NeurIPS 2016 论文列表

We study the problem of 3D object generation. We propose a novel framework, namely 3D Generative Adversarial Network (3D-GAN), which generates 3D objects from a probabilistic space by leveraging recent advances in volumetric convolutional networks and generative adversarial nets. The benefits of our model are three-fold: first, the use of an adversarial criterion, instead of traditional heuristic criteria, enables the generator to capture object structure implicitly and to synthesize high-quality 3D objects; second, the generator establishes a mapping from a low-dimensional probabilistic space to the space of 3D objects, so that we can sample objects without a reference image or CAD models, and explore the 3D object manifold; third, the adversarial discriminator provides a powerful 3D shape descriptor which, learned without supervision, has wide applications in 3D object recognition. Experiments demonstrate that our method generates high-quality 3D objects, and our unsupervisedly learned features achieve impressive performance on 3D object recognition, comparable with those of supervised learning methods.

This work is motivated by the engineering task of achieving a near state-of-the-art face recognition on a minimal computing budget running on an embedded system. Our main technical contribution centers around a novel training method, called Multibatch, for similarity learning, i.e., for the task of generating an invariant ``face signature'' through training pairs of ``same'' and ``not-same'' face images. The Multibatch method first generates signatures for a mini-batch of $k$ face images and then constructs an unbiased estimate of the full gradient by relying on all $k^2-k$ pairs from the mini-batch. We prove that the variance of the Multibatch estimator is bounded by $O(1/k^2)$, under some mild conditions. In contrast, the standard gradient estimator that relies on random $k/2$ pairs has a variance of order $1/k$. The smaller variance of the Multibatch estimator significantly speeds up the convergence rate of stochastic gradient descent. Using the Multibatch method we train a deep convolutional neural network that achieves an accuracy of $98.2\%$ on the LFW benchmark, while its prediction runtime takes only $30$msec on a single ARM Cortex A9 core. Furthermore, the entire training process took only 12 hours on a single Titan X GPU.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently demonstrated the capability to synthesize compelling real-world images, such as room interiors, album covers, manga, faces, birds, and flowers. While existing models can synthesize images based on global constraints such as a class label or caption, they do not provide control over pose or object location. We propose a new model, the Generative Adversarial What-Where Network (GAWWN), that synthesizes images given instructions describing what content to draw in which location. We show high-quality 128 × 128 image synthesis on the Caltech-UCSD Birds dataset, conditioned on both informal text descriptions and also object location. Our system exposes control over both the bounding box around the bird and its constituent parts. By modeling the conditional distributions over part locations, our system also enables conditioning on arbitrary subsets of parts (e.g. only the beak and tail), yielding an efficient interface for picking part locations.

Semi-supervised clustering algorithms have been proposed to identify data clusters that align with user perceived ones via the aid of side information such as seeds or pairwise constrains. However, traditional side information is mostly at the instance level and subject to the sampling bias, where non-randomly sampled instances in the supervision can mislead the algorithms to wrong clusters. In this paper, we propose learning from the feature-level supervision. We show that this kind of supervision can be easily obtained in the form of perception vectors in many applications. Then we present novel algorithms, called Perception Embedded (PE) clustering, that exploit the perception vectors as well as traditional side information to find clusters perceived by the user. Extensive experiments are conducted on real datasets and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of PE empirically.

We present a method for learning treewidth-bounded Bayesian networks from data sets containing thousands of variables. Bounding the treewidth of a Bayesian network greatly reduces the complexity of inferences. Yet, being a global property of the graph, it considerably increases the difficulty of the learning process. Our novel algorithm accomplishes this task, scaling both to large domains and to large treewidths. Our novel approach consistently outperforms the state of the art on experiments with up to thousands of variables.

Many real phenomena, including behaviors, involve strategic interactions that can be learned from data. We focus on learning tree structured potential games where equilibria are represented by local maxima of an underlying potential function. We cast the learning problem within a max margin setting and show that the problem is NP-hard even when the strategic interactions form a tree. We develop a variant of dual decomposition to estimate the underlying game and demonstrate with synthetic and real decision/voting data that the game theoretic perspective (carving out local maxima) enables meaningful recovery.

Supervised learning with large scale labelled datasets and deep layered models has caused a paradigm shift in diverse areas in learning and recognition. However, this approach still suffers from generalization issues under the presence of a domain shift between the training and the test data distribution. Since unsupervised domain adaptation algorithms directly address this domain shift problem between a labelled source dataset and an unlabelled target dataset, recent papers have shown promising results by fine-tuning the networks with domain adaptation loss functions which try to align the mismatch between the training and testing data distributions. Nevertheless, these recent deep learning based domain adaptation approaches still suffer from issues such as high sensitivity to the gradient reversal hyperparameters and overfitting during the fine-tuning stage. In this paper, we propose a unified deep learning framework where the representation, cross domain transformation, and target label inference are all jointly optimized in an end-to-end fashion for unsupervised domain adaptation. Our experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in both object recognition and digit classification experiments by a large margin. We will make our learned models as well as the source code available immediately upon acceptance.

In this paper, we consider a non-convex loss-minimization problem of learning Supervised PageRank models, which can account for features of nodes and edges. We propose gradient-based and random gradient-free methods to solve this problem. Our algorithms are based on the concept of an inexact oracle and unlike the state-of-the-art gradient-based method we manage to provide theoretically the convergence rate guarantees for both of them. Finally, we compare the performance of the proposed optimization methods with the state of the art applied to a ranking task.

High demand for computation resources severely hinders deployment of large-scale Deep Neural Networks (DNN) in resource constrained devices. In this work, we propose a Structured Sparsity Learning (SSL) method to regularize the structures (i.e., filters, channels, filter shapes, and layer depth) of DNNs. SSL can: (1) learn a compact structure from a bigger DNN to reduce computation cost; (2) obtain a hardware-friendly structured sparsity of DNN to efficiently accelerate the DNN’s evaluation. Experimental results show that SSL achieves on average 5.1X and 3.1X speedups of convolutional layer computation of AlexNet against CPU and GPU, respectively, with off-the-shelf libraries. These speedups are about twice speedups of non-structured sparsity; (3) regularize the DNN structure to improve classification accuracy. The results show that for CIFAR-10, regularization on layer depth reduces a 20-layer Deep Residual Network (ResNet) to 18 layers while improves the accuracy from 91.25% to 92.60%, which is still higher than that of original ResNet with 32 layers. For AlexNet, SSL reduces the error by ~1%.

We present a novel framework, called GRAB (GRaphical models with overlApping Blocks), to capture densely connected components in a network estimate. GRAB takes as input a data matrix of p variables and n samples, and jointly learns both a network among p variables and densely connected groups of variables (called `blocks'). GRAB has four major novelties as compared to existing network estimation methods: 1) It does not require the blocks to be given a priori. 2) Blocks can overlap. 3) It can jointly learn a network structure and overlapping blocks. 4) It solves a joint optimization problem with the block coordinate descent method that is convex in each step. We show that GRAB reveals the underlying network structure substantially better than four state-of-the-art competitors on synthetic data. When applied to cancer gene expression data, GRAB outperforms its competitors in revealing known functional gene sets and potentially novel genes that drive cancer.

Recent progress on many imaging and vision tasks has been driven by the use of deep feed-forward neural networks, which are trained by propagating gradients of a loss defined on the final output, back through the network up to the first layer that operates directly on the image. We propose back-propagating one step further---to learn camera sensor designs jointly with networks that carry out inference on the images they capture. In this paper, we specifically consider the design and inference problems in a typical color camera---where the sensor is able to measure only one color channel at each pixel location, and computational inference is required to reconstruct a full color image. We learn the camera sensor's color multiplexing pattern by encoding it as layer whose learnable weights determine which color channel, from among a fixed set, will be measured at each location. These weights are jointly trained with those of a reconstruction network that operates on the corresponding sensor measurements to produce a full color image. Our network achieves significant improvements in accuracy over the traditional Bayer pattern used in most color cameras. It automatically learns to employ a sparse color measurement approach similar to that of a recent design, and moreover, improves upon that design by learning an optimal layout for these measurements.

Learning accurate prior knowledge of natural images is of great importance for single image super-resolution (SR). Existing SR methods either learn the prior from the low/high-resolution patch pairs or estimate the prior models from the input low-resolution (LR) image. Specifically, high-frequency details are learned in the former methods. Though effective, they are heuristic and have limitations in dealing with blurred LR images; while the latter suffers from the limitations of frequency aliasing. In this paper, we propose to combine those two lines of ideas for image super-resolution. More specifically, the parametric sparse prior of the desirable high-resolution (HR) image patches are learned from both the input low-resolution (LR) image and a training image dataset. With the learned sparse priors, the sparse codes and thus the HR image patches can be accurately recovered by solving a sparse coding problem. Experimental results show that the proposed SR method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both subjective and objective image qualities.

Many tasks in AI require the collaboration of multiple agents. Typically, the communication protocol between agents is manually specified and not altered during training. In this paper we explore a simple neural model, called CommNet, that uses continuous communication for fully cooperative tasks. The model consists of multiple agents and the communication between them is learned alongside their policy. We apply this model to a diverse set of tasks, demonstrating the ability of the agents to learn to communicate amongst themselves, yielding improved performance over non-communicative agents and baselines. In some cases, it is possible to interpret the language devised by the agents, revealing simple but effective strategies for solving the task at hand.

Randomized features provide a computationally efficient way to approximate kernel machines in machine learning tasks. However, such methods require a user-defined kernel as input. We extend the randomized-feature approach to the task of learning a kernel (via its associated random features). Specifically, we present an efficient optimization problem that learns a kernel in a supervised manner. We prove the consistency of the estimated kernel as well as generalization bounds for the class of estimators induced by the optimized kernel, and we experimentally evaluate our technique on several datasets. Our approach is efficient and highly scalable, and we attain competitive results with a fraction of the training cost of other techniques.

We study the problem of learning influence functions under incomplete observations of node activations. Incomplete observations are a major concern as most (online and real-world) social networks are not fully observable. We establish both proper and improper PAC learnability of influence functions under randomly missing observations. Proper PAC learnability under the Discrete-Time Linear Threshold (DLT) and Discrete-Time Independent Cascade (DIC) models is established by reducing incomplete observations to complete observations in a modified graph. Our improper PAC learnability result applies for the DLT and DIC models as well as the Continuous-Time Independent Cascade (CIC) model. It is based on a parametrization in terms of reachability features, and also gives rise to an efficient and practical heuristic. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the ability of our method to compensate even for a fairly large fraction of missing observations.

In this work, we propose an infinite restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), whose maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) corresponds to a constrained convex optimization. We consider the Frank-Wolfe algorithm to solve the program, which provides a sparse solution that can be interpreted as inserting a hidden unit at each iteration, so that the optimization process takes the form of a sequence of finite models of increasing complexity. As a side benefit, this can be used to easily and efficiently identify an appropriate number of hidden units during the optimization. The resulting model can also be used as an initialization for typical state-of-the-art RBM training algorithms such as contrastive divergence, leading to models with consistently higher test likelihood than random initialization.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in using spectral methods for estimating latent variable models. However, it is usually assumed that the distribution of the observations conditioned on the latent variables is either discrete or belongs to a parametric family. In this paper, we study the estimation of an $m$-state hidden Markov model (HMM) with only smoothness assumptions, such as H\"olderian conditions, on the emission densities. By leveraging some recent advances in continuous linear algebra and numerical analysis, we develop a computationally efficient spectral algorithm for learning nonparametric HMMs. Our technique is based on computing an SVD on nonparametric estimates of density functions by viewing them as \emph{continuous matrices}. We derive sample complexity bounds via concentration results for nonparametric density estimation and novel perturbation theory results for continuous matrices. We implement our method using Chebyshev polynomial approximations. Our method is competitive with other baselines on synthetic and real problems and is also very computationally efficient.

In this paper we aim at facilitating generalization for deep networks while supporting interpretability of the learned representations. Towards this goal, we propose a clustering based regularization that encourages parsimonious representations. Our k-means style objective is easy to optimize and flexible supporting various forms of clustering, including sample and spatial clustering as well as co-clustering. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the tasks of unsupervised learning, classification, fine grained categorization and zero-shot learning.

We suggest a new loss for learning deep embeddings. The key characteristics of the new loss is the absence of tunable parameters and very good results obtained across a range of datasets and problems. The loss is computed by estimating two distribution of similarities for positive (matching) and negative (non-matching) point pairs, and then computing the probability of a positive pair to have a lower similarity score than a negative pair based on these probability estimates. We show that these operations can be performed in a simple and piecewise-differentiable manner using 1D histograms with soft assignment operations. This makes the proposed loss suitable for learning deep embeddings using stochastic optimization. The experiments reveal favourable results compared to recently proposed loss functions.