nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Learning by shaking: Computing policy gradients by physical forward-propagation
Authors: Arash Mehrjou, Ashkan Soleymani, Stefan Bauer, Bernhard Schölkopf

Model-free and model-based reinforcement learning are two ends of a spectrum. Learning a good policy without a dynamic model can be prohibitively expensive. Learning the dynamic model of a system can reduce the cost of learning the policy, but it can also introduce bias if it is not accurate. We propose a middle ground where instead of the transition model, the sensitivity of the trajectories with respect to the perturbation (shaking) of the parameters is learned. This allows us to predict the local behavior of the physical system around a set of nominal policies without knowing the actual model. We assay our method on a custom-built physical robot in extensive experiments and show the feasibility of the approach in practice. We investigate potential challenges when applying our method to physical systems and propose solutions to each of them.
Non-Autoregressive Dialog State Tracking
Authors: Hung Le, Richard Socher, Steven C.H. Hoi

Recent efforts in Dialogue State Tracking (DST) for task-oriented dialogues have progressed toward open-vocabulary or generation-based approaches where the models can generate slot value candidates from the dialogue history itself. These approaches have shown good performance gain, especially in complicated dialogue domains with dynamic slot values. However, they fall short in two aspects: (1) they do not allow models to explicitly learn signals across domains and slots to detect potential dependencies among \textit{(domain, slot)} pairs; and (2) existing models follow auto-regressive approaches which incur high time cost when the dialogue evolves over multiple domains and multiple turns. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of Non-Autoregressive Dialog State Tracking (NADST) which can factor in potential dependencies among domains and slots to optimize the models towards better prediction of dialogue states as a complete set rather than separate slots. In particular, the non-autoregressive nature of our method not only enables decoding in parallel to significantly reduce the latency of DST for real-time dialogue response generation, but also detect dependencies among slots at token level in addition to slot and domain level. Our empirical results show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art joint accuracy across all domains on the MultiWOZ 2.1 corpus, and the latency of our model is an order of magnitude lower than the previous state of the art as the dialogue history extends over time.
The Connection between Out-of-Distribution Generalization and Privacy of ML Models
Authors: Divyat Mahajan, Shruti Tople, Amit Sharma

With the goal of generalizing to out-of-distribution (OOD) data, recent domain generalization methods aim to learn ``stable'' feature representations whose effect on the output remains invariant across domains. Given the theoretical connection between generalization and privacy, we ask whether better OOD generalization leads to better privacy for machine learning models, where privacy is measured through robustness to membership inference (MI) attacks. In general, we find that the relationship does not hold. Through extensive evaluation on a synthetic dataset and image datasets like MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and Chest X-rays, we show that a lower OOD generalization gap does not imply better robustness to MI attacks. Instead, privacy benefits are based on the extent to which a model captures the stable features. A model that captures stable features is more robust to MI attacks than models that exhibit better OOD generalization but do not learn stable features. Further, for the same provable differential privacy guarantees, a model that learns stable features provides higher utility as compared to others. Our results offer the first extensive empirical study connecting stable features and privacy, and also have a takeaway for the domain generalization community; MI attack can be used as a complementary metric to measure model quality.
Deep Active Learning with Noise Stability
Authors: Xingjian Li, Pengkun Yang, Tianyang Wang, Min Xu, Dejing Dou, Cheng-zhong Xu

Uncertainty estimation for unlabeled data is crucial to active learning. With a deep neural network employed as the backbone model, the data selection process is highly challenged due to the potential over-confidence of the model inference. Existing methods usually resort to multi-pass model training or adversarial training to handle this challenge, resulting in complex and inefficient pipelines, which prevent the deployment in practice. To address such an issue, in this work we propose a novel Single-Training Multi-Inference algorithm that leverages noise stability to estimate data uncertainty. Specifically, it is measured by to what degree the output deviates from the original observation when the model parameters are randomly perturbed by noise. We provide theoretical analysis of using small Gaussian noise, showing that our method has a solid connection with the classical theory of variance reduction, i.e. labelling a data sample of higher uncertainty, indicated by the inverse noise stability, contributes more to reducing the variance of existing training samples. Despite its simplicity and efficiency, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art active learning baselines in image classification and semantic segmentation tasks.
Stable Opponent Shaping in Differentiable Games
Authors: Alistair Letcher, Jakob Foerster, David Balduzzi, Tim Rocktäschel, Shimon Whiteson

A growing number of learning methods are actually differentiable games whose players optimise multiple, interdependent objectives in parallel – from GANs and intrinsic curiosity to multi-agent RL. Opponent shaping is a powerful approach to improve learning dynamics in these games, accounting for player influence on others’ updates. Learning with Opponent-Learning Awareness (LOLA) is a recent algorithm that exploits this response and leads to cooperation in settings like the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Although experimentally successful, we show that LOLA agents can exhibit ‘arrogant’ behaviour directly at odds with convergence. In fact, remarkably few algorithms have theoretical guarantees applying across all (n-player, non-convex) games. In this paper we present Stable Opponent Shaping (SOS), a new method that interpolates between LOLA and a stable variant named LookAhead. We prove that LookAhead converges locally to equilibria and avoids strict saddles in all differentiable games. SOS inherits these essential guarantees, while also shaping the learning of opponents and consistently either matching or outperforming LOLA experimentally.
Explicit Connection Distillation
Authors: Lujun Li, Yikai Wang, Anbang Yao, Yi Qian, Xiao Zhou, Ke He

One effective way to ease the deployment of deep neural networks on resource constrained devices is Knowledge Distillation (KD), which boosts the accuracy of a low-capacity student model by mimicking the learnt information of a high-capacity teacher (either a single model or a multi-model ensemble). Although great progress has been attained on KD research, existing efforts are primarily invested to design better distillation losses by using soft logits or intermediate feature representations of the teacher as the extra supervision. In this paper, we present Explicit Connection Distillation (ECD), a new KD framework, which addresses the knowledge distillation problem in a novel perspective of bridging dense intermediate feature connections between a student network and its corresponding teacher generated automatically in the training, achieving knowledge transfer goal via direct cross-network layer-to-layer gradients propagation. ECD has two interdependent modules. In the first module, given a student network, an auxiliary teacher architecture is temporarily generated conditioned on strengthening feature representations of basic convolutions of the student network via replacing them with dynamic additive convolutions and keeping the other layers unchanged in structure. The teacher generated in this way guarantees its superior capacity and makes a perfect feature alignment (both in input and output dimensions) to the student at every convolutional layer. In the second module, dense feature connections between the aligned convolutional layers from the student to its auxiliary teacher are introduced, which allows explicit layer-to-layer gradients propagation from the teacher to the student via the merged model training from scratch. Intriguingly, as feature connection direction is one-way, all feature connections together with the auxiliary teacher merely exist during training phase. Experiments on popular image classification tasks validate the effectiveness of our method. Code will be made publicly available.
Learning a Generative Model for Validity in Complex Discrete Structures
Authors: Dave Janz, Jos van der Westhuizen, Brooks Paige, Matt Kusner, José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

Deep generative models have been successfully used to learn representations for high-dimensional discrete spaces by representing discrete objects as sequences and employing powerful sequence-based deep models. Unfortunately, these sequence-based models often produce invalid sequences: sequences which do not represent any underlying discrete structure; invalid sequences hinder the utility of such models. As a step towards solving this problem, we propose to learn a deep recurrent validator model, which can estimate whether a partial sequence can function as the beginning of a full, valid sequence. This validator provides insight as to how individual sequence elements influence the validity of the overall sequence, and can be used to constrain sequence based models to generate valid sequences — and thus faithfully model discrete objects. Our approach is inspired by reinforcement learning, where an oracle which can evaluate validity of complete sequences provides a sparse reward signal. We demonstrate its effectiveness as a generative model of Python 3 source code for mathematical expressions, and in improving the ability of a variational autoencoder trained on SMILES strings to decode valid molecular structures.
DEEP-TRIM: REVISITING L1 REGULARIZATION FOR CONNECTION PRUNING OF DEEP NETWORK
Authors: Chih-Kuan Yeh, Ian E.H. Yen, Hong-You Chen, Chun-Pei Yang, Shou-De Lin, Pradeep Ravikumar

State-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) typically have tens of millions of parameters, which might not fit into the upper levels of the memory hierarchy, thus increasing the inference time and energy consumption significantly, and prohibiting their use on edge devices such as mobile phones. The compression of DNN models has therefore become an active area of research recently, with \emph{connection pruning} emerging as one of the most successful strategies. A very natural approach is to prune connections of DNNs via $\ell_1$ regularization, but recent empirical investigations have suggested that this does not work as well in the context of DNN compression. In this work, we revisit this simple strategy and analyze it rigorously, to show that: (a) any \emph{stationary point} of an $\ell_1$-regularized layerwise-pruning objective has its number of non-zero elements bounded by the number of penalized prediction logits, regardless of the strength of the regularization; (b) successful pruning highly relies on an accurate optimization solver, and there is a trade-off between compression speed and distortion of prediction accuracy, controlled by the strength of regularization. Our theoretical results thus suggest that $\ell_1$ pruning could be successful provided we use an accurate optimization solver. We corroborate this in our experiments, where we show that simple $\ell_1$ regularization with an Adamax-L1(cumulative) solver gives pruning ratio competitive to the state-of-the-art.
Where is the bottleneck in long-tailed classification?
Authors: Zaid Khan, Yun Fu

A commonly held belief in deep-learning based long-tailed classiﬁcation is that the representations learned from long-tailed data are ”good enough” and the performance bottleneck is the classiﬁcation head atop the representation learner. We design experiments to investigate this folk wisdom, and ﬁnd that representations learned from long-tailed data distributions substantially differ from the representations learned from ”normal” data distributions. We show that the long-tailed representations are volatile and brittle with respect to the true data distribution. Compared to the representations learned from the true, balanced distributions, long-tailed representations fail to localize tail classes and display vastly worse inter-class separation and intra-class compactness when unseen samples from the true data distribution are embedded into the feature space. We provide an explanation for why data augmentation helps long-tailed classiﬁcation despite leaving the dataset imbalance unchanged — it promotes inter-class separation, intra-class compactness, and improves localization of tail classes w.r.t to the true data distribution.
A novel method to determine the number of latent dimensions with SVD
Authors: Asana Neishabouri, Michel Desmarais

Determining the number of latent dimensions is a ubiquitous problem in machine
learning. In this study, we introduce a novel method that relies on SVD to discover
the number of latent dimensions. The general principle behind the method is to
compare the curve of singular values of the SVD decomposition of a data set with
the randomized data set curve. The inferred number of latent dimensions corresponds
to the crossing point of the two curves. To evaluate our methodology, we
compare it with competing methods such as Kaisers eigenvalue-greater-than-one
rule (K1), Parallel Analysis (PA), Velicers MAP test (Minimum Average Partial).
We also compare our method with the Silhouette Width (SW) technique which is
used in different clustering methods to determine the optimal number of clusters.
The result on synthetic data shows that the Parallel Analysis and our method have
similar results and more accurate than the other methods, and that our methods is
slightly better result than the Parallel Analysis method for the sparse data sets.
Attacking Binarized Neural Networks
Authors: Angus Galloway, Graham W. Taylor, Medhat Moussa

Neural networks with low-precision weights and activations offer compelling
efficiency advantages over their full-precision equivalents. The two most
frequently discussed benefits of quantization are reduced memory consumption,
and a faster forward pass when implemented with efficient bitwise
operations. We propose a third benefit of very low-precision neural networks:
improved robustness against some adversarial attacks, and in the worst case,
performance that is on par with full-precision models. We focus on the very
low-precision case where weights and activations are both quantized to $\pm$1,
and note that stochastically quantizing weights in just one layer can sharply
reduce the impact of iterative attacks. We observe that non-scaled binary neural
networks exhibit a similar effect to the original \emph{defensive distillation}
procedure that led to \emph{gradient masking}, and a false notion of security.
We address this by conducting both black-box and white-box experiments with
binary models that do not artificially mask gradients.
FedBABU: Toward Enhanced Representation for Federated Image Classification
Authors: Jaehoon Oh, SangMook Kim, Se-Young Yun

Federated learning has evolved to improve a single global model under data heterogeneity (as a curse) or to develop multiple personalized models using data heterogeneity (as a blessing). However, little research has considered both directions simultaneously. In this paper, we first investigate the relationship between them by analyzing Federated Averaging at the client level and determine that a better federated global model performance does not constantly improve personalization. To elucidate the cause of this personalization performance degradation problem, we decompose the entire network into the body (extractor), which is related to universality, and the head (classifier), which is related to personalization. We then point out that this problem stems from training the head. Based on this observation, we propose a novel federated learning algorithm, coined FedBABU, which only updates the body of the model during federated training (i.e., the head is randomly initialized and never updated), and the head is fine-tuned for personalization during the evaluation process. Extensive experiments show consistent performance improvements and an efficient personalization of FedBABU. The code is available at https://github.com/jhoon-oh/FedBABU.
A bi-diffusion based layer-wise sampling method for deep learning in large graphs
Authors: Yu He, Shiyang Wen, Wenjin Wu, Yan Zhang, Siran Yang, Yuan Wei, Di Zhang, Guojie  Song, Wei Lin, Liang Wang, Bo Zheng

The Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and its variants are powerful models for graph representation learning and have recently achieved great success on many graph-based applications. However, most of them target on shallow models (e.g. 2 layers) on relatively small graphs. Very recently, although many acceleration methods have been developed for GCNs training,
it still remains a severe challenge how to scale GCN-like models to larger graphs and deeper layers due to the over-expansion of neighborhoods across layers. In this paper, to address the above challenge, we propose a novel layer-wise sampling strategy, which samples the nodes layer by layer conditionally based on the factors of the bi-directional diffusion between layers. In this way, we potentially restrict the time complexity linear to the number of layers, and construct a mini-batch of nodes with high local bi-directional influence (correlation). Further, we apply the self-attention mechanism to flexibly learn suitable weights for the sampled nodes, which allows the model to be able to incorporate both the first-order and higher-order proximities during a single layer propagation process without extra recursive propagation or skip connection. Extensive experiments on three large benchmark graphs demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model.
An Efficient Protocol for Distributed Column Subset Selection in the Entrywise $\ell_p$ Norm
Authors: Shuli Jiang, Dongyu Li, Irene Mengze Li, Arvind V. Mahankali, David Woodruff

We give a distributed protocol with nearly-optimal communication and number of rounds for Column Subset Selection with respect to the entrywise {$\ell_1$} norm ($k$-CSS$_1$), and more generally, for the $\ell_p$-norm with $1 \leq p < 2$. We study matrix factorization in $\ell_1$-norm loss, rather than the more standard Frobenius norm loss, because the $\ell_1$ norm is more robust to noise, which is observed to lead to improved performance in a wide range of computer vision and robotics problems.
In the distributed setting, we consider $s$ servers in the standard coordinator model of communication, where the columns of the input matrix $A \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times n}$ ($n \gg d$) are distributed across the $s$ servers. We give a protocol in this model with $\widetilde{O}(sdk)$ communication, $1$ round, and polynomial running time, and which achieves a multiplicative $k^{\frac{1}{p} - \frac{1}{2}}\poly(\log nd)$-approximation to the best possible column subset. A key ingredient in our proof is the reduction to the $\ell_{p,2}$-norm, which corresponds to the $p$-norm of the vector of Euclidean norms of each of the columns of $A$. This enables us to use strong coreset constructions for Euclidean norms, which previously had not been used in this context. This naturally also allows us to implement our algorithm in the popular streaming model of computation. We further propose a greedy algorithm for selecting columns, which can be used by the coordinator, and show the first provable guarantees for a greedy algorithm for the $\ell_{1,2}$ norm. Finally, we implement our protocol and give significant practical advantages on real-world data analysis tasks.
Improving machine classification using human uncertainty measurements
Authors: Ruairidh M. Battleday, Joshua C. Peterson, Thomas L. Griffiths

As deep CNN classifier performance using ground-truth labels has begun to asymptote at near-perfect levels, a key aim for the field is to extend training paradigms to capture further useful structure in natural image data and improve model robustness and generalization. In this paper, we present a novel natural image benchmark for making this extension, which we call CIFAR10H. This new dataset comprises a human-derived, full distribution over labels for each image of the CIFAR10 test set, offering the ability to assess the generalization of state-of-the-art CIFAR10 models, as well as investigate the effects of including this information in model training. We show that classification models trained on CIFAR10 do not generalize as well to our dataset as it does to traditional extensions, and that models fine-tuned using our label information are able to generalize better to related datasets, complement popular data augmentation schemes, and provide robustness to adversarial attacks. We explain these improvements in terms of better empirical approximations to the expected loss function over natural images and their categories in the visual world.
Learning Implicitly Recurrent CNNs Through Parameter Sharing
Authors: Pedro Savarese, Michael Maire

We introduce a parameter sharing scheme, in which different layers of a convolutional neural network (CNN) are defined by a learned linear combination of parameter tensors from a global bank of templates.  Restricting the number of templates yields a flexible hybridization of traditional CNNs and recurrent networks.  Compared to traditional CNNs, we demonstrate substantial parameter savings on standard image classification tasks, while maintaining accuracy.
Our simple parameter sharing scheme, though defined via soft weights, in practice often yields trained networks with near strict recurrent structure; with negligible side effects, they convert into networks with actual loops. Training these networks thus implicitly involves discovery of suitable recurrent architectures. Though considering only the aspect of recurrent links, our trained networks achieve accuracy competitive with those built using state-of-the-art neural architecture search (NAS) procedures.
Our hybridization of recurrent and convolutional networks may also represent a beneficial architectural bias.  Specifically, on synthetic tasks which are algorithmic in nature, our hybrid networks both train faster and extrapolate better to test examples outside the span of the training set.
RL-LIM: Reinforcement Learning-based Locally Interpretable Modeling
Authors: Jinsung Yoon, Sercan O. Arik, Tomas Pfister

Understanding black-box machine learning models is important towards their widespread adoption. However, developing globally interpretable models that explain the behavior of the entire model is challenging. An alternative approach is to explain black-box models through explaining individual prediction using a locally interpretable model. In this paper, we propose a novel method for locally interpretable modeling -- Reinforcement Learning-based Locally Interpretable Modeling (RL-LIM). RL-LIM employs reinforcement learning to select a small number of samples and distill the black-box model prediction into a low-capacity locally interpretable model. Training is guided with a reward that is obtained directly by measuring agreement of the predictions from the locally interpretable model with the black-box model. RL-LIM near-matches the overall prediction performance of black-box models while yielding human-like interpretability, and significantly outperforms state of the art locally interpretable models in terms of overall prediction performance and fidelity.