Ankit Vani

SPARO: Selective Attention for Robust and Compositional Transformer Encodings for Vision

Bac Nguyen

Samuel Lavoie

Ranjay Krishna

Aaron Courville

Selective attention helps us focus on task-relevant aspects in the constant flood of our sensory input. This constraint in our perception al… (see more)lows us to robustly generalize under distractions and to new compositions of perceivable concepts. Transformers employ a similar notion of attention in their architecture, but representation learning models with transformer backbones like CLIP and DINO often fail to demonstrate robustness and compositionality. We highlight a missing architectural prior: unlike human perception, transformer encodings do not separately attend over individual concepts. In response, we propose SPARO, a read-out mechanism that partitions encodings into separately-attended slots, each produced by a single attention head. Using SPARO with CLIP imparts an inductive bias that the vision and text modalities are different views of a shared compositional world with the same corresponding concepts. Using SPARO, we demonstrate improvements on downstream recognition, robustness, retrieval, and compositionality benchmarks with CLIP (up to +14% for ImageNet, +4% for SugarCrepe), and on nearest neighbors and linear probe for ImageNet with DINO (+3% each). We also showcase a powerful ability to intervene and select individual SPARO concepts to further improve downstream task performance (up from +4% to +9% for SugarCrepe) and use this ability to study the robustness of SPARO's representation structure. Finally, we provide insights through ablation experiments and visualization of learned concepts.

2024-01-01

ECCV (66) (published)

Simplicial Embeddings in Self-Supervised Learning and Downstream Classification

Samuel Lavoie

Simplicial Embeddings (SEM) are representations learned through self-supervised learning (SSL), wherein a representation is projected into …

2023-02-01

ICLR.cc/2023/Conference (notable)

openreview.net

On the Compositional Generalization Gap of In-Context Learning

Pretrained large generative language models have shown great performance on many tasks, but exhibit low compositional generalization abiliti… (see more)es. Scaling such models has been shown to improve their performance on various NLP tasks even just by conditioning them on a few examples to solve the task without any fine-tuning (also known as in-context learning). In this work, we look at the gap between the in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) performance of such models in semantic parsing tasks with in-context learning. In the ID settings, the demonstrations are from the same split (\textit{test} or \textit{train}) that the model is being evaluated on, and in the OOD settings, they are from the other split. We look at how the relative generalization gap of in-context learning evolves as models are scaled up. We evaluate four model families, OPT, BLOOM, CodeGen and Codex on three semantic parsing datasets, CFQ, SCAN and GeoQuery with different number of exemplars, and observe a trend of decreasing relative generalization gap as models are scaled up.

2022-11-15

ArXiv (preprint)

Fortuitous Forgetting in Connectionist Networks

Forgetting is often seen as an unwanted characteristic in both human and machine learning. However, we propose that forgetting can in fact b… (see more)e favorable to learning. We introduce"forget-and-relearn"as a powerful paradigm for shaping the learning trajectories of artificial neural networks. In this process, the forgetting step selectively removes undesirable information from the model, and the relearning step reinforces features that are consistently useful under different conditions. The forget-and-relearn framework unifies many existing iterative training algorithms in the image classification and language emergence literature, and allows us to understand the success of these algorithms in terms of the disproportionate forgetting of undesirable information. We leverage this understanding to improve upon existing algorithms by designing more targeted forgetting operations. Insights from our analysis provide a coherent view on the dynamics of iterative training in neural networks and offer a clear path towards performance improvements.

2022-01-28

ICLR.cc/2022/Conference (poster)

openreview.net

Iterated learning for emergent systematicity in VQA

Max Schwarzer

Yuchen Lu

Eeshan Dhekane

Aaron Courville

Although neural module networks have an architectural bias towards compositionality, they require gold standard layouts to generalize system… (see more)atically in practice. When instead learning layouts and modules jointly, compositionality does not arise automatically and an explicit pressure is necessary for the emergence of layouts exhibiting the right structure. We propose to address this problem using iterated learning, a cognitive science theory of the emergence of compositional languages in nature that has primarily been applied to simple referential games in machine learning. Considering the layouts of module networks as samples from an emergent language, we use iterated learning to encourage the development of structure within this language. We show that the resulting layouts support systematic generalization in neural agents solving the more complex task of visual question-answering. Our regularized iterated learning method can outperform baselines without iterated learning on SHAPES-SyGeT (SHAPES Systematic Generalization Test), a new split of the SHAPES dataset we introduce to evaluate systematic generalization, and on CLOSURE, an extension of CLEVR also designed to test systematic generalization. We demonstrate superior performance in recovering ground-truth compositional program structure with limited supervision on both SHAPES-SyGeT and CLEVR.

2021-01-12

ICLR.cc/2021/Conference (oral)

openreview.net

GAIT: A Geometric Approach to Information Theory

Jose Gallego-Posada

Max Schwarzer

Simon Lacoste-Julien

We advocate the use of a notion of entropy that reflects the relative abundances of the symbols in an alphabet, as well as the similarities … (see more)between them. This concept was originally introduced in theoretical ecology to study the diversity of ecosystems. Based on this notion of entropy, we introduce geometry-aware counterparts for several concepts and theorems in information theory. Notably, our proposed divergence exhibits performance on par with state-of-the-art methods based on the Wasserstein distance, but enjoys a closed-form expression that can be computed efficiently. We demonstrate the versatility of our method via experiments on a broad range of domains: training generative models, computing image barycenters, approximating empirical measures and counting modes.

2020-01-01

AISTATS (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

GAIT: A Geometric Approach to Information Theory

Jose Gallego-Posada

Max Schwarzer

Simon Lacoste-Julien

We advocate the use of a notion of entropy that reflects the relative abundances of the symbols in an alphabet, as well as the similarities … (see more)between them. This concept was originally introduced in theoretical ecology to study the diversity of ecosystems. Based on this notion of entropy, we introduce geometry-aware counterparts for several concepts and theorems in information theory. Notably, our proposed divergence exhibits performance on par with state-of-the-art methods based on the Wasserstein distance, but enjoys a closed-form expression that can be computed efficiently. We demonstrate the versatility of our method via experiments on a broad range of domains: training generative models, computing image barycenters, approximating empirical measures and counting modes.

2019-06-19

ArXiv (preprint)