NeurIPS 2017 Papers

We propose EP, Embedding Propagation, an unsupervised learning framework for graph-structured data. EP learns vector representations of graphs by passing two types of messages between neighboring nodes. Forward messages consist of label representations such as representations of words and other attributes associated with the nodes. Backward messages consist of gradients that result from aggregating the label representations and applying a reconstruction loss. Node representations are finally computed from the representation of their labels. With significantly fewer parameters and hyperparameters, an instance of EP is competitive with and often outperforms state of the art unsupervised and semi-supervised learning methods on a range of benchmark data sets.

Despite significant accuracy improvement in convolutional neural networks (CNN) based object detectors, they often require prohibitive runtimes to process an image for real-time applications. State-of-the-art models often use very deep networks with a large number of floating point operations. Efforts such as model compression learn compact models with fewer number of parameters, but with much reduced accuracy. In this work, we propose a new framework to learn compact and fast ob- ject detection networks with improved accuracy using knowledge distillation [20] and hint learning [34]. Although knowledge distillation has demonstrated excellent improvements for simpler classification setups, the complexity of detection poses new challenges in the form of regression, region proposals and less voluminous la- bels. We address this through several innovations such as a weighted cross-entropy loss to address class imbalance, a teacher bounded loss to handle the regression component and adaptation layers to better learn from intermediate teacher distribu- tions. We conduct comprehensive empirical evaluation with different distillation configurations over multiple datasets including PASCAL, KITTI, ILSVRC and MS-COCO. Our results show consistent improvement in accuracy-speed trade-offs for modern multi-class detection models.

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) learn representations of data by jointly training a probabilistic encoder and decoder network. Typically these models encode all features of the data into a single variable. Here we are interested in learning disentangled representations that encode distinct aspects of the data into separate variables. We propose to learn such representations using model architectures that generalise from standard VAEs, employing a general graphical model structure in the encoder and decoder. This allows us to train partially-specified models that make relatively strong assumptions about a subset of interpretable variables and rely on the flexibility of neural networks to learn representations for the remaining variables. We further define a general objective for semi-supervised learning in this model class, which can be approximated using an importance sampling procedure. We evaluate our framework's ability to learn disentangled representations, both by qualitative exploration of its generative capacity, and quantitative evaluation of its discriminative ability on a variety of models and datasets.

Recent works have shown that exploiting multi-scale representations deeply learned via convolutional neural networks (CNN) is of tremendous importance for accurate contour detection. This paper presents a novel approach for predicting contours which advances the state of the art in two fundamental aspects, i.e. multi-scale feature generation and fusion. Different from previous works directly considering multi-scale feature maps obtained from the inner layers of a primary CNN architecture, we introduce a hierarchical deep model which produces more rich and complementary representations. Furthermore, to refine and robustly fuse the representations learned at different scales, the novel Attention-Gated Conditional Random Fields (AG-CRFs) are proposed. The experiments ran on two publicly available datasets (BSDS500 and NYUDv2) demonstrate the effectiveness of the latent AG-CRF model and of the overall hierarchical framework.

We present a new algorithmic approach for the task of finding a chordal Markov network structure that maximizes a given scoring function. The algorithm is based on branch and bound and integrates dynamic programming for both domain pruning and for obtaining strong bounds for search-space pruning. Empirically, we show that the approach dominates in terms of running times a recent integer programming approach (and thereby also a recent constraint optimization approach) for the problem. Furthermore, our algorithm scales at times further with respect to the number of variables than a state-of-the-art dynamic programming algorithm for the problem, with the potential of reaching 20 variables and at the same time circumventing the tight exponential lower bounds on memory consumption of the pure dynamic programming approach.

We study causal discovery in a multi-environment setting, in which the functional relations for producing the variables from their direct causes remain the same across environments, while the distribution of exogenous noises may vary. We introduce the idea of using the invariance of the functional relations of the variables to their causes across a set of environments for structure learning. We define a notion of completeness for a causal inference algorithm in this setting and prove the existence of such algorithm by proposing the baseline algorithm. Additionally, we present an alternate algorithm that has significantly improved computational and sample complexity compared to the baseline algorithm. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the other existing algorithms.

In this paper, we propose a spatial propagation networks for learning affinity matrix. We show that by constructing a row/column linear propagation model, the spatially variant transformation matrix constitutes an affinity matrix that models dense, global pairwise similarities of an image. Specifically, we develop a three-way connection for the linear propagation model, which (a) formulates a sparse transformation matrix where all elements can be the output from a deep CNN, but (b) results in a dense affinity matrix that is effective to model any task-specific pairwise similarity. Instead of designing the similarity kernels according to image features of two points, we can directly output all similarities in a pure data-driven manner. The spatial propagation network is a generic framework that can be applied to numerous tasks, which traditionally benefit from designed affinity, e.g., image matting, colorization, and guided filtering, to name a few. Furthermore, the model can also learn semantic-aware affinity for high-level vision tasks due to the learning capability of the deep model. We validate the proposed framework by refinement of object segmentation. Experiments on the HELEN face parsing and PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic segmentation tasks show that the spatial propagation network provides general, effective and efficient solutions for generating high-quality segmentation results.

In this paper, we suggest a novel data-driven approach to active learning (AL). The key idea is to train a regressor that predicts the expected error reduction for a candidate sample in a particular learning state. By formulating the query selection procedure as a regression problem we are not restricted to working with existing AL heuristics; instead, we learn strategies based on experience from previous AL outcomes. We show that a strategy can be learnt either from simple synthetic 2D datasets or from a subset of domain-specific data. Our method yields strategies that work well on real data from a wide range of domains.

Co-clustering methods have been widely applied to document clustering and gene expression analysis. These methods make use of the duality between features and samples such that the co-occurring structure of sample and feature clusters can be extracted. In graph based co-clustering methods, a bipartite graph is constructed to depict the relation between features and samples. Most existing co-clustering methods conduct clustering on the graph achieved from the original data matrix, which doesn’t have explicit cluster structure, thus they require a post-processing step to obtain the clustering results. In this paper, we propose a novel co-clustering method to learn a bipartite graph with exactly k connected components, where k is the number of clusters. The new bipartite graph learned in our model approximates the original graph but maintains an explicit cluster structure, from which we can immediately get the clustering results without post-processing. Extensive empirical results are presented to verify the effectiveness and robustness of our model.

Computer vision has benefited from initializing multiple deep layers with weights pretrained on large supervised training sets like ImageNet. Natural language processing (NLP) typically sees initialization of only the lowest layer of deep models with pretrained word vectors. In this paper, we use a deep LSTM encoder from an attentional sequence-to-sequence model trained for machine translation (MT) to contextualize word vectors. We show that adding these context vectors (CoVe) improves performance over using only unsupervised word and character vectors on a wide variety of common NLP tasks: sentiment analysis (SST, IMDb), question classification (TREC), entailment (SNLI), and question answering (SQuAD). For fine-grained sentiment analysis and entailment, CoVe improves performance of our baseline models to the state of the art.

Compressive image recovery is a challenging problem that requires fast and accurate algorithms. Recently, neural networks have been applied to this problem with promising results. By exploiting massively parallel GPU processing architectures and oodles of training data, they can run orders of magnitude faster than existing techniques. However, these methods are largely unprincipled black boxes that are difficult to train and often-times specific to a single measurement matrix. It was recently demonstrated that iterative sparse-signal-recovery algorithms can be ``unrolled’' to form interpretable deep networks. Taking inspiration from this work, we develop a novel neural network architecture that mimics the behavior of the denoising-based approximate message passing (D-AMP) algorithm. We call this new network {\em Learned} D-AMP (LDAMP). The LDAMP network is easy to train, can be applied to a variety of different measurement matrices, and comes with a state-evolution heuristic that accurately predicts its performance. Most importantly, it outperforms the state-of-the-art BM3D-AMP and NLR-CS algorithms in terms of both accuracy and run time. At high resolutions, and when used with sensing matrices that have fast implementations, LDAMP runs over $50\times$ faster than BM3D-AMP and hundreds of times faster than NLR-CS.

We consider the problem of solving a large-scale Quadratically Constrained Quadratic Program. Such problems occur naturally in many scientific and web applications. Although there are efficient methods which tackle this problem, they are mostly not scalable. In this paper, we develop a method that transforms the quadratic constraint into a linear form by a sampling a set of low-discrepancy points. The transformed problem can then be solved by applying any state-of-the-art large-scale solvers. We show the convergence of our approximate solution to the true solution as well as some finite sample error bounds. Experimental results are also shown to prove scalability in practice.

We present extensive experimental and theoretical support for the efficacy of recurrent highway networks (RHNs) and recurrent hypernetworks complimentary to the original works. Where the original RHN work primarily provides theoretical treatment of the subject, we demonstrate experimentally that RHNs benefit from far better gradient flow than LSTMs in addition to their improved task accuracy. The original hypernetworks work presents detailed experimental results but leaves several theoretical issues unresolved--we consider these in depth and frame several feasible solutions that we believe will yield further gains in the future. We demonstrate that these approaches are complementary: by combining RHNs and hypernetworks, we make a significant improvement over current state-of-the-art character-level language modeling performance on Penn Treebank while relying on much simpler regularization. Finally, we argue for RHNs as a drop-in replacement for LSTMs (analogous to LSTMs for vanilla RNNs) and for hypernetworks as a de-facto augmentation (analogous to attention) for recurrent architectures.

Minimizing non-convex and high-dimensional objective functions is challenging, especially when training modern deep neural networks. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed which divides the training process into two consecutive phases to obtain better generalization performance: Bayesian sampling and stochastic optimization. The first phase is to explore the energy landscape and to capture the `fat'' modes; and the second one is to fine-tune the parameter learned from the first phase. In the Bayesian learning phase, we apply continuous tempering and stochastic approximation into the Langevin dynamics to create an efficient and effective sampler, in which the temperature is adjusted automatically according to the designed ``temperature dynamics''. These strategies can overcome the challenge of early trapping into bad local minima and have achieved remarkable improvements in various types of neural networks as shown in our theoretical analysis and empirical experiments.

We propose a framework that learns a representation transferable across different domains and tasks in a data efficient manner. Our approach battles domain shift with a domain adversarial loss, and generalizes the embedding to novel task using a metric learning-based approach. Our model is simultaneously optimized on labeled source data and unlabeled or sparsely labeled data in the target domain. Our method shows compelling results on novel classes within a new domain even when only a few labeled examples per class are available, outperforming the prevalent fine-tuning approach. In addition, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on the transfer learning task from image object recognition to video action recognition.

Label distribution learning (LDL) is a general learning framework, which assigns to an instance a distribution over a set of labels rather than a single label or multiple labels. Current LDL methods have either restricted assumptions on the expression form of the label distribution or limitations in representation learning, e.g., to learn deep features in an end-to-end manner. This paper presents label distribution learning forests (LDLFs) - a novel label distribution learning algorithm based on differentiable decision trees, which have several advantages: 1) Decision trees have the potential to model any general form of label distributions by a mixture of leaf node predictions. 2) The learning of differentiable decision trees can be combined with representation learning. We define a distribution-based loss function for a forest, enabling all the trees to be learned jointly, and show that an update function for leaf node predictions, which guarantees a strict decrease of the loss function, can be derived by variational bounding. The effectiveness of the proposed LDLFs is verified on several LDL tasks and a computer vision application, showing significant improvements to the state-of-the-art LDL methods.

Given only information in the form of similarity triplets "Object A is more similar to object B than to object C" about a data set, we propose two ways of defining a kernel function on the data set. While previous approaches construct a low-dimensional Euclidean embedding of the data set that reflects the given similarity triplets, we aim at defining kernel functions that correspond to high-dimensional embeddings. These kernel functions can subsequently be used to apply any kernel method to the data set.

We propose a method for feature selection that employs kernel-based measures of independence to find a subset of covariates that is maximally predictive of the response. Building on past work in kernel dimension reduction, we show how to perform feature selection via a constrained optimization problem involving the trace of the conditional covariance operator. We prove various consistency results for this procedure, and also demonstrate that our method compares favorably with other state-of-the-art algorithms on a variety of synthetic and real data sets.

This paper deals with the unsupervised domain adaptation problem, where one wants to estimate a prediction function $f$ in a given target domain without any labeled sample by exploiting the knowledge available from a source domain where labels are known. Our work makes the following assumption: there exists a non-linear transformation between the joint feature/label space distributions of the two domain $\ps$ and $\pt$. We propose a solution of this problem with optimal transport, that allows to recover an estimated target $\pt^f=(X,f(X))$ by optimizing simultaneously the optimal coupling and $f$. We show that our method corresponds to the minimization of a bound on the target error, and provide an efficient algorithmic solution, for which convergence is proved. The versatility of our approach, both in terms of class of hypothesis or loss functions is demonstrated with real world classification and regression problems, for which we reach or surpass state-of-the-art results.