nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Deep Symbolic Representation Learning for Heterogeneous Time-series Classification
Authors: Shengdong Zhang, Soheil Bahrampour, Naveen Ramakrishnan, Mohak Shah

In this paper, we consider the problem of event classification with multi-variate time series data consisting of heterogeneous (continuous and categorical) variables. The complex temporal dependencies between the variables combined with sparsity of the data makes the event classification problem particularly challenging. Most state-of-art approaches address this either by designing hand-engineered features or breaking up the problem over homogeneous variates. In this work, we propose and compare three representation learning algorithms over symbolized sequences which enables classification of heterogeneous time-series data using a deep architecture. The proposed representations are trained jointly along with the rest of the network architecture in an end-to-end fashion that makes the learned features discriminative for the given task. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
Dense Recurrent Neural Network with Attention Gate
Authors: Yong-Ho Yoo, Kook Han, Sanghyun Cho, Kyoung-Chul Koh, Jong-Hwan Kim

We propose the dense RNN, which has the fully connections from each hidden state to multiple preceding hidden states of all layers directly. As the density of the connection increases, the number of paths through which the gradient flows can be increased. It increases the magnitude of gradients, which help to prevent the vanishing gradient problem in time. Larger gradients, however, can also cause exploding gradient problem. To complement the trade-off between two problems, we propose an attention gate, which controls the amounts of gradient flows. We describe the relation between the attention gate and the gradient flows by approximation. The experiment on the language modeling using Penn Treebank corpus shows dense connections with the attention gate improve the model’s performance.
Exploring the Limits of Large Scale Pre-training
Authors: Samira Abnar, Mostafa Dehghani, Behnam Neyshabur, Hanie Sedghi

Recent developments in large-scale machine learning suggest that by scaling up data, model size and training time properly, one might  observe that improvements in pre-training would transfer favorably to  most downstream tasks. In this work we systematically study this phenomena and establish that, as we increase the upstream accuracy, performance of downstream tasks \emph{saturates}. In particular, we investigate more than 4800 experiments on Vision Transformers, MLP-Mixers and ResNets with number of parameters ranging from ten million to ten billion, trained on the largest scale of available image data (JFT, ImageNet21K) and evaluated on more than 20 downstream image recognition tasks. We propose a model for downstream performance  that reflects the saturation phenomena and captures the nonlinear relationship in performance of upstream and downstream tasks. Delving deeper to understand the reasons that give rise to these phenomena, we show that the observed saturation behavior is closely related to the way that representations evolve through the layers of the models. We showcase an even more extreme scenario where performance on upstream and downstream are at odds with each other. That is, in order to have a better downstream performance, we need to hurt upstream accuracy.
Towards Synthesizing Complex Programs From Input-Output Examples
Authors: Xinyun Chen, Chang Liu, Dawn Song

In recent years, deep learning techniques have been developed to improve the performance of program synthesis from input-output examples. Albeit its significant progress, the programs that can be synthesized by state-of-the-art approaches are still simple in terms of their complexity. In this work, we move a significant step forward along this direction by proposing a new class of challenging tasks in the domain of program synthesis from input-output examples: learning a context-free parser from pairs of input programs and their parse trees. We show that this class of tasks are much more challenging than previously studied tasks, and the test accuracy of existing approaches is almost 0%.

We tackle the challenges by developing three novel techniques inspired by three novel observations, which reveal the key ingredients of using deep learning to synthesize a complex program. First, the use of a non-differentiable machine is the key to effectively restrict the search space. Thus our proposed approach learns a neural program operating a domain-specific non-differentiable machine. Second, recursion is the key to achieve generalizability. Thus, we bake-in the notion of recursion in the design of our non-differentiable machine. Third, reinforcement learning is the key to learn how to operate the non-differentiable machine, but it is also hard to train the model effectively with existing reinforcement learning algorithms from a cold boot. We develop a novel two-phase reinforcement learning-based search algorithm to overcome this issue. In our evaluation, we show that using our novel approach, neural parsing programs can be learned to achieve 100% test accuracy on test inputs that are 500x longer than the training samples.
Interactive Parallel Exploration for Reinforcement Learning in Continuous Action Spaces
Authors: Whiyoung Jung, Giseung Park, Youngchul Sung

In this paper, a new interactive parallel learning scheme is proposed to enhance the performance of off-policy continuous-action reinforcement learning.  In the proposed interactive parallel learning scheme, multiple identical learners with their own value-functions and policies share a common experience replay buffer, and search a good policy in collaboration with the guidance of the best policy information. The information of the best policy  is fused in a soft manner by constructing an augmented loss function for policy update to enlarge the overall search space by the multiple learners. The guidance by the previous best policy and the enlarged search space by the proposed interactive parallel learning scheme enable faster and better policy search in the policy parameter space. Working algorithms are constructed by  applying the proposed interactive parallel learning scheme to several off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms such as  the twin delayed deep deterministic (TD3) policy gradient algorithm and the soft actor-critic (SAC) algorithm, and numerical results show that the constructed IPE-enhanced algorithms outperform most of the current state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous action control.
Continual Learning using the SHDL Framework with Skewed Replay Distributions
Authors: Amarjot Singh, Jay McClelland

Human and animals continuously acquire, adapt as well as transfer knowledge throughout their lifespan. The ability to learn continuously is crucial for the effective functioning of agents interacting with the real world and processing continuous streams of information. Continuous learning has been a long-standing challenge for neural networks as the repeated acquisition of information from non-uniform data distributions generally lead to catastrophic forgetting or interference.  This work proposes a modular architecture capable of continuous acquisition of tasks while averting catastrophic forgetting.  Specifically, our contributions are: (i) Efficient Architecture: a modular architecture emulating the visual cortex that can learn meaningful representations with limited labelled examples, (ii) Knowledge Retention: retention of learned knowledge via limited replay of past experiences, (iii) Forward Transfer: efficient and relatively faster learning on new tasks, and (iv) Naturally Skewed Distributions: The learning  in the above-mentioned claims is performed on non-uniform data distributions which better represent the natural statistics of our ongoing experience. Several experiments that substantiate the above-mentioned claims are demonstrated on the CIFAR-100 dataset.
Sample weighting as an explanation for mode collapse in generative adversarial networks
Authors: Aksel Wilhelm Wold Eide, Eilif Solberg, Ingebjørg Kåsen

Generative adversarial networks were introduced with a logistic MiniMax cost formulation, which normally fails to train due to saturation, and a Non-Saturating reformulation. While addressing the saturation problem, NS-GAN also inverts the generator's sample weighting, implicitly shifting emphasis from higher-scoring to lower-scoring samples when updating parameters. We present both theory and empirical results suggesting that this makes NS-GAN prone to mode dropping. We design MM-nsat, which preserves MM-GAN sample weighting while avoiding saturation by rescaling the MM-GAN minibatch gradient such that its magnitude approximates NS-GAN's gradient magnitude. MM-nsat has qualitatively different training dynamics, and on MNIST and CIFAR-10 it is stronger in terms of mode coverage, stability and FID. While the empirical results for MM-nsat are promising and favorable also in comparison with the LS-GAN and Hinge-GAN formulations, our main contribution is to show how and why NS-GAN's sample weighting causes mode dropping and training collapse.
Statistical Adaptive Stochastic Optimization
Authors: Pengchuan Zhang, Hunter Lang, Qiang Liu, Lin Xiao

We investigate statistical methods for automatically scheduling the learning rate (step size) in stochastic optimization. First, we consider a broad family of stochastic optimization methods with constant hyperparameters (including the learning rate and various forms of momentum) and derive a general necessary condition for the resulting dynamics to be stationary. Based on this condition, we develop a simple online statistical test to detect (non-)stationarity and use it to automatically drop the learning rate by a constant factor whenever stationarity is detected. Unlike in prior work, our stationarity condition and our statistical test applies to different algorithms without modification. Finally, we propose a smoothed stochastic line-search method that can be used to warm up the optimization process before the statistical test can be applied effectively. This removes the expensive trial and error for setting a good initial learning rate. The combined method is highly autonomous and it attains state-of-the-art training and testing performance in our experiments on several deep learning tasks.
COLD FUSION: TRAINING SEQ2SEQ MODELS TOGETHER WITH LANGUAGE MODELS
Authors: Anuroop Sriram, Heewoo Jun, Sanjeev Satheesh, Adam Coates

Sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models with attention have excelled at tasks which involve generating natural language sentences such as machine translation, image captioning and speech recognition. Performance has further been improved by leveraging unlabeled data, often in the form of a language model. In this work, we present the Cold Fusion method, which leverages a pre-trained language model during training, and show its effectiveness on the speech recognition task. We show that Seq2Seq models with Cold Fusion are able to better utilize language information enjoying i) faster convergence and better generalization, and ii) almost complete transfer to a new domain while using less than 10% of the labeled training data.
Understanding AdamW through Proximal Methods and Scale-Freeness
Authors: Zhenxun Zhuang, Mingrui Liu, Ashok Cutkosky, Francesco Orabona

Adam has been widely adopted for training deep neural networks due to less hyperparameter tuning and remarkable performance. To improve generalization, Adam is typically used in tandem with a squared $\ell_2$ regularizer (referred to as Adam-$\ell_2$). However, even better performance can be obtained with AdamW, which decouples the gradient of the regularizer from the update rule of Adam-$\ell_2$. Yet, we are still lacking a complete explanation of the advantages of AdamW. In this paper, we tackle this question from both an optimization and an empirical point of view. First, we show how to re-interpret AdamW as an approximation of a proximal gradient method, which takes advantage of the closed-form proximal mapping of the regularizer instead of only utilizing its gradient information as in Adam-$\ell_2$. Next, we consider the property of ``scale-freeness'' enjoyed by AdamW and by its proximal counterpart: their updates are invariant to component-wise rescaling of the gradients. We provide empirical evidence across a wide range of deep learning experiments showing a correlation between the problems in which AdamW exhibits an advantage over Adam-$\ell_2$ and the degree to which we expect the gradients of the network to exhibit multiple scales, thus motivating the hypothesis that the advantage of AdamW could be due to the scale-free updates.
Analytical Moment Regularizer for Training Robust Networks
Authors: Modar Alfadly, Adel Bibi, Muhammed Kocabas, Bernard Ghanem

Despite the impressive performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) on numerous learning  tasks, they still exhibit uncouth behaviours. One puzzling behaviour is the subtle sensitive reaction of DNNs to various noise attacks. Such a nuisance has strengthened the line of research around developing and training noise-robust networks. In this work, we propose a new training regularizer that aims to minimize the probabilistic expected training loss of a DNN subject to a generic Gaussian input. We provide an efficient and simple approach to approximate such a regularizer for arbitrarily deep networks. This is done by leveraging the analytic expression of the output mean of a shallow neural network, avoiding the need for memory and computation expensive data augmentation. We conduct extensive experiments on LeNet and AlexNet on various datasets including MNIST, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100 to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed regularizer. In particular, we show that networks that are trained with the proposed regularizer benefit from a boost in robustness against Gaussian noise to an equivalent amount of performing 3-21 folds of noisy data augmentation. Moreover, we empirically show on several architectures and datasets that improving robustness against Gaussian noise, by using the new regularizer, can improve the overall robustness against 6 other types of attacks by two orders of magnitude.
Automated curriculum generation through setter-solver interactions
Authors: Sebastien Racaniere, Andrew Lampinen, Adam Santoro, David Reichert, Vlad Firoiu, Timothy Lillicrap

Reinforcement learning algorithms use correlations between policies and rewards to improve agent performance.   But in dynamic or sparsely rewarding environments these correlations are often too small,  or rewarding events are too infrequent to make learning feasible. Human education instead relies on curricula –the breakdown of tasks into simpler, static challenges with dense rewards– to build up to complex behaviors.  While curricula are also useful for artificial agents, hand-crafting them is time consuming.  This has lead researchers to explore automatic curriculum generation. Here we explore automatic curriculum generation in rich,dynamic environments.  Using a setter-solver paradigm we show the importance of considering goal validity, goal feasibility, and goal coverage to construct useful curricula.  We demonstrate the success of our approach in rich but sparsely rewarding 2D and 3D environments, where an agent is tasked to achieve a single goal selected from a set of possible goals that varies between episodes, and identify challenges for future work.  Finally, we demonstrate the value of a novel technique that guides agents towards a desired goal distribution. Altogether, these results represent a substantial step towards applying automatic task curricula to learn complex,  otherwise unlearnable goals,  and to our knowledge are the first to demonstrate automated curriculum generation for goal-conditioned agents in environments where the possible goals vary between episodes.
Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGAN
Authors: Jiahui Yu, Xin Li, Jing Yu Koh, Han Zhang, Ruoming Pang, James Qin, Alexander Ku, Yuanzhong Xu, Jason Baldridge, Yonghui Wu

Pretraining language models with next-token prediction on massive text corpora has delivered phenomenal zero-shot, few-shot, transfer learning and multi-tasking capabilities on both generative and discriminative language tasks. Motivated by this success, we explore a Vector-quantized Image Modeling (VIM) approach that involves pretraining a Transformer to predict rasterized image tokens autoregressively. The discrete image tokens are encoded from a learned Vision-Transformer-based VQGAN (ViT-VQGAN). We first propose multiple improvements over vanilla VQGAN from architecture to codebook learning, yielding better efficiency and reconstruction fidelity. The improved ViT-VQGAN further improves vector-quantized image modeling tasks, including unconditional, class-conditioned image generation and unsupervised representation learning. When trained on ImageNet at 256x256 resolution, we achieve Inception Score (IS) of 175.1 and Fr'echet Inception Distance (FID) of 4.17, a dramatic improvement over the vanilla VQGAN, which obtains 70.6 and 17.04 for IS and FID, respectively. Based on ViT-VQGAN and unsupervised pretraining, we further evaluate the pretrained Transformer by averaging intermediate features, similar to Image GPT (iGPT). This ImageNet-pretrained VIM-L significantly beats iGPT-L on linear-probe accuracy from 60.3% to 73.2% for a similar model size. ViM-L also outperforms iGPT-XL which is trained with extra web image data and larger model size.
Dynamic Backdoor Attacks Against Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Ahmed Salem, Rui Wen, Michael Backes, Shiqing Ma, Yang Zhang

Current Deep Neural Network (DNN) backdooring attacks rely on adding static triggers (with fixed patterns and locations) on model inputs that are prone to detection.  In this paper, we propose the first class of dynamic backdooring techniques: Random Backdoor, Backdoor Generating Network (BaN), and conditional Backdoor Generating Network (c-BaN). Triggers generated by our techniques have random patterns and locations. In particular, BaN and c-BaN based on a novel generative network are the first two schemes that algorithmically generate triggers.  Moreover, c-BaN is the first conditional backdooring technique that given a target label, it can generate a target-specific trigger.  Both BaN and c-BaN are essentially a general framework which renders the adversary the flexibility for further customizing backdoor attacks. We extensively evaluate our techniques on three benchmark datasets and show that our techniques achieve almost perfect attack performance on backdoored data with a negligible utility loss. More importantly, our techniques can bypass state-of-the-art defense mechanisms.
Auto-Conditioned Recurrent Networks for Extended Complex Human Motion Synthesis
Authors: Yi Zhou, Zimo Li, Shuangjiu Xiao, Chong He, Zeng Huang, Hao Li

We present a real-time method for synthesizing highly complex human motions using a novel training regime we call the auto-conditioned Recurrent Neural Network (acRNN). Recently, researchers have attempted to synthesize new motion by using autoregressive techniques, but existing methods tend to freeze or diverge after a couple of seconds due to an accumulation of errors that are fed back into the network. Furthermore, such methods have only been shown to be reliable for relatively simple human motions, such as walking or running. In contrast, our approach can synthesize arbitrary motions with highly complex styles, including dances or martial arts in addition to locomotion. The acRNN is able to accomplish this by explicitly accommodating for autoregressive noise accumulation during training. Our work is the first to our knowledge that demonstrates the ability to generate over 18,000 continuous frames (300 seconds) of new complex human motion w.r.t. different styles.
Learning Pseudometric-based Action Representations for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Pengjie Gu, Mengchen Zhao, Chen Chen, Dong Li, Jianye Hao, Bo An

Offline reinforcement learning is a promising approach for practical applications since it does not require interactions with real-world environments. However, existing offline RL methods only work well in environments with continuous or small discrete action spaces. In environments with large and discrete action spaces, such as recommender systems and dialogue systems, the performance of existing methods decreases drastically because they suffer from inaccurate value estimation for a large proportion of o.o.d. actions. While recent works have demonstrated that online RL benefits from incorporating semantic information in action representations, unfortunately, they fail to learn reasonable relative distances between action representations, which is key to offline RL to reduce the influence of out-of-distribution (o.o.d.) actions. This paper proposes an action representation learning framework for offline RL based on a pseudometric, which measures both the behavioral relation and the data-distributional relation between actions.  We provide theoretical analysis on the continuity and the bounds of the expected Q-values using the learned action representations. Experimental results show that our methods significantly improve the performance of two typical offline RL methods in environments with large and discrete action spaces.
Model-based micro-data reinforcement learning: what are the crucial model properties and which model to choose?
Authors: Balázs Kégl, Gabriel Hurtado, Albert Thomas

We contribute to micro-data model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) by rigorously comparing popular generative models using a fixed (random shooting) control agent. We find that on an environment that requires multimodal posterior predictives, mixture density nets outperform all other models by a large margin. When multimodality is not required, our surprising finding is that we do not need probabilistic posterior predictives: deterministic models are on par, in fact they consistently (although non-significantly) outperform their probabilistic counterparts. We also found that heteroscedasticity at training time, perhaps acting as a regularizer, improves predictions at longer horizons. At the methodological side, we design metrics and an experimental protocol which can be used to evaluate the various models, predicting their asymptotic performance when using them on the control problem. Using this framework, we improve the state-of-the-art sample complexity of MBRL on Acrobot by two to four folds, using an aggressive training schedule which is outside of the hyperparameter interval usually considered.
Multi-resolution modeling of a discrete stochastic process identifies causes of cancer
Authors: Adam Uri Yaari, Maxwell Sherman, Oliver Clarke Priebe, Po-Ru Loh, Boris Katz, Andrei Barbu, Bonnie Berger

Detection of cancer-causing mutations within the vast and mostly unexplored human genome is a major challenge. Doing so requires modeling the background mutation rate, a highly non-stationary stochastic process, across regions of interest varying in size from one to millions of positions. Here, we present the split-Poisson-Gamma (SPG) distribution, an extension of the classical Poisson-Gamma formulation, to model a discrete stochastic process at multiple resolutions. We demonstrate that the probability model has a closed-form posterior, enabling efficient and accurate linear-time prediction over any length scale after the parameters of the model have been inferred a single time. We apply our framework to model mutation rates in tumors and show that model parameters can be accurately inferred from high-dimensional epigenetic data using a convolutional neural network, Gaussian process, and maximum-likelihood estimation. Our method is both more accurate and more efficient than existing models over a large range of length scales. We demonstrate the usefulness of multi-resolution modeling by detecting genomic elements that drive tumor emergence and are of vastly differing sizes.