35 publications acceptées à NeurIPS pour les chercheurs de Mila

Mila est fier d’annoncer que ses membres s’illustrent dans le cadre de la 33e édition de la Conférence NeuRIPS, avec 35 publications acceptées et une implication à l’organisation de 9 ateliers.

L’événement, qui se tiendra du 8 au 14 décembre prochain à Vancouver, rassemble des chercheurs en apprentissage automatique de partout dans le monde.

Voici la liste complète des publications, ainsi qu’un aperçu des ateliers organisés ou co-organisés par des membres Mila.

Publications cosignées par des membres de Mila à NeurIPS 2019 (en anglais)

(1) Reducing Noise in GAN Training with Variance Reduced Extragradient

We study the effect of the stochastic gradient noise on the training of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and show that it can prevent the convergence of standard game optimization methods, while the batch version converges. We address this issue with a novel stochastic variance-reduced extragradient (SVRE) optimization algorithm that improves upon the best convergence rates proposed in the literature. We observe empirically that SVRE performs similarly to a batch method on MNIST while being computationally cheaper, and that SVRE yields more stable GAN training on standard datasets.
Tatjana Chavdarova, Gauthier Gidel, François Fleuret, Simon Lacoste-Julien

(2) vGraph: A Generative Model for Joint Community Detection and Node Representation Learning

This paper focuses on two fundamental tasks of graph analysis: community detection and node representation learning, which capture the global and local structures of graphs, respectively. In the current literature, these two tasks are usually independently studied while they are actually highly correlated. We propose a probabilistic generative model called vGraph to learn community membership and node representation collaboratively. Specifically, we assume that each node can be represented as a mixture of communities, and each community is defined as a multinomial distribution over nodes. Both the mixing coefficients and the community distribution are parameterized by the low-dimensional representations of the nodes and communities. We designed an effective variational inference algorithm which regularizes the community membership of neighboring nodes to be similar in the latent space. Experimental results on multiple real-world graphs show that vGraph is very effective in both community detection and node representation learning, outperforming many competitive baselines in both tasks. We show that the framework of vGraph is quite flexible and can be easily extended to detect hierarchical communities.
Fan-Yun Sun, Meng Qu, Jordan Hoffmann, Chin-Wei Huang, Jian Tang

(3) Implicit Regularization of Discrete Gradient Dynamics in Deep Linear Neural Networks

When optimizing over-parameterized models, such as deep neural networks, a large set of parameters can achieve zero training error. In such cases, the choice of the optimization algorithm and its respective hyper-parameters introduces biases that will lead to convergence to specific minimizers of the objective. Consequently, this choice can be considered as an implicit regularization for the training of over-parametrized models. In this work, we push this idea further by studying the discrete gradient dynamics of the training of a two-layer linear network with the least-square loss. Using a time rescaling, we show that, with a vanishing initialization and a small enough step size, this dynamics sequentially learns components that are the solutions of a reduced-rank regression with a gradually increasing rank.
Gauthier Gidel, Francis Bach, Simon Lacoste-Julien

(4) Painless Stochastic Gradient: Interpolation, Line-Search, and Convergence Rates

Recent works have shown that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) achieves the fast convergence rates of full-batch gradient descent for over-parameterized models satisfying certain interpolation conditions. However, the step-size used in these works depends on unknown quantities, and SGD’s practical performance heavily relies on the choice of the step-size. We propose to use line-search methods to automatically set the step-size when training models that can interpolate the data. We prove that SGD with the classic Armijo line-search attains the fast convergence rates of full-batch gradient descent in convex and strongly-convex settings. We also show that under additional assumptions, SGD with a modified line-search can attain a fast rate of convergence for non-convex functions. Furthermore, we show that a stochastic extra-gradient method with a Lipschitz line-search attains a fast convergence rate for an important class of non-convex functions and saddle-point problems satisfying interpolation. We then give heuristics to use larger step-sizes and acceleration with our line-search techniques. We compare the proposed algorithms against numerous optimization methods for standard classification tasks using both kernel methods and deep networks. The proposed methods are robust and result in competitive performance across all models and datasets. Moreover, for the deep network models, SGD with our line-search results in both faster convergence and better generalization.
Sharan Vaswani, Aaron Mishkin, Issam Laradji, Mark Schmidt, Gauthier Gidel, Simon Lacoste-Julien

(5) On Adversarial Mixup Resynthesis

In this paper, we explore new approaches to combining information encoded within the learned representations of auto-encoders. We explore models that are capable of combining the attributes of multiple inputs such that a resynthesised output is trained to fool an adversarial discriminator for real versus synthesised data. Furthermore, we explore the use of such an architecture in the context of semi-supervised learning, where we learn a mixing function whose objective is to produce interpolations of hidden states, or masked combinations of latent representations that are consistent with a conditioned class label. We show quantitative and qualitative evidence that such a formulation is an interesting avenue of research.
Christopher Beckham, Sina Honari, Vikas Verma, Alex Lamb, Farnoosh Ghadiri, R Devon Hjelm, Yoshua Bengio, Christopher Pal

(6) No-Press Diplomacy: Modeling Multi-Agent Gameplay

Diplomacy is a seven-player non-stochastic, non-cooperative game, where agents acquire resources through a mix of teamwork and betrayal. Reliance on trust and coordination makes Diplomacy the first non-cooperative multi-agent benchmark for complex sequential social dilemmas in a rich environment. In this work, we focus on training an agent that learns to play the No Press version of Diplomacy where there is no dedicated communication channel between players. We present DipNet, a neural-network-based policy model for No Press Diplomacy. The model was trained on a new dataset of more than 150,000 human games. Our model is trained by supervised learning (SL) from expert trajectories, which is then used to initialize a reinforcement learning (RL) agent trained through self-play. Both the SL and RL agents demonstrate state-of-the-art No Press performance by beating popular rule-based bots.
Philip Paquette, Yuchen Lu, Steven Bocco, Max O. Smith, Satya Ortiz-Gagne, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Satinder Singh, Joelle Pineau, Aaron Courville

(7) Reducing the variance in online optimization by transporting past gradients

Most stochastic optimization methods use gradients once before discarding them. While variance reduction methods have shown that reusing past gradients can be beneficial when there is a finite number of datapoints, they do not easily extend to the online setting. One issue is the staleness due to using past gradients. We propose to correct this staleness using the idea of implicit gradient transport (IGT) which transforms gradients computed at previous iterates into gradients evaluated at the current iterate without using the Hessian explicitly. In addition to reducing the variance and bias of our updates over time, IGT can be used as a drop-in replacement for the gradient estimate in a number of well-understood methods such as heavy ball or Adam. We show experimentally that it achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of architectures and benchmarks. Additionally, the IGT gradient estimator yields the optimal asymptotic convergence rate for online stochastic optimization in the restricted setting where the Hessians of all component functions are equal.
Sébastien M. R. Arnold, Pierre-Antoine Manzagol, Reza Babanezhad, Ioannis Mitliagkas, Nicolas Le Roux

(8) Updates of Equilibrium Prop Match Gradients of Backprop Through Time in an RNN with Static Input

Equilibrium Propagation (EP) is a biologically inspired learning algorithm for convergent recurrent neural networks, i.e. RNNs that are fed by a static input x and settle to a steady state. Training convergent RNNs consists in adjusting the weights until the steady state of output neurons coincides with a target y. Convergent RNNs can also be trained with the more conventional Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) algorithm. In its original formulation EP was described in the case of real-time neuronal dynamics, which is computationally costly. In this work, we introduce a discrete-time version of EP with simplified equations and with reduced simulation time, bringing EP closer to practical machine learning tasks. We first prove theoretically, as well as numerically that the neural and weight updates of EP, computed by forward-time dynamics, are step-by-step equal to the ones obtained by BPTT, with gradients computed backward in time. The equality is strict when the transition function of the dynamics derives from a primitive function and the steady state is maintained long enough. We then show for more standard discrete-time neural network dynamics that the same property is approximately respected and we subsequently demonstrate training with EP with equivalent performance to BPTT. In particular, we define the first convolutional architecture trained with EP achieving ~ 1% test error on MNIST, which is the lowest error reported with EP. These results can guide the development of deep neural networks trained with EP.
Maxence Ernoult, Julie Grollier, Damien Querlioz, Yoshua Bengio, Benjamin Scellier

(9) Probabilistic Logic Neural Networks for Reasoning

Knowledge graph reasoning, which aims at predicting the missing facts through reasoning with the observed facts, is critical to many applications. Such a problem has been widely explored by traditional logic rule-based approaches and recent knowledge graph embedding methods. A principled logic rule-based approach is the Markov Logic Network (MLN), which is able to leverage domain knowledge with first-order logic and meanwhile handle their uncertainty. However, the inference of MLNs is usually very difficult due to the complicated graph structures. Different from MLNs, knowledge graph embedding methods (e.g. TransE, DistMult) learn effective entity and relation embeddings for reasoning, which are much more effective and efficient. However, they are unable to leverage domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose the probabilistic Logic Neural Network (pLogicNet), which combines the advantages of both methods. A pLogicNet defines the joint distribution of all possible triplets by using a Markov logic network with first-order logic, which can be efficiently optimized with the variational EM algorithm. In the E-step, a knowledge graph embedding model is used for inferring the missing triplets, while in the M-step, the weights of logic rules are updated based on both the observed and predicted triplets. Experiments on multiple knowledge graphs prove the effectiveness of pLogicNet over many competitive baselines.
Meng Qu, Jian Tang

(10) Unsupervised State Representation Learning in Atari

State representation learning, or the ability to capture latent generative factors of an environment, is crucial for building intelligent agents that can perform a wide variety of tasks. Learning such representations without supervision from rewards is a challenging open problem. We introduce a method that learns state representations by maximizing mutual information across spatially and temporally distinct features of a neural encoder of the observations. We also introduce a new benchmark based on Atari 2600 games where we evaluate representations based on how well they capture the ground truth state variables. We believe this new framework for evaluating representation learning models will be crucial for future representation learning research. Finally, we compare our technique with other state-of-the-art generative and contrastive representation learning methods.
Ankesh Anand, Evan Racah, Sherjil Ozair, Yoshua Bengio, Marc-Alexandre Côté, R Devon Hjelm

(11) How to Initialize your Network? Robust Initialization for WeightNorm & ResNets

Residual networks (ResNet) and weight normalization play an important role in various deep learning applications. However, parameter initialization strategies have not been studied previously for weight normalized networks and, in practice, initialization methods designed for un-normalized networks are used as a proxy. Similarly, initialization for ResNets have also been studied for un-normalized networks and often under simplified settings ignoring the shortcut connection. To address these issues, we propose a novel parameter initialization strategy that avoids explosion/vanishment of information across layers for weight normalized networks with and without residual connections. The proposed strategy is based on a theoretical analysis using mean field approximation. We run over 2,500 experiments and evaluate our proposal on image datasets showing that the proposed initialization outperforms existing initialization methods in terms of generalization performance, robustness to hyper-parameter values and variance between seeds, especially when networks get deeper in which case existing methods fail to even start training. Finally, we show that using our initialization in conjunction with learning rate warmup is able to reduce the gap between the performance of weight normalized and batch normalized networks.
Devansh Arpit, Victor Campos, Yoshua Bengio

(12) Break the Ceiling: Stronger Multi-scale Deep Graph Convolutional Networks

Recently, neural network based approaches have achieved significant improvement for solving large, complex, graph-structured problems. However, their bottlenecks still need to be addressed, and the advantages of multi-scale information and deep architectures have not been sufficiently exploited. In this paper, we theoretically analyze how existing Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have limited expressive power due to the constraint of the activation functions and their architectures. We generalize spectral graph convolution and deep GCN in block Krylov subspace forms and devise two architectures, both with the potential to be scaled deeper but each making use of the multi-scale information in different ways. We further show that the equivalence of these two architectures can be established under certain conditions. On several node classification tasks, with or without the help of validation, the two new architectures achieve better performance compared to many state-of-the-art methods.
Sitao Luan, Mingde Zhao, Xiao-Wen Chang, Doina Precup

(13) Gradient based sample selection for online continual learning

A continual learning agent learns online with a non-stationary and never-ending stream of data. The key to such learning process is to overcome the catastrophic forgetting of previously seen data, which is a well known problem of neural networks. To prevent forgetting, a replay buffer is usually employed to store the previous data for the purpose of rehearsal. Previous works often depend on task boundary and i.i.d. assumptions to properly select samples for the replay buffer. In this work, we formulate sample selection as a constraint reduction problem based on the constrained optimization view of continual learning. The goal is to select a fixed subset of constraints that best approximate the feasible region defined by the original constraints. We show that it is equivalent to maximizing the diversity of samples in the replay buffer with parameters gradient as the feature. We further develop a greedy alternative that is cheap and efficient. The advantage of the proposed method is demonstrated by comparing to other alternatives under the continual learning setting. Further comparisons are made against state of the art methods that rely on task boundaries which show comparable or even better results for our method.
Rahaf Aljundi, Min Lin, Baptiste Goujaud, Yoshua Bengio

(14) Online Continual Learning with Maximal Interfered Retrieval

Continual learning, the setting where a learning agent is faced with a never ending stream of data, continues to be a great challenge for modern machine learning systems. In particular the online or “single-pass through the data” setting has gained attention recently as a natural setting that is difficult to tackle. Methods based on replay, either generative or from a stored memory, have been shown to be effective approaches for continual learning, matching or exceeding the state of the art in a number of standard benchmarks. These approaches typically rely on randomly selecting samples from the replay memory or from a generative model, which is suboptimal. In this work we consider a controlled sampling of memories for replay. We retrieve the samples which are most interfered, i.e. whose prediction will be most negatively impacted by the foreseen parameters update. We show a formulation for this sampling criterion in both the generative replay and the experience replay setting, producing consistent gains in performance and greatly reduced forgetting.
Rahaf Aljundi, Lucas Caccia, Eugene Belilovsky, Massimo Caccia, Min Lin, Laurent Charlin, Tinne Tuytelaars

(15) Non-normal Recurrent Neural Network (nnRNN): learning long time dependencies while improving expressivity with transient dynamics

A recent strategy to circumvent the exploding and vanishing gradient problem in RNNs, and to allow the stable propagation of signals over long time scales, is to constrain recurrent connectivity matrices to be orthogonal or unitary. This ensures eigenvalues with unit norm and thus stable dynamics and training. However this comes at the cost of reduced expressivity due to the limited variety of orthogonal transformations. We propose a novel connectivity structure based on the Schur decomposition and a splitting of the Schur form into normal and non-normal parts. This allows to parametrize matrices with unit-norm eigenspectra without orthogonality constraints on eigenbases. The resulting architecture ensures access to a larger space of spectrally constrained matrices, of which orthogonal matrices are a subset. This crucial difference retains the stability advantages and training speed of orthogonal RNNs while enhancing expressivity, especially on tasks that require computations over ongoing input sequences.
Giancarlo Kerg, Kyle Goyette, Maximilian Puelma Touzel, Gauthier Gidel, Eugene Vorontsov, Yoshua Bengio, Guillaume Lajoie

(16) Exact Combinatorial Optimization with Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

Combinatorial optimization problems are typically tackled by the branch-and-bound paradigm. We propose a new graph convolutional neural network model for learning branch-and-bound variable selection policies, which leverages the natural variable-constraint bipartite graph representation of mixed-integer linear programs. We train our model via imitation learning from the strong branching expert rule, and demonstrate on a series of hard problems that our approach produces policies that improve upon state-of-the-art machine-learning methods for branching and generalize to instances significantly larger than seen during training. Moreover, we improve for the first time over expert-designed branching rules implemented in a state-of-the-art solver on large problems. Code for reproducing all the experiments can be found at this https URL.
Maxime Gasse, Didier Chételat, Nicola Ferroni, Laurent Charlin, Andrea Lodi

(17) Wasserstein Dependency Measure for Representation Learning

Mutual information maximization has emerged as a powerful learning objective for unsupervised representation learning obtaining state-of-the-art performance in applications such as object recognition, speech recognition, and reinforcement learning. However, such approaches are fundamentally limited since a tight lower bound of mutual information requires sample size exponential in the mutual information. This limits the applicability of these approaches for prediction tasks with high mutual information, such as in video understanding or reinforcement learning. In these settings, such techniques are prone to overfit, both in theory and in practice, and capture only a few of the relevant factors of variation. This leads to incomplete representations that are not optimal for downstream tasks. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that mutual information-based representation learning approaches do fail to learn complete representations on a number of designed and real-world tasks. To mitigate these problems we introduce the Wasserstein dependency measure, which learns more complete representations by using the Wasserstein distance instead of the KL divergence in the mutual information estimator. We show that a practical approximation to this theoretically motivated solution, constructed using Lipschitz constraint techniques from the GAN literature, achieves substantially improved results on tasks where incomplete representations are a major challenge.
Sherjil Ozair, Corey Lynch, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron van den Oord, Sergey Levine, Pierre Sermanet

(18) Gossip-based Actor-Learner Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Multi-simulator training has contributed to the recent success of Deep Reinforcement Learning by stabilizing learning and allowing for higher training throughputs. We propose Gossip-based Actor-Learner Architectures (GALA) where several actor-learners (such as A2C agents) are organized in a peer-to-peer communication topology, and exchange information through asynchronous gossip in order to take advantage of a large number of distributed simulators. We prove that GALA agents remain within an epsilon-ball of one-another during training when using loosely coupled asynchronous communication. By reducing the amount of synchronization between agents, GALA is more computationally efficient and scalable compared to A2C, its fully-synchronous counterpart. GALA also outperforms A2C, being more robust and sample efficient. We show that we can run several loosely coupled GALA agents in parallel on a single GPU and achieve significantly higher hardware utilization and frame-rates than vanilla A2C at comparable power draws.
Mahmoud Assran, Joshua Romoff, Nicolas Ballas, Joelle Pineau, Mike Rabbat

(19) Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views

We propose an approach to self-supervised representation learning based on maximizing mutual information between features extracted from multiple views of a shared context. For example, one could produce multiple views of a local spatio-temporal context by observing it from different locations (e.g., camera positions within a scene), and via different modalities (e.g., tactile, auditory, or visual). Or, an ImageNet image could provide a context from which one produces multiple views by repeatedly applying data augmentation. Maximizing mutual information between features extracted from these views requires capturing information about high-level factors whose influence spans multiple views — e.g., presence of certain objects or occurrence of certain events. Following our proposed approach, we develop a model which learns image representations that significantly outperform prior methods on the tasks we consider. Most notably, using self-supervised learning, our model learns representations which achieve 68.1% accuracy on ImageNet using standard linear evaluation. This beats prior results by over 12% and concurrent results by 7%. When we extend our model to use mixture-based representations, segmentation behaviour emerges as a natural side-effect. Our code is available online: this https URL.
Philip Bachman, R Devon Hjelm, William Buchwalter

(20) Learning Neural Networks with Adaptive Regularization

Feed-forward neural networks can be understood as a combination of an intermediate representation and a linear hypothesis. While most previous works aim to diversify the representations, we explore the complementary direction by performing an adaptive and data-dependent regularization motivated by the empirical Bayes method. Specifically, we propose to construct a matrix-variate normal prior (on weights) whose covariance matrix has a Kronecker product structure. This structure is designed to capture the correlations in neurons through backpropagation. Under the assumption of this Kronecker factorization, the prior encourages neurons to borrow statistical strength from one another. Hence, it leads to an adaptive and data-dependent regularization when training networks on small datasets. To optimize the model, we present an efficient block coordinate descent algorithm with analytical solutions. Empirically, we demonstrate that the proposed method helps networks converge to local optima with smaller stable ranks and spectral norms. These properties suggest better generalizations and we present empirical results to support this expectation. We also verify the effectiveness of the approach on multiclass classification and multitask regression problems with various network structures.
Han Zhao, Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Geoffrey J. Gordon

(21) Inherent Tradeoffs in Learning Fair Representation

With the prevalence of machine learning in high-stakes applications, especially the ones regulated by anti-discrimination laws or societal norms, it is crucial to ensure that the predictive models do not propagate any existing bias or discrimination. Due to the ability of deep neural nets to learn rich representations, recent advances in algorithmic fairness have focused on learning fair representations with adversarial techniques to reduce bias in data while preserving utility simultaneously. In this paper, through the lens of information theory, we provide the first result that quantitatively characterizes the tradeoff between demographic parity and the joint utility across different population groups. Specifically, when the base rates differ between groups, we show that any method aiming to learn fair representation admits an information-theoretic lower bound on the joint error across these groups. To complement our negative results, we also prove that if the optimal decision functions across different groups are close, then learning fair representation leads to an alternative notion of fairness, known as the accuracy parity, which states that the error rates are close between groups. Our theoretical findings are also confirmed empirically on real-world datasets. We believe our insights contribute to better understanding of the tradeoff between utility and different notions of fairness.
Han Zhao, Geoffrey J. Gordon

(22) A Geometric Perspective on Optimal Representations for Reinforcement Learning

We propose a new perspective on representation learning in reinforcement learning based on geometric properties of the space of value functions. We leverage this perspective to provide formal evidence regarding the usefulness of value functions as auxiliary tasks. Our formulation considers adapting the representation to minimize the (linear) approximation of the value function of all stationary policies for a given environment. We show that this optimization reduces to making accurate predictions regarding a special class of value functions which we call adversarial value functions (AVFs). We demonstrate that using value functions as auxiliary tasks corresponds to an expected-error relaxation of our formulation, with AVFs a natural candidate, and identify a close relationship with proto-value functions (Mahadevan, 2005). We highlight characteristics of AVFs and their usefulness as auxiliary tasks in a series of experiments on the four-room domain.
Marc G. Bellemare, Will Dabney, Robert Dadashi, Adrien Ali Taiga, Pablo Samuel Castro, Nicolas Le Roux, Dale Schuurmans, Tor Lattimore, Clare Lyle

(23) Towards modular and programmable architecture search

Neural architecture search methods are able to find high performance deep learning architectures with minimal effort from an expert. However, current systems focus on specific use-cases (e.g. convolutional image classifiers and recurrent language models), making them unsuitable for general use-cases that an expert might wish to write. Hyperparameter optimization systems are general-purpose but lack the constructs needed for easy application to architecture search. In this work, we propose a formal language for encoding search spaces over general computational graphs. The language constructs allow us to write modular, composable, and reusable search space encodings and to reason about search space design. We use our language to encode search spaces from the architecture search literature. The language allows us to decouple the implementations of the search space and the search algorithm, allowing us to expose search spaces to search algorithms through a consistent interface. Our experiments show the ease with which we can experiment with different combinations of search spaces and search algorithms without having to implement each combination from scratch. We release an implementation of our language with this paper.
Renato Negrinho, Matthew Gormley, Geoffrey J. Gordon, Darshan Patil, Nghia Le, Daniel Ferreira

(24) Variational Temporal Abstraction

We introduce a variational approach to learning and inference of temporally hierarchical structure and representation for sequential data. We propose the Variational Temporal Abstraction (VTA), a hierarchical recurrent state space model that can infer the latent temporal structure and thus perform the stochastic state transition hierarchically. We also propose to apply this model to implement the jumpy-imagination ability in imagination-augmented agent-learning in order to improve the efficiency of the imagination. In experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed method can model 2D and 3D visual sequence datasets with interpretable temporal structure discovery and that its application to jumpy imagination enables more efficient agent-learning in a 3D navigation task.
Taesup Kim, Sungjin Ahn, Yoshua Bengio

(25) Efficient Graph Generation with Graph Recurrent Attention Networks

We propose a new family of efficient and expressive deep generative models of graphs, called Graph Recurrent Attention Networks (GRANs). Our model generates graphs one block of nodes and associated edges at a time. The block size and sampling stride allow us to trade off sample quality for efficiency. Compared to previous RNN-based graph generative models, our framework better captures the auto-regressive conditioning between the already-generated and to-be-generated parts of the graph using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with attention. This not only reduces the dependency on node ordering but also bypasses the long-term bottleneck caused by the sequential nature of RNNs. Moreover, we parameterize the output distribution per block using a mixture of Bernoulli, which captures the correlations among generated edges within the block. Finally, we propose to handle node orderings in generation by marginalizing over a family of canonical orderings. On standard benchmarks, we achieve state-of-the-art time efficiency and sample quality compared to previous models. Additionally, we show our model is capable of generating large graphs of up to 5K nodes with good quality. To the best of our knowledge, GRAN is the first deep graph generative model that can scale to this size. Our code is released at: this https URL.
Renjie Liao, Yujia Li, Yang Song, Shenlong Wang, Will Hamilton, David Duvenaud, Raquel Urtasun, Richard Zemel

(26) Real-Time Reinforcement Learning

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) — the mathematical framework underlying most algorithms in Reinforcement Learning (RL), are often used in a way that wrongfully assumes that the state of an agent’s environment does not change during action selection. As RL systems based on MDPs begin to find application in real-world safety critical situations this mismatch between the assumptions underlying classical MDPs and the reality of real-time computation may lead to undesirable outcomes. In this paper we introduce a new framework, in which states and actions evolve simultaneously, we show how it is related to the classical MDP formulation. We analyze existing algorithms under the new real-time formulation and show why they might be suboptimal when used in real-time. We then use those insights to create a new algorithm Real-Time Actor Critic (RTAC) that outperforms the existing state-of-the-art continuous control algorithm Soft Actor Critic both in real-time and non-real-time settings.
Simon Ramstedt, Chris Pal

(27) Neural Multisensory Scene Inference

For embodied agents to infer representations of the underlying 3D physical world they inhabit, they should efficiently combine multisensory cues from numerous trials, e.g., by looking at and touching objects. Despite its importance, multisen-sory 3D scene representation learning has received less attention compared to the unimodal setting. In this paper, we propose the Generative Multisensory Network(GMN) for learning latent representations of 3D scenes which are partially observable through multiple sensory modalities. We also introduce a novel method, called the Amortized Product-of-Experts, to improve the computational efficiency and the robustness to unseen combinations of modalities at test time. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can efficiently infer robust modality-invariant 3D-scene representations from arbitrary combinations of modalities and perform accurate cross-modal generation. To perform this exploration, we also develop the Multisensory Embodied 3D-Scene Environment (MESE).
Jae Hyun Lim, Pedro O. Pinheiro, Negar Rostamzadeh, Chris Pal, Sungjin Ahn

(28) Ordered Memory

Stack-augmented recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been of interest to the deep learning community for some time. However, the difficulty of training memory models remains a problem obstructing the widespread use of such models. In this paper, we propose the Ordered Memory architecture. Inspired by Ordered Neurons (Shen et al., 2018), we introduce a new Stick-breaking Attention Mechanism and use its cumulative probability to control the writing and erasing opera- tion of memory. We also introduce a new Gated Recursive Cell to compose lower level representations into higher level representation. We demonstrate that our model achieves strong performance on the logical inference task (Bowman et al.,2015) and the ListOps (Nangia and Bowman, 2018) task. We can also interpret the model to retrieve the induced tree structure, and find that these induced structures align with the ground truth. Finally, we evaluate our model on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank tasks (Socher et al., 2013), and find that it performs comparatively with the state-of-the-art methods in the literature.
Yikang Shen, Shawn Tan, Seyed, Arian Hossini, Zhouhan Lin, Alessandro Sordoni, Aaron Courville

(29) MelGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Conditional Waveform Synthesis

Previous works (Donahue et al., 2018a; Engel et al., 2019) have found that generating coherent raw audio waveforms with GANs is challenging. In this paper, we show that it is possible to train GANs reliably to generate high quality coherent waveforms by introducing a set of architectural changes and simple training techniques. Subjective evaluation metric (Mean Opinion Score, or MOS) suggests that our model is state-of-the-art for mel-spectrogram inversion. To establish the generality of the proposed techniques, we show qualitative results of our model in speech synthesis, music domain translation and unconditional music synthesis. We evaluate the various components of the model through ablation studies and suggest a set of guidelines to design general purpose discriminators and generators for conditional sequence synthesis tasks. Our model is non-autoregressive, fully convolutional, with significantly fewer parameters than competing models and generalizes to unseen speakers for mel-spectrogram inversion. Our pytorch implementation runs at more than 100x faster than realtime on GTX 1080Ti GPU and more than 2x faster than real-time on CPU, without any hardware specific optimization tricks.
Kundan Kumar, Rithesh Kumar, Thibault de Boissiere, Lucas Gestin, Wei Zhen Teoh, Jose Sotelo, Alexandre de Brébisson, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville

(30) The Option Keyboard: Combining Skills in Reinforcement Learning

The ability to combine known skills to create new ones may be crucial in the solution of complex reinforcement learning problems that unfold over extended periods. We argue that a robust way of combining skills is to define and manipulate them in the space of pseudo-rewards (or “cumulants”). Based on this premise, we propose a framework for combining skills using the formalism of options. We show that every deterministic option can be unambiguously represented as a cumulant defined in an extended domain. Building on this insight and on previous results on transfer learning, we show how to approximate options whose cumulants are linear combinations of the cumulants of known options. This means that, once we have learned options associated with a set of cumulants, we can instantaneously synthesise options induced by any linear combination of them, without any learning involved. We describe how this framework provides a hierarchical interface to the environment whose abstract actions correspond to combinations of basic skills. We demonstrate the practical benefits of our approach in a resource management problem and a navigation task involving a quadrupedal simulated robot.
Andre Barreto, Diana Borsa, Shaobo Hou, Gheorghe Comanici, Eser Aygun, Philippe Hamel, Daniel Toyama, Jonathan J Hunt, Shibl Mourad, David Silver, Doina Precup

(31) Hindsight Credit Assignment

We consider the problem of efficient credit assignment in reinforcement learning. In order to efficiently and meaningfully utilize new data, we propose to explicitly assign credit to past decisions based on the likelihood of them having led to the observed outcome. This approach uses new information in hindsight, rather than employing foresight. Somewhat surprisingly, we show that value functions can be rewritten through this lens, yielding a new family of algorithms. We study the properties of these algorithms, and empirically show that they successfully address important credit assignment challenges, through a set of illustrative tasks.
Anna Harutyunyan, Will Dabney, Thomas Mesnard, Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar, Bilal Piot, Nicolas Heess, Hado van Hasselt, Gregory Wayne, Satinder Singh, Doina Precup, Remi Munos

(32) Neural Similarity Learning

Inner product-based convolution has been the founding stone of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), enabling end-to-end learning of visual representation. By generalizing inner product with a bilinear matrix, we propose the neural similarity which serves as a learnable parametric similarity measure for CNNs. Neural similarity naturally generalizes the convolution and enhances flexibility. Further, we consider the neural similarity learning (NSL) in order to learn the neural similarity adaptively from training data. Specifically, we propose two different ways of learning the neural similarity: static NSL and dynamic NSL. Interestingly, dynamic neural similarity makes the CNN become a dynamic inference network. By regularizing the bilinear matrix, NSL can be viewed as learning the shape of kernel and the similarity measure simultaneously. We further justify the effectiveness of NSL with a theoretical viewpoint. Most importantly, NSL shows promising performance in visual recognition and few-shot learning, validating the superiority of NSL over the inner product-based convolution counterparts.
Weiyang Liu, Zhen Liu, James M Rehg, Le Song

(33) Fast AutoAugment

Data augmentation is an essential technique for improving generalization ability of deep learning models. Recently, AutoAugment has been proposed as an algorithm to automatically search for augmentation policies from a dataset and has significantly enhanced performances on many image recognition tasks. However, its search method requires thousands of GPU hours even for a relatively small dataset. In this paper, we propose an algorithm called Fast AutoAugment that finds effective augmentation policies via a more efficient search strategy based on density matching. In comparison to AutoAugment, the proposed algorithm speeds up the search time by orders of magnitude while achieves comparable performances on image recognition tasks with various models and datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet.
Sungbin Lim, Ildoo Kim, Taesup Kim (Mila / Kakao Brain), Chiheon Kim, Sungwoong Kim

(34) Exponential Family Estimation via Adversarial Dynamics Embedding

We present an efficient algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of the general exponential family, even in cases when the energy function is represented by a deep neural network. We consider the primal-dual view of the MLE for the kinectics augmented model, which naturally introduces an adversarial dual sampler. The sampler will be represented by a novel neural network architectures, dynamics embeddings, mimicking the dynamical-based samplers, e.g., Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo and its variants. The dynamics embedding parametrization inherits the flexibility from HMC, and provides tractable entropy estimation of the augmented model. Meanwhile, it couples the adversarial dual samplers with the primal model, reducing memory and sample complexity. We further show that several existing estimators, including contrastive divergence (Hinton, 2002), score matching (Hyvärinen, 2005), pseudo-likelihood (Besag, 1975), noise-contrastive estimation (Gutmann and Hyvärinen, 2010), non-local contrastive objectives (Vickrey et al., 2010), and minimum probability flow (Sohl-Dickstein et al., 2011), can be recast as the special cases of the proposed method with different prefixed dual samplers. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the superiority of the proposed estimator against existing state-of-the-art methods on synthetic and real-world benchmarks.
Bo Dai, Zhen Liu, Hanjun Dai, Niao He, Arthur Gretton, Le Song, Dale Schuurmans

(35) Adaptive Cross-Modal Few-shot Learning

Metric-based meta-learning techniques have successfully been applied to few-shot classification problems. In this paper, we propose to leverage cross-modal information to enhance metric-based few-shot learning methods. Visual and semantic feature spaces have different structures by definition. For certain concepts, visual features might be richer and more discriminative than text ones. While for others, the inverse might be true. Moreover, when the support from visual information is limited in image classification, semantic representations (learned from unsupervised text corpora) can provide strong prior knowledge and context to help learning. Based on these two intuitions, we propose a mechanism that can adaptively combine information from both modalities according to new image categories to be learned. Through a series of experiments, we show that by this adaptive combination of the two modalities, our model outperforms current uni-modality few-shot learning methods and modality-alignment methods by a large margin on all benchmarks and few-shot scenarios tested. Experiments also show that our model can effectively adjust its focus on the two modalities. The improvement in performance is particularly large when the number of shots is very small.
Chen Xing, Negar Rostamzadeh, Boris Oreshkin, Pedro O. Pinheiro

Ateliers NeurIPS 2019 animés par les membres Mila

(1) Graph Representation Learning – Vendredi 13 décembre ou samedi 14 décembre, 8:45AM – 5:30PM

Organisateur membre de Mila : William L. Hamilton

Résumé : Graph-structured data is ubiquitous throughout the natural and social sciences, from telecommunication networks to quantum chemistry. Building relational inductive biases into deep learning architectures is crucial if we want systems that can learn, reason, and generalize from this kind of data. The workshop will consist of contributed talks, contributed posters, and invited talks on a wide variety of methods and problems in this area.

(2) Retrospectives: A Venue for Self-Reflection in ML Research – Vendredi 13 décembre, 08:00 AM – 06:00 PM

Organisateurs membres de Mila : Ryan Lowe · Yoshua Bengio · Joelle Pineau · Shagun Sodhani · Kanika Madan · Koustuv Sinha · Xavier Bouthillier

Résumé : The NeurIPS Retrospectives Workshop is about reflecting on machine learning research. In addition to publishing meta-analysis papers on the state of the field, this workshop will kick-start the exploration of a new kind of scientific publication, called retrospectives. A retrospective is written about a single paper, by that paper’s author, and takes the form of an informal blog post. The purpose of a retrospective is to answer the question: “What should readers of this paper know now, that is not in the original publication?” The overarching goal of retrospectives is to do better science, increase the openness and accessibility of the machine learning field, and to show that it’s okay to make mistakes.

(3) Biological and Artificial Reinforcement Learning – Vendredi 13 décembre, 08:00 AM – 06:00 PM

Organisateurs membres de Mila : Raymond Chua · Blake Richards · Doina Precup

Résumé : Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms learn how to interact with the environment guided by reward signals. Reinforcement learning theory has provided a normative perspective and framework to study how animals and humans learn through rewards. With the progression of time, biological and artificial reinforcement learning have contributed to their reciprocal development by informing and inspiring each other. This workshop will bring together a vast array of researchers interested in biological and artificial RL, with the aim of both gaining inspiration from neural and cognitive mechanisms to tackle current challenges in RL research for designing intelligent agents as well as using machine learning theory to further our understanding humans’ or animals’ brain and behaviour.

(4) The Optimization Foundations of Reinforcement Learning – Samedi 14 décembre, 08:00 AM – 06:00 PM

Organisateurs membres de Mila : Nicolas Le Roux

Résumé : Research in RL remains hampered by limited theoretical understanding, making the field overly reliant on empirical exploration with insufficient principles to guide future development. Recently, fundamental concepts from optimization and control theory have provided a fresh perspective that has led to the development of sound RL algorithms with provable efficiency. The goal of this workshop is to catalyze the growing synergy between RL and optimization research, promoting a rational reconsideration of the foundational principles for reinforcement learning, and bridging the gap between theory and practice.

(5) Joint Workshop on AI for Social Good – Saturday December 14th 08:00 AM

Organisateurs membres de Mila : Margaux Luck · Tristan Sylvain · Myriam Côté · Yoshua Bengio

Résumé : The accelerating pace of intelligent system research and real world deployment presents three clear challenges for producing “good” intelligent systems: (1) the research community lacks incentives and venues for results centered on social impact, (2) deployed systems often produce unintended negative consequences, and (3) there is little consensus for public policy that maximizes “good” social impacts, while minimizing the likelihood of harm. As a result, researchers often find themselves without a clear path to positive real world impact. The Workshop on AI for Social Good addresses these challenges by bringing together machine learning researchers, social impact leaders, ethicists, and public policy leaders to present their ideas and applications for maximizing the social good.

(6) Deep Reinforcement Learning – Samedi 14 décembre, 08:00 AM – 06:00 PM

Organisateurs membres de Mila : Joelle Pineau

Résumé : In recent years, the use of deep neural networks as function approximators has enabled researchers to extend reinforcement learning techniques to solve increasingly complex control tasks. The emerging field of deep reinforcement learning has led to remarkable empirical results in rich and varied domains like robotics, strategy games, and multiagent interaction. This workshop will bring together researchers working at the intersection of deep learning and reinforcement learning, and it will help interested researchers outside of the field gain a high-level view about the current state of the art and potential directions for future contributions.

(7) Tackling Climate Change with ML – Samedi 14 décembre, 08:00 AM – 06:00 PM

Organisateurs membres de Mila : Tegan Maharaj · Yoshua Bengio

Résumé : Climate change is one of the greatest problems society has ever faced, with increasingly severe consequences for humanity as natural disasters multiply, sea levels rise, and ecosystems falter. Since climate change is a complex issue, action takes many forms, from designing smart electric grids to tracking greenhouse gas emissions through satellite imagery. While no silver bullet, machine learning can be an invaluable tool in fighting climate change via a wide array of applications and techniques. These applications require algorithmic innovations in machine learning and close collaboration with diverse fields and practitioners. This workshop is intended as a forum for those in the machine learning community who wish to help tackle climate change.

(8) Real Neurons & Hidden Units: future directions at the intersection of neuroscience and AI – Samedi 14 décembre, 08:00 AM – 06:00 PM

Organisateurs membres de Mila : Guillaume Lajoie · Maximilian Puelma Touzel · Jessica Thompson

Résumé : Neuroscience and AI have a long and entangled history. However, the recent explosion of AI and the development of evermore powerful experimental methods in neuroscience invite us to revisit the extent to which brains and machines can work the same way. Will understanding how the brain works really lead us to build better AI? Will building better AI really help us understand how the brain works? This workshop intends to address these contentious topics head on, and provide a forum for healthy discussion about future directions in both AI and neuroscience, and crucially, in research endeavours that aim to establish meaningful links between the two.

(9) Bridging Game Theory and Deep Learning – Samedi 14 décembre, 08:00 AM – 06:00 PM

Organisateurs membres de Mila : Ioannis Mitliagkas · Gauthier Gidel · Reyhane Askari Hemmat · Simon Lacoste-Julien

Résumé : Advances in generative modeling and adversarial learning gave rise to a recent surge of interest in differentiable two-players games, with much of the attention falling on generative adversarial networks (GANs). Solving these games introduces distinct challenges compared to the standard minimization tasks that the machine learning (ML) community is used to. A symptom of this issue is ML and deep learning (DL) practitioners using optimization tools on game-theoretic problems. Our NeurIPS 2018 workshop, “Smooth games optimization in ML”, aimed to rectify this situation, addressing theoretical aspects of games in machine learning, their special dynamics, and typical challenges. For this year, we significantly expand our scope to tackle questions like the design of game formulations for other classes of ML problems, the integration of learning with game theory as well as their important applications.