While the depth of modern Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) surpasses that of the pioneering networks with a significant margin, the traditional way of appending supervision only over the final classifier and progressively propagating gradient flow upstream remains the training mainstay. Seminal Deeply-Supervised Networks (DSN) were proposed to alleviate the difficulty of optimization arising from gradient flow through a long chain. However, it is still vulnerable to issues including interference to the hierarchical representation generation process and inconsistent optimization objectives, as illustrated theoretically and empirically in this paper. Complementary to previous training strategies, we propose Dynamic Hierarchical Mimicking, a generic feature learning mechanism, to advance CNN training with enhanced generalization ability. Partially inspired by DSN, we fork delicately designed side branches from the intermediate layers of a given neural network. Each branch can emerge from certain locations of the main branch dynamically, which not only retains representation rooted in the backbone network but also generates more diverse representations along its own pathway. We go one step further to promote multi-level interactions among different branches through an optimization formula with probabilistic prediction matching losses, thus guaranteeing a more robust optimization process and better representation ability. Experiments on both category and instance recognition tasks demonstrate the substantial improvements of our proposed method over its corresponding counterparts using diverse state-of-the-art CNN architectures. Code and models are publicly available at //github.com/d-li14/DHM
Recent self-supervised methods for image representation learning are based on maximizing the agreement between embedding vectors from different views of the same image. A trivial solution is obtained when the encoder outputs constant vectors. This collapse problem is often avoided through implicit biases in the learning architecture, that often lack a clear justification or interpretation. In this paper, we introduce VICReg (Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization), a method that explicitly avoids the collapse problem with a simple regularization term on the variance of the embeddings along each dimension individually. VICReg combines the variance term with a decorrelation mechanism based on redundancy reduction and covariance regularization, and achieves results on par with the state of the art on several downstream tasks. In addition, we show that incorporating our new variance term into other methods helps stabilize the training and leads to performance improvements.
Manipulating an articulated object requires perceiving itskinematic hierarchy: its parts, how each can move, and howthose motions are coupled. Previous work has explored per-ception for kinematics, but none infers a complete kinematichierarchy on never-before-seen object instances, without relyingon a schema or template. We present a novel perception systemthat achieves this goal. Our system infers the moving parts ofan object and the kinematic couplings that relate them. Toinfer parts, it uses a point cloud instance segmentation neuralnetwork and to infer kinematic hierarchies, it uses a graphneural network to predict the existence, direction, and typeof edges (i.e. joints) that relate the inferred parts. We trainthese networks using simulated scans of synthetic 3D models.We evaluate our system on simulated scans of 3D objects, andwe demonstrate a proof-of-concept use of our system to drivereal-world robotic manipulation.
Self-supervised learning has been widely used to obtain transferrable representations from unlabeled images. Especially, recent contrastive learning methods have shown impressive performances on downstream image classification tasks. While these contrastive methods mainly focus on generating invariant global representations at the image-level under semantic-preserving transformations, they are prone to overlook spatial consistency of local representations and therefore have a limitation in pretraining for localization tasks such as object detection and instance segmentation. Moreover, aggressively cropped views used in existing contrastive methods can minimize representation distances between the semantically different regions of a single image. In this paper, we propose a spatially consistent representation learning algorithm (SCRL) for multi-object and location-specific tasks. In particular, we devise a novel self-supervised objective that tries to produce coherent spatial representations of a randomly cropped local region according to geometric translations and zooming operations. On various downstream localization tasks with benchmark datasets, the proposed SCRL shows significant performance improvements over the image-level supervised pretraining as well as the state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods.
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) was first proposed to achieve state-of-the-art performance through the discovery of new architecture patterns, without human intervention. An over-reliance on expert knowledge in the search space design has however led to increased performance (local optima) without significant architectural breakthroughs, thus preventing truly novel solutions from being reached. In this work we 1) are the first to investigate casting NAS as a problem of finding the optimal network generator and 2) we propose a new, hierarchical and graph-based search space capable of representing an extremely large variety of network types, yet only requiring few continuous hyper-parameters. This greatly reduces the dimensionality of the problem, enabling the effective use of Bayesian Optimisation as a search strategy. At the same time, we expand the range of valid architectures, motivating a multi-objective learning approach. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy on six benchmark datasets and show that our search space generates extremely lightweight yet highly competitive models.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are information processing architectures for signals supported on graphs. They are presented here as generalizations of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in which individual layers contain banks of graph convolutional filters instead of banks of classical convolutional filters. Otherwise, GNNs operate as CNNs. Filters are composed with pointwise nonlinearities and stacked in layers. It is shown that GNN architectures exhibit equivariance to permutation and stability to graph deformations. These properties provide a measure of explanation respecting the good performance of GNNs that can be observed empirically. It is also shown that if graphs converge to a limit object, a graphon, GNNs converge to a corresponding limit object, a graphon neural network. This convergence justifies the transferability of GNNs across networks with different number of nodes.
Sampling methods (e.g., node-wise, layer-wise, or subgraph) has become an indispensable strategy to speed up training large-scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, existing sampling methods are mostly based on the graph structural information and ignore the dynamicity of optimization, which leads to high variance in estimating the stochastic gradients. The high variance issue can be very pronounced in extremely large graphs, where it results in slow convergence and poor generalization. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the variance of sampling methods and show that, due to the composite structure of empirical risk, the variance of any sampling method can be decomposed into \textit{embedding approximation variance} in the forward stage and \textit{stochastic gradient variance} in the backward stage that necessities mitigating both types of variance to obtain faster convergence rate. We propose a decoupled variance reduction strategy that employs (approximate) gradient information to adaptively sample nodes with minimal variance, and explicitly reduces the variance introduced by embedding approximation. We show theoretically and empirically that the proposed method, even with smaller mini-batch sizes, enjoys a faster convergence rate and entails a better generalization compared to the existing methods.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which generalize deep neural networks to graph-structured data, have drawn considerable attention and achieved state-of-the-art performance in numerous graph related tasks. However, existing GNN models mainly focus on designing graph convolution operations. The graph pooling (or downsampling) operations, that play an important role in learning hierarchical representations, are usually overlooked. In this paper, we propose a novel graph pooling operator, called Hierarchical Graph Pooling with Structure Learning (HGP-SL), which can be integrated into various graph neural network architectures. HGP-SL incorporates graph pooling and structure learning into a unified module to generate hierarchical representations of graphs. More specifically, the graph pooling operation adaptively selects a subset of nodes to form an induced subgraph for the subsequent layers. To preserve the integrity of graph's topological information, we further introduce a structure learning mechanism to learn a refined graph structure for the pooled graph at each layer. By combining HGP-SL operator with graph neural networks, we perform graph level representation learning with focus on graph classification task. Experimental results on six widely used benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.
Hierarchical text classification, which aims to classify text documents into a given hierarchy, is an important task in many real-world applications. Recently, deep neural models are gaining increasing popularity for text classification due to their expressive power and minimum requirement for feature engineering. However, applying deep neural networks for hierarchical text classification remains challenging, because they heavily rely on a large amount of training data and meanwhile cannot easily determine appropriate levels of documents in the hierarchical setting. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised neural method for hierarchical text classification. Our method does not require a large amount of training data but requires only easy-to-provide weak supervision signals such as a few class-related documents or keywords. Our method effectively leverages such weak supervision signals to generate pseudo documents for model pre-training, and then performs self-training on real unlabeled data to iteratively refine the model. During the training process, our model features a hierarchical neural structure, which mimics the given hierarchy and is capable of determining the proper levels for documents with a blocking mechanism. Experiments on three datasets from different domains demonstrate the efficacy of our method compared with a comprehensive set of baselines.
Graphs, which describe pairwise relations between objects, are essential representations of many real-world data such as social networks. In recent years, graph neural networks, which extend the neural network models to graph data, have attracted increasing attention. Graph neural networks have been applied to advance many different graph related tasks such as reasoning dynamics of the physical system, graph classification, and node classification. Most of the existing graph neural network models have been designed for static graphs, while many real-world graphs are inherently dynamic. For example, social networks are naturally evolving as new users joining and new relations being created. Current graph neural network models cannot utilize the dynamic information in dynamic graphs. However, the dynamic information has been proven to enhance the performance of many graph analytical tasks such as community detection and link prediction. Hence, it is necessary to design dedicated graph neural networks for dynamic graphs. In this paper, we propose DGNN, a new {\bf D}ynamic {\bf G}raph {\bf N}eural {\bf N}etwork model, which can model the dynamic information as the graph evolving. In particular, the proposed framework can keep updating node information by capturing the sequential information of edges, the time intervals between edges and information propagation coherently. Experimental results on various dynamic graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Deep hierarchical reinforcement learning has gained a lot of attention in recent years due to its ability to produce state-of-the-art results in challenging environments where non-hierarchical frameworks fail to learn useful policies. However, as problem domains become more complex, deep hierarchical reinforcement learning can become inefficient, leading to longer convergence times and poor performance. We introduce the Deep Nested Agent framework, which is a variant of deep hierarchical reinforcement learning where information from the main agent is propagated to the low level $nested$ agent by incorporating this information into the nested agent's state. We demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of the Deep Nested Agent framework by applying it to three scenarios in Minecraft with comparisons to a deep non-hierarchical single agent framework, as well as, a deep hierarchical framework.