nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Semi-Supervised Learning with Normalizing Flows
Authors: Pavel Izmailov, Polina Kirichenko, Marc Finzi, Andrew Wilson

We propose Flow Gaussian Mixture Model (FlowGMM), a general-purpose method for semi-supervised learning based on a simple and principled probabilistic framework. We approximate the joint distribution of the labeled and unlabeled data with a flexible mixture model implemented as a Gaussian mixture transformed by a normalizing flow. We train the model by maximizing the exact joint likelihood of the labeled and unlabeled data. We evaluate FlowGMM on a wide range of semi-supervised classification  problems across different data types: AG-News and Yahoo Answers text data, MNIST, SVHN and CIFAR-10 image classification problems as well as tabular UCI datasets. FlowGMM achieves promising results on image classification problems and outperforms the competing methods on other types of data. FlowGMM learns an interpretable latent repesentation space and allows hyper-parameter free feature visualization at real time rates. Finally, we show that FlowGMM can be calibrated to produce meaningful uncertainty estimates for its predictions.
Source-Free Adaptation to Measurement Shift via Bottom-Up Feature Restoration
Authors: Cian Eastwood, Ian Mason, Chris Williams, Bernhard Schölkopf

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt a model trained on labelled data in a source domain to unlabelled data in a target domain without access to the source-domain data during adaptation. Existing methods for SFDA leverage entropy-minimization techniques which: (i) apply only to classification; (ii) destroy model calibration; and (iii) rely on the source model achieving a good level of feature-space class-separation in the target domain. We address these issues for a particularly pervasive type of domain shift called measurement shift which can be resolved by restoring the source features rather than extracting new ones. In particular, we propose Feature Restoration (FR) wherein we: (i) store a lightweight and flexible approximation of the feature distribution under the source data; and (ii) adapt the feature-extractor such that the approximate feature distribution under the target data realigns with that saved on the source. We additionally propose a bottom-up training scheme which boosts performance, which we call Bottom-Up Feature Restoration (BUFR). On real and synthetic data, we demonstrate that BUFR outperforms existing SFDA methods in terms of accuracy, calibration, and data efficiency, while being less reliant on the performance of the source model in the target domain.
Learning to Represent Programs with Graphs
Authors: Miltiadis Allamanis, Marc Brockschmidt, Mahmoud Khademi

Learning tasks on source code (i.e., formal languages) have been considered recently, but most work has tried to transfer natural language methods and does not capitalize on the unique opportunities offered by code's known syntax. For example, long-range dependencies induced by using the same variable or function in distant locations are often not considered. We propose to use graphs to represent both the syntactic and semantic structure of code and use graph-based deep learning methods to learn to reason over program structures.

In this work, we present how to construct graphs from source code and how to scale Gated Graph Neural Networks training to such large graphs. We evaluate our method on two tasks: VarNaming, in which a network attempts to predict the name of a variable given its usage, and VarMisuse, in which the network learns to reason about selecting the correct variable that should be used at a given program location. Our comparison to methods that use less structured program representations shows the advantages of modeling known structure, and suggests that our models learn to infer meaningful names and to solve the VarMisuse task in many cases. Additionally, our testing showed that VarMisuse identifies a number of bugs in mature open-source projects.
Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning
Authors: Kaidi Cao, Maria Brbic, Jure Leskovec

A fundamental limitation of applying semi-supervised learning in real-world settings is the assumption that unlabeled test data contains only classes previously encountered in the labeled training data. However, this assumption rarely holds for data in-the-wild, where instances belonging to novel classes may appear at testing time. Here, we introduce a novel open-world semi-supervised learning setting that formalizes the notion that novel classes may appear in the unlabeled test data. In this novel setting, the goal is to solve the class distribution mismatch problem between labeled and unlabeled data, where at the test time every input instance either needs to be classified into one of the existing classes or a new unseen class needs to be initialized and the instance assigned to it. To tackle this challenging problem, we propose ORCA, an end-to-end approach that assigns instances to previously seen classes or  forms novel classes by grouping similar instances without assuming any prior knowledge. The key idea in ORCA is to utilize uncertainty adaptive margin to circumvent the bias towards seen classes caused by learning seen classes faster than the novel classes. In this way, ORCA gradually increases the discriminability of the model during the training and reduces the gap between intra-class variance of seen with respect to novel classes. Extensive experiments on image classification datasets and a single-cell dataset demonstrate that ORCA consistently outperforms alternative baselines, achieving 25% improvement on seen and 96% improvement on novel classes of the ImageNet dataset.
On the Effectiveness of Weight-Encoded Neural Implicit 3D Shapes   
Authors: Thomas Ryan Davies, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Alec Jacobson

A neural implicit outputs a number indicating whether the given query point in space is inside, outside, or on a surface. Many prior works have focused on _latent-encoded_ neural implicits, where a latent vector encoding of a specific shape is also fed as input. While affording latent-space interpolation, this comes at the cost of reconstruction accuracy for any _single_ shape.  Training a specific network for each 3D shape, a _weight-encoded_ neural implicit may forgo the latent vector and focus reconstruction accuracy on the details of a single shape. While previously considered as an intermediary representation for 3D scanning tasks or as a toy-problem leading up to latent-encoding tasks, weight-encoded neural implicits have not yet been taken seriously as a 3D shape representation. In this paper, we establish that weight-encoded neural implicits meet the criteria of a first-class 3D shape representation. We introduce a suite of technical contributions to improve reconstruction accuracy, convergence, and robustness when learning the signed distance field induced by a polygonal mesh --- the _de facto_ standard representation. Viewed as a lossy compression, our conversion outperforms standard techniques from geometry processing. Compared to previous latent- and weight-encoded neural implicits we demonstrate superior robustness, scalability, and performance.
Faster No-Regret Learning Dynamics for Extensive-Form Correlated Equilibrium
Authors: Ioannis Anagnostides, Gabriele Farina, Christian Kroer, Tuomas Sandholm

A recent emerging trend in the literature on learning in games has been concerned with providing accelerated learning dynamics for correlated and coarse correlated equilibria in normal-form games. Much less is known about the significantly more challenging setting of extensive-form games, which can capture sequential and simultaneous moves, as well as imperfect information. In this paper, we develop faster no-regret learning dynamics for \textit{extensive-form correlated equilibrium (EFCE)} in multiplayer general-sum imperfect-information extensive-form games. When all agents play $T$ repetitions of the game according to the accelerated dynamics, the correlated distribution of play is an $O(T^{-3/4})$-approximate EFCE. This significantly improves over the best prior rate of $O(T^{-1/2})$. One of our conceptual contributions is to connect predictive (that is, optimistic) regret minimization with the framework of $\Phi$-regret. One of our main technical contributions is to characterize the stability of certain fixed point strategies through a refined perturbation analysis of a structured Markov chain, which may be of independent interest. 
Finally, experiments on standard benchmarks corroborate our findings.
Churn Reduction via Distillation
Authors: Heinrich Jiang, Harikrishna Narasimhan, Dara Bahri, Andrew Cotter, Afshin Rostamizadeh

In real-world systems, models are frequently updated as more data becomes available, and in addition to achieving high accuracy, the goal is to also maintain a low difference in predictions compared to the base model (i.e. predictive churn). If model retraining results in vastly different behavior, then it could cause negative effects in downstream systems, especially if this churn can be avoided with limited impact on model accuracy. In this paper, we show an equivalence between training with distillation using the base model as the teacher and training with an explicit constraint on the predictive churn. We then show that distillation performs strongly for low churn training against a number of recent baselines on a wide range of datasets and model architectures, including fully-connected networks, convolutional networks, and transformers.
Open Loop Hyperparameter Optimization and Determinantal Point Processes
Authors: Jesse Dodge, Kevin Jamieson, Noah Smith

Driven by the need for parallelizable hyperparameter optimization methods, this paper studies open loop search methods: sequences that are predetermined and can be generated before a single configuration is evaluated. Examples include grid search, uniform random search, low discrepancy sequences, and other sampling distributions.
In particular, we propose the use of k-determinantal point processes in  hyperparameter optimization via random search. Compared to conventional uniform random search where hyperparameter settings are sampled independently, a k-DPP promotes diversity.  We describe an approach that transforms hyperparameter search spaces for efficient use with a k-DPP. In addition, we introduce a novel Metropolis-Hastings algorithm which can sample from k-DPPs defined over any space from which uniform samples can be drawn, including spaces with a mixture of discrete and continuous dimensions or tree structure. Our experiments show significant benefits  in realistic scenarios with a limited budget for training supervised learners, whether in serial or parallel.
Self-supervised Contrastive Zero to Few-shot Learning from Small, Long-tailed Text data
Authors: Nils Rethmeier, Isabelle Augenstein

For natural language processing (NLP) ‘text-to-text’ tasks, prevailing approaches heavily rely on pretraining large self-supervised models on massive external datasources.  However, this methodology is being critiqued for: exceptional compute and pretraining data requirements; diminishing returns on both large and small datasets; and importantly, favourable evaluation settings that overestimate performance differences.  The core belief behind current methodology, coined 'the bitter lesson' by R. Sutton, is that 'compute scale-up beats data and compute-efficient algorithms', neglecting that progress in compute hardware scale-up is based almost entirely on the miniaturisation of resource consumption.  We thus approach pretraining from a miniaturisation perspective, such as not to require massive external data sources and models, or learned translations from continuous input embeddings to discrete labels.  To minimise overly favourable evaluation, we examine learning on a long-tailed, low-resource, multi-label text classification dataset with noisy, highly sparse labels and many rare concepts.  To this end, we propose a novel 'dataset-internal' contrastive autoencoding approach to self-supervised pretraining and demonstrate marked improvements in zero-shot, few-shot and solely supervised learning performance; even under an unfavorable low-resource scenario, and without defaulting to large-scale external datasets for self-supervision.  We also find empirical evidence that zero and few-shot learning markedly benefit from adding more 'dataset-internal', self-supervised training signals, which is of practical importance when retrieving or computing on large external sources of such signals is infeasible.
Putting Theory to Work: From Learning Bounds to Meta-Learning Algorithms
Authors: Quentin Bouniot, Ievgen Redko, Romaric Audigier, Angélique Loesch, Amaury Habrard

Most of existing deep learning models rely on excessive amounts of labeled training data in order to achieve state-of-the-art results, even though these data can be hard or costly to get in practice. One attractive alternative is to learn with little supervision, commonly referred to as few-shot learning (FSL), and, in particular, meta-learning that learns to learn with few data from related tasks. Despite the practical success of meta-learning, many of its algorithmic solutions proposed in the literature are based on sound intuitions, but lack a solid theoretical analysis of the expected performance on the test task. In this paper, we review the recent advances in meta-learning theory and show how they can be used in practice both to better understand the behavior of popular meta-learning algorithms and to improve their generalization capacity. This latter is achieved by integrating the theoretical assumptions ensuring efficient meta-learning in the form of regularization terms into several popular meta-learning algorithms for which we provide a large study of their behavior on classic few-shot classification benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first contribution that puts the most recent learning bounds of meta-learning theory into practice for the popular task of few-shot classification.
Assessing Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Charles Packer*, Katelyn Gao*, Jernej Kos, Philipp Krahenbuhl, Vladlen Koltun, Dawn Song

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved breakthrough results on many tasks, but has been shown to be sensitive to system changes at test time. As a result, building deep RL agents that generalize has become an active research area. Our aim is to catalyze and streamline community-wide progress on this problem by providing the first benchmark and a common experimental protocol for investigating generalization in RL. Our benchmark contains a diverse set of environments and our evaluation methodology covers both in-distribution and out-of-distribution generalization. To provide a set of baselines for future research, we conduct a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art algorithms, including those that specifically tackle the problem of generalization. The experimental results indicate that in-distribution generalization may be within the capacity of current algorithms, while out-of-distribution generalization is an exciting challenge for future work.
Online Tuning for Offline Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jiechuan Jiang, Zongqing Lu

Offline reinforcement learning could learn effective policies from a fixed dataset, which is promising in real-world applications. However, in offline decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning, due to the discrepancy between the behavior policy and learned policy, the transition dynamics in offline experiences do not accord with the transition dynamics in online execution, which creates severe errors in value estimates, leading to uncoordinated and suboptimal policies. One way to overcome the transition bias is to bridge offline training and online tuning. However, considering both deployment efficiency and sample efficiency, we could only collect very limited online experiences, making it insufficient to use merely online data for updating the agent policy. To utilize both offline and online experiences to tune the policies of agents, we introduce online transition correction (OTC) to implicitly correct the biased transition dynamics by modifying sampling probabilities. We design two types of distances, i.e., embedding-based and value-based distance, to measure the similarity between transitions, and further propose an adaptive rank-based prioritization to sample transitions according to the transition similarity. OTC is simple yet effective to increase data efficiency and improve agent policies in online tuning. Empirically, we show that OTC outperforms baselines in a variety of tasks.
Rethinking Uncertainty in Deep Learning: Whether and How it Improves Robustness
Authors: Yilun Jin, Lixin Fan, Kam Woh Ng, Ce Ju, Qiang Yang

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to be prone to adversarial attacks, for which many remedies are proposed. While adversarial training (AT) is regarded as the most robust defense, it suffers from poor performance both on clean examples and under other types of attacks, e.g. attacks with larger perturbations. Meanwhile, regularizers that encourage uncertain outputs, such as entropy maximization (EntM) and label smoothing (LS) can maintain accuracy on clean examples and improve performance under weak attacks, yet their ability to defend against strong attacks is still in doubt. In this paper, we revisit uncertainty promotion regularizers, including EntM and LS, in the field of adversarial learning. We show that EntM and LS alone provide robustness only under small perturbations. Contrarily, we show that uncertainty promotion regularizers complement AT in a principled manner, consistently improving performance on both clean examples and under various attacks, especially attacks with large perturbations. We further analyze how uncertainty promotion regularizers enhance the performance of AT from the perspective of Jacobian matrices $\nabla_X f(X;\theta)$, and find out that EntM effectively shrinks the norm of Jacobian matrices and hence promotes robustness.
Large-Scale Answerer in Questioner's Mind for Visual Dialog Question Generation
Authors: Sang-Woo Lee, Tong Gao, Sohee Yang, Jaejun Yoo, Jung-Woo Ha

Answerer in Questioner's Mind (AQM) is an information-theoretic framework that has been recently proposed for task-oriented dialog systems. AQM benefits from asking a question that would maximize the information gain when it is asked. However, due to its intrinsic nature of explicitly calculating the information gain, AQM has a limitation when the solution space is very large. To address this, we propose AQM+ that can deal with a large-scale problem and ask a question that is more coherent to the current context of the dialog. We evaluate our method on GuessWhich, a challenging task-oriented visual dialog problem, where the number of candidate classes is near 10K. Our experimental results and ablation studies show that AQM+ outperforms the state-of-the-art models by a remarkable margin with a reasonable approximation. In particular, the proposed AQM+ reduces more than 60% of error as the dialog proceeds, while the comparative algorithms diminish the error by less than 6%. Based on our results, we argue that AQM+ is a general task-oriented dialog algorithm that can be applied for non-yes-or-no responses.
Learning Boolean Circuits with Neural Networks
Authors: Eran Malach, Shai Shalev-Shwartz

Training neural-networks is computationally hard. However, in practice they are trained efficiently using gradient-based algorithms, achieving remarkable performance on natural data. To bridge this gap, we observe the property of local correlation: correlation between small patterns of the input and the target label. We focus on learning deep neural-networks with a variant of gradient-descent, when the target function is a tree-structured Boolean circuit. We show that in this case, the existence of correlation between the gates of the circuit and the target label determines whether the optimization succeeds or fails. Using this result, we show that neural-networks can learn the (log n)-parity problem for most product distributions. These results hint that local correlation may play an important role in differentiating between distributions that are hard or easy to learn.
Learning Multimodal Graph-to-Graph Translation for Molecule Optimization
Authors: Wengong Jin, Kevin Yang, Regina Barzilay, Tommi Jaakkola

We view molecule optimization as a graph-to-graph translation problem. The goal is to learn to map from one molecular graph to another with better properties based on an available corpus of paired molecules. Since molecules can be optimized in different ways, there are multiple viable translations for each input graph. A key challenge is therefore to model diverse translation outputs. Our primary contributions include a junction tree encoder-decoder for learning diverse graph translations along with a novel adversarial training method for aligning distributions of molecules. Diverse output distributions in our model are explicitly realized by low-dimensional latent vectors that modulate the translation process. We evaluate our model on multiple molecule optimization tasks and show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin.
Inference and Introspection in Deep Generative Models of Sparse Data
Authors: Rahul G. Krishnan, Matthew Hoffman

Deep generative models such as deep latent Gaussian models (DLGMs) are powerful and popular density estimators. However, they have been applied almost exclusively to dense data such as images; DLGMs are rarely applied to sparse, high-dimensional integer data such as word counts or product ratings. One reason is that the standard training procedures find poor local optima when applied to such data. We propose two techniques that alleviate this problem, significantly improving our ability to fit DLGMs to sparse, high-dimensional data. Having fit these models, we are faced with another challenge: how to use and interpret the representation that we have learned? To that end, we propose a method that extracts distributed representations of features via a simple linearization of the model.
Learning Efficient Parameter Server Synchronization Policies for Distributed SGD
Authors: Rong Zhu, Sheng Yang, Andreas Pfadler, Zhengping Qian, Jingren Zhou

We apply a reinforcement learning (RL) based approach to learning optimal synchronization policies used for Parameter Server-based distributed training of machine learning models with Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). Utilizing a formal synchronization policy description in the PS-setting, we are able to derive a suitable and compact description of states and actions, allowing us to efficiently use the standard off-the-shelf deep Q-learning algorithm. As a result, we are able to learn synchronization policies which generalize to different cluster environments, different training datasets and small model variations and (most importantly) lead to considerable decreases in training time when compared to standard policies such as bulk synchronous parallel (BSP), asynchronous parallel (ASP), or stale synchronous parallel (SSP). To support our claims we present extensive numerical results obtained from experiments performed in simulated cluster environments. In our experiments training time is reduced by 44 on average and learned policies generalize to multiple unseen circumstances.