nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
On the Relationship between Neural Machine Translation and Word Alignment
Authors: Xintong Li, Lemao Liu, Guanlin Li, Max Meng, Shuming Shi

Prior researches suggest that attentional neural machine translation (NMT) is able to capture word alignment by attention, however, to our surprise, it almost fails for NMT models with multiple attentional layers except for those with a single layer. This paper introduce two methods to induce word alignment from general neural machine translation models. Experiments verify that both methods obtain much better word alignment than the method by attention.  Furthermore, based on one of the proposed method, we design a criterion to divide target words into two categories (i.e. those mostly contributed from source "CFS" words and the other words mostly contributed from target "CFT" words), and analyze word alignment under these two categories in depth. We find that although NMT models are difficult to capture word alignment for CFT words but these words do not sacrifice translation quality significantly, which provides an explanation why NMT is more successful for translation yet worse for word alignment compared to statistical machine translation. We further demonstrate that word alignment errors for CFS words are responsible for translation errors in some extent by measuring the correlation between word alignment and translation for several NMT systems.
Uncertainty-aware Active Learning for Optimal Bayesian Classifier
Authors: Guang Zhao, Edward Dougherty, Byung-Jun Yoon, Francis Alexander, Xiaoning Qian

For pool-based active learning, in each iteration a candidate training sample is chosen for labeling by optimizing an acquisition function. In Bayesian classification, expected Loss Reduction~(ELR) methods maximize the expected reduction in the classification error given a new labeled candidate based on a one-step-look-ahead strategy. ELR is the optimal strategy with a single query; however, since such myopic strategies cannot identify the long-term effect of a query on the classification error, ELR may get stuck before reaching the optimal classifier.  In this paper, inspired by the mean objective cost of uncertainty (MOCU), a metric quantifying the uncertainty directly affecting the classification error, we propose an acquisition function based on a weighted form of MOCU. Similar to ELR, the proposed method focuses on the reduction of the uncertainty that pertains to the classification error. But unlike any other existing scheme, it provides the critical advantage that the resulting Bayesian active learning algorithm guarantees convergence to the optimal classifier of the true model. We demonstrate its performance with both synthetic and real-world datasets.
Augmented Sliced Wasserstein Distances
Authors: Xiongjie Chen, Yongxin Yang, Yunpeng Li

While theoretically appealing, the application of the Wasserstein distance to large-scale machine learning problems has been hampered by its prohibitive computational cost. The sliced Wasserstein distance and its variants improve the computational efficiency through the random projection, yet they suffer from low accuracy if the number of projections is not sufficiently large, because the majority of projections result in trivially small values. In this work, we propose a new family of distance metrics, called augmented sliced Wasserstein distances (ASWDs), constructed by first mapping samples to higher-dimensional hypersurfaces parameterized by neural networks. It is derived from a key observation that (random) linear projections of samples residing on these hypersurfaces would translate to much more flexible nonlinear projections in the original sample space, so they can capture complex structures of the data distribution. We show that the hypersurfaces can be optimized by gradient ascent efficiently. We provide the condition under which the ASWD is a valid metric and show that this can be obtained by an injective neural network architecture. Numerical results demonstrate that the ASWD significantly outperforms other Wasserstein variants for both synthetic and real-world problems.
Unsupervised  one-to-many image translation
Authors: Samuel Lavoie-Marchildon, Sebastien Lachapelle, Mikołaj Bińkowski, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio, R Devon Hjelm

We perform completely unsupervised one-sided image to image translation between a source domain $X$ and a target domain $Y$ such that we preserve relevant underlying shared semantics (e.g., class, size, shape, etc). 
In particular, we are interested in a more difficult case than those typically addressed in the literature, where the source and target are ``far" enough that reconstruction-style or pixel-wise approaches fail.
We argue that transferring (i.e., \emph{translating}) said relevant information should involve both discarding source domain-specific information while incorporate target domain-specific information, the latter of which we model with a noisy prior distribution. 
In order to avoid the degenerate case where the generated samples are only explained by the prior distribution, we propose to minimize an estimate of the mutual information between the generated sample and the sample from the prior distribution. We discover that the architectural choices are an important factor to consider in order to preserve the shared semantic between $X$ and $Y$. 
We show state of the art results on the MNIST to SVHN task for unsupervised image to image translation.
Sharper Utility Bounds for Differentially Private Models
Authors: Yilin Kang, Yong Liu, Jian Li, Weipinng Wang

In this paper, by introducing Generalized Bernstein condition, we propose the first $\mathcal{O}\big(\frac{\sqrt{p}}{n\epsilon}\big)$ high probability excess population risk bound for differentially private algorithms under the assumptions $G$-Lipschitz, $L$-smooth, and Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz condition, based on gradient perturbation method. If we replace the properties $G$-Lipschitz and $L$-smooth by $\alpha$-H{\"o}lder smoothness (which can be used in non-smooth setting), the high probability bound comes to $\mathcal{O}\big(n^{-\frac{2\alpha}{1+2\alpha}}\big)$ w.r.t $n$, which cannot achieve $\mathcal{O}\left(1/n\right)$ when $\alpha\in(0,1]$. %and only better than previous results when $\alpha\in[1/2,1]$. To solve this problem, we propose a variant of gradient perturbation method, \textbf{max$\{1,g\}$-Normalized Gradient Perturbation} (m-NGP). We further show that by normalization, the high probability excess population risk bound under assumptions $\alpha$-H{\"o}lder smooth and Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz condition can achieve $\mathcal{O}\big(\frac{\sqrt{p}}{n\epsilon}\big)$, which is the first $\mathcal{O}\left(1/n\right)$ high probability utility bound w.r.t $n$ for differentially private algorithms under non-smooth conditions. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of the new proposed algorithm m-NGP, the experimental results show that m-NGP improves the performance (measured by accuracy) of the DP model over real datasets. It demonstrates that m-NGP improves the excess population risk bound and the accuracy of the DP model on real datasets simultaneously.
Towards Counteracting Adversarial Perturbations to Resist Adversarial Examples
Authors: Haimin ZHANG, Min Xu

Studies show that neural networks are susceptible to adversarial attacks. This exposes a potential threat to neural network-based artificial intelligence systems. We observe that the probability of the correct result outputted by the network increases by applying small perturbations generated for class labels other than the original predicted one to adversarial examples. Based on this observation, we propose a method of counteracting adversarial perturbations to resist adversarial examples. In our method, we randomly select a number of class labels and generate small perturbations for these selected labels. The generated perturbations are added together and then clamped to a specified space. The obtained perturbation is finally added to the adversarial example to counteract the adversarial perturbation contained in the example. The proposed method is applied at inference time and does not require retraining or finetuning the model. We validate the proposed method on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. The experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively improves the defense performance of the baseline methods, especially against strong adversarial examples generated using more iterations.
Provably Robust Adversarial Examples
Authors: Dimitar Iliev Dimitrov, Gagandeep Singh, Timon Gehr, Martin Vechev

We introduce the concept of provably robust adversarial examples for deep neural networks – connected input regions constructed from standard adversarial examples which are guaranteed to be robust to a set of real-world perturbations (such as changes in pixel intensity and geometric transformations). We present a novel method called PARADE for generating these regions in a scalable manner which works by iteratively refining the region initially obtained via sampling until a refined region is certified to be adversarial with existing state-of-the-art verifiers. At each step, a novel optimization procedure is applied to maximize the region's volume under the constraint that the convex relaxation of the network behavior with respect to the region implies a chosen bound on the certification objective. Our experimental evaluation shows the effectiveness of PARADE: it successfully finds large provably robust regions including ones containing $\approx 10^{573}$ adversarial examples for pixel intensity and $\approx 10^{599}$ for geometric perturbations. The provability enables our robust examples to be significantly more effective against state-of-the-art defenses based on randomized smoothing than the individual attacks used to construct the regions.
World Model as a Graph: Learning Latent Landmarks for Planning
Authors: Lunjun Zhang, Ge Yang, Bradly C Stadie

Planning, the ability to analyze the structure of a problem in the large and decompose it into interrelated subproblems, is a hallmark of human intelligence. While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise for solving relatively straightforward control tasks, it remains an open problem how to best incorporate planning into existing deep RL paradigms to handle increasingly complex environments. One prominent framework, Model-Based RL, learns a world model and plans using step-by-step virtual rollouts. This type of world model quickly diverges from reality when the planning horizon increases, thus struggling at long-horizon planning. How can we learn world models that endow agents with the ability to do temporally extended reasoning? In this work, we propose to learn graph-structured world models composed of sparse, multi-step transitions. We devise a novel algorithm to learn latent landmarks that are scattered (in terms of reachability) across the goal space as the nodes on the graph. In this same graph, the edges are the reachability estimates distilled from Q-functions. On a variety of high-dimensional continuous control tasks ranging from robotic manipulation to navigation, we demonstrate that our method, named L^{3}P, significantly outperforms prior work, and is oftentimes the only method capable of leveraging both the robustness of model-free RL and generalization of graph-search algorithms. We believe our work is an important step towards scalable planning in reinforcement learning.
Adam$^+$: A Stochastic Method with Adaptive Variance Reduction
Authors: Mingrui Liu, Wei Zhang, Francesco Orabona, Tianbao Yang

Adam is a widely used stochastic optimization method for deep learning applications. While practitioners prefer Adam because it requires less parameter tuning, its use is problematic from a theoretical point of view since it may not converge.  Variants of Adam have been proposed with provable convergence guarantee, but they tend not be competitive with Adam on the practical performance. In this paper, we propose a new method named Adam$^+$ (pronounced as Adam-plus). Adam$^+$ retains some of the key components of Adam but it also has several noticeable differences: (i) it does not maintain the moving average of second moment estimate but instead computes the moving average of first moment estimate at extrapolated points; (ii) its adaptive step size is formed not by dividing the square root of second moment estimate but instead by dividing the root of the norm of first moment estimate. As a result,  Adam$^+$ requires few parameter tuning, as Adam, but it enjoys a provable convergence guarantee. Our analysis further shows that Adam$^+$ enjoys adaptive variance reduction, i.e., the variance of the stochastic gradient estimator reduces as the algorithm converges, hence enjoying an adaptive convergence. We also propose a more general variant of Adam$^+$ with different adaptive step sizes and establish their fast convergence rate. Our empirical studies on various deep learning tasks, including image classification, language modeling, and automatic speech recognition, demonstrate that Adam$^+$ significantly outperforms Adam and achieves comparable performance with best-tuned SGD and momentum SGD.
Discriminative Similarity for Data Clustering
Authors: Yingzhen Yang, Ping Li

Similarity-based clustering methods separate data into clusters according to the pairwise similarity between the data, and the pairwise similarity is crucial for their performance. In this paper, we propose {\em Clustering by  Discriminative Similarity (CDS)}, a novel method which learns discriminative similarity for data clustering. CDS learns an unsupervised similarity-based classifier from each data partition, and searches for the optimal partition of the data by minimizing the generalization error of the learnt classifiers associated with the data partitions. By generalization analysis via Rademacher complexity, the generalization error bound for the unsupervised similarity-based classifier is expressed as the sum of discriminative similarity between the data from different classes. It is proved that the derived discriminative similarity can also be induced by the integrated squared error bound for kernel density classification. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed discriminative similarity, we propose a new clustering method using a kernel as the similarity function, CDS via unsupervised kernel classification (CDSK), with its effectiveness demonstrated by experimental results.
Learning to Write by Learning the Objective
Authors: Ari Holtzman, Jan Buys, Maxwell Forbes, Antoine Bosselut, Yejin Choi

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are powerful autoregressive sequence models for learning prevalent patterns in natural language.   Yet language generated by RNNs often shows several degenerate characteristics that are uncommon in human language; while fluent, RNN language production can be overly generic, repetitive, and even self-contradictory.  We postulate that the objective function optimized by RNN language models, which amounts to the overall perplexity of a text, is not expressive enough to capture the abstract qualities of good generation such as Grice’s Maxims. In this paper, we introduce a general learning framework that can construct a decoding objective better suited for generation. Starting with a generatively trained RNN language model, our framework learns to construct a substantially stronger generator by combining several discriminatively trained models that can collectively address the limitations of RNN generation.  Human evaluation demonstrates that text generated by the resulting generator is preferred over  that  of  baselines  by  a  large  margin  and  significantly  enhances  the  overall coherence, style, and information content of the generated text.
Active Learning for Convolutional Neural Networks: A Core-Set Approach
Authors: Ozan Sener, Silvio Savarese

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully applied to many recognition and learning tasks using a universal recipe;  training a deep model on a very large dataset of supervised examples. However, this approach is rather restrictive in practice since collecting a large set of labeled images is very expensive. One way to ease this problem is coming up with smart ways for choosing images to be labelled from a  very large collection (i.e. active learning).

Our empirical study suggests that many of the active learning heuristics in the literature are not effective when applied to CNNs when applied in batch setting. Inspired by these limitations, we define the problem of active learning as core-set selection, i.e. choosing set of points such that a model learned over the selected subset is competitive for the remaining data points. We further present a theoretical result characterizing the performance of any selected subset using the geometry of the datapoints. As an active learning algorithm, we choose the subset which is expected to yield best result according to our characterization. Our experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing approaches in image classification experiments by a large margin.
Pairwise Adversarial Training for Unsupervised Class-imbalanced Domain Adaptation
Authors: Weili Shi, Ronghang Zhu, Sheng Li

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has become an appealing approach for knowledge transfer from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. However, when the classes in source and target domains are imbalanced, most existing UDA methods experience significant performance drop, as the decision boundary usually favors the majority classes. Some recent class-imbalanced domain adaptation (CDA) methods aim to tackle the challenge of biased label distribution by exploiting pseudo-labeled target data during training process. However, these methods may be challenged with the problem of unreliable pseudo labels and error accumulation during training. In this paper, we propose a pairwise adversarial training approach to augment training data for unsupervised class-imbalanced domain adaptation. Unlike conventional adversarial training in which the adversarial samples are obtained from the $\ell_p$ ball of the original data, we obtain the semantic adversarial samples from the interpolated line of the aligned pair-wise samples from source domain and target domain. Experimental results and ablation study show that our method can achieve considerable improvements on the CDA benchmarks compared with the state-of-art methods focusing on the same problem.
Rotational Unit of Memory 
Authors: Rumen Dangovski, Li Jing, Marin Soljacic

The concepts of unitary evolution matrices and associative memory have boosted the field of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of sequential tasks.  However, RNN still has a limited capacity to manipulate long-term memory.  To bypass this weakness the most successful applications of RNN use external techniques such as attention mechanisms. In this paper we propose a novel RNN model that unifies the state-of-the-art approaches: Rotational Unit of Memory (RUM). The core of RUM is its rotational operation, which is,  naturally,  a unitary matrix, providing architectures with the power to learn long-term dependencies by overcoming the vanishing and exploding gradients problem.  Moreover,  the rotational unit also serves as associative memory. We evaluate our model on synthetic memorization, question answering and language modeling tasks.   RUM learns the Copying Memory task completely and improves the state-of-the-art result in the Recall task.  RUM’s performance in the bAbI Question Answering task is comparable to that of models with attention mechanism. We also improve the state-of-the-art result to 1.189 bits-per-character (BPC) loss in the Character Level Penn Treebank (PTB) task, which is to signify the applications of RUM to real-world sequential data. The universality of our construction, at the core of RNN, establishes RUM as a promising approach to language modeling, speech recognition and machine translation.
Batch Normalization is a Cause of Adversarial Vulnerability
Authors: Angus Galloway, Anna Golubeva, Thomas Tanay, Medhat Moussa, Graham W. Taylor

Batch normalization (BN) is often used in an attempt to stabilize and accelerate training in deep neural networks. In many cases it indeed decreases the number of parameter updates required to achieve low training error. However, it also reduces robustness to small adversarial input perturbations and common corruptions by double-digit percentages, as we show on five standard datasets. Furthermore, we find that substituting weight decay for BN is sufficient to nullify a relationship between adversarial vulnerability and the input dimension. A recent mean-field analysis found that BN induces gradient explosion when used on multiple layers, but this cannot fully explain the vulnerability we observe, given that it occurs already for a single BN layer. We argue that the actual cause is the tilting of the decision boundary with respect to the nearest-centroid classifier along input dimensions of low variance. As a result, the constant introduced for numerical stability in the BN step acts as an important hyperparameter that can be tuned to recover some robustness at the cost of standard test accuracy. We explain this mechanism explicitly on a linear ``toy model and show in experiments that it still holds for nonlinear ``real-world models.
A Primal Approach to Constrained Policy Optimization: Global Optimality and Finite-Time Analysis
Authors: Tengyu Xu, Yingbin Liang, Guanghui Lan

Safe reinforcement learning (SRL) problems are typically modeled as constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), in which an agent explores the environment to maximize the expected total reward and meanwhile avoids violating certain constraints on a number of expected total costs. In general, such SRL problems have nonconvex objective functions subject to multiple nonconvex constraints, and hence are very challenging to solve, particularly to provide a globally optimal policy. Many popular SRL algorithms adopt a primal-dual structure which utilizes the updating of dual variables for satisfying the constraints. In contrast, we propose a primal approach, called constraint-rectified policy optimization (CRPO), which updates the policy alternatingly between objective improvement and constraint satisfaction. CRPO provides a primal-type algorithmic framework to solve SRL problems, where each policy update can take any variant of policy optimization step. To demonstrate the theoretical performance of CRPO, we adopt natural policy gradient (NPG) for each policy update step and show that CRPO achieves an $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ convergence rate to the global optimal policy in the constrained policy set and an $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ error bound on constraint satisfaction. This is the first finite-time analysis of SRL algorithms with global optimality guarantee. Our empirical results demonstrate that CRPO can outperform the existing primal-dual baseline algorithms significantly.
Optimal transport maps for distribution preserving operations on latent spaces of Generative Models
Authors: Eirikur Agustsson, Alexander Sage, Radu Timofte, Luc Van Gool

Generative models such as Variational Auto Encoders (VAEs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are typically trained for a fixed prior distribution in the latent space, such as uniform or Gaussian.
After a trained model is obtained, one can sample the Generator in various forms for exploration and understanding, such as interpolating between two samples, sampling in the vicinity of a sample or exploring differences between a pair of samples applied to a third sample.
In this paper, we show that the latent space operations used in the literature so far induce a distribution mismatch between the resulting outputs and the prior distribution the model was trained on. To address this, we propose to use distribution matching transport maps to ensure that such  latent space operations preserve the prior distribution, while minimally modifying the original operation. 
Our experimental results validate that the proposed operations give higher quality samples compared to the original operations.