While deep learning models have replaced hand-designed features across many domains, these models are still trained with hand-designed optimizers. In this work, we leverage the same scaling approach behind the success of deep learning to learn versatile optimizers. We train an optimizer for deep learning which is itself a small neural network that ingests gradients and outputs parameter updates. Meta-trained with approximately four thousand TPU-months of compute on a wide variety of optimization tasks, our optimizer not only exhibits compelling performance, but optimizes in interesting and unexpected ways. It requires no hyperparameter tuning, instead automatically adapting to the specifics of the problem being optimized. We open source our learned optimizer, meta-training code, the associated train and test data, and an extensive optimizer benchmark suite with baselines at velo-code.github.io.
Segmentation is one of the primary tasks in the application of deep learning in medical imaging, owing to its multiple downstream clinical applications. As a result, many large-scale segmentation datasets have been curated and released for the segmentation of different anatomical structures. However, these datasets focus on the segmentation of a subset of anatomical structures in the body, therefore, training a model for each dataset would potentially result in hundreds of models and thus limit their clinical translational utility. Furthermore, many of these datasets share the same field of view but have different subsets of annotations, thus making individual dataset annotations incomplete. To that end, we developed SegViz, a federated learning framework for aggregating knowledge from distributed medical image segmentation datasets with different and incomplete annotations into a `global` meta-model. The SegViz framework was trained to build a single model capable of segmenting both liver and spleen aggregating knowledge from both these nodes by aggregating the weights after every 10 epochs. The global SegViz model was tested on an external dataset, Beyond the Cranial Vault (BTCV), comprising both liver and spleen annotations using the dice similarity (DS) metric. The baseline individual segmentation models for spleen and liver trained on their respective datasets produced a DS score of 0.834 and 0.878 on the BTCV test set. In comparison, the SegViz model produced comparable mean DS scores of 0.829 and 0.899 for the segmentation of the spleen and liver respectively. Our results demonstrate SegViz as an essential first step towards training clinically translatable multi-task segmentation models from distributed datasets with disjoint incomplete annotations with excellent performance.
When AI tools can generate many solutions, some human preference must be applied to determine which solution is relevant to the current project. One way to find those preferences is interactive search-based software engineering (iSBSE) where humans can influence the search process. This paper argues that when optimizing a model using human-in-the-loop, data mining methods such as our SNEAK tool (that recurses into divisions of the data) perform better than standard iSBSE methods (that mutates multiple candidate solutions over many generations). For our case studies, SNEAK runs faster, asks fewer questions, achieves better solutions (that are within 3% of the best solutions seen in our sample space), and scales to large problems (in our experiments, models with 1000 variables can be explored with half a dozen interactions where, each time, we ask only four questions). Accordingly, we recommend SNEAK as a baseline against which future iSBSE work should be compared. To facilitate that, all our scripts are online at //github.com/ai-se/sneak.
This paper proposes a novel learning-based control policy with strong generalizability to new environments that enables a mobile robot to navigate autonomously through spaces filled with both static obstacles and dense crowds of pedestrians. The policy uses a unique combination of input data to generate the desired steering angle and forward velocity: a short history of lidar data, kinematic data about nearby pedestrians, and a sub-goal point. The policy is trained in a reinforcement learning setting using a reward function that contains a novel term based on velocity obstacles to guide the robot to actively avoid pedestrians and move towards the goal. Through a series of 3D simulated experiments with up to 55 pedestrians, this control policy is able to achieve a better balance between collision avoidance and speed (i.e. higher success rate and faster average speed) than state-of-the-art model-based and learning-based policies, and it also generalizes better to different crowd sizes and unseen environments. An extensive series of hardware experiments demonstrate the ability of this policy to directly work in different real-world environments with different crowd sizes with zero retraining. Furthermore, a series of simulated and hardware experiments show that the control policy also works in highly constrained static environments on a different robot platform without any additional training. Lastly, we summarize several important lessons that can be applied to other robot learning systems. Multimedia demonstrations are available at //www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCcNYSbgCv8&list=PLouWbAcP4zIvPgaARrV223lf2eiSR-eSS.
Threshold guards are a basic primitive of many fault-tolerant algorithms that solve classical problems in distributed computing, such as reliable broadcast, two-phase commit, and consensus. Moreover, threshold guards can be found in recent blockchain algorithms such as, e.g., Tendermint consensus. In this article, we give an overview of techniques for automated verification of threshold-guarded fault-tolerant distributed algorithms, implemented in the Byzantine Model Checker (ByMC). These threshold-guarded algorithms have the following features: (1) up to $t$ of processes may crash or behave Byzantine; (2) the correct processes count messages and make progress when they receive sufficiently many messages, e.g., at least $t+1$; (3) the number $n$ of processes in the system is a parameter, as well as the number $t$ of faults; and (4) the parameters are restricted by a resilience condition, e.g., $n > 3t$. Traditionally, these algorithms were implemented in distributed systems with up to ten participating processes. Nowadays, they are implemented in distributed systems that involve hundreds or thousands of processes. To make sure that these algorithms are still correct for that scale, it is imperative to verify them for all possible values of the parameters.
This work performs a non-asymptotic analysis of the generalized Lasso under the assumption of sub-exponential data. Our main results continue recent research on the benchmark case of (sub-)Gaussian sample distributions and thereby explore what conclusions are still valid when going beyond. While many statistical features remain unaffected (e.g., consistency and error decay rates), the key difference becomes manifested in how the complexity of the hypothesis set is measured. It turns out that the estimation error can be controlled by means of two complexity parameters that arise naturally from a generic-chaining-based proof strategy. The output model can be non-realizable, while the only requirement for the input vector is a generic concentration inequality of Bernstein-type, which can be implemented for a variety of sub-exponential distributions. This abstract approach allows us to reproduce, unify, and extend previously known guarantees for the generalized Lasso. In particular, we present applications to semi-parametric output models and phase retrieval via the lifted Lasso. Moreover, our findings are discussed in the context of sparse recovery and high-dimensional estimation problems.
The standard supervised learning paradigm works effectively when training data shares the same distribution as the upcoming testing samples. However, this stationary assumption is often violated in real-world applications, especially when testing data appear in an online fashion. In this paper, we formulate and investigate the problem of \emph{online label shift} (OLaS): the learner trains an initial model from the labeled offline data and then deploys it to an unlabeled online environment where the underlying label distribution changes over time but the label-conditional density does not. The non-stationarity nature and the lack of supervision make the problem challenging to be tackled. To address the difficulty, we construct a new unbiased risk estimator that utilizes the unlabeled data, which exhibits many benign properties albeit with potential non-convexity. Building upon that, we propose novel online ensemble algorithms to deal with the non-stationarity of the environments. Our approach enjoys optimal \emph{dynamic regret}, indicating that the performance is competitive with a clairvoyant who knows the online environments in hindsight and then chooses the best decision for each round. The obtained dynamic regret bound scales with the intensity and pattern of label distribution shift, hence exhibiting the adaptivity in the OLaS problem. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness and support our theoretical findings.
Polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) is a versatile tool widely used in uncertainty quantification and machine learning, but its successful application depends strongly on the accuracy and reliability of the resulting PCE-based response surface. High accuracy typically requires high polynomial degrees, demanding many training points especially in high-dimensional problems through the curse of dimensionality. So-called sparse PCE concepts work with a much smaller selection of basis polynomials compared to conventional PCE approaches and can overcome the curse of dimensionality very efficiently, but have to pay specific attention to their strategies of choosing training points. Furthermore, the approximation error resembles an uncertainty that most existing PCE-based methods do not estimate. In this study, we develop and evaluate a fully Bayesian approach to establish the PCE representation via joint shrinkage priors and Markov chain Monte Carlo. The suggested Bayesian PCE model directly aims to solve the two challenges named above: achieving a sparse PCE representation and estimating uncertainty of the PCE itself. The embedded Bayesian regularizing via the joint shrinkage prior allows using higher polynomial degrees for given training points due to its ability to handle underdetermined situations, where the number of considered PCE coefficients could be much larger than the number of available training points. We also explore multiple variable selection methods to construct sparse PCE expansions based on the established Bayesian representations, while globally selecting the most meaningful orthonormal polynomials given the available training data. We demonstrate the advantages of our Bayesian PCE and the corresponding sparsity-inducing methods on several benchmarks.
With the rise of powerful pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, it becomes essential to investigate ways to adapt these models to downstream datasets. A recently proposed method named Context Optimization (CoOp) introduces the concept of prompt learning -- a recent trend in NLP -- to the vision domain for adapting pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, CoOp turns context words in a prompt into a set of learnable vectors and, with only a few labeled images for learning, can achieve huge improvements over intensively-tuned manual prompts. In our study we identify a critical problem of CoOp: the learned context is not generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset, suggesting that CoOp overfits base classes observed during training. To address the problem, we propose Conditional Context Optimization (CoCoOp), which extends CoOp by further learning a lightweight neural network to generate for each image an input-conditional token (vector). Compared to CoOp's static prompts, our dynamic prompts adapt to each instance and are thus less sensitive to class shift. Extensive experiments show that CoCoOp generalizes much better than CoOp to unseen classes, even showing promising transferability beyond a single dataset; and yields stronger domain generalization performance as well. Code is available at //github.com/KaiyangZhou/CoOp.
It has been shown that deep neural networks are prone to overfitting on biased training data. Towards addressing this issue, meta-learning employs a meta model for correcting the training bias. Despite the promising performances, super slow training is currently the bottleneck in the meta learning approaches. In this paper, we introduce a novel Faster Meta Update Strategy (FaMUS) to replace the most expensive step in the meta gradient computation with a faster layer-wise approximation. We empirically find that FaMUS yields not only a reasonably accurate but also a low-variance approximation of the meta gradient. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the proposed method on two tasks. We show our method is able to save two-thirds of the training time while still maintaining the comparable or achieving even better generalization performance. In particular, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and realistic noisy labels, and obtains promising performance on long-tailed recognition on standard benchmarks.
With the rapid increase of large-scale, real-world datasets, it becomes critical to address the problem of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes account for most of the data, while most classes are under-represented). Existing solutions typically adopt class re-balancing strategies such as re-sampling and re-weighting based on the number of observations for each class. In this work, we argue that as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula $(1-\beta^{n})/(1-\beta)$, where $n$ is the number of samples and $\beta \in [0,1)$ is a hyperparameter. We design a re-weighting scheme that uses the effective number of samples for each class to re-balance the loss, thereby yielding a class-balanced loss. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on artificially induced long-tailed CIFAR datasets and large-scale datasets including ImageNet and iNaturalist. Our results show that when trained with the proposed class-balanced loss, the network is able to achieve significant performance gains on long-tailed datasets.