ICLR 2018 论文列表

This paper proposes a new actor-critic-style algorithm called Dual Actor-Critic or Dual-AC. It is derived in a principled way from the Lagrangian dual form of the Bellman optimality equation, which can be viewed as a two-player game between the actor and a critic-like function, which is named as dual critic. Compared to its actor-critic relatives, Dual-AC has the desired property that the actor and dual critic are updated cooperatively to optimize the same objective function, providing a more transparent way for learning the critic that is directly related to the objective function of the actor. We then provide a concrete algorithm that can effectively solve the minimax optimization problem, using techniques of multi-step bootstrapping, path regularization, and stochastic dual ascent algorithm. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art performances across several benchmarks.

The robustness of neural networks to adversarial examples has received great attention due to security implications. Despite various attack approaches to crafting visually imperceptible adversarial examples, little has been developed towards a comprehensive measure of robustness. In this paper, we provide theoretical justification for converting robustness analysis into a local Lipschitz constant estimation problem, and propose to use the Extreme Value Theory for efficient evaluation. Our analysis yields a novel robustness metric called CLEVER, which is short for Cross Lipschitz Extreme Value for nEtwork Robustness. The proposed CLEVER score is attack-agnostic and is computationally feasible for large neural networks. Experimental results on various networks, including ResNet, Inception-v3 and MobileNet, show that (i) CLEVER is aligned with the robustness indication measured by the $\ell_2$ and $\ell_\infty$ norms of adversarial examples from powerful attacks, and (ii) defended networks using defensive distillation or bounded ReLU indeed give better CLEVER scores. To the best of our knowledge, CLEVER is the first attack-independent robustness metric that can be applied to any neural network classifiers.

To represent a text as a bag of properly identified “phrases” and use the representation for processing the text is proved to be useful. The key question here is how to identify the phrases and represent them. The traditional method of utilizing n-grams can be regarded as an approximation of the approach. Such a method can suffer from data sparsity, however, particularly when the length of n-gram is large. In this paper, we propose a new method of learning and utilizing task-specific distributed representations of n-grams, referred to as “region embeddings”. Without loss of generality we address text classification. We specifically propose two models for region embeddings. In our models, the representation of a word has two parts, the embedding of the word itself, and a weighting matrix to interact with the local context, referred to as local context unit. The region embeddings are learned and used in the classification task, as parameters of the neural network classifier. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms existing methods in text classification on several benchmark datasets. The results also indicate that our method can indeed capture the salient phrasal expressions in the texts.

This paper develops variational continual learning (VCL), a simple but general framework for continual learning that fuses online variational inference (VI) and recent advances in Monte Carlo VI for neural networks. The framework can successfully train both deep discriminative models and deep generative models in complex continual learning settings where existing tasks evolve over time and entirely new tasks emerge. Experimental results show that VCL outperforms state-of-the-art continual learning methods on a variety of tasks, avoiding catastrophic forgetting in a fully automatic way.

Identifying analogies across domains without supervision is a key task for artificial intelligence. Recent advances in cross domain image mapping have concentrated on translating images across domains. Although the progress made is impressive, the visual fidelity many times does not suffice for identifying the matching sample from the other domain. In this paper, we tackle this very task of finding exact analogies between datasets i.e. for every image from domain A find an analogous image in domain B. We present a matching-by-synthesis approach: AN-GAN, and show that it outperforms current techniques. We further show that the cross-domain mapping task can be broken into two parts: domain alignment and learning the mapping function. The tasks can be iteratively solved, and as the alignment is improved, the unsupervised translation function reaches quality comparable to full supervision.

We propose a novel regularizer to improve the training of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The motivation is that when the discriminator D spreads out its model capacity in the right way, the learning signals given to the generator G are more informative and diverse, which helps G to explore better and discover the real data manifold while avoiding large unstable jumps due to the erroneous extrapolation made by D . Our regularizer guides the rectifier discriminator D to better allocate its model capacity, by encouraging the binary activation patterns on selected internal layers of D to have a high joint entropy. Experimental results on both synthetic data and real datasets demonstrate improvements in stability and convergence speed of the GAN training, as well as higher sample quality. The approach also leads to higher classification accuracies in semi-supervised learning.

In recent years, deep neural network approaches have been widely adopted for machine learning tasks, including classification. However, they were shown to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations: carefully crafted small perturbations can cause misclassification of legitimate images. We propose Defense-GAN, a new framework leveraging the expressive capability of generative models to defend deep neural networks against such attacks. Defense-GAN is trained to model the distribution of unperturbed images. At inference time, it finds a close output to a given image which does not contain the adversarial changes. This output is then fed to the classifier. Our proposed method can be used with any classification model and does not modify the classifier structure or training procedure. It can also be used as a defense against any attack as it does not assume knowledge of the process for generating the adversarial examples. We empirically show that Defense-GAN is consistently effective against different attack methods and improves on existing defense strategies.

A critical component to enabling intelligent reasoning in partially observable environments is memory. Despite this importance, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents have so far used relatively simple memory architectures, with the main methods to overcome partial observability being either a temporal convolution over the past k frames or an LSTM layer. More recent work (Oh et al., 2016) has went beyond these architectures by using memory networks which can allow more sophisticated addressing schemes over the past k frames. But even these architectures are unsatisfactory due to the reason that they are limited to only remembering information from the last k frames. In this paper, we develop a memory system with an adaptable write operator that is customized to the sorts of 3D environments that DRL agents typically interact with. This architecture, called the Neural Map, uses a spatially structured 2D memory image to learn to store arbitrary information about the environment over long time lags. We demonstrate empirically that the Neural Map surpasses previous DRL memories on a set of challenging 2D and 3D maze environments and show that it is capable of generalizing to environments that were not seen during training.

Options in reinforcement learning allow agents to hierarchically decompose a task into subtasks, having the potential to speed up learning and planning. However, autonomously learning effective sets of options is still a major challenge in the field. In this paper we focus on the recently introduced idea of using representation learning methods to guide the option discovery process. Specifically, we look at eigenoptions, options obtained from representations that encode diffusive information flow in the environment. We extend the existing algorithms for eigenoption discovery to settings with stochastic transitions and in which handcrafted features are not available. We propose an algorithm that discovers eigenoptions while learning non-linear state representations from raw pixels. It exploits recent successes in the deep reinforcement learning literature and the equivalence between proto-value functions and the successor representation. We use traditional tabular domains to provide intuition about our approach and Atari 2600 games to demonstrate its potential.

Neural program embeddings have shown much promise recently for a variety of program analysis tasks, including program synthesis, program repair, code completion, and fault localization. However, most existing program embeddings are based on syntactic features of programs, such as token sequences or abstract syntax trees. Unlike images and text, a program has well-defined semantics that can be difficult to capture by only considering its syntax (i.e. syntactically similar programs can exhibit vastly different run-time behavior), which makes syntax-based program embeddings fundamentally limited. We propose a novel semantic program embedding that is learned from program execution traces. Our key insight is that program states expressed as sequential tuples of live variable values not only capture program semantics more precisely, but also offer a more natural fit for Recurrent Neural Networks to model. We evaluate different syntactic and semantic program embeddings on the task of classifying the types of errors that students make in their submissions to an introductory programming class and on the CodeHunt education platform. Our evaluation results show that the semantic program embeddings significantly outperform the syntactic program embeddings based on token sequences and abstract syntax trees. In addition, we augment a search-based program repair system with predictions made from our semantic embedding and demonstrate significantly improved search efficiency.

We study the error landscape of deep linear and nonlinear neural networks with the squared error loss. Minimizing the loss of a deep linear neural network is a nonconvex problem, and despite recent progress, our understanding of this loss surface is still incomplete. For deep linear networks, we present necessary and sufficient conditions for a critical point of the risk function to be a global minimum. Surprisingly, our conditions provide an efficiently checkable test for global optimality, while such tests are typically intractable in nonconvex optimization. We further extend these results to deep nonlinear neural networks and prove similar sufficient conditions for global optimality, albeit in a more limited function space setting.

Actor-critic methods solve reinforcement learning problems by updating a parameterized policy known as an actor in a direction that increases an estimate of the expected return known as a critic. However, existing actor-critic methods only use values or gradients of the critic to update the policy parameter. In this paper, we propose a novel actor-critic method called the guide actor-critic (GAC). GAC firstly learns a guide actor that locally maximizes the critic and then it updates the policy parameter based on the guide actor by supervised learning. Our main theoretical contributions are two folds. First, we show that GAC updates the guide actor by performing second-order optimization in the action space where the curvature matrix is based on the Hessians of the critic. Second, we show that the deterministic policy gradient method is a special case of GAC when the Hessians are ignored. Through experiments, we show that our method is a promising reinforcement learning method for continuous controls.

We propose to study the problem of few-shot learning with the prism of inference on a partially observed graphical model, constructed from a collection of input images whose label can be either observed or not. By assimilating generic message-passing inference algorithms with their neural-network counterparts, we define a graph neural network architecture that generalizes several of the recently proposed few-shot learning models. Besides providing improved numerical performance, our framework is easily extended to variants of few-shot learning, such as semi-supervised or active learning, demonstrating the ability of graph-based models to operate well on ‘relational’ tasks.

We consider two questions at the heart of machine learning; how can we predict if a minimum will generalize to the test set, and why does stochastic gradient descent find minima that generalize well? Our work responds to \citet{zhang2016understanding}, who showed deep neural networks can easily memorize randomly labeled training data, despite generalizing well on real labels of the same inputs. We show that the same phenomenon occurs in small linear models. These observations are explained by the Bayesian evidence, which penalizes sharp minima but is invariant to model parameterization. We also demonstrate that, when one holds the learning rate fixed, there is an optimum batch size which maximizes the test set accuracy. We propose that the noise introduced by small mini-batches drives the parameters towards minima whose evidence is large. Interpreting stochastic gradient descent as a stochastic differential equation, we identify the ``noise scale" $g = \epsilon (\frac{N}{B} - 1) \approx \epsilon N/B$, where $\epsilon$ is the learning rate, $N$ the training set size and $B$ the batch size. Consequently the optimum batch size is proportional to both the learning rate and the size of the training set, $B_{opt} \propto \epsilon N$. We verify these predictions empirically.

Do GANS (Generative Adversarial Nets) actually learn the target distribution? The foundational paper of Goodfellow et al. (2014) suggested they do, if they were given sufficiently large deep nets, sample size, and computation time. A recent theoretical analysis in Arora et al. (2017) raised doubts whether the same holds when discriminator has bounded size. It showed that the training objective can approach its optimum value even if the generated distribution has very low support. In other words, the training objective is unable to prevent mode collapse. The current paper makes two contributions. (1) It proposes a novel test for estimating support size using the birthday paradox of discrete probability. Using this evidence is presented that well-known GANs approaches do learn distributions of fairly low support. (2) It theoretically studies encoder-decoder GANs architectures (e.g., BiGAN/ALI), which were proposed to learn more meaningful features via GANs, and consequently to also solve the mode-collapse issue. Our result shows that such encoder-decoder training objectives also cannot guarantee learning of the full distribution because they cannot prevent serious mode collapse. More seriously, they cannot prevent learning meaningless codes for data, contrary to usual intuition.

Neuromorphic hardware tends to pose limits on the connectivity of deep networks that one can run on them. But also generic hardware and software implementations of deep learning run more efficiently for sparse networks. Several methods exist for pruning connections of a neural network after it was trained without connectivity constraints. We present an algorithm, DEEP R, that enables us to train directly a sparsely connected neural network. DEEP R automatically rewires the network during supervised training so that connections are there where they are most needed for the task, while its total number is all the time strictly bounded. We demonstrate that DEEP R can be used to train very sparse feedforward and recurrent neural networks on standard benchmark tasks with just a minor loss in performance. DEEP R is based on a rigorous theoretical foundation that views rewiring as stochastic sampling of network configurations from a posterior.

Meta-learning allows an intelligent agent to leverage prior learning episodes as a basis for quickly improving performance on a novel task. Bayesian hierarchical modeling provides a theoretical framework for formalizing meta-learning as inference for a set of parameters that are shared across tasks. Here, we reformulate the model-agnostic meta-learning algorithm (MAML) of Finn et al. (2017) as a method for probabilistic inference in a hierarchical Bayesian model. In contrast to prior methods for meta-learning via hierarchical Bayes, MAML is naturally applicable to complex function approximators through its use of a scalable gradient descent procedure for posterior inference. Furthermore, the identification of MAML as hierarchical Bayes provides a way to understand the algorithm’s operation as a meta-learning procedure, as well as an opportunity to make use of computational strategies for efficient inference. We use this opportunity to propose an improvement to the MAML algorithm that makes use of techniques from approximate inference and curvature estimation.

Natural language processing (NLP) models often require a massive number of parameters for word embeddings, resulting in a large storage or memory footprint. Deploying neural NLP models to mobile devices requires compressing the word embeddings without any significant sacrifices in performance. For this purpose, we propose to construct the embeddings with few basis vectors. For each word, the composition of basis vectors is determined by a hash code. To maximize the compression rate, we adopt the multi-codebook quantization approach instead of binary coding scheme. Each code is composed of multiple discrete numbers, such as (3, 2, 1, 8), where the value of each component is limited to a fixed range. We propose to directly learn the discrete codes in an end-to-end neural network by applying the Gumbel-softmax trick. Experiments show the compression rate achieves 98% in a sentiment analysis task and 94% ~ 99% in machine translation tasks without performance loss. In both tasks, the proposed method can improve the model performance by slightly lowering the compression rate. Compared to other approaches such as character-level segmentation, the proposed method is language-independent and does not require modifications to the network architecture.

We explore efficient neural architecture search methods and show that a simple yet powerful evolutionary algorithm can discover new architectures with excellent performance. Our approach combines a novel hierarchical genetic representation scheme that imitates the modularized design pattern commonly adopted by human experts, and an expressive search space that supports complex topologies. Our algorithm efficiently discovers architectures that outperform a large number of manually designed models for image classification, obtaining top-1 error of 3.6% on CIFAR-10 and 20.3% when transferred to ImageNet, which is competitive with the best existing neural architecture search approaches. We also present results using random search, achieving 0.3% less top-1 accuracy on CIFAR-10 and 0.1% less on ImageNet whilst reducing the search time from 36 hours down to 1 hour.