ICLR 2019 论文列表

The impressive lifelong learning in animal brains is primarily enabled by plastic changes in synaptic connectivity. Importantly, these changes are not passive, but are actively controlled by neuromodulation, which is itself under the control of the brain. The resulting self-modifying abilities of the brain play an important role in learning and adaptation, and are a major basis for biological reinforcement learning. Here we show for the first time that artificial neural networks with such neuromodulated plasticity can be trained with gradient descent. Extending previous work on differentiable Hebbian plasticity, we propose a differentiable formulation for the neuromodulation of plasticity. We show that neuromodulated plasticity improves the performance of neural networks on both reinforcement learning and supervised learning tasks. In one task, neuromodulated plastic LSTMs with millions of parameters outperform standard LSTMs on a benchmark language modeling task (controlling for the number of parameters). We conclude that differentiable neuromodulation of plasticity offers a powerful new framework for training neural networks.

Reinforcement learning is a promising framework for solving control problems, but its use in practical situations is hampered by the fact that reward functions are often difficult to engineer. Specifying goals and tasks for autonomous machines, such as robots, is a significant challenge: conventionally, reward functions and goal states have been used to communicate objectives. But people can communicate objectives to each other simply by describing or demonstrating them. How can we build learning algorithms that will allow us to tell machines what we want them to do? In this work, we investigate the problem of grounding language commands as reward functions using inverse reinforcement learning, and argue that language-conditioned rewards are more transferable than language-conditioned policies to new environments. We propose language-conditioned reward learning (LC-RL), which grounds language commands as a reward function represented by a deep neural network. We demonstrate that our model learns rewards that transfer to novel tasks and environments on realistic, high-dimensional visual environments with natural language commands, whereas directly learning a language-conditioned policy leads to poor performance.

Estimating the frequencies of elements in a data stream is a fundamental task in data analysis and machine learning. The problem is typically addressed using streaming algorithms which can process very large data using limited storage. Today's streaming algorithms, however, cannot exploit patterns in their input to improve performance. We propose a new class of algorithms that automatically learn relevant patterns in the input data and use them to improve its frequency estimates. The proposed algorithms combine the benefits of machine learning with the formal guarantees available through algorithm theory. We prove that our learning-based algorithms have lower estimation errors than their non-learning counterparts. We also evaluate our algorithms on two real-world datasets and demonstrate empirically their performance gains.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) form a generative modeling approach known for producing appealing samples, but they are notably difficult to train. One common way to tackle this issue has been to propose new formulations of the GAN objective. Yet, surprisingly few studies have looked at optimization methods designed for this adversarial training. In this work, we cast GAN optimization problems in the general variational inequality framework. Tapping into the mathematical programming literature, we counter some common misconceptions about the difficulties of saddle point optimization and propose to extend methods designed for variational inequalities to the training of GANs. We apply averaging, extrapolation and a computationally cheaper variant that we call extrapolation from the past to the stochastic gradient method (SGD) and Adam.

Generating musical audio directly with neural networks is notoriously difficult because it requires coherently modeling structure at many different timescales. Fortunately, most music is also highly structured and can be represented as discrete note events played on musical instruments. Herein, we show that by using notes as an intermediate representation, we can train a suite of models capable of transcribing, composing, and synthesizing audio waveforms with coherent musical structure on timescales spanning six orders of magnitude (~0.1 ms to ~100 s), a process we call Wave2Midi2Wave. This large advance in the state of the art is enabled by our release of the new MAESTRO (MIDI and Audio Edited for Synchronous TRacks and Organization) dataset, composed of over 172 hours of virtuosic piano performances captured with fine alignment (~3 ms) between note labels and audio waveforms. The networks and the dataset together present a promising approach toward creating new expressive and interpretable neural models of music.

A wide range of defenses have been proposed to harden neural networks against adversarial attacks. However, a pattern has emerged in which the majority of adversarial defenses are quickly broken by new attacks. Given the lack of success at generating robust defenses, we are led to ask a fundamental question: Are adversarial attacks inevitable? This paper analyzes adversarial examples from a theoretical perspective, and identifies fundamental bounds on the susceptibility of a classifier to adversarial attacks. We show that, for certain classes of problems, adversarial examples are inescapable. Using experiments, we explore the implications of theoretical guarantees for real-world problems and discuss how factors such as dimensionality and image complexity limit a classifier's robustness against adversarial examples.

In open-domain dialogue intelligent agents should exhibit the use of knowledge, however there are few convincing demonstrations of this to date. The most popular sequence to sequence models typically “generate and hope” generic utterances that can be memorized in the weights of the model when mapping from input utterance(s) to output, rather than employing recalled knowledge as context. Use of knowledge has so far proved difficult, in part because of the lack of a supervised learning benchmark task which exhibits knowledgeable open dialogue with clear grounding. To that end we collect and release a large dataset with conversations directly grounded with knowledge retrieved from Wikipedia. We then design architectures capable of retrieving knowledge, reading and conditioning on it, and finally generating natural responses. Our best performing dialogue models are able to conduct knowledgeable discussions on open-domain topics as evaluated by automatic metrics and human evaluations, while our new benchmark allows for measuring further improvements in this important research direction.

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are very successful at solving challenging problems with sequential data. However, this observed efficiency is not yet entirely explained by theory. It is known that a certain class of multiplicative RNNs enjoys the property of depth efficiency --- a shallow network of exponentially large width is necessary to realize the same score function as computed by such an RNN. Such networks, however, are not very often applied to real life tasks. In this work, we attempt to reduce the gap between theory and practice by extending the theoretical analysis to RNNs which employ various nonlinearities, such as Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU), and show that they also benefit from properties of universality and depth efficiency. Our theoretical results are verified by a series of extensive computational experiments.

Modern neural networks are over-parametrized. In particular, each rectified linear hidden unit can be modified by a multiplicative factor by adjusting input and out- put weights, without changing the rest of the network. Inspired by the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm, we introduce a fast iterative method for minimizing the l2 norm of the weights, equivalently the weight decay regularizer. It provably converges to a unique solution. Interleaving our algorithm with SGD during training improves the test accuracy. For small batches, our approach offers an alternative to batch- and group- normalization on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet with a ResNet-18.

Recent studies have highlighted adversarial examples as a ubiquitous threat to different neural network models and many downstream applications. Nonetheless, as unique data properties have inspired distinct and powerful learning principles, this paper aims to explore their potentials towards mitigating adversarial inputs. In particular, our results reveal the importance of using the temporal dependency in audio data to gain discriminate power against adversarial examples. Tested on the automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks and three recent audio adversarial attacks, we find that (i) input transformation developed from image adversarial defense provides limited robustness improvement and is subtle to advanced attacks; (ii) temporal dependency can be exploited to gain discriminative power against audio adversarial examples and is resistant to adaptive attacks considered in our experiments. Our results not only show promising means of improving the robustness of ASR systems, but also offer novel insights in exploiting domain-specific data properties to mitigate negative effects of adversarial examples.

While deep neural networks are a highly successful model class, their large memory footprint puts considerable strain on energy consumption, communication bandwidth, and storage requirements. Consequently, model size reduction has become an utmost goal in deep learning. A typical approach is to train a set of deterministic weights, while applying certain techniques such as pruning and quantization, in order that the empirical weight distribution becomes amenable to Shannon-style coding schemes. However, as shown in this paper, relaxing weight determinism and using a full variational distribution over weights allows for more efficient coding schemes and consequently higher compression rates. In particular, following the classical bits-back argument, we encode the network weights using a random sample, requiring only a number of bits corresponding to the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the sampled variational distribution and the encoding distribution. By imposing a constraint on the Kullback-Leibler divergence, we are able to explicitly control the compression rate, while optimizing the expected loss on the training set. The employed encoding scheme can be shown to be close to the optimal information-theoretical lower bound, with respect to the employed variational family. Our method sets new state-of-the-art in neural network compression, as it strictly dominates previous approaches in a Pareto sense: On the benchmarks LeNet-5/MNIST and VGG-16/CIFAR-10, our approach yields the best test performance for a fixed memory budget, and vice versa, it achieves the highest compression rates for a fixed test performance.

Several first order stochastic optimization methods commonly used in the Euclidean domain such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD), accelerated gradient descent or variance reduced methods have already been adapted to certain Riemannian settings. However, some of the most popular of these optimization tools - namely Adam, Adagrad and the more recent Amsgrad - remain to be generalized to Riemannian manifolds. We discuss the difficulty of generalizing such adaptive schemes to the most agnostic Riemannian setting, and then provide algorithms and convergence proofs for geodesically convex objectives in the particular case of a product of Riemannian manifolds, in which adaptivity is implemented across manifolds in the cartesian product. Our generalization is tight in the sense that choosing the Euclidean space as Riemannian manifold yields the same algorithms and regret bounds as those that were already known for the standard algorithms. Experimentally, we show faster convergence and to a lower train loss value for Riemannian adaptive methods over their corresponding baselines on the realistic task of embedding the WordNet taxonomy in the Poincare ball.

In this paper, we present a new deep learning architecture for addressing the problem of supervised learning with sparse and irregularly sampled multivariate time series. The architecture is based on the use of a semi-parametric interpolation network followed by the application of a prediction network. The interpolation network allows for information to be shared across multiple dimensions of a multivariate time series during the interpolation stage, while any standard deep learning model can be used for the prediction network. This work is motivated by the analysis of physiological time series data in electronic health records, which are sparse, irregularly sampled, and multivariate. We investigate the performance of this architecture on both classification and regression tasks, showing that our approach outperforms a range of baseline and recently proposed models.

Learning to control an environment without hand-crafted rewards or expert data remains challenging and is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. We present an unsupervised learning algorithm to train agents to achieve perceptually-specified goals using only a stream of observations and actions. Our agent simultaneously learns a goal-conditioned policy and a goal achievement reward function that measures how similar a state is to the goal state. This dual optimization leads to a co-operative game, giving rise to a learned reward function that reflects similarity in controllable aspects of the environment instead of distance in the space of observations. We demonstrate the efficacy of our agent to learn, in an unsupervised manner, to reach a diverse set of goals on three domains -- Atari, the DeepMind Control Suite and DeepMind Lab.

Hyperparameter optimization can be formulated as a bilevel optimization problem, where the optimal parameters on the training set depend on the hyperparameters. We aim to adapt regularization hyperparameters for neural networks by fitting compact approximations to the best-response function, which maps hyperparameters to optimal weights and biases. We show how to construct scalable best-response approximations for neural networks by modeling the best-response as a single network whose hidden units are gated conditionally on the regularizer. We justify this approximation by showing the exact best-response for a shallow linear network with L2-regularized Jacobian can be represented by a similar gating mechanism. We fit this model using a gradient-based hyperparameter optimization algorithm which alternates between approximating the best-response around the current hyperparameters and optimizing the hyperparameters using the approximate best-response function. Unlike other gradient-based approaches, we do not require differentiating the training loss with respect to the hyperparameters, allowing us to tune discrete hyperparameters, data augmentation hyperparameters, and dropout probabilities. Because the hyperparameters are adapted online, our approach discovers hyperparameter schedules that can outperform fixed hyperparameter values. Empirically, our approach outperforms competing hyperparameter optimization methods on large-scale deep learning problems. We call our networks, which update their own hyperparameters online during training, Self-Tuning Networks (STNs).

Deep neural networks work well at approximating complicated functions when provided with data and trained by gradient descent methods. At the same time, there is a vast amount of existing functions that programmatically solve different tasks in a precise manner eliminating the need for training. In many cases, it is possible to decompose a task to a series of functions, of which for some we may prefer to use a neural network to learn the functionality, while for others the preferred method would be to use existing black-box functions. We propose a method for end-to-end training of a base neural network that integrates calls to existing black-box functions. We do so by approximating the black-box functionality with a differentiable neural network in a way that drives the base network to comply with the black-box function interface during the end-to-end optimization process. At inference time, we replace the differentiable estimator with its external black-box non-differentiable counterpart such that the base network output matches the input arguments of the black-box function. Using this ``Estimate and Replace'' paradigm, we train a neural network, end to end, to compute the input to black-box functionality while eliminating the need for intermediate labels. We show that by leveraging the existing precise black-box function during inference, the integrated model generalizes better than a fully differentiable model, and learns more efficiently compared to RL-based methods.

We introduce Auxiliary Variational MCMC, a novel framework for learning MCMC kernels that combines recent advances in variational inference with insights drawn from traditional auxiliary variable MCMC methods such as Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. Our framework exploits low dimensional structure in the target distribution in order to learn a more efficient MCMC sampler. The resulting sampler is able to suppress random walk behaviour and mix between modes efficiently, without the need to compute gradients of the target distribution. We test our sampler on a number of challenging distributions, where the underlying structure is known, and on the task of posterior sampling in Bayesian logistic regression. Code to reproduce all experiments is available at https://github.com/AVMCMC/AuxiliaryVariationalMCMC .

A central goal of unsupervised learning is to acquire representations from unlabeled data or experience that can be used for more effective learning of downstream tasks from modest amounts of labeled data. Many prior unsupervised learning works aim to do so by developing proxy objectives based on reconstruction, disentanglement, prediction, and other metrics. Instead, we develop an unsupervised meta-learning method that explicitly optimizes for the ability to learn a variety of tasks from small amounts of data. To do so, we construct tasks from unlabeled data in an automatic way and run meta-learning over the constructed tasks. Surprisingly, we find that, when integrated with meta-learning, relatively simple task construction mechanisms, such as clustering embeddings, lead to good performance on a variety of downstream, human-specified tasks. Our experiments across four image datasets indicate that our unsupervised meta-learning approach acquires a learning algorithm without any labeled data that is applicable to a wide range of downstream classification tasks, improving upon the embedding learned by four prior unsupervised learning methods.

Detecting the emergence of abrupt property changes in time series is a challenging problem. Kernel two-sample test has been studied for this task which makes fewer assumptions on the distributions than traditional parametric approaches. However, selecting kernels is non-trivial in practice. Although kernel selection for the two-sample test has been studied, the insufficient samples in change point detection problem hinder the success of those developed kernel selection algorithms. In this paper, we propose KL-CPD, a novel kernel learning framework for time series CPD that optimizes a lower bound of test power via an auxiliary generative model. With deep kernel parameterization, KL-CPD endows kernel two-sample test with the data-driven kernel to detect different types of change-points in real-world applications. The proposed approach significantly outperformed other state-of-the-art methods in our comparative evaluation of benchmark datasets and simulation studies.