nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Adversarially Robust Change Point Detection
Authors: Mengchu Li, Yi Yu

Change point detection is becoming increasingly popular in many application areas. On one hand, most of the theoretically-justified methods are investigated in an ideal setting without model violations, or merely robust against identical heavy-tailed noise distribution across time and/or against isolate outliers; on the other hand, we are aware that there have been exponentially growing attacks from adversaries, who may pose systematic contamination on data to purposely create spurious change points or disguise true change points. In light of the timely need for a change point detection method that is robust against adversaries, we start with, arguably, the simplest univariate mean change point detection problem. The adversarial attacks are formulated through the Huber $\varepsilon$-contamination framework, which in particular allows the contamination distributions to be different at each time point. In this paper, we demonstrate a phase transition phenomenon in change point detection. This detection boundary is a function of the contamination proportion~$\varepsilon$ and is the first time shown in the literature. In addition, we derive the minimax-rate optimal localisation error rate, quantifying the cost of accuracy in terms of the contamination proportion. We propose a computationally feasible method, matching the minimax lower bound under certain conditions, saving for logarithmic factors. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted with comparisons to robust change point detection methods in the existing literature.
Generative vs. Discriminative: Rethinking The Meta-Continual Learning
Authors: Mohammad Amin Banayeean Zade, Rasoul Mirzaiezadeh, Hosein Hasani, Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah

Deep neural networks have achieved human-level capabilities in various learning tasks. However, they generally lose performance in more realistic scenarios like learning in a continual manner. In contrast, humans can incorporate their prior knowledge to learn new concepts efficiently without forgetting older ones. In this work, we leverage meta-learning to encourage the model to learn how to learn continually. Inspired by human concept learning, we develop a generative classifier that efficiently uses data-driven experience to learn new concepts even from few samples while being immune to forgetting. Along with cognitive and theoretical insights, extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The ability to remember all previous concepts, with negligible computational and structural overheads, suggests that generative models provide a natural way for alleviating catastrophic forgetting, which is a major drawback of discriminative models.
Regularized Softmax Deep Multi-Agent Q-Learning
Authors: Ling Pan, Tabish Rashid, Bei Peng, Longbo Huang, Shimon Whiteson

Tackling overestimation in $Q$-learning is an important problem that has been extensively studied in single-agent reinforcement learning, but has received comparatively little attention in the multi-agent setting. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that QMIX, a popular $Q$-learning algorithm for cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), suffers from a more severe overestimation in practice than previously acknowledged, and is not mitigated by existing approaches. We rectify this with a novel regularization-based update scheme that penalizes large joint action-values that deviate from a baseline and demonstrate its effectiveness in stabilizing learning. Furthermore, we propose to employ a softmax operator, which we efficiently approximate in a novel way in the multi-agent setting, to further reduce the potential overestimation bias. Our approach, Regularized Softmax (RES) Deep Multi-Agent $Q$-Learning, is general and can be applied to any $Q$-learning based MARL algorithm. We demonstrate that, when applied to QMIX, RES avoids severe overestimation and significantly improves performance, yielding state-of-the-art results in a variety of cooperative multi-agent tasks, including the challenging StarCraft II micromanagement benchmarks.
Bridging Offline Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning: A Tale of Pessimism
Authors: Paria Rashidinejad, Banghua Zhu, Cong Ma, Jiantao Jiao, Stuart Russell

Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main methods are used: imitation learning which is suitable for expert datasets, and vanilla offline RL which often requires uniform coverage datasets. From a practical standpoint, datasets often deviate from these two extremes and the exact data composition is usually unknown. To bridge this gap, we present a new offline RL framework that smoothly interpolates between the two extremes of data composition, hence unifying imitation learning and vanilla offline RL. The new framework is centered around a weak version of the concentrability coefficient that measures the deviation of the behavior policy from the expert policy alone. Under this new framework, we ask: can one develop an algorithm that achieves a minimax optimal rate adaptive to unknown data composition? To address this question, we consider a lower confidence bound (LCB) algorithm developed based on pessimism in the face of uncertainty in offline RL. We study finite-sample properties of LCB as well as information-theoretic limits in multi-armed bandits, contextual bandits, and Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our analysis reveals surprising facts about optimality rates. In particular, in both contextual bandits and RL, LCB achieves a faster rate of $1/N$ for nearly-expert datasets compared to the usual rate of $1/\sqrt{N}$ in offline RL, where $N$ is the batch dataset sample size. In contextual bandits with at least two contexts, we prove that LCB is adaptively optimal for the entire data composition range, achieving a smooth transition from imitation learning to offline RL. We further show that LCB is almost adaptively optimal in MDPs.
Do Different Tracking Tasks Require Different Appearance Models?
Authors: Zhongdao Wang, Hengshuang Zhao, Ya-Li Li, Shengjin Wang, Philip Torr, Luca Bertinetto

Tracking objects of interest in a video is one of the most popular and widely applicable problems in computer vision. However, with the years, a Cambrian explosion of use cases and benchmarks has fragmented the problem in a multitude of different experimental setups. As a consequence, the literature has fragmented too, and now novel approaches proposed by the community are usually specialised to fit only one specific setup. To understand to what extent this specialisation is necessary, in this work we present UniTrack, a solution to address five different tasks within the same framework. UniTrack consists of a single and task-agnostic appearance model, which can be learned in a supervised or self-supervised fashion, and multiple ``heads'' that address individual tasks and do not require training. We show how most tracking tasks can be solved within this framework, and that the same appearance model can be successfully used to obtain results that are competitive against specialised methods for most of the tasks considered. The framework also allows us to analyse appearance models obtained with the most recent self-supervised methods, thus extending their evaluation and comparison to a larger variety of important problems.
Analytically Tractable Bayesian Deep Q-Learning
Authors: Luong-Ha Nguyen, James-A. Goulet

Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained increasing interest since the demonstration it was able to reach human performance on video game benchmarks using deep Q-learning (DQN). The current consensus for training neural networks on such complex environments is to rely on gradient-based optimization. Although alternative Bayesian deep learning methods exist, most of them still rely on gradient-based optimization, and they typically do not scale on benchmarks such as the Atari game environment. Moreover none of these approaches allow performing the analytical inference for the weights and biases defining the neural network. In this paper, we present how we can adapt the temporal difference Q-learning framework to make it compatible with the tractable approximate Gaussian inference (TAGI), which allows learning the parameters of a neural network using a closed-form analytical method. Throughout the experiments with on- and off-policy reinforcement learning approaches, we demonstrate that TAGI can reach a performance comparable to backpropagation-trained networks while using fewer hyperparameters, and without relying on gradient-based optimization.
A Consciousness-Inspired Planning Agent for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Mingde Zhao, Zhen Liu, Sitao Luan, Shuyuan Zhang, Doina Precup, Yoshua Bengio

We present an end-to-end, model-based deep reinforcement learning agent which dynamically attends to relevant parts of its state during planning. The agent uses a bottleneck mechanism over a set-based representation to force the number of entities to which the agent attends at each planning step to be small. In experiments, we investigate the bottleneck mechanism with several sets of customized environments featuring different challenges. We consistently observe that the design allows the planning agents to generalize their learned task-solving abilities in compatible unseen environments by attending to the relevant objects, leading to better out-of-distribution generalization performance.
Compositional Modeling of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems with ODE-based Random Features
Authors: Thomas M. McDonald, Mauricio A Álvarez

Effectively modeling phenomena present in highly nonlinear dynamical systems whilst also accurately quantifying uncertainty is a challenging task, which often requires problem-specific techniques. We present a novel, domain-agnostic approach to tackling this problem, using compositions of physics-informed random features, derived from ordinary differential equations. The architecture of our model leverages recent advances in approximate inference for deep Gaussian processes, such as layer-wise weight-space approximations which allow us to incorporate random Fourier features, and stochastic variational inference for approximate Bayesian inference. We provide evidence that our model is capable of capturing highly nonlinear behaviour in real-world multivariate time series data. In addition, we find that our approach achieves comparable performance to a number of other probabilistic models on benchmark regression tasks.
Stronger NAS with Weaker Predictors
Authors: Junru Wu, Xiyang Dai, Dongdong Chen, Yinpeng Chen, Mengchen Liu, Ye Yu, Zhangyang Wang, Zicheng Liu, Mei Chen, Lu Yuan

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) often trains and evaluates a large number of architectures. Recent predictor-based NAS approaches attempt to alleviate such heavy computation costs with two key steps: sampling some architecture-performance pairs and fitting a proxy accuracy predictor. Given limited samples, these predictors, however, are far from accurate to locate top architectures due to the difficulty of fitting the huge search space. This paper reflects on a simple yet crucial question: if our final goal is to find the best architecture, do we really need to model the whole space well?. We propose a paradigm shift from fitting the whole architecture space using one strong predictor, to progressively fitting a search path towards the high-performance sub-space through a set of weaker predictors. As a key property of the weak predictors, their probabilities of sampling better architectures keep increasing. Hence we only sample a few well-performed architectures guided by the previously learned predictor and estimate a new better weak predictor. This embarrassingly easy framework, dubbed WeakNAS, produces coarse-to-fine iteration to gradually refine the ranking of sampling space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WeakNAS costs fewer samples to find top-performance architectures on NAS-Bench-101 and NAS-Bench-201. Compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) predictor-based NAS methods, WeakNAS outperforms all with notable margins, e.g., requiring at least 7.5x less samples to find global optimal on NAS-Bench-101. WeakNAS can also absorb their ideas to boost performance more. Further, WeakNAS strikes the new SOTA result of 81.3% in the ImageNet MobileNet Search Space. The code is available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/WeakNAS.
Characterizing and Measuring the Similarity of Neural Networks with Persistent Homology
Authors: David Pérez Fernández, Asier Gutiérrez-Fandiño, Jordi Armengol-Estapé, Marta Villegas

Characterizing the structural properties of neural networks is crucial yet poorly understood, and there are no well-established similarity measures between networks. In this work, we observe that neural networks can be represented as abstract simplicial complex and analyzed using their topological 'fingerprints' via Persistent Homology (PH). We then describe a PH-based representation proposed for characterizing and measuring similarity of neural networks. We empirically show the effectiveness of this representation as a descriptor of different architectures in several datasets. This approach based on Topological Data Analysis is a step towards better understanding neural networks and serves as a useful similarity measure.
On Contrastive Representations of Stochastic Processes
Authors: Emile Mathieu, Adam Foster, Yee Whye Teh

Learning representations of stochastic processes is an emerging problem in machine learning with applications from meta-learning to physical object models to time series. Typical methods rely on exact reconstruction of observations, but this approach breaks down as observations become high-dimensional or noise distributions become complex. To address this, we propose a unifying framework for learning contrastive representations of stochastic processes (CReSP) that does away with exact reconstruction. We dissect potential use cases for stochastic process representations, and propose methods that accommodate each. Empirically, we show that our methods are effective for learning representations of periodic functions, 3D objects and dynamical processes. Our methods tolerate noisy high-dimensional observations better than traditional approaches, and the learned representations transfer to a range of downstream tasks.
Implicit Semantic Response Alignment for Partial Domain Adaptation
Authors: Wenxiao Xiao, Zhengming Ding, Hongfu Liu

Partial Domain Adaptation (PDA) addresses the unsupervised domain adaptation problem where the target label space is a subset of the source label space. Most state-of-art PDA methods tackle the inconsistent label space by assigning weights to classes or individual samples, in an attempt to discard the source data that belongs to the irrelevant classes. However, we believe samples from those extra categories would still contain valuable information to promote positive transfer. In this paper, we propose the Implicit Semantic Response Alignment to explore the intrinsic relationships among different categories by applying a weighted schema on the feature level. Specifically, we design a class2vec module to extract the implicit semantic topics from the visual features. With an attention layer, we calculate the semantic response according to each implicit semantic topic. Then semantic responses of source and target data are aligned to retain the relevant information contained in multiple categories by weighting the features, instead of samples. Experiments on several cross-domain benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over the state-of-the-art PDA methods. Moreover, we elaborate in-depth analyses to further explore implicit semantic alignment.
Inverse Problems Leveraging Pre-trained Contrastive Representations
Authors: Sriram Ravula, Georgios Smyrnis, Matt Jordan, Alex Dimakis

We study a new family of inverse problems for recovering representations of corrupted data. We assume access to a pre-trained representation learning network R(x) that operates on clean images, like CLIP. The problem is to recover the representation of an image R(x), if we are only given a corrupted version A(x), for some known forward operator A. We propose a supervised inversion method that uses a contrastive objective to obtain excellent representations for highly corrupted images. Using a linear probe on our robust representations, we achieve a higher accuracy than end-to-end supervised baselines when classifying images with various types of distortions, including blurring, additive noise, and random pixel masking. We evaluate on a subset of ImageNet and observe that our method is robust to varying levels of distortion. Our method outperforms end-to-end baselines even with a fraction of the labeled data in a wide range of forward operators.
Generalization Bounds for Meta-Learning via PAC-Bayes and Uniform Stability
Authors: Alec Farid, Anirudha Majumdar

We are motivated by the problem of providing strong generalization guarantees in the context of meta-learning. Existing generalization bounds are either challenging to evaluate or provide vacuous guarantees in even relatively simple settings. We derive a probably approximately correct (PAC) bound for gradient-based meta-learning using two different generalization frameworks in order to deal with the qualitatively different challenges of generalization at the "base" and "meta" levels. We employ bounds for uniformly stable algorithms at the base level and bounds from the PAC-Bayes framework at the meta level. The result of this approach is a novel PAC bound that is tighter when the base learner adapts quickly, which is precisely the goal of meta-learning. We show that our bound provides a tighter guarantee than other bounds on a toy non-convex problem on the unit sphere and a text-based classification example. We also present a practical regularization scheme motivated by the bound in settings where the bound is loose and demonstrate improved performance over baseline techniques.
On the Provable Generalization of Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Lifu Wang, Bo Shen, Bo Hu, Xing Cao

Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is a fundamental structure in deep learning. Recently, some works study the training process of over-parameterized neural networks, and show that over-parameterized networks can learn functions in some notable concept classes with a provable generalization error bound. In this paper, we analyze the training and generalization for RNNs with random initialization, and provide the following improvements over recent works:
(1) For a RNN with input sequence $x=(X_1,X_2,...,X_L)$, previous works study to learn functions that are summation of $f(\beta^T_lX_l)$ and require normalized conditions that $||X_l||\leq\epsilon$ with some very small $\epsilon$ depending on the complexity of $f$. In this paper, using detailed analysis about the neural tangent kernel matrix, we prove a generalization error bound to learn such functions without normalized conditions and show that some notable concept classes are learnable with  the numbers of iterations and samples scaling almost-polynomially in the input length $L$.
(2) Moreover, we prove a novel result to learn N-variables functions of input sequence  with the form $f(\beta^T[X_{l_1},...,X_{l_N}])$, which do not belong to the ``additive'' concept class, i,e., the summation of function $f(X_l)$. And we show that when either $N$ or $l_0=\max(l_1,..,l_N)-\min(l_1,..,l_N)$ is small, $f(\beta^T[X_{l_1},...,X_{l_N}])$ will be learnable with the number iterations and samples scaling  almost-polynomially in the input length $L$.
Fast rates for prediction with limited expert advice
Authors: El Mehdi Saad, Gilles Blanchard

We investigate the problem of minimizing the excess generalization error with respect to the best expert prediction in a finite family in the stochastic setting,  under limited access to information. We consider that the learner has only access to a limited number of expert advices per training round, as well as for prediction. Assuming that the loss function is Lipschitz and strongly convex, we show that if we are allowed to see the advice of only one expert per round in the training phase, or to use the advice of only one expert for prediction in the test phase, the worst-case excess risk is ${\Omega}(1/\sqrt{T})$ with probability lower bounded by a constant. However, if we are allowed to see at least two actively chosen expert advices per training round and use at least two experts for prediction, the fast rate $\mathcal{O}(1/T)$ can be achieved. We design novel algorithms achieving this rate in this setting, and in the setting where the learner have a budget constraint on the total number of observed experts advices,  and give precise instance-dependent bounds on the number of training rounds needed to achieve a given generalization error precision.
Discrete-Valued Neural Communication
Authors: Dianbo Liu, Alex Lamb, Kenji Kawaguchi, Anirudh Goyal, Chen Sun, Michael Curtis Mozer, Yoshua Bengio

Deep learning has advanced from fully connected architectures to structured models organized into components, e.g., the transformer composed of positional elements, modular architectures divided into slots, and graph neural nets made up of nodes. The nature of structured models is that communication among the components has a bottleneck, typically achieved by restricted connectivity and attention. In this work, we further tighten the bottleneck via discreteness of the representations transmitted between components. We hypothesize that this constraint serves as a useful form of inductive bias. Our hypothesis is motivated by past empirical work showing the benefits of discretization in non-structured architectures as well as our own theoretical results showing that discretization increases noise robustness and reduces the underlying dimensionality of the model. Building on an existing technique for discretization from the VQ-VAE, we consider multi-headed discretization with shared codebooks as the output of each architectural component. One motivating intuition is human language in which communication occurs through multiple discrete symbols. This form of communication is hypothesized to facilitate transmission of information between functional components of the brain by providing a common interlingua, just as it does for human-to-human communication. Our experiments show that discrete-valued neural communication (DVNC) substantially improves systematic generalization in a variety of architectures—transformers, modular architectures, and graph neural networks. We also show that the DVNC is robust to the choice of hyperparameters, making the method useful in practice.
SNIPS: Solving Noisy Inverse Problems Stochastically
Authors: Bahjat Kawar, Gregory Vaksman, Michael Elad

In this work we introduce a novel stochastic algorithm dubbed SNIPS, which draws samples from the posterior distribution of any linear inverse problem, where the observation is assumed to be contaminated by additive white Gaussian noise. Our solution incorporates ideas from Langevin dynamics and Newton's method, and exploits a pre-trained minimum mean squared error (MMSE) Gaussian denoiser. The proposed approach relies on an intricate derivation of the posterior score function that includes a singular value decomposition (SVD) of the degradation operator, in order to obtain a tractable iterative algorithm for the desired sampling. Due to its stochasticity, the algorithm can produce multiple high perceptual quality samples for the same noisy observation. We demonstrate the abilities of the proposed paradigm for image deblurring, super-resolution, and compressive sensing. We show that the samples produced are sharp, detailed and consistent with the given measurements, and their diversity exposes the inherent uncertainty in the inverse problem being solved.