ICML 2023 Papers

We make two contributions in the field of AI fairness over continuous protected attributes. First, we show that the Hirschfeld-Gebelein-Renyi (HGR) indicator (the only one currently available for such a case) is valuable but subject to a few crucial limitations regarding semantics, interpretability, and robustness. Second, we introduce a family of indicators that are: 1) complementary to HGR in terms of semantics; 2) fully interpretable and transparent; 3) robust over finite samples; 4) configurable to suit specific applications. Our approach also allows us to define fine-grained constraints to permit certain types of dependence and forbid others selectively. By expanding the available options for continuous protected attributes, our approach represents a significant contribution to the area of fair artificial intelligence.

State space models (SSMs) have high performance on long sequence modeling but require sophisticated initialization techniques and specialized implementations for high quality and runtime performance. We study whether a simple alternative can match SSMs in performance and efficiency: directly learning long convolutions over the sequence. We find that a key requirement to achieving high performance is keeping the convolution kernels smooth. We find that simple interventions-such as squashing the kernel weights-result in smooth kernels and recover SSM performance on a range of tasks including the long range arena, image classification, language modeling, and brain data modeling. Next, we develop FlashButterfly, an IO-aware algorithm to improve the runtime performance of long convolutions. FlashButterfly appeals to classic Butterfly decompositions of the convolution to reduce GPU memory IO and increase FLOP utilization. FlashButterfly speeds up convolutions by 2.2$\times$, and allows us to train on Path256, a challenging task with sequence length 64K, where we set state-of-the-art by 29.1 points while training 7.2$\times$ faster than prior work. Lastly, we introduce an extension to FlashButterfly that learns the coefficients of the Butterfly decomposition, increasing expressivity without increasing runtime. Using this extension, we outperform a Transformer on WikiText103 by 0.2 PPL with 30% fewer parameters.

Deep neural networks have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial noise. Recent works show that exploring the impact of adversarial noise on intrinsic components of data can help improve adversarial robustness. However, the pattern closely related to human perception has not been deeply studied. In this paper, inspired by the cognitive science, we investigate the interference of adversarial noise from the perspective of image phase, and find ordinarily-trained models lack enough robustness against phase-level perturbations. Motivated by this, we propose a joint adversarial defense method: a *phase-level adversarial training mechanism* to enhance the adversarial robustness on the phase pattern; an *amplitude-based pre-processing operation* to mitigate the adversarial perturbation in the amplitude pattern. Experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the robust accuracy against multiple attacks and even adaptive attacks. In addition, ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our defense strategy.

One of the key capabilities of intelligent agents is the ability to discover useful skills without external supervision. However, the current unsupervised skill discovery methods are often limited to acquiring simple, easy-to-learn skills due to the lack of incentives to discover more complex, challenging behaviors. We introduce a novel unsupervised skill discovery method, Controllability-aware Skill Discovery (CSD), which actively seeks complex, hard-to-control skills without supervision. The key component of CSD is a controllability-aware distance function, which assigns larger values to state transitions that are harder to achieve with the current skills. Combined with distance-maximizing skill discovery, CSD progressively learns more challenging skills over the course of training as our jointly trained distance function reduces rewards for easy-to-achieve skills. Our experimental results in six robotic manipulation and locomotion environments demonstrate that CSD can discover diverse complex skills including object manipulation and locomotion skills with no supervision, significantly outperforming prior unsupervised skill discovery methods. Videos and code are available at https://seohong.me/projects/csd/

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have continuously achieved new milestones in object detection. However, the considerable computation and memory burden compromise their efficiency and generalization of deployment on resource-constraint devices. Besides, efficient transformer-based detectors designed by existing works can hardly achieve a realistic speedup, especially on multi-core processors (e.g., GPUs). The main issue is that the current literature solely concentrates on building algorithms with minimal computation, oblivious that the practical latency can also be affected by the memory access cost and the degree of parallelism. Therefore, we propose SpeedDETR, a novel speed-aware transformer for end-to-end object detectors, achieving high-speed inference on multiple devices. Specifically, we design a latency prediction model which can directly and accurately estimate the network latency by analyzing network properties, hardware memory access pattern, and degree of parallelism. Following the effective local-to-global visual modeling process and the guidance of the latency prediction model, we build our hardware-oriented architecture design and develop a new family of SpeedDETR. Experiments on the MS COCO dataset show SpeedDETR outperforms current DETR-based methods on Tesla V100. Even acceptable speed inference can be achieved on edge GPUs.

Standard MSE or MAE loss function is commonly used in limited field-of-vision depth completion, treating each pixel equally under a basic assumption that all pixels have same contribution during optimization. Recently, with the rapid rise of panoramic photography, panoramic depth completion (PDC) has raised increasing attention in 3D computer vision. However, the assumption is inapplicable to panoramic data due to its latitude-wise distortion and high uncertainty nearby textures and edges. To handle these challenges, we propose distortion and uncertainty aware loss (DUL) that consists of a distortion-aware loss and an uncertainty-aware loss. The distortion-aware loss is designed to tackle the panoramic distortion caused by equirectangular projection, whose coordinate transformation relation is used to adaptively calculate the weight of the latitude-wise distortion, distributing uneven importance instead of the equal treatment for each pixel. The uncertainty-aware loss is presented to handle the inaccuracy in non-smooth regions. Specifically, we characterize uncertainty into PDC solutions under Bayesian deep learning framework, where a novel consistent uncertainty estimation constraint is designed to learn the consistency between multiple uncertainty maps of a single panorama. This consistency constraint allows model to produce more precise uncertainty estimation that is robust to feature deformation. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our method over standard loss functions, reaching the state of the art.