nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Let Your Heart Speak in its Mother Tongue: Multilingual Captioning of Cardiac Signals
Authors: Dani Kiyasseh, Tingting Zhu, David A. Clifton

Cardiac signals convey a significant amount of information about the health status of a patient. Upon recording these signals, cardiologists are expected to manually generate an accompanying report to share with physicians and patients. Generating these reports, however, can be time-consuming and error-prone, while also exhibiting a high degree of intra- and inter-physician variability. To address this, we design a neural, multilingual, cardiac signal captioning framework. In the process, we propose a discriminative multilingual representation learning method, RTLP, which randomly replaces tokens with those from a different language and tasks a network with identifying the language of all tokens. We show that RTLP performs on par with state-of-the-art pre-training methods such as MLM and MARGE, while generating more clinically accurate reports than MLM. We also show that, with RTLP, multilingual fine-tuning can be preferable to its monolingual counterpart, a phenomenon we refer to as the \textit{blessing of multilinguality}.
NeurWIN: Neural Whittle Index Network for Restless Bandits via Deep RL
Authors: Khaled Nakhleh, Santosh Ganji, Ping-Chun Hsieh, I-Hong Hou, Srinivas Shakkottai

Whittle index policy is a powerful tool to obtain asymptotically optimal solutions for the notoriously intractable problem of restless bandits. However, finding the Whittle indices remains a difficult problem for many practical restless bandits with convoluted transition kernels. This paper proposes NeurWIN, a neural Whittle index network that seeks to learn the Whittle indices for any restless bandits by leveraging mathematical properties of the Whittle indices. We show that a neural network that produces the Whittle index is also one that produces the optimal control for a set of Markov decision problems. This property motivates using deep reinforcement learning for the training of NeurWIN. We demonstrate the utility of NeurWIN by evaluating its performance for three recently studied restless bandit problems. Our experiment results show that the performance of NeurWIN is either better than, or as good as, state-of-the-art policies for all three problems.
Reintroducing Straight-Through Estimators as Principled Methods for Stochastic Binary Networks
Authors: Alexander Shekhovtsov, Viktor Yanush

Training neural networks with binary weights and activations is a challenging problem due to the lack of gradients and difficulty of optimization over discrete weights.
Many successful experimental results have been achieved with empirical straight-through (ST) approaches, proposing a variety of ad-hoc rules for propagating gradients through non-differentiable activations and updating discrete weights. At the same time, ST methods can be truly derived as estimators in the stochastic binary network (SBN) model with Bernoulli weights. We advance these derivations to a more complete and systematic study. We analyze properties, estimation accuracy, obtain different forms of correct ST estimators for activations and weights, explain existing empirical approaches and their shortcomings, explain how latent weights arise from the mirror descent method when optimizing over probabilities. This allows to reintroduce, once empirical, ST methods as sound approximations, apply them with clarity and develop further improvements.
The Benefit of Distraction: Denoising Remote Vitals Measurements Using Inverse Attention
Authors: Ewa Magdalena Nowara, Daniel McDuff, Ashok Veeraraghavan

Attention is a powerful concept in computer vision. End-to-end networks that learn to focus selectively on regions of an image or video often perform strongly. However, other image regions, while not necessarily containing the signal of interest, may contain useful context. We present an approach that exploits the idea that statistics of noise may be shared between the regions that contain the signal of interest and those that do not. Our technique uses the inverse of an attention mask to generate a noise estimate that is then used to denoise temporal observations. We apply this to the task of camera-based physiological measurement. A convolutional attention network is used to learn which regions of a video contain the physiological signal and generate a preliminary estimate. A noise estimate is obtained by using the pixel intensities in the inverse regions of the learned attention mask, this in turn is used to refine the estimate of the physiological signal. We perform experiments on two large benchmark datasets and show that this approach produces state-of-the-art results, increasing the signal-to-noise ratio by up to 5.8 dB, reducing heart rate and breathing rate estimation error by as much as 30%, recovering subtle pulse waveform dynamics, and generalizing from RGB to NIR videos without retraining.
MDFL: A UNIFIED FRAMEWORK WITH META-DROPOUT FOR FEW-SHOT LEARNING
Authors: Shaobo Lin, Xingyu Zeng, Rui Zhao

Conventional training of deep neural networks usually requires a substantial amount of data with expensive human annotations. In this paper, we utilize the idea of meta-learning to integrate two very different streams of few-shot learning, i.e., the episodic meta-learning-based and pre-train finetune-based few-shot learning, and form a unified meta-learning framework. In order to improve the generalization power of our framework, we propose a simple yet effective strategy named meta-dropout, which is applied to the transferable knowledge generalized from base categories to novel categories. The proposed strategy can effectively prevent neural units from co-adapting excessively in the meta-training stage. Extensive experiments on the few-shot object detection and few-shot image classification datasets, i.e., Pascal VOC, MS COCO, CUB, and mini-ImageNet, validate the effectiveness of our method.
Global Momentum Compression for Sparse Communication in Distributed SGD
Authors: Shen-Yi Zhao, Yin-Peng Xie, Hao Gao, Wu-Jun Li

With the rapid growth of data, distributed stochastic gradient descent~(DSGD) has been widely used for solving large-scale machine learning problems. Due to the latency and limited bandwidth of network, communication has become the bottleneck of DSGD when we need to train large scale models, like deep neural networks. Communication compression with sparsified gradient, abbreviated as \emph{sparse communication}, has been widely used for reducing communication cost in DSGD. Recently, there has appeared one method, called deep gradient compression~(DGC), to combine memory gradient and momentum SGD for sparse communication. DGC has achieved promising performance in practice. However, the theory about the convergence of DGC is lack. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called \emph{\underline{g}}lobal \emph{\underline{m}}omentum \emph{\underline{c}}ompression~(GMC), for sparse communication in DSGD. GMC also combines memory gradient and momentum SGD. But different from DGC which adopts local momentum, GMC adopts global momentum. We theoretically prove the convergence rate of GMC for both convex and non-convex problems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that proves the convergence of distributed momentum SGD~(DMSGD) with sparse communication and memory gradient. Empirical results show that, compared with the DMSGD counterpart without sparse communication, GMC can reduce the communication cost by approximately 100 fold without loss of generalization accuracy. GMC can also achieve comparable~(sometimes better) performance compared with DGC, with an extra theoretical guarantee.
TextSETTR: Label-Free Text Style Extraction and Tunable Targeted Restyling
Authors: Parker Riley, Noah Constant, Mandy Guo, Girish Kumar, David Uthus, Zarana Parekh

We present a novel approach to the challenging problem of label-free text style transfer. Unlike previous approaches that use parallel or non-parallel labeled data, our technique removes the need for labels entirely, relying instead on the implicit connection in style between adjacent sentences in unlabeled text. We show that T5 (Raffel et al., 2020), a strong pretrained text-to-text model, can be adapted to extract a style vector from arbitrary text and use this vector to condition the decoder to perform style transfer. As the resulting learned style vector space encodes many facets of textual style, we recast transfers as "targeted restyling" vector operations that adjust specific attributes of the input text while preserving others. When trained over unlabeled Amazon reviews data, our resulting TextSETTR model is competitive on sentiment transfer, even when given only four exemplars of each class. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a single model trained on unlabeled Common Crawl data is capable of transferring along multiple dimensions including dialect, emotiveness, formality, politeness, and sentiment.
THE EFFECT OF ADVERSARIAL TRAINING: A THEORETICAL CHARACTERIZATION
Authors: Mingyang Yi, Huishuai Zhang, Wei Chen, Zhi-Ming Ma, Tie-Yan Liu

It has widely shown that adversarial training (Madry et al., 2018) is effective in defending adversarial attack empirically. However, the theoretical understanding of the difference between the solution of adversarial training and that of standard training is limited. In this paper, we characterize the solution of adversarial training for linear classification problem for a full range of adversarial radius ". Specifically, we show that if the data themselves are ”-strongly linearly-separable”, adversarial
training with radius smaller than " converges to the hard margin solution of SVM with a faster rate than standard training. If the data themselves are not ”-strongly linearly-separable”, we show that adversarial training with radius " is stable to outliers while standard training is not. Moreover, we prove that the classifier returned by adversarial training with a large radius " has low confidence in each data point. Experiments corroborate our theoretical finding well.
Efficiently Disentangle Causal Representations
Authors: Yuanpeng Li, Joel Hestness, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Liang Zhao, Kenneth Church

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to efficiently learning disentangled representations with causal mechanisms, based on the difference of conditional probabilities in original and new distributions. We approximate the difference with model's generalization abilities so that it fits in standard machine learning framework and can be efficiently computed. In contrast to the state-of-the-art approach, which relies on learner's adaptation speed to new distribution, the proposed approach only requires evaluating the generalization ability of the model. We provide theoretical explanation for the advantage of the proposed method, and our experiments show that the proposed technique is 1.9-11.0x more sample efficient and 9.4-32.4x quicker than the previous method on various tasks.
Provable Memorization via Deep Neural Networks using Sub-linear Parameters
Authors: Sejun Park, Jaeho Lee, Chulhee Yun, Jinwoo Shin

It is known that $\Theta(N)$ parameters are sufficient for neural networks to memorize arbitrary $N$ input-label pairs. By exploiting depth, we show that $\Theta(N^{2/3})$ parameters suffice to memorize $N$ pairs, under a mild condition on the separation of input points. In particular, deeper networks (even with width $3$) are shown to memorize more pairs than shallow networks, which also agrees with the recent line of works on the benefits of depth for function approximation. We also provide empirical results that support our theoretical findings.
Generative model based on minimizing exact empirical Wasserstein distance
Authors: Akihiro Iohara, Takahito Ogawa, Toshiyuki Tanaka

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a very powerful framework for generative modeling. However, they are often hard to train, and learning of GANs often becomes unstable. Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) is a promising framework to deal with the instability problem as it has a good convergence property. One drawback of the WGAN is that it evaluates the Wasserstein distance in the dual domain, which requires some approximation, so that it may fail to optimize the true Wasserstein distance. In this paper, we propose evaluating the exact empirical optimal transport cost efficiently in the primal domain and performing gradient descent with respect to its derivative to train the generator network. Experiments on the MNIST dataset show that our method is significantly stable to converge, and achieves the lowest Wasserstein distance among the WGAN variants at the cost of some sharpness of generated images. Experiments on the 8-Gaussian toy dataset show that better gradients for the generator are obtained in our method. In addition, the proposed method enables more flexible generative modeling than WGAN.
Unsupervised Learning of Global Factors in Deep Generative Models
Authors: Ignacio Peis, Pablo M. Olmos, Antonio Artés

We present a novel deep generative model based on non i.i.d. variational autoencoders that captures global dependencies among observations in a fully unsupervised fashion. In contrast to the recent semi-supervised alternatives for global modeling in deep generative models, our approach combines a mixture model in the local or data-dependent space and a global Gaussian latent variable, which lead us to obtain three particular insights. First, the induced latent global space captures interpretable disentangled representations with no user-defined regularization in the evidence lower bound (as in beta-VAE and its generalizations). Second, we show that the model performs domain alignment to find correlations and interpolate between different databases. Finally, we study the ability of the global space to discriminate between groups of observations with non-trivial underlying structures, such as face images with shared attributes or defined sequences of digits images.
The Mutual Autoencoder: Controlling Information in Latent Code Representations
Authors: Mary Phuong, Max Welling, Nate Kushman, Ryota Tomioka, Sebastian Nowozin

Variational autoencoders (VAE) learn probabilistic latent variable models by optimizing a bound on the marginal likelihood of the observed data. Beyond providing a good density model a VAE model assigns to each data instance a latent code. In many applications, this latent code provides a useful high-level summary of the observation. However, the VAE may fail to learn a useful representation when the decoder family is very expressive. This is because maximum likelihood does not explicitly encourage useful representations and the latent variable is used only if it helps model the marginal distribution. This makes representation learning with VAEs unreliable. To address this issue, we propose a method for explicitly controlling the amount of information stored in the latent code. Our method can learn codes ranging from independent to nearly deterministic while benefiting from decoder capacity. Thus, we decouple the choice of decoder capacity and the latent code dimensionality from the amount of information stored in the code.
Learning Less-Overlapping Representations
Authors: Hongbao Zhang, Pengtao Xie, Eric Xing

In representation learning (RL), how to make the learned representations easy to interpret and less overfitted to training data are two important but challenging issues. To address these problems, we study a new type of regularization approach that encourages the supports of weight vectors in RL models to have small overlap, by simultaneously promoting near-orthogonality among vectors and sparsity of each vector. We apply the proposed regularizer to two models: neural networks (NNs) and sparse coding (SC), and develop an efficient ADMM-based algorithm for regularized SC. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate that weight vectors learned under our regularizer are more interpretable and have better generalization performance.
The Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark
Authors: Xiaohua Zhai, Joan Puigcerver, Alexander Kolesnikov, Pierre Ruyssen, Carlos Riquelme, Mario Lucic, Josip Djolonga, Andre Susano Pinto, Maxim Neumann, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Lucas Beyer, Olivier Bachem, Michael Tschannen, Marcin Michalski, Olivier Bousquet, Sylvain Gelly, Neil Houlsby

Representation learning promises to unlock deep learning for the long tail of vision tasks without expansive labelled datasets. Yet, the absence of a unified yardstick to evaluate general visual representations hinders progress. Many sub-fields promise representations, but each has different evaluation protocols that are either too constrained (linear classification), limited in scope (ImageNet, CIFAR, Pascal-VOC), or only loosely related to representation quality (generation). We present the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark (VTAB): a diverse, realistic, and challenging benchmark to evaluate representations. VTAB embodies one principle: good representations adapt to unseen tasks with few examples. We run a large VTAB study of popular algorithms, answering questions like: How effective are ImageNet representation on non-standard datasets? Are generative models competitive? Is self-supervision useful if one already has labels?
Efficient Sampling for Generative Adversarial Networks with Reparameterized Markov Chains
Authors: Yifei Wang, Yisen Wang, Jiansheng Yang, Zhouchen Lin

Recently, sampling methods have been successfully applied to enhance the sample quality of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, in practice, they typically have poor sample efficiency because of the independent proposal sampling from the generator. In this work, we propose REP-GAN, a novel sampling method that allows general dependent proposals by REParameterizing the Markov chains into the latent space of the generator. Theoretically, we show that our reparameterized proposal admits a closed-form Metropolis-Hastings acceptance ratio. Empirically, extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our REP-GAN largely improves the sample efficiency and obtains better sample quality simultaneously.
An Adversarial Attack via Feature Contributive Regions
Authors: Yaguan Qian, Jiamin Wang, Xiang Ling, Zhaoquan Gu, Bin Wang, Chunming Wu

Recently, to deal with the vulnerability to generate examples of CNNs, there are many advanced algorithms that have been proposed. These algorithms focus on modifying global pixels directly with small perturbations, and some work involves modifying local pixels. However, the global attacks have the problem of perturbations’ redundancy and the local attacks are not effective. To overcome this challenge, we achieve a trade-off between the perturbation power and the number of perturbed pixels in this paper. The key idea is to find the feature contributive regions (FCRs) of the images. Furthermore, in order to create an adversarial example similar to the corresponding clean image as much as possible, we redefine a loss function as the objective function of the optimization in this paper and then using gradient descent optimization algorithm to find the efficient perturbations. Various experiments have been carried out on CIFAR-10 and ILSVRC2012 datasets, which show the excellence of this method, and in addition, the FCRs attack shows strong attack ability in both white-box and black-box settings.
Distribution-Guided Local Explanation for Black-Box Classifiers
Authors: Weijie Fu, Meng Wang, Mengnan Du, Ninghao Liu, Shijie Hao, Xia Hu

Existing local explanation methods provide an explanation for each decision of black-box classifiers, in the form of relevance scores of features according to their contributions. To obtain satisfying explainability, many methods introduce ad hoc constraints into the classification loss to regularize these relevance scores. However, the large information gap between the classification loss and these constraints increases the difficulty of tuning hyper-parameters. To bridge this gap, in this paper we present a simple but effective mask predictor. Specifically, we model the above constraints with a distribution controller, and integrate it with a neural network to directly guide the distribution of relevance scores. The benefit of this strategy is to facilitate the setting of involved hyper-parameters, and enable discriminative scores over supporting features. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms others in terms of faithfulness and explainability. Meanwhile, it also provides effective saliency maps for explaining each decision.
MT-GBM: A Multi-Task Gradient Boosting Machine  with Shared Decision Trees
Authors: Zhenzhe Ying, Zhuoer Xu, LANQING XUE, Changhua Meng, Weiqiang Wang

Despite the success of deep learning in computer vision and natural language processing, Gradient Boosted Decision Tree (GBDT) is yet one of the most powerful tools for applications with tabular data such as e-commerce and FinTech. However, applying GBDT to multi-task learning is still a challenge. Unlike deep models that can jointly learn a shared latent representation across multiple tasks, GBDT can hardly learn a shared tree structure.

In this paper, we propose Multi-Task Gradient Boosting Machine (MT-GBM), a GBDT-based method for multi-task learning. The MT-GBM can find the shared tree structures and split branches according to multi-task losses. First, it assigns multiple outputs to each leaf node. Next, it computes the gradient corresponding to each output (task). Then, we also propose an algorithm to combine the gradients of all tasks and update the tree. Finally, we apply MT-GBM to LightGBM. Experiments show that our MT-GBM improves the performance of the main task significantly, which means the proposed MT-GBM is efficient and effective.
The Expressive Power of Deep Neural Networks with Circulant Matrices
Authors: Alexandre Araujo, Benjamin Negrevergne, Yann Chevaleyre, Jamal Atif

Recent results from linear algebra stating that any matrix can be decomposed into products of diagonal and circulant matrices has lead to the design of compact deep neural network architectures that perform well in practice. In this paper, we bridge the gap between these good empirical results 
and the theoretical approximation capabilities of Deep diagonal-circulant ReLU networks. More precisely, we first demonstrate  that a Deep diagonal-circulant ReLU networks of
bounded width and small depth can approximate a deep ReLU network in which the dense matrices are
of low rank. Based on this result, we provide new bounds on the expressive power and universal approximativeness of this type of networks. We support our experimental results with thorough experiments on a large, real world video classification problem.
Small-GAN: Speeding up GAN Training using Core-Sets
Authors: Samarth Sinha, Han Zhang, Anirudh Goyal, Yoshua Bengio, Hugo Larochelle, Augustus Odena

BigGAN suggests that Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) benefit disproportionately from large minibatch sizes. This finding is interesting but also discouraging -- large batch sizes  are slow and expensive to emulate on conventional hardware. Thus, it would be nice if there were some trick by which we could generate batches that were effectively big though small in practice. In this work, we propose such a trick, inspired by the use of Coreset-selection in active learning. When training a GAN, we draw a large batch of samples from the prior and then compress that batch using Coreset-selection. To create effectively large batches of real images, we create a cached dataset of Inception activations of each training image, randomly project them down to a smaller dimension, and then use Coreset-selection on those projected embeddings at training time. We conduct experiments showing that this technique substantially reduces training time and memory usage for modern GAN variants, that it reduces the fraction of dropped modes in a synthetic dataset, and that it helps us use GANs to reach a new state of the art in anomaly detection.