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Sherjil Ozair

Alumni

Publications

Generative Adversarial Networks
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a type of deep learning techniques that have shown remarkable success in generating realistic ima… (see more)ges, videos, and other types of data. This paper provides a comprehensive guide to GANs, covering their architecture, loss functions, training methods, applications, evaluation metrics, challenges, and future directions. We begin with an introduction to GANs and their historical development, followed by a review of the background and related work. We then provide a detailed overview of the GAN architecture, including the generator and discriminator networks, and discuss the key design choices and variations. Next, we review the loss functions utilized in GANs, including the original minimax objective, as well as more recent approaches s.a. Wasserstein distance and gradient penalty. We then delve into the training of GANs, discussing common techniques s.a. alternating optimization, minibatch discrimination, and spectral normalization. We also provide a survey of the various applications of GANs across domains. In addition, we review the evaluation metrics utilized to assess the diversity and quality of GAN-produced data. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges and open issues in GANs, including mode collapse, training instability, and ethical considerations. Finally, we provide a glimpse into the future directions of GAN research, including improving scalability, developing new architectures, incorporating domain knowledge, and exploring new applications. Overall, this paper serves as a comprehensive guide to GANs, providing both theoretical and practical insights for researchers and practitioners in the field.
The Journey is the Reward: Unsupervised Learning of Influential Trajectories
Unsupervised exploration and representation learning become increasingly important when learning in diverse and sparse environments. The inf… (see more)ormation-theoretic principle of empowerment formalizes an unsupervised exploration objective through an agent trying to maximize its influence on the future states of its environment. Previous approaches carry certain limitations in that they either do not employ closed-loop feedback or do not have an internal state. As a consequence, a privileged final state is taken as an influence measure, rather than the full trajectory. We provide a model-free method which takes into account the whole trajectory while still offering the benefits of option-based approaches. We successfully apply our approach to settings with large action spaces, where discovery of meaningful action sequences is particularly difficult.
Unsupervised State Representation Learning in Atari
Evan Racah
Marc-Alexandre Côté
State representation learning, or the ability to capture latent generative factors of an environment, is crucial for building intelligent ag… (see more)ents 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. The code associated with this work is available at this https URL
Wasserstein Dependency Measure for Representation Learning
Corey Lynch
Aäron van den Oord
Sergey Levine
Pierre Sermanet
Mutual information maximization has emerged as a powerful learning objective for unsupervised representation learning obtaining state-of-the… (see more)-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.
Mutual Information Neural Estimation
We argue that the estimation of mutual information between high dimensional continuous random variables can be achieved by gradient descent … (see more)over neural networks. We present a Mutual Information Neural Estimator (MINE) that is linearly scalable in dimensionality as well as in sample size, trainable through back-prop, and strongly consistent. We present a handful of applications on which MINE can be used to minimize or maximize mutual information. We apply MINE to improve adversarially trained generative models. We also use MINE to implement Information Bottleneck, applying it to supervised classification; our results demonstrate substantial improvement in flexibility and performance in these settings.
Learning Generative Models with Locally Disentangled Latent Factors
One of the most successful techniques in generative models has been decomposing a complicated generation task into a series of simpler gener… (see more)ation tasks. For example, generating an image at a low resolution and then learning to refine that into a high resolution image often improves results substantially. Here we explore a novel strategy for decomposing generation for complicated objects in which we first generate latent variables which describe a subset of the observed variables, and then map from these latent variables to the observed space. We show that this allows us to achieve decoupled training of complicated generative models and present both theoretical and experimental results supporting the benefit of such an approach.
Generative adversarial networks
Generative adversarial networks are a kind of artificial intelligence algorithm designed to solve the generative modeling problem. The goal … (see more)of a generative model is to study a collection of training examples and learn the probability distribution that generated them. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are then able to generate more examples from the estimated probability distribution. Generative models based on deep learning are common, but GANs are among the most successful generative models (especially in terms of their ability to generate realistic high-resolution images). GANs have been successfully applied to a wide variety of tasks (mostly in research settings) but continue to present unique challenges and research opportunities because they are based on game theory while most other approaches to generative modeling are based on optimization.