transformation equivariance in data space. Incorporating group equivariance, such as rotation and scaling equivariance, provides a way to consider the symmetry of real-world data. We give a decomposition theorem for permutation-invariant and group-equivariant maps, which leads us to construct EquivCNPs with an infinite-dimensional latent space to handle group symmetries. In this paper, we build architecture using Lie group convolutional layers for practical implementation. We show that EquivCNP with translation equivariance achieves comparable performance to conventional CNPs in a 1D regression task. Moreover, we demonstrate that incorporating an appropriate Lie group equivariance, EquivCNP is capable of zero-shot generalization for an image-completion task by selecting an appropriate Lie group equivariance.
Clustering-friendly Representation Learning via Instance Discrimination and Feature Decorrelation
Authors: Yaling Tao, Kentaro Takagi, Kouta Nakata
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Clustering is one of the most fundamental tasks in machine learning. Recently, deep clustering has become a major trend in clustering techniques. Representation learning often plays an important role in the effectiveness of deep clustering, and thus can be a principal cause of performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a clustering-friendly representation learning method using instance discrimination and feature decorrelation. Our deep-learning-based representation learning method is motivated by the properties of classical spectral clustering. Instance discrimination learns similarities among data and feature decorrelation removes redundant correlation among features. We utilize an instance discrimination method in which learning individual instance classes leads to learning similarity among instances. Through detailed experiments and examination, we show that the approach can be adapted to learning a latent space for clustering. We design novel softmax-formulated decorrelation constraints for learning. In evaluations of image clustering using CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-10, our method achieves accuracy of 81.5% and 95.4%, respectively. We also show that the softmax-formulated constraints are compatible with various neural networks.
Adapting to Reward Progressivity via Spectral Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Michael Dann, John Thangarajah
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper we consider reinforcement learning tasks with progressive rewards; that is, tasks where the rewards tend to increase in magnitude over time. We hypothesise that this property may be problematic for value-based deep reinforcement learning agents, particularly if the agent must first succeed in relatively unrewarding regions of the task in order to reach more rewarding regions. To address this issue, we propose Spectral DQN, which decomposes the reward into frequencies such that the high frequencies only activate when large rewards are found. This allows the training loss to be balanced so that it gives more even weighting across small and large reward regions. In two domains with extreme reward progressivity, where standard value-based methods struggle significantly, Spectral DQN is able to make much farther progress. Moreover, when evaluated on a set of six standard Atari games that do not overtly favour the approach, Spectral DQN remains more than competitive: While it underperforms one of the benchmarks in a single game, it comfortably surpasses the benchmarks in three games. These results demonstrate that the approach is not overfit to its target problem, and suggest that Spectral DQN may have advantages beyond addressing reward progressivity.
Information Laundering for Model Privacy
Authors: Xinran Wang, Yu Xiang, Jun Gao, Jie Ding
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this work, we propose information laundering, a novel framework for enhancing model privacy. Unlike data privacy that concerns the protection of raw data information, model privacy aims to protect an already-learned model that is to be deployed for public use. The private model can be obtained from general learning methods, and its deployment means that it will return a deterministic or random response for a given input query. An information-laundered model consists of probabilistic components that deliberately maneuver the intended input and output for queries of the model, so the model's adversarial acquisition is less likely. Under the proposed framework, we develop an information-theoretic principle to quantify the fundamental tradeoffs between model utility and privacy leakage and derive the optimal design.
Seq2Tens: An Efficient Representation of Sequences by Low-Rank Tensor Projections
Authors: Csaba Toth, Patric Bonnier, Harald Oberhauser
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Sequential data such as time series, video, or text can be challenging to analyse as the ordered structure gives rise to complex dependencies. At the heart of this is non-commutativity, in the sense that reordering the elements of a sequence can completely change its meaning. We use a classical mathematical object -- the free algebra -- to capture this non-commutativity. To address the innate computational complexity of this algebra, we use compositions of low-rank tensor projections. This yields modular and scalable building blocks that give state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks such as multivariate time series classification, mortality prediction and generative models for video.
Linear Last-iterate Convergence in Constrained Saddle-point Optimization
Authors: Chen-Yu Wei, Chung-Wei Lee, Mengxiao Zhang, Haipeng Luo
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Optimistic Gradient Descent Ascent (OGDA) and Optimistic Multiplicative Weights Update (OMWU) for saddle-point optimization have received growing attention due to their favorable last-iterate convergence. However, their behaviors for simple bilinear games over the probability simplex are still not fully understood --- previous analysis lacks explicit convergence rates, only applies to an exponentially small learning rate, or requires additional assumptions such as the uniqueness of the optimal solution.

In this work, we significantly expand the understanding of last-iterate convergence for OGDA and OMWU in the constrained setting. Specifically, for OMWU in bilinear games over the simplex, we show that when the equilibrium is unique, linear last-iterate convergence is achievable with a constant learning rate, which improves the result of (Daskalakis & Panageas, 2019) under the same assumption. We then significantly extend the results to more general objectives and feasible sets for the projected OGDA algorithm, by introducing a sufficient condition under which OGDA exhibits concrete last-iterate convergence rates with a constant learning rate. We show that bilinear games over any polytope satisfy this condition and OGDA converges exponentially fast even without the unique equilibrium assumption. Our condition also holds for strongly-convex-strongly-concave functions, recovering the result of (Hsieh et al., 2019). Finally, we provide experimental results to further support our theory.
Graph Edit Networks
Authors: Benjamin Paassen, Daniele Grattarola, Daniele Zambon, Cesare Alippi, Barbara Hammer
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: While graph neural networks have made impressive progress in classification and regression, few approaches to date perform time series prediction on graphs, and those that do are mostly limited to edge changes. We suggest that graph edits are a more natural interface for graph-to-graph learning. In particular,  graph edits are general enough to describe any graph-to-graph change, not only edge changes; they are sparse, making them easier to understand for humans and more efficient computationally; and they are local, avoiding the need for pooling layers in graph neural networks. In this paper, we propose a novel output layer - the graph edit network - which takes node embeddings as input and generates a sequence of graph edits that transform the input graph to the output graph. We prove that a mapping between the node sets of two graphs is sufficient to construct training data for a graph edit network and that an optimal mapping yields edit scripts that are almost as short as the graph edit distance between the graphs. We further provide a proof-of-concept empirical evaluation on several graph dynamical systems, which are difficult to learn for baselines from the literature.
Evaluating the Disentanglement of Deep Generative Models through Manifold Topology
Authors: Sharon Zhou, Eric Zelikman, Fred Lu, Andrew Y. Ng, Gunnar E. Carlsson, Stefano Ermon
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learning disentangled representations is regarded as a fundamental task for improving the generalization, robustness, and interpretability of generative models. However, measuring disentanglement has been challenging and inconsistent, often dependent on an ad-hoc external model or specific to a certain dataset. To address this, we present a method for quantifying disentanglement that only uses the generative model, by measuring the topological similarity of conditional submanifolds in the learned representation. This method showcases both unsupervised and supervised variants. To illustrate the effectiveness and applicability of our method, we empirically evaluate several state-of-the-art models across multiple datasets. We find that our method ranks models similarly to existing methods. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/stanfordmlgroup/disentanglement.
FedBE: Making Bayesian Model Ensemble Applicable to Federated Learning
Authors: Hong-You Chen, Wei-Lun Chao
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Federated learning aims to collaboratively train a strong global model by accessing users' locally trained models but not their own data. A crucial step is therefore to aggregate local models into a global model, which has been shown challenging when users have non-i.i.d. data. In this paper, we propose a novel aggregation algorithm named FedBE, which takes a Bayesian inference perspective by sampling higher-quality global models and combining them via Bayesian model Ensemble, leading to much robust aggregation. We show that an effective model distribution can be constructed by simply fitting a Gaussian or Dirichlet distribution to the local models. Our empirical studies validate FedBE's superior performance, especially when users' data are not i.i.d. and when the neural networks go deeper. Moreover, FedBE is compatible with recent efforts in regularizing users' model training, making it an easily applicable module: you only need to replace the aggregation method but leave other parts of your federated learning algorithm intact.
Control-Aware Representations for Model-based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Brandon Cui, Yinlam Chow, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: A major challenge in modern reinforcement learning (RL) is efficient control of dynamical systems from high-dimensional sensory observations.   Learning controllable embedding (LCE) is a promising approach that addresses this challenge by embedding the observations into a lower-dimensional latent space, estimating the latent dynamics, and utilizing it to perform control in the latent space.  Two important questions in this area are how to learn a representation that is amenable to the control problem at hand, and how to achieve an end-to-end framework for representation learning and control.  In this paper, we take a few steps towards addressing these questions. We first formulate a LCE model to learn representations that are suitable to be used by a policy iteration style algorithm in the latent space.We call this model control-aware representation learning(CARL). We derive a loss function and three implementations for CARL. In the offline implementation, we replace the locally-linear control algorithm (e.g., iLQR) used by the existing LCE methods with a RL algorithm, namely model-based soft actor-critic, and show that it results in significant improvement. In online CARL, we interleave representation learning and control, and demonstrate further gain in performance.  Finally, we propose value-guided CARL, a variation in which we optimize a weighted version of the CARL loss function, where the weights depend on the TD-error of the current policy. We evaluate the proposed algorithms by extensive experiments on benchmark tasks and compare them with several LCE baselines.
Conditionally Adaptive Multi-Task Learning: Improving Transfer Learning in NLP Using Fewer Parameters & Less Data
Authors: Jonathan Pilault, Amine El hattami, Christopher Pal
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Multi-Task Learning (MTL) networks have emerged as a promising method for transferring learned knowledge across different tasks. However, MTL must deal with challenges such as: overfitting to low resource tasks, catastrophic forgetting, and negative task transfer, or learning interference. Often, in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a separate model per task is needed to obtain the best performance. However, many fine-tuning approaches are both parameter inefficient, i.e., potentially involving one new model per task, and highly susceptible to losing knowledge acquired during pretraining. We propose a novel Transformer based Hypernetwork Adapter consisting of a new conditional attention mechanism as well as a set of task-conditioned modules that facilitate weight sharing. Through this construction, we achieve more efficient parameter sharing and mitigate forgetting by keeping half of the weights of a pretrained model fixed. We also use a new multi-task data sampling strategy to mitigate the negative effects of data imbalance across tasks. Using this approach, we are able to surpass single task fine-tuning methods while being parameter and data efficient (using around 66% of the data). Compared to other BERT Large methods on GLUE, our 8-task model surpasses other Adapter methods by 2.8% and our 24-task model outperforms by 0.7-1.0% models that use MTL and single task fine-tuning. We show that a larger variant of our single multi-task model approach performs competitively across 26 NLP tasks and yields state-of-the-art results on a number of test and development sets.
Rethinking the Role of Gradient-based Attribution Methods for Model Interpretability
Authors: Suraj Srinivas, Francois Fleuret
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Current methods for the interpretability of discriminative deep neural networks commonly rely on the model's input-gradients, i.e., the gradients of the output logits w.r.t. the inputs. The common assumption is that these input-gradients contain information regarding $p_{\theta} ( y\mid \mathbf{x} )$, the model's discriminative capabilities, thus justifying their use for interpretability. However, in this work, we show that these input-gradients can be arbitrarily manipulated as a consequence of the shift-invariance of softmax without changing the discriminative function. This leaves an open question: given that input-gradients can be arbitrary, why are they highly structured and explanatory in standard models?

In this work, we re-interpret the logits of standard softmax-based classifiers as unnormalized log-densities of the data distribution and show that input-gradients can be viewed as gradients of a class-conditional generative model $p_{\theta}(\mathbf{x} \mid y)$ implicit in the discriminative model. This leads us to hypothesize that the highly structured and explanatory nature of input-gradients may be due to the alignment of this class-conditional model $p_{\theta}(\mathbf{x} \mid y)$ with that of the ground truth data distribution $p_{\text{data}} (\mathbf{x} \mid y)$. We test this hypothesis by studying the effect of density alignment on gradient explanations. To achieve this density alignment, we use an algorithm called score-matching, and propose novel approximations to this algorithm to enable training large-scale models.

Our experiments show that improving the alignment of the implicit density model with the data distribution enhances gradient structure and explanatory power while reducing this alignment has the opposite effect. This also leads us to conjecture that unintended density alignment in standard neural network training may explain the highly structured nature of input-gradients observed in practice. Overall, our finding that input-gradients capture information regarding an implicit generative model implies that we need to re-think their use for interpreting discriminative models.
Training with Quantization Noise for Extreme Model Compression
Authors: Pierre Stock, Angela Fan, Benjamin Graham, Edouard Grave, Rémi Gribonval, Herve Jegou, Armand Joulin
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We tackle the problem of producing compact models, maximizing their accuracy for a given model size. A standard solution is to train networks with Quantization Aware Training, where the weights are quantized during training and the gradients approximated with the Straight-Through Estimator. In this paper, we extend this approach to work with extreme compression methods where the approximations introduced by STE are severe. Our proposal is to only quantize a different random subset of weights during each forward, allowing for unbiased gradients to flow through the other weights. Controlling the amount of noise and its form allows for extreme compression rates while maintaining the performance of the original model. As a result we establish new state-of-the-art compromises between accuracy and model size both in natural language processing and image classification. For example, applying our method to state-of-the-art Transformer and ConvNet architectures, we can achieve 82.5% accuracy on MNLI by compressing RoBERTa to 14 MB and 80.0% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet by compressing an EfficientNet-B3 to 3.3 MB.
Teaching Temporal Logics to Neural Networks
Authors: Christopher Hahn, Frederik Schmitt, Jens U. Kreber, Markus Norman Rabe, Bernd Finkbeiner
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study two fundamental questions in neuro-symbolic computing: can deep learning tackle challenging problems in logics end-to-end, and can neural networks learn the semantics of logics. In this work we focus on linear-time temporal logic (LTL), as it is widely used in verification. We train a Transformer on the problem to directly predict a solution, i.e. a trace, to a given LTL formula. The training data is generated with classical solvers, which, however, only provide one of many possible solutions to each formula. We demonstrate that it is sufficient to train on those particular solutions to formulas, and that Transformers can predict solutions even to formulas from benchmarks from the literature on which the classical solver timed out. Transformers also generalize to the semantics of the logics: while they often deviate from the solutions found by the classical solvers, they still predict correct solutions to most formulas.
Aligning AI With Shared Human Values
Authors: Dan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Steven Basart, Andrew Critch, Jerry Li, Dawn Song, Jacob Steinhardt
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We show how to assess a language model's knowledge of basic concepts of morality. We introduce the ETHICS dataset, a new benchmark that spans concepts in justice, well-being, duties, virtues, and commonsense morality. Models predict widespread moral judgments about diverse text scenarios. This requires connecting physical and social world knowledge to value judgements, a capability that may enable us to steer chatbot outputs or eventually regularize open-ended reinforcement learning agents. With the ETHICS dataset, we find that current language models have a promising but incomplete ability to predict basic human ethical judgements. Our work shows that progress can be made on machine ethics today, and it provides a steppingstone toward AI that is aligned with human values.
Non-asymptotic Confidence Intervals of Off-policy Evaluation:  Primal and Dual Bounds 
Authors: Yihao Feng, Ziyang Tang, na zhang, qiang liu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the task of estimating the expected reward of a given policy based on offline data previously collected under different policies. Therefore, OPE is a key step in applying reinforcement learning to real-world domains such as medical treatment, where interactive data collection is expensive or even unsafe. As the observed data tends to be noisy and limited, it is essential to provide rigorous  uncertainty quantification, not just a point estimation, when applying OPE to make high stakes decisions. This work considers the problem of constructing non-asymptotic confidence intervals in infinite-horizon  off-policy evaluation, which remains a challenging open question. We develop a practical algorithm through a primal-dual optimization-based approach, which leverages the kernel Bellman loss (KBL) of Feng et al. 2019 and a new  martingale concentration inequality of KBL applicable to time-dependent data with unknown mixing conditions. Our algorithm makes  minimum assumptions on the data and the function class of the Q-function,  and works for the behavior-agnostic settings where the data is collected under a mix of arbitrary unknown behavior policies.  We present empirical results that clearly demonstrate the advantages of our approach over existing methods.