nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
ARMCMC: Online Model Parameters full probability Estimation in Bayesian Paradigm
Authors: Pedram Agand, Mo Chen, Hamid D. Taghirad

Although the Bayesian paradigm provides a rigorous framework to estimate the full probability distribution over unknown parameters,  its online  implementation can be challenging due to heavy computational costs. This paper proposes Adaptive Recursive Markov Chain Monte Carlo (ARMCMC) which estimates full probability density of model parameters while alleviating  shortcomings of conventional online approaches. These shortcomings include: being solely able to account for Gaussian noise, being applicable to systems with linear in the parameters (LIP) constraint, or having requirements on persistence excitation (PE). In ARMCMC, we propose a variable jump distribution, which depends on a temporal forgetting factor.  This allows one to adjust the trade-off between exploitation and exploration, depending on whether there is an abrupt change to the parameter being estimated. We prove that ARMCMC requires fewer samples to achieve the same precision and reliability compared to conventional MCMC approaches.  We demonstrate our approach on two challenging benchmark:  the estimation of parameters in a soft bending actuator and the Hunt-Crossley dynamic model. Our method shows at-least 70% improvement in parameter point estimation accuracy and approximately 55% reduction in tracking error of the value of interest compared to recursive least squares and conventional MCMC.
FLAG: Adversarial Data Augmentation for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Kezhi Kong, Guohao Li, Mucong Ding, Zuxuan Wu, Chen Zhu, Bernard Ghanem, Gavin Taylor, Tom Goldstein

Data augmentation helps neural networks generalize better, but it remains an open question how to effectively augment graph data to enhance the performance of GNNs (Graph Neural Networks). While most existing graph regularizers focus on augmenting graph topological structures by adding/removing edges, we offer a novel direction to augment in the input node feature space for better performance. We propose a simple but effective solution, FLAG (Free Large-scale Adversarial Augmentation on Graphs), which iteratively augments node features with gradient-based adversarial perturbations during training, and boosts performance at test time. Empirically, FLAG can be easily implemented with a dozen lines of code and is flexible enough to function with any GNN backbone, on a wide variety of large-scale datasets, and in both transductive and inductive settings. Without modifying a model's architecture or training setup, FLAG yields a consistent and salient performance boost across both node and graph classification tasks. Using FLAG, we reach state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale ogbg-molpcba, ogbg-ppa, and ogbg-code datasets.
On Batch-size Selection for Stochastic Training for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Yaochen Hu, Amit Levi, Ishaan Kumar, Yingxue Zhang, Mark Coates

Batch size is an important hyper-parameter for training deep learning models with stochastic gradient decent (SGD) method, and it has great influence on the training time and model performance. We study the batch size selection problem for training graph neural network (GNN) with SGD method. 
To reduce the training time while keeping a decent model performance, we propose a metric that combining both the variance of gradients and compute time for each mini-batch. We theoretically analyze how batch-size influence such a metric and propose the formula to evaluate some rough range of optimal batch size. 
In GNN, gradients evaluated on samples in a mini-batch are not independent and it is challenging to evaluate the exact variance of gradients. To address the dependency, we analyze an estimator for gradients that considers the randomness arising from two consecutive layers in GNN, and suggest a guideline for picking the appropriate scale of the batch size. 
We complement our theoretical results with extensive empirical experiments for ClusterGCN, FastGCN and GraphSAINT on 4 datasets: Ogbn-products, Ogbn-arxiv, Reddit and Pubmed. We demonstrate that in contrast to conventional deep learning models, GNNs benefit from large batch sizes.
Model-Based Visual Planning with Self-Supervised Functional Distances
Authors: Stephen Tian, Suraj Nair, Frederik Ebert, Sudeep Dasari, Benjamin Eysenbach, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine

A generalist robot must be able to complete a variety of tasks in its environment. One appealing way to specify each task is in terms of a goal observation. However, learning goal-reaching policies with reinforcement learning remains a challenging problem, particularly when hand-engineered reward functions are not available. Learned dynamics models are a promising approach for learning about the environment without rewards or task-directed data, but planning to reach goals with such a model requires a notion of functional similarity between observations and goal states. We present a self-supervised method for model-based visual goal reaching, which uses both a visual dynamics model as well as a dynamical distance function learned using model-free reinforcement learning. Our approach learns entirely using offline, unlabeled data, making it practical to scale to large and diverse datasets. In our experiments, we find that our method can successfully learn models that perform a variety of tasks at test-time, moving objects amid distractors with a simulated robotic arm and even learning to open and close a drawer using a real-world robot. In comparisons, we find that this approach substantially outperforms both model-free and model-based prior methods.
Blending Diverse Physical Priors with Neural Networks
Authors: Yunhao Ba, Guangyuan Zhao, Achuta Kadambi

Rethinking physics in the era of deep learning is an increasingly important topic. This topic is special because, in addition to data, one can leverage a vast library of physical prior models (e.g. kinematics, fluid flow, etc) to perform more robust inference. The nascent sub-field of physics-based learning (PBL) studies this problem of blending neural networks with physical priors. While previous PBL algorithms have been applied successfully to specific tasks, it is hard to generalize existing PBL methods to a wide range of physics-based problems. Such generalization would require an architecture that can adapt to variations in the correctness of the physics, or in the quality of training data. No such architecture exists. In this paper, we aim to generalize PBL, by making a first attempt to bring neural architecture search (NAS) to the realm of PBL. We introduce a new method known as physics-based neural architecture search (PhysicsNAS) that is a top-performer across a diverse range of quality in the physical model and the dataset.
On the Robustness of Sentiment Analysis for Stock Price Forecasting
Authors: Gabriel Deza, Colin Rowat, Nicolas Papernot

Machine learning (ML) models are known to be vulnerable to attacks both at training and test time. Despite the extensive literature on adversarial ML, prior efforts focus primarily on applications of computer vision to object recognition or sentiment analysis to movie reviews. In these settings, the incentives for adversaries to manipulate the model's prediction are often unclear and attacks require extensive control of direct inputs to the model. This makes it difficult to evaluate how severe the impact of vulnerabilities exposed is on systems deploying ML with little provenance guarantees for the input data. In this paper, we study adversarial ML with stock price forecasting. Adversarial incentives are clear and may be quantified experimentally through a simulated portfolio.  We replicate an industry standard pipeline, which performs a sentiment analysis of Twitter data to forecast trends in stock prices. We show that an adversary can exploit the lack of provenance to indirectly use tweets to  manipulate the model's perceived sentiment about a target company and in turn force the model to forecast price erroneously. Our attack is mounted at test time and does not modify the training data. Given past market anomalies, we conclude with a series of recommendations for the use of machine learning as input signal to trading algorithms.
BOIL: Towards Representation Change for Few-shot Learning
Authors: Jaehoon Oh, Hyungjun Yoo, ChangHwan Kim, Se-Young Yun

Model Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) is one of the most representative of gradient-based meta-learning algorithms. MAML learns new tasks with a few data samples using inner updates from a meta-initialization point and learns the meta-initialization parameters with outer updates. It has recently been hypothesized that representation reuse, which makes little change in efficient representations, is the dominant factor in the performance of the meta-initialized model through MAML in contrast to representation change, which causes a significant change in representations. In this study, we investigate the necessity of representation change for the ultimate goal of few-shot learning, which is solving domain-agnostic tasks. To this aim, we propose a novel meta-learning algorithm, called BOIL (Body Only update in Inner Loop), which updates only the body (extractor) of the model and freezes the head (classifier) during inner loop updates. BOIL leverages representation change rather than representation reuse. A frozen head cannot achieve better results than even a random guessing classifier at the initial point of new tasks, and feature vectors (representations) have to move quickly to their corresponding frozen head vectors. We visualize this property using cosine similarity, CKA, and empirical results without the head. Although the inner loop updates purely hinge on representation change, BOIL empirically shows significant performance improvement over MAML, particularly on cross-domain tasks. The results imply that representation change in gradient-based meta-learning approaches is a critical component.
Graph Deformer Network
Authors: Wenting Zhao, Yuan Fang, Zhen Cui, Tong Zhang, Jian Yang, Wei Liu

Convolution learning on graphs draws increasing attention recently due to its potential applications to a large amount of irregular data. Most graph convolution methods leverage the plain summation/average aggregation to avoid the discrepancy of responses from isomorphic graphs. However, such an extreme collapsing way would result in a structural loss and signal entanglement of nodes, which further cause the degradation of the learning ability. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective graph deformer network (GDN) to fulfill anisotropic convolution filtering on graphs,  analogous to the standard convolution operation on images. Local neighborhood subgraphs (acting like receptive fields) with different structures are deformed into a unified virtual space, coordinated by several anchor nodes. In space deformation, we transfer components of nodes therein into anchors by learning their correlation, and build a pseudo multi-granularity plane calibrated with anchors. Anisotropic convolutional kernels can be further performed over the anchor-coordinated space to well encode local variations of receptive fields. By parameterizing anchors and stacking coarsening layers, we build a graph deformer network in an end-to-end fashion. Theoretical analysis indicates its connection to previous work and shows the promising property of isomorphism testing. Extensive experiments on widely-used datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed GDN in node and graph classifications.
EigenGame: PCA as a Nash Equilibrium
Authors: Ian Gemp, Brian McWilliams, Claire Vernade, Thore Graepel

We present a novel view on principal components analysis as a competitive game in which each approximate eigenvector is controlled by a player whose goal is to maximize their own utility function. We analyze the properties of this PCA game and the behavior of its gradient based updates. The resulting algorithm---which combines elements from Oja's rule with a  generalized Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization---is naturally decentralized and hence parallelizable through message passing. We demonstrate the scalability of the algorithm with experiments on large image datasets and neural network activations. We discuss how this new view of PCA as a differentiable game can lead to further algorithmic developments and insights.
Deep Coherent Exploration For Continuous Control
Authors: Yijie Zhang, Herke van Hoof

In policy search methods for reinforcement learning (RL), exploration is often performed by injecting noise either in action space at each step independently or in parameter space over each full trajectory. In prior work, it has been shown that with linear policies, a more balanced trade-off between these two exploration strategies is beneficial. However, that method did not scale to policies using deep neural networks. In this paper, we introduce Deep Coherent Exploration, a general and scalable exploration framework for deep RL algorithms on continuous control, that generalizes step-based and trajectory-based exploration. This framework models the last layer parameters of the policy network as latent variables and uses a recursive inference step within the policy update to handle these latent variables in a scalable manner. We find that Deep Coherent Exploration improves the speed and stability of learning of A2C, PPO, and SAC on several continuous control tasks.
Sensitivity and Generalization in Neural Networks: an Empirical Study
Authors: Roman Novak, Yasaman Bahri, Daniel A. Abolafia, Jeffrey Pennington, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

In practice it is often found that large over-parameterized neural networks generalize better than their smaller counterparts, an observation that appears to conflict with classical notions of function complexity, which typically favor smaller models. In this work, we investigate this tension between complexity and generalization through an extensive empirical exploration of two natural metrics of complexity related to sensitivity to input perturbations. Our experiments survey thousands of models with different architectures, optimizers, and other hyper-parameters, as well as four different image classification datasets.

We find that trained neural networks are more robust to input perturbations in the vicinity of the training data manifold, as measured by the input-output Jacobian of the network, and that this correlates well with generalization. We further establish that factors associated with poor generalization -- such as full-batch training or using random labels -- correspond to higher sensitivity, while factors associated with good generalization  -- such as data augmentation and ReLU non-linearities -- give rise to more robust functions. Finally, we demonstrate how the input-output Jacobian norm can be predictive of generalization at the level of individual test points.
Quantifying Statistical Significance of Neural Network Representation-Driven Hypotheses by Selective Inference
Authors: Vo Nguyen Le Duy, Shogo Iwazaki, Ichiro Takeuchi

In the past few years, various approaches have been developed to explain and interpret deep neural network (DNN) representations, but it has been pointed out that these representations are sometimes unstable and not reproducible. In this paper, we interpret these representations as hypotheses driven by DNN (called DNN-driven hypotheses) and propose a method to quantify the reliability of these hypotheses in statistical hypothesis testing framework. To this end, we introduce Selective Inference (SI) framework, which has received much attention in the past few years as a new statistical inference framework for data-driven hypotheses. The basic idea of SI is to make conditional inferences on the selected hypotheses under the condition that they are selected. In order to use SI framework for DNN representations, we develop a new SI algorithm based on homotopy method which enables us to derive the exact (non-asymptotic) conditional sampling distribution of the DNN-driven hypotheses. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, through which we offer evidence that our proposed method can successfully control the false positive rate, has decent performance in terms of computational efficiency, and provides good results in practical applications.
Monotonic Robust Policy Optimization with Model Discrepancy
Authors: Yuankun Jiang, Chenglin Li, Junni Zou, Wenrui Dai, Hongkai Xiong

State-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms tend to overfit in some specific environments due to the lack of data diversity in training. To mitigate the model discrepancy between training and target (testing) environments, domain randomization (DR) can generate plenty of environments with a sufficient diversity by randomly sampling environment parameters in simulator. Though standard DR using a uniform distribution improves the average performance on the whole range of environments, the worst-case environment is usually neglected without any performance guarantee. Since the average and worst-case performance are equally important for the generalization in RL, in this paper, we propose a policy optimization approach for concurrently improving the policy's performance in the average case (i.e., over all possible environments) and the worst-case environment. We theoretically derive a lower bound for the worst-case performance of a given policy over all environments. Guided by this lower bound, we formulate an optimization problem which aims to optimize the policy and sampling distribution together, such that the constrained expected performance of all environments is maximized. We prove that the worst-case performance is monotonically improved by iteratively solving this optimization problem. Based on the proposed lower bound, we develop a practical algorithm, named monotonic robust policy optimization (MRPO), and validate MRPO on several robot control tasks. By modifying the environment parameters in simulation, we obtain environments for the same task but with different transition dynamics for training and testing. We demonstrate that MRPO can improve both the average and worst-case performance in the training environments, and facilitate the learned policy with a better generalization capability in unseen testing environments.
Wavelet-Packet Powered Deepfake Image Detection
Authors: Moritz Wolter, Felix Blanke, Charles Tapley Hoyt, Jochen Garcke

As neural networks become able to generate realistic artificial images, they have the potential to improve movies, music, video games and make the internet an even more creative and inspiring place.
Yet, at the same time, the latest technology potentially enables new digital ways to lie. In response, the need for a diverse and reliable method toolbox arises to identify artificial images and other content.
Previous work primarily relies on pixel-space CNN or the Fourier transform. To the best of our knowledge, synthesized fake image analysis and detection methods based on a multi-scale wavelet representation,
which is localized in both space and frequency, have been absent thus far. 
This paper proposes to learn a model for the detection of synthetic images based on the wavelet-packet representation of natural and GAN-generated images. We evaluate our method on FFHQ, CelebA, and LSUN source identification problems and find improved or competitive performance. Our forensic classifier has a small network size and can be learned efficiently.
Furthermore, a comparison of the wavelet coefficients from these two sources of images allows an interpretation and identifies significant differences.
F8Net: Fixed-Point 8-bit Only Multiplication for Network Quantization
Authors: Qing Jin, Jian Ren, Richard Zhuang, Sumant Hanumante, Zhengang Li, Zhiyu Chen, Yanzhi Wang, Kaiyuan Yang, Sergey Tulyakov

Neural network quantization is a promising compression technique to reduce memory footprint and save energy consumption, potentially leading to real-time inference. However, there is a performance gap between quantized and full-precision models. To reduce it, existing quantization approaches require high-precision INT32 or full-precision multiplication during inference for scaling or dequantization. This introduces a noticeable cost in terms of memory, speed, and required energy. To tackle these issues, we present F8Net, a novel quantization framework consisting in only ﬁxed-point 8-bit multiplication. To derive our method, we ﬁrst discuss the advantages of ﬁxed-point multiplication with different formats of ﬁxed-point numbers and study the statistical behavior of the associated ﬁxed-point numbers. Second, based on the statistical and algorithmic analysis, we apply different ﬁxed-point formats for weights and activations of different layers. We introduce a novel algorithm to automatically determine the right format for each layer during training. Third, we analyze a previous quantization algorithm—parameterized clipping activation (PACT)—and reformulate it using ﬁxed-point arithmetic. Finally, we unify the recently proposed method for quantization ﬁne-tuning and our ﬁxed-point approach to show the potential of our method. We verify F8Net on ImageNet for MobileNet V1/V2 and ResNet18/50. Our approach achieves comparable and better performance, when compared not only to existing quantization techniques with INT32 multiplication or ﬂoating point arithmetic, but also to the full-precision counterparts, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Assessing Generalization in TD methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Emmanuel Bengio, Doina Precup, Joelle Pineau

Current Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods  can exhibit both data inefficiency and brittleness, which seem to indicate that they generalize poorly. In this work, we experimentally analyze this issue through the lens of memorization, and show that it can be observed directly during training. More precisely, we find that Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) trained with supervised tasks on trajectories capture temporal structure well, but DNNs trained with TD(0) methods struggle to do so, while using TD(lambda) targets leads to better generalization.
Is Label Smoothing Truly Incompatible with Knowledge Distillation: An Empirical Study
Authors: Zhiqiang Shen, Zechun Liu, Dejia Xu, Zitian Chen, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Marios Savvides

This work aims to empirically clarify a recently discovered perspective that label smoothing is incompatible with knowledge distillation. We begin by introducing the motivation behind on how this incompatibility is raised, i.e., label smoothing erases relative information between teacher logits. We provide a novel connection on how label smoothing affects distributions of semantically similar and dissimilar classes. Then we propose a metric to quantitatively measure the degree of erased information in sample's representation. After that, we study its one-sidedness and imperfection of the incompatibility view through massive analyses, visualizations and comprehensive experiments on Image Classification, Binary Networks, and Neural Machine Translation. Finally, we broadly discuss several circumstances wherein label smoothing will indeed lose its effectiveness.