pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Approximate Probabilistic Inference with Composed Flows
Authors: Jay Whang, Erik Lindgren, Alex Dimakis
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Inference

We study the problem of probabilistic inference on the joint distribution defined by a normalizing flow model. Given a pre-trained flow model $p(\boldsymbol{x})$, we wish to estimate $p(\boldsymbol{x}_2 \mid \boldsymbol{x}_1)$ for some arbitrary partitioning of the variables $\boldsymbol{x} = (\boldsymbol{x}_1, \boldsymbol{x}_2)$. We first show that this task is computationally hard for a large class of flow models.  Motivated by this hardness result, we propose a framework for $\textit{approximate}$ probabilistic inference. Specifically, our method trains a new generative model with the property that its composition with the given model approximates the target conditional distribution. By parametrizing this new distribution as another flow model, we can efficiently train it using variational inference and also handle conditioning under arbitrary differentiable transformations. Since the resulting approximate posterior remains a flow, it offers exact likelihood evaluation, inversion, and efficient sampling. We provide an extensive empirical evidence showcasing the flexibility of our method on a variety of inference tasks with applications to inverse problems. We also experimentally demonstrate that our approach is comparable to simple MCMC baselines in terms of sample quality. Further, we explain the failure of naively applying variational inference and show that our method does not suffer from the same issue.
GRF: Learning a General Radiance Field for 3D Scene Representation and Rendering
Authors: Alex Trevithick, Bo Yang
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00

We present a simple yet powerful implicit neural function that can represent and render arbitrarily complex 3D scenes in a single network only from 2D observations. The function models 3D scenes as a general radiance field, which takes a set of 2D images with camera poses and intrinsics as input, constructs an internal representation for each 3D point of the scene, and renders the corresponding appearance and geometry of any 3D point viewing from an arbitrary angle. The key to our approach is to explicitly integrate the principle of multi-view geometry to obtain the internal representations from observed 2D views, such that the learned implicit representations empirically remain multi-view consistent. In addition, we introduce an effective neural module to learn general features for each pixel in 2D images, allowing the constructed internal 3D representations to be general as well. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach.
Data Instance Prior for Transfer Learning in GANs
Authors: Puneet Mangla, Nupur Kumari, Mayank Singh, Vineeth N. Balasubramanian, Balaji Krishnamurthy
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity, Image Generation, Transfer Learning, Unconditional Image Generation

Recent advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown remarkable progress in generating high-quality images. However, this gain in performance depends on the availability of a large amount of training data. In limited data regimes, training typically diverges, and therefore the generated samples are of low quality and lack diversity. Previous works have addressed training in low data setting by leveraging transfer learning and data augmentation techniques. We propose a novel transfer learning method for GANs in the limited data domain by leveraging informative data prior derived from self-supervised/supervised pre-trained networks trained on a diverse source domain. We perform experiments on several standard vision datasets using various GAN architectures (BigGAN, SNGAN, StyleGAN2) to demonstrate that the proposed method effectively transfers knowledge to domains with few target images, outperforming existing state-of-the-art techniques in terms of image quality and diversity. We also show the utility of data instance prior in large-scale unconditional image generation and image editing tasks.
Model-Agnostic Round-Optimal Federated Learning via Knowledge Transfer
Authors: Qinbin Li, Bingsheng He, Dawn Song
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Transfer Learning

Federated learning enables multiple parties to collaboratively learn a model without exchanging their local data. Currently, federated averaging (FedAvg) is the most widely used federated learning algorithm. However, FedAvg or its variants have obvious shortcomings. It can only be used to learn differentiable models and needs many communication rounds to converge. In this paper, we propose a novel federated learning algorithm FedKT that needs only a single communication round (i.e., round-optimal). With applying the knowledge transfer approach, our algorithm can be applied to any classification model. Moreover, we develop the differentially private versions of FedKT and theoretically analyze the privacy loss. The experiments show that our method can achieve close or better accuracy compared with the other state-of-the-art federated learning algorithms.
Beyond Prioritized Replay: Sampling States in Model-Based RL via Simulated Priorities
Authors: Jincheng Mei, Yangchen Pan, Martha White, Amir-Massoud Farahmand, Hengshuai Yao
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00

The prioritized Experience Replay (ER) method has attracted great attention; however, there is little theoretical understanding of such prioritization strategy and why they help. In this work, we revisit prioritized ER and, in an ideal setting, show equivalence to minimizing cubic loss, providing theoretical insight into why it improves upon uniform sampling. This theoretical equivalence highlights two limitations of current prioritized experience replay methods: insufficient coverage of the sample space and outdated priorities of training samples. This motivates our model-based approach, which does not suffer from these limitations. Our key idea is to actively search for high priority states using gradient ascent. Under certain conditions, we prove that the hypothetical experiences generated from these states are sampled proportionally to approximately true priorities. We also characterize the distance between the sampling distribution of our method and the true prioritized sampling distribution. Our experiments on both benchmark and application-oriented domains show that our approach achieves superior performance over baselines.
Once Quantized for All: Progressively Searching for Quantized Compact Models
Authors: Mingzhu Shen, Feng Liang, Chuming Li, Chen Lin, Ming Sun, Junjie Yan, Wanli Ouyang
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Neural Architecture Search, Quantization

Automatic search of Quantized Neural Networks (QNN) has attracted a lot of attention. However, the existing quantization-aware Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approaches inherit a two-stage search-retrain schema, which is not only time-consuming but also adversely affected by the unreliable ranking of architectures during the search. To avoid the undesirable effect of the search-retrain schema, we present Once Quantized for All (OQA), a novel framework that searches for quantized compact models and deploys their quantized weights at the same time without additional post-process. While supporting a huge architecture search space, our OQA can produce a series of quantized compact models under ultra-low bit-widths(e.g. 4/3/2 bit). A progressive bit inheritance procedure is introduced to support ultra-low bit-width. Our searched model family, OQANets, achieves a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) on quantized compact models compared with various quantization methods and bit-widths. In particular, OQA2bit-L achieves 64.0\% ImageNet Top-1 accuracy, outperforming its 2 bit counterpart EfficientNet-B0@QKD by a large margin of 14\%  using 30\% less computation cost.
Simplifying Models with Unlabeled Output Data
Authors: Sang Michael Xie, Tengyu Ma, Percy Liang
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Translation, Image Generation, Translation, valid

We focus on prediction problems with high-dimensional outputs that are subject to output validity constraints, e.g. a pseudocode-to-code translation task where the code must compile. For these problems, labeled input-output pairs are expensive to obtain, but "unlabeled" outputs, i.e. outputs without corresponding inputs, are freely available and provide information about output validity (e.g. code on GitHub). In this paper, we present predict-and-denoise, a framework that can leverage unlabeled outputs. Specifically, we first train a denoiser to map possibly invalid outputs to valid outputs using synthetic perturbations of the unlabeled outputs. Second, we train a predictor composed with this fixed denoiser. We show theoretically that for a family of functions with a high-dimensional discrete valid output space, composing with a denoiser reduces the complexity of a 2-layer ReLU network needed to represent the function and that this complexity gap can be arbitrarily large. We evaluate the framework empirically on several datasets, including image generation from attributes and pseudocode-to-code translation. On the SPoC pseudocode-to-code dataset, our framework improves the proportion of code outputs that pass all test cases by 3-5% over a baseline Transformer.
A Representational Model of Grid Cells' Path Integration Based on Matrix Lie Algebras
Authors: Ruiqi Gao, Jianwen Xie, Xue-Xin Wei, Song-Chun Zhu, Ying Nian Wu
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

The grid cells in the mammalian medial entorhinal cortex exhibit striking hexagon firing patterns when the agent navigates in the open field. It is hypothesized that the grid cells are involved in path integration so that the agent is aware of its self-position by accumulating its self-motion. Assuming the grid cells form a vector representation of self-position, we elucidate a minimally simple recurrent model for grid cells' path integration based on two coupled matrix Lie algebras that underlie two coupled rotation systems that mirror the agent's self-motion: (1) When the agent moves along a certain direction, the vector is rotated by a generator matrix. (2) When the agent changes direction, the generator matrix is rotated by another generator matrix. Our experiments show that our model learns hexagonal grid response patterns that resemble the firing patterns observed from the grid cells in the brain. Furthermore, the learned model is capable of near exact path integration, and it is also capable of error correction. Our model is novel and simple, with explicit geometric and algebraic structures.
Adaptive Automotive Radar data Acquisition
Authors: Madhumitha Sakthi, Ahmed Tewfik
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

In an autonomous driving scenario, it is vital to acquire and efficiently process data from various sensors to obtain a complete and robust perspective of the surroundings. Many studies have shown the importance of having radar data in addition to images since radar improves object detection performance. We develop a novel algorithm motivated by the hypothesis that with a limited sampling budget, allocating more sampling budget to areas with the object as opposed to a uniform sampling budget ultimately improves relevant object detection and classification. In order to identify the areas with objects, we develop an algorithm to process the object detection results from the Faster R-CNN object detection algorithm and the previous radar frame and use these as prior information to adaptively allocate more bits to areas in the scene that may contain relevant objects. We use previous radar frame information to mitigate the potential information loss of an object missed by the image or the object detection network. Also, in our algorithm, the error of missing relevant information in the current frame due to the limited budget sampling of the previous radar frame did not propagate across frames. We also develop an end-to-end transformer-based 2D object detection network using the NuScenes radar and image data. Finally, we compare the performance of our algorithm against that of standard CS and adaptive CS using radar on the Oxford Radar RobotCar dataset.
Neural Lyapunov Model Predictive Control
Authors: Mayank Mittal, Marco Gallieri, Alessio Quaglino, Seyed Sina Mirrazavi Salehian, Jan Koutnik
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, model, Model Predictive Control

With a growing interest in data-driven control techniques, Model Predictive Control (MPC) provides a significant opportunity to exploit the surplus of data reliably, particularly while taking safety and stability into account. In this paper, we aim to infer the terminal cost of an MPC controller from transitions generated by an initial \emph{unknown} demonstrator. We propose an algorithm to alternatively learn the terminal cost and update the MPC parameters according to a stability metric. We design the terminal cost as a Lyapunov function neural network and theoretically show that, under limited approximation error, our proposed approach guarantees that the size of the stability region (region of attraction) is greater than or equal to the one from the initial demonstrator. We also present theorems that characterize the stability and performance of the learned MPC in the presence of model uncertainties and sub-optimality due to function approximation. Empirically, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm on non-linear continuous control tasks with soft constraints. Our results show that the proposed approach can improve upon the initial demonstrator also in practice and achieve better task performance than other learning-based baselines.
Does Adversarial Transferability Indicate Knowledge Transferability?
Authors: Kaizhao Liang, Jacky Y. Zhang, Oluwasanmi O Koyejo, Bo Li
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Despite the immense success that deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved, \emph{adversarial examples}, which are perturbed inputs that aim to mislead DNNs to make mistakes, have recently led to great concerns. On the other hand, adversarial examples exhibit interesting phenomena, such as \emph{adversarial transferability}. DNNs also exhibit knowledge transfer, which is critical to improving learning efficiency and learning in domains that lack high-quality training data. To uncover the fundamental connections between these phenomena, we investigate and give an affirmative answer to the question: \emph{does adversarial transferability indicate knowledge transferability?} We theoretically analyze the relationship between adversarial transferability and knowledge transferability, and outline easily checkable sufficient conditions that identify when adversarial transferability indicates knowledge transferability. In particular, we show that composition with an affine function is sufficient to reduce the difference between two models when they possess high adversarial transferability. Furthermore, we provide empirical evaluation for different transfer learning scenarios on diverse datasets, showing a strong positive correlation between the adversarial transferability and knowledge transferability, thus illustrating that our theoretical insights are predictive of practice.
Differentiate Everything with a Reversible Domain-Specific Language
Authors: JinGuo Liu, Taine Zhao
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Reverse-mode automatic differentiation (AD) suffers from the issue of having too much space overhead to trace back intermediate computational states for backpropagation.
The traditional method to trace back states is called checkpointing that stores intermediate states into a global stack and restore state through either stack pop or re-computing.
The overhead of stack manipulations and re-computing makes the general purposed (or not tensor-based) AD engines unable to meet many industrial needs.
Instead of checkpointing, we propose to use reverse computing to trace back states by designing and implementing a reversible programming eDSL, where a program can be executed bi-directionally without implicit stack operations. The absence of implicit stack operations makes the program compatible with existing compiler features, including utilizing existing optimization passes and compiling the code as GPU kernels.
We implement AD for sparse matrix operations and some machine learning applications to show that our framework has state-of-the-art performance.
Linking average- and worst-case perturbation robustness via class selectivity and dimensionality
Authors: Matthew L Leavitt, Ari S. Morcos
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00

Representational sparsity is known to affect robustness to input perturbations in deep neural networks (DNNs), but less is known about how the semantic content of representations affects robustness. Class selectivity—the variability of a unit’s responses across data classes or dimensions—is one way of quantifying the sparsity of semantic representations. Given recent evidence that class selectivity may not be necessary for, and in some cases can impair generalization, we sought to investigate whether it also confers robustness (or vulnerability) to perturbations of input data. We found that class selectivity leads to increased vulnerability to average-case (naturalistic) perturbations in ResNet18, ResNet50, and ResNet20, as measured using Tiny ImageNetC (ResNet18 and ResNet50) and CIFAR10C (ResNet20). Networks regularized to have lower levels of class selectivity are more robust to average-case perturbations, while networks with higher class selectivity are more vulnerable. In contrast, we found that class selectivity increases robustness to multiple types of worst-case (i.e. white box adversarial) perturbations, suggesting that while decreasing class selectivity is helpful for average-case perturbations, it is harmful for worst-case perturbations. To explain this difference, we studied the dimensionality of the networks' representations: we found that the dimensionality of early-layer representations is inversely proportional to a network's class selectivity, and that adversarial samples cause a larger increase in early-layer dimensionality than corrupted samples. We also found that the input-unit gradient was more variable across samples and units in high-selectivity networks compared to low-selectivity networks. These results lead to the conclusion that units participate more consistently in low-selectivity regimes compared to high-selectivity regimes, effectively creating a larger attack surface and hence vulnerability to worst-case perturbations.
Adaptive Gradient Methods Converge Faster with Over-Parameterization (and you can do a line-search)
Authors: Sharan Vaswani, Issam H. Laradji, Frederik Kunstner, Si Yi Meng, Mark Schmidt, Simon Lacoste-Julien
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification

Adaptive gradient methods are typically used for training over-parameterized models capable of exactly fitting the data; we thus study their convergence in this interpolation setting. Under an interpolation assumption, we prove that AMSGrad with a constant step-size and momentum can converge to the minimizer at the faster $O(1/T)$ rate for smooth, convex functions. Furthermore, in this setting, we show that AdaGrad can achieve an $O(1)$ regret in the online convex optimization framework. When interpolation is only approximately satisfied, we show that constant step-size AMSGrad converges to a neighbourhood of the solution. On the other hand, we prove that AdaGrad is robust to the violation of interpolation and converges to the minimizer at the optimal rate. However, we demonstrate that even for simple, convex problems satisfying interpolation, the empirical performance of these methods heavily depends on the step-size and requires tuning. We alleviate this problem by using stochastic line-search (SLS) and Polyak's step-sizes (SPS) to help these methods adapt to the function's local smoothness. By using these techniques, we prove that AdaGrad and AMSGrad do not require knowledge of problem-dependent constants and retain the convergence guarantees of their constant step-size counterparts. Experimentally, we show that these techniques help improve the convergence and generalization performance across tasks, from binary classification with kernel mappings to classification with deep neural networks.
MDP Playground: Controlling Orthogonal Dimensions of Hardness in Toy Environments
Authors: Raghu Rajan, Jessica Lizeth Borja Diaz, Suresh Guttikonda, Fabio Ferreira, André Biedenkapp, Frank Hutter
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: OpenAI Gym, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We present MDP Playground, an efficient benchmark for Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms with various dimensions of hardness that can be controlled independently to challenge algorithms in different ways and to obtain varying degrees of hardness in generated environments. We consider and allow control over a wide variety of key hardness dimensions, including delayed rewards, rewardable sequences, sparsity of rewards, stochasticity, image representations, irrelevant features, time unit, and action max. While it is very time consuming to run RL algorithms on standard benchmarks, we define a parameterised collection of fast-to-run toy benchmarks in OpenAI Gym by varying these dimensions. Despite their toy nature and low compute requirements, we show that these benchmarks present substantial challenges to current RL algorithms. Furthermore, since we can generate environments with a desired value for each of the dimensions, in addition to having fine-grained control over the environments' hardness, we also have the ground truth available for evaluating algorithms. Finally, we evaluate the kinds of transfer for these dimensions that may be expected from our benchmarks to more complex benchmarks. We believe that MDP Playground is a valuable testbed for researchers designing new, adaptive and intelligent RL algorithms and those wanting to unit test their algorithms.
Learning Online Data Association
Authors: Yilun Du, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tomas Perez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling
Date: 2020-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

When an agent interacts with a complex environment, it receives a stream of percepts in which it may detect entities, such as objects or people. To build up a coherent, low-variance estimate of the underlying state, it is necessary to fuse information from multiple detections over time. To do this fusion, the agent must decide which detections to associate with one another. We address this data-association problem in the setting of an online filter, in which each observation is processed by aggregating into an existing object hypothesis. Classic methods with strong probabilistic foundations exist, but they are computationally expensive and require models that can be difficult to acquire. In this work, we use the deep-learning tools of sparse attention and representation learning to learn a machine that processes a stream of detections and outputs a set of hypotheses about objects in the world. We evaluate this approach on simple clustering problems, problems with dynamics, and a complex image-based domain. We find that it generalizes well from short to long observation sequences and from a few to many hypotheses, outperforming other learning approaches and classical non-learning methods.