A wide range of machine learning applications such as privacy-preserving learning, algorithmic fairness, and domain adaptation/generalization among others, involve learning \emph{invariant representations} of the data that aim to achieve two competing goals: (a) maximize information or accuracy with respect to a target response, and (b) maximize invariance or independence with respect to a set of protected features (e.g.\ for fairness, privacy, etc). Despite their wide applicability, theoretical understanding of the optimal tradeoffs -- with respect to accuracy, and invariance -- achievable by invariant representations is still severely lacking. In this paper, we provide precisely such an information-theoretic analysis of such tradeoffs under both classification and regression settings. We provide a geometric characterization of the accuracy and invariance achievable by any representation of the data; we term this feasible region the information plane. We provide a lower bound for this feasible region for the classification case, and an exact characterization for the regression case, which allows us to either bound or exactly characterize the Pareto optimal frontier between accuracy and invariance. Although our contributions are mainly theoretical, a key practical application of our results is in certifying the potential sub-optimality of any given representation learning algorithm for either classification or regression tasks. Our results shed new light on the fundamental interplay between accuracy and invariance, and may be useful in guiding the design of future representation learning algorithms.
Despite strong performance in numerous applications, the fragility of deep learning to input perturbations has raised serious questions about its use in safety-critical domains. While adversarial training can mitigate this issue in practice, state-of-the-art methods are increasingly application-dependent, heuristic in nature, and suffer from fundamental trade-offs between nominal performance and robustness. Moreover, the problem of finding worst-case perturbations is non-convex and underparameterized, both of which engender a non-favorable optimization landscape. Thus, there is a gap between the theory and practice of adversarial training, particularly with respect to when and why adversarial training works. In this paper, we take a constrained learning approach to address these questions and to provide a theoretical foundation for robust learning. In particular, we leverage semi-infinite optimization and non-convex duality theory to show that adversarial training is equivalent to a statistical problem over perturbation distributions, which we characterize completely. Notably, we show that a myriad of previous robust training techniques can be recovered for particular, sub-optimal choices of these distributions. Using these insights, we then propose a hybrid Langevin Monte Carlo approach of which several common algorithms (e.g., PGD) are special cases. Finally, we show that our approach can mitigate the trade-off between nominal and robust performance, yielding state-of-the-art results on MNIST and CIFAR-10. Our code is available at: //github.com/arobey1/advbench.
Graph representation learning is crucial for many real-world applications (e.g. social relation analysis). A fundamental problem for graph representation learning is how to effectively learn representations without human labeling, which is usually costly and time-consuming. Graph contrastive learning (GCL) addresses this problem by pulling the positive node pairs (or similar nodes) closer while pushing the negative node pairs (or dissimilar nodes) apart in the representation space. Despite the success of the existing GCL methods, they primarily sample node pairs based on the node-level proximity yet the community structures have rarely been taken into consideration. As a result, two nodes from the same community might be sampled as a negative pair. We argue that the community information should be considered to identify node pairs in the same communities, where the nodes insides are semantically similar. To address this issue, we propose a novel Graph Communal Contrastive Learning (gCooL) framework to jointly learn the community partition and learn node representations in an end-to-end fashion. Specifically, the proposed gCooL consists of two components: a Dense Community Aggregation (DeCA) algorithm for community detection and a Reweighted Self-supervised Cross-contrastive (ReSC) training scheme to utilize the community information. Additionally, the real-world graphs are complex and often consist of multiple views. In this paper, we demonstrate that the proposed gCooL can also be naturally adapted to multiplex graphs. Finally, we comprehensively evaluate the proposed gCooL on a variety of real-world graphs. The experimental results show that the gCooL outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
In the image domain, excellent representations can be learned by inducing invariance to content-preserving transformations via noise contrastive learning. In this paper, we generalize contrastive learning to a wider set of transformations, and their compositions, for which either invariance or distinctiveness is sought. We show that it is not immediately obvious how existing methods such as SimCLR can be extended to do so. Instead, we introduce a number of formal requirements that all contrastive formulations must satisfy, and propose a practical construction which satisfies these requirements. In order to maximise the reach of this analysis, we express all components of noise contrastive formulations as the choice of certain generalized transformations of the data (GDTs), including data sampling. We then consider videos as an example of data in which a large variety of transformations are applicable, accounting for the extra modalities -- for which we analyze audio and text -- and the dimension of time. We find that being invariant to certain transformations and distinctive to others is critical to learning effective video representations, improving the state-of-the-art for multiple benchmarks by a large margin, and even surpassing supervised pretraining.
Self-supervised learning has been shown to be very effective in learning useful representations, and yet much of the success is achieved in data types such as images, audio, and text. The success is mainly enabled by taking advantage of spatial, temporal, or semantic structure in the data through augmentation. However, such structure may not exist in tabular datasets commonly used in fields such as healthcare, making it difficult to design an effective augmentation method, and hindering a similar progress in tabular data setting. In this paper, we introduce a new framework, Subsetting features of Tabular data (SubTab), that turns the task of learning from tabular data into a multi-view representation learning problem by dividing the input features to multiple subsets. We argue that reconstructing the data from the subset of its features rather than its corrupted version in an autoencoder setting can better capture its underlying latent representation. In this framework, the joint representation can be expressed as the aggregate of latent variables of the subsets at test time, which we refer to as collaborative inference. Our experiments show that the SubTab achieves the state of the art (SOTA) performance of 98.31% on MNIST in tabular setting, on par with CNN-based SOTA models, and surpasses existing baselines on three other real-world datasets by a significant margin.
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is successful in solving many complex Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) problems. However, agents often face unanticipated environmental changes after deployment in the real world. These changes are often spurious and unrelated to the underlying problem, such as background shifts for visual input agents. Unfortunately, deep RL policies are usually sensitive to these changes and fail to act robustly against them. This resembles the problem of domain generalization in supervised learning. In this work, we study this problem for goal-conditioned RL agents. We propose a theoretical framework in the Block MDP setting that characterizes the generalizability of goal-conditioned policies to new environments. Under this framework, we develop a practical method PA-SkewFit that enhances domain generalization. The empirical evaluation shows that our goal-conditioned RL agent can perform well in various unseen test environments, improving by 50% over baselines.
This dissertation studies a fundamental open challenge in deep learning theory: why do deep networks generalize well even while being overparameterized, unregularized and fitting the training data to zero error? In the first part of the thesis, we will empirically study how training deep networks via stochastic gradient descent implicitly controls the networks' capacity. Subsequently, to show how this leads to better generalization, we will derive {\em data-dependent} {\em uniform-convergence-based} generalization bounds with improved dependencies on the parameter count. Uniform convergence has in fact been the most widely used tool in deep learning literature, thanks to its simplicity and generality. Given its popularity, in this thesis, we will also take a step back to identify the fundamental limits of uniform convergence as a tool to explain generalization. In particular, we will show that in some example overparameterized settings, {\em any} uniform convergence bound will provide only a vacuous generalization bound. With this realization in mind, in the last part of the thesis, we will change course and introduce an {\em empirical} technique to estimate generalization using unlabeled data. Our technique does not rely on any notion of uniform-convergece-based complexity and is remarkably precise. We will theoretically show why our technique enjoys such precision. We will conclude by discussing how future work could explore novel ways to incorporate distributional assumptions in generalization bounds (such as in the form of unlabeled data) and explore other tools to derive bounds, perhaps by modifying uniform convergence or by developing completely new tools altogether.
This book develops an effective theory approach to understanding deep neural networks of practical relevance. Beginning from a first-principles component-level picture of networks, we explain how to determine an accurate description of the output of trained networks by solving layer-to-layer iteration equations and nonlinear learning dynamics. A main result is that the predictions of networks are described by nearly-Gaussian distributions, with the depth-to-width aspect ratio of the network controlling the deviations from the infinite-width Gaussian description. We explain how these effectively-deep networks learn nontrivial representations from training and more broadly analyze the mechanism of representation learning for nonlinear models. From a nearly-kernel-methods perspective, we find that the dependence of such models' predictions on the underlying learning algorithm can be expressed in a simple and universal way. To obtain these results, we develop the notion of representation group flow (RG flow) to characterize the propagation of signals through the network. By tuning networks to criticality, we give a practical solution to the exploding and vanishing gradient problem. We further explain how RG flow leads to near-universal behavior and lets us categorize networks built from different activation functions into universality classes. Altogether, we show that the depth-to-width ratio governs the effective model complexity of the ensemble of trained networks. By using information-theoretic techniques, we estimate the optimal aspect ratio at which we expect the network to be practically most useful and show how residual connections can be used to push this scale to arbitrary depths. With these tools, we can learn in detail about the inductive bias of architectures, hyperparameters, and optimizers.
Adversarial training is among the most effective techniques to improve the robustness of models against adversarial perturbations. However, the full effect of this approach on models is not well understood. For example, while adversarial training can reduce the adversarial risk (prediction error against an adversary), it sometimes increase standard risk (generalization error when there is no adversary). Even more, such behavior is impacted by various elements of the learning problem, including the size and quality of training data, specific forms of adversarial perturbations in the input, model overparameterization, and adversary's power, among others. In this paper, we focus on \emph{distribution perturbing} adversary framework wherein the adversary can change the test distribution within a neighborhood of the training data distribution. The neighborhood is defined via Wasserstein distance between distributions and the radius of the neighborhood is a measure of adversary's manipulative power. We study the tradeoff between standard risk and adversarial risk and derive the Pareto-optimal tradeoff, achievable over specific classes of models, in the infinite data limit with features dimension kept fixed. We consider three learning settings: 1) Regression with the class of linear models; 2) Binary classification under the Gaussian mixtures data model, with the class of linear classifiers; 3) Regression with the class of random features model (which can be equivalently represented as two-layer neural network with random first-layer weights). We show that a tradeoff between standard and adversarial risk is manifested in all three settings. We further characterize the Pareto-optimal tradeoff curves and discuss how a variety of factors, such as features correlation, adversary's power or the width of two-layer neural network would affect this tradeoff.
Siamese networks have become a common structure in various recent models for unsupervised visual representation learning. These models maximize the similarity between two augmentations of one image, subject to certain conditions for avoiding collapsing solutions. In this paper, we report surprising empirical results that simple Siamese networks can learn meaningful representations even using none of the following: (i) negative sample pairs, (ii) large batches, (iii) momentum encoders. Our experiments show that collapsing solutions do exist for the loss and structure, but a stop-gradient operation plays an essential role in preventing collapsing. We provide a hypothesis on the implication of stop-gradient, and further show proof-of-concept experiments verifying it. Our "SimSiam" method achieves competitive results on ImageNet and downstream tasks. We hope this simple baseline will motivate people to rethink the roles of Siamese architectures for unsupervised representation learning. Code will be made available.
Combining clustering and representation learning is one of the most promising approaches for unsupervised learning of deep neural networks. However, doing so naively leads to ill posed learning problems with degenerate solutions. In this paper, we propose a novel and principled learning formulation that addresses these issues. The method is obtained by maximizing the information between labels and input data indices. We show that this criterion extends standard cross-entropy minimization to an optimal transport problem, which we solve efficiently for millions of input images and thousands of labels using a fast variant of the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm. The resulting method is able to self-label visual data so as to train highly competitive image representations without manual labels. Our method achieves state of the art representation learning performance for AlexNet and ResNet-50 on SVHN, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet.