nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
DeepXML: Scalable & Accurate Deep Extreme Classification for Matching User Queries to Advertiser Bid Phrases
Authors: Kunal Dahiya, Anshul Mittal, Deepak Saini, Kushal Dave, Himanshu Jain, Sumeet Agarwal, Manik Varma

The objective in deep extreme multi-label learning is to jointly learn feature representations and classifiers to automatically tag data points with the most relevant subset of labels from an extremely large label set. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art deep extreme classifiers are either not scalable or inaccurate for short text documents.  This paper develops the DeepXML algorithm which addresses both limitations by introducing a novel architecture that splits training of head and tail labels.  DeepXML increases accuracy by (a) learning word embeddings on head labels and transferring them through a novel residual connection to data impoverished tail labels; (b) increasing the amount of negative training data available by extending state-of-the-art negative sub-sampling techniques; and (c) re-ranking the set of predicted labels to eliminate the hardest negatives for the original classifier. All of these contributions are implemented efficiently by extending the highly scalable Slice algorithm for pretrained embeddings to learn the proposed DeepXML architecture. As a result, DeepXML could efficiently scale to problems involving millions of labels that were beyond the pale of state-of-the-art deep extreme classifiers as it could be more than 10x faster at training than XML-CNN and AttentionXML. At the same time, DeepXML was also empirically determined to be up to 19% more accurate than leading techniques for matching search engine queries to advertiser bid phrases.
Neural Architecture Search without Training
Authors: Joseph Mellor, Jack Turner, Amos Storkey, Elliot J. Crowley

The time and effort involved in hand-designing deep neural networks is immense. This has prompted the development of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques to automate this design. However, NAS algorithms tend to be slow and expensive; they need to train vast numbers of candidate networks to inform the search process. This could be remedied if we could infer a network's trained accuracy from its initial state. In this work, we examine the correlation of linear maps induced by augmented versions of a single image in untrained networks and motivate how this can be used to give a measure which is highly indicative of a network’s trained performance. We incorporate this measure into a simple algorithm that allows us to search for powerful networks without any training in a matter of seconds on a single GPU, and verify its effectiveness on NAS-Bench-101 and NAS-Bench-201. Finally, we show that our approach can be readily combined with more expensive search methods for added value: we modify regularised evolutionary search to produce a novel algorithm that outperforms its predecessor.
Multi-Task Learning via Scale Aware Feature Pyramid Networks and Effective Joint Head
Authors: Feng Ni

As a concise and classic framework for object detection and instance segmentation, Mask R-CNN achieves promising performance in both two tasks. However, considering stronger feature representation for Mask R-CNN fashion framework, there is room for improvement from two aspects. On the one hand, performing multi-task prediction needs more credible feature extraction and multi-scale features integration to handle objects with varied scales. In this paper, we address this problem by using a novel neck module called SA-FPN (Scale Aware Feature Pyramid Networks). With the enhanced feature representations, our model can accurately detect and segment the objects of multiple scales. On the other hand, in Mask R-CNN framework, isolation between parallel detection branch and instance segmentation branch exists, causing the gap between training and testing processes. To narrow this gap, we propose a unified head module named EJ-Head (Effective Joint Head) to combine two branches into one head, not only realizing the interaction between two tasks, but also enhancing the effectiveness of multi-task learning. Comprehensive experiments show that our proposed methods bring noticeable gains for object detection and instance segmentation. In particular, our model outperforms the original Mask R-CNN by 1~2 percent AP in both object detection and instance segmentation task on MS-COCO benchmark. Code will be available soon.
Dynamic Token Normalization improves Vision Transformers
Authors: Wenqi Shao, Yixiao Ge, Zhaoyang Zhang, XUYUAN XU, Xiaogang Wang, Ying Shan, Ping Luo

Transformer (ViT) and its variants (e.g., Swin, PVT) have achieved great success in various computer vision tasks, owing to their capability to learn long-range contextual information. Layer Normalization (LN) is an essential ingredient in these models. However, we found that the ordinary LN  makes tokens at different positions similar in magnitude because it normalizes embeddings within each token. It is difficult for Transformers to capture inductive bias such as the positional context in an image with LN. We tackle this problem by proposing a new normalizer, termed Dynamic Token Normalization (DTN), where normalization is performed both within each token (intra-token) and across different tokens (inter-token). DTN has several merits. Firstly, it is built on a unified formulation and thus can represent various existing normalization methods. Secondly, DTN learns to normalize tokens in both intra-token and inter-token manners, enabling Transformers to capture both the global contextual information and the local positional context. Thirdly, by simply replacing LN layers, DTN can be readily plugged into various vision transformers, such as ViT, Swin, and PVT. Extensive experiments show that the transformer equipped with DTN consistently outperforms baseline model with minimal extra parameters and computational overhead. For example, DTN outperforms LN on small ViT by $1.1\%$ top-1 accuracy on ImageNet.
Efficient Certified Defenses Against Patch Attacks on Image Classifiers
Authors: Jan Hendrik Metzen, Maksym Yatsura

Adversarial patches pose a realistic threat model for physical world attacks on autonomous systems via their perception component. Autonomous systems in safety-critical domains such as automated driving should thus contain a fail-safe fallback component that combines certifiable robustness against patches with efficient inference while maintaining high performance on clean inputs. We propose BagCert, a novel combination of model architecture and certification procedure that allows efficient certification. We derive a loss that enables end-to-end optimization of certified robustness against patches of different sizes and locations. On CIFAR10, BagCert certifies 10.000 examples in 43 seconds on a single GPU and obtains 86% clean and 60% certified accuracy against 5x5 patches.
A global convergence theory for deep ReLU implicit networks via over-parameterization
Authors: Tianxiang Gao, Hailiang Liu, Jia Liu, Hridesh Rajan, Hongyang Gao

Implicit deep learning has received increasing attention recently due to the fact that it generalizes the recursive prediction rule of many commonly used neural network architectures. Its prediction rule is provided implicitly based on the solution of an equilibrium equation. Although a line of recent empirical studies has demonstrated its superior performances, the theoretical understanding of implicit neural networks is limited. In general, the equilibrium equation may not be well-posed during the training. As a result, there is no guarantee that a vanilla (stochastic) gradient descent (SGD) training nonlinear implicit neural networks can converge. This paper fills the gap by analyzing the gradient flow of Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activated implicit neural networks. For an $m$ width implicit neural network with ReLU activation and $n$ training samples, we show that a randomly initialized gradient descent converges to a global minimum at a linear rate for the square loss function if the implicit neural network is over-parameterized. It is worth noting that, unlike existing works on the convergence of (S)GD on finite-layer over-parameterized neural networks, our convergence results hold for implicit neural networks, where the number of layers is infinite.
Evaluation of Similarity-based Explanations
Authors: Kazuaki Hanawa, Sho Yokoi, Satoshi Hara, Kentaro Inui

Explaining the predictions made by complex machine learning models helps users to understand and accept the predicted outputs with confidence. One promising way is to use similarity-based explanation that provides similar instances as evidence to support model predictions. Several relevance metrics are used for this purpose. In this study, we investigated relevance metrics that can provide reasonable explanations to users. Specifically, we adopted three tests to evaluate whether the relevance metrics satisfy the minimal requirements for similarity-based explanation. Our experiments revealed that the cosine similarity of the gradients of the loss performs best, which would be a recommended choice in practice. In addition, we showed that some metrics perform poorly in our tests and analyzed the reasons of their failure. We expect our insights to help practitioners in selecting appropriate relevance metrics and also aid further researches for designing better relevance metrics for explanations.
Image Compression and Classification Using Qubits and Quantum Deep Learning
Authors: Ali Mohsen, Mo Tiwari

Recent work suggests that quantum machine learning techniques can be used for classical image classification by encoding the images in quantum states and using a quantum neural network for inference. However, such work has been restricted to very small input images, at most $4 \times 4$, that are unrealistic and cannot even be accurately labeled by humans. The primary difficulties in using larger input images is that hitherto-proposed encoding schemes necessitate more qubits than are physically realizable. We propose a framework to classify larger, realistic images using quantum systems. Our approach relies on a novel encoding mechanism that embeds images in quantum states while necessitating fewer qubits than prior work. Our framework is able to classify images that are larger than previously possible, up to $16 \times 16$ for the MNIST dataset on a personal laptop, and obtains accuracy comparable to classical neural networks with the same number of learnable parameters. We also propose a technique for further reducing the number of qubits needed to represent images that may result in an easier physical implementation at the expense of final performance. Our work enables quantum machine learning and classification on classical datasets of dimensions that were previously intractable by physically realizable quantum computers or classical simulation.
Intriguing class-wise properties of adversarial training
Authors: Qi Tian, Kun Kuang, Fei Wu, Yisen Wang

Adversarial training is one of the most effective approaches to improve model robustness against adversarial examples. However, previous works mainly focus on the overall robustness of the model, and the in-depth analysis on the role of each class involved in adversarial training is still missing. In this paper, we provide the first detailed class-wise diagnosis of adversarial training on six widely used datasets, $\textit{i.e.}$, MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, STL-10 and ImageNet. Surprisingly, we find that there are $\textit{remarkable robustness discrepancies among classes}$, demonstrating the following intriguing properties: 1) Many examples from a certain class could only be maliciously attacked to some specific semantic-similar classes, and these examples will not exist adversarial counterparts in bounded $\epsilon$-ball if we re-train the model without those specific classes; 2) The robustness of each class is positively correlated with its norm of classifier weight in deep neural networks; 3) Stronger attacks are usually more powerful for vulnerable classes. Finally, we propose an attack to better understand the defense mechanism of some state-of-the-art models from the class-wise perspective. We believe these findings can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of adversarial training as well as further improvement of adversarial robustness.
Additive Powers-of-Two Quantization: An Efficient Non-uniform Discretization for Neural Networks
Authors: Yuhang Li, Xin Dong, Wei Wang

We propose Additive Powers-of-Two~(APoT) quantization, an efficient non-uniform quantization scheme for the bell-shaped and long-tailed distribution of weights and activations in neural networks. By constraining all quantization levels as the sum of Powers-of-Two terms, APoT quantization enjoys high computational efficiency and a good match with the distribution of weights. A simple reparameterization of the clipping function is applied to generate a better-defined gradient for learning the clipping threshold. Moreover, weight normalization is presented to refine the distribution of weights to make the training more stable and consistent. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and is even competitive with the full-precision models, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed APoT quantization. For example, our 4-bit quantized ResNet-50 on ImageNet achieves 76.6% top-1 accuracy without bells and whistles; meanwhile, our model reduces 22% computational cost compared with the uniformly quantized counterpart.
SnapQuant: A Probabilistic and Nested Parameterization for Binary Networks
Authors: Kuan Wang, Hao Zhao, Anbang Yao, Aojun Zhou, Dawei Sun, Yurong Chen

In this paper, we study the problem of training real binary weight networks (without layer-wise or filter-wise scaling factors) from scratch under the Bayesian deep learning perspective, meaning that the final objective is to approximate the posterior distribution of binary weights rather than reach a point estimation. The proposed method, named as SnapQuant, has two intriguing features: (1) The posterior distribution is parameterized as a policy network trained with a reinforcement learning scheme. During the training phase, we generate binary weights on-the-fly since what we actually maintain is the policy network, and all the binary weights are used in a burn-after-reading style. At the testing phase, we can sample binary weight instances for a given recognition architecture from the learnt policy network. (2) The policy network, which has a nested parameter structure consisting of layer-wise, filter-wise and kernel-wise parameter sharing designs, is applicable to any neural network architecture. Such a nested parameterization explicitly and hierarchically models the joint posterior distribution of binary weights. The performance of SnapQuant is evaluated with several visual recognition tasks including ImageNet. The code will be made publicly available.
Interpretable Network Structure for Modeling Contextual Dependency
Authors: Xindian Ma, Peng Zhang, Xiaoliu Mao, Yehua Zhang, Nan Duan, Yuexian Hou, Ming Zhou.

Neural language models have achieved great success in many NLP tasks, to a large extent, due to the ability to capture contextual dependencies among terms in a text. While many efforts have been devoted to empirically explain the connection between the network hyperparameters and the ability to represent the contextual dependency, the theoretical analysis is relatively insufficient. Inspired by the recent research on the use of tensor space to explain the neural network architecture, we explore the interpretable mechanism for neural language models. Specifically, we define the concept of separation rank in the language modeling process, in order to theoretically measure the degree of contextual dependencies in a sentence. Then, we show that the lower bound of such a separation rank can reveal the quantitative relation between the network structure (e.g. depth/width) and the modeling ability for the contextual dependency. Especially, increasing the depth of the neural network can be more effective to improve the ability of modeling contextual dependency. Therefore, it is important to design an adaptive network to compute the adaptive depth in a task. Inspired by Adaptive Computation Time (ACT), we design an adaptive recurrent network based on the separation rank to model contextual dependency. Experiments on various NLP tasks have verified the proposed theoretical analysis. We also test our adaptive recurrent neural network in the sentence classification task, and the experiments show that it can achieve better results than the traditional bidirectional LSTM.
Efficient Multi-Objective Neural Architecture Search via Lamarckian Evolution
Authors: Thomas Elsken, Jan Hendrik Metzen, Frank Hutter

Architecture search aims at automatically finding neural architectures that are competitive with architectures designed by human experts. While recent approaches have achieved state-of-the-art predictive performance for image recognition, they are problematic under resource constraints for two reasons: (1) the neural architectures found are solely optimized for high predictive performance, without penalizing excessive resource consumption; (2)most architecture search methods require vast computational resources. We address the first shortcoming by proposing LEMONADE, an evolutionary algorithm for multi-objective architecture search that allows approximating the Pareto-front of architectures under multiple objectives, such as predictive performance and number of parameters, in a single run of the method. We address the second shortcoming by proposing a Lamarckian inheritance mechanism for LEMONADE which generates children networks that are warmstarted with the predictive performance of their trained parents. This is accomplished by using (approximate) network morphism operators for generating children. The combination of these two contributions allows finding models that are on par or even outperform different-sized NASNets, MobileNets, MobileNets V2 and Wide Residual Networks on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet64x64 within only one week on eight GPUs, which is about 20-40x less compute power than previous architecture search methods that yield state-of-the-art performance.
Near-Optimal Regret Bounds for Model-Free RL in Non-Stationary Episodic MDPs
Authors: Weichao Mao, Kaiqing Zhang, Ruihao Zhu, David Simchi-Levi, Tamer Basar

We consider model-free reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary Markov decision processes (MDPs). Both the reward functions and the state transition distributions are allowed to vary over time, either gradually or abruptly, as long as their cumulative variation magnitude does not exceed certain budgets. We propose an algorithm, named Restarted Q-Learning with Upper Confidence Bounds (RestartQ-UCB), for this setting, which adopts a simple restarting strategy and an extra optimism term. Our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art (model-based) solution in terms of dynamic regret. Specifically, RestartQ-UCB with Freedman-type bonus terms achieves a dynamic regret of $\widetilde{O}(S^{\frac{1}{3}} A^{\frac{1}{3}} \Delta^{\frac{1}{3}} H T^{\frac{2}{3}})$, where $S$ and $A$ are the numbers of states and actions, respectively, $\Delta>0$ is the variation budget, $H$ is the number of steps per episode, and $T$ is the total number of steps. We further show that our algorithm is near-optimal by establishing an information-theoretical lower bound of $\Omega(S^{\frac{1}{3}} A^{\frac{1}{3}} \Delta^{\frac{1}{3}} H^{\frac{2}{3}} T^{\frac{2}{3}})$, which to the best of our knowledge is the first impossibility result in non-stationary RL in general.
Picking up the pieces: separately evaluating supernet training and architecture selection
Authors: Gabriel Meyer-Lee, Nick Cheney

Differentiable Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has emerged as a simple and efficient method for the automated design of neural networks. Recent research has demonstrated improvements on various aspects on the original algorithm (DARTS), but comparative evaluation of these advances remains costly and difficult. We frame supernet NAS as a two-stage search, decoupling the training of the supernet from the extraction of a final design from the supernet. We propose a set of metrics which utilize benchmark data sets to evaluate each stage of the search process independently. We demonstrate two metrics measuring separately the quality of the supernet's shared weights and the quality of the learned sampling distribution, as well as corresponding statistics approximating the reliance of the second stage search on these components of the supernet. These metrics facilitate both more robust evaluation of NAS algorithms and provide practical method for designing complete NAS algorithms from separate supernet training and architecture selection techniques.
Provable Defenses against Spatially Transformed Adversarial Inputs: Impossibility and Possibility Results
Authors: Xinyang Zhang, Yifan Huang, Chanh Nguyen, Shouling Ji, Ting Wang

One intriguing property of neural networks is their inherent vulnerability to adversarial inputs, which are maliciously crafted samples to trigger target networks to misbehave. The state-of-the-art attacks generate adversarial inputs using either pixel perturbation or spatial transformation. Thus far, several provable defenses have been proposed against pixel perturbation-based attacks; yet, little is known about whether such solutions exist for spatial transformation-based attacks. This paper bridges this striking gap by conducting the first systematic study on provable defenses against spatially transformed adversarial inputs. Our findings convey mixed messages. On the impossibility side, we show that such defenses may not exist in practice: for any given networks, it is possible to find legitimate inputs and imperceptible transformations to generate adversarial inputs that force arbitrarily large errors. On the possibility side, we show that it is still feasible to construct adversarial training methods to significantly improve the resilience of networks against adversarial inputs over empirical datasets. We believe our findings provide insights for designing more effective defenses against spatially transformed adversarial inputs.
Regularizing Trajectories to Mitigate Catastrophic Forgetting
Authors: Paul Michel, Elisabeth Salesky, Graham Neubig

Regularization-based continual learning approaches generally prevent catastrophic forgetting by augmenting the training loss with an auxiliary objective. However in most practical optimization scenarios with noisy data and/or gradients, it is possible that stochastic gradient descent can inadvertently change critical parameters.
In this paper, we argue for the importance of regularizing optimization trajectories directly. We derive a new co-natural gradient update rule for continual learning whereby the new task gradients are preconditioned with the empirical Fisher information of previously learnt tasks. We show that using the co-natural gradient systematically reduces forgetting in continual learning. Moreover, it helps combat overfitting when learning a new task in a low resource scenario.