pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Recurrent Quantum Neural Networks
Authors: Johannes Bausch
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Benchmarking, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Data Augmentation, Machine Translation, Quantum Machine Learning, Speech Synthesis

Recurrent neural networks are the foundation of many sequence-to-sequence models in machine learning, such as machine translation and speech synthesis. In contrast, applied quantum computing is in its infancy. Nevertheless there already exist quantum machine learning models such as variational quantum eigensolvers which have been used successfully e.g. in the context of energy minimization tasks. In this work we construct a quantum recurrent neural network (QRNN) with demonstrable performance on non-trivial tasks such as sequence learning and integer digit classification. The QRNN cell is built from parametrized quantum neurons, which, in conjunction with amplitude amplification, create a nonlinear activation of polynomials of its inputs and cell state, and allow the extraction of a probability distribution over predicted classes at each step. To study the model's performance, we provide an implementation in pytorch, which allows the relatively efficient optimization of parametrized quantum circuits with thousands of parameters. We establish a QRNN training setup by benchmarking optimization hyperparameters, and analyse suitable network topologies for simple memorisation and sequence prediction tasks from Elman's seminal paper (1990) on temporal structure learning. We then proceed to evaluate the QRNN on MNIST classification, both by feeding the QRNN each image pixel-by-pixel; and by utilising modern data augmentation as preprocessing step. Finally, we analyse to what extent the unitary nature of the network counteracts the vanishing gradient problem that plagues many existing quantum classifiers and classical RNNs.
Parametric Instance Classification for Unsupervised Visual Feature Learning
Authors: Yue Cao, Zhenda Xie, Bin Liu, Yutong Lin, Zheng Zhang, Han Hu
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, GPU

This paper presents parametric instance classification (PIC) for unsupervised visual feature learning. Unlike the state-of-the-art approaches which do instance discrimination in a dual-branch non-parametric fashion, PIC directly performs a one-branch parametric instance classification, revealing a simple framework similar to supervised classification and without the need to address the information leakage issue. We show that the simple PIC framework can be as effective as the state-of-the-art approaches, i.e. SimCLR and MoCo v2, by adapting several common component settings used in the state-of-the-art approaches. We also propose two novel techniques to further improve effectiveness and practicality of PIC: 1) a sliding-window data scheduler, instead of the previous epoch-based data scheduler, which addresses the extremely infrequent instance visiting issue in PIC and improves the effectiveness; 2) a negative sampling and weight update correction approach to reduce the training time and GPU memory consumption, which also enables application of PIC to almost unlimited training images. We hope that the PIC framework can serve as a simple baseline to facilitate future study.
An Analysis of SVD for Deep Rotation Estimation
Authors: Jake Levinson, Carlos Esteves, Kefan Chen, Noah Snavely, Angjoo Kanazawa, Afshin Rostamizadeh, Ameesh Makadia
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: 3D Pose Estimation, 3D Rotation Estimation, Pose Estimation

Symmetric orthogonalization via SVD, and closely related procedures, are well-known techniques for projecting matrices onto $O(n)$ or $SO(n)$. These tools have long been used for applications in computer vision, for example optimal 3D alignment problems solved by orthogonal Procrustes, rotation averaging, or Essential matrix decomposition. Despite its utility in different settings, SVD orthogonalization as a procedure for producing rotation matrices is typically overlooked in deep learning models, where the preferences tend toward classic representations like unit quaternions, Euler angles, and axis-angle, or more recently-introduced methods. Despite the importance of 3D rotations in computer vision and robotics, a single universally effective representation is still missing. Here, we explore the viability of SVD orthogonalization for 3D rotations in neural networks. We present a theoretical analysis that shows SVD is the natural choice for projecting onto the rotation group. Our extensive quantitative analysis shows simply replacing existing representations with the SVD orthogonalization procedure obtains state of the art performance in many deep learning applications covering both supervised and unsupervised training.
LayoutTransformer: Layout Generation and Completion with Self-attention
Authors: Kamal Gupta, Justin Lazarow, Alessandro Achille, Larry Davis, Vijay Mahadevan, Abhinav Shrivastava
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Layout Generation

We address the problem of scene layout generation for diverse domains such as images, mobile applications, documents, and 3D objects. Most complex scenes, natural or human-designed, can be expressed as a meaningful arrangement of simpler compositional graphical primitives. Generating a new layout or extending an existing layout requires understanding the relationships between these primitives. To do this, we propose LayoutTransformer, a novel framework that leverages self-attention to learn contextual relationships between layout elements and generate novel layouts in a given domain. Our framework allows us to generate a new layout either from an empty set or from an initial seed set of primitives, and can easily scale to support an arbitrary of primitives per layout. Furthermore, our analyses show that the model is able to automatically capture the semantic properties of the primitives. We propose simple improvements in both representation of layout primitives, as well as training methods to demonstrate competitive performance in very diverse data domains such as object bounding boxes in natural images(COCO bounding box), documents (PubLayNet), mobile applications (RICO dataset) as well as 3D shapes (Part-Net). Code and other materials will be made available at https://kampta.github.io/layout.
Maximum Multiscale Entropy and Neural Network Regularization
Authors: Amir R. Asadi, Emmanuel Abbe
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation

A well-known result across information theory, machine learning, and statistical physics shows that the maximum entropy distribution under a mean constraint has an exponential form called the Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution. This is used for instance in density estimation or to achieve excess risk bounds derived from single-scale entropy regularizers (Xu-Raginsky '17). This paper investigates a generalization of these results to a multiscale setting. We present different ways of generalizing the maximum entropy result by incorporating the notion of scale. For different entropies and arbitrary scale transformations, it is shown that the distribution maximizing a multiscale entropy is characterized by a procedure which has an analogy to the renormalization group procedure in statistical physics. For the case of decimation transformation, it is further shown that this distribution is Gaussian whenever the optimal single-scale distribution is Gaussian. This is then applied to neural networks, and it is shown that in a teacher-student scenario, the multiscale Gibbs posterior can achieve a smaller excess risk than the single-scale Gibbs posterior.
Space-Time Correspondence as a Contrastive Random Walk
Authors: Allan Jabri, Andrew Owens, Alexei A. Efros
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Dense Pixel Correspondence Estimation, Link Prediction, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

This paper proposes a simple self-supervised approach for learning a representation for visual correspondence from raw video. We cast correspondence as prediction of links in a space-time graph constructed from video. In this graph, the nodes are patches sampled from each frame, and nodes adjacent in time can share a directed edge. We learn a representation in which pairwise similarity defines transition probability of a random walk, so that long-range correspondence is computed as a walk along the graph. We optimize the representation to place high probability along paths of similarity. Targets for learning are formed without supervision, by cycle-consistency: the objective is to maximize the likelihood of returning to the initial node when walking along a graph constructed from a palindrome of frames. Thus, a single path-level constraint implicitly supervises chains of intermediate comparisons. When used as a similarity metric without adaptation, the learned representation outperforms the self-supervised state-of-the-art on label propagation tasks involving objects, semantic parts, and pose. Moreover, we demonstrate that a technique we call edge dropout, as well as self-supervised adaptation at test-time, further improve transfer for object-centric correspondence.
Learning to simulate complex scenes
Authors: Zhenfeng Xue, Weijie Mao, Liang Zheng
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Semantic Segmentation, Unity

Data simulation engines like Unity are becoming an increasingly important data source that allows us to acquire ground truth labels conveniently. Moreover, we can flexibly edit the content of an image in the engine, such as objects (position, orientation) and environments (illumination, occlusion). When using simulated data as training sets, its editable content can be leveraged to mimic the distribution of real-world data, and thus reduce the content difference between the synthetic and real domains. This paper explores content adaptation in the context of semantic segmentation, where the complex street scenes are fully synthesized using 19 classes of virtual objects from a first person driver perspective and controlled by 23 attributes. To optimize the attribute values and obtain a training set of similar content to real-world data, we propose a scalable discretization-and-relaxation (SDR) approach. Under a reinforcement learning framework, we formulate attribute optimization as a random-to-optimized mapping problem using a neural network. Our method has three characteristics. 1) Instead of editing attributes of individual objects, we focus on global attributes that have large influence on the scene structure, such as object density and illumination. 2) Attributes are quantized to discrete values, so as to reduce search space and training complexity. 3) Correlated attributes are jointly optimized in a group, so as to avoid meaningless scene structures and find better convergence points. Experiment shows our system can generate reasonable and useful scenes, from which we obtain promising real-world segmentation accuracy compared with existing synthetic training sets.
A causal view of compositional zero-shot recognition
Authors: Yuval Atzmon, Felix Kreuk, Uri Shalit, Gal Chechik
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Attribute, Compositional Zero-Shot Learning, Zero-Shot Learning

People easily recognize new visual categories that are new combinations of known components. This compositional generalization capacity is critical for learning in real-world domains like vision and language because the long tail of new combinations dominates the distribution. Unfortunately, learning systems struggle with compositional generalization because they often build on features that are correlated with class labels even if they are not "essential" for the class. This leads to consistent misclassification of samples from a new distribution, like new combinations of known components. Here we describe an approach for compositional generalization that builds on causal ideas. First, we describe compositional zero-shot learning from a causal perspective, and propose to view zero-shot inference as finding "which intervention caused the image?". Second, we present a causal-inspired embedding model that learns disentangled representations of elementary components of visual objects from correlated (confounded) training data. We evaluate this approach on two datasets for predicting new combinations of attribute-object pairs: A well-controlled synthesized images dataset and a real-world dataset which consists of fine-grained types of shoes. We show improvements compared to strong baselines.
Bayesian Optimization with a Prior for the Optimum
Authors: Artur Souza, Luigi Nardi, Leonardo B. Oliveira, Kunle Olukotun, Marius Lindauer, Frank Hutter
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

While Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a very popular method for optimizing expensive black-box functions, it fails to leverage the experience of domain experts. This causes BO to waste function evaluations on bad design choices (e.g., machine learning hyperparameters) that the expert already knows to work poorly. To address this issue, we introduce Bayesian Optimization with a Prior for the Optimum (BOPrO). BOPrO allows users to inject their knowledge into the optimization process in the form of priors about which parts of the input space will yield the best performance, rather than BO's standard priors over functions, which are much less intuitive for users. BOPrO then combines these priors with BO's standard probabilistic model to form a pseudo-posterior used to select which points to evaluate next. We show that BOPrO is around 6.67x faster than state-of-the-art methods on a common suite of benchmarks, and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on a real-world hardware design application. We also show that BOPrO converges faster even if the priors for the optimum are not entirely accurate and that it robustly recovers from misleading priors.
Global Convergence and Generalization Bound of Gradient-Based Meta-Learning with Deep Neural Nets
Authors: Haoxiang Wang, Ruoyu Sun, Bo Li
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Meta-Learning

Gradient-based meta-learning (GBML) with deep neural nets (DNNs) has become a popular approach for few-shot learning. However, due to the non-convexity of DNNs and the bi-level optimization in GBML, the theoretical properties of GBML with DNNs remain largely unknown. In this paper, we first aim to answer the following question: Does GBML with DNNs have global convergence guarantees? We provide a positive answer to this question by proving that GBML with over-parameterized DNNs is guaranteed to converge to global optima at a linear rate. The second question we aim to address is: How does GBML achieve fast adaption to new tasks with prior experience on past tasks? To answer it, we theoretically show that GBML is equivalent to a functional gradient descent operation that explicitly propagates experience from the past tasks to new ones, and then we prove a generalization error bound of GBML with over-parameterized DNNs.
Ensembles of Generative Adversarial Networks for Disconnected Data
Authors: Lorenzo Luzi, Randall Balestriero, Richard G. Baraniuk
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00

Most current computer vision datasets are composed of disconnected sets, such as images from different classes. We prove that distributions of this type of data cannot be represented with a continuous generative network without error. They can be represented in two ways: With an ensemble of networks or with a single network with truncated latent space. We show that ensembles are more desirable than truncated distributions in practice. We construct a regularized optimization problem that establishes the relationship between a single continuous GAN, an ensemble of GANs, conditional GANs, and Gaussian Mixture GANs. This regularization can be computed efficiently, and we show empirically that our framework has a performance sweet spot which can be found with hyperparameter tuning. This ensemble framework allows better performance than a single continuous GAN or cGAN while maintaining fewer total parameters.
The Surprising Simplicity of the Early-Time Learning Dynamics of Neural Networks
Authors: Wei Hu, Lechao Xiao, Ben Adlam, Jeffrey Pennington
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

Modern neural networks are often regarded as complex black-box functions whose behavior is difficult to understand owing to their nonlinear dependence on the data and the nonconvexity in their loss landscapes. In this work, we show that these common perceptions can be completely false in the early phase of learning. In particular, we formally prove that, for a class of well-behaved input distributions, the early-time learning dynamics of a two-layer fully-connected neural network can be mimicked by training a simple linear model on the inputs. We additionally argue that this surprising simplicity can persist in networks with more layers and with convolutional architecture, which we verify empirically. Key to our analysis is to bound the spectral norm of the difference between the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) at initialization and an affine transform of the data kernel; however, unlike many previous results utilizing the NTK, we do not require the network to have disproportionately large width, and the network is allowed to escape the kernel regime later in training.
Newton-type Methods for Minimax Optimization
Authors: Guojun Zhang, Kaiwen Wu, Pascal Poupart, Yao-Liang Yu
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL), Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

Differential games, in particular two-player sequential zero-sum games (a.k.a. minimax optimization), have been an important modeling tool in applied science and received renewed interest in machine learning due to many recent applications, such as adversarial training, generative models and reinforcement learning. However, existing theory mostly focuses on convex-concave functions with few exceptions. In this work, we propose two novel Newton-type algorithms for nonconvex-nonconcave minimax optimization. We prove their local convergence at strict local minimax points, which are surrogates of global solutions. We argue that our Newton-type algorithms nicely complement existing ones in that (a) they converge faster to strict local minimax points; (b) they are much more effective when the problem is ill-conditioned; (c) their computational complexity remains similar. We verify the effectiveness of our Newton-type algorithms through experiments on training GANs which are intrinsically nonconvex and ill-conditioned. Our code is available at https://github.com/watml/min-max-2nd-order.
Bidirectional compression in heterogeneous settings for distributed or federated learning with partial participation: tight convergence guarantees
Authors: Constantin Philippenko, Aymeric Dieuleveut
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

We introduce a framework - Artemis - to tackle the problem of learning in a distributed or federated setting with communication constraints and device partial participation. Several workers (randomly sampled) perform the optimization process using a central server to aggregate their computations. To alleviate the communication cost, Artemis allows to compress the information sent in both directions (from the workers to the server and conversely) combined with a memory mechanism. It improves on existing algorithms that only consider unidirectional compression (to the server), or use very strong assumptions on the compression operator, and often do not take into account devices partial participation. We provide fast rates of convergence (linear up to a threshold) under weak assumptions on the stochastic gradients (noise's variance bounded only at optimal point) in non-i.i.d. setting, highlight the impact of memory for unidirectional and bidirectional compression, analyze Polyak-Ruppert averaging. We use convergence in distribution to obtain a lower bound of the asymptotic variance that highlights practical limits of compression. We propose two approaches to tackle the challenging case of devices partial participation and provide experimental results to demonstrate the validity of our analysis.
The Effect of Optimization Methods on the Robustness of Out-of-Distribution Detection Approaches
Authors: Vahdat Abdelzad, Krzysztof Czarnecki, Rick Salay
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become the de facto learning mechanism in different domains. Their tendency to perform unreliably on out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs hinders their adoption in critical domains. Several approaches have been proposed for detecting OOD inputs. However, existing approaches still lack robustness. In this paper, we shed light on the robustness of OOD detection (OODD) approaches by revealing the important role of optimization methods. We show that OODD approaches are sensitive to the type of optimization method used during training deep models. Optimization methods can provide different solutions to a non-convex problem and so these solutions may or may not satisfy the assumptions (e.g., distributions of deep features) made by OODD approaches. Furthermore, we propose a robustness score that takes into account the role of optimization methods. This provides a sound way to compare OODD approaches. In addition to comparing several OODD approaches using our proposed robustness score, we demonstrate that some optimization methods provide better solutions for OODD approaches.
Replication-Robust Payoff-Allocation for Machine Learning Data Markets
Authors: Dongge Han, Michael Wooldridge, Alex Rogers, Olga Ohrimenko, Sebastian Tschiatschek
Date: 2020-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Submodular functions have been a powerful mathematical model for a wide range of real-world applications. Recently, submodular functions are becoming increasingly important in machine learning (ML) for modelling notions such as information and redundancy among entities such as data and features. Among these applications, a key question is payoff allocation, i.e., how to evaluate the importance of each entity towards the collective objective? To this end, classic solution concepts from cooperative game theory offer principled approaches to payoff allocation. However, despite the extensive body of game-theoretic literature, payoff allocation in submodular games are relatively under-researched. In particular, an important notion that arises in the emerging submodular applications is redundancy, which may occur from various sources such as abundant data or malicious manipulations where a player replicates its resource and act under multiple identities. Though many game-theoretic solution concepts can be directly used in submodular games, naively applying them for payoff allocation in these settings may incur robustness issues against replication. In this paper, we systematically study the replication manipulation in submodular games and investigate replication robustness, a metric that quantitatively measures the robustness of solution concepts against replication. Using this metric, we present conditions which theoretically characterise the robustness of semivalues, a wide family of solution concepts including the Shapley and Banzhaf value. Moreover, we empirically validate our theoretical results on an emerging submodular ML application, i.e., the ML data market.