Multi-task learning is a powerful method for solving several tasks jointly by learning robust representation. Optimization of the multi-task learning model is a more complex task than a single-task due to task conflict. Based on theoretical results, convergence to the optimal point is guaranteed when step size is chosen through line search. But, usually, line search for the step size is not the best choice due to the large computational time overhead. We propose a novel idea for line search algorithms in multi-task learning. The idea is to use latent representation space instead of parameter space for finding step size. We examined this idea with backtracking line search. We compare this fast backtracking algorithm with classical backtracking and gradient methods with a constant learning rate on MNIST, CIFAR-10, Cityscapes tasks. The systematic empirical study showed that the proposed method leads to more accurate and fast solution, than the traditional backtracking approach and keep competitive computational time and performance compared to the constant learning rate method.
The neuroevolution is one of the methodologies that can be used for learning optimal architecture during the training. It uses evolutionary algorithms to generate topology of artificial neural networks (ANN) and its parameters. In this work, a modified neuroevolution technique is presented which incorporates multi-level optimization. The presented approach adapts evolution strategies for evolving ensemble model based on bagging technique, using genetic operators for optimizing single anomaly detection models, reducing the training dataset to speedup the search process and performs non gradient fine tuning. The multivariate anomaly detection as an unsupervised learning task is the case study on which presented approach is tested. Single model optimization is based on mutation, crossover operators and focuses on finding optimal window sizes, the number of layers, layer depths, hyperparameters etc. to boost the anomaly detection scores of new and already known models. The proposed framework and its protocol shows that it is possible to find architecture in a reasonable time which can boost all well known multivariate anomaly detection deep learning architectures. The work concentrates on improvements to multi-level neuroevolution approach for anomaly detection. The main modifications are in the methods of mixing groups and single models evolution, non gradient fine tuning and voting mechanism. The presented framework can be used as an efficient learning network architecture method for any different unsupervised task where autoencoder architectures can be used. The tests were run on SWAT and WADI datasets and presented approach evolved architectures that achieve best scores among other deep learning models.
The multi-task learning (MTL) paradigm can be traced back to an early paper of Caruana (1997) in which it was argued that data from multiple tasks can be used with the aim to obtain a better performance over learning each task independently. A solution of MTL with conflicting objectives requires modelling the trade-off among them which is generally beyond what a straight linear combination can achieve. A theoretically principled and computationally effective strategy is finding solutions which are not dominated by others as it is addressed in the Pareto analysis. Multi-objective optimization problems arising in the multi-task learning context have specific features and require adhoc methods. The analysis of these features and the proposal of a new computational approach represent the focus of this work. Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) can easily include the concept of dominance and therefore the Pareto analysis. The major drawback of MOEAs is a low sample efficiency with respect to function evaluations. The key reason for this drawback is that most of the evolutionary approaches do not use models for approximating the objective function. Bayesian Optimization takes a radically different approach based on a surrogate model, such as a Gaussian Process. In this thesis the solutions in the Input Space are represented as probability distributions encapsulating the knowledge contained in the function evaluations. In this space of probability distributions, endowed with the metric given by the Wasserstein distance, a new algorithm MOEA/WST can be designed in which the model is not directly on the objective function but in an intermediate Information Space where the objects from the input space are mapped into histograms. Computational results show that the sample efficiency and the quality of the Pareto set provided by MOEA/WST are significantly better than in the standard MOEA.
Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to improve the generalization of several related tasks by learning them jointly. As a comparison, in addition to the joint training scheme, modern meta-learning allows unseen tasks with limited labels during the test phase, in the hope of fast adaptation over them. Despite the subtle difference between MTL and meta-learning in the problem formulation, both learning paradigms share the same insight that the shared structure between existing training tasks could lead to better generalization and adaptation. In this paper, we take one important step further to understand the close connection between these two learning paradigms, through both theoretical analysis and empirical investigation. Theoretically, we first demonstrate that MTL shares the same optimization formulation with a class of gradient-based meta-learning (GBML) algorithms. We then prove that for over-parameterized neural networks with sufficient depth, the learned predictive functions of MTL and GBML are close. In particular, this result implies that the predictions given by these two models are similar over the same unseen task. Empirically, we corroborate our theoretical findings by showing that, with proper implementation, MTL is competitive against state-of-the-art GBML algorithms on a set of few-shot image classification benchmarks. Since existing GBML algorithms often involve costly second-order bi-level optimization, our first-order MTL method is an order of magnitude faster on large-scale datasets such as mini-ImageNet. We believe this work could help bridge the gap between these two learning paradigms, and provide a computationally efficient alternative to GBML that also supports fast task adaptation.
The time and effort involved in hand-designing deep neural networks is immense. This has prompted the development of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques to automate this design. However, NAS algorithms tend to be slow and expensive; they need to train vast numbers of candidate networks to inform the search process. This could be alleviated if we could partially predict a network's trained accuracy from its initial state. In this work, we examine the overlap of activations between datapoints in untrained networks and motivate how this can give a measure which is usefully indicative of a network's trained performance. We incorporate this measure into a simple algorithm that allows us to search for powerful networks without any training in a matter of seconds on a single GPU, and verify its effectiveness on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, NATS-Bench, and Network Design Spaces. Our approach can be readily combined with more expensive search methods; we examine a simple adaptation of regularised evolutionary search. Code for reproducing our experiments is available at //github.com/BayesWatch/nas-without-training.
To rapidly learn a new task, it is often essential for agents to explore efficiently -- especially when performance matters from the first timestep. One way to learn such behaviour is via meta-learning. Many existing methods however rely on dense rewards for meta-training, and can fail catastrophically if the rewards are sparse. Without a suitable reward signal, the need for exploration during meta-training is exacerbated. To address this, we propose HyperX, which uses novel reward bonuses for meta-training to explore in approximate hyper-state space (where hyper-states represent the environment state and the agent's task belief). We show empirically that HyperX meta-learns better task-exploration and adapts more successfully to new tasks than existing methods.
To improve the search efficiency for Neural Architecture Search (NAS), One-shot NAS proposes to train a single super-net to approximate the performance of proposal architectures during search via weight-sharing. While this greatly reduces the computation cost, due to approximation error, the performance prediction by a single super-net is less accurate than training each proposal architecture from scratch, leading to search inefficiency. In this work, we propose few-shot NAS that explores the choice of using multiple super-nets: each super-net is pre-trained to be in charge of a sub-region of the search space. This reduces the prediction error of each super-net. Moreover, training these super-nets can be done jointly via sequential fine-tuning. A natural choice of sub-region is to follow the splitting of search space in NAS. We empirically evaluate our approach on three different tasks in NAS-Bench-201. Extensive results have demonstrated that few-shot NAS, using only 5 super-nets, significantly improves performance of many search methods with slight increase of search time. The architectures found by DARTs and ENAS with few-shot models achieved 88.53% and 86.50% test accuracy on CIFAR-10 in NAS-Bench-201, significantly outperformed their one-shot counterparts (with 54.30% and 54.30% test accuracy). Moreover, on AUTOGAN and DARTS, few-shot NAS also outperforms previously state-of-the-art models.
Automatic neural architecture design has shown its potential in discovering powerful neural network architectures. Existing methods, no matter based on reinforcement learning or evolutionary algorithms (EA), conduct architecture search in a discrete space, which is highly inefficient. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient method to automatic neural architecture design based on continuous optimization. We call this new approach neural architecture optimization (NAO). There are three key components in our proposed approach: (1) An encoder embeds/maps neural network architectures into a continuous space. (2) A predictor takes the continuous representation of a network as input and predicts its accuracy. (3) A decoder maps a continuous representation of a network back to its architecture. The performance predictor and the encoder enable us to perform gradient based optimization in the continuous space to find the embedding of a new architecture with potentially better accuracy. Such a better embedding is then decoded to a network by the decoder. Experiments show that the architecture discovered by our method is very competitive for image classification task on CIFAR-10 and language modeling task on PTB, outperforming or on par with the best results of previous architecture search methods with a significantly reduction of computational resources. Specifically we obtain $2.07\%$ test set error rate for CIFAR-10 image classification task and $55.9$ test set perplexity of PTB language modeling task. The best discovered architectures on both tasks are successfully transferred to other tasks such as CIFAR-100 and WikiText-2.
Policy gradient methods are often applied to reinforcement learning in continuous multiagent games. These methods perform local search in the joint-action space, and as we show, they are susceptable to a game-theoretic pathology known as relative overgeneralization. To resolve this issue, we propose Multiagent Soft Q-learning, which can be seen as the analogue of applying Q-learning to continuous controls. We compare our method to MADDPG, a state-of-the-art approach, and show that our method achieves better coordination in multiagent cooperative tasks, converging to better local optima in the joint action space.
Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning algorithms to search for better policies in the parameterized policy space. They do gradient search in the policy space and are known to converge very slowly. Nesterov developed an accelerated gradient search algorithm for convex optimization problems. This has been recently extended for non-convex and also stochastic optimization. We use Nesterov's acceleration for policy gradient search in the well-known actor-critic algorithm and show the convergence using ODE method. We tested this algorithm on a scheduling problem. Here an incoming job is scheduled into one of the four queues based on the queue lengths. We see from experimental results that algorithm using Nesterov's acceleration has significantly better performance compared to algorithm which do not use acceleration. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time Nesterov's acceleration has been used with actor-critic algorithm.
In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning architecture, which incorporates recent advances in attention mechanisms. Our approach, the Multi-Task Attention Network (MTAN), consists of a single shared network containing a global feature pool, together with task-specific soft-attention modules, which are trainable in an end-to-end manner. These attention modules allow for learning of task-specific features from the global pool, whilst simultaneously allowing for features to be shared across different tasks. The architecture can be built upon any feed-forward neural network, is simple to implement, and is parameter efficient. Experiments on the CityScapes dataset show that our method outperforms several baselines in both single-task and multi-task learning, and is also more robust to the various weighting schemes in the multi-task loss function. We further explore the effectiveness of our method through experiments over a range of task complexities, and show how our method scales well with task complexity compared to baselines.