ICLR 2020 论文列表

This paper presents a novel physics-inspired deep learning approach for point cloud processing motivated by the natural flow phenomena in fluid mechanics. Our learning architecture jointly defines data in an Eulerian world space, using a static background grid, and a Lagrangian material space, using moving particles. By introducing this Eulerian-Lagrangian representation, we are able to naturally evolve and accumulate particle features using flow velocities generated from a generalized, high-dimensional force field. We demonstrate the efficacy of this system by solving various point cloud classification and segmentation problems with state-of-the-art performance. The entire geometric reservoir and data flow mimic the pipeline of the classic PIC/FLIP scheme in modeling natural flow, bridging the disciplines of geometric machine learning and physical simulation.

In this paper, we explore meta-learning for few-shot text classification. Meta-learning has shown strong performance in computer vision, where low-level patterns are transferable across learning tasks. However, directly applying this approach to text is challenging--lexical features highly informative for one task may be insignificant for another. Thus, rather than learning solely from words, our model also leverages their distributional signatures, which encode pertinent word occurrence patterns. Our model is trained within a meta-learning framework to map these signatures into attention scores, which are then used to weight the lexical representations of words. We demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms prototypical networks learned on lexical knowledge (Snell et al., 2017) in both few-shot text classification and relation classification by a significant margin across six benchmark datasets (20.0% on average in 1-shot classification).

Large transformer-based language models (LMs) trained on huge text corpora have shown unparalleled generation capabilities. However, controlling attributes of the generated language (e.g. switching topic or sentiment) is difficult without modifying the model architecture or fine-tuning on attribute-specific data and entailing the significant cost of retraining. We propose a simple alternative: the Plug and Play Language Model (PPLM) for controllable language generation, which combines a pretrained LM with one or more simple attribute classifiers that guide text generation without any further training of the LM. In the canonical scenario we present, the attribute models are simple classifiers consisting of a user-specified bag of words or a single learned layer with 100,000 times fewer parameters than the LM. Sampling entails a forward and backward pass in which gradients from the attribute model push the LM's hidden activations and thus guide the generation. Model samples demonstrate control over a range of topics and sentiment styles, and extensive automated and human annotated evaluations show attribute alignment and fluency. PPLMs are flexible in that any combination of differentiable attribute models may be used to steer text generation, which will allow for diverse and creative applications beyond the examples given in this paper.

Recent efforts in Dialogue State Tracking (DST) for task-oriented dialogues have progressed toward open-vocabulary or generation-based approaches where the models can generate slot value candidates from the dialogue history itself. These approaches have shown good performance gain, especially in complicated dialogue domains with dynamic slot values. However, they fall short in two aspects: (1) they do not allow models to explicitly learn signals across domains and slots to detect potential dependencies among \textit{(domain, slot)} pairs; and (2) existing models follow auto-regressive approaches which incur high time cost when the dialogue evolves over multiple domains and multiple turns. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of Non-Autoregressive Dialog State Tracking (NADST) which can factor in potential dependencies among domains and slots to optimize the models towards better prediction of dialogue states as a complete set rather than separate slots. In particular, the non-autoregressive nature of our method not only enables decoding in parallel to significantly reduce the latency of DST for real-time dialogue response generation, but also detect dependencies among slots at token level in addition to slot and domain level. Our empirical results show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art joint accuracy across all domains on the MultiWOZ 2.1 corpus, and the latency of our model is an order of magnitude lower than the previous state of the art as the dialogue history extends over time.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is frequently used to increase performance in text generation tasks, including machine translation (MT), notably through the use of Minimum Risk Training (MRT) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). However, little is known about what and how these methods learn in the context of MT. We prove that one of the most common RL methods for MT does not optimize the expected reward, as well as show that other methods take an infeasibly long time to converge. In fact, our results suggest that RL practices in MT are likely to improve performance only where the pre-trained parameters are already close to yielding the correct translation. Our findings further suggest that observed gains may be due to effects unrelated to the training signal, concretely, changes in the shape of the distribution curve.

Reinforcement learning algorithms use correlations between policies and rewards to improve agent performance. But in dynamic or sparsely rewarding environments these correlations are often too small, or rewarding events are too infrequent to make learning feasible. Human education instead relies on curricula –the breakdown of tasks into simpler, static challenges with dense rewards– to build up to complex behaviors. While curricula are also useful for artificial agents, hand-crafting them is time consuming. This has lead researchers to explore automatic curriculum generation. Here we explore automatic curriculum generation in rich,dynamic environments. Using a setter-solver paradigm we show the importance of considering goal validity, goal feasibility, and goal coverage to construct useful curricula. We demonstrate the success of our approach in rich but sparsely rewarding 2D and 3D environments, where an agent is tasked to achieve a single goal selected from a set of possible goals that varies between episodes, and identify challenges for future work. Finally, we demonstrate the value of a novel technique that guides agents towards a desired goal distribution. Altogether, these results represent a substantial step towards applying automatic task curricula to learn complex, otherwise unlearnable goals, and to our knowledge are the first to demonstrate automated curriculum generation for goal-conditioned agents in environments where the possible goals vary between episodes.

It has been widely recognized that adversarial examples can be easily crafted to fool deep networks, which mainly root from the locally non-linear behavior nearby input examples. Applying mixup in training provides an effective mechanism to improve generalization performance and model robustness against adversarial perturbations, which introduces the globally linear behavior in-between training examples. However, in previous work, the mixup-trained models only passively defend adversarial attacks in inference by directly classifying the inputs, where the induced global linearity is not well exploited. Namely, since the locality of the adversarial perturbations, it would be more efficient to actively break the locality via the globality of the model predictions. Inspired by simple geometric intuition, we develop an inference principle, named mixup inference (MI), for mixup-trained models. MI mixups the input with other random clean samples, which can shrink and transfer the equivalent perturbation if the input is adversarial. Our experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 demonstrate that MI can further improve the adversarial robustness for the models trained by mixup and its variants.

Data augmentation (DA) has been widely utilized to improve generalization in training deep neural networks. Recently, human-designed data augmentation has been gradually replaced by automatically learned augmentation policy. Through finding the best policy in well-designed search space of data augmentation, AutoAugment (Cubuk et al., 2019) can significantly improve validation accuracy on image classification tasks. However, this approach is not computationally practical for large-scale problems. In this paper, we develop an adversarial method to arrive at a computationally-affordable solution called Adversarial AutoAugment, which can simultaneously optimize target related object and augmentation policy search loss. The augmentation policy network attempts to increase the training loss of a target network through generating adversarial augmentation policies, while the target network can learn more robust features from harder examples to improve the generalization. In contrast to prior work, we reuse the computation in target network training for policy evaluation, and dispense with the retraining of the target network. Compared to AutoAugment, this leads to about 12x reduction in computing cost and 11x shortening in time overhead on ImageNet. We show experimental results of our approach on CIFAR-10/CIFAR-100, ImageNet, and demonstrate significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art. On CIFAR-10, we achieve a top-1 test error of 1.36%, which is the currently best performing single model. On ImageNet, we achieve a leading performance of top-1 accuracy 79.40% on ResNet-50 and 80.00% on ResNet-50-D without extra data.

Mutual Information (MI) plays an important role in representation learning. However, MI is unfortunately intractable in continuous and high-dimensional settings. Recent advances establish tractable and scalable MI estimators to discover useful representation. However, most of the existing methods are not capable of providing an accurate estimation of MI with low-variance when the MI is large. We argue that directly estimating the gradients of MI is more appealing for representation learning than estimating MI in itself. To this end, we propose the Mutual Information Gradient Estimator (MIGE) for representation learning based on the score estimation of implicit distributions. MIGE exhibits a tight and smooth gradient estimation of MI in the high-dimensional and large-MI settings. We expand the applications of MIGE in both unsupervised learning of deep representations based on InfoMax and the Information Bottleneck method. Experimental results have indicated significant performance improvement in learning useful representation.

Machine learning has shown growing success in recent years. However, current machine learning systems are highly specialized, trained for particular problems or domains, and typically on a single narrow dataset. Human learning, on the other hand, is highly general and adaptable. Never-ending learning is a machine learning paradigm that aims to bridge this gap, with the goal of encouraging researchers to design machine learning systems that can learn to perform a wider variety of inter-related tasks in more complex environments. To date, there is no environment or testbed to facilitate the development and evaluation of never-ending learning systems. To this end, we propose the Jelly Bean World testbed. The Jelly Bean World allows experimentation over two-dimensional grid worlds which are filled with items and in which agents can navigate. This testbed provides environments that are sufficiently complex and where more generally intelligent algorithms ought to perform better than current state-of-the-art reinforcement learning approaches. It does so by producing non-stationary environments and facilitating experimentation with multi-task, multi-agent, multi-modal, and curriculum learning settings. We hope that this new freely-available software will prompt new research and interest in the development and evaluation of never-ending learning systems and more broadly, general intelligence systems.

Recent Transformer-based models such as Transformer-XL and BERT have achieved huge success on various natural language processing tasks. However, contextualized embeddings at the output layer of these powerful models tend to degenerate and occupy an anisotropic cone in the vector space, which is called the representation degeneration problem. In this paper, we propose a novel spectrum control approach to address this degeneration problem. The core idea of our method is to directly guide the spectra training of the output embedding matrix with a slow-decaying singular value prior distribution through a reparameterization framework. We show that our proposed method encourages isotropy of the learned word representations while maintains the modeling power of these contextual neural models. We further provide a theoretical analysis and insight on the benefit of modeling singular value distribution. We demonstrate that our spectrum control method outperforms the state-of-the-art Transformer-XL modeling for language model, and various Transformer-based models for machine translation, on common benchmark datasets for these tasks.

Self-supervised learning is showing great promise for monocular depth estimation, using geometry as the only source of supervision. Depth networks are indeed capable of learning representations that relate visual appearance to 3D properties by implicitly leveraging category-level patterns. In this work we investigate how to leverage more directly this semantic structure to guide geometric representation learning, while remaining in the self-supervised regime. Instead of using semantic labels and proxy losses in a multi-task approach, we propose a new architecture leveraging fixed pretrained semantic segmentation networks to guide self-supervised representation learning via pixel-adaptive convolutions. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage training process to overcome a common semantic bias on dynamic objects via resampling. Our method improves upon the state of the art for self-supervised monocular depth prediction over all pixels, fine-grained details, and per semantic categories.

Despite the widespread adoption of Transformer models for NLP tasks, the expressive power of these models is not well-understood. In this paper, we establish that Transformer models are universal approximators of continuous permutation equivariant sequence-to-sequence functions with compact support, which is quite surprising given the amount of shared parameters in these models. Furthermore, using positional encodings, we circumvent the restriction of permutation equivariance, and show that Transformer models can universally approximate arbitrary continuous sequence-to-sequence functions on a compact domain. Interestingly, our proof techniques clearly highlight the different roles of the self-attention and the feed-forward layers in Transformers. In particular, we prove that fixed width self-attention layers can compute contextual mappings of the input sequences, playing a key role in the universal approximation property of Transformers. Based on this insight from our analysis, we consider other simpler alternatives to self-attention layers and empirically evaluate them.

Abstract reasoning, particularly in the visual domain, is a complex human ability, but it remains a challenging problem for artificial neural learning systems. In this work we propose MXGNet, a multilayer graph neural network for multi-panel diagrammatic reasoning tasks. MXGNet combines three powerful concepts, namely, object-level representation, graph neural networks and multiplex graphs, for solving visual reasoning tasks. MXGNet first extracts object-level representations for each element in all panels of the diagrams, and then forms a multi-layer multiplex graph capturing multiple relations between objects across different diagram panels. MXGNet summarises the multiple graphs extracted from the diagrams of the task, and uses this summarisation to pick the most probable answer from the given candidates. We have tested MXGNet on two types of diagrammatic reasoning tasks, namely Diagram Syllogisms and Raven Progressive Matrices (RPM). For an Euler Diagram Syllogism task MXGNet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 99.8%. For PGM and RAVEN, two comprehensive datasets for RPM reasoning, MXGNet outperforms the state-of-the-art models by a considerable margin.

It has recently been shown that ReLU networks produce arbitrarily over-confident predictions far away from the training data. Thus, ReLU networks do not know when they don't know. However, this is a highly important property in safety critical applications. In the context of out-of-distribution detection (OOD) there have been a number of proposals to mitigate this problem but none of them are able to make any mathematical guarantees. In this paper we propose a new approach to OOD which overcomes both problems. Our approach can be used with ReLU networks and provides provably low confidence predictions far away from the training data as well as the first certificates for low confidence predictions in a neighborhood of an out-distribution point. In the experiments we show that state-of-the-art methods fail in this worst-case setting whereas our model can guarantee its performance while retaining state-of-the-art OOD performance.

Navigation is crucial for animal behavior and is assumed to require an internal representation of the external environment, termed a cognitive map. The precise form of this representation is often considered to be a metric representation of space. An internal representation, however, is judged by its contribution to performance on a given task, and may thus vary between different types of navigation tasks. Here we train a recurrent neural network that controls an agent performing several navigation tasks in a simple environment. To focus on internal representations, we split learning into a task-agnostic pre-training stage that modifies internal connectivity and a task-specific Q learning stage that controls the network's output. We show that pre-training shapes the attractor landscape of the networks, leading to either a continuous attractor, discrete attractors or a disordered state. These structures induce bias onto the Q-Learning phase, leading to a performance pattern across the tasks corresponding to metric and topological regularities. Our results show that, in recurrent networks, inductive bias takes the form of attractor landscapes -- which can be shaped by pre-training and analyzed using dynamical systems methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate that non-metric representations are useful for navigation tasks.

We address the following question: How redundant is the parameterisation of ReLU networks? Specifically, we consider transformations of the weight space which leave the function implemented by the network intact. Two such transformations are known for feed-forward architectures: permutation of neurons within a layer, and positive scaling of all incoming weights of a neuron coupled with inverse scaling of its outgoing weights. In this work, we show for architectures with non-increasing widths that permutation and scaling are in fact the only function-preserving weight transformations. For any eligible architecture we give an explicit construction of a neural network such that any other network that implements the same function can be obtained from the original one by the application of permutations and rescaling. The proof relies on a geometric understanding of boundaries between linear regions of ReLU networks, and we hope the developed mathematical tools are of independent interest.

Handling missing data is one of the most fundamental problems in machine learning. Among many approaches, the simplest and most intuitive way is zero imputation, which treats the value of a missing entry simply as zero. However, many studies have experimentally confirmed that zero imputation results in suboptimal performances in training neural networks. Yet, none of the existing work has explained what brings such performance degradations. In this paper, we introduce the variable sparsity problem (VSP), which describes a phenomenon where the output of a predictive model largely varies with respect to the rate of missingness in the given input, and show that it adversarially affects the model performance. We first theoretically analyze this phenomenon and propose a simple yet effective technique to handle missingness, which we refer to as Sparsity Normalization (SN), that directly targets and resolves the VSP. We further experimentally validate SN on diverse benchmark datasets, to show that debiasing the effect of input-level sparsity improves the performance and stabilizes the training of neural networks.

Due to insufficient training data and the high computational cost to train a deep neural network from scratch, transfer learning has been extensively used in many deep-neural-network-based applications. A commonly used transfer learning approach involves taking a part of a pre-trained model, adding a few layers at the end, and re-training the new layers with a small dataset. This approach, while efficient and widely used, imposes a security vulnerability because the pre-trained model used in transfer learning is usually publicly available, including to potential attackers. In this paper, we show that without any additional knowledge other than the pre-trained model, an attacker can launch an effective and efficient brute force attack that can craft instances of input to trigger each target class with high confidence. We assume that the attacker has no access to any target-specific information, including samples from target classes, re-trained model, and probabilities assigned by Softmax to each class, and thus making the attack target-agnostic. These assumptions render all previous attack models inapplicable, to the best of our knowledge. To evaluate the proposed attack, we perform a set of experiments on face recognition and speech recognition tasks and show the effectiveness of the attack. Our work reveals a fundamental security weakness of the Softmax layer when used in transfer learning settings.