pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
When Does Preconditioning Help or Hurt Generalization?
Authors: Shun-ichi Amari, Jimmy Ba, Roger Grosse, Xuechen Li, Atsushi Nitanda, Taiji Suzuki, Denny Wu, Ji Xu
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: regression, Second-order methods

While second order optimizers such as natural gradient descent (NGD) often speed up optimization, their effect on generalization has been called into question. This work presents a more nuanced view on how the \textit{implicit bias} of first- and second-order methods affects the comparison of generalization properties. We provide an exact asymptotic bias-variance decomposition of the generalization error of overparameterized ridgeless regression under a general class of preconditioner $\boldsymbol{P}$, and consider the inverse population Fisher information matrix (used in NGD) as a particular example. We determine the optimal $\boldsymbol{P}$ for both the bias and variance, and find that the relative generalization performance of different optimizers depends on the label noise and the "shape" of the signal (true parameters): when the labels are noisy, the model is misspecified, or the signal is misaligned with the features, NGD can achieve lower risk; conversely, GD generalizes better than NGD under clean labels, a well-specified model, or aligned signal. Based on this analysis, we discuss several approaches to manage the bias-variance tradeoff, and the potential benefit of interpolating between GD and NGD. We then extend our analysis to regression in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space and demonstrate that preconditioned GD can decrease the population risk faster than GD. Lastly, we empirically compare the generalization error of first- and second-order optimizers in neural network experiments, and observe robust trends matching our theoretical analysis.
Spin-Weighted Spherical CNNs
Authors: Carlos Esteves, Ameesh Makadia, Kostas Daniilidis
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Learning equivariant representations is a promising way to reduce sample and model complexity and improve the generalization performance of deep neural networks. The spherical CNNs are successful examples, producing SO(3)-equivariant representations of spherical inputs. There are two main types of spherical CNNs. The first type lifts the inputs to functions on the rotation group SO(3) and applies convolutions on the group, which are computationally expensive since SO(3) has one extra dimension. The second type applies convolutions directly on the sphere, which are limited to zonal (isotropic) filters, and thus have limited expressivity. In this paper, we present a new type of spherical CNN that allows anisotropic filters in an efficient way, without ever leaving the spherical domain. The key idea is to consider spin-weighted spherical functions, which were introduced in physics in the study of gravitational waves. These are complex-valued functions on the sphere whose phases change upon rotation. We define a convolution between spin-weighted functions and build a CNN based on it. The spin-weighted functions can also be interpreted as spherical vector fields, allowing applications to tasks where the inputs or outputs are vector fields. Experiments show that our method outperforms previous methods on tasks like classification of spherical images, classification of 3D shapes and semantic segmentation of spherical panoramas.
Diverse Image Generation via Self-Conditioned GANs
Authors: Steven Liu, Tongzhou Wang, David Bau, Jun-Yan Zhu, Antonio Torralba
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Clustering, Diversity, Image Generation

We introduce a simple but effective unsupervised method for generating realistic and diverse images. We train a class-conditional GAN model without using manually annotated class labels. Instead, our model is conditional on labels automatically derived from clustering in the discriminator's feature space. Our clustering step automatically discovers diverse modes, and explicitly requires the generator to cover them. Experiments on standard mode collapse benchmarks show that our method outperforms several competing methods when addressing mode collapse. Our method also performs well on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet and Places365, improving both image diversity and standard quality metrics, compared to previous methods.
Tent: Fully Test-time Adaptation by Entropy Minimization
Authors: Dequan Wang, Evan Shelhamer, Shaoteng Liu, Bruno Olshausen, Trevor Darrell
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Semantic Segmentation, Source-Free Domain Adaptation, Test-time Adaptation

A model must adapt itself to generalize to new and different data during testing. In this setting of fully test-time adaptation the model has only the test data and its own parameters. We propose to adapt by test entropy minimization (tent): we optimize the model for confidence as measured by the entropy of its predictions. Our method estimates normalization statistics and optimizes channel-wise affine transformations to update online on each batch. Tent reduces generalization error for image classification on corrupted ImageNet and CIFAR-10/100 and reaches a new state-of-the-art error on ImageNet-C. Tent handles source-free domain adaptation on digit recognition from SVHN to MNIST/MNIST-M/USPS, on semantic segmentation from GTA to Cityscapes, and on the VisDA-C benchmark. These results are achieved in one epoch of test-time optimization without altering training.
Cyclic Differentiable Architecture Search
Authors: Hongyuan Yu, Houwen Peng, Yan Huang, Jianlong Fu, Hao Du, Liang Wang, Haibin Ling
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

Differentiable ARchiTecture Search, i.e., DARTS, has drawn great attention in neural architecture search. It tries to find the optimal architecture in a shallow search network and then measures its performance in a deep evaluation network. The independent optimization of the search and evaluation networks, however, leaves room for potential improvement by allowing interaction between the two networks. To address the problematic optimization issue, we propose new joint optimization objectives and a novel Cyclic Differentiable ARchiTecture Search framework, dubbed CDARTS. Considering the structure difference, CDARTS builds a cyclic feedback mechanism between the search and evaluation networks with introspective distillation. First, the search network generates an initial architecture for evaluation, and the weights of the evaluation network are optimized. Second, the architecture weights in the search network are further optimized by the label supervision in classification, as well as the regularization from the evaluation network through feature distillation. Repeating the above cycle results in joint optimization of the search and evaluation networks and thus enables the evolution of the architecture to fit the final evaluation network. The experiments and analysis on CIFAR, ImageNet and NAS-Bench-201 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach over the state-of-the-art ones. Specifically, in the DARTS search space, we achieve 97.52% top-1 accuracy on CIFAR10 and 76.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. In the chain-structured search space, we achieve 78.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, which is 1.1% higher than EfficientNet-B0. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/Cream.
Ocean: Object-aware Anchor-free Tracking
Authors: Zhipeng Zhang, Houwen Peng, Jianlong Fu, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Object, Video Object Tracking, Visual Object Tracking

Anchor-based Siamese trackers have achieved remarkable advancements in accuracy, yet the further improvement is restricted by the lagged tracking robustness. We find the underlying reason is that the regression network in anchor-based methods is only trained on the positive anchor boxes (i.e., $IoU \geq0.6$). This mechanism makes it difficult to refine the anchors whose overlap with the target objects are small. In this paper, we propose a novel object-aware anchor-free network to address this issue. First, instead of refining the reference anchor boxes, we directly predict the position and scale of target objects in an anchor-free fashion. Since each pixel in groundtruth boxes is well trained, the tracker is capable of rectifying inexact predictions of target objects during inference. Second, we introduce a feature alignment module to learn an object-aware feature from predicted bounding boxes. The object-aware feature can further contribute to the classification of target objects and background. Moreover, we present a novel tracking framework based on the anchor-free model. The experiments show that our anchor-free tracker achieves state-of-the-art performance on five benchmarks, including VOT-2018, VOT-2019, OTB-100, GOT-10k and LaSOT. The source code is available at https://github.com/researchmm/TracKit.
IReEn: Reverse-Engineering of Black-Box Functions via Iterative Neural Program Synthesis
Authors: Hossein Hajipour, Mateusz Malinowski, Mario Fritz
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop CAP 2020 12
Tasks: Computer Security, Program Synthesis

In this work, we investigate the problem of revealing the functionality of a black-box agent. Notably, we are interested in the interpretable and formal description of the behavior of such an agent. Ideally, this description would take the form of a program written in a high-level language. This task is also known as reverse engineering and plays a pivotal role in software engineering, computer security, but also most recently in interpretability. In contrast to prior work, we do not rely on privileged information on the black box, but rather investigate the problem under a weaker assumption of having only access to inputs and outputs of the program. We approach this problem by iteratively refining a candidate set using a generative neural program synthesis approach until we arrive at a functionally equivalent program. We assess the performance of our approach on the Karel dataset. Our results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on this challenge by finding an approximately functional equivalent program in 78% of cases -- even exceeding prior work that had privileged information on the black-box.
List-Decodable Mean Estimation via Iterative Multi-Filtering
Authors: Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel M. Kane, Daniel Kongsgaard
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

We study the problem of {\em list-decodable mean estimation} for bounded covariance distributions. Specifically, we are given a set $T$ of points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with the promise that an unknown $\alpha$-fraction of points in $T$, where $0< \alpha < 1/2$, are drawn from an unknown mean and bounded covariance distribution $D$, and no assumptions are made on the remaining points. The goal is to output a small list of hypothesis vectors such that at least one of them is close to the mean of $D$. We give the first practically viable estimator for this problem. In more detail, our algorithm is sample and computationally efficient, and achieves information-theoretically near-optimal error. While the only prior algorithm for this setting inherently relied on the ellipsoid method, our algorithm is iterative and only uses spectral techniques. Our main technical innovation is the design of a soft outlier removal procedure for high-dimensional heavy-tailed datasets with a majority of outliers.
Zero-Shot Learning with Common Sense Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Nihal V. Nayak, Stephen H. Bach
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Generalized Zero-Shot Learning, Knowledge Graphs, Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-shot learning relies on semantic class representations such as hand-engineered attributes or learned embeddings to predict classes without any labeled examples. We propose to learn class representations by embedding nodes from common sense knowledge graphs in a vector space. Common sense knowledge graphs are an untapped source of explicit high-level knowledge that requires little human effort to apply to a range of tasks. To capture the knowledge in the graph, we introduce ZSL-KG, a general-purpose framework with a novel transformer graph convolutional network (TrGCN) for generating class representations. Our proposed TrGCN architecture computes non-linear combinations of node neighbourhoods. Our results show that ZSL-KG improves over existing WordNet-based methods on five out of six zero-shot benchmark datasets in language and vision.
Task-agnostic Out-of-Distribution Detection Using Kernel Density Estimation
Authors: Ertunc Erdil, Krishna Chaitanya, Neerav Karani, Ender Konukoglu
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Classification, Density Estimation, General Classification, Image Segmentation, Medical Diagnosis, Medical Image Segmentation, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection, Semantic Segmentation

In the recent years, researchers proposed a number of successful methods to perform out-of-distribution (OOD) detection in deep neural networks (DNNs). So far the scope of the highly accurate methods has been limited to image level classification tasks. However, attempts for generally applicable methods beyond classification did not attain similar performance. In this paper, we address this limitation by proposing a simple yet effective task-agnostic OOD detection method. We estimate the probability density functions (pdfs) of intermediate features of a pre-trained DNN by performing kernel density estimation (KDE) on the training dataset. As direct application of KDE to feature maps is hindered by their high dimensionality, we use a set of lower-dimensional marginalized KDE models instead of a single high-dimensional one. At test time, we evaluate the pdfs on a test sample and produce a confidence score that indicates the sample is OOD. The use of KDE eliminates the need for making simplifying assumptions about the underlying feature pdfs and makes the proposed method task-agnostic. We perform extensive experiments on classification tasks using benchmark datasets for OOD detection. Additionally, we perform experiments on medical image segmentation tasks using brain MRI datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently achieves high OOD detection performance in both classification and segmentation tasks and improves state-of-the-art in almost all cases. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/eerdil/task_agnostic_ood}
STEER: Simple Temporal Regularization For Neural ODEs
Authors: Arnab Ghosh, Harkirat Singh Behl, Emilien Dupont, Philip H. S. Torr, Vinay Namboodiri
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Training Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) is often computationally expensive. Indeed, computing the forward pass of such models involves solving an ODE which can become arbitrarily complex during training. Recent works have shown that regularizing the dynamics of the ODE can partially alleviate this. In this paper we propose a new regularization technique: randomly sampling the end time of the ODE during training. The proposed regularization is simple to implement, has negligible overhead and is effective across a wide variety of tasks. Further, the technique is orthogonal to several other methods proposed to regularize the dynamics of ODEs and as such can be used in conjunction with them. We show through experiments on normalizing flows, time series models and image recognition that the proposed regularization can significantly decrease training time and even improve performance over baseline models.
Set Distribution Networks: a Generative Model for Sets of Images
Authors: Shuangfei Zhai, Walter Talbott, Miguel Angel Bautista, Carlos Guestrin, Josh M. Susskind
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Face Verification

Images with shared characteristics naturally form sets. For example, in a face verification benchmark, images of the same identity form sets. For generative models, the standard way of dealing with sets is to represent each as a one hot vector, and learn a conditional generative model $p(\mathbf{x}|\mathbf{y})$. This representation assumes that the number of sets is limited and known, such that the distribution over sets reduces to a simple multinomial distribution. In contrast, we study a more generic problem where the number of sets is large and unknown. We introduce Set Distribution Networks (SDNs), a novel framework that learns to autoencode and freely generate sets. We achieve this by jointly learning a set encoder, set discriminator, set generator, and set prior. We show that SDNs are able to reconstruct image sets that preserve salient attributes of the inputs in our benchmark datasets, and are also able to generate novel objects/identities. We examine the sets generated by SDN with a pre-trained 3D reconstruction network and a face verification network, respectively, as a novel way to evaluate the quality of generated sets of images.
Latent Video Transformer
Authors: Ruslan Rakhimov, Denis Volkhonskiy, Alexey Artemov, Denis Zorin, Evgeny Burnaev
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation, Video Prediction

The video generation task can be formulated as a prediction of future video frames given some past frames. Recent generative models for videos face the problem of high computational requirements. Some models require up to 512 Tensor Processing Units for parallel training. In this work, we address this problem via modeling the dynamics in a latent space. After the transformation of frames into the latent space, our model predicts latent representation for the next frames in an autoregressive manner. We demonstrate the performance of our approach on BAIR Robot Pushing and Kinetics-600 datasets. The approach tends to reduce requirements to 8 Graphical Processing Units for training the models while maintaining comparable generation quality.
Semi-Supervised Recognition under a Noisy and Fine-grained Dataset
Authors: Cheng Cui, Zhi Ye, Yangxi Li, Xinjian Li, Min Yang, Kai Wei, Bing Dai, Yanmei Zhao, Zhongji Liu, Rong Pang
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Fine-Grained Image Recognition, Image Classification, TAG

Simi-Supervised Recognition Challenge-FGVC7 is a challenging fine-grained recognition competition. One of the difficulties of this competition is how to use unlabeled data. We adopted pseudo-tag data mining to increase the amount of training data. The other one is how to identify similar birds with a very small difference, especially those have a relatively tiny main-body in examples. We combined generic image recognition and fine-grained image recognition method to solve the problem. All generic image recognition models were training using PaddleClas . Using the combination of two different ways of deep recognition models, we finally won the third place in the competition.
Deep Reinforcement Learning amidst Lifelong Non-Stationarity
Authors: Annie Xie, James Harrison, Chelsea Finn
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML Workshop LifelongML 2020 7
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

As humans, our goals and our environment are persistently changing throughout our lifetime based on our experiences, actions, and internal and external drives. In contrast, typical reinforcement learning problem set-ups consider decision processes that are stationary across episodes. Can we develop reinforcement learning algorithms that can cope with the persistent change in the former, more realistic problem settings? While on-policy algorithms such as policy gradients in principle can be extended to non-stationary settings, the same cannot be said for more efficient off-policy algorithms that replay past experiences when learning. In this work, we formalize this problem setting, and draw upon ideas from the online learning and probabilistic inference literature to derive an off-policy RL algorithm that can reason about and tackle such lifelong non-stationarity. Our method leverages latent variable models to learn a representation of the environment from current and past experiences, and performs off-policy RL with this representation. We further introduce several simulation environments that exhibit lifelong non-stationarity, and empirically find that our approach substantially outperforms approaches that do not reason about environment shift.
Free Energy Wells and Overlap Gap Property in Sparse PCA
Authors: Gérard Ben Arous, Alexander S. Wein, Ilias Zadik
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00

We study a variant of the sparse PCA (principal component analysis) problem in the "hard" regime, where the inference task is possible yet no polynomial-time algorithm is known to exist. Prior work, based on the low-degree likelihood ratio, has conjectured a precise expression for the best possible (sub-exponential) runtime throughout the hard regime. Following instead a statistical physics inspired point of view, we show bounds on the depth of free energy wells for various Gibbs measures naturally associated to the problem. These free energy wells imply hitting time lower bounds that corroborate the low-degree conjecture: we show that a class of natural MCMC (Markov chain Monte Carlo) methods (with worst-case initialization) cannot solve sparse PCA with less than the conjectured runtime. These lower bounds apply to a wide range of values for two tuning parameters: temperature and sparsity misparametrization. Finally, we prove that the Overlap Gap Property (OGP), a structural property that implies failure of certain local search algorithms, holds in a significant part of the hard regime.
A dataset for complex activity recognition withmicro and macro activities in a cooking scenario
Authors: Paula Lago, Shingo Takeda, Sayeda Shamma Alia, Kohei Adachi, Brahim Bennai, Francois Charpillet, Sozo Inoue
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition

Complex activity recognition can benefit from understanding the steps that compose them. Current datasets, however, are annotated with one label only, hindering research in this direction. In this paper, we describe a new dataset for sensor-based activity recognition featuring macro and micro activities in a cooking scenario. Three sensing systems measured simultaneously, namely a motion capture system, tracking 25 points on the body; two smartphone accelerometers, one on the hip and the other one on the forearm; and two smartwatches one on each wrist. The dataset is labeled for both the recipes (macro activities) and the steps (micro activities). We summarize the results of a baseline classification using traditional activity recognition pipelines. The dataset is designed to be easily used to test and develop activity recognition approaches.