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ICLR.cc/2019/Conference | Detecting Topological Defects in 2D Active Nematics Using Convolutional Neural Networks | Active matter consists of active agents which transform energy extracted from surroundings into momentum, producing a variety of collective phenomena. A model, synthetic active system composed of microtubule polymers driven by protein motors spontaneously forms a liquid-crystalline nematic phase. Extensile stress created by the protein motors precipitates continuous buckling and folding of the microtubules creating motile topological defects and turbulent fluid flows. Defect motion is determined by the rheological properties of the material; however, these remain largely unquantified. Measuring defects dynamics can yield fundamental insights into active nematics, a class of materials that include bacterial films and animal cells. Current methods for defect detection lack robustness and precision, and require fine-tuning for datasets with different visual quality. In this study, we applied Deep Learning to train a defect detector to automatically analyze microscopy videos of the microtubule active nematic. Experimental results indicate that our method is robust and accurate. It is expected to significantly increase the amount of video data that can be processed. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Contextual Transformer for Offline Reinforcement Learning | Recently, the pretrain-tuning paradigm in large-scale sequence models has made significant progress in Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. However, such a paradigm is still hindered by intractable challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL), including the lack of self-supervised large-scale pretraining methods based on offline data and efficient fine-tuning/prompt-tuning over unseen downstream tasks. In this work, we explore how prompts can help sequence-modeling-based offline Reinforcement Learning (offline-RL) algorithms. Firstly, we propose prompt tuning for offline RL, where a context vector sequence is concatenated with the input to guide the conditional generation. As such, we can pretrain a model on the offline dataset with supervised loss and learn a prompt to guide the policy to play the desired actions. Secondly, we extend the framework to the Meta-RL setting and propose Contextual Meta Transformer (CMT), which leverages the context among different tasks as the prompt to improve the performance on unseen tasks. We conduct extensive experiments across three different offline-RL settings: offline single-agent RL on the D4RL dataset, offline Meta-RL on the MuJoCo benchmark, and offline MARL on the SMAC benchmark. The results validate the strong performance, and generality of our methods. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Continual Backprop: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Persistent Randomness | The Backprop algorithm for learning in neural networks utilizes two mechanisms: first, stochastic gradient descent and second, initialization with small random weights, where the latter is essential to the effectiveness of the former. We show that in continual learning setups, Backprop performs well initially, but over time its performance degrades. Stochastic gradient descent alone is insufficient to learn continually; the initial randomness enables only initial learning but not continual learning. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first result showing this degradation in Backprop’s ability to learn. To address this issue, we propose an algorithm that continually injects random features alongside gradient descent using a new generate-and-test process. We call this the Continual Backprop algorithm. We show that, unlike Backprop, Continual Backprop is able to continually adapt in both supervised and reinforcement learning problems. We expect that as continual learning becomes more common in future applications, a method like Continual Backprop will be essential where the advantages of random initialization are present throughout learning. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis | In this work, we propose DiffWave, a versatile diffusion probabilistic model for conditional and unconditional waveform generation. The model is non-autoregressive, and converts the white noise signal into structured waveform through a Markov chain with a constant number of steps at synthesis. It is efficiently trained by optimizing a variant of variational bound on the data likelihood. DiffWave produces high-fidelity audios in different waveform generation tasks, including neural vocoding conditioned on mel spectrogram, class-conditional generation, and unconditional generation. We demonstrate that DiffWave matches a strong WaveNet vocoder in terms of speech quality (MOS: 4.44 versus 4.43), while synthesizing orders of magnitude faster. In particular, it significantly outperforms autoregressive and GAN-based waveform models in the challenging unconditional generation task in terms of audio quality and sample diversity from various automatic and human evaluations. | Accept (Oral) |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Fast and Sample-Efficient Domain Adaptation for Autoencoder-Based End-to-End Communication | The problem of domain adaptation conventionally considers the setting where a source domain has plenty of labeled data, and a target domain (with a different data distribution) has plenty of unlabeled data but none or very limited labeled data. In this paper, we address the setting where the target domain has only limited labeled data from a distribution that is expected to change frequently. We first propose a fast and light-weight method for adapting a Gaussian mixture density network (MDN) using only a small set of target domain samples. This method is well-suited for the setting where the distribution of target data changes rapidly (e.g., a wireless channel), making it challenging to collect a large number of samples and retrain. We then apply the proposed MDN adaptation method to the problem of end-of-end learning of a communication autoencoder, which jointly learns the encoder, decoder, and a channel networks to minimize the decoding error rate. However, the error rate of an autoencoder trained on a particular (source) channel distribution can degrade as the channel distribution changes frequently, not allowing enough time for data collection and retraining of the autoencoder to the target channel distribution. We propose a method for adapting the autoencoder without modifying the encoder and decoder neural networks, and adapting only the MDN model of the channel. The method utilizes feature transformations at the decoder to compensate for changes in the channel distribution, and effectively present to the decoder samples close to the source distribution. Experimental evaluation on simulated datasets and real mmWave wireless channels demonstrate that the proposed methods can adapt the MDN model using very limited number of samples, and improve or maintain the error rate of the autoencoder under changing channel conditions. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | DIGEST: FAST AND COMMUNICATION EFFICIENT DECENTRALIZED LEARNING WITH LOCAL UPDATES | Decentralized learning advocates the elimination of centralized parameter servers
(aggregation points) for potentially better utilization of underlying resources, de-
lay reduction, and resiliency against parameter server unavailability and catas-
trophic failures. Gossip based decentralized algorithms, where each node in a net-
work has its own locally kept model on which it effectuates the learning by talking
to its neighbors, received a lot of attention recently. Despite their potential, Gossip
algorithms introduce huge communication costs. In this work, we show that nodes
do not need to communicate as frequently as in Gossip for fast convergence; in
fact, a sporadic exchange of a digest of a trained model is sufficient. Thus, we
design a fast and communication-efficient decentralized learning mechanism; DI-
GEST by particularly focusing on stochastic gradient descent (SGD). DIGEST is
a decentralized algorithm building on local-SGD algorithms, which are originally
designed for communication efficient centralized learning. We show through anal-
ysis and experiments that DIGEST significantly reduces the communication cost
without hurting convergence time for both iid and non-iid data. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | Large-scale Pretraining for Neural Machine Translation with Tens of Billions of Sentence Pairs | In this paper, we investigate the problem of training neural machine translation (NMT) systems with a dataset of more than 40 billion bilingual sentence pairs, which is larger than the largest dataset to date by orders of magnitude. Unprecedented challenges emerge in this situation compared to previous NMT work, including severe noise in the data and prohibitively long training time. We propose practical solutions to handle these issues and demonstrate that large-scale pretraining significantly improves NMT performance. We are able to push the BLEU score of WMT17 Chinese-English dataset to 32.3, with a significant performance boost of +3.2 over existing state-of-the-art results. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | On the Role of Neural Collapse in Transfer Learning | We study the ability of foundation models to learn representations for classification that are transferable to new, unseen classes. Recent results in the literature show that representations learned by a single classifier over many classes are competitive on few-shot learning problems with representations learned by special-purpose algorithms designed for such problems. In this paper, we provide an explanation for this behavior based on the recently observed phenomenon that the features learned by overparameterized classification networks show an interesting clustering property, called neural collapse. We demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that neural collapse generalizes to new samples from the training classes, and -- more importantly -- to new classes as well, allowing foundation models to provide feature maps that work well in transfer learning and, specifically, in the few-shot setting. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | A Mathematical Framework for Characterizing Dependency Structures of Multimodal Learning | Dependency structures between modalities have been utilized explicitly and implicitly in multimodal learning to enhance classification performance, particularly when the training samples are insufficient. Recent efforts have concentrated on developing suitable dependence structures and applying them in deep neural networks, but the interplay between the training sample size and various structures has not received enough attention. To address this issue, we propose a mathematical framework that can be utilized to characterize conditional dependency structures in analytic ways. It provides an explicit description of the sample size in learning various structures in a non-asymptotic regime. Additionally, it demonstrates how task complexity and a fitness evaluation of conditional dependence structures affect the results. Furthermore, we develop an autonomous updated coefficient algorithm auto-CODES based on the theoretical framework and conduct experiments on multimodal emotion recognition tasks using the MELD and IEMOCAP datasets. The experimental results validate our theory and show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | K-SAM: Sharpness-Aware Minimization at the Speed of SGD | Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has recently emerged as a robust technique for improving the accuracy of deep neural networks. However, SAM incurs a high computational cost in practice, requiring up to twice as much computation as vanilla SGD. The computational challenge posed by SAM arises because each iteration requires both ascent and descent steps and thus double the gradient computations. To address this challenge, we propose to compute gradients in both stages of SAM on only the top-k samples with highest loss. K-SAM is simple and extremely easy-to-implement while providing significant generalization boosts over vanilla SGD at little to no additional cost. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Coarformer: Transformer for large graph via graph coarsening | Although Transformer has been generalized to graph data, its advantages are mostly observed on small graphs, such as molecular graphs. In this paper, we identify the obstacles of applying Transformer to large graphs: (1) The vast number of distant nodes distract the necessary attention of each target node from its local neighborhood; (2) The quadratic computational complexity regarding the number of nodes makes the learning procedure costly. We get rid of these obstacles by exploiting the complementary natures of GNN and Transformer, and trade the fine-grained long-range information for the efficiency of Transformer. In particular, we present Coarformer, a two-view architecture that captures fine-grained local information using a GNN-based module on the original graph and coarse yet long-range information using a Transformer-based module on the coarse graph (with far fewer nodes). Meanwhile, we design a scheme to enable message passing across these two views to enhance each other. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets, where Coarformer outperforms any single-view method that solely applies a GNN or Transformer. Besides, the coarse global view and the cross-view propagation scheme enable Coarformer to perform better than the combinations of different GNN-based and Transformer-based modules while consuming the least running time and GPU memory. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Data Efficient Language-Supervised Zero-Shot Recognition with Optimal Transport Distillation | Traditional computer vision models are trained to predict a fixed set of predefined categories. Recently, natural language has been shown to be a broader and richer source of supervision that provides finer descriptions to visual concepts than supervised "gold" labels. Previous works, such as CLIP, use InfoNCE loss to train a model to predict the pairing between images and text captions. CLIP, however, is data hungry and requires more than 400M image-text pairs for training. The inefficiency can be \textit{partially} attributed to the fact that the image-text pairs are noisy. To address this, we propose OTTER (Optimal TransporT distillation for Efficient zero-shot Recognition), which uses online entropic optimal transport to find a soft image-text match as labels for contrastive learning. Based on pretrained image and text encoders, models trained with OTTER achieve strong performance with only 3M image text pairs. Compared with InfoNCE loss, label smoothing, and knowledge distillation, OTTER consistently outperforms these baselines in zero-shot evaluation on Google Open Images (19,958 classes) and multi-labeled ImageNet 10K (10032 classes) from Tencent ML-Images. Over 42 evaluations on 7 different dataset/architecture settings x 6 metrics, OTTER outperforms (32) or ties (2) all baselines in 34 of them. Our source code is open sourced at https://github.com/facebookresearch/OTTER. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | DeepXML: Scalable & Accurate Deep Extreme Classification for Matching User Queries to Advertiser Bid Phrases | The objective in deep extreme multi-label learning is to jointly learn feature representations and classifiers to automatically tag data points with the most relevant subset of labels from an extremely large label set. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art deep extreme classifiers are either not scalable or inaccurate for short text documents. This paper develops the DeepXML algorithm which addresses both limitations by introducing a novel architecture that splits training of head and tail labels. DeepXML increases accuracy by (a) learning word embeddings on head labels and transferring them through a novel residual connection to data impoverished tail labels; (b) increasing the amount of negative training data available by extending state-of-the-art negative sub-sampling techniques; and (c) re-ranking the set of predicted labels to eliminate the hardest negatives for the original classifier. All of these contributions are implemented efficiently by extending the highly scalable Slice algorithm for pretrained embeddings to learn the proposed DeepXML architecture. As a result, DeepXML could efficiently scale to problems involving millions of labels that were beyond the pale of state-of-the-art deep extreme classifiers as it could be more than 10x faster at training than XML-CNN and AttentionXML. At the same time, DeepXML was also empirically determined to be up to 19% more accurate than leading techniques for matching search engine queries to advertiser bid phrases. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | Multi-hop Question Answering via Reasoning Chains | Multi-hop question answering requires models to gather information from different parts of a text to answer a question. Most current approaches learn to address this task in an end-to-end way with neural networks, without maintaining an explicit representation of the reasoning process. We propose a method to extract a discrete reasoning chain over the text, which consists of a series of sentences leading to the answer. We then feed the extracted chains to a BERT-based QA model to do final answer prediction. Critically, we do not rely on gold annotated chains or ``supporting facts:'' at training time, we derive pseudogold reasoning chains using heuristics based on named entity recognition and coreference resolution. Nor do we rely on these annotations at test time, as our model learns to extract chains from raw text alone. We test our approach on two recently proposed large multi-hop question answering datasets: WikiHop and HotpotQA, and achieve state-of-art performance on WikiHop and strong performance on HotpotQA. Our analysis shows the properties of chains that are crucial for high performance: in particular, modeling extraction sequentially is important, as is dealing with each candidate sentence in a context-aware way. Furthermore, human evaluation shows that our extracted chains allow humans to give answers with high confidence, indicating that these are a strong intermediate abstraction for this task. | Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Learning to Complete Code with Sketches | Code completion is usually cast as a language modelling problem, i.e., continuing an input in a left-to-right fashion. However, in practice, some parts of the completion (e.g., string literals) may be very hard to predict, whereas subsequent parts directly follow from the context.
To handle this, we instead consider the scenario of generating code completions with "holes" inserted in places where a model is uncertain. We develop Grammformer, a Transformer-based model that guides the code generation by the programming language grammar, and compare it to a variety of more standard sequence models.
We train the models on code completion for C# and Python given partial code context. To evaluate models, we consider both ROUGE as well as a new metric RegexAcc that measures success of generating completions matching long outputs with as few holes as possible.
In our experiments, Grammformer generates 10-50% more accurate completions compared to traditional generative models and 37-50% longer sketches compared to sketch-generating baselines trained with similar techniques. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Learning Cut Selection for Mixed-Integer Linear Programming via Hierarchical Sequence Model | Cutting planes (cuts) are important for solving mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs), which formulate a wide range of important real-world applications. Cut selection---which aims to select a proper subset of the candidate cuts to improve the efficiency of solving MILPs---heavily depends on (P1) which cuts should be preferred, and (P2) how many cuts should be selected. Although many modern MILP solvers tackle (P1)-(P2) by manually designed heuristics, machine learning offers a promising approach to learn more effective heuristics from MILPs collected from specific applications. However, many existing learning-based methods focus on learning which cuts should be preferred, neglecting the importance of learning the number of cuts that should be selected. Moreover, we observe from extensive empirical results that (P3) what order of selected cuts should be preferred has a significant impact on the efficiency of solving MILPs as well. To address this challenge, we propose a novel hierarchical sequence model (HEM) to learn cut selection policies via reinforcement learning. Specifically, HEM consists of a two-level model: (1) a higher-level model to learn the number of cuts that should be selected, (2) and a lower-level model---that formulates the cut selection task as a sequence to sequence learning problem---to learn policies selecting an ordered subset with the size determined by the higher-level model. To the best of our knowledge, HEM is the first method that can tackle (P1)-(P3) in cut selection simultaneously from a data-driven perspective. Experiments show that HEM significantly improves the efficiency of solving MILPs compared to human-designed and learning-based baselines on both synthetic and large-scale real-world MILPs, including MIPLIB 2017. Moreover, experiments demonstrate that HEM well generalizes to MILPs that are significantly larger than those seen during training. | Accept: poster |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Temporal Efficient Training of Spiking Neural Network via Gradient Re-weighting | Recently, brain-inspired spiking neuron networks (SNNs) have attracted widespread research interest because of their event-driven and energy-efficient characteristics. It is difficult to efficiently train deep SNNs due to the non-differentiability of its activation function, which disables the typically used gradient descent approaches for traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs). Although the adoption of surrogate gradient (SG) formally allows for the back-propagation of losses, the discrete spiking mechanism actually differentiates the loss landscape of SNNs from that of ANNs, failing the surrogate gradient methods to achieve comparable accuracy as for ANNs. In this paper, we first analyze why the current direct training approach with surrogate gradient results in SNNs with poor generalizability. Then we introduce the temporal efficient training (TET) approach to compensate for the loss of momentum in the gradient descent with SG so that the training process can converge into flatter minima with better generalizability. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that TET improves the temporal scalability of SNN and induces a temporal inheritable training for acceleration. Our method consistently outperforms the SOTA on all reported mainstream datasets, including CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet. Remarkably on DVS-CIFAR10, we obtained 83% top-1 accuracy, over 10% improvement compared to existing state of the art. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Determining the Ethno-nationality of Writers Using Written English Text | Ethno-nationality is where nations are defined by a shared heritage, for instance it can be a membership of a common language, nationality, religion or an ethnic ancestry. The main goal of this research is to determine a person’s country-of-origin using English text written in less controlled environments, employing Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. The current literature mainly focuses on determining the native language of English writers and a minimal number of researches have been conducted in determining the country-of-origin of English writers.
Further, most experiments in the literature are mainly based on the TOEFL, ICLE datasets which were collected in more controlled environments (i.e., standard exam answers). Hence, most of the writers try to follow some guidelines and patterns of writing. Subsequently, the creativity, freedom of writing and the insights of writers could be hidden. Thus, we believe it hides the real nativism of the writers. Further, those corpora are not freely available as it involves a high cost of licenses. Thus, the main data corpus used for this research was the International Corpus of English (ICE corpus). Up to this point, none of the researchers have utilised the ICE corpus for the purpose of determining the writers’ country-of-origin, even though there is a true potential.
For this research, an overall accuracy of 0.7636 for the flat classification (for all ten countries) and accuracy of 0.6224~1.000 for sub-categories were received. In addition, the best ML model obtained for the flat classification strategy is linear SVM with SGD optimizer trained with word (1,1) uni-gram model. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Last Layer Re-Training is Sufficient for Robustness to Spurious Correlations | Neural network classifiers can largely rely on simple spurious features, such as image backgrounds, to make predictions. However, even in these cases, we show that they still often learn core features associated with the desired attributes of the data, contrary to recent findings. Inspired by this insight, we demonstrate that simple last layer retraining can match or outperform state-of-the-art approaches on spurious correlation benchmarks, but with profoundly lower complexity and computational expenses. Moreover, we show that last layer retraining on large ImageNet-trained models can also significantly reduce reliance on background and texture information, improving robustness to covariate shift, after only minutes of training on a single GPU. | Accept: notable-top-25% |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | Policy Learning Using Weak Supervision | Most existing policy learning solutions require the learning agents to receive high-quality supervision signals, e.g., rewards in reinforcement learning (RL) or high-quality expert demonstrations in behavior cloning (BC). These quality supervisions are either infeasible or prohibitively expensive to obtain in practice. We aim for a unified framework that leverages the weak supervisions to perform policy learning efficiently. To handle this problem, we treat the ``weak supervisions'' as imperfect information coming from a \emph{peer agent}, and evaluate the learning agent's policy based on a ``correlated agreement'' with the peer agent's policy (instead of simple agreements). Our way of leveraging peer agent's information offers us a family of solutions that learn effectively from weak supervisions with theoretical guarantees. Extensive evaluations on tasks including RL with noisy reward, BC with weak demonstrations, and standard policy co-training (RL + BC) show that the proposed approach leads to substantial improvements, especially when the complexity or the noise of the learning environments grows. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Group equivariant neural posterior estimation | Simulation-based inference with conditional neural density estimators is a powerful approach to solving inverse problems in science. However, these methods typically treat the underlying forward model as a black box, with no way to exploit geometric properties such as equivariances. Equivariances are common in scientific models, however integrating them directly into expressive inference networks (such as normalizing flows) is not straightforward. We here describe an alternative method to incorporate equivariances under joint transformations of parameters and data. Our method---called group equivariant neural posterior estimation (GNPE)---is based on self-consistently standardizing the "pose" of the data while estimating the posterior over parameters. It is architecture-independent, and applies both to exact and approximate equivariances. As a real-world application, we use GNPE for amortized inference of astrophysical binary black hole systems from gravitational-wave observations. We show that GNPE achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while reducing inference times by three orders of magnitude. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Identifiability Results for Multimodal Contrastive Learning | Contrastive learning is a cornerstone underlying recent progress in multi-view and multimodal learning, e.g., in representation learning with image/caption pairs. While its effectiveness is not yet fully understood, a line of recent work reveals that contrastive learning can invert the data generating process and recover ground truth latent factors shared between views. In this work, we present new identifiability results for multimodal contrastive learning, showing that it is possible to recover shared factors in a more general setup than the multi-view setting studied previously. Specifically, we distinguish between the multi-view setting with one generative mechanism (e.g., multiple cameras of the same type) and the multimodal setting that is characterized by distinct mechanisms (e.g., cameras and microphones). Our work generalizes previous identifiability results by redefining the generative process in terms of distinct mechanisms with modality-specific latent variables. We prove that contrastive learning can block-identify latent factors shared between modalities, even when there are nontrivial dependencies between factors. We empirically verify our identifiability results with numerical simulations and corroborate our findings on a complex multimodal dataset of image/text pairs. Zooming out, our work provides a theoretical basis for multimodal representation learning and explains in which settings multimodal contrastive learning can be effective in practice. | Accept: poster |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Prototypical Calibration for Few-shot Learning of Language Models | In-context learning of GPT-like models has been recognized as fragile across different hand-crafted templates, and demonstration permutations. In this work, we propose prototypical calibration to adaptively learn a more robust decision boundary for zero- and few-shot classification, instead of greedy decoding. Concretely, our method first adopts Gaussian mixture distribution to estimate the prototypical clusters for all categories. Then we assign each cluster to the corresponding label by solving a weighted bipartite matching problem. Given an example, its prediction is calibrated by the likelihood of prototypical clusters. Experimental results show that prototypical calibration yields a substantial improvement on a diverse set of tasks. Extensive analysis across different scales also indicates that our method calibrates the decision boundary as expected, greatly improving the robustness of GPT to templates, permutations, and class imbalance. | Accept: poster |
ICLR.cc/2019/Conference | Optimal Attacks against Multiple Classifiers | We study the problem of designing provably optimal adversarial noise algorithms that induce misclassification in settings where a learner aggregates decisions from multiple classifiers. Given the demonstrated vulnerability of state-of-the-art models to adversarial examples, recent efforts within the field of robust machine learning have focused on the use of ensemble classifiers as a way of boosting the robustness of individual models. In this paper, we design provably optimal attacks against a set of classifiers. We demonstrate how this problem can be framed as finding strategies at equilibrium in a two player, zero sum game between a learner and an adversary and consequently illustrate the need for randomization in adversarial attacks. The main technical challenge we consider is the design of best response oracles that can be implemented in a Multiplicative Weight Updates framework to find equilibrium strategies in the zero-sum game. We develop a series of scalable noise generation algorithms for deep neural networks, and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art attacks on various image classification tasks. Although there are generally no guarantees for deep learning, we show this is a well-principled approach in that it is provably optimal for linear classifiers. The main insight is a geometric characterization of the decision space that reduces the problem of designing best response oracles to minimizing a quadratic function over a set of convex polytopes. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | Are Neural Rankers still Outperformed by Gradient Boosted Decision Trees? | Despite the success of neural models on many major machine learning problems, their effectiveness on traditional Learning-to-Rank (LTR) problems is still not widely acknowledged. We first validate this concern by showing that most recent neural LTR models are, by a large margin, inferior to the best publicly available Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) in terms of their reported ranking accuracy on benchmark datasets. This unfortunately was somehow overlooked in recent neural LTR papers. We then investigate why existing neural LTR models under-perform and identify several of their weaknesses. Furthermore, we propose a unified framework comprising of counter strategies to ameliorate the existing weaknesses of neural models. Our models are the first to be able to perform equally well, comparing with the best tree-based baseline, while outperforming recently published neural LTR models by a large margin. Our results can also serve as a benchmark to facilitate future improvement of neural LTR models. | Accept (Spotlight) |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | Minimizing Change in Classifier Likelihood to Mitigate Catastrophic Forgetting | Continual learning is a longstanding goal of artificial intelligence, but is often counfounded by catastrophic forgetting that prevents neural networks from learning tasks sequentially. Previous methods in continual learning have demonstrated how to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, and learn new tasks while retaining performance on the previous tasks. We analyze catastrophic forgetting from the perspective of change in classifier likelihood and propose a simple L1 minimization criterion which can be adapted to different use cases. We further investigate two ways to minimize forgetting as quantified by this criterion and propose strategies to achieve finer control over forgetting. Finally, we evaluate our strategies on 3 datasets of varying difficulty and demonstrate improvements over previously known L2 strategies for mitigating catastrophic forgetting. | Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | Few-Shot Regression via Learning Sparsifying Basis Functions | Recent few-shot learning algorithms have enabled models to quickly adapt to new tasks based on only a few training samples. Previous few-shot learning works have mainly focused on classification and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose a few-shot meta-learning system that focuses exclusively on regression tasks. Our model is based on the idea that the degree of freedom of the unknown function can be significantly reduced if it is represented as a linear combination of a set of sparsifying basis functions. This enables a few labeled samples to approximate the function. We design a Basis Function Learner network to encode basis functions for a task distribution, and a Weights Generator network to generate the weight vector for a novel task. We show that our model outperforms the current state of the art meta-learning methods in various regression tasks. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2019/Conference | BEHAVIOR MODULE IN NEURAL NETWORKS | Prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a part of the brain which is responsible for behavior repertoire. Inspired by PFC functionality and connectivity, as well as human behavior formation process, we propose a novel modular architecture of neural networks with a Behavioral Module (BM) and corresponding end-to-end training strategy. This approach allows the efficient learning of behaviors and preferences representation. This property is particularly useful for user modeling (as for dialog agents) and recommendation tasks, as allows learning personalized representations of different user states. In the experiment with video games playing, the resultsshow that the proposed method allows separation of main task’s objectives andbehaviors between different BMs. The experiments also show network extendability through independent learning of new behavior patterns. Moreover, we demonstrate a strategy for an efficient transfer of newly learned BMs to unseen tasks. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2018/Conference | DuoRC: Towards Complex Language Understanding with Paraphrased Reading Comprehension | We propose DuoRC, a novel dataset for Reading Comprehension (RC) that motivates several new challenges for neural approaches in language understanding beyond those offered by existing RC datasets. DuoRC contains 186,089 unique question-answer pairs created from a collection of 7680 pairs of movie plots where each pair in the collection reflects two versions of the same movie - one from Wikipedia and the other from IMDb - written by two different authors. We asked crowdsourced workers to create questions from one version of the plot and a different set of workers to extract or synthesize corresponding answers from the other version. This unique characteristic of DuoRC where questions and answers are created from different versions of a document narrating the same underlying story, ensures by design, that there is very little lexical overlap between the questions created from one version and the segments containing the answer in the other version. Further, since the two versions have different level of plot detail, narration style, vocabulary, etc., answering questions from the second version requires deeper language understanding and incorporating background knowledge not available in the given text. Additionally, the narrative style of passages arising from movie plots (as opposed to typical descriptive passages in existing datasets) exhibits the need to perform complex reasoning over events across multiple sentences. Indeed, we observe that state-of-the-art neural RC models which have achieved near human performance on the SQuAD dataset, even when coupled with traditional NLP techniques to address the challenges presented in DuoRC exhibit very poor performance (F1 score of 37.42% on DuoRC v/s 86% on SQuAD dataset). This opens up several interesting research avenues wherein DuoRC could complement other Reading Comprehension style datasets to explore novel neural approaches for studying language understanding. | Invite to Workshop Track |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | Benchmarking Unsupervised Object Representations for Video Sequences | Perceiving the world in terms of objects and tracking them through time is a crucial prerequisite for reasoning and scene understanding. Recently, several methods have been proposed for unsupervised learning of object-centric representations. However, since these models have been evaluated with respect to different downstream tasks, it remains unclear how they compare in terms of basic perceptual abilities such as detection, figure-ground segmentation and tracking of individual objects. To close this gap, we design a benchmark with three datasets of varying complexity and seven additional test sets which feature challenging tracking scenarios relevant for natural videos. Using this benchmark, we compare the perceptual abilities of four unsupervised object-centric learning approaches: ViMON, a video-extension of MONet, based on a recurrent spatial attention mechanism, OP3, which exploits clustering via spatial mixture models, as well as TBA and SCALOR, which use an explicit factorization via spatial transformers. Our results suggest that architectures with unconstrained latent representations and full-image object masks such as ViMON and OP3 are able to learn more powerful representations in terms of object detection, segmentation and tracking than the explicitly parameterized spatial transformer based architecture of TBA and SCALOR. We also observe that none of the methods are able to gracefully handle the most challenging tracking scenarios despite their synthetic nature, suggesting that our benchmark may provide fruitful guidance towards learning more robust object-centric video representations. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Evaluating the Robustness of Time Series Anomaly and Intrusion Detection Methods against Adversarial Attacks | Time series anomaly and intrusion detection are extensively studied in statistics, economics, and computer science. Over the years, numerous methods have been proposed for time series anomaly and intrusion detection using deep learning-based methods. Many of these methods demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets, giving the false impression that these systems are robust and deployable in practical and industrial scenarios. In this paper, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art anomaly and intrusion detection methods can be easily fooled by adding adversarial perturbations to the sensor data. We use different scoring metrics such as prediction errors, anomaly, and classification scores over several public and private datasets belong to aerospace applications, automobiles, server machines, and cyber-physical systems. We evaluate state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) and graph neural networks (GNNs) methods, which claim to be robust against anomalies and intrusions, and find their performance can drop to as low as 0\% under adversarial attacks from Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) methods. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate the vulnerabilities of anomaly and intrusion detection systems against adversarial attacks. Our code is available here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ICLR298 | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2019/Conference | An analytic theory of generalization dynamics and transfer learning in deep linear networks | Much attention has been devoted recently to the generalization puzzle in deep learning: large, deep networks can generalize well, but existing theories bounding generalization error are exceedingly loose, and thus cannot explain this striking performance. Furthermore, a major hope is that knowledge may transfer across tasks, so that multi-task learning can improve generalization on individual tasks. However we lack analytic theories that can quantitatively predict how the degree of knowledge transfer depends on the relationship between the tasks. We develop an analytic theory of the nonlinear dynamics of generalization in deep linear networks, both within and across tasks. In particular, our theory provides analytic solutions to the training and testing error of deep networks as a function of training time, number of examples, network size and initialization, and the task structure and SNR. Our theory reveals that deep networks progressively learn the most important task structure first, so that generalization error at the early stopping time primarily depends on task structure and is independent of network size. This suggests any tight bound on generalization error must take into account task structure, and explains observations about real data being learned faster than random data. Intriguingly our theory also reveals the existence of a learning algorithm that proveably out-performs neural network training through gradient descent. Finally, for transfer learning, our theory reveals that knowledge transfer depends sensitively, but computably, on the SNRs and input feature alignments of pairs of tasks. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | Support-guided Adversarial Imitation Learning | We propose Support-guided Adversarial Imitation Learning (SAIL), a generic imitation learning framework that unifies support estimation of the expert policy with the family of Adversarial Imitation Learning (AIL) algorithms. SAIL addresses two important challenges of AIL, including the implicit reward bias and potential training instability. We also show that SAIL is at least as efficient as standard AIL. In an extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that the proposed method effectively handles the reward bias and achieves better performance and training stability than other baseline methods on a wide range of benchmark control tasks. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | Variational Information Bottleneck for Effective Low-Resource Fine-Tuning | While large-scale pretrained language models have obtained impressive results when fine-tuned on a wide variety of tasks, they still often suffer from overfitting in low-resource scenarios. Since such models are general-purpose feature extractors, many of these features are inevitably irrelevant for a given target task. We propose to use Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) to suppress irrelevant features when fine-tuning on low-resource target tasks, and show that our method successfully reduces overfitting. Moreover, we show that our VIB model finds sentence representations that are more robust to biases in natural language inference datasets, and thereby obtains better generalization to out-of-domain datasets. Evaluation on seven low-resource datasets in different tasks shows that our method significantly improves transfer learning in low-resource scenarios, surpassing prior work. Moreover, it improves generalization on 13 out of 15 out-of-domain natural language inference benchmarks. Our code is publicly available in https://github.com/rabeehk/vibert. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2019/Conference | Bias Also Matters: Bias Attribution for Deep Neural Network Explanation | The gradient of a deep neural network (DNN) w.r.t. the input provides information that can be used to explain the output prediction in terms of the input features and has been widely studied to assist in interpreting DNNs. In a linear model (i.e., $g(x)=wx+b$), the gradient corresponds solely to the weights $w$. Such a model can reasonably locally linearly approximate a smooth nonlinear DNN, and hence the weights of this local model are the gradient. The other part, however, of a local linear model, i.e., the bias $b$, is usually overlooked in attribution methods since it is not part of the gradient. In this paper, we observe that since the bias in a DNN also has a non-negligible contribution to the correctness of predictions, it can also play a significant role in understanding DNN behaviors. In particular, we study how to attribute a DNN's bias to its input features. We propose a backpropagation-type algorithm ``bias back-propagation (BBp)'' that starts at the output layer and iteratively attributes the bias of each layer to its input nodes as well as combining the resulting bias term of the previous layer. This process stops at the input layer, where summing up the attributions over all the input features exactly recovers $b$. Together with the backpropagation of the gradient generating $w$, we can fully recover the locally linear model $g(x)=wx+b$. Hence, the attribution of the DNN outputs to its inputs is decomposed into two parts, the gradient $w$ and the bias attribution, providing separate and complementary explanations. We study several possible attribution methods applied to the bias of each layer in BBp. In experiments, we show that BBp can generate complementary and highly interpretable explanations of DNNs in addition to gradient-based attributions. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | Pushing the bounds of dropout | We push on the boundaries of our knowledge about dropout by showing theoretically that dropout training can be understood as performing MAP estimation concurrently for an entire family of conditional models whose objectives are themselves lower bounded by the original dropout objective. This discovery allows us to pick any model from this family after training, which leads to a substantial improvement on regularisation-heavy language modelling. The family includes models that compute a power mean over the sampled dropout masks, and their less stochastic subvariants with tighter and higher lower bounds than the fully stochastic dropout objective. The deterministic subvariant's bound is equal to its objective, and the highest amongst these models. It also exhibits the best model fit in our experiments. Together, these results suggest that the predominant view of deterministic dropout as a good approximation to MC averaging is misleading. Rather, deterministic dropout is the best available approximation to the true objective. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | Towards Controllable and Interpretable Face Completion via Structure-Aware and Frequency-Oriented Attentive GANs | Face completion is a challenging conditional image synthesis task. This paper proposes controllable and interpretable high-resolution and fast face completion by learning generative adversarial networks (GANs) progressively from low resolution to high resolution. We present structure-aware and frequency-oriented attentive GANs. The proposed structure-aware component leverages off-the-shelf facial landmark detectors and proposes a simple yet effective method of integrating the detected landmarks in generative learning. It facilitates facial expression transfer together with facial attributes control, and helps regularize the structural consistency in progressive training. The proposed frequency-oriented attentive module (FOAM) encourages GANs to attend to only finer details in the coarse-to-fine progressive training, thus enabling progressive attention to face structures. The learned FOAMs show a strong pattern of switching its attention from low-frequency to high-frequency signals. In experiments, the proposed method is tested on the CelebA-HQ benchmark. Experiment results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art face completion methods. The proposed method is also fast with mean inference time of 0.54 seconds for images at 1024x1024 resolution (using a Titan Xp GPU). | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Learning Better Visual Representations for Weakly-Supervised Object Detection Using Natural Language Supervision | We present a framework to better leverage natural language supervision for a specific downstream task, namely weakly-supervised object detection (WSOD). Our framework employs a multimodal pre-training step, during which region-level groundings are learned in a weakly-supervised manner and later maintained for the downstream task. Further, to appropriately use the noisy supervision that captions contain for object detection, we use coherence analysis and other cross-modal alignment metrics to weight image-caption pairs during WSOD training. Results indicate that WSOD can better leverage representation learning by (1) learning a region-based alignment between image regions and caption tokens, (2) enforcing the visual backbone does not forget this alignment during the downstream WSOD task, and (3) suppressing instances that have weak image-caption correspondence during the WSOD training stage. | Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | PTUnifier: Pseudo Tokens as Paradigm Unifiers in Medical Vision-and-Language Pre-training | Medical vision-and-language pre-training (Med-VLP) has shown promising improvements on many downstream medical tasks owing to its applicability to extracting generic representations from medical images and texts. Practically, there exist two typical paradigms, i.e., the \textbf{fusion-encoder paradigm} and the \textbf{dual-encoder paradigm}, depending on whether a heavy fusion module is used. The former outperforms on multi-modal tasks owing to the sufficient interaction between modalities; the latter outperforms on uni-modal and cross-modal tasks due to the single-modality encoding ability. To take advantage of these two paradigms, we propose an effective yet straightforward scheme named PTUnifier to unify the two paradigms thanks to the identical input format by introducing visual and textual pseudo tokens, which serve as a feature bank that stores the most representative images/texts. By doing so, a single model could process various tasks adopting different input formats (i.e., image-only, text-only, and image-text-pair). Furthermore, we construct a pool of pseudo tokens (instead of static ones) to improve diversity and scalability. Experimental results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on a broad range of tasks, spanning uni-modal tasks (i.e., image/text classification and text summarization), cross-modal tasks (i.e., image-to-text generation and image-text/text-image retrieval), and multi-modal tasks (i.e., visual question answering), demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Note that the adoption of pseudo tokens is orthogonal to most existing Med-VLP approaches, and we believe that our approach could be a beneficial and complementary extension to these approaches. | Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Elastic Mean-Teacher Distillation Mitigates the Continual Learning Stability Gap | Nowadays, neural networks are being used to solve a variety of tasks. They are very effective when trained on large datasets. However, in continual learning, they are trained on non-stationary stream of data, which often results in forgetting of the previous knowledge. In the literature, continual learning models are exposed to a sequence of tasks, and must learn each task one by one. They are then evaluated at the end of each learning session. This allows to measure the average accuracy over all tasks encountered so far. Recently De Lange et al. (2022) showed that continual learning methods suffer from the Stability Gap, encountered when evaluating the model continually. Even when the performance at the end of training is high, the worst-case performance is low, which could be a problem in applications where the learner needs to always perform greatly on all tasks while learning the new task. In this paper, we propose to apply a refined variant of knowledge distillation, adapted to the class-incremental learning setting, and used in combination with replay, to improve the stability of the continual learning algorithms. We also propose to use a distillation method derived from the Mean teacher distillation training paradigm introduced in semi-supervised learning. We demonstrate empirically that the use of this method enhances the stability in the more challenging setting of online continual learning. | Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | Deep Multivariate Mixture of Gaussians for Object Detection under Occlusion | In this paper, we consider the problem of detecting object under occlusion. Most object detectors formulate bounding box regression as a unimodal task (i.e., regressing a single set of bounding box coordinates independently). However, we observe that the bounding box borders of an occluded object can have multiple plausible configurations. Also, the occluded bounding box borders have correlations with visible ones. Motivated by these two observations, we propose a deep multivariate mixture of Gaussians model for bounding box regression under occlusion. The mixture components potentially learn different configurations of an occluded part, and the covariances between variates help to learn the relationship between the occluded parts and the visible ones. Quantitatively, our model improves the AP of the baselines by 3.9% and 1.2% on CrowdHuman and MS-COCO respectively with almost no computational or memory overhead. Qualitatively, our model enjoys explainability since we can interpret the resulting bounding boxes via the covariance matrices and the mixture components. | Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Structural Optimization Makes Graph Classification Simpler and Better | In deep neural networks, better results can often be obtained by increasing the complexity of previously developed basic models. However, it is unclear whether there is a way to boost performance by decreasing the complexity of such models. Here, based on an optimization method, we investigate the feasibility of improving graph classification performance while simplifying the model learning process. Inspired by progress in structural information assessment, we optimize the given data sample from graphs to encoding trees. In particular, we minimize the structural entropy of the transformed encoding tree to decode the key structure underlying a graph. This transformation is denoted as structural optimization. Furthermore, we propose a novel feature combination scheme, termed hierarchical reporting, for encoding trees. In this scheme, features are transferred from leaf nodes to root nodes by following the hierarchical structures of encoding trees. We then present an implementation of the scheme in a tree kernel and a convolutional network to perform graph classification. The tree kernel follows label propagation in the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) subtree kernel, but it has a lower runtime complexity $O(n)$. The convolutional network is a special implementation of our tree kernel in the deep learning field and is called Encoding Tree Learning (ETL). We empirically validate our tree kernel and convolutional network with several graph classification benchmarks and demonstrate that our methods achieve better performance and lower computational consumption than competing approaches. | Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2019/Conference | Unseen Action Recognition with Unpaired Adversarial Multimodal Learning | In this paper, we present a method to learn a joint multimodal representation space that allows for the recognition of unseen activities in videos. We compare the effect of placing various constraints on the embedding space using paired text and video data. Additionally, we propose a method to improve the joint embedding space using an adversarial formulation with unpaired text and video data. In addition to testing on publicly available datasets, we introduce a new, large-scale text/video dataset. We experimentally confirm that learning such shared embedding space benefits three difficult tasks (i) zero-shot activity classification, (ii) unsupervised activity discovery, and (iii) unseen activity captioning.
| Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | CoordX: Accelerating Implicit Neural Representation with a Split MLP Architecture | Implicit neural representations with multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) have recently gained prominence for a wide variety of tasks such as novel view synthesis and 3D object representation and rendering. However, a significant challenge with these representations is that both training and inference with an MLP over a large number of input coordinates to learn and represent an image, video, or 3D object, require large amounts of computation and incur long processing times. In this work, we aim to accelerate inference and training of coordinate-based MLPs for implicit neural representations by proposing a new split MLP architecture, CoordX. With CoordX, the initial layers are split to learn each dimension of the input coordinates separately. The intermediate features are then fused by the last layers to generate the learned signal at the corresponding coordinate point. This significantly reduces the amount of computation required and leads to large speedups in training and inference, while achieving similar accuracy as the baseline MLP. This approach thus aims at first learning functions that are a decomposition of the original signal and then fusing them to generate the learned signal. Our proposed architecture can be generally used for many implicit neural representation tasks with no additional memory overheads. We demonstrate a speedup of up to 2.92x compared to the baseline model for image, video, and 3D shape representation and rendering tasks. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | Fair Differential Privacy Can Mitigate the Disparate Impact on Model Accuracy | The techniques based on the theory of differential privacy (DP) has become a standard building block in the machine learning community. DP training mechanisms offer strong guarantees that an adversary cannot determine with high confidence about the training data based on analyzing the released model, let alone any details of the instances. However, DP may disproportionately affect the underrepresented and relatively complicated classes. That is, the reduction in utility is unequal for each class. This paper proposes a fair differential privacy algorithm (FairDP) to mitigate the disparate impact on model accuracy for each class. We cast the learning procedure as a two-stage optimization problem, which integrates differential privacy with fairness. FairDP establishes a self-adaptive DP mechanism and dynamically adjusts instance influence in each class depending on the theoretical bias-variance bound. Our experimental evaluation shows the effectiveness of FairDP in mitigating the disparate impact on model accuracy among the classes on several benchmark datasets and scenarios ranging from text to vision. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | Improving Hierarchical Adversarial Robustness of Deep Neural Networks | Do all adversarial examples have the same consequences? An autonomous driving system misclassifying a pedestrian as a car may induce a far more dangerous --and even potentially lethal-- behavior than, for instance, a car as a bus. In order to better tackle this important problematic, we introduce the concept of hierarchical adversarial robustness. Given a dataset whose classes can be grouped into coarse-level labels, we define hierarchical adversarial examples as the ones leading to a misclassification at the coarse level. To improve the resistance of neural networks to hierarchical attacks, we introduce a hierarchical adversarially robust (HAR) network design that decomposes a single classification task into one coarse and multiple fine classification tasks, before being specifically trained by adversarial defense techniques. As an alternative to an end-to-end learning approach, we show that HAR significantly improves the robustness of the network against $\ell_{\infty}$ and $\ell_{2}$bounded hierarchical attacks on CIFAR-100. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Sparsity-Constrained Optimal Transport | Regularized optimal transport (OT) is now increasingly used as a loss or as a matching layer in neural networks. Entropy-regularized OT can be computed using the Sinkhorn algorithm but it leads to fully-dense transportation plans, meaning that all sources are (fractionally) matched with all targets. To address this issue, several works have investigated quadratic regularization instead. This regularization preserves sparsity and leads to unconstrained and smooth (semi) dual objectives, that can be solved with off-the-shelf gradient methods. Unfortunately, quadratic regularization does not give direct control over the cardinality (number of nonzeros) of the transportation plan. We propose in this paper a new approach for OT with explicit cardinality constraints on the transportation plan. Our work is motivated by an application to sparse mixture of experts, where OT can be used to match input tokens such as image patches with expert models such as neural networks. Cardinality constraints ensure that at most $k$ tokens are matched with an expert, which is crucial for computational performance reasons. Despite the nonconvexity of cardinality constraints, we show that the corresponding (semi) dual problems are tractable and can be solved with first-order gradient methods. Our method can be thought as a middle ground between unregularized OT (recovered in the limit case $k=1$) and quadratically-regularized OT (recovered when $k$ is large enough). The smoothness of the objectives increases as $k$ increases, giving rise to a trade-off between convergence speed and sparsity of the optimal plan. | Accept: notable-top-25% |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | A Geometric Analysis of Deep Generative Image Models and Its Applications | Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have emerged as a powerful unsupervised method to model the statistical patterns of real-world data sets, such as natural images. These networks are trained to map random inputs in their latent space to new samples representative of the learned data. However, the structure of the latent space is hard to intuit due to its high dimensionality and the non-linearity of the generator, which limits the usefulness of the models. Understanding the latent space requires a way to identify input codes for existing real-world images (inversion), and a way to identify directions with known image transformations (interpretability). Here, we use a geometric framework to address both issues simultaneously. We develop an architecture-agnostic method to compute the Riemannian metric of the image manifold created by GANs. The eigen-decomposition of the metric isolates axes that account for different levels of image variability. An empirical analysis of several pretrained GANs shows that image variation around each position is concentrated along surprisingly few major axes (the space is highly anisotropic) and the directions that create this large variation are similar at different positions in the space (the space is homogeneous). We show that many of the top eigenvectors correspond to interpretable transforms in the image space, with a substantial part of eigenspace corresponding to minor transforms which could be compressed out. This geometric understanding unifies key previous results related to GAN interpretability. We show that the use of this metric allows for more efficient optimization in the latent space (e.g. GAN inversion) and facilitates unsupervised discovery of interpretable axes. Our results illustrate that defining the geometry of the GAN image manifold can serve as a general framework for understanding GANs. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Ordered GNN: Ordering Message Passing to Deal with Heterophily and Over-smoothing | Most graph neural networks follow the message passing mechanism. However, it faces the over-smoothing problem when multiple times of message passing is applied to a graph, causing indistinguishable node representations and prevents the model to effectively learn dependencies between farther-away nodes. On the other hand, features of neighboring nodes with different labels are likely to be falsely mixed, resulting in the heterophily problem. In this work, we propose to order the messages passing into the node representation, with specific blocks of neurons targeted for message passing within specific hops. This is achieved by aligning the hierarchy of the rooted-tree of a central node with the ordered neurons in its node representation. Experimental results on an extensive set of datasets show that our model can simultaneously achieve the state-of-the-art in both homophily and heterophily settings, without any targeted design. Moreover, its performance maintains pretty well while the model becomes really deep, effectively preventing the over-smoothing problem. Finally, visualizing the gating vectors shows that our model learns to behave differently between homophily and heterophily settings, providing an explainable graph neural model. | Accept: poster |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | Adversarial Synthetic Datasets for Neural Program Synthesis | Program synthesis is the task of automatically generating a program consistent with a given specification. A natural way to specify programs is to provide examples of desired input-output behavior, and many current program synthesis approaches have achieved impressive results after training on randomly generated input-output examples. However, recent work has discovered that some of these approaches generalize poorly to data distributions different from that of the randomly generated examples. We show that this problem applies to other state-of-the-art approaches as well and that current methods to counteract this problem are insufficient. We then propose a new, adversarial approach to control the bias of synthetic data distributions and show that it outperforms current approaches. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Extreme Masking for Learning Instance and Distributed Visual Representations | The paper presents a scalable approach for learning distributed representations over individual tokens and a holistic instance representation simultaneously. We use self-attention blocks to represent distributed tokens, followed by cross-attention blocks to aggregate the holistic instance. The core of the approach is the use of extremely large token masking (75\%-90\%) as the data augmentation for supervision. Our model, named ExtreMA, follows the plain BYOL approach where the instance representation from the unmasked subset is trained to predict that from the intact input. Learning requires the model to capture informative variations in an instance, instead of encouraging invariances.
The paper makes three contributions: 1) Random masking is a strong and computationally efficient data augmentation for learning generalizable attention representations. 2) With multiple sampling per instance, extreme masking greatly speeds up learning and hungers for more data. 3) Distributed representations can be learned from the instance supervision alone, unlike per-token supervisions in masked modeling. | Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | ConBaT: Control Barrier Transformer for Safety-Critical Policy Learning | Large-scale self-supervised models have recently revolutionized our ability to perform a variety of tasks within the vision and language domains. However, using such models for autonomous systems is challenging because of safety requirements: besides executing correct actions, an autonomous agent needs to also avoid high cost and potentially fatal critical mistakes. Traditionally, self-supervised training mostly focuses on imitating previously observed behaviors, and the training demonstrations carry no notion of which behaviors should be explicitly avoided. In this work, we propose Control Barrier Transformer (ConBaT), an approach that learns safe behaviors from demonstrations in a self-supervised fashion. ConBaT is inspired by the concept of control barrier functions in control theory and uses a causal transformer that learns to predict safe robot actions autoregressively using a critic that requires minimal safety data labeling. During deployment, we employ a lightweight online optimization to find actions that can ensure future states lie within the safe set. We apply our approach to different simulated control tasks and show that our method results in safer control policies compared to other classical and learning-based methods. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | InfoBERT: Improving Robustness of Language Models from An Information Theoretic Perspective | Large-scale language models such as BERT have achieved state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of NLP tasks. Recent studies, however, show that such BERT-based models are vulnerable facing the threats of textual adversarial attacks. We aim to address this problem from an information-theoretic perspective, and propose InfoBERT, a novel learning framework for robust fine-tuning of pre-trained language models. InfoBERT contains two mutual-information-based regularizers for model training: (i) an Information Bottleneck regularizer, which suppresses noisy mutual information between the input and the feature representation; and (ii) a Robust Feature regularizer, which increases the mutual information between local robust features and global features. We provide a principled way to theoretically analyze and improve the robustness of representation learning for language models in both standard and adversarial training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that InfoBERT achieves state-of-the-art robust accuracy over several adversarial datasets on Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Question Answering (QA) tasks.
Our code is available at https://github.com/AI-secure/InfoBERT. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Domain Generalisation via Domain Adaptation: An Adversarial Fourier Amplitude Approach | We tackle the domain generalisation (DG) problem by posing it as a domain adaptation (DA) task where we adversarially synthesise the worst-case `target' domain and adapt a model to that worst-case domain, thereby improving the model’s robustness. To synthesise data that is challenging yet semantics-preserving, we generate Fourier amplitude images and combine them with source domain phase images, exploiting the widely believed conjecture from signal processing that amplitude spectra mainly determines image style, while phase data mainly captures image semantics. To synthesise a worst-case domain for adaptation, we train the classifier and the amplitude generator adversarially. Specifically, we exploit the maximum classifier discrepancy (MCD) principle from DA that relates the target domain performance to the discrepancy of classifiers in the model hypothesis space. By Bayesian hypothesis modeling, we express the model hypothesis space effectively as a posterior distribution over classifiers given the source domains, making adversarial MCD minimisation feasible. On the DomainBed benchmark including the large-scale DomainNet dataset, the proposed approach yields significantly improved domain generalisation performance over the state-of-the-art. | Accept: poster |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | A Latent Morphology Model for Open-Vocabulary Neural Machine Translation | Translation into morphologically-rich languages challenges neural machine translation (NMT) models with extremely sparse vocabularies where atomic treatment of surface forms is unrealistic. This problem is typically addressed by either pre-processing words into subword units or performing translation directly at the level of characters. The former is based on word segmentation algorithms optimized using corpus-level statistics with no regard to the translation task. The latter learns directly from translation data but requires rather deep architectures. In this paper, we propose to translate words by modeling word formation through a hierarchical latent variable model which mimics the process of morphological inflection. Our model generates words one character at a time by composing two latent representations: a continuous one, aimed at capturing the lexical semantics, and a set of (approximately) discrete features, aimed at capturing the morphosyntactic function, which are shared among different surface forms. Our model achieves better accuracy in translation into three morphologically-rich languages than conventional open-vocabulary NMT methods, while also demonstrating a better generalization capacity under low to mid-resource settings. | Accept (Spotlight) |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | The Lipschitz Constant of Self-Attention | Lipschitz constants of neural networks have been explored in various contexts in deep learning, such as provable adversarial robustness, estimating Wasserstein distance, stabilising training of GANs, and formulating invertible neural networks. Such works have focused on bounding the Lipschitz constant of fully connected or convolutional networks, composed of linear maps and pointwise non-linearities. In this paper, we investigate the Lipschitz constant of self-attention, a non-linear neural network module widely used in sequence modelling. We prove that the standard dot-product self-attention is *not* Lipschitz, and propose an alternative L2 self-attention that *is* Lipschitz. We derive an upper bound on the Lipschitz constant of L2 self-attention and provide empirical evidence for its asymptotic tightness. To demonstrate the practical relevance of our theoretical work, we formulate invertible self-attention and use it in a Transformer-based architecture for a character-level language modelling task. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Vera Verto: Multimodal Hijacking Attack | The increasing cost of training machine learning (ML) models has led to the inclusion of new parties to the training pipeline, such as users who contribute training data and companies that provide computing resources. This involvement of such new parties in the ML training process has introduced new attack surfaces for an adversary to exploit. A recent attack in this domain is the model hijacking attack, whereby an adversary hijacks a victim model to implement their own -- possibly malicious -- hijacking tasks. However, the scope of the model hijacking attack is so far limited to computer vision-related tasks. In this paper, we transform the model hijacking attack into a more general multimodal setting, where the hijacking and original tasks are performed on data of different modalities. Specifically, we focus on the setting where an adversary implements a natural language processing (NLP) hijacking task into an image classification model. To mount the attack, we propose a novel encoder-decoder based framework, namely the Blender, which relies on advanced image and language models. Experimental results show that our modal hijacking attack achieves strong performances in different settings. For instance, our attack achieves 94%, 94%, and 95% attack success rate when using the Sogou news dataset to hijack STL10, CIFAR-10, and MNIST classifiers. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2019/Conference | RotDCF: Decomposition of Convolutional Filters for Rotation-Equivariant Deep Networks | Explicit encoding of group actions in deep features makes it possible for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to handle global deformations of images, which is critical to success in many vision tasks. This paper proposes to decompose the convolutional filters over joint steerable bases across the space and the group geometry simultaneously, namely a rotation-equivariant CNN with decomposed convolutional filters (RotDCF). This decomposition facilitates computing the joint convolution, which is proved to be necessary for the group equivariance. It significantly reduces the model size and computational complexity while preserving performance, and truncation of the bases expansion serves implicitly to regularize the filters. On datasets involving in-plane and out-of-plane object rotations, RotDCF deep features demonstrate greater robustness and interpretability than regular CNNs. The stability of the equivariant representation to input variations is also proved theoretically. The RotDCF framework can be extended to groups other than rotations, providing a general approach which achieves both group equivariance and representation stability at a reduced model size. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | GRAPHIX: A Pre-trained Graph Edit Model for Automated Program Repair | We present GRAPHIX, a pre-trained graph edit model for automatically detecting and fixing bugs and code quality issues in Java programs. Unlike sequence-to-sequence models, GRAPHIX leverages the abstract syntax structure of code and represents the code using a multi-head graph encoder. Along with an autoregressive tree decoder, the model learns to perform graph edit actions for automated program repair. We devise a novel pre-training strategy for GRAPHIX, namely deleted sub-tree reconstruction, to enrich the model with implicit knowledge of program structures from unlabeled source code. The pre-training objective is made consistent with the bug fixing task to facilitate the downstream learning. We evaluate GRAPHIX on the Patches in The Wild Java benchmark, using both abstract and concrete code. Experimental results show that GRAPHIX significantly outperforms a wide range of baselines including CodeBERT and BART and is as competitive as other state-of-the-art pre-trained Transformer models despite using one order of magnitude fewer parameters. Further analysis demonstrates strong inductive biases of GRAPHIX in learning meaningful structural and semantic code patterns, both in abstract and concrete source code. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2019/Conference | LeMoNADe: Learned Motif and Neuronal Assembly Detection in calcium imaging videos | Neuronal assemblies, loosely defined as subsets of neurons with reoccurring spatio-temporally coordinated activation patterns, or "motifs", are thought to be building blocks of neural representations and information processing. We here propose LeMoNADe, a new exploratory data analysis method that facilitates hunting for motifs in calcium imaging videos, the dominant microscopic functional imaging modality in neurophysiology. Our nonparametric method extracts motifs directly from videos, bypassing the difficult intermediate step of spike extraction. Our technique augments variational autoencoders with a discrete stochastic node, and we show in detail how a differentiable reparametrization and relaxation can be used. An evaluation on simulated data, with available ground truth, reveals excellent quantitative performance. In real video data acquired from brain slices, with no ground truth available, LeMoNADe uncovers nontrivial candidate motifs that can help generate hypotheses for more focused biological investigations. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Graph Neural Bandits | Contextual bandits aim to choose the optimal arm with the highest reward out of a set of candidates based on their contextual information, and various bandit algorithms have been applied to personalized recommendation due to their ability of solving the exploitation-exploration dilemma. Motivated by online recommendation scenarios, in this paper, we propose a framework named Graph Neural Bandits (GNB) to leverage the collaborative nature among users empowered by graph neural networks (GNNs). Instead of estimating rigid user clusters, we model the "fine-grained'' collaborative effects through estimated user graphs in terms of exploitation and exploration individually. Then, to refine the recommendation strategy, we utilize separate GNN-based models on estimated user graphs for exploitation and adaptive exploration. Theoretical analysis and experimental results on multiple real data sets in comparison with state-of-the-art baselines are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Latent Graph Inference | This paper introduces a new architecture for multivariate time series forecasting that simultaneously infers and leverages relations among time series. We cast our method as a modular extension to univariate architectures where relations among individual time series are dynamically inferred in the latent space obtained after encoding the whole input signal. Our approach is flexible enough to scale gracefully according to the needs of the forecasting task under consideration. In its most straight-forward and general version, we infer a potentially fully connected graph to model the interactions between time series, which allows us to obtain competitive forecast accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art in graph neural networks for forecasting. In addition, whereas previous latent graph inference methods scale O(N^2) w.r.t. the number of nodes N (representing the time series), we show how to configure our approach to cater for the scale of modern time series panels. By assuming the inferred graph to be bipartite where one partition consists of the original N nodes and we introduce K nodes (taking inspiration from low-rank-decompositions) we reduce the time complexity of our procedure to O(NK). This allows us to leverage the dependency structure with a small trade-off in forecasting accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for a variety of datasets where it performs better or very competitively to previous methods under both the fully connected and bipartite assumptions. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Cognitively Inspired Learning of Incremental Drifting Concepts | Humans continually expand their learned knowledge to new domains and learn new concepts without any interference with past learned experiences. In contrast, machine learning models perform poorly in a continual learning setting, where input data distribution changes over time. Inspired by the nervous system learning mechanisms, we develop a computational model that enables a deep neural network to learn new concepts and expand its learned knowledge to new domains incrementally in a continual learning setting. We rely on the Parallel Distributed Processing theory to encode abstract concepts in an embedding space in terms of a multimodal distribution. This embedding space is modeled by internal data representations in a hidden network layer. We also leverage the Complementary Learning Systems theory to equip the model with a memory mechanism to overcome catastrophic forgetting through implementing pseudo-rehearsal. Our model can generate pseudo-data points for experience replay and accumulate new experiences to past learned experiences without causing cross-task interference. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | Removing input features via a generative model to explain their attributions to classifier's decisions | Interpretability methods often measure the contribution of an input feature to an image classifier's decisions by heuristically removing it via e.g. blurring, adding noise, or graying out, which often produce unrealistic, out-of-samples. Instead, we propose to integrate a generative inpainter into three representative attribution map methods as a mechanism for removing input features. Compared to the original counterparts, our methods (1) generate more plausible counterfactual samples under the true data generating process; (2) are more robust to hyperparameter settings; and (3) localize objects more accurately. Our findings were consistent across both ImageNet and Places365 datasets and two different pairs of classifiers and inpainters. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | Unifying Regularisation Methods for Continual Learning | Continual Learning addresses the challenge of learning a number of different distributions sequentially. The goal of maintaining knowledge of earlier distributions without re-accessing them starkly conflicts with standard SGD training for artificial neural networks. An influential method to tackle this are so-called regularisation approaches. They measure the importance of each parameter for modelling a given distribution and subsequently protect important parameters from large changes. In the literature, three ways to measure parameter importance have been put forward and they have inspired a large body of follow-up work. Here, we present strong theoretical and empirical evidence that these three methods, Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC), Synaptic Intelligence (SI) and Memory Aware Synapses (MAS), all approximate the Fisher Information. Only EWC intentionally relies on the Fisher, while the other two methods stem from rather different motivations. We find that for SI the relation to the Fisher -- and in fact its performance -- is due to a previously unknown bias. Altogether, this unifies a large body of regularisation approaches. It also provides the first theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of SI- and MAS-based algorithms and offers theoretically justified versions of these algorithms. From a practical viewpoint, our insights offer computational speed-ups and uncover conditions needed for different algorithms to work. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2019/Conference | Adapting Auxiliary Losses Using Gradient Similarity | One approach to deal with the statistical inefficiency of neural networks is to rely on auxiliary losses that help to build useful representations. However, it is not always trivial to know if an auxiliary task will be helpful for the main task and when it could start hurting. We propose to use the cosine similarity between gradients of tasks as an adaptive weight to detect when an auxiliary loss is helpful to the main loss. We show that our approach is guaranteed to converge to critical points of the main task and demonstrate the practical usefulness of the proposed algorithm in a few domains: multi-task supervised learning on subsets of ImageNet, reinforcement learning on gridworld, and reinforcement learning on Atari games. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Test-Time Adaptation to Distribution Shifts by Confidence Maximization and Input Transformation | Deep neural networks often exhibit poor performance on data that is unlikely under the train-time data distribution, for instance data affected by corruptions. Previous works demonstrate that test-time adaptation to data shift, for instance using entropy minimization, effectively improves performance on such shifted distributions. This paper focuses on the fully test-time adaptation setting, where only unlabeled data from the target distribution is required. This allows adapting arbitrary pretrained networks. Specifically, we propose a novel loss that improves test-time adaptation by addressing both premature convergence and instability of entropy minimization. This is achieved by replacing the entropy by a non-saturating surrogate and adding a diversity regularizer based on batch-wise entropy maximization that prevents convergence to trivial collapsed solutions. Moreover, we propose to prepend an input transformation module to the network that can partially undo test-time distribution shifts. Surprisingly, this preprocessing can be learned solely using the fully test-time adaptation loss in an end-to-end fashion without any target domain labels or source domain data. We show that our approach outperforms previous work in improving the robustness of publicly available pretrained image classifiers to common corruptions on such challenging benchmarks as ImageNet-C. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2019/Conference | Relational Graph Attention Networks | We investigate Relational Graph Attention Networks, a class of models that extends non-relational graph attention mechanisms to incorporate relational information, opening up these methods to a wider variety of problems. A thorough evaluation of these models is performed, and comparisons are made against established benchmarks. To provide a meaningful comparison, we retrain Relational Graph Convolutional Networks, the spectral counterpart of Relational Graph Attention Networks, and evaluate them under the same conditions. We find that Relational Graph Attention Networks perform worse than anticipated, although some configurations are marginally beneficial for modelling molecular properties. We provide insights as to why this may be, and suggest both modifications to evaluation strategies, as well as directions to investigate for future work. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | Discriminative Representation Loss (DRL): A More Efficient Approach than Gradient Re-Projection in Continual Learning | The use of episodic memories in continual learning has been shown to be effective in terms of alleviating catastrophic forgetting. In recent studies, several gradient-based approaches have been developed to make more efficient use of compact episodic memories, which constrain the gradients resulting from new samples with those from memorized samples, aiming to reduce the diversity of gradients from different tasks. In this paper, we reveal the relation between diversity of gradients and discriminativeness of representations, demonstrating connections between Deep Metric Learning and continual learning. Based on these findings, we propose a simple yet efficient method -- Discriminative Representation Loss (DRL) -- for continual learning. In comparison with several state-of-the-art methods, this method shows effectiveness with low computational cost on multiple benchmark experiments in the setting of online continual learning. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | StableDR: Stabilized Doubly Robust Learning for Recommendation on Data Missing Not at Random | In recommender systems, users always choose the favorite items to rate, which leads to data missing not at random and poses a great challenge for unbiased evaluation and learning of prediction models. Currently, the doubly robust (DR) methods have been widely studied and demonstrate superior performance. However, in this paper, we show that DR methods are unstable and have unbounded bias, variance, and generalization bounds to extremely small propensities. Moreover, the fact that DR relies more on extrapolation will lead to suboptimal performance. To address the above limitations while retaining double robustness, we propose a stabilized doubly robust (StableDR) learning approach with a weaker reliance on extrapolation. Theoretical analysis shows that StableDR has bounded bias, variance, and generalization error bound simultaneously under inaccurate imputed errors and arbitrarily small propensities. In addition, we propose a novel learning approach for StableDR that updates the imputation, propensity, and prediction models cyclically, achieving more stable and accurate predictions. Extensive experiments show that our approaches significantly outperform the existing methods. | Accept: poster |
ICLR.cc/2019/Conference | Isolating effects of age with fair representation learning when assessing dementia | One of the most prevalent symptoms among the elderly population, dementia, can be detected by classifiers trained on linguistic features extracted from narrative transcripts. However, these linguistic features are impacted in a similar but different fashion by the normal aging process. Aging is therefore a confounding factor, whose effects have been hard for machine learning classifiers to isolate.
In this paper, we show that deep neural network (DNN) classifiers can infer ages from linguistic features, which is an entanglement that could lead to unfairness across age groups. We show this problem is caused by undesired activations of v-structures in causality diagrams, and it could be addressed with fair representation learning. We build neural network classifiers that learn low-dimensional representations reflecting the impacts of dementia yet discarding the effects of age. To evaluate these classifiers, we specify a model-agnostic score $\Delta_{eo}^{(N)}$ measuring how classifier results are disentangled from age. Our best models outperform baseline neural network classifiers in disentanglement, while compromising accuracy by as little as 2.56\% and 2.25\% on DementiaBank and the Famous People dataset respectively. | Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2019/Conference | MANIFOLDNET: A DEEP NEURAL NETWORK FOR MANIFOLD-VALUED DATA | Developing deep neural networks (DNNs) for manifold-valued data sets
has gained much interest of late in the deep learning research
community. Examples of manifold-valued data include data from
omnidirectional cameras on automobiles, drones etc., diffusion
magnetic resonance imaging, elastography and others. In this paper, we
present a novel theoretical framework for DNNs to cope with
manifold-valued data inputs. In doing this generalization, we draw
parallels to the widely popular convolutional neural networks (CNNs).
We call our network the ManifoldNet.
As in vector spaces where convolutions are equivalent to computing the
weighted mean of functions, an analogous definition for
manifold-valued data can be constructed involving the computation of
the weighted Fr\'{e}chet Mean (wFM). To this end, we present a
provably convergent recursive computation of the wFM of the given
data, where the weights makeup the convolution mask, to be
learned. Further, we prove that the proposed wFM layer achieves a
contraction mapping and hence the ManifoldNet does not need the
additional non-linear ReLU unit used in standard CNNs. Operations such
as pooling in traditional CNN are no longer necessary in this setting
since wFM is already a pooling type operation. Analogous to the
equivariance of convolution in Euclidean space to translations, we
prove that the wFM is equivariant to the action of the group of
isometries admitted by the Riemannian manifold on which the data
reside. This equivariance property facilitates weight sharing within
the network. We present experiments, using the ManifoldNet framework,
to achieve video classification and image reconstruction using an
auto-encoder+decoder setting. Experimental results demonstrate the
efficacy of ManifoldNet in the context of classification and
reconstruction accuracy. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Cascaded Teaching Transformers with Data Reweighting for Long Sequence Time-series Forecasting | The Transformer-based models have shown superior performance in the long sequence time-series forecasting problem. The sparsity assumption on self-attention dot-product reveals that not all inputs are equally significant for Transformers. Instead of implicitly utilizing weighted time-series, we build a new learning framework by cascaded teaching Transformers to reweight samples. We formulate the framework as a multi-level optimization and design three different dataset-weight generators. We perform extensive experiments on five datasets, which shows that our proposed method could significantly outperform the SOTA Transformers. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | EMFlow: Data Imputation in Latent Space via EM and Deep Flow Models | The presence of missing values within high-dimensional data is an ubiquitous problem for many applied sciences. A serious limitation of many available data mining and machine learning methods is their inability to handle partially missing values and so an integrated approach that combines imputation and model estimation is vital for down-stream analysis. A computationally fast algorithm, called EMFlow, is introduced that performs imputation in a latent space via an online version of Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm by using a normalizing flow (NF) model which maps the data space to a latent space. The proposed EMFlow algorithm is iterative, involving updating the parameters of online EM and NF alternatively. Extensive experimental results for high-dimensional multivariate and image datasets are presented to illustrate the superior performance of the EMFlow compared to a couple of recently available methods in terms of both predictive accuracy and speed of algorithmic convergence. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | Teaching GAN to generate per-pixel annotation | We propose a method for joint image and per-pixel annotation synthesis with GAN. We demonstrate that GAN has good high-level representation of target data that can be easily projected to semantic segmentation masks. This method can be used to create a training dataset for teaching separate semantic segmentation network. Our experiments show that such segmentation network successfully generalizes on real data. Additionally, the method outperforms supervised training when the number of training samples is small, and works on variety of different scenes and classes. The source code of the proposed method will be publicly available. | Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Learning Time-dependent PDE Solver using Message Passing Graph Neural Networks | One of the main challenges in solving time-dependent partial differential equations is to develop computationally efficient solvers that are accurate and stable. Here, we introduce a general graph neural network approach to finding efficient PDE solvers through learning using message-passing models. We first introduce domain invariant features for PDE-data inspired by classical PDE solvers for an efficient physical representation. Next, we use graphs to represent PDE-data on an unstructured mesh and show that message passing graph neural networks (MPGNN) can parameterize governing equations, and as a result, efficiently learn accurate solver schemes for linear/nonlinear PDEs. We further show that the solvers are independent of the initial training geometry and can solve the same PDE on more complex domains. Lastly, we show that a recurrent graph neural network approach can find a temporal sequence of solutions to a PDE. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | Revisit Knowledge Distillation: a Teacher-free Framework | Knowledge Distillation (KD) aims to distill the knowledge of a cumbersome teacher model into a lightweight student model. Its success is generally attributed to the privileged information on similarities among categories provided by the teacher model, and in this sense, only strong teacher models are deployed to teach weaker students in practice. In this work, we challenge this common belief by following experimental observations: 1) beyond the acknowledgment that the teacher can improve the student, the student can also enhance the teacher significantly by reversing the KD procedure; 2) a poorly-trained teacher with much lower accuracy than the student can still improve the latter significantly. To explain these observations, we provide a theoretical analysis of the relationships between KD and label smoothing regularization. We prove that 1) KD is a type of learned label smoothing regularization and 2) label smoothing regularization provides a virtual teacher model for KD. From these results, we argue that the success of KD is not fully due to the similarity information between categories, but also to the regularization of soft targets, which is equally or even more important.
Based on these analyses, we further propose a novel Teacher-free Knowledge Distillation (Tf-KD) framework, where a student model learns from itself or manually-designed regularization distribution. The Tf-KD achieves comparable performance with normal KD from a superior teacher. It is generic and can be directly deployed for training deep neural networks. Without any extra computation cost, Tf-KD achieves up to 0.65% improvement on ImageNet over well-established baseline models, which is superior to label smoothing regularization. | Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | Optimizing Loss Landscape Connectivity via Neuron Alignment | The loss landscapes of deep neural networks are poorly understood due to their high nonconvexity. Empirically, the local optima of these loss functions can be connected by a simple curve in model space, along which the loss remains fairly constant. Yet, current path finding algorithms do not consider the influence of symmetry in the loss surface caused by weight permutations of the networks corresponding to the minima. We propose a framework to investigate the effect of symmetry on the landscape connectivity by directly optimizing the weight permutations of the networks being connected. Through utilizing an existing neuron alignment technique, we derive an initialization for the weight permutations. Empirically, this initialization is critical for efficiently learning a simple, planar, low-loss curve between networks that successfully generalizes. Additionally, we introduce a proximal alternating minimization scheme to address if an optimal permutation can be learned, with some provable convergence guarantees. We find that the learned parameterized curve is still a low-loss curve after permuting the weights of the endpoint models, for a subset of permutations. We also show that there is small but steady performance gain in performance of the ensembles constructed from the learned curve, when considering weight space symmetry. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Does Adversarial Robustness Really Imply Backdoor Vulnerability? | Recent research has revealed a trade-off between the robustness against adversarial attacks and backdoor attacks. Specifically, with the increasing adversarial robustness obtained through adversarial training, the model easily memorizes the malicious behaviors embedded in poisoned data and becomes more vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Meanwhile, some studies have demonstrated that adversarial training can somewhat mitigate the effect of poisoned data during training. This paper revisits the trade-off and raises a question \textit{whether adversarial robustness really implies backdoor vulnerability.} Based on thorough experiments, we find that such trade-off ignores the interactions between the perturbation budget of adversarial training and the magnitude of the backdoor trigger. Indeed, an adversarially trained model is capable of achieving backdoor robustness as long as the perturbation budget surpasses the trigger magnitude, while it is vulnerable to backdoor attacks only for adversarial training with a small perturbation budget. To always mitigate the backdoor vulnerability, we propose an adversarial-training based detection strategy and a general pipeline against backdoor attacks, which consistently brings backdoor robustness regardless of the perturbation budget.
| Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | Context-Agnostic Learning Using Synthetic Data | We propose a novel setting for learning, where the input domain is the image of a map defined on the product of two sets, one of which completely determines the labels. Given the ability to sample from each set independently, we present an algorithm that learns a classifier over the input domain more efficiently than sampling from the input domain directly. We apply this setting to visual classification tasks, where our approach enables us to train classifiers on datasets that consist entirely of a single example of each class. On several standard benchmarks for real-world image classification, our approach achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art results from the few-shot learning and domain transfer literature, while using significantly less data. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Complete Verification via Multi-Neuron Relaxation Guided Branch-and-Bound | State-of-the-art neural network verifiers are fundamentally based on one of two paradigms: either encoding the whole verification problem via tight multi-neuron convex relaxations or applying a Branch-and-Bound (BaB) procedure leveraging imprecise but fast bounding methods on a large number of easier subproblems. The former can capture complex multi-neuron dependencies but sacrifices completeness due to the inherent limitations of convex relaxations. The latter enables complete verification but becomes increasingly ineffective on larger and more challenging networks. In this work, we present a novel complete verifier which combines the strengths of both paradigms: it leverages multi-neuron relaxations to drastically reduce the number of subproblems generated during the BaB process and an efficient GPU-based dual optimizer to solve the remaining ones. An extensive evaluation demonstrates that our verifier achieves a new state-of-the-art on both established benchmarks as well as networks with significantly higher accuracy than previously considered. The latter result (up to 28% certification gains) indicates meaningful progress towards creating verifiers that can handle practically relevant networks. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Towards Efficient Gradient-Based Meta-Learning in Heterogenous Environments | A challenging problem for machine learning is few-shot learning, as its models usually require many training samples. Since meta-learning models have strong fine-tuning capabilities for the distribution of tasks, many of them have been applied to few-shot learning. Model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) is one of the most popular ones. Recent studies showed that MAML-trained models tend to reuse learned features and do not perform strong adaption, especially in the earlier layers. This paper presents an in-detail analysis of this phenomenon by analyzing MAML's components of different variants. Our results show an interesting relationship between the importance of fine-tuning earlier layers and the difference in the distribution between training and testing. As a result, we determine a fundamental weakness of existing MAML variants when the task distribution is heterogeneous, e.g., the numbers of classes do not match during testing and training. We propose a novel nonparametric version of MAML that overcomes these issues while still being able to perform cross-domain adaption. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | PointConvFormer: Revenge of the Point-Based Convolution | We introduce PointConvFormer, a novel building block for point cloud based deep network architectures. Inspired by generalization theory, PointConvFormer combines ideas from point convolution, where filter weights are only based on relative position, and Transformers which utilize feature-based attention. In PointConvFormer, attention computed from feature difference between points in the neighborhood is used to modify the convolutional weights at each point. Hence, we preserved the invariances from point convolution, whereas attention helps to select relevant points in the neighborhood for convolution. We experiment on both semantic segmentation and scene flow estimation tasks on point clouds with multiple datasets including ScanNet, SemanticKitti, FlyingThings3D and KITTI. Our results show that PointConvFormer substantially outperforms classic convolutions, regular transformers, and voxelized sparse convolution approaches with much smaller and faster networks. Visualizations show that PointConvFormer performs similarly to convolution on flat areas, whereas the neighborhood selection effect is stronger on object boundaries, showing that it has got the best of both worlds. The code will be available with the final version. | Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | A Closer Look at Deep Policy Gradients | We study how the behavior of deep policy gradient algorithms reflects the conceptual framework motivating their development. To this end, we propose a fine-grained analysis of state-of-the-art methods based on key elements of this framework: gradient estimation, value prediction, and optimization landscapes. Our results show that the behavior of deep policy gradient algorithms often deviates from what their motivating framework would predict: surrogate rewards do not match the true reward landscape, learned value estimators fail to fit the true value function, and gradient estimates poorly correlate with the "true" gradient. The mismatch between predicted and empirical behavior we uncover highlights our poor understanding of current methods, and indicates the need to move beyond current benchmark-centric evaluation methods. | Accept (Talk) |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | CM3: Cooperative Multi-goal Multi-stage Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning | A variety of cooperative multi-agent control problems require agents to achieve individual goals while contributing to collective success. This multi-goal multi-agent setting poses difficulties for recent algorithms, which primarily target settings with a single global reward, due to two new challenges: efficient exploration for learning both individual goal attainment and cooperation for others' success, and credit-assignment for interactions between actions and goals of different agents. To address both challenges, we restructure the problem into a novel two-stage curriculum, in which single-agent goal attainment is learned prior to learning multi-agent cooperation, and we derive a new multi-goal multi-agent policy gradient with a credit function for localized credit assignment. We use a function augmentation scheme to bridge value and policy functions across the curriculum. The complete architecture, called CM3, learns significantly faster than direct adaptations of existing algorithms on three challenging multi-goal multi-agent problems: cooperative navigation in difficult formations, negotiating multi-vehicle lane changes in the SUMO traffic simulator, and strategic cooperation in a Checkers environment. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | VoGE: A Differentiable Volume Renderer using Gaussian Ellipsoids for Analysis-by-Synthesis | Differentiable rendering allows the application of computer graphics on vision tasks, e.g. object pose and shape fitting, via analysis-by-synthesis, where gradients at occluded regions are important when inverting the rendering process.To obtain those gradients, state-of-the-art (SoTA) differentiable renderers use rasterization to collect a set of nearest components for each pixel and aggregate them based on the viewing distance. In this paper, we propose VoGE, which uses ray tracing to capture nearest components with their volume density distributions on the rays and aggregates via integral of the volume densities based on Gaussian ellipsoids, which brings more efficient and stable gradients. To efficiently render via VoGE, we propose an approximate close-form solution for the volume density aggregation and a coarse-to-fine rendering strategy. Finally, we provide a CUDA implementation of VoGE, which gives a competitive rendering speed in comparison to PyTorch3D. Quantitative and qualitative experiment results show VoGE outperforms SoTA counterparts when applied to various vision tasks, e.g., object pose estimation, shape/texture fitting, and occlusion reasoning. The VoGE code is available at: https://github.com/Angtian/VoGE. | Accept: poster |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Defending against Reconstruction attacks using Rényi Differential Privacy | Reconstruction attacks allow an adversary to regenerate data samples of the training set using access to only a trained model. It has been recently shown that simple heuristics can reconstruct data samples from language models, making this threat scenario an important aspect of model release. Differential privacy is a known solution to such attacks, but is often used with a large privacy budget (epsilon > 8) which does not translate to meaningful guarantees. In this paper we show that, for a same mechanism, we can derive privacy guarantees for reconstruction attacks that are better than the traditional ones from the literature. In particular, we show that larger privacy budgets do not provably protect against membership inference, but can still protect extraction of rare secrets. We design a method to efficiently run reconstruction attacks with lazy sampling and empirically show that we can surface at-risk training samples from non-private language models. We show experimentally that our guarantees hold on real-life language models trained with differential privacy for difficult scenarios, including GPT-2 finetuned on Wikitext-103. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | Provable Rich Observation Reinforcement Learning with Combinatorial Latent States | We propose a novel setting for reinforcement learning that combines two common real-world difficulties: presence of observations (such as camera images) and factored states (such as location of objects). In our setting, the agent receives observations generated stochastically from a "latent" factored state. These observations are "rich enough" to enable decoding of the latent state and remove partial observability concerns. Since the latent state is combinatorial, the size of state space is exponential in the number of latent factors. We create a learning algorithm FactoRL (Fact-o-Rel) for this setting, which uses noise-contrastive learning to identify latent structures in emission processes and discover a factorized state space. We derive polynomial sample complexity guarantees for FactoRL which polynomially depend upon the number factors, and very weakly depend on the size of the observation space. We also provide a guarantee of polynomial time complexity when given access to an efficient planning algorithm. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2020/Conference | Entropy Penalty: Towards Generalization Beyond the IID Assumption | It has been shown that instead of learning actual object features, deep networks tend to exploit non-robust (spurious) discriminative features that are shared between training and test sets. Therefore, while they achieve state of the art performance on such test sets, they achieve poor generalization on out of distribution (OOD) samples where the IID (independent, identical distribution) assumption breaks and the distribution of non-robust features shifts. Through theoretical and empirical analysis, we show that this happens because maximum likelihood training (without appropriate regularization) leads the model to depend on all the correlations (including spurious ones) present between inputs and targets in the dataset. We then show evidence that the information bottleneck (IB) principle can address this problem. To do so, we propose a regularization approach based on IB called Entropy Penalty, that reduces the model's dependence on spurious features-- features corresponding to such spurious correlations. This allows deep networks trained with Entropy Penalty to generalize well even under distribution shift of spurious features. As a controlled test-bed for evaluating our claim, we train deep networks with Entropy Penalty on a colored MNIST (C-MNIST) dataset and show that it is able to generalize well on vanilla MNIST, MNIST-M and SVHN datasets in addition to an OOD version of C-MNIST itself. The baseline regularization methods we compare against fail to generalize on this test-bed. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Relational Surrogate Loss Learning | Evaluation metrics in machine learning are often hardly taken as loss functions, as they could be non-differentiable and non-decomposable, e.g., average precision and F1 score. This paper aims to address this problem by revisiting the surrogate loss learning, where a deep neural network is employed to approximate the evaluation metrics. Instead of pursuing an exact recovery of the evaluation metric through a deep neural network, we are reminded of the purpose of the existence of these evaluation metrics, which is to distinguish whether one model is better or worse than another. In this paper, we show that directly maintaining the relation of models between surrogate losses and metrics suffices, and propose a rank correlation-based optimization method to maximize this relation and learn surrogate losses. Compared to previous works, our method is much easier to optimize and enjoys significant efficiency and performance gains. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves improvements on various tasks including image classification and neural machine translation, and even outperforms state-of-the-art methods on human pose estimation and machine reading comprehension tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/hunto/ReLoss. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | Cross-Architecture Distillation Using Bidirectional CMOW Embeddings | Large pretrained language models (PreLMs) are revolutionizing natural language processing across all benchmarks. However, their sheer size is prohibitive for small laboratories or deployment on mobile devices. Approaches like pruning and distillation reduce the model size but typically retain the same model architecture. In contrast, we explore distilling PreLMs into a different, more efficient architecture CMOW, which embeds each word as a matrix and uses matrix multiplication to encode sequences. We extend the CMOW architecture and its CMOW/CBOW-Hybrid variant with a bidirectional component, per-token representations for distillation during pretraining, and a two-sequence encoding scheme that facilitates downstream tasks on sentence pairs such as natural language inferencing. Our results show that the embedding-based models yield scores comparable to DistilBERT on QQP and RTE, while using only half of its parameters and providing three times faster inference speed. We match or exceed the scores of ELMo, and only fall behind more expensive models on linguistic acceptability. Still, our distilled bidirectional CMOW/CBOW-Hybrid model more than doubles the scores on linguistic acceptability compared to previous cross-architecture distillation approaches. Furthermore, our experiments confirm the positive effects of bidirection and the two-sequence encoding scheme. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Posterior Sampling Model-based Policy Optimization under Approximate Inference | Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms (MBRL) hold tremendous promise for improving the sample efficiency in online RL. However, many existing popular MBRL algorithms cannot deal with exploration and exploitation properly. Posterior sampling reinforcement learning (PSRL) serves as a promising approach for automatically trading off the exploration and exploitation, but the theoretical guarantees only hold under exact inference. In this paper, we show that adopting the same methodology as in exact PSRL can be fairly suboptimal under approximate inference. Motivated by the analysis, we propose an improved factorization for the posterior distribution of polices by removing the conditional independence between the policy and data given the model. By adopting such a posterior factorization, we further propose a general algorithmic framework for PSRL under approximate inference and a practical instantiation of it. Empirically, our algorithm can surpass the baseline methods by a significant margin on both dense rewards and sparse rewards tasks from DM control suite, OpenAI Gym and Metaworld benchmarks. | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Continual Unsupervised Disentangling of Self-Organizing Representations | Limited progress has been made in continual unsupervised learning of representations, especially in reusing, expanding, and continually disentangling learned semantic factors across data environments. We argue that this is because existing approaches treat continually-arrived data independently, without considering how they are related based on the underlying semantic factors. We address this by a new generative model describing a topologically-connected mixture of spike-and-slab distributions in the latent space, learned end-to-end in a continual fashion via principled variational inference. The learned mixture is able to automatically discover the active semantic factors underlying each data environment and to accumulate their relational structure based on that. This distilled knowledge of different data environments can further be used for generative replay and guiding continual disentangling of new semantic factors. We tested the presented method on a split version of 3DShapes to provide the first quantitative disentanglement evaluation of continually learned representations, and further demonstrated its ability to continually disentangle new representations in benchmark datasets. | Accept: notable-top-25% |
ICLR.cc/2021/Conference | Spatially Structured Recurrent Modules | Capturing the structure of a data-generating process by means of appropriate inductive biases can help in learning models that generalise well and are robust to changes in the input distribution. While methods that harness spatial and temporal structures find broad application, recent work has demonstrated the potential of models that leverage sparse and modular structure using an ensemble of sparingly interacting modules. In this work, we take a step towards dynamic models that are capable of simultaneously exploiting both modular and spatiotemporal structures. To this end, we model the dynamical system as a collection of autonomous but sparsely interacting sub-systems that interact according to a learned topology which is informed by the spatial structure of the underlying system. This gives rise to a class of models that are well suited for capturing the dynamics of systems that only offer local views into their state, along with corresponding spatial locations of those views. On the tasks of video prediction from cropped frames and multi-agent world modelling from partial observations in the challenging Starcraft2 domain, we find our models to be more robust to the number of available views and better capable of generalisation to novel tasks without additional training than strong baselines that perform equally well or better on the training distribution. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Quantum reinforcement learning | With the rapid development of quantum technology, it has been confirmed that it can surpass the speed of traditional computing in some fields. Quantum advantage can also be manifested in the field of machine learning. We reviewed many current papers related to quantum reinforcement learning. We discuss in depth how quantum reinforcement learning is implemented and core techniques. quantum reinforcement learning (QRL) method is proposed by combining quantum theory and reinforcement learning (RL).The field of quantum reinforcement learning actually includes two aspects: One is use quantum properties to help reinforcement learning, the other is using reinforcement learning to help quantum circuit design. We have completed agent training for several classic games using quantum reinforcement learning methods, and the superiority and feasibility of the simulation experiments were evaluated. The QRL algorithm can be used in many aspects such as finance, industrial simulation, mechanical control, quantum communication, and quantum circuit optimization. We take a look at the field of quantum reinforcement learning and make bold predictions that many applications in the future will benefit from the development of this technology. | Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2019/Conference | The role of over-parametrization in generalization of neural networks | Despite existing work on ensuring generalization of neural networks in terms of scale sensitive complexity measures, such as norms, margin and sharpness, these complexity measures do not offer an explanation of why neural networks generalize better with over-parametrization. In this work we suggest a novel complexity measure based on unit-wise capacities resulting in a tighter generalization bound for two layer ReLU networks. Our capacity bound correlates with the behavior of test error with increasing network sizes (within the range reported in the experiments), and could partly explain the improvement in generalization with over-parametrization. We further present a matching lower bound for the Rademacher complexity that improves over previous capacity lower bounds for neural networks. | Accept (Poster) |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Pessimistic Model-Based Actor-Critic for Offline Reinforcement Learning: Theory and Algorithms | Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved superior performance than model-free RL in many decision-making problems due to its sample efficiency and generalizability. However, prior model-based offline RL methods in the literature either demonstrate their successes only through empirical studies, or provide algorithms that have theoretical guarantees but are hard to implement in practice. To date, a general computationally-tractable algorithm for model-based offline RL with PAC guarantees is still lacking. To fill this gap, we develop a pessimistic model-based actor-critic (PeMACO) algorithm with general function approximations assuming partial coverage of the offline dataset. Specifically, the critic provides a pessimistic Q-function through incorporating uncertainties of the learned transition model, and the actor updates policies by employing approximations of the pessimistic Q-function. Under some mild assumptions, we establish theoretical PAC guarantees of the proposed PeMACO algorithm by proving upper bounds on the suboptimality of the returned policy by PeMACO. | Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Abstract-to-Executable Trajectory Translation for One-Shot Task Generalization | Training long-horizon robotic policies in complex physical environments is essential for many applications, such as robotic manipulation. However, learning a policy that can generalize to unseen tasks is challenging. In this work, we propose to achieve one-shot task generalization by decoupling plan generation and plan execution. Specifically, our method solves complex long-horizon tasks in three steps: build a paired abstract environment by simplifying geometry and physics, generate abstract trajectories, and solve the original task by an abstract-to-executable trajectory translator. In the abstract environment, complex dynamics such as physical manipulation are removed, making abstract trajectories easier to generate. However, this introduces a large domain gap between abstract trajectories and the actual executed trajectories as abstract trajectories lack low-level details and aren’t aligned frame-to-frame with the executed trajectory. In a manner reminiscent of language translation, our approach leverages a seq-to-seq model to overcome the large domain gap between the abstract and executable trajectories, enabling the low-level policy to follow the abstract trajectory. Experimental results on various unseen long-horizon tasks with different robot embodiments demonstrate the practicability of our methods to achieve one-shot task generalization. Videos and more details can be found in the supplementary materials and project page: https://sites.google.com/view/abstract-to-executable-iclr23/ | Reject |
ICLR.cc/2022/Conference | On the Effect of Input Perturbations for Graph Neural Networks | The expressive power of a message passing graph neural network (MPGNN) depends on its architecture and the input node attributes. In this work, we study how this interplay is affected by input perturbations. First, perturbations of node attributes may act as noise and hinder predictive power. But, perturbations can also aid expressiveness, by making nodes more identifiable. Recent works show that unique node IDs are necessary to represent certain functions with MPGNNs. Our results relate properties of the noise, smoothness of the model and the geometry of the input graphs and task. In particular, we take the perspective of lower bounding smoothness for achieving discrimination: how much output variation is needed for exploiting random node IDs, or for retaining discriminability? Our theoretical results imply constraints on the model for exploiting random node IDs, and, conversely, insights into the tolerance of a given model class for retaining discrimination with perturbations of node attributes. | Withdrawn |
ICLR.cc/2023/Conference | Model-Agnostic Meta-Attack: Towards Reliable Evaluation of Adversarial Robustness | The vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial examples has motivated an increasing number of defense strategies for promoting model robustness. However, the progress is usually hampered by insufficient robustness evaluations. As the de facto standard to evaluate adversarial robustness, adversarial attacks typically solve an optimization problem of crafting adversarial examples with an iterative process. But the existing attacks are usually limited by using hand-designed optimization algorithms, leading to less accurate robustness evaluations. In this paper, we propose a Model-Agnostic Meta-Attack (MAMA) approach to discover stronger attack algorithms automatically. Our method learns the optimizer in adversarial attacks parameterized by a recurrent neural network, which is trained over a class of data samples and defense models to produce effective update directions during adversarial example generation. Furthermore, we develop a model-agnostic training algorithm to improve the generalization ability of the learned optimizer when attacking unseen defenses. Our approach can be flexibly incorporated with various attacks and consistently improves their performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the learned attacks by MAMA, e.g., MAMA achieves x2 speedup over the state-of-the-art AutoAttack while obtaining lower robust test accuracy on all adopted defense models. Therefore, MAMA leads to a more reliable and efficient evaluation of adversarial robustness. | Withdrawn |