ICML 2022 论文列表

Negative sampling (NS) loss plays an important role in learning knowledge graph embedding (KGE) to handle a huge number of entities. However, the performance of KGE degrades without hyperparameters such as the margin term and number of negative samples in NS loss being appropriately selected. Currently, empirical hyperparameter tuning addresses this problem at the cost of computational time. To solve this problem, we theoretically analyzed NS loss to assist hyperparameter tuning and understand the better use of the NS loss in KGE learning. Our theoretical analysis showed that scoring methods with restricted value ranges, such as TransE and RotatE, require appropriate adjustment of the margin term or the number of negative samples different from those without restricted value ranges, such as RESCAL, ComplEx, and DistMult. We also propose subsampling methods specialized for the NS loss in KGE studied from a theoretical aspect. Our empirical analysis on the FB15k-237, WN18RR, and YAGO3-10 datasets showed that the results of actually trained models agree with our theoretical findings.

We introduce a compositional physics-aware FInite volume Neural Network (FINN) for learning spatiotemporal advection-diffusion processes. FINN implements a new way of combining the learning abilities of artificial neural networks with physical and structural knowledge from numerical simulation by modeling the constituents of partial differential equations (PDEs) in a compositional manner. Results on both one- and two-dimensional PDEs (Burgers’, diffusion-sorption, diffusion-reaction, Allen{–}Cahn) demonstrate FINN’s superior modeling accuracy and excellent out-of-distribution generalization ability beyond initial and boundary conditions. With only one tenth of the number of parameters on average, FINN outperforms pure machine learning and other state-of-the-art physics-aware models in all cases{—}often even by multiple orders of magnitude. Moreover, FINN outperforms a calibrated physical model when approximating sparse real-world data in a diffusion-sorption scenario, confirming its generalization abilities and showing explanatory potential by revealing the unknown retardation factor of the observed process.

Many communication-efficient methods have been proposed for distributed learning, whereby gradient compression is used to reduce the communication cost. However, given recent advances in large batch optimization (e.g., large batch SGD and its variant LARS with layerwise adaptive learning rates), the compute power of each machine is being fully utilized. This means, in modern distributed learning, the per-machine computation cost is no longer negligible compared to the communication cost. In this paper, we propose new gradient compression methods for large batch optimization, JointSpar and its variant JointSpar-LARS with layerwise adaptive learning rates, that jointly reduce both the computation and the communication cost. To achieve this, we take advantage of the redundancy in the gradient computation, unlike the existing methods compute all coordinates of the gradient vector, even if some coordinates are later dropped for communication efficiency. JointSpar and its variant further reduce the training time by avoiding the wasted computation on dropped coordinates. While computationally more efficient, we prove that JointSpar and its variant also maintain the same convergence rates as their respective baseline methods. Extensive experiments show that, by reducing the time per iteration, our methods converge faster than state-of-the-art compression methods in terms of wall-clock time.

Federated learning is a machine learning training paradigm that enables clients to jointly train models without sharing their own localized data. However, the implementation of federated learning in practice still faces numerous challenges, such as the large communication overhead due to the repetitive server-client synchronization and the lack of adaptivity by SGD-based model updates. Despite that various methods have been proposed for reducing the communication cost by gradient compression or quantization, and the federated versions of adaptive optimizers such as FedAdam are proposed to add more adaptivity, the current federated learning framework still cannot solve the aforementioned challenges all at once. In this paper, we propose a novel communication-efficient adaptive federated learning method (FedCAMS) with theoretical convergence guarantees. We show that in the nonconvex stochastic optimization setting, our proposed FedCAMS achieves the same convergence rate of $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{TKm}})$ as its non-compressed counterparts. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks verify our theoretical analysis.

We consider the problem of communicating exogenous information by means of Markov decision process trajectories. This setting, which we call a Markov coding game (MCG), generalizes both source coding and a large class of referential games. MCGs also isolate a problem that is important in decentralized control settings in which cheap-talk is not available—namely, they require balancing communication with the associated cost of communicating. We contribute a theoretically grounded approach to MCGs based on maximum entropy reinforcement learning and minimum entropy coupling that we call MEME. Due to recent breakthroughs in approximation algorithms for minimum entropy coupling, MEME is not merely a theoretical algorithm, but can be applied to practical settings. Empirically, we show both that MEME is able to outperform a strong baseline on small MCGs and that MEME is able to achieve strong performance on extremely large MCGs. To the latter point, we demonstrate that MEME is able to losslessly communicate binary images via trajectories of Cartpole and Pong, while simultaneously achieving the maximal or near maximal expected returns, and that it is even capable of performing well in the presence of actuator noise.

To improve model generalization, model designers often restrict the features that their models use, either implicitly or explicitly. In this work, we explore the design space of leveraging such feature priors by viewing them as distinct perspectives on the data. Specifically, we find that models trained with diverse sets of explicit feature priors have less overlapping failure modes, and can thus be combined more effectively. Moreover, we demonstrate that jointly training such models on additional (unlabeled) data allows them to correct each other’s mistakes, which, in turn, leads to better generalization and resilience to spurious correlations.

In this paper, we propose a Collaboration of Experts (CoE) framework to assemble the expertise of multiple networks towards a common goal. Each expert is an individual network with expertise on a unique portion of the dataset, contributing to the collective capacity. Given a sample, delegator selects an expert and simultaneously outputs a rough prediction to trigger potential early termination. For each model in CoE, we propose a novel training algorithm with two major components: weight generation module (WGM) and label generation module (LGM). It fulfills the co-adaptation of experts and delegator. WGM partitions the training data into portions based on delegator via solving a balanced transportation problem, then impels each expert to focus on one portion by reweighting the losses. LGM generates the label to constitute the loss of delegator for expert selection. CoE achieves the state-of-the-art performance on ImageNet, 80.7% top-1 accuracy with 194M FLOPs. Combined with PWLU and CondConv, CoE further boosts the accuracy to 80.0% with only 100M FLOPs for the first time. Furthermore, experiment results on the translation task also demonstrate the strong generalizability of CoE. CoE is hardware-friendly, yielding a 3 6x acceleration compared with existing conditional computation approaches.

We show that neural networks with access to randomness can outperform deterministic networks by using amplification. We call such networks Coin-Flipping Neural Networks, or CFNNs. We show that a CFNN can approximate the indicator of a d-dimensional ball to arbitrary accuracy with only 2 layers and O(1) neurons, where a 2-layer deterministic network was shown to require Omega(e^d) neurons, an exponential improvement. We prove a highly non-trivial result, that for almost any classification problem, there exists a trivially simple network that solves it given a sufficiently powerful generator for the network’s weights. Combining these results we conjecture that for most classification problems, there is a CFNN which solves them with higher accuracy or fewer neurons than any deterministic network. Finally, we verify our proofs experimentally using novel CFNN architectures on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100, reaching an improvement of 9.25% from the baseline.

The lottery ticket hypothesis (LTH) has shown that dense models contain highly sparse subnetworks (i.e., winning tickets) that can be trained in isolation to match full accuracy. Despite many exciting efforts being made, there is one "commonsense" rarely challenged: a winning ticket is found by iterative magnitude pruning (IMP) and hence the resultant pruned subnetworks have only unstructured sparsity. That gap limits the appeal of winning tickets in practice, since the highly irregular sparse patterns are challenging to accelerate on hardware. Meanwhile, directly substituting structured pruning for unstructured pruning in IMP damages performance more severely and is usually unable to locate winning tickets. In this paper, we demonstrate the first positive result that a structurally sparse winning ticket can be effectively found in general. The core idea is to append "post-processing techniques" after each round of (unstructured) IMP, to enforce the formation of structural sparsity. Specifically, we first "re-fill" pruned elements back in some channels deemed to be important, and then "re-group" non-zero elements to create flexible group-wise structural patterns. Both our identified channel- and group-wise structural subnetworks win the lottery, with substantial inference speedups readily supported by existing hardware. Extensive experiments, conducted on diverse datasets across multiple network backbones, consistently validate our proposal, showing that the hardware acceleration roadblock of LTH is now removed. Specifically, the structural winning tickets obtain up to {64.93%, 64.84%, 60.23%} running time savings at {36% 80%, 74%, 58%} sparsity on {CIFAR, Tiny-ImageNet, ImageNet}, while maintaining comparable accuracy. Code is at https://github.com/VITA-Group/Structure-LTH.

We demonstrate that co-training (Blum & Mitchell, 1998) can improve the performance of prompt-based learning by using unlabeled data. While prompting has emerged as a promising paradigm for few-shot and zero-shot learning, it is often brittle and requires much larger models compared to the standard supervised setup. We find that co-training makes it possible to improve the original prompt model and at the same time learn a smaller, downstream task-specific model. In the case where we only have partial access to a prompt model (e.g., output probabilities from GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020)) we learn a calibration model over the prompt outputs. When we have full access to the prompt model’s gradients but full finetuning remains prohibitively expensive (e.g., T0 (Sanh et al., 2021)), we learn a set of soft prompt continuous vectors to iteratively update the prompt model. We find that models trained in this manner can significantly improve performance on challenging datasets where there is currently a large gap between prompt-based learning and fully-supervised models.

Time series alignment methods call for highly expressive, differentiable and invertible warping functions which preserve temporal topology, i.e diffeomorphisms. Diffeomorphic warping functions can be generated from the integration of velocity fields governed by an ordinary differential equation (ODE). Gradient-based optimization frameworks containing diffeomorphic transformations require to calculate derivatives to the differential equation’s solution with respect to the model parameters, i.e. sensitivity analysis. Unfortunately, deep learning frameworks typically lack automatic-differentiation-compatible sensitivity analysis methods; and implicit functions, such as the solution of ODE, require particular care. Current solutions appeal to adjoint sensitivity methods, ad-hoc numerical solvers or ResNet’s Eulerian discretization. In this work, we present a closed-form expression for the ODE solution and its gradient under continuous piecewise-affine (CPA) velocity functions. We present a highly optimized implementation of the results on CPU and GPU. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments on several datasets to validate the generalization ability of our model to unseen data for time-series joint alignment. Results show significant improvements both in terms of efficiency and accuracy.

Visualizing optimization landscapes has resulted in many fundamental insights in numeric optimization, specifically regarding novel improvements to optimization techniques. However, visualizations of the objective that reinforcement learning optimizes (the "reward surface") have only ever been generated for a small number of narrow contexts. This work presents reward surfaces and related visualizations of 27 of the most widely used reinforcement learning environments in Gym for the first time. We also explore reward surfaces in the policy gradient direction and show for the first time that many popular reinforcement learning environments have frequent "cliffs" (sudden large drops in expected reward). We demonstrate that A2C often "dives off" these cliffs into low reward regions of the parameter space while PPO avoids them, confirming a popular intuition for PPO’s improved performance over previous methods. We additionally introduce a highly extensible library that allows researchers to easily generate these visualizations in the future. Our findings provide new intuition to explain the successes and failures of modern RL methods, and our visualizations concretely characterize several failure modes of reinforcement learning agents in novel ways.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has proven to be successful in overcoming labeling difficulties by leveraging unlabeled data. Previous SSL algorithms typically assume a balanced class distribution. However, real-world datasets are usually class-imbalanced, causing the performance of existing SSL algorithms to be seriously decreased. One essential reason is that pseudo-labels for unlabeled data are selected based on a fixed confidence threshold, resulting in low performance on minority classes. In this paper, we develop a simple yet effective framework, which only involves adaptive thresholding for different classes in SSL algorithms, and achieves remarkable performance improvement on more than twenty imbalance ratios. Specifically, we explicitly optimize the number of pseudo-labels for each class in the SSL objective, so as to simultaneously obtain adaptive thresholds and minimize empirical risk. Moreover, the determination of the adaptive threshold can be efficiently obtained by a closed-form solution. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.

In pure-exploration problems, information is gathered sequentially to answer a question on the stochastic environment. While best-arm identification for linear bandits has been extensively studied in recent years, few works have been dedicated to identifying one arm that is $\varepsilon$-close to the best one (and not exactly the best one). In this problem with several correct answers, an identification algorithm should focus on one candidate among those answers and verify that it is correct. We demonstrate that picking the answer with highest mean does not allow an algorithm to reach asymptotic optimality in terms of expected sample complexity. Instead, a

We hypothesize that due to the greedy nature of learning in multi-modal deep neural networks, these models tend to rely on just one modality while under-fitting the other modalities. Such behavior is counter-intuitive and hurts the models’ generalization, as we observe empirically. To estimate the model’s dependence on each modality, we compute the gain on the accuracy when the model has access to it in addition to another modality. We refer to this gain as the conditional utilization rate. In the experiments, we consistently observe an imbalance in conditional utilization rates between modalities, across multiple tasks and architectures. Since conditional utilization rate cannot be computed efficiently during training, we introduce a proxy for it based on the pace at which the model learns from each modality, which we refer to as the conditional learning speed. We propose an algorithm to balance the conditional learning speeds between modalities during training and demonstrate that it indeed addresses the issue of greedy learning. The proposed algorithm improves the model’s generalization on three datasets: Colored MNIST, ModelNet40, and NVIDIA Dynamic Hand Gesture.

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) requires vision models to quickly adapt to brand-new classification tasks with a shift in task distribution. Understanding the difficulties posed by this task distribution shift is central to FSL. In this paper, we show that a simple channel-wise feature transformation may be the key to unraveling this secret from a channel perspective. When facing novel few-shot tasks in the test-time datasets, this transformation can greatly improve the generalization ability of learned image representations, while being agnostic to the choice of datasets and training algorithms. Through an in-depth analysis of this transformation, we find that the difficulty of representation transfer in FSL stems from the severe channel bias problem of image representations: channels may have different importance in different tasks, while convolutional neural networks are likely to be insensitive, or respond incorrectly to such a shift. This points out a core problem of the generalization ability of modern vision systems which needs further attention in the future.

Certifying the robustness of model performance under bounded data distribution drifts has recently attracted intensive interest under the umbrella of distributional robustness. However, existing techniques either make strong assumptions on the model class and loss functions that can be certified, such as smoothness expressed via Lipschitz continuity of gradients, or require to solve complex optimization problems. As a result, the wider application of these techniques is currently limited by its scalability and flexibility — these techniques often do not scale to large-scale datasets with modern deep neural networks or cannot handle loss functions which may be non-smooth such as the 0-1 loss. In this paper, we focus on the problem of certifying distributional robustness for blackbox models and bounded loss functions, and propose a novel certification framework based on the Hellinger distance. Our certification technique scales to ImageNet-scale datasets, complex models, and a diverse set of loss functions. We then focus on one specific application enabled by such scalability and flexibility, i.e., certifying out-of-domain generalization for large neural networks and loss functions such as accuracy and AUC. We experimentally validate our certification method on a number of datasets, ranging from ImageNet, where we provide the first non-vacuous certified out-of-domain generalization, to smaller classification tasks where we are able to compare with the state-of-the-art and show that our method performs considerably better.

Deep learning models have achieved great success in many fields, yet they are vulnerable to adversarial examples. This paper follows a causal perspective to look into the adversarial vulnerability and proposes Causal Intervention by Semantic Smoothing (CISS), a novel framework towards robustness against natural language attacks. Instead of merely fitting observational data, CISS learns causal effects p(y|do(x)) by smoothing in the latent semantic space to make robust predictions, which scales to deep architectures and avoids tedious construction of noise customized for specific attacks. CISS is provably robust against word substitution attacks, as well as empirically robust even when perturbations are strengthened by unknown attack algorithms. For example, on YELP, CISS surpasses the runner-up by 6.8% in terms of certified robustness against word substitutions, and achieves 80.7% empirical robustness when syntactic attacks are integrated.

Watermarking is a commonly used strategy to protect creators’ rights to digital images, videos and audio. Recently, watermarking methods have been extended to deep learning models – in principle, the watermark should be preserved when an adversary tries to copy the model. However, in practice, watermarks can often be removed by an intelligent adversary. Several papers have proposed watermarking methods that claim to be empirically resistant to different types of removal attacks, but these new techniques often fail in the face of new or better-tuned adversaries. In this paper, we propose the first