## Oral Session 9

Moderators: Animesh Garg · Hanie Sedghi · Liang Zhao

Abstract:

### Chat is not available.

Wed 5 May 19:00 - 19:15 PDT

(Oral)
##### Improved Autoregressive Modeling with Distribution Smoothing

Chenlin Meng · Jiaming Song · Yang Song · Shengjia Zhao · Stefano Ermon

While autoregressive models excel at image compression, their sample quality is often lacking. Although not realistic, generated images often have high likelihood according to the model, resembling the case of adversarial examples. Inspired by a successful adversarial defense method, we incorporate randomized smoothing into autoregressive generative modeling. We first model a smoothed version of the data distribution, and then reverse the smoothing process to recover the original data distribution. This procedure drastically improves the sample quality of existing autoregressive models on several synthetic and real-world image datasets while obtaining competitive likelihoods on synthetic datasets.

[Paper]
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Wed 5 May 19:15 - 19:25 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### GAN "Steerability" without optimization

Nurit Spingarn Eliezer · Ron Banner · Tomer Michaeli

Recent research has shown remarkable success in revealing "steering" directions in the latent spaces of pre-trained GANs. These directions correspond to semantically meaningful image transformations (e.g., shift, zoom, color manipulations), and have the same interpretable effect across all categories that the GAN can generate. Some methods focus on user-specified transformations, while others discover transformations in an unsupervised manner. However, all existing techniques rely on an optimization procedure to expose those directions, and offer no control over the degree of allowed interaction between different transformations. In this paper, we show that "steering" trajectories can be computed in closed form directly from the generator's weights without any form of training or optimization. This applies to user-prescribed geometric transformations, as well as to unsupervised discovery of more complex effects. Our approach allows determining both linear and nonlinear trajectories, and has many advantages over previous methods. In particular, we can control whether one transformation is allowed to come on the expense of another (e.g., zoom-in with or without allowing translation to keep the object centered). Moreover, we can determine the natural end-point of the trajectory, which corresponds to the largest extent to which a transformation can be applied without incurring degradation. Finally, we show how transferring attributes between images can be achieved without optimization, even across different categories.

[Paper]
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Wed 5 May 19:25 - 19:35 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Large Scale Image Completion via Co-Modulated Generative Adversarial Networks

Shengyu Zhao · Jonathan Cui · Yilun Sheng · Yue Dong · Xiao Liang · Eric Chang · Yan Xu

Numerous task-specific variants of conditional generative adversarial networks have been developed for image completion. Yet, a serious limitation remains that all existing algorithms tend to fail when handling large-scale missing regions. To overcome this challenge, we propose a generic new approach that bridges the gap between image-conditional and recent modulated unconditional generative architectures via co-modulation of both conditional and stochastic style representations. Also, due to the lack of good quantitative metrics for image completion, we propose the new Paired/Unpaired Inception Discriminative Score (P-IDS/U-IDS), which robustly measures the perceptual fidelity of inpainted images compared to real images via linear separability in a feature space. Experiments demonstrate superior performance in terms of both quality and diversity over state-of-the-art methods in free-form image completion and easy generalization to image-to-image translation. Code is available at https://github.com/zsyzzsoft/co-mod-gan.

[Paper]
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Wed 5 May 19:35 - 19:45 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Emergent Symbols through Binding in External Memory

Taylor Webb · Ishan Sinha · Jonathan Cohen

A key aspect of human intelligence is the ability to infer abstract rules directly from high-dimensional sensory data, and to do so given only a limited amount of training experience. Deep neural network algorithms have proven to be a powerful tool for learning directly from high-dimensional data, but currently lack this capacity for data-efficient induction of abstract rules, leading some to argue that symbol-processing mechanisms will be necessary to account for this capacity. In this work, we take a step toward bridging this gap by introducing the Emergent Symbol Binding Network (ESBN), a recurrent network augmented with an external memory that enables a form of variable-binding and indirection. This binding mechanism allows symbol-like representations to emerge through the learning process without the need to explicitly incorporate symbol-processing machinery, enabling the ESBN to learn rules in a manner that is abstracted away from the particular entities to which those rules apply. Across a series of tasks, we show that this architecture displays nearly perfect generalization of learned rules to novel entities given only a limited number of training examples, and outperforms a number of other competitive neural network architectures.

[Paper]
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Wed 5 May 19:45 - 19:55 PDT

(Q&A)
##### Q&A

Wed 5 May 19:55 - 20:10 PDT

(Oral)
##### Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection

Xizhou Zhu · Weijie Su · Lewei Lu · Bin Li · Xiaogang Wang · Jifeng Dai

DETR has been recently proposed to eliminate the need for many hand-designed components in object detection while demonstrating good performance. However, it suffers from slow convergence and limited feature spatial resolution, due to the limitation of Transformer attention modules in processing image feature maps. To mitigate these issues, we proposed Deformable DETR, whose attention modules only attend to a small set of key sampling points around a reference. Deformable DETR can achieve better performance than DETR (especially on small objects) with 10$\times$ less training epochs. Extensive experiments on the COCO benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Code is released at https://github.com/fundamentalvision/Deformable-DETR.

[Paper]
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Wed 5 May 20:10 - 20:20 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Graph-Based Continual Learning

Binh Tang · David S Matteson

Despite significant advances, continual learning models still suffer from catastrophic forgetting when exposed to incrementally available data from non-stationary distributions. Rehearsal approaches alleviate the problem by maintaining and replaying a small episodic memory of previous samples, often implemented as an array of independent memory slots. In this work, we propose to augment such an array with a learnable random graph that captures pairwise similarities between its samples, and use it not only to learn new tasks but also to guard against forgetting. Empirical results on several benchmark datasets show that our model consistently outperforms recently proposed baselines for task-free continual learning.

[Paper]
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Wed 5 May 20:20 - 20:30 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Understanding the role of importance weighting for deep learning

Da Xu · Yuting Ye · Chuanwei Ruan

The recent paper by Byrd & Lipton (2019), based on empirical observations, raises a major concern on the impact of importance weighting for the over-parameterized deep learning models. They observe that as long as the model can separate the training data, the impact of importance weighting diminishes as the training proceeds. Nevertheless, there lacks a rigorous characterization of this phenomenon. In this paper, we provide formal characterizations and theoretical justifications on the role of importance weighting with respect to the implicit bias of gradient descent and margin-based learning theory. We reveal both the optimization dynamics and generalization performance under deep learning models. Our work not only explains the various novel phenomenons observed for importance weighting in deep learning, but also extends to the studies where the weights are being optimized as part of the model, which applies to a number of topics under active research.

[Paper]
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Wed 5 May 20:30 - 20:40 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Towards Robustness Against Natural Language Word Substitutions

Xinshuai Dong · Anh Tuan Luu · Rongrong Ji · Hong Liu

Robustness against word substitutions has a well-defined and widely acceptable form, i.e., using semantically similar words as substitutions, and thus it is considered as a fundamental stepping-stone towards broader robustness in natural language processing. Previous defense methods capture word substitutions in vector space by using either l_2-ball or hyper-rectangle, which results in perturbation sets that are not inclusive enough or unnecessarily large, and thus impedes mimicry of worst cases for robust training. In this paper, we introduce a novel Adversarial Sparse Convex Combination (ASCC) method. We model the word substitution attack space as a convex hull and leverages a regularization term to enforce perturbation towards an actual substitution, thus aligning our modeling better with the discrete textual space. Based on ASCC method, we further propose ASCC-defense, which leverages ASCC to generate worst-case perturbations and incorporates adversarial training towards robustness. Experiments show that ASCC-defense outperforms the current state-of-the-arts in terms of robustness on two prevailing NLP tasks, i.e., sentiment analysis and natural language inference, concerning several attacks across multiple model architectures. Besides, we also envision a new class of defense towards robustness in NLP, where our robustly trained word vectors can be plugged into a normally trained model and enforce its robustness without applying any other defense techniques.

[Paper]
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Wed 5 May 20:40 - 20:50 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Undistillable: Making A Nasty Teacher That CANNOT teach students

Haoyu Ma · Tianlong Chen · Ting-Kuei Hu · Chenyu You · Xiaohui Xie · Zhangyang Wang

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a widely used technique to transfer knowledge from pre-trained teacher models to (usually more lightweight) student models. However, in certain situations, this technique is more of a curse than a blessing. For instance, KD poses a potential risk of exposing intellectual properties (IPs): even if a trained machine learning model is released in black boxes'' (e.g., as executable software or APIs without open-sourcing code), it can still be replicated by KD through imitating input-output behaviors. To prevent this unwanted effect of KD, this paper introduces and investigates a concept called $\textit{Nasty Teacher}$: a specially trained teacher network that yields nearly the same performance as a normal one, but would significantly degrade the performance of student models learned by imitating it. We propose a simple yet effective algorithm to build the nasty teacher, called $\textit{self-undermining knowledge distillation}$. Specifically, we aim to maximize the difference between the output of the nasty teacher and a normal pre-trained network. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate that our method is effective on both standard KD and data-free KD, providing the desirable KD-immunity to model owners for the first time. We hope our preliminary study can draw more awareness and interest in this new practical problem of both social and legal importance. Our codes and pre-trained models can be found at: $\url{https://github.com/VITA-Group/Nasty-Teacher}$.

[Paper]
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Wed 5 May 20:50 - 21:00 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### CPT: Efficient Deep Neural Network Training via Cyclic Precision

Yonggan Fu · Han Guo · Meng Li · Xin Yang · Yining Ding · Vikas Chandra · Yingyan Lin

Low-precision deep neural network (DNN) training has gained tremendous attention as reducing precision is one of the most effective knobs for boosting DNNs' training time/energy efficiency. In this paper, we attempt to explore low-precision training from a new perspective as inspired by recent findings in understanding DNN training: we conjecture that DNNs' precision might have a similar effect as the learning rate during DNN training, and advocate dynamic precision along the training trajectory for further boosting the time/energy efficiency of DNN training. Specifically, we propose Cyclic Precision Training (CPT) to cyclically vary the precision between two boundary values which can be identified using a simple precision range test within the first few training epochs. Extensive simulations and ablation studies on five datasets and eleven models demonstrate that CPT's effectiveness is consistent across various models/tasks (including classification and language modeling). Furthermore, through experiments and visualization we show that CPT helps to (1) converge to a wider minima with a lower generalization error and (2) reduce training variance which we believe opens up a new design knob for simultaneously improving the optimization and efficiency of DNN training.

[Paper]
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Wed 5 May 21:00 - 21:15 PDT

(Q&A)
##### Q&A

Wed 5 May 21:15 - 21:25 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### PlasticineLab: A Soft-Body Manipulation Benchmark with Differentiable Physics

Zhiao Huang · Yuanming Hu · Tao Du · Siyuan Zhou · Hao Su · Joshua B Tenenbaum · Chuang Gan

Simulated virtual environments serve as one of the main driving forces behind developing and evaluating skill learning algorithms. However, existing environments typically only simulate rigid body physics. Additionally, the simulation process usually does not provide gradients that might be useful for planning and control optimizations. We introduce a new differentiable physics benchmark called PasticineLab, which includes a diverse collection of soft body manipulation tasks. In each task, the agent uses manipulators to deform the plasticine into a desired configuration. The underlying physics engine supports differentiable elastic and plastic deformation using the DiffTaichi system, posing many under-explored challenges to robotic agents. We evaluate several existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods and gradient-based methods on this benchmark. Experimental results suggest that 1) RL-based approaches struggle to solve most of the tasks efficiently; 2) gradient-based approaches, by optimizing open-loop control sequences with the built-in differentiable physics engine, can rapidly find a solution within tens of iterations, but still fall short on multi-stage tasks that require long-term planning. We expect that PlasticineLab will encourage the development of novel algorithms that combine differentiable physics and RL for more complex physics-based skill learning tasks. PlasticineLab will be made publicly available.

[Paper]
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Wed 5 May 21:25 - 21:35 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Regularization Matters in Policy Optimization - An Empirical Study on Continuous Control

Zhuang Liu · Xuanlin Li · Bingyi Kang · trevor darrell

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has been receiving increasingly more attention thanks to its encouraging performance on a variety of control tasks. Yet, conventional regularization techniques in training neural networks (e.g., $L_2$ regularization, dropout) have been largely ignored in RL methods, possibly because agents are typically trained and evaluated in the same environment, and because the deep RL community focuses more on high-level algorithm designs. In this work, we present the first comprehensive study of regularization techniques with multiple policy optimization algorithms on continuous control tasks. Interestingly, we find conventional regularization techniques on the policy networks can often bring large improvement, especially on harder tasks. Our findings are shown to be robust against training hyperparameter variations. We also compare these techniques with the more widely used entropy regularization. In addition, we study regularizing different components and find that only regularizing the policy network is typically the best. We further analyze why regularization may help generalization in RL from four perspectives - sample complexity, reward distribution, weight norm, and noise robustness. We hope our study provides guidance for future practices in regularizing policy optimization algorithms. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuanlinli17/iclr2021_rlreg .

[Paper]
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Wed 5 May 21:35 - 21:45 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Regularized Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Wonseok Jeon · Chen-Yang Su · Paul Barde · Thang Doan · Derek Nowrouzezahrai · Joelle Pineau

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) aims to facilitate a learner’s ability to imitate expert behavior by acquiring reward functions that explain the expert’s decisions. Regularized IRLapplies strongly convex regularizers to the learner’s policy in order to avoid the expert’s behavior being rationalized by arbitrary constant rewards, also known as degenerate solutions. We propose tractable solutions, and practical methods to obtain them, for regularized IRL. Current methods are restricted to the maximum-entropy IRL framework, limiting them to Shannon-entropy regularizers, as well as proposing solutions that are intractable in practice. We present theoretical backing for our proposed IRL method’s applicability to both discrete and continuous controls, empirically validating our performance on a variety of tasks.

[Paper]
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Wed 5 May 21:45 - 21:55 PDT

(Spotlight)
##### Behavioral Cloning from Noisy Demonstrations

Fumihiro Sasaki · Ryota Yamashina

We consider the problem of learning an optimal expert behavior policy given noisy demonstrations that contain observations from both optimal and non-optimal expert behaviors. Popular imitation learning algorithms, such as generative adversarial imitation learning, assume that (clear) demonstrations are given from optimal expert policies but not the non-optimal ones, and thus often fail to imitate the optimal expert behaviors given the noisy demonstrations. Prior works that address the problem require (1) learning policies through environment interactions in the same fashion as reinforcement learning, and (2) annotating each demonstration with confidence scores or rankings. However, such environment interactions and annotations in real-world settings take impractically long training time and a significant human effort. In this paper, we propose an imitation learning algorithm to address the problem without any environment interactions and annotations associated with the non-optimal demonstrations. The proposed algorithm learns ensemble policies with a generalized behavioral cloning (BC) objective function where we exploit another policy already learned by BC. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can learn behavior policies that are much closer to the optimal policies than ones learned by BC.

[Paper]
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Wed 5 May 21:55 - 22:05 PDT

(Q&A)