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Vincent Dumoulin

Alumni

Publications

Learning a Universal Template for Few-shot Dataset Generalization
Eleni Triantafillou
Richard Zemel
A Unified Few-Shot Classification Benchmark to Compare Transfer and Meta Learning Approaches
Neil Houlsby
Utku Evci
Xiaohua Zhai
Sylvain Gelly
Meta and transfer learning are two successful families of approaches to few-shot 1 learning. Despite highly related goals, state-of-the-art … (see more)advances in each family are 2 measured largely in isolation of each other. As a result of diverging evaluation 3 norms, a direct or thorough comparison of different approaches is challenging. 4 To bridge this gap, we introduce a few-shot classification evaluation protocol 5 named VTAB+MD with the explicit goal of facilitating sharing of insights from 6 each community. We demonstrate its accessibility in practice by performing a 7 cross-family study of the best transfer and meta learners which report on both a 8 large-scale meta-learning benchmark (Meta-Dataset, MD), and a transfer learning 9 benchmark (Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark, VTAB). We find that, on average, 10 large-scale transfer methods (Big Transfer, BiT) outperform competing approaches 11 on MD, even when trained only on ImageNet. In contrast, meta-learning approaches 12 struggle to compete on VTAB when trained and validated on MD. However, BiT 13 is not without limitations, and pushing for scale does not improve performance 14 on highly out-of-distribution MD tasks. We hope that this work contributes to 15 accelerating progress on few-shot learning research. 16
An Effective Anti-Aliasing Approach for Residual Networks
Image pre-processing in the frequency domain has traditionally played a vital role in computer vision and was even part of the standard pipe… (see more)line in the early days of deep learning. However, with the advent of large datasets, many practitioners concluded that this was unnecessary due to the belief that these priors can be learned from the data itself. Frequency aliasing is a phenomenon that may occur when sub-sampling any signal, such as an image or feature map, causing distortion in the sub-sampled output. We show that we can mitigate this effect by placing non-trainable blur filters and using smooth activation functions at key locations, particularly where networks lack the capacity to learn them. These simple architectural changes lead to substantial improvements in out-of-distribution generalization on both image classification under natural corruptions on ImageNet-C [10] and few-shot learning on Meta-Dataset [17], without introducing additional trainable parameters and using the default hyper-parameters of open source codebases.
Feature-wise transformations
FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer
We introduce a general-purpose conditioning method for neural networks called FiLM: Feature-wise Linear Modulation. FiLM layers influence ne… (see more)ural network computation via a simple, feature-wise affine transformation based on conditioning information. We show that FiLM layers are highly effective for visual reasoning - answering image-related questions which require a multi-step, high-level process - a task which has proven difficult for standard deep learning methods that do not explicitly model reasoning. Specifically, we show on visual reasoning tasks that FiLM layers 1) halve state-of-the-art error for the CLEVR benchmark, 2) modulate features in a coherent manner, 3) are robust to ablations and architectural modifications, and 4) generalize well to challenging, new data from few examples or even zero-shot.
FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer
We introduce a general-purpose conditioning method for neural networks called FiLM: Feature-wise Linear Modulation. FiLM layers influence ne… (see more)ural network computation via a simple, feature-wise affine transformation based on conditioning information. We show that FiLM layers are highly effective for visual reasoning - answering image-related questions which require a multi-step, high-level process - a task which has proven difficult for standard deep learning methods that do not explicitly model reasoning. Specifically, we show on visual reasoning tasks that FiLM layers 1) halve state-of-the-art error for the CLEVR benchmark, 2) modulate features in a coherent manner, 3) are robust to ablations and architectural modifications, and 4) generalize well to challenging, new data from few examples or even zero-shot.
Learning Visual Reasoning Without Strong Priors
Achieving artificial visual reasoning - the ability to answer image-related questions which require a multi-step, high-level process - is an… (see more) important step towards artificial general intelligence. This multi-modal task requires learning a question-dependent, structured reasoning process over images from language. Standard deep learning approaches tend to exploit biases in the data rather than learn this underlying structure, while leading methods learn to visually reason successfully but are hand-crafted for reasoning. We show that a general-purpose, Conditional Batch Normalization approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the CLEVR Visual Reasoning benchmark with a 2.4% error rate. We outperform the next best end-to-end method (4.5%) and even methods that use extra supervision (3.1%). We probe our model to shed light on how it reasons, showing it has learned a question-dependent, multi-step process. Previous work has operated under the assumption that visual reasoning calls for a specialized architecture, but we show that a general architecture with proper conditioning can learn to visually reason effectively.
Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are powerful generative models, but suffer from training instability. The recently proposed Wasserste… (see more)in GAN (WGAN) makes progress toward stable training of GANs, but sometimes can still generate only low-quality samples or fail to converge. We find that these problems are often due to the use of weight clipping in WGAN to enforce a Lipschitz constraint on the critic, which can lead to undesired behavior. We propose an alternative to clipping weights: penalize the norm of gradient of the critic with respect to its input. Our proposed method performs better than standard WGAN and enables stable training of a wide variety of GAN architectures with almost no hyperparameter tuning, including 101-layer ResNets and language models over discrete data. We also achieve high quality generations on CIFAR-10 and LSUN bedrooms.
Adversarially Learned Inference
We introduce the adversarially learned inference (ALI) model, which jointly learns a generation network and an inference network using an ad… (see more)versarial process. The generation network maps samples from stochastic latent variables to the data space while the inference network maps training examples in data space to the space of latent variables. An adversarial game is cast between these two networks and a discriminative network is trained to distinguish between joint latent/data-space samples from the generative network and joint samples from the inference network. We illustrate the ability of the model to learn mutually coherent inference and generation networks through the inspections of model samples and reconstructions and confirm the usefulness of the learned representations by obtaining a performance competitive with state-of-the-art on the semi-supervised SVHN and CIFAR10 tasks.
Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are powerful generative models, but suffer from training instability. The recently proposed Wasserste… (see more)in GAN (WGAN) makes progress toward stable training of GANs, but sometimes can still generate only low-quality samples or fail to converge. We find that these problems are often due to the use of weight clipping in WGAN to enforce a Lipschitz constraint on the critic, which can lead to undesired behavior. We propose an alternative to clipping weights: penalize the norm of gradient of the critic with respect to its input. Our proposed method performs better than standard WGAN and enables stable training of a wide variety of GAN architectures with almost no hyperparameter tuning, including 101-layer ResNets and language models over discrete data. We also achieve high quality generations on CIFAR-10 and LSUN bedrooms.
Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions
Rami Al-rfou'
Amjad Almahairi
Christof Angermüller
Frédéric Bastien
Justin S. Bayer
A. Belikov
A. Belopolsky
J. Bergstra
Josh Bleecher Snyder
Paul F. Christiano
Marc-Alexandre Côté
Myriam Côté
Julien Demouth
Sander Dieleman
M'elanie Ducoffe
Ziye Fan
Mathieu Germain
Ian J. Goodfellow
Matthew Graham
Balázs Hidasi
Arjun Jain
S'ebastien Jean
Kai Jia
Mikhail V. Korobov
Vivek Kulkarni
Pascal Lamblin
Eric P. Larsen
S. Lee
Simon-mark Lefrancois
J. Livezey
Cory R. Lorenz
Jeremiah L. Lowin
Qianli M. Ma
R. McGibbon
Mehdi Mirza
Alberto Orlandi
Colin Raffel
Daniel Renshaw
Matthew David Rocklin
Markus Dr. Roth
Peter Sadowski
John Salvatier
Jan Schlüter
John D. Schulman
Gabriel Schwartz
Iulian V. Serban
Samira Shabanian
Sigurd Spieckermann
S. Subramanyam
Gijs van Tulder
Joseph P. Turian
Sebastian Urban
Dustin J. Webb
M. Willson
Lijun Xue
Theano is a Python library that allows to define, optimize, and evaluate mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays efficie… (see more)ntly. Since its introduction, it has been one of the most used CPU and GPU mathematical compilers - especially in the machine learning community - and has shown steady performance improvements. Theano is being actively and continuously developed since 2008, multiple frameworks have been built on top of it and it has been used to produce many state-of-the-art machine learning models. The present article is structured as follows. Section I provides an overview of the Theano software and its community. Section II presents the principal features of Theano and how to use them, and compares them with other similar projects. Section III focuses on recently-introduced functionalities and improvements. Section IV compares the performance of Theano against Torch7 and TensorFlow on several machine learning models. Section V discusses current limitations of Theano and potential ways of improving it.
Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions
Rami Al-rfou'
Amjad Almahairi
Christof Angermüller
Frédéric Bastien
Justin S. Bayer
A. Belikov
A. Belopolsky
Josh Bleecher Snyder
Paul F. Christiano
Marc-Alexandre Côté
Myriam Côté
Julien Demouth
Sander Dieleman
M'elanie Ducoffe
Ziye Fan
Mathieu Germain
Ian G Goodfellow
Matthew Graham
Balázs Hidasi
Arjun Jain
Kai Jia
Mikhail V. Korobov
Vivek Kulkarni
Pascal Lamblin
Eric Larsen
S. Lee
Simon-mark Lefrancois
J. Livezey
Cory R. Lorenz
Jeremiah L. Lowin
Qianli M. Ma
R. McGibbon
Mehdi Mirza
Alberto Orlandi
Colin Raffel
Daniel Renshaw
Matthew David Rocklin
Markus Dr. Roth
Peter Sadowski
John Salvatier
Jan Schlüter
John D. Schulman
Gabriel Schwartz
Iulian V. Serban
Samira Shabanian
Sigurd Spieckermann
S. Subramanyam
Gijs van Tulder
Sebastian Urban
Dustin J. Webb
M. Willson
Lijun Xue
Theano is a Python library that allows to define, optimize, and evaluate mathematical expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays efficie… (see more)ntly. Since its introduction, it has been one of the most used CPU and GPU mathematical compilers - especially in the machine learning community - and has shown steady performance improvements. Theano is being actively and continuously developed since 2008, multiple frameworks have been built on top of it and it has been used to produce many state-of-the-art machine learning models. The present article is structured as follows. Section I provides an overview of the Theano software and its community. Section II presents the principal features of Theano and how to use them, and compares them with other similar projects. Section III focuses on recently-introduced functionalities and improvements. Section IV compares the performance of Theano against Torch7 and TensorFlow on several machine learning models. Section V discusses current limitations of Theano and potential ways of improving it.