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… (voir plus)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.
Online Hyper-Parameter Optimization
Damien Vincent
Sylvain Gelly
Olivier Bousquet
Finding Flatter Minima with SGD
Stanisław Jastrzębski
Zac Kenton
Devansh Arpit
Nicolas Ballas
Asja Fischer
Amos Storkey
Graph Priors for Deep Neural Networks
Francis Dutil
Joseph Paul Cohen
Martin Weiss
Georgy Derevyanko
In this work we explore how gene-gene interaction graphs can be used as a prior for the representation of a model to construct features base… (voir plus)d on known interactions between genes. Most existing machine learning work on graphs focuses on building models when data is confined to a graph structure. In this work we focus on using the information from a graph to build better representations in our models. We use the percolate task, determining if a path exists across a grid for a set of node values, as a proxy for gene pathways. We create variants of the percolate task to explore where existing methods fail. We test the limits of existing methods in order to determine what can be improved when applying these methods to a real task. This leads us to propose new methods based on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) that use pooling and dropout to deal with noise in the graph prior.
Inferring Identity Factors for Grouped Examples
We propose a method for modelling groups of face images from the same identity. The model is trained to infer a distribution over the latent… (voir plus) space for identity given a small set of “training data”. One can then sample images using that latent representation to produce images of the same identity. We demonstrate that the model extracts disentangled factors for identity factors and image-specific vectors. We also perform generative classification over identities to assess its feasibility for few-shot face recognition.
Online variance-reducing optimization
Reza Babanezhad Harikandeh
Reza Babanezhad
Pierre-Antoine Manzagol
SGD S MOOTHS THE S HARPEST D IRECTIONS
Stanisław Jastrzębski
Zac Kenton
Nicolas Ballas
Asja Fischer
Amos Storkey
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is able to find regions that generalize well, even in drastically over-parametrized models such as deep ne… (voir plus)ural networks. We observe that noise in SGD controls the spectral norm and conditioning of the Hessian throughout the training. We hypothesize the cause of this phenomenon is due to the dynamics of neurons saturating their non-linearity along the largest curvature directions, thus leading to improved conditioning.
Extending the Framework of Equilibrium Propagation to General Dynamics
Benjamin Scellier
Anirudh Goyal
Jonathan Binas
Thomas Mesnard
Hierarchical Adversarially Learned Inference
Ishmael Belghazi
Sai Rajeswar
Olivier Mastropietro
Jovana Mitrovic
We propose a novel hierarchical generative model with a simple Markovian structure and a corresponding inference model. Both the generative … (voir plus)and inference model are trained using the adversarial learning paradigm. We demonstrate that the hierarchical structure supports the learning of progressively more abstract representations as well as providing semantically meaningful reconstructions with different levels of fidelity. Furthermore, we show that minimizing the Jensen-Shanon divergence between the generative and inference network is enough to minimize the reconstruction error. The resulting semantically meaningful hierarchical latent structure discovery is exemplified on the CelebA dataset. There, we show that the features learned by our model in an unsupervised way outperform the best handcrafted features. Furthermore, the extracted features remain competitive when compared to several recent deep supervised approaches on an attribute prediction task on CelebA. Finally, we leverage the model's inference network to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a semi-supervised variant of the MNIST digit classification task.
Combining intraoperative ultrasound brain shift correction and augmented reality visualizations: a pilot study of eight cases
Ian J. Gerard
Marta Kersten-Oertel
Simon Drouin
Jeffery A. Hall
Kevin Petrecca
Dante De Nigris
Daniel A. Di Giovanni
D. Louis Collins
Abstract. We present our work investigating the feasibility of combining intraoperative ultrasound for brain shift correction and augmented … (voir plus)reality (AR) visualization for intraoperative interpretation of patient-specific models in image-guided neurosurgery (IGNS) of brain tumors. We combine two imaging technologies for image-guided brain tumor neurosurgery. Throughout surgical interventions, AR was used to assess different surgical strategies using three-dimensional (3-D) patient-specific models of the patient’s cortex, vasculature, and lesion. Ultrasound imaging was acquired intraoperatively, and preoperative images and models were registered to the intraoperative data. The quality and reliability of the AR views were evaluated with both qualitative and quantitative metrics. A pilot study of eight patients demonstrates the feasible combination of these two technologies and their complementary features. In each case, the AR visualizations enabled the surgeon to accurately visualize the anatomy and pathology of interest for an extended period of the intervention. Inaccuracies associated with misregistration, brain shift, and AR were improved in all cases. These results demonstrate the potential of combining ultrasound-based registration with AR to become a useful tool for neurosurgeons to improve intraoperative patient-specific planning by improving the understanding of complex 3-D medical imaging data and prolonging the reliable use of IGNS.
A Deep Reinforcement Learning Chatbot (Short Version)
Iulian V. Serban
Chinnadhurai Sankar
Mathieu Germain
Saizheng Zhang
Zhouhan Lin
Sandeep Subramanian
Taesup Kim
Michael Pieper
Nan Rosemary Ke
Sai Rajeswar
Alexandre De Brébisson
Jose Sotelo
Dendi Suhubdy
Vincent Michalski
Alexandre Nguyen
We present MILABOT: a deep reinforcement learning chatbot developed by the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) for the Amazon … (voir plus)Alexa Prize competition. MILABOT is capable of conversing with humans on popular small talk topics through both speech and text. The system consists of an ensemble of natural language generation and retrieval models, including neural network and template-based models. By applying reinforcement learning to crowdsourced data and real-world user interactions, the system has been trained to select an appropriate response from the models in its ensemble. The system has been evaluated through A/B testing with real-world users, where it performed significantly better than other systems. The results highlight the potential of coupling ensemble systems with deep reinforcement learning as a fruitful path for developing real-world, open-domain conversational agents.
A3T: Adversarially Augmented Adversarial Training
Akram Erraqabi
Aristide Baratin
Recent research showed that deep neural networks are highly sensitive to so-called adversarial perturbations, which are tiny perturbations o… (voir plus)f the input data purposely designed to fool a machine learning classifier. Most classification models, including deep learning models, are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this work, we investigate a procedure to improve adversarial robustness of deep neural networks through enforcing representation invariance. The idea is to train the classifier jointly with a discriminator attached to one of its hidden layer and trained to filter the adversarial noise. We perform preliminary experiments to test the viability of the approach and to compare it to other standard adversarial training methods.