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Title: Achieving Small-Batch Accuracy with Large-Batch Scalability via Adaptive Learning Rate Adjustment. Abstract: We consider synchronous data-parallel neural network training with fixed large batch sizes. While the large batch size provides a high degree of parallelism, it likely degrades the generalization performance due to the low gradient noise scale. We propose a two-phase adaptive learning rate adjustment framework that tackles the poor generalization issue in large-batch training. Our empirical study shows that the number of training epochs before decaying the learning rate strongly affects the final accuracy. The framework performs extra epochs using the large learning rate even after the loss is flattened. After sufficient training under the noisy condition, the framework decays the learning rate based on the observed loss landscape at run-time. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed heuristics and algorithm enable to use an extremely large batch size while maintaining the model accuracy. For CIFAR-10 classification with ResNet20, our method achieves $92.66\%$ accuracy using $8,192$ batch size, which is close to $92.83\%$ achieved using $128$ batch size, at a negligible extra computational cost. | 2withdrawn
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Title: Conditioning Trick for Training Stable GANs. Abstract: In this paper we propose a conditioning trick, called difference departure from normality, applied on the generator network in response to instability issues during GAN training. We force the generator to get closer to the departure from normality function of real samples computed in the spectral domain of Schur decomposition. This binding makes the generator amenable to truncation and does not limit exploring all the possible modes. We slightly modify the BigGAN architecture incorporating residual network for synthesizing 2D representations of audio signals which enables reconstructing high quality sounds with some preserved phase information. Additionally, the proposed conditional training scenario makes a trade-off between fidelity and variety for the generated spectrograms. The experimental results on UrbanSound8k and ESC-50 environmental sound datasets and the Mozilla common voice dataset have shown that the proposed GAN configuration with the conditioning trick remarkably outperforms baseline architectures, according to three objective metrics: inception score, Frechet inception distance, and signal-to-noise ratio. | 2withdrawn
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Title: Object detection deep learning networks for Optical Character Recognition. Abstract: In this article, we show how we applied a simple approach coming from deep learning networks for object detection to the task of optical character recognition in order to build image features taylored for documents. In contrast to scene text reading in natural images using networks pretrained on ImageNet, our document reading is performed with small networks inspired by MNIST digit recognition challenge, at a small computational budget and a small stride. The object detection modern frameworks allow a direct end-to-end training, with no other algorithm than the deep learning and the non-max-suppression algorithm to filter the duplicate predictions. The trained weights can be used for higher level models, such as, for example, document classification, or document segmentation.
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Title: StARformer: Transformer with State-Action-Reward Representations. Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be considered as a sequence modeling task, i.e., given a sequence of past state-action-reward experiences, a model autoregressively predicts a sequence of future actions. Recently, Transformers have been successfully adopted to model this problem. In this work, we propose State-Action-Reward Transformer (StARformer), which explicitly models strongly related local causal relations to help improve action prediction in long sequences. StARformer first extracts local representations (i.e., StAR-representations) from each group of state-action-reward tokens within a very short time span. A sequence of such local representations combined with state representations, is then used to make action predictions over a long time span. Our experiments show that StARformer outperforms the state-of-the-art Transformer-based method on Atari (image) and Gym (state vector) benchmarks, in both offline-RL and imitation learning settings. StARformer is also more compliant with longer sequences of inputs compared to the baseline. The code will be released online. | 2withdrawn
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Title: PIVEN: A Deep Neural Network for Prediction Intervals with Specific Value Prediction. Abstract: Improving the robustness of neural nets in regression tasks is key to their application in multiple domains. Deep learning-based approaches aim to achieve this goal either by improving their prediction of specific values (i.e., point prediction), or by producing prediction intervals (PIs) that quantify uncertainty. We present PIVEN, a deep neural network for producing both a PI and a prediction of specific values. Unlike previous studies, PIVEN makes no assumptions regarding data distribution inside the PI, making its point prediction more effective for various real-world problems. Benchmark experiments show that our approach produces tighter uncertainty bounds than the current state-of-the-art approach for producing PIs, while maintaining comparable performance to the state-of-the-art approach for specific value-prediction. Additional evaluation on large image datasets further support our conclusions. | 0reject
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Title: On Hard Episodes in Meta-Learning. Abstract: Existing meta-learners primarily focus on improving the average task accuracy across multiple episodes. Different episodes, however, may vary in hardness and quality leading to a wide gap in the meta-learner's performance across episodes. Understanding this issue is particularly critical in industrial few-shot settings, where there is limited control over test episodes as they are typically uploaded by end-users. In this paper, we empirically analyse the behaviour of meta-learners on episodes of varying hardness across three standard benchmark datasets: CIFAR-FS, mini-ImageNet, and tiered-ImageNet. Surprisingly, we observe a wide gap in accuracy of around $50\%$ between the hardest and easiest episodes across all the standard benchmarks and meta-learners. We additionally investigate various properties of hard episodes and highlight their connection to catastrophic forgetting during meta-training. To address the issue of sub-par performance on hard episodes, we investigate and benchmark different meta-training strategies based on adversarial training and curriculum learning. We find that adversarial training strategies are much more powerful than curriculum learning in improving the prediction performance on hard episodes. | 0reject
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Title: Neural ODE Processes. Abstract: Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) use a neural network to model the instantaneous rate of change in the state of a system. However, despite their apparent suitability for dynamics-governed time-series, NODEs present a few disadvantages. First, they are unable to adapt to incoming data-points, a fundamental requirement for real-time applications imposed by the natural direction of time. Second, time-series are often composed of a sparse set of measurements that could be explained by many possible underlying dynamics. NODEs do not capture this uncertainty. In contrast, Neural Processes (NPs) are a new class of stochastic processes providing uncertainty estimation and fast data-adaptation, but lack an explicit treatment of the flow of time. To address these problems, we introduce Neural ODE Processes (NDPs), a new class of stochastic processes determined by a distribution over Neural ODEs. By maintaining an adaptive data-dependent distribution over the underlying ODE, we show that our model can successfully capture the dynamics of low-dimensional systems from just a few data-points. At the same time, we demonstrate that NDPs scale up to challenging high-dimensional time-series with unknown latent dynamics such as rotating MNIST digits. | 1accept
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Title: GraphVAE: Towards Generation of Small Graphs Using Variational Autoencoders. Abstract: Deep learning on graphs has become a popular research topic with many applications. However, past work has concentrated on learning graph embedding tasks only, which is in contrast with advances in generative models for images and text. Is it possible to transfer this progress to the domain of graphs? We propose to sidestep hurdles associated with linearization of such discrete structures by having a decoder output a probabilistic fully-connected graph of a predefined maximum size directly at once. Our method is formulated as a variational autoencoder. We evaluate on the challenging task of conditional molecule generation. | 0reject
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Title: Doubly Sparse: Sparse Mixture of Sparse Experts for Efficient Softmax Inference. Abstract: Computations for the softmax function in neural network models are expensive when the number of output classes is large. This can become a significant issue in both training and inference for such models. In this paper, we present Doubly Sparse Softmax (DS-Softmax), Sparse Mixture of Sparse of Sparse Experts, to improve the efficiency for softmax inference. During training, our method learns a two-level class hierarchy by dividing entire output class space into several partially overlapping experts. Each expert is responsible for a learned subset of the output class space and each output class only belongs to a small number of those experts. During inference, our method quickly locates the most probable expert to compute small-scale softmax. Our method is learning-based and requires no knowledge of the output class partition space a priori. We empirically evaluate our method on several real-world tasks and demonstrate that we can achieve significant computation reductions without loss of performance. | 0reject
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Title: Now I Remember! Episodic Memory For Reinforcement Learning. Abstract: Humans rely on episodic memory constantly, in remembering the name of someone they met 10 minutes ago, the plot of a movie as it unfolds, or where they parked the car. Endowing reinforcement learning agents with episodic memory is a key step on the path toward replicating human-like general intelligence. We analyze why standard RL agents lack episodic memory today, and why existing RL tasks don't require it. We design a new form of external memory called Masked Experience Memory, or MEM, modeled after key features of human episodic memory. To evaluate episodic memory we define an RL task based on the common children's game of Concentration. We find that a MEM RL agent leverages episodic memory effectively to master Concentration, unlike the baseline agents we tested. | 0reject
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Title: Probabilistic Multimodal Representation Learning. Abstract: Learning multimodal representations is a requirement for many tasks such as image--caption retrieval. Previous work on this problem has only focused on finding good vector representations without any explicit measure of uncertainty. In this work, we argue and demonstrate that learning multimodal representations as probability distributions can lead to better representations, as well as providing other benefits such as adding a measure of uncertainty to the learned representations. We show that this measure of uncertainty can capture how confident our model is about the representations in the multimodal domain, i.e, how clear it is for the model to retrieve/predict the matching pair. We experiment with similarity metrics that have not been traditionally used for the multimodal retrieval task, and show that the choice of the similarity metric affects the quality of the learned representations. | 2withdrawn
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Title: Factorized Multimodal Transformer for Multimodal Sequential Learning. Abstract: The complex world around us is inherently multimodal and sequential (continuous). Information is scattered across different modalities and requires multiple continuous sensors to be captured. As machine learning leaps towards better generalization to real world, multimodal sequential learning becomes a fundamental research area. Arguably, modeling arbitrarily distributed spatio-temporal dynamics within and across modalities is the biggest challenge in this research area. In this paper, we present a new transformer model, called the Factorized Multimodal Transformer (FMT) for multimodal sequential learning. FMT inherently models the intramodal and intermodal (involving two or more modalities) dynamics within its multimodal input in a factorized manner. The proposed factorization allows for increasing the number of self-attentions to better model the multimodal phenomena at hand; without encountering difficulties during training (e.g. overfitting) even on relatively low-resource setups. All the attention mechanisms within FMT have a full time-domain receptive field which allows them to asynchronously capture long-range multimodal dynamics. In our experiments we focus on datasets that contain the three commonly studied modalities of language, vision and acoustic. We perform a wide range of experiments, spanning across 3 well-studied datasets and 21 distinct labels. FMT shows superior performance over previously proposed models, setting new state of the art in the studied datasets. | 2withdrawn
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Title: Everybody's Talkin': Let Me Talk as You Want. Abstract: We present a method to edit a target portrait footage by taking a sequence of audio as input to synthesize a photo-realistic video. This method is unique because it is highly dynamic. It does not assume a person-specific rendering network yet capable of translating one source audio into one random chosen video output within a set of speech videos. Instead of learning a highly heterogeneous and nonlinear mapping from audio to the video directly, we first factorize each target video frame into orthogonal parameter spaces, i.e., expression, geometry, and pose, via monocular 3D face reconstruction. Next, a recurrent network is introduced to translate source audio into expression parameters that are primarily related to the audio content. The audio-translated expression parameters are then used to synthesize a photo-realistic human subject in each video frame, with the movement of the mouth regions precisely mapped to the source audio. The geometry and pose parameters of the target human portrait are retained, therefore preserving the con-text of the original video footage. Finally, we introduce a novel video rendering network and a dynamic programming method to construct a temporally coherent and photo-realistic video. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing approaches. Our method is end-to-end learnable and robust to voice variations in the source audio. | 2withdrawn
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Title: Learning Universal User Representations via Self-Supervised Lifelong Behaviors Modeling. Abstract: Universal user representation is an important research topic in industry, and is widely used in diverse downstream user analysis tasks, such as user profiling and user preference prediction. With the rapid development of Internet service platforms, extremely long user behavior sequences have been accumulated. However, existing researches have little ability to model universal user representation based on lifelong behavior sequences since user registration. In this study, we propose a novel framework called Lifelong User Representation Model (LURM) to tackle this challenge. Specifically, LURM consists of two cascaded sub-models: (i) Bag of Interests (BoI) encodes user behaviors in any time period into a sparse vector with super-high dimension (eg. 10^5); (ii) Self-supervised Multi-anchor Encoder Network (SMEN) maps sequences of BoI features to multiple low-dimensional user representations by contrastive learning. SMEN achieves almost lossless dimensionality reduction with the main help of a novel multi-anchor module which can learn different aspects of user preferences. Experiments on several benchmark datasets show that our approach can outperform state-of-the-art unsupervised representation methods in downstream tasks. | 0reject
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Title: Improving Local Effectiveness for Global Robustness Training. Abstract: Despite its increasing popularity, deep neural networks are easily fooled. To alleviate this deficiency, researchers are actively developing new training strategies, which encourage models that are robust to small input perturbations. Several successful robust training methods have been proposed. However, many of them rely on strong adversaries, which can be prohibitively expensive to generate when the input dimension is high and the model structure is complicated. We adopt a new perspective on robustness and propose a novel training algorithm that allows a more effective use of adversaries. Our method improves the model robustness at each local ball centered around an adversary and then, by combining these local balls through a global term, achieves overall robustness. We demonstrate that, by maximizing the use of adversaries via focusing on local balls, we achieve high robust accuracy with weak adversaries. Specifically, our method reaches a similar robust accuracy level to the state of the art approaches trained on strong adversaries on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. As a result, the overall training time is reduced. Furthermore, when trained with strong adversaries, our method matches with the current state of the art on MNIST and outperforms them on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. | 0reject
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Title: Data augmentation for deep learning based accelerated MRI reconstruction. Abstract: Deep neural networks have emerged as very successful tools for image restoration and reconstruction tasks. These networks are often trained end-to-end to directly reconstruct an image from a noisy or corrupted measurement of that image. To achieve state-of-the-art performance, training on large and diverse sets of images is considered critical. However, it is often difficult and/or expensive to collect large amounts of training images. Inspired by the success of Data Augmentation (DA) for classification problems, in this paper, we propose a pipeline for data augmentation for image reconstruction tasks arising in medical imaging and explore its effectiveness at reducing the required training data in a variety of settings. We focus on accelerated magnetic resonance imaging, where the goal is to reconstruct an image from a few under-sampled linear measurements. Our DA pipeline is specifically designed to utilize the invariances present in medical imaging measurements as naive DA strategies that neglect the physics of the problem fail. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our data augmentation pipeline by showing that for some problem regimes, DA can achieve comparable performance to the state of the art on the FastMRI dataset while using significantly fewer training data. Specifically, for 8-fold acceleration we achieve performance comparable to the state of the art with only $10\%$ of the training data for multi-coil reconstruction and with only $33\%$ of the training data for single-coil reconstruction. Our findings show that in the low-data regime DA is beneficial, whereas in the high-data regime it has diminishing returns. | 0reject
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Title: GAN2GAN: Generative Noise Learning for Blind Denoising with Single Noisy Images. Abstract: We tackle a challenging blind image denoising problem, in which only single distinct noisy images are available for training a denoiser, and no information about noise is known, except for it being zero-mean, additive, and independent of the clean image. In such a setting, which often occurs in practice, it is not possible to train a denoiser with the standard discriminative training or with the recently developed Noise2Noise (N2N) training; the former requires the underlying clean image for the given noisy image, and the latter requires two independently realized noisy image pair for a clean image. To that end, we propose GAN2GAN (Generated-Artificial-Noise to Generated-Artificial-Noise) method that first learns a generative model that can 1) simulate the noise in the given noisy images and 2) generate a rough, noisy estimates of the clean images, then 3) iteratively trains a denoiser with subsequently synthesized noisy image pairs (as in N2N), obtained from the generative model. In results, we show the denoiser trained with our GAN2GAN achieves an impressive denoising performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets for the blind denoising setting; it almost approaches the performance of the standard discriminatively-trained or N2N-trained models that have more information than ours, and it significantly outperforms the recent baseline for the same setting, \textit{e.g.}, Noise2Void, and a more conventional yet strong one, BM3D. The official code of our method is available at https://github.com/csm9493/GAN2GAN. | 1accept
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Title: Weighted Empirical Risk Minimization: Transfer Learning based on Importance Sampling. Abstract: We consider statistical learning problems, when the distribution $P'$ of the training observations $Z'_1,\; \ldots,\; Z'_n$ differs from the distribution $P$ involved in the risk one seeks to minimize (referred to as the \textit{test distribution}) but is still defined on the same measurable space as $P$ and dominates it. In the unrealistic case where the likelihood ratio $\Phi(z)=dP/dP'(z)$ is known, one may straightforwardly extends the Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) approach to this specific \textit{transfer learning} setup using the same idea as that behind Importance Sampling, by minimizing a weighted version of the empirical risk functional computed from the 'biased' training data $Z'_i$ with weights $\Phi(Z'_i)$. Although the \textit{importance function} $\Phi(z)$ is generally unknown in practice, we show that, in various situations frequently encountered in practice, it takes a simple form and can be directly estimated from the $Z'_i$'s and some auxiliary information on the statistical population $P$. By means of linearization techniques, we then prove that the generalization capacity of the approach aforementioned is preserved when plugging the resulting estimates of the $\Phi(Z'_i)$'s into the weighted empirical risk. Beyond these theoretical guarantees, numerical results provide strong empirical evidence of the relevance of the approach promoted in this article. | 0reject
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Title: Quadrature-based features for kernel approximation. Abstract: We consider the problem of improving kernel approximation via feature maps. These maps arise as Monte Carlo approximation to integral representations of kernel functions and scale up kernel methods for larger datasets. We propose to use more efficient numerical integration technique to obtain better estimates of the integrals compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Our approach allows to use information about the integrand to enhance approximation and facilitates fast computations. We derive the convergence behavior and conduct an extensive empirical study that supports our hypothesis. | 0reject
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Title: Implicit Bias of MSE Gradient Optimization in Underparameterized Neural Networks. Abstract: We study the dynamics of a neural network in function space when optimizing the mean squared error via gradient flow. We show that in the underparameterized regime the network learns eigenfunctions of an integral operator $T_K$ determined by the Neural Tangent Kernel at rates corresponding to their eigenvalues. For example, for uniformly distributed data on the sphere $S^{d - 1}$ and rotation invariant weight distributions, the eigenfunctions of $T_K$ are the spherical harmonics. Our results can be understood as describing a spectral bias in the underparameterized regime. The proofs use the concept of ``Damped Deviations'' where deviations of the NTK matter less for eigendirections with large eigenvalues. Aside from the underparameterized regime, the damped deviations point-of-view allows us to extend certain results in the literature in the overparameterized setting. | 1accept
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Title: Not All Memories are Created Equal: Learning to Expire. Abstract: Attention mechanisms have shown promising results in sequence modeling tasks that require long-term memory. Recent work has investigated mechanisms to reduce the computational cost of preserving and storing the memories. However, not all content in the past is equally important to remember. We propose Expire-Span, a method that learns to retain the most important information and
expire the irrelevant information. This enables Transformers to scale to attend to tens of thousands of previous timesteps efficiently, as not all hidden states from previous timesteps are preserved. We demonstrate that Expire-Span can help models identify and retain critical information and show it can achieve state of the art results on long-context language modeling, reinforcement learning, and algorithmic tasks. Finally, we show that Expire-Span can scale to memories that are tens of thousands in size, which is helpful on incredibly long context tasks such as character-level PG-19 and a frame-by-frame moving objects task.
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Title: Shap-CAM: Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks based on Shapley Value. Abstract: Explaining deep convolutional neural networks has been recently drawing increasing attention since it helps to understand the networks' internal operations and why they make certain decisions. Saliency maps, which emphasize salient regions largely connected to the network's decision-making, are one of the most common ways for visualizing and analyzing deep networks in the computer vision community. However, saliency maps generated by existing methods cannot represent authentic information in images due to the unproven proposals about the weights of activation maps which lack solid theoretical foundation and fail to consider the relations between each pixels. In this paper, we develop a novel post-hoc visual explanation method called Shap-CAM based on class activation mapping. Unlike previous class activation mapping based approaches, Shap-CAM gets rid of the dependence on gradients by obtaining the importance of each pixels through Shapley value. We demonstrate that Shap-CAM achieves better visual performance and fairness for interpreting the decision making process. Our approach outperforms previous methods on both recognition and localization tasks. | 2withdrawn
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Title: CausalGAN: Learning Causal Implicit Generative Models with Adversarial Training. Abstract: We introduce causal implicit generative models (CiGMs): models that allow sampling from not only the true observational but also the true interventional distributions. We show that adversarial training can be used to learn a CiGM, if the generator architecture is structured based on a given causal graph. We consider the application of conditional and interventional sampling of face images with binary feature labels, such as mustache, young. We preserve the dependency structure between the labels with a given causal graph. We devise a two-stage procedure for learning a CiGM over the labels and the image. First we train a CiGM over the binary labels using a Wasserstein GAN where the generator neural network is consistent with the causal graph between the labels. Later, we combine this with a conditional GAN to generate images conditioned on the binary labels. We propose two new conditional GAN architectures: CausalGAN and CausalBEGAN. We show that the optimal generator of the CausalGAN, given the labels, samples from the image distributions conditioned on these labels. The conditional GAN combined with a trained CiGM for the labels is then a CiGM over the labels and the generated image. We show that the proposed architectures can be used to sample from observational and interventional image distributions, even for interventions which do not naturally occur in the dataset. | 1accept
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Title: Transferring Inductive Biases through Knowledge Distillation. Abstract: Having the right inductive biases can be crucial in many tasks or scenarios where data or computing resources are a limiting factor, or where training data is not perfectly representative of the conditions at test time. However, defining, designing, and efficiently adapting inductive biases is not necessarily straightforward. Inductive biases of a model affect its generalisation behaviour and influence the solution it converges to from different aspects. In this paper, we investigate the power of knowledge distillation in transferring the effects of inductive biases of a teacher model to a student model, when they have different architectures.
We consider different families of models: LSTMs vs. Transformers and CNNs vs. MLPs, in the context of tasks and scenarios with linguistics and vision applications, where having the right inductive biases is critical. We train our models in different setups: no knowledge distillation, self-distillation, and distillation using a teacher with a better inductive bias for the task at hand. We show that in the later setup, compared to no distillation and self-distillation, we can not only improve the performance of the students, but also the solutions they converge become similar to their teachers with respect to a wide range of properties, including different task-specific performance metrics, per sample behaviour of the models, representational similarity and how the representational space of the models evolve during training, performance on out-of-distribution datasets, confidence calibration, and finally whether the converged solutions fall within the same basins of attractions. | 0reject
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Title: Task-agnostic Continual Learning via Growing Long-Term Memory Networks. Abstract: As our experience shows, humans can learn and deploy a myriad of different skills to tackle the situations they encounter daily. Neural networks, in contrast, have a fixed memory capacity that prevents them from learning more than a few sets of skills before starting to forget them.
In this work, we make a step to bridge neural networks with human-like learning capabilities. For this, we propose a model with a growing and open-bounded memory capacity that can be accessed based on the model’s current demands. To test this system, we introduce a continual learning task based on language modelling where the model is exposed to multiple languages and domains in sequence, without providing any explicit signal on the type of input it is currently dealing with. The proposed system exhibits improved adaptation skills in that it can recover faster than comparable baselines after a switch in the input language or domain. | 2withdrawn
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Title: SCALOR: Generative World Models with Scalable Object Representations. Abstract: Scalability in terms of object density in a scene is a primary challenge in unsupervised sequential object-oriented representation learning. Most of the previous models have been shown to work only on scenes with a few objects. In this paper, we propose SCALOR, a probabilistic generative world model for learning SCALable Object-oriented Representation of a video. With the proposed spatially parallel attention and proposal-rejection mechanisms, SCALOR can deal with orders of magnitude larger numbers of objects compared to the previous state-of-the-art models. Additionally, we introduce a background module that allows SCALOR to model complex dynamic backgrounds as well as many foreground objects in the scene. We demonstrate that SCALOR can deal with crowded scenes containing up to a hundred objects while jointly modeling complex dynamic backgrounds. Importantly, SCALOR is the first unsupervised object representation model shown to work for natural scenes containing several tens of moving objects. | 1accept
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Title: Improved Training Techniques for Online Neural Machine Translation. Abstract: Neural sequence-to-sequence models are at the basis of state-of-the-art solutions for sequential prediction problems such as machine translation and speech recognition. The models typically assume that the entire input is available when starting target generation. In some applications, however, it is desirable to start the decoding process before the entire input is available, e.g. to reduce the latency in automatic speech recognition. We consider state-of-the-art wait-k decoders, that first read k tokens from the source and then alternate between reading tokens from the input and writing to the output. We investigate the sensitivity of such models to the value of k that is used during training and when deploying the model, and the effect of updating the hidden states in transformer models as new source tokens are read. We experiment with German-English translation on the IWSLT14 dataset and the larger WMT15 dataset. Our results significantly improve over earlier state-of-the-art results for German-English translation on the WMT15 dataset across different latency levels. | 0reject
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Title: Coordination Among Neural Modules Through a Shared Global Workspace. Abstract: Deep learning has seen a movement away from representing examples with a monolithic hidden state towards a richly structured state. For example, Transformers segment by position, and object-centric architectures decompose images into entities. In all these architectures, interactions between different elements are modeled via pairwise interactions: Transformers make use of self-attention to incorporate information from other positions and object-centric architectures make use of graph neural networks to model interactions among entities. We consider how to improve on pairwise interactions in terms of global coordination and a coherent, integrated representation that can be used for downstream tasks. In cognitive science, a global workspace architecture has been proposed in which functionally specialized components share information through a common, bandwidth-limited communication channel. We explore the use of such a communication channel in the context of deep learning for modeling the structure of complex environments. The proposed method includes a shared workspace through which communication among different specialist modules takes place but due to limits on the communication bandwidth, specialist modules must compete for access. We show that capacity limitations have a rational basis in that (1) they encourage specialization and compositionality and (2) they facilitate the synchronization of otherwise independent specialists.
| 1accept
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Title: MemREIN: Rein the Domain Shift for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning. Abstract: Few-shot learning aims to enable models generalize to new categories (query instances) with only limited labeled samples (support instances) from each category. Metric-based mechanism is a promising direction which compares feature embeddings via different metrics. However, it always fail to generalize to unseen domains due to the considerable domain gap challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, MemREIN, which considers Memorized, Restitution, and Instance Normalization for cross-domain few-shot learning. Specifically, an instance normalization algorithm is explored to alleviate feature dissimilarity, which provides the initial model generalization ability. However, naively normalizing the feature would lose fine-grained discriminative knowledge between different classes. To this end, a memorized module is further proposed to separate the most refined knowledge and remember it. Then, a restitution module is utilized to restitute the discrimination ability from the learned knowledge. A novel reverse contrastive learning strategy is proposed to stabilize the distillation process. Extensive experiments on five popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that MemREIN well addresses the domain shift challenge, and significantly improves the performance up to $16.37\%$ compared with state-of-the-art baselines. | 2withdrawn
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Title: Ancestral protein sequence reconstruction using a tree-structured Ornstein-Uhlenbeck variational autoencoder. Abstract: We introduce a deep generative model for representation learning of biological sequences that, unlike existing models, explicitly represents the evolutionary process. The model makes use of a tree-structured Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, obtained from a given phylogenetic tree, as an informative prior for a variational autoencoder. We show the model performs well on the task of ancestral sequence reconstruction of single protein families. Our results and ablation studies indicate that the explicit representation of evolution using a suitable tree-structured prior has the potential to improve representation learning of biological sequences considerably. Finally, we briefly discuss extensions of the model to genomic-scale data sets and the case of a latent phylogenetic tree. | 1accept
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Title: An Efficient and Margin-Approaching Zero-Confidence Adversarial Attack. Abstract: There are two major paradigms of white-box adversarial attacks that attempt to impose input perturbations. The first paradigm, called the fix-perturbation attack, crafts adversarial samples within a given perturbation level. The second paradigm, called the zero-confidence attack, finds the smallest perturbation needed to cause misclassification, also known as the margin of an input feature. While the former paradigm is well-resolved, the latter is not. Existing zero-confidence attacks either introduce significant approximation errors, or are too time-consuming. We therefore propose MarginAttack, a zero-confidence attack framework that is able to compute the margin with improved accuracy and efficiency. Our experiments show that MarginAttack is able to compute a smaller margin than the state-of-the-art zero-confidence attacks, and matches the state-of-the-art fix-perturbation attacks. In addition, it runs significantly faster than the Carlini-Wagner attack, currently the most accurate zero-confidence attack algorithm. | 0reject
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Title: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Networked System Control. Abstract: This paper considers multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in networked system control. Specifically, each agent learns a decentralized control policy based on local observations and messages from connected neighbors. We formulate such a networked MARL (NMARL) problem as a spatiotemporal Markov decision process and introduce a spatial discount factor to stabilize the training of each local agent. Further, we propose a new differentiable communication protocol, called NeurComm, to reduce information loss and non-stationarity in NMARL. Based on experiments in realistic NMARL scenarios of adaptive traffic signal control and cooperative adaptive cruise control, an appropriate spatial discount factor effectively enhances the learning curves of non-communicative MARL algorithms, while NeurComm outperforms existing communication protocols in both learning efficiency and control performance. | 1accept
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Title: SGD Converges to Global Minimum in Deep Learning via Star-convex Path. Abstract: Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been found to be surprisingly effective in training a variety of deep neural networks. However, there is still a lack of understanding on how and why SGD can train these complex networks towards a global minimum. In this study, we establish the convergence of SGD to a global minimum for nonconvex optimization problems that are commonly encountered in neural network training. Our argument exploits the following two important properties: 1) the training loss can achieve zero value (approximately), which has been widely observed in deep learning; 2) SGD follows a star-convex path, which is verified by various experiments in this paper. In such a context, our analysis shows that SGD, although has long been considered as a randomized algorithm, converges in an intrinsically deterministic manner to a global minimum. | 1accept
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Title: An Improved Composite Functional Gradient Learning by Wasserstein Regularization for Generative adversarial networks. Abstract: Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are usually trained by a minimax game which is notoriously and empirically known to be unstable. Recently, a totally new methodology called
Composite Functional Gradient Learning (CFG) provides an alternative
theoretical foundation for training GANs more stablely by employing
a strong discriminator with logistic regression and functional gradient learning for the generator.
However, the discriminator using logistic regression from the CFG framework is gradually
hard to discriminate between real and fake images while the training steps go on.
To address this problem, our key idea and contribution are to introduce
the Wasserstein distance regularization into the CFG framework for the discriminator. This gives us a novel
improved CFG formulation with more competitive generate image quality. In particular, we provide an intuitive explanation using logistic regression with Wasserstein regularization. The method helps to enhance the model gradients
in training GANs to archives better image quality. Empirically, we compare our improved CFG with the original
version. We show that the standard CFG is easy to stick into mode collapse problem, while our improved CFG works much better
thanks to the newly added Wasserstein distance regularization. We conduct extensive
experiments for image generation on different benchmarks, and it shows
the efficacy of our improved CFG method.
| 2withdrawn
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Title: Information-theoretic stochastic contrastive conditional GAN: InfoSCC-GAN. Abstract: Conditional generation is a subclass of generative problems when the output of generation is conditioned by a class attributes’ information. In this paper, we present a new stochastic contrastive conditional generative adversarial network (InfoSCC-GAN) with explorable latent space. The InfoSCC-GAN architecture is based on an unsupervised contrastive encoder built on the InfoNCE paradigm, attributes' classifier, and stochastic EigenGAN generator.
We propose two approaches for selecting the class attributes: external attributes from the dataset annotations and internal attributes from the clustered latent space of the encoder. We propose a novel training method based on a generator regularization using external or internal attributes every $n$-th iteration using the pre-trained contrastive encoder and pre-trained attributes’ classifier. The proposed InfoSCC-GAN is derived from an information-theoretic formulation of mutual information maximization between the input data and latent space representation for the encoder and the latent space and generated data for the decoder. Thus, we demonstrate a link between the training objective functions and the above information-theoretic formulation. The experimental results show that InfoSCC-GAN outperforms vanilla EigenGAN in image generation on several popular datasets, yet providing an interpretable latent space. In addition, we investigate the impact of regularization techniques and each part of the system by performing an ablation study. Finally, we demonstrate that thanks to the stochastic EigenGAN generator, the proposed framework enjoys a truly stochastic generation in contrast to vanilla deterministic GANs yet with the independent training of an encoder, a classifier, and a generator.
The code, supplementary materials, and demos are available \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/InfoSCC-GAN-D113} | 0reject
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Title: Cross-Dimensional Self-Attention for Multivariate, Geo-tagged Time Series Imputation. Abstract: Many real-world applications involve multivariate, geo-tagged time series data: at each location, multiple sensors record corresponding measurements. For example, air quality monitoring system records PM2.5, CO, etc. The resulting time-series data often has missing values due to device outages or communication errors. In order to impute the missing values, state-of-the-art methods are built on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), which process each time stamp sequentially, prohibiting the direct modeling of the relationship between distant time stamps. Recently, the self-attention mechanism has been proposed for sequence modeling tasks such as machine translation, significantly outperforming RNN because the relationship between each two time stamps can be modeled explicitly. In this paper, we are the first to adapt the self-attention mechanism for multivariate, geo-tagged time series data. In order to jointly capture the self-attention across different dimensions (i.e. time, location and sensor measurements) while keep the size of attention maps reasonable, we propose a novel approach called Cross-Dimensional Self-Attention (CDSA) to process each dimension sequentially, yet in an order-independent manner. On three real-world datasets, including one our newly collected NYC-traffic dataset, extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods for both imputation and forecasting tasks.
| 0reject
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Title: Neural Network Branching for Neural Network Verification . Abstract: Formal verification of neural networks is essential for their deployment in safety-critical areas. Many available formal verification methods have been shown to be instances of a unified Branch and Bound (BaB) formulation. We propose a novel framework for designing an effective branching strategy for BaB. Specifically, we learn a graph neural network (GNN) to imitate the strong branching heuristic behaviour. Our framework differs from previous methods for learning to branch in two main aspects. Firstly, our framework directly treats the neural network we want to verify as a graph input for the GNN. Secondly, we develop an intuitive forward and backward embedding update schedule. Empirically, our framework achieves roughly $50\%$ reduction in both the number of branches and the time required for verification on various convolutional networks when compared to the best available hand-designed branching strategy. In addition, we show that our GNN model enjoys both horizontal and vertical transferability. Horizontally, the model trained on easy properties performs well on properties of increased difficulty levels. Vertically, the model trained on small neural networks achieves similar performance on large neural networks. | 1accept
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Title: On the implicit minimization of alternative loss functions when training deep networks. Abstract: Understanding the implicit bias of optimization algorithms is important in order to improve generalization of neural networks. One approach to try to exploit such understanding would be to then make the bias explicit in the loss function. Conversely, an interesting approach to gain more insights into the implicit bias could be to study how different loss functions are being implicitly minimized when training the network. In this work, we concentrate our study on the inductive bias occurring when minimizing the cross-entropy loss with different batch sizes and learning rates. We investigate how three loss functions are being implicitly minimized during training. These three loss functions are the Hinge loss with different margins, the cross-entropy loss with different temperatures and a newly introduced Gcdf loss with different standard deviations. This Gcdf loss establishes a connection between a sharpness measure for the 0−1 loss and margin based loss functions. We find that a common behavior is emerging for all the loss functions considered. | 0reject
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Title: Connecting Graph Convolution and Graph PCA. Abstract: Graph convolution operator of the GCN model is originally motivated from a localized first-order approximation of spectral graph convolutions. This work stands on a different view; establishing a mathematical connection between graph convolution and graph-regularized PCA (GPCA). Based on this connection, the GCN architecture, shaped by stacking graph convolution layers, shares a close relationship with stacking GPCA. We empirically demonstrate that the unsupervised embeddings by GPCA paired with a 1- or 2-layer MLP achieves similar or even better performance than many sophisticated baselines on semi-supervised node classification tasks across five datasets including Open Graph Benchmark. This suggests that the prowess of graph convolution is driven by graph based regularization. In addition, we extend GPCA to the (semi-)supervised setting and show that it is equivalent to GPCA on a graph extended with “ghost” edges between nodes of the same label. Finally, we capitalize on the discovered relationship to design an effective initialization strategy based on stacking GPCA, enabling GCN to converge faster and achieve robust performance at large number of layers. | 0reject
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Title: Towards Unknown-aware Deep Q-Learning. Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in known environments where the agents are trained, yet the agents do not necessarily know what they don’t know. In particular, RL agents deployed in the open world are naturally subject to environmental shifts and encounter unknown out-of-distribution (OOD) states---i.e., states from outside the training environment. Currently, the study of handling OOD states in the RL environment remains underexplored. This paper bridges this critical gap by proposing and exploring an unknown-aware RL framework, which improves the safety and reliability of deep Q-learning. Our key idea is to regularize the training of Q-learning so that OOD states will have higher OOD uncertainty, while in-distribution states will have lower OOD uncertainty; therefore making them distinguishable. This is in contrast with vanilla Q-learning which does not take into account unknowns during training. Furthermore, we provide theoretical guarantees that our method can improve OOD uncertainty estimation while ensuring the convergence performance of the in-distribution environment. Empirically, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on six diverse environments, achieving near-optimal OOD detection performance. | 2withdrawn
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Title: A Variance Principle Explains why Dropout Finds Flatter Minima. Abstract: Although dropout has achieved great success in deep learning, little is known about how it helps the training find a good generalization solution in the high-dimensional parameter space. In this work, we show that the training with dropout finds the neural network with a flatter minimum compared with standard gradient descent training. We further study the underlying mechanism of why dropout finds flatter minima through experiments. We propose a Variance Principle that the variance of a noise is larger at the sharper direction of the loss landscape. Existing works show that SGD satisfies the variance principle, which leads the training to flatter minima. Our work show that the noise induced by the dropout also satisfies the variance principle that explains why dropout finds flatter minima. In general, our work points out that the variance principle is an important similarity between dropout and SGD that lead the training to find flatter minima and obtain good generalization. | 0reject
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Title: Set Prediction without Imposing Structure as Conditional Density Estimation. Abstract: Set prediction is about learning to predict a collection of unordered variables with unknown interrelations. Training such models with set losses imposes the structure of a metric space over sets. We focus on stochastic and underdefined cases, where an incorrectly chosen loss function leads to implausible predictions. Example tasks include conditional point-cloud reconstruction and predicting future states of molecules. In this paper we propose an alternative to training via set losses, by viewing learning as conditional density estimation. Our learning framework fits deep energy-based models and approximates the intractable likelihood with gradient-guided sampling. Furthermore, we propose a stochastically augmented prediction algorithm that enables multiple predictions, reflecting the possible variations in the target set. We empirically demonstrate on a variety of datasets the capability to learn multi-modal densities and produce different plausible predictions. Our approach is competitive with previous set prediction models on standard benchmarks. More importantly, it extends the family of addressable tasks beyond those that have unambiguous predictions. | 1accept
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Title: Ensemble Robustness and Generalization of Stochastic Deep Learning Algorithms. Abstract: The question why deep learning algorithms generalize so well has attracted increasing
research interest. However, most of the well-established approaches,
such as hypothesis capacity, stability or sparseness, have not provided complete
explanations (Zhang et al., 2016; Kawaguchi et al., 2017). In this work, we focus
on the robustness approach (Xu & Mannor, 2012), i.e., if the error of a hypothesis
will not change much due to perturbations of its training examples, then it
will also generalize well. As most deep learning algorithms are stochastic (e.g.,
Stochastic Gradient Descent, Dropout, and Bayes-by-backprop), we revisit the robustness
arguments of Xu & Mannor, and introduce a new approach – ensemble
robustness – that concerns the robustness of a population of hypotheses. Through
the lens of ensemble robustness, we reveal that a stochastic learning algorithm can
generalize well as long as its sensitiveness to adversarial perturbations is bounded
in average over training examples. Moreover, an algorithm may be sensitive to
some adversarial examples (Goodfellow et al., 2015) but still generalize well. To
support our claims, we provide extensive simulations for different deep learning
algorithms and different network architectures exhibiting a strong correlation between
ensemble robustness and the ability to generalize. | 0reject
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Title: Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection. Abstract: DETR has been recently proposed to eliminate the need for many hand-designed components in object detection while demonstrating good performance. However, it suffers from slow convergence and limited feature spatial resolution, due to the limitation of Transformer attention modules in processing image feature maps. To mitigate these issues, we proposed Deformable DETR, whose attention modules only attend to a small set of key sampling points around a reference. Deformable DETR can achieve better performance than DETR (especially on small objects) with 10$\times$ less training epochs. Extensive experiments on the COCO benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Code is released at https://github.com/fundamentalvision/Deformable-DETR. | 1accept
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Title: DropGrad: Gradient Dropout Regularization for Meta-Learning. Abstract: With the growing attention on learning-to-learn new tasks using only a few examples, meta-learning has been widely used in numerous problems such as few-shot classification, reinforcement learning, and domain generalization. However, meta-learning models are prone to overfitting when there are no sufficient training tasks for the meta-learners to generalize. Although existing approaches such as Dropout are widely used to address the overfitting problem, these methods are typically designed for regularizing models of a single task in supervised training. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective method to alleviate the risk of overfitting for gradient-based meta-learning. Specifically, during the gradient-based adaptation stage, we randomly drop the gradient in the inner-loop optimization of each parameter in deep neural networks, such that the augmented gradients improve generalization to new tasks. We present a general form of the proposed gradient dropout regularization and show that this term can be sampled from either the Bernoulli or Gaussian distribution. To validate the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments and analysis on numerous tasks, demonstrating that the gradient dropout regularization mitigates the overfitting problem and improves the performance upon various gradient-based meta-learning frameworks. | 2withdrawn
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Title: Making Efficient Use of Demonstrations to Solve Hard Exploration Problems. Abstract: This paper introduces R2D3, an agent that makes efficient use of demonstrations to solve hard exploration problems in partially observable environments with highly variable initial conditions. We also introduce a suite of eight tasks that combine these three properties, and show that R2D3 can solve several of the tasks where other state of the art methods (both with and without demonstrations) fail to see even a single successful trajectory after tens of billions of steps of exploration. | 1accept
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Title: Dual-Tree Wavelet Packet CNNs for Image Classification. Abstract: In this paper, we target an important issue of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) — the lack of a mathematical understanding of their properties. We present an explicit formalism that is motivated by the similarities between trained CNN kernels and oriented Gabor filters for addressing this problem. The core idea is to constrain the behavior of convolutional layers by splitting them into a succession of wavelet packet decompositions, which are modulated by freely-trained mixture weights. We evaluate our approach with three variants of wavelet decompositions with the AlexNet architecture for image classification as an example. The first variant relies on the separable wavelet packet transform while the other two implement the 2D dual-tree real and complex wavelet packet transforms, taking advantage of their feature extraction properties such as directional selectivity and shift invariance. Our experiments show that we achieve the accuracy rate of standard AlexNet, but with a significantly lower number of parameters, and an interpretation of the network that is grounded in mathematical theory. | 0reject
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Title: A Novel Analysis Framework of Lower Complexity Bounds for Finite-Sum Optimization. Abstract: This paper studies the lower bound complexity for the optimization problem whose objective function is the average of $n$ individual smooth convex functions. We consider the algorithm which gets access to gradient and proximal oracle for each individual component.
For the strongly-convex case, we prove such an algorithm can not reach an $\eps$-suboptimal point in fewer than $\Omega((n+\sqrt{\kappa n})\log(1/\eps))$ iterations, where $\kappa$ is the condition number of the objective function. This lower bound is tighter than previous results and perfectly matches the upper bound of the existing proximal incremental first-order oracle algorithm Point-SAGA.
We develop a novel construction to show the above result, which partitions the tridiagonal matrix of classical examples into $n$ groups to make the problem difficult enough to stochastic algorithms.
This construction is friendly to the analysis of proximal oracle and also could be used in general convex and average smooth cases naturally. | 0reject
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Title: Model-based imitation learning from state trajectories. Abstract: Imitation learning from demonstrations usually relies on learning a policy from trajectories of optimal states and actions. However, in real life expert demonstrations, often the action information is missing and only state trajectories are available. We present a model-based imitation learning method that can learn environment-specific optimal actions only from expert state trajectories. Our proposed method starts with a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm with a heuristic reward signal to sample environment dynamics, which is then used to train the state-transition probability. Subsequently, we learn the optimal actions from expert state trajectories by supervised learning, while back-propagating the error gradients through the modeled environment dynamics. Experimental evaluations show that our proposed method successfully achieves performance similar to (state, action) trajectory-based traditional imitation learning methods even in the absence of action information, with much fewer iterations compared to conventional model-free reinforcement learning methods. We also demonstrate that our method can learn to act from only video demonstrations of expert agent for simple games and can learn to achieve desired performance in less number of iterations. | 0reject
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Title: Automatic generation of object shapes with desired functionalities. Abstract: 3D objects (artefacts) are made to fulfill functions. Designing an object often starts with defining a list of functionalities that it should provide, also known as functional requirements. Today, the design of 3D object models is still a slow and largely artisanal activity, with few Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools existing to aid the exploration of the design solution space. The purpose of the study is to explore the possibility of shape generation conditioned on desired functionalities. To accelerate the design process, we introduce an algorithm for generating object shapes with desired functionalities. We follow the principle form follows function, and assume that the form of a structure is correlated to its function. First, we use an artificial neural network to learn a function-to-form mapping by analysing a dataset of objects labeled with their functionalities. Then, we combine forms providing one or more desired functions, generating an object shape that is expected to provide all of them. Finally, we verify in simulation whether the generated object possesses the desired functionalities, by defining and executing functionality tests on it. | 0reject
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Title: Beyond Finite Layer Neural Networks: Bridging Deep Architectures and Numerical Differential Equations. Abstract: Deep neural networks have become the state-of-the-art models in numerous machine learning tasks. However, general guidance to network architecture design is still missing. In our work, we bridge deep neural network design with numerical differential equations. We show that many effective networks, such as ResNet, PolyNet, FractalNet and RevNet, can be interpreted as different numerical discretizations of differential equations. This finding brings us a brand new perspective on the design of effective deep architectures. We can take advantage of the rich knowledge in numerical analysis to guide us in designing new and potentially more effective deep networks. As an example, we propose a linear multi-step architecture (LM-architecture) which is inspired by the linear multi-step method solving ordinary differential equations. The LM-architecture is an effective structure that can be used on any ResNet-like networks. In particular, we demonstrate that LM-ResNet and LM-ResNeXt (i.e. the networks obtained by applying the LM-architecture on ResNet and ResNeXt respectively) can achieve noticeably higher accuracy than ResNet and ResNeXt on both CIFAR and ImageNet with comparable numbers of trainable parameters. In particular, on both CIFAR and ImageNet, LM-ResNet/LM-ResNeXt can significantly compress (>50%) the original networks while maintaining a similar performance. This can be explained mathematically using the concept of modified equation from numerical analysis. Last but not least, we also establish a connection between stochastic control and noise injection in the training process which helps to improve generalization of the networks. Furthermore, by relating stochastic training strategy with stochastic dynamic system, we can easily apply stochastic training to the networks with the LM-architecture. As an example, we introduced stochastic depth to LM-ResNet and achieve significant improvement over the original LM-ResNet on CIFAR10. | 0reject
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Title: Empirical Studies on the Convergence of Feature Spaces in Deep Learning. Abstract: While deep learning is effective to learn features/representations from data, the distributions of samples in feature spaces learned by various architectures for different training tasks (e.g., latent layers of AEs and feature vectors in CNN classifiers) have not been well-studied or compared. We hypothesize that the feature spaces of networks trained by various architectures (AEs or CNNs) and tasks (supervised, unsupervised, or self-supervised learning) share some common subspaces, no matter what types of DNN architectures or whether the labels have been used in feature learning. To test our hypothesis, through Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of feature vectors, we demonstrate that one could linearly project the feature vectors of the same group of samples to a similar distribution, where the distribution is represented as the top left singular vector (i.e., principal subspace of feature vectors), namely $\mathcal{P}$-vectors. We further assess the convergence of feature space learning using angles between $\mathcal{P}$-vectors obtained from the well-trained model and its checkpoint per epoch during the learning procedure, where a quasi-monotonic trend of convergence to small angles has been observed. Finally, we carry out case studies to connect $\mathcal{P}$-vectors to the data distribution, and generalization performance. Extensive experiments with practically-used MLP, AE and CNN architectures for classification, image reconstruction, and self-supervised learning tasks on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets have been done to support our claims with solid evidences. | 0reject
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Title: The Close Relationship Between Contrastive Learning and Meta-Learning. Abstract: Contrastive learning has recently taken off as a paradigm for learning from unlabeled data. In this paper, we discuss the close relationship between contrastive learning and meta-learning under a certain task distribution. We complement this observation by showing that established meta-learning methods, such as Prototypical Networks, achieve comparable performance to SimCLR when paired with this task distribution. This relationship can be leveraged by taking established techniques from meta-learning, such as task-based data augmentation, and showing that they benefit contrastive learning as well. These tricks also benefit state-of-the-art self-supervised learners without using negative pairs such as BYOL, which achieves 94.6\% accuracy on CIFAR-10 using a self-supervised ResNet-18 feature extractor trained with our meta-learning tricks. We conclude that existing advances designed for contrastive learning or meta-learning can be exploited to benefit the other, and it is better for contrastive learning researchers to take lessons from the meta-learning literature (and vice-versa) than to reinvent the wheel. | 1accept
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Title: Generative Restricted Kernel Machines. Abstract: We introduce a novel framework for generative models based on Restricted Kernel Machines (RKMs) with multi-view generation and uncorrelated feature learning capabilities, called Gen-RKM. To incorporate multi-view generation, this mechanism uses a shared representation of data from various views. The mechanism is flexible to incorporate both kernel-based, (deep) neural network and convolutional based models within the same setting. To update the parameters of the network, we propose a novel training procedure which jointly learns the features and shared representation. Experiments demonstrate the potential of the framework through qualitative evaluation of generated samples. | 0reject
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Title: Learning the Representation of Behavior Styles with Imitation Learning. Abstract: Imitation learning is one of the methods for reproducing expert demonstrations adaptively by learning a mapping between observations and actions. However, behavior styles such as motion trajectory and driving habit depend largely on the dataset of human maneuvers, and settle down to an average behavior style in most imitation learning algorithms. In this study, we propose a method named style behavior cloning (Style BC), which can not only infer the latent representation of behavior styles automatically, but also imitate different style policies from expert demonstrations. Our method is inspired by the word2vec algorithm and we construct a behavior-style to action mapping which is similar to the word-embedding to context mapping in word2vec. Empirical results on popular benchmark environments show that Style BC outperforms standard behavior cloning in prediction accuracy and expected reward significantly. Furthermore, compared with various baselines, our policy influenced by its assigned style embedding can better reproduce the expert behavior styles, especially in the complex environments or the number of the behavior styles is large. | 0reject
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Title: Incorporating User-Item Similarity in Hybrid Neighborhood-based Recommendation System. Abstract: Modern hybrid recommendation systems require a sufficient amount of data. However, several internet privacy issues make users skeptical about sharing their personal information with online service providers. This work introduces various novel methods utilizing the baseline estimate to learn user interests from their interactions. Subsequently, extracted user feature vectors are implemented to estimate the user-item correlations, providing an additional fine-tuning factor for neighborhood-based collaborative filtering systems. Comprehensive experiments show that utilizing the user-item similarity can boost the accuracy of hybrid neighborhood-based systems by at least $2.11\%$ while minimizing the need for tracking users' digital footprints. | 2withdrawn
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Title: No Parameters Left Behind: Sensitivity Guided Adaptive Learning Rate for Training Large Transformer Models. Abstract: Recent research has shown the existence of significant redundancy in large Transformer models. One can prune the redundant parameters without significantly sacrificing the generalization performance. However, we question whether the redundant parameters could have contributed more if they were properly trained. To answer this question, we propose a novel training strategy that encourages all parameters to be trained sufficiently. Specifically, we adaptively adjust the learning rate for each parameter according to its sensitivity, a robust gradient-based measure reflecting this parameter's contribution to the model performance. A parameter with low sensitivity is redundant, and we improve its fitting by increasing its learning rate. In contrast, a parameter with high sensitivity is well-trained, and we regularize it by decreasing its learning rate to prevent further overfitting. We conduct extensive experiments on natural language understanding, neural machine translation, and image classification to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schedule. Analysis shows that the proposed schedule indeed reduces the redundancy and improves generalization performance. | 1accept
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Title: Policy improvement by planning with Gumbel. Abstract: AlphaZero is a powerful reinforcement learning algorithm based on approximate policy iteration and tree search. However, AlphaZero can fail to improve its policy network, if not visiting all actions at the root of a search tree. To address this issue, we propose a policy improvement algorithm based on sampling actions without replacement. Furthermore, we use the idea of policy improvement to replace the more heuristic mechanisms by which AlphaZero selects and uses actions, both at root nodes and at non-root nodes. Our new algorithms, Gumbel AlphaZero and Gumbel MuZero, respectively without and with model-learning, match the state of the art on Go, chess, and Atari, and significantly improve prior performance when planning with few simulations. | 1accept
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Title: Improved knowledge distillation by utilizing backward pass knowledge in neural networks. Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) is one of the prominent techniques for model compression. In this method, the knowledge
of a large network (teacher) is distilled into a model (student) with usually significantly fewer parameters. KD tries to
better-match the output of the student model to that of the teacher model based on the knowledge extracts from
the forward pass of the teacher network. Although conventional KD is effective for matching the two networks over the given
data points, there is no guarantee that these models would match in other areas for which we do not have enough
training samples. In this work, we address that problem by generating new auxiliary training samples based on
extracting knowledge from the backward pass of the teacher in the areas where the student diverges greatly from the
teacher. We compute the difference between the teacher and the student and generate new data samples that
maximize the divergence. This is done by perturbing data samples in the direction of the gradient of the difference
between the student and the teacher. Augmenting the training set by adding this auxiliary improves the performance of
KD significantly and leads to a closer match between the student and the teacher. Using this approach, when data samples
come from a discrete domain, such as applications of natural language processing (NLP) and language understanding,
is not trivial. However, we show how this technique can be used successfully in such applications. We studied the effect
of the proposed method on various tasks in different domains, including images and NLP tasks with considerably
smaller student networks. The results of our experiments, when compared with the original KD, show 4% improvement on MNIST with a student network that is 160 times smaller, 1% improvement on a CIFAR-10 dataset with
a student that is 9 times smaller, and an average 1.5% improvement on the GLUE benchmark with a distilroBERTa-base
student. | 2withdrawn
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Title: Transformer-XL: Language Modeling with Longer-Term Dependency. Abstract: We propose a novel neural architecture, Transformer-XL, for modeling longer-term dependency. To address the limitation of fixed-length contexts, we introduce a notion of recurrence by reusing the representations from the history. Empirically, we show state-of-the-art (SoTA) results on both word-level and character-level language modeling datasets, including WikiText-103, One Billion Word, Penn Treebank, and enwiki8. Notably, we improve the SoTA results from 1.06 to 0.99 in bpc on enwiki8, from 33.0 to 18.9 in perplexity on WikiText-103, and from 28.0 to 23.5 in perplexity on One Billion Word. Performance improves when the attention length increases during evaluation, and our best model attends to up to 1,600 words and 3,800 characters. To quantify the effective length of dependency, we devise a new metric and show that on WikiText-103 Transformer-XL manages to model dependency that is about 80% longer than recurrent networks and 450% longer than Transformer. Moreover, Transformer-XL is up to 1,800+ times faster than vanilla Transformer during evaluation. | 0reject
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Title: Automatic Concept Extraction for Concept Bottleneck-based Video Classification. Abstract: Recent efforts in interpretable deep learning models have shown that concept-based explanation methods achieve competitive accuracy with standard end-to-end models and enable reasoning and intervention about extracted high-level visual concepts from images, e.g., identifying the wing color and beak length for bird-species classification. However, these concept bottleneck models rely on a domain expert providing a necessary and sufficient set of concepts--which is intractable for complex tasks such as video classification. For complex tasks, the labels and the relationship between visual elements span many frames, e.g., identifying a bird flying or catching prey--necessitating concepts with various levels of abstraction. To this end, we present CoDEx, an automatic Concept Discovery and Extraction module that rigorously composes a necessary and sufficient set of concept abstractions for concept-based video classification. CoDEx identifies a rich set of complex concept abstractions from natural language explanations of videos--obviating the need to predefine the amorphous set of concepts. To demonstrate our method’s viability, we construct two new public datasets that combine existing complex video classification datasets with short, crowd-sourced natural language explanations for their labels. Our method elicits inherent complex concept abstractions in natural language to generalize concept-bottleneck methods to complex tasks. | 0reject
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Title: CNN Based Analysis of the Luria’s Alternating Series Test for Parkinson’s Disease Diagnostics. Abstract: Deep-learning based image classification is applied in this studies to the Luria's alternating series tests to support diagnostics of the Parkinson's disease. Luria's alternating series tests belong to the family of fine-motor drawing tests and been used in neurology and psychiatry for nearly a century. Introduction of the digital tables and later tablet PCs has allowed deviating from the classical paper and pen setting, and observe kinematic and pressure parameters describing the test. While such setting has led to a highly accurate machine learning models, the visual component of the tests is left unused. Namely, the shapes of the drawn lines are not used to classify the drawings, which eventually has caused the shift in the assessment paradigm from visual-based to the numeric parameters based. The approach proposed in this paper allows combining two assessment paradigms by augmenting initial drawings by the kinematic and pressure parameters. The paper demonstrates that the resulting network has the accuracy similar to those of human practitioner. | 2withdrawn
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Title: A Neural Tangent Kernel Perspective of Infinite Tree Ensembles. Abstract: In practical situations, the tree ensemble is one of the most popular models along with neural networks. A soft tree is a variant of a decision tree. Instead of using a greedy method for searching splitting rules, the soft tree is trained using a gradient method in which the entire splitting operation is formulated in a differentiable form. Although ensembles of such soft trees have been used increasingly in recent years, little theoretical work has been done to understand their behavior. By considering an ensemble of infinite soft trees, this paper introduces and studies the Tree Neural Tangent Kernel (TNTK), which provides new insights into the behavior of the infinite ensemble of soft trees. Using the TNTK, we theoretically identify several non-trivial properties, such as global convergence of the training, the equivalence of the oblivious tree structure, and the degeneracy of the TNTK induced by the deepening of the trees. | 1accept
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Title: VILD: Variational Imitation Learning with Diverse-quality Demonstrations. Abstract: The goal of imitation learning (IL) is to learn a good policy from high-quality demonstrations. However, the quality of demonstrations in reality can be diverse, since it is easier and cheaper to collect demonstrations from a mix of experts and amateurs. IL in such situations can be challenging, especially when the level of demonstrators' expertise is unknown. We propose a new IL paradigm called Variational Imitation Learning with Diverse-quality demonstrations (VILD), where we explicitly model the level of demonstrators' expertise with a probabilistic graphical model and estimate it along with a reward function. We show that a naive estimation approach is not suitable to large state and action spaces, and fix this issue by using a variational approach that can be easily implemented using existing reinforcement learning methods. Experiments on continuous-control benchmarks demonstrate that VILD outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our work enables scalable and data-efficient IL under more realistic settings than before. | 0reject
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Title: Compact Encoding of Words for Efficient Character-level Convolutional Neural Networks Text Classification. Abstract: This paper puts forward a new text to tensor representation that relies on information compression techniques to assign shorter codes to the most frequently used characters. This representation is language-independent with no need of pretraining and produces an encoding with no information loss. It provides an adequate description of the morphology of text, as it is able to represent prefixes, declensions, and inflections with similar vectors and are able to represent even unseen words on the training dataset. Similarly, as it is compact yet sparse, is ideal for speed up training times using tensor processing libraries. As part of this paper, we show that this technique is especially effective when coupled with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for text classification at character-level. We apply two variants of CNN coupled with it. Experimental results show that it drastically reduces the number of parameters to be optimized, resulting in competitive classification accuracy values in only a fraction of the time spent by one-hot encoding representations, thus enabling training in commodity hardware. | 0reject
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Title: Model-based Saliency for the Detection of Adversarial Examples. Abstract: Adversarial perturbations cause a shift in the salient features of an image, which may result in a misclassification. We demonstrate that gradient-based saliency approaches are unable to capture this shift, and develop a new defense which detects adversarial examples based on learnt saliency models instead. We study two approaches: a CNN trained to distinguish between natural and adversarial images using the saliency masks produced by our learnt saliency model, and a CNN trained on the salient pixels themselves as its input. On MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ASSIRA, our defenses are able to detect various adversarial attacks, including strong attacks such as C&W and DeepFool, contrary to gradient-based saliency and detectors which rely on the input image. The latter are unable to detect adversarial images when the L_2- and L_infinity- norms of the perturbations are too small. Lastly, we find that the salient pixel based detector improves on saliency map based detectors as it is more robust to white-box attacks. | 0reject
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Title: Signal Coding and Reconstruction using Spike Trains. Abstract: In many animal sensory pathways, the transformation from external stimuli to spike trains is essentially deterministic. In this context, a new mathematical framework for coding and reconstruction, based on a biologically plausible model of the spiking neuron, is presented. The framework considers encoding of a signal through spike trains generated by an ensemble of neurons via a standard convolve-then-threshold mechanism, albeit with a wide variety of convolution kernels. Neurons are distinguished by their convolution kernels and threshold values. Reconstruction is posited as a convex optimization minimizing energy. Formal conditions under which perfect reconstruction of the signal from the spike trains is possible are then identified. Coding experiments on a large audio dataset are presented to demonstrate the strength of the framework. | 0reject
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Title: Using MMD GANs to correct physics models and improve Bayesian parameter estimation. Abstract: Bayesian parameter estimation methods are robust techniques for quantifying properties of physical systems which cannot be observed directly. In estimating such parameters, one first requires a physics model of the phenomenon to be studied. Often, such a model follows a series of assumptions to make parameter inference feasible. When simplified models are used for inference, however, systematic differences between model predictions and observed data may propagate throughout the parameter estimation process, biasing inference results. In this work, we use generative adversarial networks (GANs) based on the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) to learn small stochastic corrections to physics models in order to minimize inference bias. We further propose a hybrid training procedure utilizing both the MMD and the standard GAN objective functionals. We demonstrate the ability to learn stochastic model corrections and eliminate inference bias on a toy problem wherein the true data distribution is known. Subsequently, we apply these methods to a mildly ill-posed inference problem in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), showing improvement over an established inference method. Finally, because 3D MRI images often contain millions of voxels which would each require parameter inference, we train a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) network on the corrected MRI physics model to perform fast inference and make this approach practical.
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Title: Fidelity-based Deep Adiabatic Scheduling. Abstract: Adiabatic quantum computation is a form of computation that acts by slowly interpolating a quantum system between an easy to prepare initial state and a final state that represents a solution to a given computational problem. The choice of the interpolation schedule is critical to the performance: if at a certain time point, the evolution is too rapid, the system has a high probability to transfer to a higher energy state, which does not represent a solution to the problem. On the other hand, an evolution that is too slow leads to a loss of computation time and increases the probability of failure due to decoherence. In this work, we train deep neural models to produce optimal schedules that are conditioned on the problem at hand. We consider two types of problem representation: the Hamiltonian form, and the Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) form. A novel loss function that scores schedules according to their approximated success probability is introduced. We benchmark our approach on random QUBO problems, Grover search, 3-SAT, and MAX-CUT problems and show that our approach outperforms, by a sizable margin, the linear schedules as well as alternative approaches that were very recently proposed. | 1accept
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Title: Context Mover's Distance & Barycenters: Optimal transport of contexts for building representations. Abstract: We propose a unified framework for building unsupervised representations of entities and their compositions, by viewing each entity as a histogram (or distribution) over its contexts. This enables us to take advantage of optimal transport and construct representations that effectively harness the geometry of the underlying space containing the contexts. Our method captures uncertainty via modelling the entities as distributions and simultaneously provides interpretability with the optimal transport map, hence giving a novel perspective for building rich and powerful feature representations. As a guiding example, we formulate unsupervised representations for text, and demonstrate it on tasks such as sentence similarity and word entailment detection. Empirical results show strong advantages gained through the proposed framework. This approach can potentially be used for any unsupervised or supervised problem (on text or other modalities) with a co-occurrence structure, such as any sequence data. The key tools at the core of this framework are Wasserstein distances and Wasserstein barycenters. | 0reject
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Title: HyperNetworks with statistical filtering for defending adversarial examples. Abstract: Deep learning algorithms have been known to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations in various tasks such as image classification. This problem was addressed by employing several defense methods for detection and rejection of particular types of attacks. However, training and manipulating networks according to particular defense schemes increases computational complexity of the learning algorithms. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective method to improve robustness of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to adversarial attacks by using data dependent adaptive convolution kernels. To this end, we propose a new type of HyperNetwork in order to employ statistical properties of input data and features for computation of statistical adaptive maps. Then, we filter convolution weights of CNNs with the learned statistical maps to compute dynamic kernels. Thereby, weights and kernels are collectively optimized for learning of image classification models robust to
adversarial attacks without employment of additional target detection and rejection algorithms.
We empirically demonstrate that the proposed method enables CNNs to spontaneously defend against different types of attacks, e.g. attacks generated by Gaussian noise, fast gradient sign methods (Goodfellow et al., 2014) and a black-box attack (Narodytska & Kasiviswanathan, 2016). | 2withdrawn
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Title: Learning to Extend Molecular Scaffolds with Structural Motifs. Abstract: Recent advancements in deep learning-based modeling of molecules promise to accelerate in silico drug discovery. A plethora of generative models is available, building molecules either atom-by-atom and bond-by-bond or fragment-by-fragment. However, many drug discovery projects require a fixed scaffold to be present in the generated molecule, and incorporating that constraint has only recently been explored. Here, we propose MoLeR, a graph-based model that naturally supports scaffolds as initial seed of the generative procedure, which is possible because it is not conditioned on the generation history. Our experiments show that MoLeR performs comparably to state-of-the-art methods on unconstrained molecular optimization tasks, and outperforms them on scaffold-based tasks, while being an order of magnitude faster to train and sample from than existing approaches. Furthermore, we show the influence of a number of seemingly minor design choices on the overall performance. | 1accept
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Title: Learning advanced mathematical computations from examples. Abstract: Using transformers over large generated datasets, we train models to learn mathematical properties of differential systems, such as local stability, behavior at infinity and controllability. We achieve near perfect prediction of qualitative characteristics, and good approximations of numerical features of the system. This demonstrates that neural networks can learn to perform complex computations, grounded in advanced theory, from examples, without built-in mathematical knowledge. | 1accept
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Title: Bayesian Online Meta-Learning. Abstract: Neural networks are known to suffer from catastrophic forgetting when trained on sequential datasets. While there have been numerous attempts to solve this problem for large-scale supervised classification, little has been done to overcome catastrophic forgetting for few-shot classification problems. Few-shot meta-learning algorithms often require all few-shot tasks to be readily available in a batch for training. The popular gradient-based model-agnostic meta-learning algorithm (MAML) is a typical algorithm that suffers from these limitations. This work introduces a Bayesian online meta-learning framework to tackle the catastrophic forgetting and the sequential few-shot tasks problems. Our framework incorporates MAML into a Bayesian online learning algorithm with Laplace approximation or variational inference. This framework enables few-shot classification on a range of sequentially arriving datasets with a single meta-learned model and training on sequentially arriving few-shot tasks. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that our framework can effectively prevent catastrophic forgetting and is capable of online meta-learning in various few-shot classification settings. | 0reject
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Title: Towards Structured Dynamic Sparse Pre-Training of BERT. Abstract: Identifying algorithms for computational efficient unsupervised training of large language models is an important and active area of research.
In this work, we develop and study a straightforward, dynamic always-sparse pre-training approach for BERT language modeling, which leverages periodic compression steps based on magnitude pruning followed by random parameter re-allocation.
This approach enables us to achieve Pareto improvements in terms of the number of floating-point operations (FLOPs) over statically sparse and dense models across a broad spectrum of network sizes.
Furthermore, we demonstrate that training remains FLOP-efficient when using coarse-grained block sparsity, making it particularly promising for efficient execution on modern hardware accelerators. | 0reject
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Title: Promoting Saliency From Depth: Deep Unsupervised RGB-D Saliency Detection. Abstract: Growing interests in RGB-D salient object detection (RGB-D SOD) have been witnessed in recent years, owing partly to the popularity of depth sensors and the rapid progress of deep learning techniques. Unfortunately, existing RGB-D SOD methods typically demand large quantity of training images being thoroughly annotated at pixel-level. The laborious and time-consuming manual annotation has become a real bottleneck in various practical scenarios. On the other hand, current unsupervised RGB-D SOD methods still heavily rely on handcrafted feature representations. This inspires us to propose in this paper a deep unsupervised RGB-D saliency detection approach, which requires no manual pixel-level annotation during training. It is realized by two key ingredients in our training pipeline. First, a depth-disentangled saliency update (DSU) framework is designed to automatically produce pseudo-labels with iterative follow-up refinements, which provides more trustworthy supervision signals for training the saliency network. Second, an attentive training strategy is introduced to tackle the issue of noisy pseudo-labels, by properly re-weighting to highlight the more reliable pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior efficiency and effectiveness of our approach in tackling the challenging unsupervised RGB-D SOD scenarios. Moreover, our approach can also be adapted to work in fully-supervised situation. Empirical studies show the incorporation of our approach gives rise to notably performance improvement in existing supervised RGB-D SOD models. | 1accept
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Title: Comparing Rewinding and Fine-tuning in Neural Network Pruning. Abstract: Many neural network pruning algorithms proceed in three steps: train the network to completion, remove unwanted structure to compress the network, and retrain the remaining structure to recover lost accuracy. The standard retraining technique, fine-tuning, trains the unpruned weights from their final trained values using a small fixed learning rate. In this paper, we compare fine-tuning to alternative retraining techniques. Weight rewinding (as proposed by Frankle et al., (2019)), rewinds unpruned weights to their values from earlier in training and retrains them from there using the original training schedule. Learning rate rewinding (which we propose) trains the unpruned weights from their final values using the same learning rate schedule as weight rewinding. Both rewinding techniques outperform fine-tuning, forming the basis of a network-agnostic pruning algorithm that matches the accuracy and compression ratios of several more network-specific state-of-the-art techniques.
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Title: Unsupervised Learning of Node Embeddings by Detecting Communities. Abstract: We present Deep MinCut (DMC), an unsupervised approach to learn node embeddings for graph-structured data. It derives node representations based on their membership in communities. As such, the embeddings directly provide interesting insights into the graph structure, so that the separate node clustering step of existing methods is no longer needed. DMC learns both, node embeddings and communities, simultaneously by minimizing the mincut loss, which captures the number of connections between communities. Striving for high scalability, we also propose a training process for DMC based on minibatches. We provide empirical evidence that the communities learned by DMC are meaningful and that the node embeddings are competitive in different node classification benchmarks. | 0reject
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Title: Global Relational Models of Source Code. Abstract: Models of code can learn distributed representations of a program's syntax and semantics to predict many non-trivial properties of a program. Recent state-of-the-art models leverage highly structured representations of programs, such as trees, graphs and paths therein (e.g. data-flow relations), which are precise and abundantly available for code. This provides a strong inductive bias towards semantically meaningful relations, yielding more generalizable representations than classical sequence-based models. Unfortunately, these models primarily rely on graph-based message passing to represent relations in code, which makes them de facto local due to the high cost of message-passing steps, quite in contrast to modern, global sequence-based models, such as the Transformer. In this work, we bridge this divide between global and structured models by introducing two new hybrid model families that are both global and incorporate structural bias: Graph Sandwiches, which wrap traditional (gated) graph message-passing layers in sequential message-passing layers; and Graph Relational Embedding Attention Transformers (GREAT for short), which bias traditional Transformers with relational information from graph edge types. By studying a popular, non-trivial program repair task, variable-misuse identification, we explore the relative merits of traditional and hybrid model families for code representation. Starting with a graph-based model that already improves upon the prior state-of-the-art for this task by 20%, we show that our proposed hybrid models improve an additional 10-15%, while training both faster and using fewer parameters. | 1accept
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Title: Generate Triggers in Neural Relation Extraction. Abstract: In the relation extraction task, the relationship between two entities is determined by some specific words in their source text. These words are called relation triggers, which are the evidence to explain the relationship; other words are called ir-relevant words. The current relationship extraction neural network model aims at identifying the relation type between two entities mentioned in source text by encoding the text and entities. However, these models cannot output the relation triggers, but only gives the result of relation classification. Although models can generate weights for every single word through the improvement of attention mechanism, the weights will be affected by irrelevant words essentially, which are not required by the relation extraction task. In order to output re-lation triggers accurately, we propose a novel training frame-work for Relation Extraction (RE) that reduces the negative effect of irrelevant words on them in the encoding stage. In specific, we leverage Evolutive Mask based Point Network (EMPN) as a decoder to generate relation triggers and encode these words again. For an ordered output in relation triggers, we utilize order loss to constrain the output order in them. Ex-tensive experiment results demonstrate that the effectiveness of our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on three RE benchmark datasets. | 0reject
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Title: On Evaluation Metrics for Graph Generative Models. Abstract: In image generation, generative models can be evaluated naturally by visually inspecting model outputs. However, this is not always the case for graph generative models (GGMs), making their evaluation challenging. Currently, the standard process for evaluating GGMs suffers from three critical limitations: i) it does not produce a single score which makes model selection challenging, ii) in many cases it fails to consider underlying edge and node features, and iii) it is prohibitively slow to perform. In this work, we mitigate these issues by searching for \emph{scalar, domain-agnostic, and scalable metrics} for evaluating and ranking GGMs. To this end, we study existing GGM metrics and neural-network-based metrics emerging from generative models of images that use embeddings extracted from a task-specific network. Motivated by the power of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to extract meaningful graph representations \emph{without any training}, we introduce several metrics based on the features extracted by an untrained random GNN. We design experiments to thoroughly test and objectively score metrics on their ability to measure the diversity and fidelity of generated graphs, as well as their sample and computational efficiency. Depending on the quantity of samples, we recommend one of two metrics from our collection of random-GNN-based metrics. We show these two metrics to be more expressive than pre-existing and alternative random-GNN-based metrics using our objective scoring. While we focus on applying these metrics to GGM evaluation, in practice this enables the ability to easily compute the dissimilarity between any two sets of graphs \emph{regardless of domain}. Our code is released at: https://github.com/uoguelph-mlrg/GGM-metrics. | 1accept
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Title: Policy Message Passing: A New Algorithm for Probabilistic Graph Inference. Abstract: A general graph-structured neural network architecture operates on graphs through two core components: (1) complex enough message functions; (2) a fixed information aggregation process. In this paper, we present the Policy Message Passing algorithm, which takes a probabilistic perspective and reformulates the whole information aggregation as stochastic sequential processes. The algorithm works on a much larger search space, utilizes reasoning history to perform inference, and is robust to noisy edges. We apply our algorithm to multiple complex graph reasoning and prediction tasks and show that our algorithm consistently outperforms state-of-the-art graph-structured models by a significant margin. | 0reject
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Title: Is a Good Representation Sufficient for Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning?. Abstract: Modern deep learning methods provide effective means to learn good representations. However, is a good representation itself sufficient for sample efficient reinforcement learning? This question has largely been studied only with respect to (worst-case) approximation error, in the more classical approximate dynamic programming literature. With regards to the statistical viewpoint, this question is largely unexplored, and the extant body of literature mainly focuses on conditions which \emph{permit} sample efficient reinforcement learning with little understanding of what are \emph{necessary} conditions for efficient reinforcement learning.
This work shows that, from the statistical viewpoint, the situation is far subtler than suggested by the more traditional approximation viewpoint, where the requirements on the representation that suffice for sample efficient RL are even more stringent. Our main results provide sharp thresholds for reinforcement learning methods, showing that there are hard limitations on what constitutes good function approximation (in terms of the dimensionality of the representation), where we focus on natural representational conditions relevant to value-based, model-based, and policy-based learning. These lower bounds highlight that having a good (value-based, model-based, or policy-based) representation in and of itself is insufficient for efficient reinforcement learning, unless the quality of this approximation passes certain hard thresholds. Furthermore, our lower bounds also imply exponential separations on the sample complexity between 1) value-based learning with perfect representation and value-based learning with a good-but-not-perfect representation, 2) value-based learning and policy-based learning, 3) policy-based learning and supervised learning and 4) reinforcement learning and imitation learning. | 1accept
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Title: Balancing Robustness and Sensitivity using Feature Contrastive Learning. Abstract: It is generally believed that robust training of extremely large networks is critical to their success in real-world applications. However, when taken to the extreme, methods that promote robustness can hurt the model’s sensitivity to rare or underrepresented patterns. In this paper, we discuss this trade-off between robustness and sensitivity by introducing two notions: contextual feature utility and contextual feature sensitivity. We propose Feature Contrastive Learning (FCL) that encourages the model to be more sensitive to the features that have higher contextual utility. Empirical results demonstrate that models trained with FCL achieve a better balance of robustness and sensitivity, leading to improved generalization in the presence of noise. | 0reject
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Title: Early Stopping in Deep Networks: Double Descent and How to Eliminate it. Abstract: Over-parameterized models, such as large deep networks, often exhibit a double descent phenomenon, whereas a function of model size, error first decreases, increases, and decreases at last. This intriguing double descent behavior also occurs as a function of training epochs and has been conjectured to arise because training epochs control the model complexity. In this paper, we show that such epoch-wise double descent occurs for a different reason: It is caused by a superposition of two or more bias-variance tradeoffs that arise because different parts of the network are learned at different epochs, and mitigating this by proper scaling of stepsizes can significantly improve the early stopping performance. We show this analytically for i) linear regression, where differently scaled features give rise to a superposition of bias-variance tradeoffs, and for ii) a wide two-layer neural network, where the first and second layers govern bias-variance tradeoffs. Inspired by this theory, we study two standard convolutional networks empirically and show that eliminating epoch-wise double descent through adjusting stepsizes of different layers improves the early stopping performance. | 1accept
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Title: A Probabilistic Model for Discriminative and Neuro-Symbolic Semi-Supervised Learning. Abstract: Strong progress has been achieved in semi-supervised learning (SSL) by combining several methods, some of which relate to properties of the data distribution p(x), others to the model outputs p(y|x), e.g. minimising the entropy of unlabelled predictions. Focusing on the latter, we fill a gap in the standard text by introducing a probabilistic model for discriminative semi-supervised learning, mirroring the classical generative model. Several SSL methods are theoretically explained by our model as inducing (approximate) strong priors over parameters of p(y|x). Applying this same probabilistic model to tasks in which labels represent binary attributes, we theoretically justify a family of neuro-symbolic SSL approaches, taking a step towards bridging the divide between statistical learning and logical reasoning. | 0reject
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Title: DICE: A Simple Sparsification Method for Out-of-distribution Detection. Abstract: Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs is a central challenge for safely deploying machine learning models in the real world. Previous methods commonly rely on an OOD score derived from the overparameterized weight space, while largely overlooking the role of sparsification. In this paper, we reveal important insights that reliance on unimportant weights and units can directly attribute to the brittleness of OOD detection. To mitigate the issue, we propose a sparsification-based OOD detection framework termed DICE. Our key idea is to rank weights based on a measure of contribution, and selectively use the most salient weights to derive the output for OOD detection. We provide both empirical and theoretical insights, characterizing and explaining the mechanism by which DICE improves OOD detection. By pruning away noisy signals, DICE provably reduces the output variance for OOD data, resulting in a sharper output distribution and stronger separability from ID data. DICE establishes state-of-the-art performance, reducing the FPR95 by up to 24.69% compared to the previous best method. | 2withdrawn
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Title: Knowledge distillation via softmax regression representation learning. Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of model compression via knowledge distillation. We advocate for a method that optimizes the output feature of the penultimate layer of the student network and hence is directly related to representation learning. Previous distillation methods which typically impose direct feature matching between the student and the teacher do not take into account the classification problem at hand. On the contrary, our distillation method decouples representation learning and classification and utilizes the teacher's pre-trained classifier to train the student's penultimate layer feature. In particular, for the same input image, we wish the teacher's and student's feature to produce the same output when passed through the teacher's classifier which is achieved with a simple $L_2$ loss. Our method is extremely simple to implement and straightforward to train and is shown to consistently outperform previous state-of-the-art methods over a large set of experimental settings including different (a) network architectures, (b) teacher-student capacities, (c) datasets, and (d) domains. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/jingyang2017/KD_SRRL}. | 1accept
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Title: Manifold-aware Training: Increase Adversarial Robustness with Feature Clustering. Abstract: The problem of defending against adversarial attacks has attracted increasing attention in recent years. While various types of defense methods ($\textit{e.g.}$, adversarial training, detection and rejection, and recovery) were proven empirically to bring robustness to the network, their weakness was shown by later works. Inspired by the observation from the distribution properties of the features extracted by the CNNs in the feature space and their link to robustness, this work designs a novel training process called Manifold-Aware Training (MAT), which forces CNNs to learn compact features to increase robustness. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated via comparisons with existing defense mechanisms, $\textit{i.e.}$, the TRADES algorithm, which has been recognized as a representative state-of-the-art technology, and the MMC method, which also aims to learn compact features. Further verification is also conducted using the attack adaptive to our method. Experimental results show that MAT-trained CNNs exhibit significantly higher performance than state-of-the-art robustness. | 0reject
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Title: Gram-Gauss-Newton Method: Learning Overparameterized Neural Networks for Regression Problems. Abstract: First-order methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are currently the standard algorithm for training deep neural networks. Second-order methods, despite their better convergence rate, are rarely used in practice due to the pro- hibitive computational cost in calculating the second-order information. In this paper, we propose a novel Gram-Gauss-Newton (GGN) algorithm to train deep neural networks for regression problems with square loss. Our method draws inspiration from the connection between neural network optimization and kernel regression of neural tangent kernel (NTK). Different from typical second-order methods that have heavy computational cost in each iteration, GGN only has minor overhead compared to first-order methods such as SGD. We also give theoretical results to show that for sufficiently wide neural networks, the convergence rate of GGN is quadratic. Furthermore, we provide convergence guarantee for mini-batch GGN algorithm, which is, to our knowledge, the first convergence result for the mini-batch version of a second-order method on overparameterized neural net- works. Preliminary experiments on regression tasks demonstrate that for training standard networks, our GGN algorithm converges much faster and achieves better performance than SGD. | 0reject
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Title: Physics-Aware Flow Data Completion Using Neural Inpainting. Abstract: In this paper we propose a physics-aware neural network for inpainting fluid flow data. We consider that flow field data inherently follows the solution of the Navier-Stokes equations and hence our network is designed to capture physical laws. We use a DenseBlock U-Net architecture combined with a stream function formulation to inpaint missing velocity data. Our loss functions represent the relevant physical quantities velocity, velocity Jacobian, vorticity and divergence. Obstacles are treated as known priors, and each layer of the network receives the relevant information through concatenation with the previous layer's output. Our results demonstrate the network's capability for physics-aware completion tasks, and the presented ablation studies show the effectiveness of each proposed component. | 0reject
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Title: Fast and Accurate Text Classification: Skimming, Rereading and Early Stopping. Abstract: Recent advances in recurrent neural nets (RNNs) have shown much promise in many applications in natural language processing. For most of these tasks, such as sentiment analysis of customer reviews, a recurrent neural net model parses the entire review before forming a decision. We argue that reading the entire input is not always necessary in practice, since a lot of reviews are often easy to classify, i.e., a decision can be formed after reading some crucial sentences or words in the provided text. In this paper, we present an approach of fast reading for text classification. Inspired by several well-known human reading techniques, our approach implements an intelligent recurrent agent which evaluates the importance of the current snippet in order to decide whether to make a prediction, or to skip some texts, or to re-read part of the sentence. Our agent uses an RNN module to encode information from the past and the current tokens, and applies a policy module to form decisions. With an end-to-end training algorithm based on policy gradient, we train and test our agent on several text classification datasets and achieve both higher efficiency and better accuracy compared to previous approaches.
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Title: Structural Knowledge Distillation. Abstract: Knowledge distillation is a critical technique to transfer knowledge between models, typically from a large model (the teacher) to a smaller one (the student). The objective function of knowledge distillation is typically the cross-entropy between the teacher and the student's output distributions. However, for structured prediction problems, the output space is exponential in size; therefore, the cross-entropy objective becomes intractable to compute and optimize directly. In this paper, we derive a factorized form of the knowledge distillation objective for structured prediction, which is tractable for many typical choices of the teacher and student models. In particular, we show the tractability and empirical effectiveness of structural knowledge distillation between sequence labeling and dependency parsing models under four different scenarios: 1) the teacher and student share the same factorization form of the output structure scoring function; 2) the student factorization produces smaller substructures than the teacher factorization; 3) the teacher factorization produces smaller substructures than the student factorization; 4) the factorization forms from the teacher and the student are incompatible. | 2withdrawn
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Title: DEMI: Discriminative Estimator of Mutual Information . Abstract: Estimating mutual information between continuous random variables is often intractable and extremely challenging for high-dimensional data. Recent progress has leveraged neural networks to optimize variational lower bounds on mutual information. Although showing promise for this difficult problem, the variational methods have been theoretically and empirically proven to have serious statistical limitations: 1) many methods struggle to produce accurate estimates when the underlying mutual information is either low or high; 2) the resulting estimators may suffer from high variance. Our approach is based on training a classifier that provides the probability that a data sample pair is drawn from the joint distribution rather than from the product of its marginal distributions. Moreover, we establish a direct connection between mutual information and the average log odds estimate produced by the classifier on a test set, leading to a simple and accurate estimator of mutual information. We show theoretically that our method and other variational approaches are equivalent when they achieve their optimum, while our method sidesteps the variational bound. Empirical results demonstrate high accuracy of our approach and the advantages of our estimator in the context of representation learning.
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Title: Rapid Neural Architecture Search by Learning to Generate Graphs from Datasets. Abstract: Despite the success of recent Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods on various tasks which have shown to output networks that largely outperform human-designed networks, conventional NAS methods have mostly tackled the optimization of searching for the network architecture for a single task (dataset), which does not generalize well across multiple tasks (datasets). Moreover, since such task-specific methods search for a neural architecture from scratch for every given task, they incur a large computational cost, which is problematic when the time and monetary budget are limited. In this paper, we propose an efficient NAS framework that is trained once on a database consisting of datasets and pretrained networks and can rapidly search for a neural architecture for a novel dataset. The proposed MetaD2A (Meta Dataset-to-Architecture) model can stochastically generate graphs (architectures) from a given set (dataset) via a cross-modal latent space learned with amortized meta-learning. Moreover, we also propose a meta-performance predictor to estimate and select the best architecture without direct training on target datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our model meta-learned on subsets of ImageNet-1K and architectures from NAS-Bench 201 search space successfully generalizes to multiple unseen datasets including CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, with an average search time of 33 GPU seconds. Even under MobileNetV3 search space, MetaD2A is 5.5K times faster than NSGANetV2, a transferable NAS method, with comparable performance. We believe that the MetaD2A proposes a new research direction for rapid NAS as well as ways to utilize the knowledge from rich databases of datasets and architectures accumulated over the past years. Code is available at https://github.com/HayeonLee/MetaD2A. | 1accept
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Title: SCoRe: Pre-Training for Context Representation in Conversational Semantic Parsing. Abstract: Conversational Semantic Parsing (CSP) is the task of converting a sequence of natural language queries to formal language (e.g., SQL, SPARQL) that can be executed against a structured ontology (e.g. databases, knowledge bases). To accomplish this task, a CSP system needs to model the relation between the unstructured language utterance and the structured ontology while representing the multi-turn dynamics of the dialog. Pre-trained language models (LMs) are the state-of-the-art for various natural language processing tasks. However, existing pre-trained LMs that use language modeling training objectives over free-form text have limited ability to represent natural language references to contextual structural data. In this work, we present SCORE, a new pre-training approach for CSP tasks designed to induce representations that capture the alignment between the dialogue flow and the structural context. We demonstrate the broad applicability of SCORE to CSP tasks by combining SCORE with strong base systems on four different tasks (SPARC, COSQL, MWOZ, and SQA). We show that SCORE can improve the performance over all these base systems by a significant margin and achieves state-of-the-art results on three of them. | 1accept
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Title: Spherical Motion Dynamics: Learning Dynamics of Neural Network with Normalization, Weight Decay, and SGD. Abstract: In this work, we comprehensively reveal the learning dynamics of neural network with normalization, weight decay (WD), and SGD (with momentum), named as Spherical Motion Dynamics (SMD). Most related works study SMD by focusing on "effective learning rate" in "equilibrium" condition, where weight norm remains unchanged. However, their discussions on why equilibrium condition can be reached in SMD is either absent or less convincing. Our work investigates SMD by directly exploring the cause of equilibrium condition. Specifically, 1) we introduce the assumptions that can lead to equilibrium condition in SMD, and prove that weight norm can converge at linear rate with given assumptions; 2) we propose "angular update" as a substitute for effective learning rate to measure the evolving of neural network in SMD, and prove angular update can also converge to its theoretical value at linear rate; 3) we verify our assumptions and theoretical results on various computer vision tasks including ImageNet and MSCOCO with standard settings. Experiment results show our theoretical findings agree well with empirical observations. | 0reject
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Title: Adversarial Learning for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation. Abstract: We propose a method for semi-supervised semantic segmentation using the adversarial network. While most existing discriminators are trained to classify input images as real or fake on the image level, we design a discriminator in a fully convolutional manner to differentiate the predicted probability maps from the ground truth segmentation distribution with the consideration of the spatial resolution. We show that the proposed discriminator can be used to improve the performance on semantic segmentation by coupling the adversarial loss with the standard cross entropy loss on the segmentation network. In addition, the fully convolutional discriminator enables the semi-supervised learning through discovering the trustworthy regions in prediction results of unlabeled images, providing additional supervisory signals. In contrast to existing methods that utilize weakly-labeled images, our method leverages unlabeled images without any annotation to enhance the segmentation model. Experimental results on both the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset and the Cityscapes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm. | 0reject
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Title: The Dual Information Bottleneck. Abstract: The Information-Bottleneck (IB) framework suggests a general characterization of optimal representations in learning, and deep learning in particular. It is based on the optimal trade off between the representation complexity and accuracy, both of which are quantified by mutual information. The problem is solved by alternating projections between the encoder and decoder of the representation, which can be performed locally at each representation level. The framework, however, has practical drawbacks, in that mutual information is notoriously difficult to handle at high dimension, and only has closed form solutions in special cases. Further, because it aims to extract representations which are minimal sufficient statistics of the data with respect to the desired label, it does not necessarily optimize the actual prediction of unseen labels. Here we present a formal dual problem to the IB which has several interesting properties. By switching the order in the KL-divergence between the representation decoder and data, the optimal decoder becomes the geometric rather than the arithmetic mean of the input points. While providing a good approximation to the original IB, it also preserves the form of exponential families, and optimizes the mutual information on the predicted label rather than the desired one. We also analyze the critical points of the dualIB and discuss their importance for the quality of this approach. | 0reject
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Title: Individualised Dose-Response Estimation using Generative Adversarial Nets. Abstract: The problem of estimating treatment responses from observational data is by now a well-studied one. Less well studied, though, is the problem of treatment response estimation when the treatments are accompanied by a continuous dosage parameter. In this paper, we tackle this lesser studied problem by building on a modification of the generative adversarial networks (GANs) framework that has already demonstrated effectiveness in the former problem. Our model, DRGAN, is flexible, capable of handling multiple treatments each accompanied by a dosage parameter. The key idea is to use a significantly modified GAN model to generate entire dose-response curves for each sample in the training data which will then allow us to use standard supervised methods to learn an inference model capable of estimating these curves for a new sample. Our model consists of 3 blocks: (1) a generator, (2) a discriminator, (3) an inference block. In order to address the challenge presented by the introduction of dosages, we propose novel architectures for both our generator and discriminator. We model the generator as a multi-task deep neural network. In order to address the increased complexity of the treatment space (because of the addition of dosages), we develop a hierarchical discriminator consisting of several networks: (a) a treatment discriminator, (b) a dosage discriminator for each treatment. In the experiments section, we introduce a new semi-synthetic data simulation for use in the dose-response setting and demonstrate improvements over the existing benchmark models. | 0reject
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