nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Learning to Remember Patterns: Pattern Matching Memory Networks for Traffic Forecasting
Authors: Hyunwook Lee, Seungmin Jin, Hyeshin Chu, Hongkyu Lim, Sungahn Ko

Traffic forecasting is a challenging problem due to complex road networks and sudden speed changes caused by various events on roads. Several models have been proposed to solve this challenging problem, with a focus on learning the spatio-temporal dependencies of roads. In this work, we propose a new perspective for converting the forecasting problem into a pattern-matching task, assuming that large traffic data can be represented by a set of patterns. To evaluate the validity of this new perspective, we design a novel traffic forecasting model called Pattern-Matching Memory Networks (PM-MemNet), which learns to match input data to representative patterns with a key-value memory structure. We first extract and cluster representative traffic patterns that serve as keys in the memory. Then, by matching the extracted keys and inputs, PM-MemNet acquires the necessary information on existing traffic patterns from the memory and uses it for forecasting. To model the spatio-temporal correlation of traffic, we proposed a novel memory architecture, GCMem, which integrates attention and graph convolution. The experimental results indicate that PM-MemNet is more accurate than state-of-the-art models, such as Graph WaveNet, with higher responsiveness. We also present a qualitative analysis describing how PM-MemNet works and achieves higher accuracy when road speed changes rapidly.
Cross-Entropy Loss Leads To Poor Margins
Authors: Kamil Nar, Orhan Ocal, S. Shankar Sastry, Kannan Ramchandran

Neural networks could misclassify inputs that are slightly different from their training data, which indicates a small margin between their decision boundaries and the training dataset. In this work, we study the binary classification of linearly separable datasets and show that linear classifiers could also have decision boundaries that lie close to their training dataset if cross-entropy loss is used for training. In particular, we show that if the features of the training dataset lie in a low-dimensional affine subspace and the cross-entropy loss is minimized by using a gradient method, the margin between the training points and the decision boundary could be much smaller than the optimal value. This result is contrary to the conclusions of recent related works such as (Soudry et al., 2018), and we identify the reason for this contradiction. In order to improve the margin, we introduce differential training, which is a training paradigm that uses a loss function defined on pairs of points from each class. We show that the decision boundary of a linear classifier trained with differential training indeed achieves the maximum margin. The results reveal the use of cross-entropy loss as one of the hidden culprits of adversarial examples and introduces a new direction to make neural networks robust against them.
Stochastic Inverse Reinforcement Learning 
Authors: Ce Ju

The goal of the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem is to recover the reward functions from expert demonstrations. However, the IRL problem like any ill-posed inverse problem suffers the congenital defect that the policy may be optimal for many reward functions, and expert demonstrations may be optimal for many policies. In this work, we generalize the IRL problem to a well-posed expectation optimization problem stochastic inverse reinforcement learning (SIRL) to recover the probability distribution over reward functions. We adopt the Monte Carlo expectation-maximization (MCEM) method to estimate the parameter of the probability distribution as the first solution to the SIRL problem. The solution is succinct, robust, and transferable for a learning task and can generate alternative solutions to the IRL problem. Through our formulation, it is possible to observe the intrinsic property for the IRL problem from a global viewpoint, and our approach achieves a considerable performance on the objectworld.
Mixed Precision Training of Convolutional Neural Networks using Integer Operations
Authors: Dipankar Das, Naveen Mellempudi, Dheevatsa Mudigere, Dhiraj Kalamkar, Sasikanth Avancha, Kunal Banerjee, Srinivas Sridharan, Karthik Vaidyanathan, Bharat Kaul, Evangelos Georganas, Alexander Heinecke, Pradeep Dubey, Jesus Corbal, Nikita Shustrov, Roma Dubtsov, Evarist Fomenko, Vadim Pirogov

The state-of-the-art (SOTA) for mixed precision training is dominated by variants of low precision floating point operations, and in particular, FP16 accumulating into FP32 Micikevicius et al. (2017). On the other hand, while a lot of research has also happened in the domain of low and mixed-precision Integer training, these works either present results for non-SOTA networks (for instance only AlexNet for ImageNet-1K), or relatively small datasets (like CIFAR-10). In this work, we train state-of-the-art visual understanding neural networks on the ImageNet-1K dataset, with Integer operations on General Purpose (GP) hardware. In particular, we focus on Integer Fused-Multiply-and-Accumulate (FMA) operations which take two pairs of INT16 operands and accumulate results into an INT32 output.We propose a shared exponent representation of tensors and develop a Dynamic Fixed Point (DFP) scheme suitable for common neural network operations. The nuances of developing an efficient integer convolution kernel is examined, including methods to handle overflow of the INT32 accumulator. We implement CNN training for ResNet-50, GoogLeNet-v1, VGG-16 and AlexNet; and these networks achieve or exceed SOTA accuracy within the same number of iterations as their FP32 counterparts without any change in hyper-parameters and with a 1.8X improvement in end-to-end training throughput. To the best of our knowledge these results represent the first INT16 training results on GP hardware for ImageNet-1K dataset using SOTA CNNs and achieve highest reported accuracy using half precision
Stochastic Training of Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Jianfei Chen, Jun Zhu

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are powerful deep neural networks for graph-structured data. However, GCN computes nodes' representation recursively from their neighbors, making the receptive field size grow exponentially with the number of layers.  Previous attempts on reducing the receptive field size by subsampling neighbors do not have any convergence guarantee, and their receptive field size per node is still in the order of hundreds. In this paper, we develop a preprocessing strategy and two control variate based algorithms to further reduce the receptive field size. Our algorithms are guaranteed to converge to GCN's local optimum regardless of the neighbor sampling size. Empirical results show that our algorithms have a similar convergence speed per epoch with the exact algorithm even using only two neighbors per node. The time consumption of our algorithm on the Reddit dataset is only one fifth of previous neighbor sampling algorithms.
Espresso: Efficient Forward Propagation for Binary Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Fabrizio Pedersoli, George Tzanetakis, Andrea Tagliasacchi

There are many applications scenarios for which the computational
  performance and memory footprint of the prediction phase of Deep
  Neural Networks (DNNs) need to be optimized. Binary Deep Neural
  Networks (BDNNs) have been shown to be an effective way of achieving
  this objective. In this paper, we show how Convolutional Neural
  Networks (CNNs) can be implemented using binary
  representations. Espresso is a compact, yet powerful
  library written in C/CUDA that features all the functionalities
  required for the forward propagation of CNNs, in a binary file less
  than 400KB, without any external dependencies. Although it is mainly
  designed to take advantage of massive GPU parallelism, Espresso also
  provides an equivalent CPU implementation for CNNs. Espresso
  provides special convolutional and dense layers for BCNNs,
  leveraging bit-packing and bit-wise computations
  for efficient execution. These techniques provide a speed-up of
  matrix-multiplication routines, and at the same time, reduce memory
  usage when storing parameters and activations. We experimentally
  show that Espresso is significantly faster than existing
  implementations of optimized binary neural networks (~ 2
  orders of magnitude). Espresso is released under the Apache 2.0
  license and is available at http://github.com/organization/project.
Neural Contextual Bandits with Deep Representation and Shallow Exploration
Authors: Pan Xu, Zheng Wen, Handong Zhao, Quanquan Gu

We study neural contextual bandits, a general class of contextual bandits, where each context-action pair is associated with a raw feature vector, but the specific reward generating function is unknown. We propose a novel learning algorithm that transforms the raw feature vector using the last hidden layer of a deep ReLU neural network (deep representation learning), and uses an upper confidence bound (UCB) approach to explore in the last linear layer (shallow exploration). We prove that under standard assumptions, our proposed algorithm achieves $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ finite-time regret, where $T$ is the learning time horizon. Compared with existing neural contextual bandit algorithms, our approach is computationally much more efficient since it only needs to explore in the last layer of the deep neural network.
White Noise Analysis of Neural Networks
Authors: Ali Borji, Sikun Lin

A white noise analysis of modern deep neural networks is presented to unveil
their biases at the whole network level or the single neuron level. Our analysis is
based on two popular and related methods in psychophysics and neurophysiology
namely classification images and spike triggered analysis. These methods have
been widely used to understand the underlying mechanisms of sensory systems
in humans and monkeys. We leverage them to investigate the inherent biases of
deep neural networks and to obtain a first-order approximation of their functionality.
We emphasize on CNNs since they are currently the state of the art methods
in computer vision and are a decent model of human visual processing. In
addition, we study multi-layer perceptrons, logistic regression, and recurrent neural
networks. Experiments over four classic datasets, MNIST, Fashion-MNIST,
CIFAR-10, and ImageNet, show that the computed bias maps resemble the target
classes and when used for classification lead to an over two-fold performance than
the chance level. Further, we show that classification images can be used to attack
a black-box classifier and to detect adversarial patch attacks. Finally, we utilize
spike triggered averaging to derive the filters of CNNs and explore how the behavior
of a network changes when neurons in different layers are modulated. Our
effort illustrates a successful example of borrowing from neurosciences to study
ANNs and highlights the importance of cross-fertilization and synergy across machine
learning, deep learning, and computational neuroscience.
Patch-Fool: Are Vision Transformers Always Robust Against Adversarial Perturbations?
Authors: Yonggan Fu, Shunyao Zhang, Shang Wu, Cheng Wan, Yingyan Lin

Vision transformers (ViTs) have recently set off a new wave in neural architecture design thanks to their record-breaking performance in various vision tasks. In parallel, to fulfill the goal of deploying ViTs into real-world vision applications, their robustness against potential malicious attacks has gained increasing attention. In particular, recent works show that ViTs are more robust against adversarial attacks as compared with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and conjecture that this is because ViTs focus more on capturing global interactions among different input/feature patches, leading to their improved robustness to local perturbations imposed by adversarial attacks. In this work, we ask an intriguing question: "Under what kinds of perturbations do ViTs become more vulnerable learners compared to CNNs?" Driven by this question, we first conduct a comprehensive experiment regarding the robustness of both ViTs and CNNs under various existing adversarial attacks to understand the underlying reason favoring their robustness. Based on the drawn insights, we then propose a dedicated attack framework, dubbed Patch-Fool, that fools the self-attention mechanism by attacking its basic component (i.e., a single patch) with a series of attention-aware optimization techniques. Interestingly, our Patch-Fool framework shows for the first time that ViTs are not necessarily more robust than CNNs against adversarial perturbations. In particular, we find that ViTs are more vulnerable learners compared with CNNs against our Patch-Fool attack which is consistent across extensive experiments, and the observations from Sparse/Mild Patch-Fool, two variants of Patch-Fool, indicate an intriguing insight that the perturbation density and strength on each patch seem to be the key factors that influence the robustness ranking between ViTs and CNNs. It can be expected that our Patch-Fool framework will shed light on both future architecture designs and training schemes for robustifying ViTs towards their real-world deployment. Our codes are available at https://github.com/RICE-EIC/Patch-Fool.
DISSECT: Disentangled Simultaneous Explanations via Concept Traversals
Authors: Asma Ghandeharioun, Been Kim, Chun-Liang Li, Brendan Jou, Brian Eoff, Rosalind Picard

Explaining deep learning model inferences is a promising venue for scientific understanding, improving safety, uncovering hidden biases, evaluating fairness, and beyond, as argued by many scholars. One of the principal benefits of counterfactual explanations is allowing users to explore "what-if" scenarios through what does not and cannot exist in the data, a quality that many other forms of explanation such as heatmaps and influence functions are inherently incapable of doing. However, most previous work on generative explainability cannot disentangle important concepts effectively, produces unrealistic examples, or fails to retain relevant information. We propose a novel approach, DISSECT, that jointly trains a generator, a discriminator, and a concept disentangler to overcome such challenges using little supervision. DISSECT generates Concept Traversals (CTs), defined as a sequence of generated examples with increasing degrees of concepts that influence a classifier's decision. By training a generative model from a classifier's signal, DISSECT offers a way to discover a classifier's inherent "notion" of distinct concepts automatically rather than rely on user-predefined concepts. We show that DISSECT produces CTs that (1) disentangle several concepts, (2) are influential to a classifier's decision and are coupled to its reasoning due to joint training (3), are realistic, (4) preserve relevant information, and (5) are stable across similar inputs. We validate DISSECT on several challenging synthetic and realistic datasets where previous methods fall short of satisfying desirable criteria for interpretability and show that it performs consistently well. Finally, we present experiments showing applications of DISSECT for detecting potential biases of a classifier and identifying spurious artifacts that impact predictions.
Plan Better Amid Conservatism: Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Actor Rectification
Authors: Ling Pan, Longbo Huang, Tengyu Ma, Huazhe Xu

The idea of conservatism has led to significant progress in offline reinforcement learning (RL) where an agent learns from pre-collected datasets. However, it is still an open question to resolve offline RL in the more practical multi-agent setting as many real-world scenarios involve interaction among multiple agents. Given the recent success of transferring online RL algorithms to the multi-agent setting, one may expect that offline RL algorithms will also transfer to multi-agent settings directly. Surprisingly, when conservatism-based algorithms are applied to the multi-agent setting, the performance degrades significantly with an increasing number of agents. Towards mitigating the degradation, we identify that a key issue that the landscape of the value function can be non-concave and policy gradient improvements are prone to local optima. Multiple agents exacerbate the problem since the suboptimal policy by any agent could lead to uncoordinated global failure. Following this intuition, we propose a simple yet effective method, \underline{O}ffline \underline{M}ulti-Agent RL with \underline{A}ctor \underline{R}ectification (OMAR), to tackle this critical challenge via an effective combination of first-order policy gradient and zeroth-order optimization methods for the actor to better optimize the conservative value function. Despite the simplicity, OMAR significantly outperforms strong baselines with state-of-the-art performance in multi-agent continuous control benchmarks.
Integrating linguistic knowledge into DNNs: Application to online grooming detection
Authors: Jay Morgan, Adeline Paiement, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, Anina Kinzel, Matteo Di Cristofaro

Online grooming (OG) of children is a pervasive issue in an increasingly interconnected world. We explore various complementary methods to incorporate Corpus Linguistics (CL) knowledge into accurate and interpretable Deep Learning (DL) models. They provide an implicit text normalisation that adapts embedding spaces to the groomers' usage of language, and they focus the DNN's attention onto the expressions of OG strategies. We apply these integration to two architecture types and improve on the state-of-the-art on a new OG corpus.
Deep Reinforcement Learning with Causality-based Intrinsic Reward
Authors: Peng Zhang, Furui Liu, Zhitang Chen, Jianye HAO, Jun Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great potential to deal with sequential decision-making problems. However, most RL algorithms do not explicitly consider the relations between entities in the environment. This makes the policy learning suffer from the problems of efficiency, effectivity and interpretability.  In this paper, we propose a novel deep reinforcement learning algorithm, which firstly learns the causal structure of the environment and then leverages the learned causal information to assist policy learning. The proposed algorithm learns a graph to encode the environmental structure by calculating Average Causal Effect (ACE) between different categories of entities, and an intrinsic reward is given to encourage the agent to interact more with entities belonging to top-ranked categories, which significantly boosts policy learning.  Several experiments are conducted on a number of simulation environments to demonstrate the effectiveness and better interpretability of our proposed method.
Deployment-Efficient Reinforcement Learning via Model-Based Offline Optimization
Authors: Tatsuya Matsushima, Hiroki Furuta, Yutaka Matsuo, Ofir Nachum, Shixiang Gu

Most reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume online access to the environment, in which one may readily interleave updates to the policy with experience collection using that policy. However, in many real-world applications such as health, education, dialogue agents, and robotics, the cost or potential risk of deploying a new data-collection policy is high, to the point that it can become prohibitive to update the data-collection policy more than a few times during learning. With this view, we propose a novel concept of deployment efficiency, measuring the number of distinct data-collection policies that are used during policy learning. We observe that naïvely applying existing model-free offline RL algorithms recursively does not lead to a practical deployment-efficient and sample-efficient algorithm. We propose a novel model-based algorithm, Behavior-Regularized Model-ENsemble (BREMEN), that not only performs better than or comparably as the state-of-the-art dynamic-programming-based and concurrently-proposed model-based offline approaches on existing benchmarks, but can also effectively optimize a policy offline using 10-20 times fewer data than prior works. Furthermore, the recursive application of BREMEN achieves impressive deployment efficiency while maintaining the same or better sample efficiency, learning successful policies from scratch on simulated robotic environments with only 5-10 deployments, compared to typical values of hundreds to millions in standard RL baselines.
Adversarial Robustness Against the Union of Multiple Perturbation Models
Authors: Pratyush Maini, Eric Wong, Zico Kolter

Owing to the susceptibility of deep learning systems to adversarial attacks, there has been a great deal of work in developing (both empirically and certifiably) robust classifiers, but the vast majority has defended against single types of attacks. Recent work has looked at defending against multiple attacks, specifically on the MNIST dataset, yet this approach used a relatively complex architecture, claiming that standard adversarial training can not apply because it "overfits" to a particular norm. In this work, we show that it is indeed possible to adversarially train a robust model against a union of norm-bounded attacks, by using a natural generalization of the standard PGD-based procedure for adversarial training to multiple threat models. With this approach, we are able to train standard architectures which are robust against l_inf, l_2, and l_1 attacks, outperforming past approaches on the MNIST dataset and providing the first CIFAR10 network trained to be simultaneously robust against (l_inf, l_2, l_1) threat models, which achieves adversarial accuracy rates of (47.6%, 64.3%, 53.4%) for (l_inf, l_2, l_1) perturbations with epsilon radius = (0.03,0.5,12).
Mean Replacement Pruning  
Authors: Utku Evci, Nicolas Le Roux, Pablo Castro, Leon Bottou

Pruning units in a deep network can help speed up inference and training as well as reduce the size of the model. We show that bias propagation is a pruning technique which consistently outperforms the common approach of merely removing units,  regardless of the architecture and the dataset.  We also show how a simple adaptation to an existing scoring function allows us to select the best units to prune.  Finally,  we show that the units selected by the best performing scoring functions are somewhat consistent over the course of training, implying the dead parts of the network appear during the stages of training.
Adversarial Training: embedding adversarial perturbations into the parameter space of a neural network to build a robust system
Authors: Shixian Wen, Laurent Itti

Adversarial training, in which a network is trained on both adversarial and clean examples, is one of the most trusted defense methods against adversarial attacks. However, there are three major practical difficulties in implementing and deploying this method - expensive in terms of extra memory and computation costs; accuracy trade-off between clean and adversarial examples; and lack of diversity of adversarial perturbations. Classical adversarial training uses fixed, precomputed perturbations in adversarial examples (input space). In contrast, we introduce dynamic adversarial perturbations into the parameter space of the network, by adding perturbation biases to the fully connected layers of deep convolutional neural network. During training, using only clean images, the perturbation biases are updated in the Fast Gradient Sign Direction to automatically create and store adversarial perturbations by recycling the gradient information computed. The network learns and adjusts itself automatically to these learned adversarial perturbations. Thus, we can achieve adversarial training with negligible cost compared to requiring a training set of adversarial example images. In addition, if combined with classical adversarial training, our perturbation biases can alleviate accuracy trade-off difficulties, and diversify adversarial perturbations.