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Publications
GibbsNet: Iterative Adversarial Inference for Deep Graphical Models
Spectral methods of moments provide a powerful tool for learning the parameters of latent variable models. Despite their theoretical appeal,… (see more) the applicability of these methods to real data is still limited due to a lack of robustness to model misspecification. In this paper we present a hierarchical approach to methods of moments to circumvent such limitations. Our method is based on replacing the tensor decomposition step used in previous algorithms with approximate joint diagonalization. Experiments on topic modeling show that our method outperforms previous tensor decomposition methods in terms of speed and model quality.
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.
It is commonly assumed that language refers to high-level visual concepts while leaving low-level visual processing unaffected. This view do… (see more)minates the current literature in computational models for language-vision tasks, where visual and linguistic input are mostly processed independently before being fused into a single representation. In this paper, we deviate from this classic pipeline and propose to modulate the \emph{entire visual processing} by linguistic input. Specifically, we condition the batch normalization parameters of a pretrained residual network (ResNet) on a language embedding. This approach, which we call MOdulated RESnet (\MRN), significantly improves strong baselines on two visual question answering tasks. Our ablation study shows that modulating from the early stages of the visual processing is beneficial.
We consider the problem of estimating multiple related functions computed by weighted automata~(WFA). We first present a natural notion of r… (see more)elatedness between WFAs by considering to which extent several WFAs can share a common underlying representation. We then introduce the model of vector-valued WFA which conveniently helps us formalize this notion of relatedness. Finally, we propose a spectral learning algorithm for vector-valued WFAs to tackle the multitask learning problem. By jointly learning multiple tasks in the form of a vector-valued WFA, our algorithm enforces the discovery of a representation space shared between tasks. The benefits of the proposed multitask approach are theoretically motivated and showcased through experiments on both synthetic and real world datasets.
Piecewise Latent Variables for Neural Variational Text Processing
Advances in neural variational inference have facilitated the learning of powerful directed graphical models with continuous latent variable… (see more)s, such as variational autoencoders. The hope is that such models will learn to represent rich, multi-modal latent factors in real-world data, such as natural language text. However, current models often assume simplistic priors on the latent variables - such as the uni-modal Gaussian distribution - which are incapable of representing complex latent factors efficiently. To overcome this restriction, we propose the simple, but highly flexible, piecewise constant distribution. This distribution has the capacity to represent an exponential number of modes of a latent target distribution, while remaining mathematically tractable. Our results demonstrate that incorporating this new latent distribution into different models yields substantial improvements in natural language processing tasks such as document modeling and natural language generation for dialogue.
2017-01-01
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (published)
Natural image modeling is a landmark challenge of unsupervised learning. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) learn a useful latent representatio… (see more)n and model global structure well but have difficulty capturing small details. PixelCNN models details very well, but lacks a latent code and is difficult to scale for capturing large structures. We present PixelVAE, a VAE model with an autoregressive decoder based on PixelCNN. Our model requires very few expensive autoregressive layers compared to PixelCNN and learns latent codes that are more compressed than a standard VAE while still capturing most non-trivial structure. Finally, we extend our model to a hierarchy of latent variables at different scales. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on binarized MNIST, competitive performance on 64 × 64 ImageNet, and high-quality samples on the LSUN bedrooms dataset.
Many real world applications include information on both attributes of individual entities as well as relations between them, while there ex… (see more)ists an interplay between these attributes and relations. For example, in a typical social network, the similarity of individuals’ characteristics motivates them to form relations, a.k.a. social selection; whereas the characteristics of individuals may be affected by the characteristics of their relations, a.k.a. social influence. We can measure proclivity in networks by quantifying the correlation of nodal attributes and the structure [1]. Here, we are interested in a more fundamental study, to extend the basic statistics defined for graphs and draw parallels for the attributed graphs. More formally, an attributed graph is denoted by (A,X); where An×n is the adjacency matrix and encodes the relationships between the n nodes, and Xn×k is the attributes matrix –each row shows the feature vector of the corresponding node. Degree of a node encodes the number of its neighbors, computed as ki = ∑ j Aij . We can extend this notion to networks with binary attributes to the number of neighbors which share a particular attribute x, i.e. ki(x) = ∑ j Aijδ(Xj , x); where δ(Xj , x) = 1 iff node j has attribute x. Similar to the simple graphs, where the degree distribution is studied and showed to be heavy tail, here we can look at: 1) the degree distributions per attribute, 2) the joint probability distribution of any pair of attributes. Moreover, if we assume A(x1, x2) is the induced subgraph (or masked matrix of edges) with endpoints of values (x1, x2), i.e., A(x1, x2) = Aijδ(Xi, x1)δ(Xj , x2), then we can study and compare these distributions for the induced subgraph per each pair of attribute values. For example, Figure 1 shows the same general trend in the distribution of the original graph and the three possible induced subgraph.
