NeurIPS 2018 Papers

Detecting test samples drawn sufficiently far away from the training distribution statistically or adversarially is a fundamental requirement for deploying a good classifier in many real-world machine learning applications. However, deep neural networks with the softmax classifier are known to produce highly overconfident posterior distributions even for such abnormal samples. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method for detecting any abnormal samples, which is applicable to any pre-trained softmax neural classifier. We obtain the class conditional Gaussian distributions with respect to (low- and upper-level) features of the deep models under Gaussian discriminant analysis, which result in a confidence score based on the Mahalanobis distance. While most prior methods have been evaluated for detecting either out-of-distribution or adversarial samples, but not both, the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performances for both cases in our experiments. Moreover, we found that our proposed method is more robust in harsh cases, e.g., when the training dataset has noisy labels or small number of samples. Finally, we show that the proposed method enjoys broader usage by applying it to class-incremental learning: whenever out-of-distribution samples are detected, our classification rule can incorporate new classes well without further training deep models.

We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems. In particular, the objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a possibly non-differentiable but convex component. We propose a proximal stochastic gradient algorithm based on variance reduction, called ProxSVRG+. Our main contribution lies in the analysis of ProxSVRG+. It recovers several existing convergence results and improves/generalizes them (in terms of the number of stochastic gradient oracle calls and proximal oracle calls). In particular, ProxSVRG+ generalizes the best results given by the SCSG algorithm, recently proposed by [Lei et al., NIPS'17] for the smooth nonconvex case. ProxSVRG+ is also more straightforward than SCSG and yields simpler analysis. Moreover, ProxSVRG+ outperforms the deterministic proximal gradient descent (ProxGD) for a wide range of minibatch sizes, which partially solves an open problem proposed in [Reddi et al., NIPS'16]. Also, ProxSVRG+ uses much less proximal oracle calls than ProxSVRG [Reddi et al., NIPS'16]. Moreover, for nonconvex functions satisfied Polyak-\L{}ojasiewicz condition, we prove that ProxSVRG+ achieves a global linear convergence rate without restart unlike ProxSVRG. Thus, it can \emph{automatically} switch to the faster linear convergence in some regions as long as the objective function satisfies the PL condition locally in these regions. Finally, we conduct several experiments and the experimental results are consistent with the theoretical results.

Many real-world vision problems suffer from inherent ambiguities. In clinical applications for example, it might not be clear from a CT scan alone which particular region is cancer tissue. Therefore a group of graders typically produces a set of diverse but plausible segmentations. We consider the task of learning a distribution over segmentations given an input. To this end we propose a generative segmentation model based on a combination of a U-Net with a conditional variational autoencoder that is capable of efficiently producing an unlimited number of plausible hypotheses. We show on a lung abnormalities segmentation task and on a Cityscapes segmentation task that our model reproduces the possible segmentation variants as well as the frequencies with which they occur, doing so significantly better than published approaches. These models could have a high impact in real-world applications, such as being used as clinical decision-making algorithms accounting for multiple plausible semantic segmentation hypotheses to provide possible diagnoses and recommend further actions to resolve the present ambiguities.

An explosion of high-throughput DNA sequencing in the past decade has led to a surge of interest in population-scale inference with whole-genome data. Recent work in population genetics has centered on designing inference methods for relatively simple model classes, and few scalable general-purpose inference techniques exist for more realistic, complex models. To achieve this, two inferential challenges need to be addressed: (1) population data are exchangeable, calling for methods that efficiently exploit the symmetries of the data, and (2) computing likelihoods is intractable as it requires integrating over a set of correlated, extremely high-dimensional latent variables. These challenges are traditionally tackled by likelihood-free methods that use scientific simulators to generate datasets and reduce them to hand-designed, permutation-invariant summary statistics, often leading to inaccurate inference. In this work, we develop an exchangeable neural network that performs summary statistic-free, likelihood-free inference. Our framework can be applied in a black-box fashion across a variety of simulation-based tasks, both within and outside biology. We demonstrate the power of our approach on the recombination hotspot testing problem, outperforming the state-of-the-art.

Generative adversarial training for imitation learning has shown promising results on high-dimensional and continuous control tasks. This paradigm is based on reducing the imitation learning problem to the density matching problem, where the agent iteratively refines the policy to match the empirical state-action visitation frequency of the expert demonstration. Although this approach has shown to robustly learn to imitate even with scarce demonstration, one must still address the inherent challenge that collecting trajectory samples in each iteration is a costly operation. To address this issue, we first propose a Bayesian formulation of generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL), where the imitation policy and the cost function are represented as stochastic neural networks. Then, we show that we can significantly enhance the sample efficiency of GAIL leveraging the predictive density of the cost, on an extensive set of imitation learning tasks with high-dimensional states and actions.

In this paper we address the graph matching problem. Following the recent works of \cite{zaslavskiy2009path,Vestner2017} we analyze and generalize the idea of concave relaxations. We introduce the concepts of \emph{conditionally concave} and \emph{probably conditionally concave} energies on polytopes and show that they encapsulate many instances of the graph matching problem, including matching Euclidean graphs and graphs on surfaces. We further prove that local minima of probably conditionally concave energies on general matching polytopes (\eg, doubly stochastic) are with high probability extreme points of the matching polytope (\eg, permutations).