mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Federated Learning via Posterior Averaging: A New Perspective and Practical Algorithms
Authors: Maruan Al-Shedivat, Jennifer Gillenwater, Eric Xing, Afshin Rostamizadeh
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Federated learning is typically approached as an optimization problem, where the goal is to minimize a global loss function by distributing computation across client devices that possess local data and specify different parts of the global objective.  We present an alternative perspective and formulate federated learning as a posterior inference problem, where the goal is to infer a global posterior distribution by having client devices each infer the posterior of their local data.  While exact inference is often intractable, this perspective provides a principled way to search for global optima in federated settings.  Further, starting with the analysis of federated quadratic objectives, we develop a computation- and communication-efficient approximate posterior inference algorithm—federated posterior averaging (FedPA).  Our algorithm uses MCMC for approximate inference of local posteriors on the clients and efficiently communicates their statistics to the server, where the latter uses them to refine a global estimate of the posterior mode.  Finally, we show that FedPA generalizes federated averaging (FedAvg), can similarly benefit from adaptive optimizers, and yields state-of-the-art results on four realistic and challenging benchmarks, converging faster, to better optima.
Linear Mode Connectivity in Multitask and Continual Learning
Authors: Seyed Iman Mirzadeh, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Dilan Gorur, Razvan Pascanu, Hassan Ghasemzadeh
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Continual (sequential) training and multitask (simultaneous) training are often attempting to solve the same overall objective: to find a solution that performs well on all considered tasks. The main difference is in the training regimes, where continual learning can only have access to one task at a time, which for neural networks typically leads to catastrophic forgetting. That is, the solution found for a subsequent task does not perform well on the previous ones anymore. 
    However, the relationship between the different minima that the two training regimes arrive at is not well understood. What sets them apart? Is there a local structure that could explain the difference in performance achieved by the two different schemes? 
    Motivated by recent work showing that different minima of the same task are typically connected by very simple curves of low error, we investigate whether multitask and continual solutions are similarly connected. We empirically find that indeed such connectivity can be reliably achieved and, more interestingly, it can be done by a linear path, conditioned on having the same initialization for both. We thoroughly analyze this observation and discuss its significance for the continual learning process.
    Furthermore, we exploit this finding to propose an effective algorithm that constrains the sequentially learned minima to behave as the multitask solution.  We show that our method outperforms several state of the art continual learning algorithms on various vision benchmarks.
Offline Model-Based Optimization via Normalized Maximum Likelihood Estimation
Authors: Justin Fu, Sergey Levine
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this work we consider data-driven optimization problems where one must maximize a function given only queries at a fixed set of points. This problem setting emerges in many domains where function evaluation is a complex and expensive process, such as in the design of materials, vehicles, or neural network architectures. Because the available data typically only covers a small manifold of the possible space of inputs, a principal challenge is to be able to construct algorithms that can reason about uncertainty and out-of-distribution values, since a naive optimizer can easily exploit an estimated model to return adversarial inputs. We propose to tackle the MBO problem by leveraging the normalized maximum-likelihood (NML) estimator, which provides a principled approach to handling uncertainty and out-of-distribution inputs. While in the standard formulation NML is intractable, we propose a tractable approximation that allows us to scale our method to high-capacity neural network models. We demonstrate that our method can effectively optimize high-dimensional design problems in a variety of disciplines such as chemistry, biology, and materials engineering.
Optimal Conversion of Conventional Artificial Neural Networks to Spiking Neural Networks
Authors: Shikuang Deng, Shi Gu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are biology-inspired artificial neural networks (ANNs) that comprise of spiking neurons to process asynchronous discrete signals. While more efficient in power consumption and inference speed on the neuromorphic hardware, SNNs are usually difficult to train directly from scratch with spikes due to the discreteness. As an alternative, many efforts have been devoted to converting conventional ANNs into SNNs by copying the weights from ANNs and adjusting the spiking threshold potential of neurons in SNNs. Researchers have designed new SNN architectures and conversion algorithms to diminish the conversion error. However, an effective conversion should address the difference between the SNN and ANN architectures with an efficient approximation of the loss function, which is missing in the field. In this work, we analyze the conversion error by recursive reduction to layer-wise summation and propose a novel strategic pipeline that transfers the weights to the target SNN by combining threshold balance and soft-reset mechanisms. This pipeline enables almost no accuracy loss between the converted SNNs and conventional ANNs with only $\sim1/10$ of the typical SNN simulation time. Our method is promising to get implanted onto embedded platforms with better support of SNNs with limited energy and memory. Codes are available at https://github.com/Jackn0/snn_optimal_conversion_pipeline.
Isometric Transformation Invariant and Equivariant Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Masanobu Horie, Naoki Morita, Toshiaki Hishinuma, Yu Ihara, Naoto Mitsume
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Graphs are one of the most important data structures for representing pairwise relations between objects. Specifically, a graph embedded in a Euclidean space is essential to solving real problems, such as physical simulations. A crucial requirement for applying graphs in Euclidean spaces to physical simulations is learning and inferring the isometric transformation invariant and equivariant features in a computationally efficient manner. In this paper, we propose a set of transformation invariant and equivariant models based on graph convolutional networks, called IsoGCNs. We demonstrate that the proposed model has a competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on tasks related to geometrical and physical simulation data. Moreover, the proposed model can scale up to graphs with 1M vertices and conduct an inference faster than a conventional finite element analysis, which the existing equivariant models cannot achieve.
A Critique of Self-Expressive Deep Subspace Clustering
Authors: Benjamin David Haeffele, Chong You, Rene Vidal
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Subspace clustering is an unsupervised clustering technique designed to cluster data that is supported on a union of linear subspaces, with each subspace defining a cluster with dimension lower than the ambient space. Many existing formulations for this problem are based on exploiting the self-expressive property of linear subspaces, where any point within a subspace can be represented as linear combination of other points within the subspace. To extend this approach to data supported on a union of non-linear manifolds, numerous studies have proposed learning an embedding of the original data using  a neural network which is regularized by a self-expressive loss function on the data in the embedded space to encourage a union of linear subspaces prior on the data in the embedded space. Here we show that there are a number of potential flaws with this approach which have not been adequately addressed in prior work. In particular, we show the model formulation is often ill-posed in that it can lead to a degenerate embedding of the data, which need not correspond to a union of subspaces at all and is poorly suited for clustering. We validate our theoretical results experimentally and also repeat prior experiments reported in the literature, where we conclude that a significant portion of the previously claimed performance benefits can be attributed to an ad-hoc post processing step rather than the deep subspace clustering model.
Do 2D GANs Know 3D Shape? Unsupervised 3D Shape Reconstruction from 2D Image GANs
Authors: Xingang Pan, Bo Dai, Ziwei Liu, Chen Change Loy, Ping Luo
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Natural images are projections of 3D objects on a 2D image plane. While state-of-the-art 2D generative models like GANs show unprecedented quality in modeling the natural image manifold, it is unclear whether they implicitly capture the underlying 3D object structures. And if so, how could we exploit such knowledge to recover the 3D shapes of objects in the images? To answer these questions, in this work, we present the first attempt to directly mine 3D geometric cues from an off-the-shelf 2D GAN that is trained on RGB images only. Through our investigation, we found that such a pre-trained GAN indeed contains rich 3D knowledge and thus can be used to recover 3D shape from a single 2D image in an unsupervised manner. The core of our framework is an iterative strategy that explores and exploits diverse viewpoint and lighting variations in the GAN image manifold. The framework does not require 2D keypoint or 3D annotations, or strong assumptions on object shapes (e.g. shapes are symmetric), yet it successfully recovers 3D shapes with high precision for human faces, cats, cars, and buildings. The recovered 3D shapes immediately allow high-quality image editing like relighting and object rotation. We quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to previous methods in both 3D shape reconstruction and face rotation. Our code is available at https://github.com/XingangPan/GAN2Shape.
Contrastive Syn-to-Real Generalization
Authors: Wuyang Chen, Zhiding Yu, Shalini De Mello, Sifei Liu, Jose M. Alvarez, Zhangyang Wang, Anima Anandkumar
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Training on synthetic data can be beneficial for label or data-scarce scenarios. However, synthetically trained models often suffer from poor generalization in real domains due to domain gaps. In this work, we make a key observation that the diversity of the learned feature embeddings plays an important role in the generalization performance. To this end, we propose contrastive synthetic-to-real generalization (CSG), a novel framework that leverage the pre-trained ImageNet knowledge to prevent overfitting to the synthetic domain, while promoting the diversity of feature embeddings as an inductive bias to improve generalization. In addition, we enhance the proposed CSG framework with attentional pooling (A-pool) to let the model focus on semantically important regions and further improve its generalization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CSG on various synthetic training tasks, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot domain generalization.
Coupled Oscillatory Recurrent Neural Network (coRNN): An accurate and (gradient) stable architecture for learning long time dependencies
Authors: T. Konstantin Rusch, Siddhartha Mishra
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Circuits of biological neurons, such as in the functional parts of the brain can be modeled as networks of coupled oscillators. Inspired by the ability of these systems to express a rich set of outputs while keeping (gradients of) state variables bounded, we propose a novel architecture for recurrent neural networks. Our proposed RNN is based on a time-discretization of a system of second-order ordinary differential equations, modeling networks of controlled nonlinear oscillators. We prove precise bounds on the gradients of the hidden states, leading to the mitigation of the exploding and vanishing gradient problem for this RNN. Experiments show that the proposed RNN is comparable in performance to the state of the art on a variety of benchmarks, demonstrating the potential of this architecture to provide stable and accurate RNNs for processing complex sequential data.
CPR: Classifier-Projection Regularization for Continual Learning
Authors: Sungmin Cha, Hsiang Hsu, Taebaek Hwang, Flavio Calmon, Taesup Moon
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a general, yet simple patch that can be applied to existing regularization-based continual learning methods called classifier-projection regularization (CPR). Inspired by both recent results on neural networks with wide local minima and information theory, CPR adds an additional regularization term that maximizes the entropy of a classifier's output probability. We demonstrate that this additional term can be interpreted as a projection of the conditional probability given by a classifier's output to the uniform distribution. By applying the Pythagorean theorem for KL divergence, we then prove that this projection may (in theory) improve the performance of continual learning methods. In our extensive experimental results, we apply CPR to several state-of-the-art regularization-based continual learning methods and benchmark performance on popular image recognition datasets. Our results demonstrate that CPR indeed promotes a wide local minima and significantly improves both accuracy and plasticity while simultaneously mitigating the catastrophic forgetting of baseline continual learning methods. The codes and scripts for this work are available at https://github.com/csm9493/CPR_CL.
Gradient Vaccine: Investigating and Improving Multi-task Optimization in Massively Multilingual Models
Authors: Zirui Wang, Yulia Tsvetkov, Orhan Firat, Yuan Cao
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Massively multilingual models subsuming tens or even hundreds of languages pose great challenges to multi-task optimization. While it is a common practice to apply a language-agnostic procedure optimizing a joint multilingual task objective, how to properly characterize and take advantage of its underlying problem structure for improving optimization efficiency remains under-explored. In this paper, we attempt to peek into the black-box of multilingual optimization through the lens of loss function geometry. We find that gradient similarity measured along the optimization trajectory is an important signal, which correlates well with not only language proximity but also the overall model performance. Such observation helps us to identify a critical limitation of existing gradient-based multi-task learning methods, and thus we derive a simple and scalable optimization procedure, named Gradient Vaccine, which encourages more geometrically aligned parameter updates for close tasks. Empirically, our method obtains significant model performance gains on multilingual machine translation and XTREME benchmark tasks for multilingual language models. Our work reveals the importance of properly measuring and utilizing language proximity in multilingual optimization, and has broader implications for multi-task learning beyond multilingual modeling.
Rapid Task-Solving in Novel Environments
Authors: Samuel Ritter, Ryan Faulkner, Laurent Sartran, Adam Santoro, Matthew Botvinick, David Raposo
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose the challenge of rapid task-solving in novel environments (RTS), wherein an agent must solve a series of tasks as rapidly as possible in an unfamiliar environment. An effective RTS agent must balance between exploring the unfamiliar environment and solving its current task, all while building a model of the new environment over which it can plan when faced with later tasks. While modern deep RL agents exhibit some of these abilities in isolation, none are suitable for the full RTS challenge. To enable progress toward RTS, we introduce two challenge domains: (1) a minimal RTS challenge called the Memory&Planning Game and (2) One-Shot StreetLearn Navigation, which introduces scale and complexity from real-world data. We demonstrate that state-of-the-art deep RL agents fail at RTS in both domains, and that this failure is due to an inability to plan over gathered knowledge. We develop Episodic Planning Networks (EPNs) and show that deep-RL agents with EPNs excel at RTS, outperforming the nearest baseline by factors of 2-3 and learning to navigate held-out StreetLearn maps within a single episode. We show that EPNs learn to execute a value iteration-like planning algorithm and that they generalize to situations beyond their training experience.
Support-set bottlenecks for video-text representation learning
Authors: Mandela Patrick, Po-Yao Huang, Yuki Asano, Florian Metze, Alexander G Hauptmann, Joao F. Henriques, Andrea Vedaldi
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The dominant paradigm for learning video-text representations – noise contrastive learning – increases the similarity of the representations of pairs of samples that are known to be related, such as text and video from the same sample, and pushes away the representations of all other pairs. We posit that this last behaviour is too strict, enforcing dissimilar representations even for samples that are semantically-related – for example, visually similar videos or ones that share the same depicted action. In this paper, we propose a novel method that alleviates this by leveraging a generative model to naturally push these related samples together: each sample’s caption must be reconstructed as a weighted combination of a support set of visual representations. This simple idea ensures that representations are not overly-specialized to individual samples, are reusable across the dataset, and results in representations that explicitly encode semantics shared between samples, unlike noise contrastive learning. Our proposed method outperforms others by a large margin on MSR-VTT, VATEX, ActivityNet, and MSVD for video-to-text and text-to-video retrieval.
Robust early-learning: Hindering the memorization of noisy labels
Authors: Xiaobo Xia, Tongliang Liu, Bo Han, Chen Gong, Nannan Wang, Zongyuan Ge, Yi Chang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The \textit{memorization effects} of deep networks show that they will first memorize training data with clean labels and then those with noisy labels. The \textit{early stopping} method therefore can be exploited for learning with noisy labels. However, the side effect brought by noisy labels will influence the memorization of clean labels before early stopping. In this paper, motivated by the \textit{lottery ticket hypothesis} which shows that only partial parameters are important for generalization, we find that only partial parameters are important for fitting clean labels and generalize well, which we term as \textit{critical parameters}; while the other parameters tend to fit noisy labels and cannot generalize well, which we term as \textit{non-critical parameters}. Based on this, we propose \textit{robust early-learning} to reduce the side effect of noisy labels before early stopping and thus enhance the memorization of clean labels. Specifically, in each iteration, we divide all parameters into the critical and non-critical ones, and then perform different update rules for different types of parameters. Extensive experiments on benchmark-simulated and real-world label-noise datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art label-noise learning methods.
Neural gradients are near-lognormal: improved quantized  and sparse training
Authors: Brian Chmiel, Liad Ben-Uri, Moran Shkolnik, Elad Hoffer, Ron Banner, Daniel Soudry
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: While training can mostly be accelerated by reducing the time needed to propagate neural gradients (loss gradients with respect to the intermediate neural layer outputs) back throughout the model, most previous works focus on the quantization/pruning of weights and activations. These methods are often not applicable to neural gradients, which have very different statistical properties. Distinguished from weights and activations, we find that the distribution of neural gradients is approximately lognormal. Considering this, we suggest two closed-form analytical methods to reduce the computational and memory burdens of neural gradients. The first method optimizes the floating-point format and scale of the gradients. The second method accurately sets sparsity thresholds for gradient pruning.  Each method achieves state-of-the-art results on ImageNet. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to (1) quantize the gradients to 6-bit floating-point formats, or (2) achieve up to 85% gradient sparsity --- in each case without accuracy degradation.
Reference implementation accompanies the paper in the supplementary material.
Hyperbolic Neural Networks++
Authors: Ryohei Shimizu, YUSUKE Mukuta, Tatsuya Harada
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Hyperbolic spaces, which have the capacity to embed tree structures without distortion owing to their exponential volume growth, have recently been applied to machine learning to better capture the hierarchical nature of data. In this study, we generalize the fundamental components of neural networks in a single hyperbolic geometry model, namely, the Poincaré ball model. This novel methodology constructs a multinomial logistic regression, fully-connected layers, convolutional layers, and attention mechanisms under a unified mathematical interpretation, without increasing the parameters. Experiments show the superior parameter efficiency of our methods compared to conventional hyperbolic components, and stability and outperformance over their Euclidean counterparts.
Towards Nonlinear Disentanglement in Natural Data with Temporal Sparse Coding
Authors: David A. Klindt, Lukas Schott, Yash Sharma, Ivan Ustyuzhaninov, Wieland Brendel, Matthias Bethge, Dylan Paiton
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Disentangling the underlying generative factors from complex data has so far been limited to carefully constructed scenarios. We propose a path towards natural data by first showing that the statistics of natural data provide enough structure to enable disentanglement, both theoretically and empirically. Specifically, we provide evidence that objects in natural movies undergo transitions that are typically small in magnitude with occasional large jumps, which is characteristic of a temporally sparse distribution. To address this finding we provide a novel proof that relies on a sparse prior on temporally adjacent observations to recover the true latent variables up to permutations and sign flips, directly providing a stronger result than previous work. We show that equipping practical estimation methods with our prior often surpasses the current state-of-the-art on several established benchmark datasets without any impractical assumptions, such as knowledge of the number of changing generative factors. Furthermore, we contribute two new benchmarks, Natural Sprites and KITTI Masks, which integrate the measured natural dynamics to enable disentanglement evaluation with more realistic datasets. We leverage these benchmarks to test our theory, demonstrating improved performance. We also identify non-obvious challenges for current methods in scaling to more natural domains. Taken together our work addresses key issues in disentanglement research for moving towards more natural settings.
Learning with AMIGo: Adversarially Motivated Intrinsic Goals
Authors: Andres Campero, Roberta Raileanu, Heinrich Kuttler, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tim Rocktäschel, Edward Grefenstette
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: A key challenge for reinforcement learning (RL) consists of learning in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. In contrast to current RL methods, humans are able to learn new skills with little or no reward by using various forms of intrinsic motivation. We propose AMIGo, a novel agent incorporating -- as form of meta-learning -- a goal-generating teacher that proposes Adversarially Motivated Intrinsic Goals to train a goal-conditioned "student" policy in the absence of (or alongside) environment reward. Specifically, through a simple but effective "constructively adversarial" objective, the teacher learns to propose increasingly challenging -- yet achievable -- goals that allow the student to learn general skills for acting in a new environment, independent of the task to be solved. We show that our method generates a natural curriculum of self-proposed goals which ultimately allows the agent to solve challenging procedurally-generated tasks where other forms of intrinsic motivation and state-of-the-art RL methods fail.
Bowtie Networks: Generative Modeling for Joint Few-Shot Recognition and Novel-View Synthesis
Authors: Zhipeng Bao, Yu-Xiong Wang, Martial Hebert
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a novel task of joint few-shot recognition and novel-view synthesis: given only one or few images of a novel object from arbitrary views with only category annotation, we aim to simultaneously learn an object classifier and generate images of that type of object from new viewpoints. While existing work copes with two or more tasks mainly by multi-task learning of shareable feature representations, we take a different perspective. We focus on the interaction and cooperation between a generative model and a discriminative model, in a way that facilitates knowledge to flow across tasks in complementary directions. To this end, we propose bowtie networks that jointly learn 3D geometric and semantic representations with a feedback loop. Experimental evaluation on challenging fine-grained recognition datasets demonstrates that our synthesized images are realistic from multiple viewpoints and significantly improve recognition performance as ways of data augmentation, especially in the low-data regime.
Deep Learning meets Projective Clustering
Authors: Alaa Maalouf, Harry Lang, Daniela Rus, Dan Feldman
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: A common approach for compressing Natural Language Processing (NLP) networks is to encode the embedding layer as a matrix $A\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$, compute its rank-$j$ approximation $A_j$ via SVD (Singular Value Decomposition), and then factor $A_j$ into a pair of matrices that correspond to smaller fully-connected layers to replace the original embedding layer. Geometrically, the rows of $A$ represent points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, and the rows of $A_j$ represent their projections onto the $j$-dimensional subspace that minimizes the sum of squared distances (``errors'') to the points. 
In practice, these rows of $A$ may be spread around $k>1$ subspaces, so factoring $A$ based on a single subspace may lead to large errors that turn into large drops in accuracy.

Inspired by \emph{projective clustering} from computational geometry,  we suggest replacing this subspace by a set of $k$ subspaces, each of dimension $j$, that minimizes the sum of squared distances over every point (row in $A$) to its \emph{closest} subspace. Based on this approach, we provide a novel architecture that replaces the original embedding layer by a set of $k$ small layers that operate in parallel and are then recombined with a single fully-connected layer. 

Extensive experimental results on the GLUE benchmark yield networks that are both more accurate and smaller compared to the standard matrix factorization (SVD). For example, we further compress DistilBERT by reducing the size of the embedding layer by $40\%$ while incurring only a $0.5\%$ average drop in accuracy over all nine GLUE tasks, compared to a $2.8\%$ drop using the existing SVD approach.
On RoBERTa we achieve $43\%$ compression of the embedding layer with less than a $0.8\%$ average drop in accuracy as compared to a $3\%$ drop previously.
Answering Complex Open-Domain Questions with Multi-Hop Dense Retrieval
Authors: Wenhan Xiong, Xiang Li, Srini Iyer, Jingfei Du, Patrick Lewis, William Yang Wang, Yashar Mehdad, Scott Yih, Sebastian Riedel, Douwe Kiela, Barlas Oguz
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a simple and efficient multi-hop dense retrieval approach for answering complex open-domain questions, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on two multi-hop datasets, HotpotQA and multi-evidence FEVER. Contrary to previous work, our method does not require access to any corpus-specific information, such as inter-document hyperlinks or human-annotated entity markers, and can be applied to any unstructured text corpus. Our system also yields a much better efficiency-accuracy trade-off, matching the best published accuracy on HotpotQA while being 10 times faster at inference time.
Efficient Continual Learning with Modular Networks and Task-Driven Priors
Authors: Tom Veniat, Ludovic Denoyer, MarcAurelio Ranzato
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Existing literature in Continual Learning (CL) has focused on overcoming catastrophic forgetting, the inability of the learner to recall how to perform tasks observed in the past. 
There are however other desirable properties of a CL system, such as the ability to transfer knowledge from previous tasks and to scale memory and compute sub-linearly with the number of tasks. Since most current benchmarks focus only on forgetting using short streams of tasks, we first propose a new suite of benchmarks to probe CL algorithms across these new axes. 
Finally, we introduce a new modular architecture, whose modules represent atomic skills that can be composed to perform a certain task. Learning a task reduces to figuring out which past modules to re-use, and which new modules to instantiate to solve the current task. Our learning algorithm leverages a task-driven prior over the exponential search space of all possible ways to combine modules, enabling efficient learning on long streams of tasks. 
Our experiments show that this modular architecture and learning algorithm perform competitively on widely used CL benchmarks while yielding superior performance on the more challenging benchmarks we introduce in this work. The Benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/CTrLBenchmark.
Generalization bounds via distillation
Authors: Daniel Hsu, Ziwei Ji, Matus Telgarsky, Lan Wang
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper theoretically investigates the following empirical phenomenon: given a high-complexity network with poor generalization bounds, one can distill it into a network with nearly identical predictions but low complexity and vastly smaller generalization bounds.  The main contribution is an analysis showing that the original network inherits this good generalization bound from its distillation, assuming the use of well-behaved data augmentation.  This bound is presented both in an abstract and in a concrete form, the latter complemented by a reduction technique to handle modern computation graphs featuring convolutional layers, fully-connected layers, and skip connections, to name a few.  To round out the story, a (looser) classical uniform convergence analysis of compression is also presented, as well as a variety of experiments on cifar and mnist demonstrating similar generalization performance between the original network and its distillation.
A teacher-student framework to distill future trajectories
Authors: Alexander Neitz, Giambattista Parascandolo, Bernhard Schölkopf
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: By learning to predict trajectories of dynamical systems, model-based methods can make extensive use of all observations from past experience. However, due to partial observability, stochasticity, compounding errors, and irrelevant dynamics, training to predict observations explicitly often results in poor models. Model-free techniques try to side-step the problem by learning to predict values directly. While breaking the explicit dependency on future observations can result in strong performance, this usually comes at the cost of low sample efficiency, as the abundant information about the dynamics contained in future observations goes unused. Here we take a step back from both approaches: Instead of hand-designing how trajectories should be incorporated, a teacher network learns to interpret the trajectories and to provide target activations which guide a student model that can only observe the present. The teacher is trained with meta-gradients to maximize the student's performance on a validation set. We show that our approach performs well on tasks that are difficult for model-free and model-based methods, and we study the role of every component through ablation studies.
The Importance of Pessimism in Fixed-Dataset Policy Optimization
Authors: Jacob Buckman, Carles Gelada, Marc G Bellemare
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We study worst-case guarantees on the expected return of fixed-dataset policy optimization algorithms. Our core contribution is a unified conceptual and mathematical framework for the study of algorithms in this regime. This analysis reveals that for naive approaches, the possibility of erroneous value overestimation leads to a difficult-to-satisfy requirement: in order to guarantee that we select a policy which is near-optimal, we may need the dataset to be informative of the value of every policy. To avoid this, algorithms can follow the pessimism principle, which states that we should choose the policy which acts optimally in the worst possible world. We show why pessimistic algorithms can achieve good performance even when the dataset is not informative of every policy, and derive families of algorithms which follow this principle. These theoretical findings are validated by experiments on a tabular gridworld, and deep learning experiments on four MinAtar environments.
AdaSpeech: Adaptive Text to Speech for Custom Voice
Authors: Mingjian Chen, Xu Tan, Bohan Li, Yanqing Liu, Tao Qin, sheng zhao, Tie-Yan Liu
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Custom voice, a specific text to speech (TTS) service in commercial speech platforms, aims to adapt a source TTS model to synthesize personal voice for a target speaker using few speech from her/him. Custom voice presents two unique challenges for TTS adaptation: 1) to support diverse customers, the adaptation model needs to handle diverse acoustic conditions which could be very different from source speech data, and 2) to support a large number of customers, the adaptation parameters need to be small enough for each target speaker to reduce memory usage while maintaining high voice quality. In this work, we propose AdaSpeech, an adaptive TTS system for high-quality and efficient customization of new voices. We design several techniques in AdaSpeech to address the two challenges in custom voice: 1) To handle different acoustic conditions, we model the acoustic information in both utterance and phoneme level. Specifically, we use one acoustic encoder to extract an utterance-level vector and another one to extract a sequence of phoneme-level vectors from the target speech during pre-training and fine-tuning; in inference, we extract the utterance-level vector from a reference speech and use an acoustic predictor to predict the phoneme-level vectors. 2) To better trade off the adaptation parameters and voice quality, we introduce conditional layer normalization in the mel-spectrogram decoder of AdaSpeech, and fine-tune this part in addition to speaker embedding for adaptation. We pre-train the source TTS model on LibriTTS datasets and fine-tune it on VCTK and LJSpeech datasets (with different acoustic conditions from LibriTTS) with few adaptation data, e.g., 20 sentences, about 1 minute speech. Experiment results show that AdaSpeech achieves much better adaptation quality than baseline methods, with only about 5K specific parameters for each speaker, which demonstrates its effectiveness for custom voice. The audio samples are available at https://speechresearch.github.io/adaspeech/.
SenSeI: Sensitive Set Invariance for Enforcing Individual Fairness
Authors: Mikhail Yurochkin, Yuekai Sun
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we cast fair machine learning as invariant machine learning. We first formulate a version of individual fairness that enforces invariance on certain sensitive sets. We then design a transport-based regularizer that enforces this version of individual fairness and develop an algorithm to minimize the regularizer efficiently. Our theoretical results guarantee the proposed approach trains certifiably fair ML models. Finally, in the experimental studies we demonstrate improved fairness metrics in comparison to several recent fair training procedures on three ML tasks that are susceptible to algorithmic bias.
Improving Relational Regularized Autoencoders with Spherical Sliced Fused Gromov Wasserstein
Authors: Khai Nguyen, Son Nguyen, Nhat Ho, Tung Pham, Hung Bui
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Relational regularized autoencoder (RAE) is a framework to learn the distribution of data by minimizing a reconstruction loss together with a relational regularization on the prior of latent space. A recent attempt to reduce the inner discrepancy between the prior and aggregated posterior distributions is to incorporate sliced fused Gromov-Wasserstein (SFG) between these distributions. That approach has a weakness since it treats every slicing direction similarly, meanwhile several directions are not useful for the discriminative task. To improve the discrepancy and consequently the relational regularization, we propose a new relational discrepancy, named spherical sliced fused Gromov Wasserstein (SSFG), that can find an important area of projections characterized by a von Mises-Fisher distribution. Then, we introduce two variants of SSFG to improve its performance. The first variant, named mixture spherical sliced fused Gromov Wasserstein (MSSFG), replaces the vMF distribution by a mixture of von Mises-Fisher distributions to capture multiple important areas of directions that are far from each other. The second variant, named power spherical sliced fused Gromov Wasserstein (PSSFG), replaces the vMF distribution by a power spherical distribution to improve the sampling time of the vMF distribution in high dimension settings. We then apply the new discrepancies to the RAE framework to achieve its new variants. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to show that the new autoencoders have favorable performance in learning latent manifold structure, image generation, and reconstruction.
Shape-Texture Debiased Neural Network Training
Authors: Yingwei Li, Qihang Yu, Mingxing Tan, Jieru Mei, Peng Tang, Wei Shen, Alan Yuille, cihang xie
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Shape and texture are two prominent and complementary cues for recognizing objects. Nonetheless, Convolutional Neural Networks are often biased towards either texture or shape, depending on the training dataset. Our ablation shows that such bias degenerates model performance. Motivated by this observation, we develop a simple algorithm for shape-texture debiased learning. To prevent models from exclusively attending on a single cue in representation learning, we augment training data with images with conflicting shape and texture information (eg, an image of chimpanzee shape but with lemon texture) and, most importantly, provide the corresponding supervisions from shape and texture simultaneously. 

Experiments show that our method successfully improves model performance on several image recognition benchmarks and adversarial robustness. For example, by training on ImageNet, it helps ResNet-152 achieve substantial improvements on ImageNet (+1.2%), ImageNet-A  (+5.2%), ImageNet-C (+8.3%) and Stylized-ImageNet (+11.1%), and on defending against FGSM adversarial attacker on ImageNet (+14.4%). Our method also claims to be compatible with other advanced data augmentation strategies, eg, Mixup, and CutMix. The code is available here: https://github.com/LiYingwei/ShapeTextureDebiasedTraining.
Sparse encoding for more-interpretable feature-selecting representations in probabilistic matrix factorization
Authors: Joshua C Chang, Patrick Fletcher, Jungmin Han, Ted L Chang, Shashaank Vattikuti, Bart Desmet, Ayah Zirikly, Carson C Chow
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Dimensionality reduction methods for count data are critical to a wide range of applications in medical informatics and other fields where model interpretability is paramount. For such data, hierarchical Poisson matrix factorization (HPF) and other sparse probabilistic non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) methods are considered to be interpretable generative models. They consist of sparse transformations for decoding their learned representations into predictions. However, sparsity in representation decoding does not necessarily imply sparsity in the encoding of representations from the original data features.  HPF is often incorrectly interpreted in the literature as if it possesses encoder sparsity. The distinction between decoder sparsity and encoder sparsity is subtle but important. Due to the lack of encoder sparsity, HPF does not possess the column-clustering property of classical NMF -- the factor loading matrix does not sufficiently define how each factor is formed from the original features. We address this deficiency by self-consistently enforcing encoder sparsity, using a generalized additive model  (GAM), thereby allowing one to relate each representation coordinate to a subset of the original data features. In doing so, the method also gains the ability to perform feature selection. We demonstrate our method on simulated data and give an example of how encoder sparsity is of practical use in a concrete application of representing inpatient comorbidities in Medicare patients.
Fair Mixup: Fairness via Interpolation
Authors: Ching-Yao Chuang, Youssef Mroueh
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Training classifiers under fairness constraints such as group fairness, regularizes the disparities of predictions between the groups. Nevertheless, even though the constraints are satisfied during training, they might not generalize at evaluation time. To improve the generalizability of fair classifiers, we propose fair mixup, a new data augmentation strategy for imposing the fairness constraint. In particular, we show that fairness can be achieved by regularizing the models on paths of interpolated samples  between the groups. We use mixup, a powerful data augmentation strategy  to generate these interpolates. We analyze fair mixup and empirically show that it ensures a better generalization for both accuracy and fairness measurement in tabular, vision, and language benchmarks.
VTNet: Visual Transformer Network for Object Goal Navigation
Authors: Heming Du, Xin Yu, Liang Zheng
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Object goal navigation aims to steer an agent towards a target object based on observations of the agent. It is of pivotal importance to design effective visual representations of the observed scene in determining navigation actions.  In this paper, we introduce a Visual Transformer Network (VTNet) for learning informative visual representation in navigation.  VTNet is a highly effective structure that embodies two key properties for visual representations: First, the relationships among all the object instances in a scene are exploited; Second, the spatial locations of objects and image regions are emphasized so that directional navigation signals can be learned. Furthermore, we also develop a pre-training scheme to associate the visual representations with navigation signals, and thus facilitate navigation policy learning. In a nutshell, VTNet embeds object and region features with their location cues as spatial-aware descriptors and then incorporates all the encoded descriptors through attention operations to achieve informative representation for navigation. Given such visual representations, agents are able to explore the correlations between visual observations and navigation actions. For example, an agent would prioritize ``turning right'' over ``turning left'' when the visual representation emphasizes on the right side of activation map. Experiments in the artificial environment AI2-Thor demonstrate that VTNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in unseen testing environments.
Interpretable Models for Granger Causality Using Self-explaining Neural Networks
Authors: Ričards Marcinkevičs, Julia E Vogt
Published in: International Conference on Learning Representations 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Exploratory analysis of time series data can yield a better understanding of complex dynamical systems. Granger causality is a practical framework for analysing interactions in sequential data, applied in a wide range of domains. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for inferring multivariate Granger causality under nonlinear dynamics based on an extension of self-explaining neural networks. This framework is more interpretable than other neural-network-based techniques for inferring Granger causality, since in addition to relational inference, it also allows detecting signs of Granger-causal effects and inspecting their variability over time. In comprehensive experiments on simulated data, we show that our framework performs on par with several powerful baseline methods at inferring Granger causality and that it achieves better performance at inferring interaction signs. The results suggest that our framework is a viable and more interpretable alternative to sparse-input neural networks for inferring Granger causality.