pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
VAE-KRnet and its applications to variational Bayes
Authors: Xiaoliang Wan, Shuangqing Wei
Date: 2020-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, Dimensionality Reduction

In this work, we have proposed a generative model, called VAE-KRnet, for density estimation or approximation, which combines the canonical variational autoencoder (VAE) with our recently developed flow-based generative model, called KRnet. VAE is used as a dimension reduction technique to capture the latent space, and KRnet is used to model the distribution of the latent variable. Using a linear model between the data and the latent variable, we show that VAE-KRnet can be more effective and robust than the canonical VAE. VAE-KRnet can be used as a density model to approximate either data distribution or an arbitrary probability density function (PDF) known up to a constant. VAE-KRnet is flexible in terms of dimensionality. When the number of dimensions is relatively small, KRnet can effectively approximate the distribution in terms of the original random variable. For high-dimensional cases, we may use VAE-KRnet to incorporate dimension reduction. One important application of VAE-KRnet is the variational Bayes for the approximation of the posterior distribution. The variational Bayes approaches are usually based on the minimization of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the model and the posterior. For high-dimensional distributions, it is very challenging to construct an accurate density model due to the curse of dimensionality, where extra assumptions are often introduced for efficiency. For instance, the classical mean-field approach assumes mutual independence between dimensions, which often yields an underestimated variance due to oversimplification. To alleviate this issue, we include into the loss the maximization of the mutual information between the latent random variable and the original random variable, which helps keep more information from the region of low density such that the estimation of variance is improved.
OccInpFlow: Occlusion-Inpainting Optical Flow Estimation by Unsupervised Learning
Authors: Kunming Luo, Chuan Wang, Nianjin Ye, Shuaicheng Liu, Jue Wang
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Occlusion Handling, Optical Flow Estimation

Occlusion is an inevitable and critical problem in unsupervised optical flow learning. Existing methods either treat occlusions equally as non-occluded regions or simply remove them to avoid incorrectness. However, the occlusion regions can provide effective information for optical flow learning. In this paper, we present OccInpFlow, an occlusion-inpainting framework to make full use of occlusion regions. Specifically, a new appearance-flow network is proposed to inpaint occluded flows based on the image content. Moreover, a boundary warp is proposed to deal with occlusions caused by displacement beyond image border. We conduct experiments on multiple leading flow benchmark data sets such as Flying Chairs, KITTI and MPI-Sintel, which demonstrate that the performance is significantly improved by our proposed occlusion handling framework.
Forced-exploration free Strategies for Unimodal Bandits
Authors: Hassan Saber, Pierre Ménard, Odalric-Ambrym Maillard
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00

We consider a multi-armed bandit problem specified by a set of Gaussian or Bernoulli distributions endowed with a unimodal structure. Although this problem has been addressed in the literature (Combes and Proutiere, 2014), the state-of-the-art algorithms for such structure make appear a forced-exploration mechanism. We introduce IMED-UB, the first forced-exploration free strategy that exploits the unimodal-structure, by adapting to this setting the Indexed Minimum Empirical Divergence (IMED) strategy introduced by Honda and Takemura (2015). This strategy is proven optimal. We then derive KLUCB-UB, a KLUCB version of IMED-UB, which is also proven optimal. Owing to our proof technique, we are further able to provide a concise finite-time analysis of both strategies in an unified way. Numerical experiments show that both IMED-UB and KLUCB-UB perform similarly in practice and outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Causality Learning: A New Perspective for Interpretable Machine Learning
Authors: Guandong Xu, Tri Dung Duong, Qian Li, Shaowu Liu, Xianzhi Wang
Date: 2020-06-27 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Interpretable Machine Learning, text-classification, Text Classification

Recent years have witnessed the rapid growth of machine learning in a wide range of fields such as image recognition, text classification, credit scoring prediction, recommendation system, etc. In spite of their great performance in different sectors, researchers still concern about the mechanism under any machine learning (ML) techniques that are inherently black-box and becoming more complex to achieve higher accuracy. Therefore, interpreting machine learning model is currently a mainstream topic in the research community. However, the traditional interpretable machine learning focuses on the association instead of the causality. This paper provides an overview of causal analysis with the fundamental background and key concepts, and then summarizes most recent causal approaches for interpretable machine learning. The evaluation techniques for assessing method quality, and open problems in causal interpretability are also discussed in this paper.
Counterfactual Predictions under Runtime Confounding
Authors: Amanda Coston, Edward H. Kennedy, Alexandra Chouldechova
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: counterfactual, Prediction

Algorithms are commonly used to predict outcomes under a particular decision or intervention, such as predicting whether an offender will succeed on parole if placed under minimal supervision. Generally, to learn such counterfactual prediction models from observational data on historical decisions and corresponding outcomes, one must measure all factors that jointly affect the outcomes and the decision taken. Motivated by decision support applications, we study the counterfactual prediction task in the setting where all relevant factors are captured in the historical data, but it is either undesirable or impermissible to use some such factors in the prediction model. We refer to this setting as runtime confounding. We propose a doubly-robust procedure for learning counterfactual prediction models in this setting. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results suggest that our method often outperforms competing approaches. We also present a validation procedure for evaluating the performance of counterfactual prediction methods.
Deep reinforcement learning approach to MIMO precoding problem: Optimality and Robustness
Authors: Heunchul Lee, Maksym Girnyk, Jaeseong Jeong
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (RL)-based precoding framework that can be used to learn an optimal precoding policy for complex multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) precoding problems. We model the precoding problem for a single-user MIMO system as an RL problem in which a learning agent sequentially selects the precoders to serve the environment of MIMO system based on contextual information about the environmental conditions, while simultaneously adapting the precoder selection policy based on the reward feedback from the environment to maximize a numerical reward signal. We develop the RL agent with two canonical deep RL (DRL) algorithms, namely deep Q-network (DQN) and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG). To demonstrate the optimality of the proposed DRL-based precoding framework, we explicitly consider a simple MIMO environment for which the optimal solution can be obtained analytically and show that DQN- and DDPG-based agents can learn the near-optimal policy to map the environment state of MIMO system to a precoder that maximizes the reward function, respectively, in the codebook-based and non-codebook based MIMO precoding systems. Furthermore, to investigate the robustness of DRL-based precoding framework, we examine the performance of the two DRL algorithms in a complex MIMO environment, for which the optimal solution is not known. The numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the DRL-based precoding framework and show that the proposed DRL-based framework can outperform the conventional approximation algorithm in the complex MIMO environment.
Towards analyzing large graphs with quantum annealing and quantum gate computers
Authors: Hannu Reittu, Ville Kotovirta, Lasse Leskelä, Hannu Rummukainen, Tomi Räty
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection, LEMMA

The use of quantum computing in graph community detection and regularity checking related to Szemeredi's Regularity Lemma (SRL) are demonstrated with D-Wave Systems' quantum annealer and simulations. We demonstrate the capability of quantum computing in solving hard problems relevant to big data. A new community detection algorithm based on SRL is also introduced and tested. In worst case scenario of regularity check we use Grover's algorithm and quantum phase estimation algorithm, in order to speed-up computations using a quantum gate computers.
Overview of Gaussian process based multi-fidelity techniques with variable relationship between fidelities
Authors: Loïc Brevault, Mathieu Balesdent, Ali Hebbal
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaussian Processes

The design process of complex systems such as new configurations of aircraft or launch vehicles is usually decomposed in different phases which are characterized for instance by the depth of the analyses in terms of number of design variables and fidelity of the physical models. At each phase, the designers have to compose with accurate but computationally intensive models as well as cheap but inaccurate models. Multi-fidelity modeling is a way to merge different fidelity models to provide engineers with accurate results with a limited computational cost. Within the context of multi-fidelity modeling, approaches relying on Gaussian Processes emerge as popular techniques to fuse information between the different fidelity models. The relationship between the fidelity models is a key aspect in multi-fidelity modeling. This paper provides an overview of Gaussian process-based multi-fidelity modeling techniques for variable relationship between the fidelity models (e.g., linearity, non-linearity, variable correlation). Each technique is described within a unified framework and the links between the different techniques are highlighted. All the approaches are numerically compared on a series of analytical test cases and four aerospace related engineering problems in order to assess their benefits and disadvantages with respect to the problem characteristics.
AdaSGD: Bridging the gap between SGD and Adam
Authors: Jiaxuan Wang, Jenna Wiens
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00

In the context of stochastic gradient descent(SGD) and adaptive moment estimation (Adam),researchers have recently proposed optimization techniques that transition from Adam to SGD with the goal of improving both convergence and generalization performance. However, precisely how each approach trades off early progress and generalization is not well understood; thus, it is unclear when or even if, one should transition from one approach to the other. In this work, by first studying the convex setting, we identify potential contributors to observed differences in performance between SGD and Adam. In particular,we provide theoretical insights for when and why Adam outperforms SGD and vice versa. We ad-dress the performance gap by adapting a single global learning rate for SGD, which we refer to as AdaSGD. We justify this proposed approach with empirical analyses in non-convex settings. On several datasets that span three different domains,we demonstrate how AdaSGD combines the benefits of both SGD and Adam, eliminating the need for approaches that transition from Adam to SGD.
Regression with reject option and application to kNN
Authors: Christophe Denis, Mohamed Hebiri, Ahmed Zaoui
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: regression

We investigate the problem of regression where one is allowed to abstain from predicting. We refer to this framework as regression with reject option as an extension of classification with reject option. In this context, we focus on the case where the rejection rate is fixed and derive the optimal rule which relies on thresholding the conditional variance function. We provide a semi-supervised estimation procedure of the optimal rule involving two datasets: a first labeled dataset is used to estimate both regression function and conditional variance function while a second unlabeled dataset is exploited to calibrate the desired rejection rate. The resulting predictor with reject option is shown to be almost as good as the optimal predictor with reject option both in terms of risk and rejection rate. We additionally apply our methodology with kNN algorithm and establish rates of convergence for the resulting kNN predictor under mild conditions. Finally, a numerical study is performed to illustrate the benefit of using the proposed procedure.
Associative Memory in Iterated Overparameterized Sigmoid Autoencoders
Authors: Yibo Jiang, Cengiz Pehlevan
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Learning Theory, regression

Recent work showed that overparameterized autoencoders can be trained to implement associative memory via iterative maps, when the trained input-output Jacobian of the network has all of its eigenvalue norms strictly below one. Here, we theoretically analyze this phenomenon for sigmoid networks by leveraging recent developments in deep learning theory, especially the correspondence between training neural networks in the infinite-width limit and performing kernel regression with the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK). We find that overparameterized sigmoid autoencoders can have attractors in the NTK limit for both training with a single example and multiple examples under certain conditions. In particular, for multiple training examples, we find that the norm of the largest Jacobian eigenvalue drops below one with increasing input norm, leading to associative memory.
Leveraging Temporal Information for 3D Detection and Domain Adaptation
Authors: Cunjun Yu, Zhongang Cai, Daxuan Ren, Haiyu Zhao
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Domain Adaptation

Ever since the prevalent use of the LiDARs in autonomous driving, tremendous improvements have been made to the learning on the point clouds. However, recent progress largely focuses on detecting objects in a single 360-degree sweep, without extensively exploring the temporal information. In this report, we describe a simple way to pass such information in the learning pipeline by adding timestamps to the point clouds, which shows consistent improvements across all three classes.
EasyQuant: Post-training Quantization via Scale Optimization
Authors: Di Wu, Qi Tang, Yongle Zhao, Ming Zhang, Ying Fu, Debing Zhang
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

The 8 bits quantization has been widely applied to accelerate network inference in various deep learning applications. There are two kinds of quantization methods, training-based quantization and post-training quantization. Training-based approach suffers from a cumbersome training process, while post-training quantization may lead to unacceptable accuracy drop. In this paper, we present an efficient and simple post-training method via scale optimization, named EasyQuant (EQ),that could obtain comparable accuracy with the training-based method.Specifically, we first alternately optimize scales of weights and activations for all layers target at convolutional outputs to further obtain the high quantization precision. Then, we lower down bit width to INT7 both for weights and activations, and adopt INT16 intermediate storage and integer Winograd convolution implementation to accelerate inference.Experimental results on various computer vision tasks show that EQ outperforms the TensorRT method and can achieve near INT8 accuracy in 7 bits width post-training.
Learning Post-Hoc Causal Explanations for Recommendation
Authors: Shuyuan Xu, Yunqi Li, Shuchang Liu, Zuohui Fu, Xu Chen, Yongfeng Zhang
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Recommendation Systems, Sequential Recommendation

State-of-the-art recommender systems have the ability to generate high-quality recommendations, but usually cannot provide intuitive explanations to humans due to the usage of black-box prediction models. The lack of transparency has highlighted the critical importance of improving the explainability of recommender systems. In this paper, we propose to extract causal rules from the user interaction history as post-hoc explanations for the black-box sequential recommendation mechanisms, whilst maintain the predictive accuracy of the recommendation model. Our approach firstly achieves counterfactual examples with the aid of a perturbation model, and then extracts personalized causal relationships for the recommendation model through a causal rule mining algorithm. Experiments are conducted on several state-of-the-art sequential recommendation models and real-world datasets to verify the performance of our model on generating causal explanations. Meanwhile, We evaluate the discovered causal explanations in terms of quality and fidelity, which show that compared with conventional association rules, causal rules can provide personalized and more effective explanations for the behavior of black-box recommendation models.
Boosting Deep Neural Networks with Geometrical Prior Knowledge: A Survey
Authors: Matthias Rath, Alexandru Paul Condurache
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, object-detection, Object Detection, Survey

Deep Neural Networks achieve state-of-the-art results in many different problem settings by exploiting vast amounts of training data. However, collecting, storing and - in the case of supervised learning - labelling the data is expensive and time-consuming. Additionally, assessing the networks' generalization abilities or predicting how the inferred output changes under input transformations is complicated since the networks are usually treated as a black box. Both of these problems can be mitigated by incorporating prior knowledge into the neural network. One promising approach, inspired by the success of convolutional neural networks in computer vision tasks, is to incorporate knowledge about symmetric geometrical transformations of the problem to solve that affect the output in a predictable way. This promises an increased data efficiency and more interpretable network outputs. In this survey, we try to give a concise overview about different approaches that incorporate geometrical prior knowledge into neural networks. Additionally, we connect those methods to 3D object detection for autonomous driving, where we expect promising results when applying those methods.
Sinkhorn EM: An Expectation-Maximization algorithm based on entropic optimal transport
Authors: Gonzalo Mena, Amin Nejatbakhsh, Erdem Varol, Jonathan Niles-Weed
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00

We study Sinkhorn EM (sEM), a variant of the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm for mixtures based on entropic optimal transport. sEM differs from the classic EM algorithm in the way responsibilities are computed during the expectation step: rather than assign data points to clusters independently, sEM uses optimal transport to compute responsibilities by incorporating prior information about mixing weights. Like EM, sEM has a natural interpretation as a coordinate ascent procedure, which iteratively constructs and optimizes a lower bound on the log-likelihood. However, we show theoretically and empirically that sEM has better behavior than EM: it possesses better global convergence guarantees and is less prone to getting stuck in bad local optima. We complement these findings with experiments on simulated data as well as in an inference task involving C. elegans neurons and show that sEM learns cell labels significantly better than other approaches.
Enabling Continual Learning with Differentiable Hebbian Plasticity
Authors: Vithursan Thangarasa, Thomas Miconi, Graham W. Taylor
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Permuted-MNIST, Split-MNIST

Continual learning is the problem of sequentially learning new tasks or knowledge while protecting previously acquired knowledge. However, catastrophic forgetting poses a grand challenge for neural networks performing such learning process. Thus, neural networks that are deployed in the real world often struggle in scenarios where the data distribution is non-stationary (concept drift), imbalanced, or not always fully available, i.e., rare edge cases. We propose a Differentiable Hebbian Consolidation model which is composed of a Differentiable Hebbian Plasticity (DHP) Softmax layer that adds a rapid learning plastic component (compressed episodic memory) to the fixed (slow changing) parameters of the softmax output layer; enabling learned representations to be retained for a longer timescale. We demonstrate the flexibility of our method by integrating well-known task-specific synaptic consolidation methods to penalize changes in the slow weights that are important for each target task. We evaluate our approach on the Permuted MNIST, Split MNIST and Vision Datasets Mixture benchmarks, and introduce an imbalanced variant of Permuted MNIST -- a dataset that combines the challenges of class imbalance and concept drift. Our proposed model requires no additional hyperparameters and outperforms comparable baselines by reducing forgetting.
Predicting Sample Collision with Neural Networks
Authors: Tuan Tran, Jory Denny, Chinwe Ekenna
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Planning

Many state-of-art robotics applications require fast and efficient motion planning algorithms. Existing motion planning methods become less effective as the dimensionality of the robot and its workspace increases, especially the computational cost of collision detection routines. In this work, we present a framework to address the cost of expensive primitive operations in sampling-based motion planning. This framework determines the validity of a sample robot configuration through a novel combination of a Contractive AutoEncoder (CAE), which captures a occupancy grids representation of the robot's workspace, and a Multilayer Perceptron, which efficiently predicts the collision state of the robot from the CAE and the robot's configuration. We evaluate our framework on multiple planning problems with a variety of robots in 2D and 3D workspaces. The results show that (1) the framework is computationally efficient in all investigated problems, and (2) the framework generalizes well to new workspaces.
Black-box Certification and Learning under Adversarial Perturbations
Authors: Hassan Ashtiani, Vinayak Pathak, Ruth Urner
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1

We formally study the problem of classification under adversarial perturbations from a learner's perspective as well as a third-party who aims at certifying the robustness of a given black-box classifier. We analyze a PAC-type framework of semi-supervised learning and identify possibility and impossibility results for proper learning of VC-classes in this setting. We further introduce a new setting of black-box certification under limited query budget, and analyze this for various classes of predictors and perturbation. We also consider the viewpoint of a black-box adversary that aims at finding adversarial examples, showing that the existence of an adversary with polynomial query complexity can imply the existence of a sample efficient robust learner.