Publications

MetaGAN: An Adversarial Approach to Few-Shot Learning
Ruixiang Zhang
Tong Che
Zoubin Ghahramani
Yoshua Bengio
Yangqiu Song
In this paper, we propose a conceptually simple and general framework called MetaGAN for few-shot learning problems. Most state-of-the-art f… (voir plus)ew-shot classification models can be integrated with MetaGAN in a principled and straightforward way. By introducing an adversarial generator conditioned on tasks, we augment vanilla few-shot classification models with the ability to discriminate between real and fake data. We argue that this GAN-based approach can help few-shot classifiers to learn sharper decision boundary, which could generalize better. We show that with our MetaGAN framework, we can extend supervised few-shot learning models to naturally cope with unlabeled data. Different from previous work in semi-supervised few-shot learning, our algorithms can deal with semi-supervision at both sample-level and task-level. We give theoretical justifications of the strength of MetaGAN, and validate the effectiveness of MetaGAN on challenging few-shot image classification benchmarks.
2017-12-31
NeurIPS (publié)
dblp.uni-trier.de
Nash equilibria for integer programming games
Margarida Carvalho
Andrea Lodi
João Pedro Pedroso
In this paper, we develop algorithmic approaches for a recently defined class of games, the integer programming games. Two general methods t… (voir plus)o approximate an equilibrium are presented and enhanced in order to improve their practical efficiency. Their performance is analysed through computational experiments in a knapsack game and a competitive lot-sizing game. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that equilibria computation methods for general integer programming games are build and computationally tested.
2017-12-31
(publié)
www.semanticscholar.org
Negative eigenvalues of the Hessian in deep neural networks
Guillaume Alain
Nicolas Roux
Pierre-Antoine Manzagol
The loss function of deep networks is known to be non-convex but the precise nature of this nonconvexity is still an active area of research… (voir plus). In this work, we study the loss landscape of deep networks through the eigendecompositions of their Hessian matrix. In particular, we examine how important the negative eigenvalues are and the benefits one can observe in handling them appropriately.
2017-12-31
ICLR (Workshop) (publié)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Neural Language Modeling by Jointly Learning Syntax and Lexicon
Yikang Shen
Zhouhan Lin
Chin-wei Huang
Aaron Courville
We propose a neural language model capable of unsupervised syntactic structure induction. The model leverages the structure information to f… (voir plus)orm better semantic representations and better language modeling. Standard recurrent neural networks are limited by their structure and fail to efficiently use syntactic information. On the other hand, tree-structured recursive networks usually require additional structural supervision at the cost of human expert annotation. In this paper, We propose a novel neural language model, called the Parsing-Reading-Predict Networks (PRPN), that can simultaneously induce the syntactic structure from unannotated sentences and leverage the inferred structure to learn a better language model. In our model, the gradient can be directly back-propagated from the language model loss into the neural parsing network. Experiments show that the proposed model can discover the underlying syntactic structure and achieve state-of-the-art performance on word/character-level language model tasks.
2017-12-31
ICLR.cc/2018/Conference (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Nonlinear Weighted Finite Automata
Tianyu Li
Guillaume Rabusseau
Doina Preup
2017-12-31
AISTATS (publié)
proceedings.mlr.press
proceedings.mlr.press
Optimizing Home Energy Management and Electric Vehicle Charging with Reinforcement Learning
Di Wu
Guillaume Rabusseau
Vincent François-Lavet
Doina Precup
Benoit Boulet
Smart grids are advancing the management efficiency and security of power grids with the integration of energy storage, distributed controll… (voir plus)ers, and advanced meters. In particular, with the increasing prevalence of residential automation devices and distributed renewable energy generation, residential energy management is now drawing more attention. Meanwhile, the increasing adoption of electric vehicle (EV) brings more challenges and opportunities for smart residential energy management. This paper formalizes energy management for the residential home with EV charging as a Markov Decision Process and proposes reinforcement learning (RL) based control algorithms to address it. The objective of the proposed algorithms is to minimize the long-term operating cost. We further use a recurrent neural network (RNN) to model the electricity demand as a preprocessing step. Both the RNN prediction and latent representations are used as additional state features for the RL based control algorithms. Experiments on real-world data show that the proposed algorithms can significantly reduce the operating cost and peak power consumption compared to baseline control algorithms.
2017-12-31
(publié)
www.semanticscholar.org
A polynomial algorithm for a continuous bilevel knapsack problem.
Margarida Carvalho
Andrea Lodi
Patrice Marcotte
2017-12-31
Operations Research Letters (publié)
doi.org
Residual Connections Encourage Iterative Inference
Stanisław Jastrzębski
Devansh Arpit
Nicolas Ballas
Vikas Verma
Tong Che
Yoshua Bengio
Residual networks (Resnets) have become a prominent architecture in deep learning. However, a comprehensive understanding of Resnets is stil… (voir plus)l a topic of ongoing research. A recent view argues that Resnets perform iterative refinement of features. We attempt to further expose properties of this aspect. To this end, we study Resnets both analytically and empirically. We formalize the notion of iterative refinement in Resnets by showing that residual connections naturally encourage features of residual blocks to move along the negative gradient of loss as we go from one block to the next. In addition, our empirical analysis suggests that Resnets are able to perform both representation learning and iterative refinement. In general, a Resnet block tends to concentrate representation learning behavior in the first few layers while higher layers perform iterative refinement of features. Finally we observe that sharing residual layers naively leads to representation explosion and counterintuitively, overfitting, and we show that simple existing strategies can help alleviating this problem.
2017-12-31
ICLR.cc/2018/Conference (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Sparse Attentive Backtracking: Temporal Credit Assignment Through Reminding
Nan Rosemary Ke
Anirudh Goyal
Olexa Bilaniuk
Jonathan Binas
Michael C. Mozer
Chris Pal
Yoshua Bengio
Learning long-term dependencies in extended temporal sequences requires credit assignment to events far back in the past. The most common me… (voir plus)thod for training recurrent neural networks, back-propagation through time (BPTT), requires credit information to be propagated backwards through every single step of the forward computation, potentially over thousands or millions of time steps. This becomes computationally expensive or even infeasible when used with long sequences. Importantly, biological brains are unlikely to perform such detailed reverse replay over very long sequences of internal states (consider days, months, or years.) However, humans are often reminded of past memories or mental states which are associated with the current mental state. We consider the hypothesis that such memory associations between past and present could be used for credit assignment through arbitrarily long sequences, propagating the credit assigned to the current state to the associated past state. Based on this principle, we study a novel algorithm which only back-propagates through a few of these temporal skip connections, realized by a learned attention mechanism that associates current states with relevant past states. We demonstrate in experiments that our method matches or outperforms regular BPTT and truncated BPTT in tasks involving particularly long-term dependencies, but without requiring the biologically implausible backward replay through the whole history of states. Additionally, we demonstrate that the proposed method transfers to longer sequences significantly better than LSTMs trained with BPTT and LSTMs trained with full self-attention.
2017-12-31
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31 (NeurIPS 2018) (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Streaming kernel regression with provably adaptive mean, variance, and regularization
Audrey Durand
Odalric-Ambrym Maillard
Joelle Pineau
We consider the problem of streaming kernel regression, when the observations arrive sequentially and the goal is to recover the underlying … (voir plus)mean function, assumed to belong to an RKHS. The variance of the noise is not assumed to be known. In this context, we tackle the problem of tuning the regularization parameter adaptively at each time step, while maintaining tight confidence bounds estimates on the value of the mean function at each point. To this end, we first generalize existing results for finite-dimensional linear regression with fixed regularization and known variance to the kernel setup with a regularization parameter allowed to be a measurable function of past observations. Then, using appropriate self-normalized inequalities we build upper and lower bound estimates for the variance, leading to Bersntein-like concentration bounds. The later is used in order to define the adaptive regularization. The bounds resulting from our technique are valid uniformly over all observation points and all time steps, and are compared against the literature with numerical experiments. Finally, the potential of these tools is illustrated by an application to kernelized bandits, where we revisit the Kernel UCB and Kernel Thompson Sampling procedures, and show the benefits of the novel adaptive kernel tuning strategy.
2017-12-31
Journal of Machine Learning Research (publié)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Temporal Regularization for Markov Decision Process
Pierre Thodoroff
Audrey Durand
Joelle Pineau
Doina Precup
Several applications of Reinforcement Learning suffer from instability due to high variance. This is especially prevalent in high dimensiona… (voir plus)l domains. Regularization is a commonly used technique in machine learning to reduce variance, at the cost of introducing some bias. Most existing regularization techniques focus on spatial (perceptual) regularization. Yet in reinforcement learning, due to the nature of the Bellman equation, there is an opportunity to also exploit temporal regularization based on smoothness in value estimates over trajectories. This paper explores a class of methods for temporal regularization. We formally characterize the bias induced by this technique using Markov chain concepts. We illustrate the various characteristics of temporal regularization via a sequence of simple discrete and continuous MDPs, and show that the technique provides improvement even in high-dimensional Atari games.
2017-12-31
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31 (NeurIPS 2018) (publié)
dblp.uni-trier.de
Towards Deep Conversational Recommendations
Raymond Li
Samira Ebrahimi Kahou
Hannes Schulz
Vincent Michalski
Laurent Charlin
Chris Pal
There has been growing interest in using neural networks and deep learning techniques to create dialogue systems. Conversational recommendat… (voir plus)ion is an interesting setting for the scientific exploration of dialogue with natural language as the associated discourse involves goal-driven dialogue that often transforms naturally into more free-form chat. This paper provides two contributions. First, until now there has been no publicly available large-scale dataset consisting of real-world dialogues centered around recommendations. To address this issue and to facilitate our exploration here, we have collected ReDial, a dataset consisting of over 10,000 conversations centered around the theme of providing movie recommendations. We make this data available to the community for further research. Second, we use this dataset to explore multiple facets of conversational recommendations. In particular we explore new neural architectures, mechanisms, and methods suitable for composing conversational recommendation systems. Our dataset allows us to systematically probe model sub-components addressing different parts of the overall problem domain ranging from: sentiment analysis and cold-start recommendation generation to detailed aspects of how natural language is used in this setting in the real world. We combine such sub-components into a full-blown dialogue system and examine its behavior.
2017-12-31
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 31 (NeurIPS 2018) (publié)
doi.org
arxiv.org