Certified robustness is a desirable property for deep neural networks in safety-critical applications, and popular training algorithms can certify robustness of a neural network by computing a global bound on its Lipschitz constant. However, such a bound is often loose: it tends to over-regularize the neural network and degrade its natural accuracy. A tighter Lipschitz bound may provide a better tradeoff between natural and certified accuracy, but is generally hard to compute exactly due to non-convexity of the network. In this work, we propose an efficient and trainable \emph{local} Lipschitz upper bound by considering the interactions between activation functions (e.g. ReLU) and weight matrices. Specifically, when computing the induced norm of a weight matrix, we eliminate the corresponding rows and columns where the activation function is guaranteed to be a constant in the neighborhood of each given data point, which provides a provably tighter bound than the global Lipschitz constant of the neural network. Our method can be used as a plug-in module to tighten the Lipschitz bound in many certifiable training algorithms. Furthermore, we propose to clip activation functions (e.g., ReLU and MaxMin) with a learnable upper threshold and a sparsity loss to assist the network to achieve an even tighter local Lipschitz bound. Experimentally, we show that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both clean and certified accuracy on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and TinyImageNet datasets with various network architectures.
Computational design problems arise in a number of settings, from synthetic biology to computer architectures. In this paper, we aim to solve data-driven model-based optimization (MBO) problems, where the goal is to find a design input that maximizes an unknown objective function provided access to only a static dataset of prior experiments. Such data-driven optimization procedures are the only practical methods in many real-world domains where active data collection is expensive (e.g., when optimizing over proteins) or dangerous (e.g., when optimizing over aircraft designs). Typical methods for MBO that optimize the design against a learned model suffer from distributional shift: it is easy to find a design that "fools" the model into predicting a high value. To overcome this, we propose conservative objective models (COMs), a method that learns a model of the objective function that lower bounds the actual value of the ground-truth objective on out-of-distribution inputs, and uses it for optimization. Structurally, COMs resemble adversarial training methods used to overcome adversarial examples. COMs are simple to implement and outperform a number of existing methods on a wide range of MBO problems, including optimizing protein sequences, robot morphologies, neural network weights, and superconducting materials.
Self-training algorithms, which train a model to fit pseudolabels predicted by another previously-learned model, have been very successful for learning with unlabeled data using neural networks. However, the current theoretical understanding of self-training only applies to linear models. This work provides a unified theoretical analysis of self-training with deep networks for semi-supervised learning, unsupervised domain adaptation, and unsupervised learning. At the core of our analysis is a simple but realistic ``expansion'' assumption, which states that a low-probability subset of the data must expand to a neighborhood with large probability relative to the subset. We also assume that neighborhoods of examples in different classes have minimal overlap. We prove that under these assumptions, the minimizers of population objectives based on self-training and input-consistency regularization will achieve high accuracy with respect to ground-truth labels. By using off-the-shelf generalization bounds, we immediately convert this result to sample complexity guarantees for neural nets that are polynomial in the margin and Lipschitzness. Our results help explain the empirical successes of recently proposed self-training algorithms which use input consistency regularization.
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.
Model efficiency has become increasingly important in computer vision. In this paper, we systematically study various neural network architecture design choices for object detection and propose several key optimizations to improve efficiency. First, we propose a weighted bi-directional feature pyramid network (BiFPN), which allows easy and fast multi-scale feature fusion; Second, we propose a compound scaling method that uniformly scales the resolution, depth, and width for all backbone, feature network, and box/class prediction networks at the same time. Based on these optimizations, we have developed a new family of object detectors, called EfficientDet, which consistently achieve an order-of-magnitude better efficiency than prior art across a wide spectrum of resource constraints. In particular, without bells and whistles, our EfficientDet-D7 achieves stateof-the-art 51.0 mAP on COCO dataset with 52M parameters and 326B FLOPS1 , being 4x smaller and using 9.3x fewer FLOPS yet still more accurate (+0.3% mAP) than the best previous detector.
A core capability of intelligent systems is the ability to quickly learn new tasks by drawing on prior experience. Gradient (or optimization) based meta-learning has recently emerged as an effective approach for few-shot learning. In this formulation, meta-parameters are learned in the outer loop, while task-specific models are learned in the inner-loop, by using only a small amount of data from the current task. A key challenge in scaling these approaches is the need to differentiate through the inner loop learning process, which can impose considerable computational and memory burdens. By drawing upon implicit differentiation, we develop the implicit MAML algorithm, which depends only on the solution to the inner level optimization and not the path taken by the inner loop optimizer. This effectively decouples the meta-gradient computation from the choice of inner loop optimizer. As a result, our approach is agnostic to the choice of inner loop optimizer and can gracefully handle many gradient steps without vanishing gradients or memory constraints. Theoretically, we prove that implicit MAML can compute accurate meta-gradients with a memory footprint that is, up to small constant factors, no more than that which is required to compute a single inner loop gradient and at no overall increase in the total computational cost. Experimentally, we show that these benefits of implicit MAML translate into empirical gains on few-shot image recognition benchmarks.
In this paper we study the convergence of generative adversarial networks (GANs) from the perspective of the informativeness of the gradient of the optimal discriminative function. We show that GANs without restriction on the discriminative function space commonly suffer from the problem that the gradient produced by the discriminator is uninformative to guide the generator. By contrast, Wasserstein GAN (WGAN), where the discriminative function is restricted to $1$-Lipschitz, does not suffer from such a gradient uninformativeness problem. We further show in the paper that the model with a compact dual form of Wasserstein distance, where the Lipschitz condition is relaxed, also suffers from this issue. This implies the importance of Lipschitz condition and motivates us to study the general formulation of GANs with Lipschitz constraint, which leads to a new family of GANs that we call Lipschitz GANs (LGANs). We show that LGANs guarantee the existence and uniqueness of the optimal discriminative function as well as the existence of a unique Nash equilibrium. We prove that LGANs are generally capable of eliminating the gradient uninformativeness problem. According to our empirical analysis, LGANs are more stable and generate consistently higher quality samples compared with WGAN.
We know SGAN may have a risk of gradient vanishing. A significant improvement is WGAN, with the help of 1-Lipschitz constraint on discriminator to prevent from gradient vanishing. Is there any GAN having no gradient vanishing and no 1-Lipschitz constraint on discriminator? We do find one, called GAN-QP. To construct a new framework of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) usually includes three steps: 1. choose a probability divergence; 2. convert it into a dual form; 3. play a min-max game. In this articles, we demonstrate that the first step is not necessary. We can analyse the property of divergence and even construct new divergence in dual space directly. As a reward, we obtain a simpler alternative of WGAN: GAN-QP. We demonstrate that GAN-QP have a better performance than WGAN in theory and practice.
Eligibility traces are an effective technique to accelerate reinforcement learning by smoothly assigning credit to recently visited states. However, their online implementation is incompatible with modern deep reinforcement learning algorithms, which rely heavily on i.i.d. training data and offline learning. We utilize an efficient, recursive method for computing {\lambda}-returns offline that can provide the benefits of eligibility traces to any value-estimation or actor-critic method. We demonstrate how our method can be combined with DQN, DRQN, and A3C to greatly enhance the learning speed of these algorithms when playing Atari 2600 games, even under partial observability. Our results indicate several-fold improvements to sample efficiency on Seaquest and Q*bert. We expect similar results for other algorithms and domains not considered here, including those with continuous actions.
We consider the exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning and we show that an agent imbued with a risk-seeking utility function is able to explore efficiently, as measured by regret. The parameter that controls how risk-seeking the agent is can be optimized exactly, or annealed according to a schedule. We call the resulting algorithm K-learning and show that the corresponding K-values are optimistic for the expected Q-values at each state-action pair. The K-values induce a natural Boltzmann exploration policy for which the `temperature' parameter is equal to the risk-seeking parameter. This policy achieves an expected regret bound of $\tilde O(L^{3/2} \sqrt{S A T})$, where $L$ is the time horizon, $S$ is the number of states, $A$ is the number of actions, and $T$ is the total number of elapsed time-steps. This bound is only a factor of $L$ larger than the established lower bound. K-learning can be interpreted as mirror descent in the policy space, and it is similar to other well-known methods in the literature, including Q-learning, soft-Q-learning, and maximum entropy policy gradient, and is closely related to optimism and count based exploration methods. K-learning is simple to implement, as it only requires adding a bonus to the reward at each state-action and then solving a Bellman equation. We conclude with a numerical example demonstrating that K-learning is competitive with other state-of-the-art algorithms in practice.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are powerful generative models, but suffer from training instability. The recently proposed Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) makes progress toward stable training of GANs, but sometimes can still generate only low-quality samples or fail to converge. We find that these problems are often due to the use of weight clipping in WGAN to enforce a Lipschitz constraint on the critic, which can lead to undesired behavior. We propose an alternative to clipping weights: penalize the norm of gradient of the critic with respect to its input. Our proposed method performs better than standard WGAN and enables stable training of a wide variety of GAN architectures with almost no hyperparameter tuning, including 101-layer ResNets and language models over discrete data. We also achieve high quality generations on CIFAR-10 and LSUN bedrooms.