NeurIPS 2020 Papers

Reservoir Computing is a class of simple yet efficient Recurrent Neural Networks where internal weights are fixed at random and only a linear output layer is trained. In the large size limit, such random neural networks have a deep connection with kernel methods. Our contributions are threefold: a) We rigorously establish the recurrent kernel limit of Reservoir Computing and prove its convergence. b) We test our models on chaotic time series prediction, a classic but challenging benchmark in Reservoir Computing, and show how the Recurrent Kernel is competitive and computationally efficient when the number of data points remains moderate. c) When the number of samples is too large, we leverage the success of structured Random Features for kernel approximation by introducing Structured Reservoir Computing. The two proposed methods, Recurrent Kernel and Structured Reservoir Computing, turn out to be much faster and more memory-efficient than conventional Reservoir Computing.

Reconstructing seeing images from fMRI recordings is an absorbing research area in neuroscience and provides a potential brain-reading technology. The challenge lies in that visual encoding in brain is highly complex and not fully revealed. Inspired by the theory that visual features are hierarchically represented in cortex, we propose to break the complex visual signals into multi-level components and decode each component separately. Specifically, we decode shape and semantic representations from the lower and higher visual cortex respectively, and merge the shape and semantic information to images by a generative adversarial network (Shape-Semantic GAN). This 'divide and conquer' strategy captures visual information more accurately. Experiments demonstrate that Shape-Semantic GAN improves the reconstruction similarity and image quality, and achieves the state-of-the-art image reconstruction performance.

Neural networks are sensitive to hyper-parameter and architecture choices. Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is a promising paradigm for automating these choices. Current ML software libraries, however, are quite limited in handling the dynamic interactions among the components of AutoML. For example, efficient NAS algorithms, such as ENAS and DARTS, typically require an implementation coupling between the search space and search algorithm, the two key components in AutoML. Furthermore, implementing a complex search flow, such as searching architectures within a loop of searching hardware configurations, is difficult. To summarize, changing the search space, search algorithm, or search flow in current ML libraries usually requires a significant change in the program logic.

Sparse sequences of neural spikes are posited to underlie aspects of working memory, motor production, and learning. Discovering these sequences in an unsupervised manner is a longstanding problem in statistical neuroscience. Promising recent work utilized a convolutive nonnegative matrix factorization model to tackle this challenge. However, this model requires spike times to be discretized, utilizes a sub-optimal least-squares criterion, and does not provide uncertainty estimates for model predictions or estimated parameters. We address each of these shortcomings by developing a point process model that characterizes fine-scale sequences at the level of individual spikes and represents sequence occurrences as a small number of marked events in continuous time. This ultra-sparse representation of sequence events opens new possibilities for spike train modeling. For example, we introduce learnable time warping parameters to model sequences of varying duration, which have been experimentally observed in neural circuits. We demonstrate these advantages on recordings from songbird higher vocal center and rodent hippocampus.

Domain adaptive semantic segmentation aims to train a model performing satisfactory pixel-level predictions on the target with only out-of-domain (source) annotations. The conventional solution to this task is to minimize the discrepancy between source and target to enable effective knowledge transfer. Previous domain discrepancy minimization methods are mainly based on the adversarial training. They tend to consider the domain discrepancy globally, which ignore the pixel-wise relationships and are less discriminative. In this paper, we propose to build the pixel-level cycle association between source and target pixel pairs and contrastively strengthen their connections to diminish the domain gap and make the features more discriminative. To the best of our knowledge, this is a new perspective for tackling such a challenging task. Experiment results on two representative domain adaptation benchmarks, i.e. GTAV $\rightarrow$ Cityscapes and SYNTHIA $\rightarrow$ Cityscapes, verify the effectiveness of our proposed method and demonstrate that our method performs favorably against previous state-of-the-arts. Our method can be trained end-to-end in one stage and introduce no additional parameters, which is expected to serve as a general framework and help ease future research in domain adaptive semantic segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/kgl-prml/Pixel-Level-Cycle-Association.

In this paper, we study one challenging issue in multi-view data clustering. To be specific, for two data matrices $\mathbf{X}^{(1)}$ and $\mathbf{X}^{(2)}$ corresponding to two views, we do not assume that $\mathbf{X}^{(1)}$ and $\mathbf{X}^{(2)}$ are fully aligned in row-wise. Instead, we assume that only a small portion of the matrices has established the correspondence in advance. Such a partially view-aligned problem (PVP) could lead to the intensive labor of capturing or establishing the aligned multi-view data, which has less been touched so far to the best of our knowledge. To solve this practical and challenging problem, we propose a novel multi-view clustering method termed partially view-aligned clustering (PVC). To be specific, PVC proposes to use a differentiable surrogate of the non-differentiable Hungarian algorithm and recasts it as a pluggable module. As a result, the category-level correspondence of the unaligned data could be established in a latent space learned by a neural network, while learning a common space across different views using the ``aligned'' data. Extensive experimental results show promising results of our method in clustering partially view-aligned data.

Optimal Transport (OT) distances are now routinely used as loss functions in ML tasks. Yet, computing OT distances between arbitrary (i.e. not necessarily discrete) probability distributions remains an open problem. This paper introduces a new online estimator of entropy-regularized OT distances between two such arbitrary distributions. It uses streams of samples from both distributions to iteratively enrich a non-parametric representation of the transportation plan. Compared to the classic Sinkhorn algorithm, our method leverages new samples at each iteration, which enables a consistent estimation of the true regularized OT distance. We provide a theoretical analysis of the convergence of the online Sinkhorn algorithm, showing a nearly-1/n asymptotic sample complexity for the iterate sequence. We validate our method on synthetic 1-d to 10-d data and on real 3-d shape data.

We study the role of $L_2$ regularization in deep learning, and uncover simple relations between the performance of the model, the $L_2$ coefficient, the learning rate, and the number of training steps. These empirical relations hold when the network is overparameterized. They can be used to predict the optimal regularization parameter of a given model. In addition, based on these observations we propose a dynamical schedule for the regularization parameter that improves performance and speeds up training. We test these proposals in modern image classification settings. Finally, we show that these empirical relations can be understood theoretically in the context of infinitely wide networks. We derive the gradient flow dynamics of such networks, and compare the role of $L_2$ regularization in this context with that of linear models.

In the context of learning to map an input $I$ to a function $h_I:\mathcal{X}\to \mathbb{R}$, two alternative methods are compared: (i) an embedding-based method, which learns a fixed function in which $I$ is encoded as a conditioning signal $e(I)$ and the learned function takes the form $h_I(x) = q(x,e(I))$, and (ii) hypernetworks, in which the weights $\theta_I$ of the function $h_I(x) = g(x;\theta_I)$ are given by a hypernetwork $f$ as $\theta_I=f(I)$. In this paper, we define the property of modularity as the ability to effectively learn a different function for each input instance $I$. For this purpose, we adopt an expressivity perspective of this property and extend the theory of~\cite{devore} and provide a lower bound on the complexity (number of trainable parameters) of neural networks as function approximators, by eliminating the requirements for the approximation method to be robust. Our results are then used to compare the complexities of $q$ and $g$, showing that under certain conditions and when letting the functions $e$ and $f$ be as large as we wish, $g$ can be smaller than $q$ by orders of magnitude. This sheds light on the modularity of hypernetworks in comparison with the embedding-based method. Besides, we show that for a structured target function, the overall number of trainable parameters in a hypernetwork is smaller by orders of magnitude than the number of trainable parameters of a standard neural network and an embedding method.

We present a new approach for efficient exploration which leverages a low-dimensional encoding of the environment learned with a combination of model-based and model-free objectives. Our approach uses intrinsic rewards that are based on the distance of nearest neighbors in the low dimensional representational space to gauge novelty. We then leverage these intrinsic rewards for sample-efficient exploration with planning routines in representational space for hard exploration tasks with sparse rewards. One key element of our approach is the use of information theoretic principles to shape our representations in a way so that our novelty reward goes beyond pixel similarity. We test our approach on a number of maze tasks, as well as a control problem and show that our exploration approach is more sample-efficient compared to strong baselines.

A common goal in the analysis of neural data is to compress large population recordings into sets of interpretable, low-dimensional latent trajectories. This problem can be approached using Gaussian process (GP)-based methods which provide uncertainty quantification and principled model selection. However, standard GP priors do not distinguish between underlying dynamical processes and other forms of temporal autocorrelation. Here, we propose a new family of “dynamical” priors over trajectories, in the form of GP covariance functions that express a property shared by most dynamical systems: temporal non-reversibility. Non-reversibility is a universal signature of autonomous dynamical systems whose state trajectories follow consistent flow fields, such that any observed trajectory could not occur in reverse. Our new multi-output GP kernels can be used as drop-in replacements for standard kernels in multivariate regression, but also in latent variable models such as Gaussian process factor analysis (GPFA). We therefore introduce GPFADS (Gaussian Process Factor Analysis with Dynamical Structure), which models single-trial neural population activity using low-dimensional, non-reversible latent processes. Unlike previously proposed non-reversible multi-output kernels, ours admits a Kronecker factorization enabling fast and memory-efficient learning and inference. We apply GPFADS to synthetic data and show that it correctly recovers ground truth phase portraits. GPFADS also provides a probabilistic generalization of jPCA, a method originally developed for identifying latent rotational dynamics in neural data. When applied to monkey M1 neural recordings, GPFADS discovers latent trajectories with strong dynamical structure in the form of rotations.

The existence of simple, uncoupled no-regret dynamics that converge to correlated equilibria in normal-form games is a celebrated result in the theory of multi-agent systems. Specifically, it has been known for more than 20 years that when all players seek to minimize their internal regret in a repeated normal-form game, the empirical frequency of play converges to a normal-form correlated equilibrium. Extensive-form (that is, tree-form) games generalize normal-form games by modeling both sequential and simultaneous moves, as well as private information. Because of the sequential nature and presence of partial information in the game, extensive-form correlation has significantly different properties than the normal-form counterpart, many of which are still open research directions. Extensive-form correlated equilibrium (EFCE) has been proposed as the natural extensive-form counterpart to normal-form correlated equilibrium. However, it was currently unknown whether EFCE emerges as the result of uncoupled agent dynamics. In this paper, we give the first uncoupled no-regret dynamics that converge to the set of EFCEs in n-player general-sum extensive-form games with perfect recall. First, we introduce a notion of trigger regret in extensive-form games, which extends that of internal regret in normal-form games. When each player has low trigger regret, the empirical frequency of play is a close to an EFCE. Then, we give an efficient no-trigger-regret algorithm. Our algorithm decomposes trigger regret into local subproblems at each decision point for the player, and constructs a global strategy of the player from the local solutions at each decision point.

Visual perception is critically influenced by the focus of attention. Due to limited resources, it is well known that neural representations are biased in favor of attended locations. Using concurrent eye-tracking and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) recordings from a large cohort of human subjects watching movies, we first demonstrate that leveraging gaze information, in the form of attentional masking, can significantly improve brain response prediction accuracy in a neural encoding model. Next, we propose a novel approach to neural encoding by including a trainable soft-attention module. Using our new approach, we demonstrate that it is possible to learn visual attention policies by end-to-end learning merely on fMRI response data, and without relying on any eye-tracking. Interestingly, we find that attention locations estimated by the model on independent data agree well with the corresponding eye fixation patterns, despite no explicit supervision to do so. Together, these findings suggest that attention modules can be instrumental in neural encoding models of visual stimuli.

The presence of missing values makes supervised learning much more challenging. Indeed, previous work has shown that even when the response is a linear function of the complete data, the optimal predictor is a complex function of the observed entries and the missingness indicator. As a result, the computational or sample complexities of consistent approaches depend on the number of missing patterns, which can be exponential in the number of dimensions. In this work, we derive the analytical form of the optimal predictor under a linearity assumption and various missing data mechanisms including Missing at Random (MAR) and self-masking (Missing Not At Random). Based on a Neumann-series approximation of the optimal predictor, we propose a new principled architecture, named NeuMiss networks. Their originality and strength come from the use of a new type of non-linearity: the multiplication by the missingness indicator. We provide an upper bound on the Bayes risk of NeuMiss networks, and show that they have good predictive accuracy with both a number of parameters and a computational complexity independent of the number of missing data patterns. As a result they scale well to problems with many features, and remain statistically efficient for medium-sized samples. Moreover, we show that, contrary to procedures using EM or imputation, they are robust to the missing data mechanism, including difficult MNAR settings such as self-masking.

Given the ever-increasing computational costs of modern machine learning models, we need to find new ways to reuse such expert models and thus tap into the resources that have been invested in their creation. Recent work suggests that the power of these massive models is captured by the representations they learn. Therefore, we seek a model that can relate between different existing representations and propose to solve this task with a conditionally invertible network. This network demonstrates its capability by (i) providing generic transfer between diverse domains, (ii) enabling controlled content synthesis by allowing modification in other domains, and (iii) facilitating diagnosis of existing representations by translating them into interpretable domains such as images. Our domain transfer network can translate between fixed representations without having to learn or finetune them. This allows users to utilize various existing domain-specific expert models from the literature that had been trained with extensive computational resources. Experiments on diverse conditional image synthesis tasks, competitive image modification results and experiments on image-to-image and text-to-image generation demonstrate the generic applicability of our approach. For example, we translate between BERT and BigGAN, state-of-the-art text and image models to provide text-to-image generation, which neither of both experts can perform on their own.

We propose a new class of implicit networks, the multiscale deep equilibrium model (MDEQ), suited to large-scale and highly hierarchical pattern recognition domains. An MDEQ directly solves for and backpropagates through the equilibrium points of multiple feature resolutions simultaneously, using implicit differentiation to avoid storing intermediate states (and thus requiring only O(1) memory consumption). These simultaneously-learned multi-resolution features allow us to train a single model on a diverse set of tasks and loss functions, such as using a single MDEQ to perform both image classification and semantic segmentation. We illustrate the effectiveness of this approach on two large-scale vision tasks: ImageNet classification and semantic segmentation on high-resolution images from the Cityscapes dataset. In both settings, MDEQs are able to match or exceed the performance of recent competitive computer vision models: the first time such performance and scale have been achieved by an implicit deep learning approach. The code and pre-trained models are at https://github.com/locuslab/mdeq.

Variational mutual information (MI) estimators are widely used in unsupervised representation learning methods such as contrastive predictive coding (CPC). A lower bound on MI can be obtained from a multi-class classification problem, where a critic attempts to distinguish a positive sample drawn from the underlying joint distribution from (m-1) negative samples drawn from a suitable proposal distribution. Using this approach, MI estimates are bounded above by \log m, and could thus severely underestimate unless m is very large. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel estimator based on a multi-label classification problem, where the critic needs to jointly identify \emph{multiple} positive samples at the same time. We show that using the same amount of negative samples, multi-label CPC is able to exceed the \log m bound, while still being a valid lower bound of mutual information. We demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to lead to better mutual information estimation, gain empirical improvements in unsupervised representation learning, and beat the current state-of-the-art in knowledge distillation over 10 out of 13 tasks.

Telehealth and remote health monitoring have become increasingly important during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and it is widely expected that this will have a lasting impact on healthcare practices. These tools can help reduce the risk of exposing patients and medical staff to infection, make healthcare services more accessible, and allow providers to see more patients. However, objective measurement of vital signs is challenging without direct contact with a patient. We present a video-based and on-device optical cardiopulmonary vital sign measurement approach. It leverages a novel multi-task temporal shift convolutional attention network (MTTS-CAN) and enables real-time cardiovascular and respiratory measurements on mobile platforms. We evaluate our system on an Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) CPU and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy while running at over 150 frames per second which enables real-time applications. Systematic experimentation on large benchmark datasets reveals that our approach leads to substantial (20%-50%) reductions in error and generalizes well across datasets.

We study an online learning problem subject to the constraint of individual fairness, which requires that similar individuals are treated similarly. Unlike prior work on individual fairness, we do not assume the similarity measure among individuals is known, nor do we assume that such measure takes a certain parametric form. Instead, we leverage the existence of an auditor who detects fairness violations without enunciating the quantitative measure. In each round, the auditor examines the learner's decisions and attempts to identify a pair of individuals that are treated unfairly by the learner. We provide a general reduction framework that reduces online classification in our model to standard online classification, which allows us to leverage existing online learning algorithms to achieve sub-linear regret and number of fairness violations. Surprisingly, in the stochastic setting where the data are drawn independently from a distribution, we are also able to establish PAC-style fairness and accuracy generalization guarantees (Rothblum and Yona (2018)), despite only having access to a very restricted form of fairness feedback. Our fairness generalization bound qualitatively matches the uniform convergence bound of Rothblum and Yona (2018), while also providing a meaningful accuracy generalization guarantee. Our results resolve an open question by Gillen et al. (2018) by showing that online learning under an unknown individual fairness constraint is possible even without assuming a strong parametric form of the underlying similarity measure.