Tag Archives: ICLR

Google at ICLR 2021

Posted by Jaqui Herman, Research Specialist and Tim Herrmann, Program Manager

The 9th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2021), a virtual conference focused on deep learning, kicked off this week, offering conference and workshop tracks that present some of the latest research in deep learning and its applications to areas such as computer vision, computational biology, speech recognition, text understanding, and more.

As a Platinum Sponsor of ICLR 2021, Google will have a strong presence with over 100 accepted publications and participation on organizing committees and in workshops. If you have registered for ICLR 2021, we hope you’ll watch our talks and learn about the work at Google that goes into solving interesting problems for billions of people. Learn more about our research being presented in the list below (Googlers in bold).

Officers and Board Members
Includes: Hugo Larochelle, Tara Sainath

Organizing Committee
Includes: Sanmi Koyejo, Chelsea Finn

Area Chairs
Includes: Abhishek Kumar, Aditya Menon, Aleksandra Faust, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Andrew Cotter, Andrew Dai, Augustus Odena, Been Kim, Behnam Neyshabur, Ben Poole, Bo Dai, Bo Li, Branislav Kveton, Ce Liu, Claudio Gentile, Colin Raffel, Danny Tarlow, David Ha, Dengyong Zhou, Dumitru Erhan, Dustin Tran, Felix Hill, George Tucker, Hanie Sedghi, Heinrich Jiang, Hossein Mobahi, Izhak Shafran, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Jasper Snoek, Jean-Philippe Vert, Jeffrey Pennington, Justin Gilmer, Kevin Swersky, Marco Cuturi, Mario Lucic, Marlos C. Machado, Mathieu Blondel, Matt Johnson, Matthieu Geist, Mohammad Norouzi, Naman Agarwal, Navdeep Jaitly, Nicolas Le Roux, Niki Parmar, Olivier Bachem, Olivier Pietquin, Philip Long, Quentin Berthet, Razvan Pascanu, Rodolphe Jenatton, Samy Bengio*, Sebastian Nowozin, Silvio Lattanzi, Slav Petrov, Srinadh Bhojanapalli, Suman Ravuri, Tim Salimans, Vitaly Kuznetsov, William Cohen, Yann Dauphin, Yujia Li

Publications
Scalable Learning and MAP Inference for Nonsymmetric Determinantal Point Processes
Mike Gartrell, Insu Han, Elvis Dohmatob, Jennifer Gillenwater, Victor-Emmanuel Brunel

An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale (see the blog post)
Alexey Dosovitskiy, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Dirk Weissenborn, Xiaohua Zhai, Thomas Unterthiner, Mostafa Dehghani, Matthias Minderer, Georg Heigold, Sylvain Gelly, Jakob Uszkoreit, Neil Houlsby

Share or Not? Learning to Schedule Language-Specific Capacity for Multilingual Translation
Biao Zhang*, Ankur Bapna, Rico Sennrich, Orhan Firat

Evolving Reinforcement Learning Algorithms (see the blog post)
John D Co-Reyes, Yingjie Miao, Daiyi Peng, Esteban Real, Quoc V Le, Sergey Levine, Honglak Lee, Aleksandra Faust

Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations
Yang Song*, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Diederik P Kingma, Abhishek Kumar, Stefano Ermon, Ben Poole

What Matters for On-Policy Deep Actor-Critic Methods? A Large-Scale Study
Marcin Andrychowicz, Anton Raichuk, Piotr Stańczyk, Manu Orsini, Sertan Girgin, Raphaël Marinier, Leonard Hussenot, Matthieu Geist, Olivier Pietquin, Marcin Michalski, Sylvain Gelly, Olivier Bachem

When Do Curricula Work?
Xiaoxia Wu, Ethan Dyer, Behnam Neyshabur

Sharpness-aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization
Pierre Foret*, Ariel Kleiner, Hossein Mobahi, Behnam Neyshabur

Gradient Vaccine: Investigating and Improving Multi-task Optimization in Massively Multilingual Models Zirui Wang*, Yulia Tsvetkov, Orhan Firat, Yuan Cao

Mathematical Reasoning via Self-supervised Skip-tree Training
Markus Norman Rabe, Dennis Lee, Kshitij Bansal, Christian Szegedy

Long-Tail Learning via Logit Adjustment
Aditya Krishna Menon, Sadeep Jayasumana, Ankit Singh Rawat, Himanshu Jain, Andreas Veit, Sanjiv Kumar

Are Neural Rankers Still Outperformed by Gradient Boosted Decision Trees?
Zhen Qin, Le Yan, Honglei Zhuang, Yi Tay, Rama Kumar Pasumarthi, Xuanhui Wang, Michael Bendersky, Marc Najork

LambdaNetworks: Modeling Long-Range Interactions without Attention
Irwan Bello

Contrastive Behavioral Similarity Embeddings for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Rishabh Agarwal, Marlos C. Machado, Pablo Samuel Castro, Marc G Bellemare

BUSTLE: Bottom-Up Program Synthesis Through Learning-Guided Exploration
Augustus Odena, Kensen Shi, David Bieber, Rishabh Singh, Charles Sutton, Hanjun Dai

Practical Real Time Recurrent Learning with a Sparse Approximation
Jacob Menick, Erich Elsen, Utku Evci, Simon Osindero, Karen Simonyan, Alex Graves

LEAF: A Learnable Frontend for Audio Classification (see the blog post)
Neil Zeghidour, Olivier Teboul, Félix de Chaumont Quitry, Marco Tagliasacchi

Batch Reinforcement Learning Through Continuation Method
Yijie Guo, Shengyu Feng, Nicolas Le Roux, Ed Chi, Honglak Lee, Minmin Chen

Scalable Transfer Learning with Expert Models
Joan Puigcerver, Carlos Riquelme Ruiz, Basil Mustafa, Cedric Renggli*, André Susano Pinto, Sylvain Gelly, Daniel Keysers, Neil Houlsby

Contrastive Behavioral Similarity Embeddings for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Rishabh Agarwal, Marlos C. Machado*, Pablo Samuel Castro, Marc G Bellemare

Scaling Symbolic Methods Using Gradients for Neural Model Explanation
Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Subhashini Venugopalan, Li Li, Rishabh Singh, Patrick Riley

Primal Wasserstein Imitation Learning (see the blog post)
Robert Dadashi, Leonard Hussenot, Matthieu Geist, Olivier Pietquin

Reset-Free Lifelong Learning with Skill-Space Planning
Kevin Lu, Aditya Grover, Pieter Abbeel, Igor Mordatch

Teaching Temporal Logics to Neural Networks
Christopher Hahn, Frederik Schmitt, Jens U. Kreber, Markus Norman Rabe, Bernd Finkbeiner

Shape-Texture Debiased Neural Network Training
Yingwei Li, Qihang Yu, Mingxing Tan, Jieru Mei, Peng Tang, Wei Shen, Alan Yuille, Cihang Xie

Rethinking Embedding Coupling in Pre-trained Language Models
Hyung Won Chung, Thibault Fevry*, Henry Tsai, Melvin Johnson, Sebastian Ruder

Overparameterisation and Worst-Case Generalisation: Friend or Foe?
Aditya Krishna Menon, Ankit Singh Rawat, Sanjiv Kumar

Single-Photon Image Classification
Thomas Fischbacher, Luciano Sbaiz

Into the Wild with AudioScope: Unsupervised Audio-Visual Separation of On-Screen Sounds
Efthymios Tzinis*, Scott Wisdom, Aren Jansen, Shawn Hershey, Tal Remez, Daniel P. W. Ellis, John R. Hershey

Adaptive Federated Optimization
Sashank J. Reddi, Zachary Charles, Manzil Zaheer, Zachary Garrett, Keith Rush, Jakub Konečný, Sanjiv Kumar, Hugh Brendan McMahan

Share or Not? Learning to Schedule Language-Specific Capacity for Multilingual Translation
Biao Zhang*, Ankur Bapna, Rico Sennrich, Orhan Firat

Off-Dynamics Reinforcement Learning: Training for Transfer with Domain Classifiers
Benjamin Eysenbach, Shreyas Chaudhari, Swapnil Asawa, Sergey Levine, Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Open Question Answering over Tables and Text
Wenhu Chen*, Ming-Wei Chang, Eva Schlinger, William Yang Wang, William W. Cohen

Practical Real Time Recurrent Learning with a Sparse Approximation
Jacob Menick, Erich Elsen, Utku Evci, Simon Osindero, Karen Simonyan, Alex Graves

IDF++: Analyzing and Improving Integer Discrete Flows for Lossless Compression
Rianne van den Berg, Alexey A. Gritsenko, Mostafa Dehghani, Casper Kaae Sønderby, Tim Salimans

A Universal Representation Transformer Layer for Few-Shot Image Classification
Lu Liu, William L. Hamilton, Guodong Long, Jing Jiang, Hugo Larochelle

Tradeoffs in Data Augmentation: An Empirical Study
Raphael Gontijo-Lopes, Sylvia Smullin, Ekin Dogus Cubuk, Ethan Dyer

Coping with Label Shift via Distributionally Robust Optimisation
Jingzhao Zhang, Aditya Krishna Menon, Andreas Veit, Srinadh Bhojanapalli, Sanjiv Kumar, Suvrit Sra

Rethinking Attention with Performers (see the blog post)
Krzysztof Marcin Choromanski, Valerii Likhosherstov, David Dohan, Xingyou Song, Andreea Gane, Tamas Sarlos, Peter Hawkins, Jared Quincy Davis, Afroz Mohiuddin, Lukasz Kaiser, David Benjamin Belanger, Lucy J Colwell, Adrian Weller

Teaching with Commentaries
Aniruddh Raghu*, Maithra Raghu, Simon Kornblith, David Duvenaud, Geoffrey Hinton

Anatomy of Catastrophic Forgetting: Hidden Representations and Task Semantics
Vinay Venkatesh Ramasesh, Ethan Dyer, Maithra Raghu

Model-Based Offline Planning
Arthur Argenson, Gabriel Dulac-Arnold

The Geometry of Integration in Text Classification RNNs
Kyle Aitken*, Vinay Venkatesh Ramasesh, Ankush Garg, Yuan Cao, David Sussillo, Niru Maheswaranathan

On the Origin of Implicit Regularization in Stochastic Gradient Descent
Samuel L Smith, Benoit Dherin, David Barrett, Soham De

Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations
Yang Song*, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Diederik P Kingma, Abhishek Kumar, Stefano Ermon, Ben Poole

The Deep Bootstrap Framework: Good Online Learners are Good Offline Generalizers (see the blog post)
Preetum Nakkiran*, Behnam Neyshabur, Hanie Sedghi

Learning Energy-Based Models by Diffusion Recovery Likelihood
Ruiqi Gao, Yang Song, Ben Poole, Ying Nian Wu, Diederik P Kingma

Latent Skill Planning for Exploration and Transfer
Kevin Xie, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Danijar Hafner, Animesh Garg, Florian Shkurti

PseudoSeg: Designing Pseudo Labels for Semantic Segmentation
Yuliang Zou*, Zizhao Zhang, Han Zhang, Chun-Liang Li, Xiao Bian, Jia-Bin Huang, Tomas Pfister

WaveGrad: Estimating Gradients for Waveform Generation
Nanxin Chen*, Yu Zhang, Heiga Zen, Ron J Weiss, Mohammad Norouzi, William Chan

One Network Fits All? Modular versus Monolithic Task Formulations in Neural Networks
Atish Agarwala, Abhimanyu Das, Brendan Juba*, Rina Panigrahy, Vatsal Sharan*, Xin Wang, Qiuyi Zhang

Long Range Arena : A Benchmark for Efficient Transformers
Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Samira Abnar, Yikang Shen, Dara Bahri, Philip Pham, Jinfeng Rao, Liu Yang, Sebastian Ruder, Donald Metzler

Explainable Deep One-Class Classification
Philipp Liznerski, Lukas Ruff, Robert A. Vandermeulen, Billy Joe Franks, Marius Kloft, Klaus Robert Muller

Net-DNF: Effective Deep Modeling of Tabular Data
Liran Katzir, Gal Elidan, Ran El-Yaniv

Deployment-Efficient Reinforcement Learning via Model-Based Offline Optimization
Tatsuya Matsushima, Hiroki Furuta, Yutaka Matsuo, Ofir Nachum, Shixiang Gu

Auxiliary Task Update Decomposition: The Good, the Bad and the Neutral
Lucio M. Dery, Yann Dauphin, David Grangier

Long-Tail Learning via Logit Adjustment
Aditya Krishna Menon, Sadeep Jayasumana, Ankit Singh Rawat, Himanshu Jain, Andreas Veit, Sanjiv Kumar

Average-Case Acceleration for Bilinear Games and Normal Matrices
Carles Domingo-Enrich, Fabian Pedregosa, Damien Scieur

OPAL: Offline Primitive Discovery for Accelerating Offline Reinforcement Learning
Anurag Ajay*, Aviral Kumar, Pulkit Agrawal, Sergey Levine, Ofir Nachum

Training Independent Subnetworks for Robust Prediction
Marton Havasi*, Rodolphe Jenatton, Stanislav Fort, Jeremiah Zhe Liu, Jasper Snoek, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Andrew Mingbo Dai, Dustin Tran

Benchmarks for Deep Off-Policy Evaluation
Justin Fu, Mohammad Norouzi, Ofir Nachum, George Tucker, Ziyu Wang, Alexander Novikov, Mengjiao Yang, Michael R Zhang, Yutian Chen, Aviral Kumar, Cosmin Paduraru, Sergey Levine, Thomas Paine

TropEx: An Algorithm for Extracting Linear Terms in Deep Neural Networks
Martin Trimmel, Henning Petzka, Cristian Sminchisescu

Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models (see the blog post)
Danijar Hafner, Timothy P Lillicrap, Mohammad Norouzi, Jimmy Ba

Exploring the Uncertainty Properties of Neural Networks’ Implicit Priors in the Infinite-Width Limit
Danijar Hafner, Timothy P Lillicrap, Mohammad Norouzi, Jimmy Ba

Graph Traversal with Tensor Functionals: A Meta-Algorithm for Scalable Learning
Ben Adlam, Jaehoon Lee, Lechao Xiao, Jeffrey Pennington, Jasper Snoek

Anchor & Transform: Learning Sparse Embeddings for Large Vocabularies
Paul Pu Liang*, Manzil Zaheer, Yuan Wang, Amr Ahmed

Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization
Pierre Foret*, Ariel Kleiner, Hossein Mobahi, Behnam Neyshabur

HyperGrid Transformers: Towards A Single Model for Multiple Tasks
Yi Tay, Zhe Zhao, Dara Bahri, Donald Metzler, Da-Cheng Juan

Federated Learning via Posterior Averaging: A New Perspective and Practical Algorithms
Maruan Al-Shedivat*, Jennifer Gillenwater, Eric Xing, Afshin Rostamizadeh

BUSTLE: Bottom-Up Program Synthesis Through Learning-Guided Exploration
Augustus Odena, Kensen Shi, David Bieber, Rishabh Singh, Charles Sutton, Hanjun Dai

Are Neural Rankers Still Outperformed by Gradient Boosted Decision Trees?
Zhen Qin, Le Yan, Honglei Zhuang, Yi Tay, Rama Kumar Pasumarthi, Xuanhui Wang, Michael Bendersky, Marc Najork

Do Wide and Deep Networks Learn the Same Things? Uncovering How Neural Network Representations Vary with Width and Depth
Thao Nguyen, Maithra Raghu, Simon Kornblith

A Unifying View on Implicit Bias in Training Linear Neural Networks
Chulhee Yun*, Shankar Krishnan, Hossein Mobahi

Implicit Under-Parameterization Inhibits Data-Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning
Aviral Kumar, Rishabh Agarwal, Dibya Ghosh, Sergey Levine

Mathematical Reasoning via Self-Supervised Skip-Tree Training
Markus Norman Rabe, Dennis Lee, Kshitij Bansal, Christian Szegedy

Lipschitz Recurrent Neural Networks
N. Benjamin Erichson, Omri Azencot, Alejandro Queiruga, Liam Hodgkinson, Michael W. Mahoney

Autoregressive Dynamics Models for Offline Policy Evaluation and Optimization
Michael R Zhang*, Thomas Paine, Ofir Nachum, Cosmin Paduraru, George Tucker, ziyu wang, Mohammad Norouzi

The Importance of Pessimism in Fixed-Dataset Policy Optimization
Jacob Buckman, Carles Gelada, Marc G Bellemare

Monotonic Kronecker-Factored Lattice
William Taylor Bakst, Nobuyuki Morioka, Erez Louidor

What Matters for On-Policy Deep Actor-Critic Methods? A Large-Scale Study
Marcin Andrychowicz, Anton Raichuk, Piotr Stańczyk, Manu Orsini, Sertan Girgin, Raphaël Marinier, Leonard Hussenot, Matthieu Geist, Olivier Pietquin, Marcin Michalski, Sylvain Gelly, Olivier Bachem

Adversarially Guided Actor-Critic
Yannis Flet-Berliac, Johan Ferret, Olivier Pietquin, Philippe Preux, Matthieu Geist

Scalable Learning and MAP Inference for Nonsymmetric Determinantal Point Processes
Mike Gartrell, Insu Han, Elvis Dohmatob, Jennifer Gillenwater, Victor-Emmanuel Brunel

GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding
Dmitry Lepikhin, HyoukJoong Lee, Yuanzhong Xu, Dehao Chen, Orhan Firat, Yanping Huang, Maxim Krikun, Noam Shazeer, Zhifeng Chen

Revisiting Hierarchical Approach for Persistent Long-Term Video Prediction
Wonkwang Lee, Whie Jung, Han Zhang, Ting Chen, Jing Yu Koh, Thomas Huang, Hyungsuk Yoon, Honglak Lee*, Seunghoon Hong

Gradient Vaccine: Investigating and Improving Multi-task Optimization in Massively Multilingual Models
Zirui Wang, Yulia Tsvetkov, Orhan Firat, Yuan Cao

Dataset Meta-Learning from Kernel Ridge-Regression
Timothy Nguyen, Zhourong Chen, Jaehoon Lee

Dual-Mode ASR: Unify and Improve Streaming ASR with Full-Context Modeling
Jiahui Yu, Wei Han, Anmol Gulati, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Bo Li, Tara N Sainath, Yonghui Wu, Ruoming Pang

Implicit Gradient Regularization
David Barrett, Benoit Dherin

Contrastive Behavioral Similarity Embeddings for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Rishabh Agarwal, Marlos C. Machado, Pablo Samuel Castro, Marc G Bellemare

Deconstructing the Regularization of BatchNorm
Yann Dauphin, Ekin Dogus Cubuk

C-Learning: Learning to Achieve Goals via Recursive Classification
Benjamin Eysenbach, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Sergey Levine

Evolving Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
John D Co-Reyes, Yingjie Miao, Daiyi Peng, Esteban Real, Quoc V Le, Sergey Levine, Honglak Lee, Aleksandra Faust

Colorization Transformer
Manoj Kumar, Dirk Weissenborn, Nal Kalchbrenner

Control-Aware Representations for Model-based Reinforcement Learning
Brandon Cui, Yinlam Chow, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Evaluations and Methods for Explanation through Robustness Analysis
Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Xuanqing Liu, Pradeep Kumar Ravikumar, Seungyeon Kim, Sanjiv Kumar, Cho-Jui Hsieh

Learning and Evaluating Representations for Deep One-Class Classification
Kihyuk Sohn, Chun-Liang Li, Jinsung Yoon, Minho Jin, Tomas Pfister

No MCMC for Me: Amortized Sampling for Fast and Stable Training of Energy-Based Models
Will Sussman Grathwohl, Jacob Jin Kelly, Milad Hashemi, Mohammad Norouzi, Kevin Swersky, David Duvenaud

Neural Thompson Sampling
Weitong ZHANG, Dongruo Zhou, Lihong Li, Quanquan Gu

A Design Space Study for LISTA and Beyond
Tianjian Meng, Xiaohan Chen, Yifan Jiang, Zhangyang Wang

i-Mix: A Domain-Agnostic Strategy for Contrastive Representation Learning
Kibok Lee, Yian Zhu, Kihyuk Sohn, Chun-Liang Li, Jinwoo Shin, Honglak Lee

Factorizing Declarative and Procedural Knowledge in Structured, Dynamical Environments
Anirudh Goyal, Alex Lamb, Phanideep Gampa, Philippe Beaudoin, Charles Blundell, Sergey Levine, Yoshua Bengio, Michael Curtis Mozer

Calibration of Neural Networks using Splines
Kartik Gupta, Amir Rahimi, Thalaiyasingam Ajanthan, Thomas Mensink, Cristian Sminchisescu, Richard Hartley

Extreme Memorization via Scale of Initialization
Harsh Mehta, Ashok Cutkosky, Behnam Neyshabur

Molecule Optimization by Explainable Evolution
Binghong Chen, Tianzhe Wang, Chengtao Li, Hanjun Dai, Le Song

Combining Ensembles and Data Augmentation Can Harm Your Calibration
Yeming Wen, Ghassen Jerfel, Rafael Muller, Michael W Dusenberry, Jasper Snoek, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Dustin Tran

Workshops
Science and Engineering of Deep Learning
Speakers and Panelists include: Alex Hanna
Moderator and Advisors include: Emily Denton
Organizers include: Negar Rostemzadeh, Samy Bengio*

Synthetic Data Generation: Quality, Privacy, Bias
Speakers include: Jinsung Yoon, Emily Denton
Program Committee includes: Syed Ashrafulla

Enormous Language Models: Perspectives and Benchmarks
Speakers and Panelists include: Noam Shazeer, Natalie Schluter
Organizers include: Colin Raffel, Adam Roberts, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Katherine Lee, William Fedus, Aitor Lewkowycz

The Role of Mathematical Reasoning in General Artificial Intelligence
Speakers and Panelists include: Markus Rabe, Christian Szegedy

Weakly Supervised Learning
Invited Speakers include: Lu Jiang

Learning to Learn
Organizers include: Yevgen Chebotar

Embodied Multimodal Learning (EML)
Invited Speakers includes: Sergey Levine

Distributed and Private Machine Learning
Program Committee includes: Peter Kairouz, Ananda Theertha Suresh

S2D-OLAD: From Shallow to Deep, Overcoming Limited and Adverse Data
Invited Speakers include: Alex Hanna, Hugo Larochelle
Organizers include: Vincent Dumoulin

Responsible AI (RAI)
Speakers include: Been Kim

Energy-Based Models: Current Perspectives, Challenges, and Opportunities
Organizers include: Adji Bousso Dieng, Igor Mordatch

A Roadmap to Never-Ending RL
Invited Session Panelists include: Aleksandra Faust
Program Committee includes: Coline Devin, Karol Hausman, Ben Eysenbach, Ofir Nachum, Ryan Julian, Tianhe Yu, Dumitru Erhan, Marc Pickett, Shixiang Gu

2nd Workshop on Practical ML for Developing Countries: Learning Under Limited/low Resource Scenarios
Program Committee includes: Pablo Samuel Castro

Beyond Static Papers: Rethinking How We Share Scientific Understanding in ML
Speakers include: David Ha, Hugo Larochelle
Organizers include: Sara Hooker


* Indicates work done while at Google

Source: Google AI Blog


Google at ICLR 2021

Posted by Jaqui Herman, Research Specialist and Tim Herrmann, Program Manager

The 9th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2021), a virtual conference focused on deep learning, kicked off this week, offering conference and workshop tracks that present some of the latest research in deep learning and its applications to areas such as computer vision, computational biology, speech recognition, text understanding, and more.

As a Platinum Sponsor of ICLR 2021, Google will have a strong presence with over 100 accepted publications and participation on organizing committees and in workshops. If you have registered for ICLR 2021, we hope you’ll watch our talks and learn about the work at Google that goes into solving interesting problems for billions of people. Learn more about our research being presented in the list below (Googlers in bold).

Officers and Board Members
Includes: Hugo Larochelle, Tara Sainath

Organizing Committee
Includes: Sanmi Koyejo, Chelsea Finn

Area Chairs
Includes: Abhishek Kumar, Aditya Menon, Aleksandra Faust, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Andrew Cotter, Andrew Dai, Augustus Odena, Been Kim, Behnam Neyshabur, Ben Poole, Bo Dai, Bo Li, Branislav Kveton, Ce Liu, Claudio Gentile, Colin Raffel, Danny Tarlow, David Ha, Dengyong Zhou, Dumitru Erhan, Dustin Tran, Felix Hill, George Tucker, Hanie Sedghi, Heinrich Jiang, Hossein Mobahi, Izhak Shafran, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Jasper Snoek, Jean-Philippe Vert, Jeffrey Pennington, Justin Gilmer, Kevin Swersky, Marco Cuturi, Mario Lucic, Marlos C. Machado, Mathieu Blondel, Matt Johnson, Matthieu Geist, Mohammad Norouzi, Naman Agarwal, Navdeep Jaitly, Nicolas Le Roux, Niki Parmar, Olivier Bachem, Olivier Pietquin, Philip Long, Quentin Berthet, Razvan Pascanu, Rodolphe Jenatton, Samy Bengio*, Sebastian Nowozin, Silvio Lattanzi, Slav Petrov, Srinadh Bhojanapalli, Suman Ravuri, Tim Salimans, Vitaly Kuznetsov, William Cohen, Yann Dauphin, Yujia Li

Publications
Scalable Learning and MAP Inference for Nonsymmetric Determinantal Point Processes
Mike Gartrell, Insu Han, Elvis Dohmatob, Jennifer Gillenwater, Victor-Emmanuel Brunel

An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale (see the blog post)
Alexey Dosovitskiy, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Dirk Weissenborn, Xiaohua Zhai, Thomas Unterthiner, Mostafa Dehghani, Matthias Minderer, Georg Heigold, Sylvain Gelly, Jakob Uszkoreit, Neil Houlsby

Share or Not? Learning to Schedule Language-Specific Capacity for Multilingual Translation
Biao Zhang*, Ankur Bapna, Rico Sennrich, Orhan Firat

Evolving Reinforcement Learning Algorithms (see the blog post)
John D Co-Reyes, Yingjie Miao, Daiyi Peng, Esteban Real, Quoc V Le, Sergey Levine, Honglak Lee, Aleksandra Faust

Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations
Yang Song*, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Diederik P Kingma, Abhishek Kumar, Stefano Ermon, Ben Poole

What Matters for On-Policy Deep Actor-Critic Methods? A Large-Scale Study
Marcin Andrychowicz, Anton Raichuk, Piotr Stańczyk, Manu Orsini, Sertan Girgin, Raphaël Marinier, Leonard Hussenot, Matthieu Geist, Olivier Pietquin, Marcin Michalski, Sylvain Gelly, Olivier Bachem

When Do Curricula Work?
Xiaoxia Wu, Ethan Dyer, Behnam Neyshabur

Sharpness-aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization
Pierre Foret*, Ariel Kleiner, Hossein Mobahi, Behnam Neyshabur

Gradient Vaccine: Investigating and Improving Multi-task Optimization in Massively Multilingual Models Zirui Wang*, Yulia Tsvetkov, Orhan Firat, Yuan Cao

Mathematical Reasoning via Self-supervised Skip-tree Training
Markus Norman Rabe, Dennis Lee, Kshitij Bansal, Christian Szegedy

Long-Tail Learning via Logit Adjustment
Aditya Krishna Menon, Sadeep Jayasumana, Ankit Singh Rawat, Himanshu Jain, Andreas Veit, Sanjiv Kumar

Are Neural Rankers Still Outperformed by Gradient Boosted Decision Trees?
Zhen Qin, Le Yan, Honglei Zhuang, Yi Tay, Rama Kumar Pasumarthi, Xuanhui Wang, Michael Bendersky, Marc Najork

LambdaNetworks: Modeling Long-Range Interactions without Attention
Irwan Bello

Contrastive Behavioral Similarity Embeddings for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Rishabh Agarwal, Marlos C. Machado, Pablo Samuel Castro, Marc G Bellemare

BUSTLE: Bottom-Up Program Synthesis Through Learning-Guided Exploration
Augustus Odena, Kensen Shi, David Bieber, Rishabh Singh, Charles Sutton, Hanjun Dai

Practical Real Time Recurrent Learning with a Sparse Approximation
Jacob Menick, Erich Elsen, Utku Evci, Simon Osindero, Karen Simonyan, Alex Graves

LEAF: A Learnable Frontend for Audio Classification (see the blog post)
Neil Zeghidour, Olivier Teboul, Félix de Chaumont Quitry, Marco Tagliasacchi

Batch Reinforcement Learning Through Continuation Method
Yijie Guo, Shengyu Feng, Nicolas Le Roux, Ed Chi, Honglak Lee, Minmin Chen

Scalable Transfer Learning with Expert Models
Joan Puigcerver, Carlos Riquelme Ruiz, Basil Mustafa, Cedric Renggli*, André Susano Pinto, Sylvain Gelly, Daniel Keysers, Neil Houlsby

Contrastive Behavioral Similarity Embeddings for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Rishabh Agarwal, Marlos C. Machado*, Pablo Samuel Castro, Marc G Bellemare

Scaling Symbolic Methods Using Gradients for Neural Model Explanation
Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Subhashini Venugopalan, Li Li, Rishabh Singh, Patrick Riley

Primal Wasserstein Imitation Learning (see the blog post)
Robert Dadashi, Leonard Hussenot, Matthieu Geist, Olivier Pietquin

Reset-Free Lifelong Learning with Skill-Space Planning
Kevin Lu, Aditya Grover, Pieter Abbeel, Igor Mordatch

Teaching Temporal Logics to Neural Networks
Christopher Hahn, Frederik Schmitt, Jens U. Kreber, Markus Norman Rabe, Bernd Finkbeiner

Shape-Texture Debiased Neural Network Training
Yingwei Li, Qihang Yu, Mingxing Tan, Jieru Mei, Peng Tang, Wei Shen, Alan Yuille, Cihang Xie

Rethinking Embedding Coupling in Pre-trained Language Models
Hyung Won Chung, Thibault Fevry*, Henry Tsai, Melvin Johnson, Sebastian Ruder

Overparameterisation and Worst-Case Generalisation: Friend or Foe?
Aditya Krishna Menon, Ankit Singh Rawat, Sanjiv Kumar

Single-Photon Image Classification
Thomas Fischbacher, Luciano Sbaiz

Into the Wild with AudioScope: Unsupervised Audio-Visual Separation of On-Screen Sounds
Efthymios Tzinis*, Scott Wisdom, Aren Jansen, Shawn Hershey, Tal Remez, Daniel P. W. Ellis, John R. Hershey

Adaptive Federated Optimization
Sashank J. Reddi, Zachary Charles, Manzil Zaheer, Zachary Garrett, Keith Rush, Jakub Konečný, Sanjiv Kumar, Hugh Brendan McMahan

Share or Not? Learning to Schedule Language-Specific Capacity for Multilingual Translation
Biao Zhang*, Ankur Bapna, Rico Sennrich, Orhan Firat

Off-Dynamics Reinforcement Learning: Training for Transfer with Domain Classifiers
Benjamin Eysenbach, Shreyas Chaudhari, Swapnil Asawa, Sergey Levine, Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Open Question Answering over Tables and Text
Wenhu Chen*, Ming-Wei Chang, Eva Schlinger, William Yang Wang, William W. Cohen

Practical Real Time Recurrent Learning with a Sparse Approximation
Jacob Menick, Erich Elsen, Utku Evci, Simon Osindero, Karen Simonyan, Alex Graves

IDF++: Analyzing and Improving Integer Discrete Flows for Lossless Compression
Rianne van den Berg, Alexey A. Gritsenko, Mostafa Dehghani, Casper Kaae Sønderby, Tim Salimans

A Universal Representation Transformer Layer for Few-Shot Image Classification
Lu Liu, William L. Hamilton, Guodong Long, Jing Jiang, Hugo Larochelle

Tradeoffs in Data Augmentation: An Empirical Study
Raphael Gontijo-Lopes, Sylvia Smullin, Ekin Dogus Cubuk, Ethan Dyer

Coping with Label Shift via Distributionally Robust Optimisation
Jingzhao Zhang, Aditya Krishna Menon, Andreas Veit, Srinadh Bhojanapalli, Sanjiv Kumar, Suvrit Sra

Rethinking Attention with Performers (see the blog post)
Krzysztof Marcin Choromanski, Valerii Likhosherstov, David Dohan, Xingyou Song, Andreea Gane, Tamas Sarlos, Peter Hawkins, Jared Quincy Davis, Afroz Mohiuddin, Lukasz Kaiser, David Benjamin Belanger, Lucy J Colwell, Adrian Weller

Teaching with Commentaries
Aniruddh Raghu*, Maithra Raghu, Simon Kornblith, David Duvenaud, Geoffrey Hinton

Anatomy of Catastrophic Forgetting: Hidden Representations and Task Semantics
Vinay Venkatesh Ramasesh, Ethan Dyer, Maithra Raghu

Model-Based Offline Planning
Arthur Argenson, Gabriel Dulac-Arnold

The Geometry of Integration in Text Classification RNNs
Kyle Aitken*, Vinay Venkatesh Ramasesh, Ankush Garg, Yuan Cao, David Sussillo, Niru Maheswaranathan

On the Origin of Implicit Regularization in Stochastic Gradient Descent
Samuel L Smith, Benoit Dherin, David Barrett, Soham De

Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations
Yang Song*, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Diederik P Kingma, Abhishek Kumar, Stefano Ermon, Ben Poole

The Deep Bootstrap Framework: Good Online Learners are Good Offline Generalizers (see the blog post)
Preetum Nakkiran*, Behnam Neyshabur, Hanie Sedghi

Learning Energy-Based Models by Diffusion Recovery Likelihood
Ruiqi Gao, Yang Song, Ben Poole, Ying Nian Wu, Diederik P Kingma

Latent Skill Planning for Exploration and Transfer
Kevin Xie, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Danijar Hafner, Animesh Garg, Florian Shkurti

PseudoSeg: Designing Pseudo Labels for Semantic Segmentation
Yuliang Zou*, Zizhao Zhang, Han Zhang, Chun-Liang Li, Xiao Bian, Jia-Bin Huang, Tomas Pfister

WaveGrad: Estimating Gradients for Waveform Generation
Nanxin Chen*, Yu Zhang, Heiga Zen, Ron J Weiss, Mohammad Norouzi, William Chan

One Network Fits All? Modular versus Monolithic Task Formulations in Neural Networks
Atish Agarwala, Abhimanyu Das, Brendan Juba*, Rina Panigrahy, Vatsal Sharan*, Xin Wang, Qiuyi Zhang

Long Range Arena : A Benchmark for Efficient Transformers
Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Samira Abnar, Yikang Shen, Dara Bahri, Philip Pham, Jinfeng Rao, Liu Yang, Sebastian Ruder, Donald Metzler

Explainable Deep One-Class Classification
Philipp Liznerski, Lukas Ruff, Robert A. Vandermeulen, Billy Joe Franks, Marius Kloft, Klaus Robert Muller

Net-DNF: Effective Deep Modeling of Tabular Data
Liran Katzir, Gal Elidan, Ran El-Yaniv

Deployment-Efficient Reinforcement Learning via Model-Based Offline Optimization
Tatsuya Matsushima, Hiroki Furuta, Yutaka Matsuo, Ofir Nachum, Shixiang Gu

Auxiliary Task Update Decomposition: The Good, the Bad and the Neutral
Lucio M. Dery, Yann Dauphin, David Grangier

Long-Tail Learning via Logit Adjustment
Aditya Krishna Menon, Sadeep Jayasumana, Ankit Singh Rawat, Himanshu Jain, Andreas Veit, Sanjiv Kumar

Average-Case Acceleration for Bilinear Games and Normal Matrices
Carles Domingo-Enrich, Fabian Pedregosa, Damien Scieur

OPAL: Offline Primitive Discovery for Accelerating Offline Reinforcement Learning
Anurag Ajay*, Aviral Kumar, Pulkit Agrawal, Sergey Levine, Ofir Nachum

Training Independent Subnetworks for Robust Prediction
Marton Havasi*, Rodolphe Jenatton, Stanislav Fort, Jeremiah Zhe Liu, Jasper Snoek, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Andrew Mingbo Dai, Dustin Tran

Benchmarks for Deep Off-Policy Evaluation
Justin Fu, Mohammad Norouzi, Ofir Nachum, George Tucker, Ziyu Wang, Alexander Novikov, Mengjiao Yang, Michael R Zhang, Yutian Chen, Aviral Kumar, Cosmin Paduraru, Sergey Levine, Thomas Paine

TropEx: An Algorithm for Extracting Linear Terms in Deep Neural Networks
Martin Trimmel, Henning Petzka, Cristian Sminchisescu

Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models (see the blog post)
Danijar Hafner, Timothy P Lillicrap, Mohammad Norouzi, Jimmy Ba

Exploring the Uncertainty Properties of Neural Networks’ Implicit Priors in the Infinite-Width Limit
Danijar Hafner, Timothy P Lillicrap, Mohammad Norouzi, Jimmy Ba

Graph Traversal with Tensor Functionals: A Meta-Algorithm for Scalable Learning
Ben Adlam, Jaehoon Lee, Lechao Xiao, Jeffrey Pennington, Jasper Snoek

Anchor & Transform: Learning Sparse Embeddings for Large Vocabularies
Paul Pu Liang*, Manzil Zaheer, Yuan Wang, Amr Ahmed

Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Efficiently Improving Generalization
Pierre Foret*, Ariel Kleiner, Hossein Mobahi, Behnam Neyshabur

HyperGrid Transformers: Towards A Single Model for Multiple Tasks
Yi Tay, Zhe Zhao, Dara Bahri, Donald Metzler, Da-Cheng Juan

Federated Learning via Posterior Averaging: A New Perspective and Practical Algorithms
Maruan Al-Shedivat*, Jennifer Gillenwater, Eric Xing, Afshin Rostamizadeh

BUSTLE: Bottom-Up Program Synthesis Through Learning-Guided Exploration
Augustus Odena, Kensen Shi, David Bieber, Rishabh Singh, Charles Sutton, Hanjun Dai

Are Neural Rankers Still Outperformed by Gradient Boosted Decision Trees?
Zhen Qin, Le Yan, Honglei Zhuang, Yi Tay, Rama Kumar Pasumarthi, Xuanhui Wang, Michael Bendersky, Marc Najork

Do Wide and Deep Networks Learn the Same Things? Uncovering How Neural Network Representations Vary with Width and Depth
Thao Nguyen, Maithra Raghu, Simon Kornblith

A Unifying View on Implicit Bias in Training Linear Neural Networks
Chulhee Yun*, Shankar Krishnan, Hossein Mobahi

Implicit Under-Parameterization Inhibits Data-Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning
Aviral Kumar, Rishabh Agarwal, Dibya Ghosh, Sergey Levine

Mathematical Reasoning via Self-Supervised Skip-Tree Training
Markus Norman Rabe, Dennis Lee, Kshitij Bansal, Christian Szegedy

Lipschitz Recurrent Neural Networks
N. Benjamin Erichson, Omri Azencot, Alejandro Queiruga, Liam Hodgkinson, Michael W. Mahoney

Autoregressive Dynamics Models for Offline Policy Evaluation and Optimization
Michael R Zhang*, Thomas Paine, Ofir Nachum, Cosmin Paduraru, George Tucker, ziyu wang, Mohammad Norouzi

The Importance of Pessimism in Fixed-Dataset Policy Optimization
Jacob Buckman, Carles Gelada, Marc G Bellemare

Monotonic Kronecker-Factored Lattice
William Taylor Bakst, Nobuyuki Morioka, Erez Louidor

What Matters for On-Policy Deep Actor-Critic Methods? A Large-Scale Study
Marcin Andrychowicz, Anton Raichuk, Piotr Stańczyk, Manu Orsini, Sertan Girgin, Raphaël Marinier, Leonard Hussenot, Matthieu Geist, Olivier Pietquin, Marcin Michalski, Sylvain Gelly, Olivier Bachem

Adversarially Guided Actor-Critic
Yannis Flet-Berliac, Johan Ferret, Olivier Pietquin, Philippe Preux, Matthieu Geist

Scalable Learning and MAP Inference for Nonsymmetric Determinantal Point Processes
Mike Gartrell, Insu Han, Elvis Dohmatob, Jennifer Gillenwater, Victor-Emmanuel Brunel

GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding
Dmitry Lepikhin, HyoukJoong Lee, Yuanzhong Xu, Dehao Chen, Orhan Firat, Yanping Huang, Maxim Krikun, Noam Shazeer, Zhifeng Chen

Revisiting Hierarchical Approach for Persistent Long-Term Video Prediction
Wonkwang Lee, Whie Jung, Han Zhang, Ting Chen, Jing Yu Koh, Thomas Huang, Hyungsuk Yoon, Honglak Lee*, Seunghoon Hong

Gradient Vaccine: Investigating and Improving Multi-task Optimization in Massively Multilingual Models
Zirui Wang, Yulia Tsvetkov, Orhan Firat, Yuan Cao

Dataset Meta-Learning from Kernel Ridge-Regression
Timothy Nguyen, Zhourong Chen, Jaehoon Lee

Dual-Mode ASR: Unify and Improve Streaming ASR with Full-Context Modeling
Jiahui Yu, Wei Han, Anmol Gulati, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Bo Li, Tara N Sainath, Yonghui Wu, Ruoming Pang

Implicit Gradient Regularization
David Barrett, Benoit Dherin

Contrastive Behavioral Similarity Embeddings for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Rishabh Agarwal, Marlos C. Machado, Pablo Samuel Castro, Marc G Bellemare

Deconstructing the Regularization of BatchNorm
Yann Dauphin, Ekin Dogus Cubuk

C-Learning: Learning to Achieve Goals via Recursive Classification
Benjamin Eysenbach, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Sergey Levine

Evolving Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
John D Co-Reyes, Yingjie Miao, Daiyi Peng, Esteban Real, Quoc V Le, Sergey Levine, Honglak Lee, Aleksandra Faust

Colorization Transformer
Manoj Kumar, Dirk Weissenborn, Nal Kalchbrenner

Control-Aware Representations for Model-based Reinforcement Learning
Brandon Cui, Yinlam Chow, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Evaluations and Methods for Explanation through Robustness Analysis
Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Xuanqing Liu, Pradeep Kumar Ravikumar, Seungyeon Kim, Sanjiv Kumar, Cho-Jui Hsieh

Learning and Evaluating Representations for Deep One-Class Classification
Kihyuk Sohn, Chun-Liang Li, Jinsung Yoon, Minho Jin, Tomas Pfister

No MCMC for Me: Amortized Sampling for Fast and Stable Training of Energy-Based Models
Will Sussman Grathwohl, Jacob Jin Kelly, Milad Hashemi, Mohammad Norouzi, Kevin Swersky, David Duvenaud

Neural Thompson Sampling
Weitong ZHANG, Dongruo Zhou, Lihong Li, Quanquan Gu

A Design Space Study for LISTA and Beyond
Tianjian Meng, Xiaohan Chen, Yifan Jiang, Zhangyang Wang

i-Mix: A Domain-Agnostic Strategy for Contrastive Representation Learning
Kibok Lee, Yian Zhu, Kihyuk Sohn, Chun-Liang Li, Jinwoo Shin, Honglak Lee

Factorizing Declarative and Procedural Knowledge in Structured, Dynamical Environments
Anirudh Goyal, Alex Lamb, Phanideep Gampa, Philippe Beaudoin, Charles Blundell, Sergey Levine, Yoshua Bengio, Michael Curtis Mozer

Calibration of Neural Networks using Splines
Kartik Gupta, Amir Rahimi, Thalaiyasingam Ajanthan, Thomas Mensink, Cristian Sminchisescu, Richard Hartley

Extreme Memorization via Scale of Initialization
Harsh Mehta, Ashok Cutkosky, Behnam Neyshabur

Molecule Optimization by Explainable Evolution
Binghong Chen, Tianzhe Wang, Chengtao Li, Hanjun Dai, Le Song

Combining Ensembles and Data Augmentation Can Harm Your Calibration
Yeming Wen, Ghassen Jerfel, Rafael Muller, Michael W Dusenberry, Jasper Snoek, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Dustin Tran

Workshops
Science and Engineering of Deep Learning
Speakers and Panelists include: Alex Hanna
Moderator and Advisors include: Emily Denton
Organizers include: Negar Rostemzadeh, Samy Bengio*

Synthetic Data Generation: Quality, Privacy, Bias
Speakers include: Jinsung Yoon, Emily Denton
Program Committee includes: Syed Ashrafulla

Enormous Language Models: Perspectives and Benchmarks
Speakers and Panelists include: Noam Shazeer, Natalie Schluter
Organizers include: Colin Raffel, Adam Roberts, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Katherine Lee, William Fedus, Aitor Lewkowycz

The Role of Mathematical Reasoning in General Artificial Intelligence
Speakers and Panelists include: Markus Rabe, Christian Szegedy

Weakly Supervised Learning
Invited Speakers include: Lu Jiang

Learning to Learn
Organizers include: Yevgen Chebotar

Embodied Multimodal Learning (EML)
Invited Speakers includes: Sergey Levine

Distributed and Private Machine Learning
Program Committee includes: Peter Kairouz, Ananda Theertha Suresh

S2D-OLAD: From Shallow to Deep, Overcoming Limited and Adverse Data
Invited Speakers include: Alex Hanna, Hugo Larochelle
Organizers include: Vincent Dumoulin

Responsible AI (RAI)
Speakers include: Been Kim

Energy-Based Models: Current Perspectives, Challenges, and Opportunities
Organizers include: Adji Bousso Dieng, Igor Mordatch

A Roadmap to Never-Ending RL
Invited Session Panelists include: Aleksandra Faust
Program Committee includes: Coline Devin, Karol Hausman, Ben Eysenbach, Ofir Nachum, Ryan Julian, Tianhe Yu, Dumitru Erhan, Marc Pickett, Shixiang Gu

2nd Workshop on Practical ML for Developing Countries: Learning Under Limited/low Resource Scenarios
Program Committee includes: Pablo Samuel Castro

Beyond Static Papers: Rethinking How We Share Scientific Understanding in ML
Speakers include: David Ha, Hugo Larochelle
Organizers include: Sara Hooker


* Indicates work done while at Google

Source: Google AI Blog


Evolving Reinforcement Learning Algorithms

Posted by John D. Co-Reyes, Research Intern and Yingjie Miao, Senior Software Engineer, Google Research

A long-term, overarching goal of research into reinforcement learning (RL) is to design a single general purpose learning algorithm that can solve a wide array of problems. However, because the RL algorithm taxonomy is quite large, and designing new RL algorithms requires extensive tuning and validation, this goal is a daunting one. A possible solution would be to devise a meta-learning method that could design new RL algorithms that generalize to a wide variety of tasks automatically.

In recent years, AutoML has shown great success in automating the design of machine learning components, such as neural networks architectures and model update rules. One example is Neural Architecture Search (NAS), which has been used to develop better neural network architectures for image classification and efficient architectures for running on phones and hardware accelerators. In addition to NAS, AutoML-Zero shows that it’s even possible to learn the entire algorithm from scratch using basic mathematical operations. One common theme in these approaches is that the neural network architecture or the entire algorithm is represented by a graph, and a separate algorithm is used to optimize the graph for certain objectives.

These earlier approaches were designed for supervised learning, in which the overall algorithm is more straightforward. But in RL, there are more components of the algorithm that could be potential targets for design automation (e.g., neural network architectures for agent networks, strategies for sampling from the replay buffer, overall formulation of the loss function), and it is not always clear what the best model update procedure would be to integrate these components. Prior efforts for the automation RL algorithm discovery have focused primarily on model update rules. These approaches learn the optimizer or RL update procedure itself and commonly represent the update rule with a neural network such as an RNN or CNN, which can be efficiently optimized with gradient-based methods. However, these learned rules are not interpretable or generalizable, because the learned weights are opaque and domain specific.

In our paper “Evolving Reinforcement Learning Algorithms”, accepted at ICLR 2021, we show that it’s possible to learn new, analytically interpretable and generalizable RL algorithms by using a graph representation and applying optimization techniques from the AutoML community. In particular, we represent the loss function, which is used to optimize an agent’s parameters over its experience, as a computational graph, and use Regularized Evolution to evolve a population of the computational graphs over a set of simple training environments. This results in increasingly better RL algorithms, and the discovered algorithms generalize to more complex environments, even those with visual observations like Atari games.

RL Algorithm as a Computational Graph
Inspired by ideas from NAS, which searches over the space of graphs representing neural network architectures, we meta-learn RL algorithms by representing the loss function of an RL algorithm as a computational graph. In this case, we use a directed acyclic graph for the loss function, with nodes representing inputs, operators, parameters and outputs. For example, in the computational graph for DQN, input nodes include data from the replay buffer, operator nodes include neural network operators and basic math operators, and the output node represents the loss, which will be minimized with gradient descent.

There are a few benefits of such a representation. This representation is expressive enough to define existing algorithms but also new, undiscovered algorithms. It is also interpretable. This graph representation can be analyzed in the same way as human designed RL algorithms, making it more interpretable than approaches that use black box function approximators for the entire RL update procedure. If researchers can understand why a learned algorithm is better, then they can both modify the internal components of the algorithm to improve it and transfer the beneficial components to other problems. Finally, the representation supports general algorithms that can solve a wide variety of problems.

Example computation graph for DQN which computes the squared Bellman error.

We implemented this representation using the PyGlove library, which conveniently turns the graph into a search space that can be optimized with regularized evolution.

Evolving RL Algorithms
We use an evolutionary based approach to optimize the RL algorithms of interest. First, we initialize a population of training agents with randomized graphs. This population of agents is trained in parallel over a set of training environments. The agents first train on a hurdle environment — an easy environment, such as CartPole, intended to quickly weed out poorly performing programs.

If an agent cannot solve the hurdle environment, the training is stopped early with a score of zero. Otherwise the training proceeds to more difficult environments (e.g., Lunar Lander, simple MiniGrid environments, etc.). The algorithm performance is evaluated and used to update the population, where more promising algorithms are further mutated. To reduce the search space, we use a functional equivalence checker which will skip over newly proposed algorithms if they are functionally the same as previously examined algorithms. This loop continues as new mutated candidate algorithms are trained and evaluated. At the end of training, we select the best algorithm and evaluate its performance over a set of unseen test environments.

The population size in the experiments was around 300 agents, and we observed the evolution of good candidate loss functions after 20-50 thousand mutations, requiring about three days of training. We were able to train on CPUs because the training environments were simple, controlling for the computational and energy cost of training. To further control the cost of training, we seeded the initial population with human-designed RL algorithms such as DQN.

Overview of meta-learning method. Newly proposed algorithms must first perform well on a hurdle environment before being trained on a set of harder environments. Algorithm performance is used to update a population where better performing algorithms are further mutated into new algorithms. At the end of training, the best performing algorithm is evaluated on test environments.

Learned Algorithms
We highlight two discovered algorithms that exhibit good generalization performance. The first is DQNReg, which builds on DQN by adding a weighted penalty on the Q-values to the normal squared Bellman error. The second learned loss function, DQNClipped, is more complex, although its dominating term has a simple form — the max of the Q-value and the squared Bellman error (modulo a constant). Both algorithms can be viewed as a way to regularize the Q-values. While DQNReg adds a soft constraint, DQNClipped can be interpreted as a kind of constrained optimization that will minimize the Q-values if they become too large. We show that this learned constraint kicks in during the early stage of training when overestimating the Q-values is a potential issue. Once this constraint is satisfied, the loss will instead minimize the original squared Bellman error.

A closer analysis shows that while baselines like DQN commonly overestimate Q-values, our learned algorithms address this issue in different ways. DQNReg underestimates the Q-values, while DQNClipped has similar behavior to double dqn in that it slowly approaches the ground truth without overestimating it.

It’s worth pointing out that these two algorithms consistently emerge when the evolution is seeded with DQN. Learning from scratch, the method rediscovers the TD algorithm. For completeness, we release a dataset of top 1000 performing algorithms discovered during evolution. Curious readers could further investigate the properties of these learned loss functions.

Overestimated values are generally a problem in value-based RL. Our method learns algorithms that have found a way to regularize the Q-values and thus reduce overestimation.

Learned Algorithms Generalization Performance
Normally in RL, generalization refers to a trained policy generalizing across tasks. However, in this work we’re interested in algorithmic generalization performance, which means how well an algorithm works over a set of environments. On a set of classical control environments, the learned algorithms can match baselines on the dense reward tasks (CartPole, Acrobot, LunarLander) and outperform DQN on the sparser reward task, MountainCar.

Performance of learned algorithms versus baselines on classical control environments.

On a set of sparse reward MiniGrid environments, which test a variety of different tasks, we see that DQNReg greatly outperforms baselines on both the training and test environments, in terms of sample efficiency and final performance. In fact, the effect is even more pronounced on the test environments, which vary in size, configuration, and existence of new obstacles, such as lava.

Training environment performance versus training steps as measured by episode return over 10 training seeds. DQNReg can match or outperform baselines in sample efficiency and final performance.
DQNReg can greatly outperform baselines on unseen test environments.

We visualize the performance of normal DDQN vs. the learned algorithm DQNReg on a few MiniGrid environments. The starting location, wall configuration, and object configuration of these environments are randomized at each reset, which requires the agent to generalize instead of simply memorizing the environment. While DDQN often struggles to learn any meaningful behavior, DQNReg can learn the optimal behavior efficiently.

DDQN
DQNReg (Learned) 

Even on image-based Atari environments we observe improved performance, even though training was on non-image-based environments. This suggests that meta-training on a set of cheap but diverse training environments with a generalizable algorithm representation could enable radical algorithmic generalization.

EnvDQNDDQNPPODQNReg
Asteroid1364.5734.72097.52390.4
Bowling50.468.140.180.5
Boxing88.091.694.6100.0
RoadRunner  39544.0    44127.0    35466.0    65516.0  
Performance of learned algorithm, DQNReg, against baselines on several Atari games. Performance is evaluated over 200 test episodes every 1 million steps.

Conclusion
In this post, we’ve discussed learning new interpretable RL algorithms by representing their loss functions as computational graphs and evolving a population of agents over this representation. The computational graph formulation allows researchers to both build upon human-designed algorithms and study the learned algorithms using the same mathematical toolset as the existing algorithms. We analyzed a few of the learned algorithms and can interpret them as a form of entropy regularization to prevent value overestimation. These learned algorithms can outperform baselines and generalize to unseen environments. The top performing algorithms are available for further analytical study.

We hope that future work will extend to more varied RL settings such as actor critic algorithms or offline RL. Furthermore we hope that this work can lead to machine assisted algorithm development where computational meta-learning can help researchers find new directions to pursue and incorporate learned algorithms into their own work.

Acknowledgements
We thank our co-authors Daiyi Peng, Esteban Real, Sergey Levine, Quoc V. Le, Honglak Lee, and Aleksandra Faust. We also thank Luke Metz for helpful early discussions and feedback on the paper, Hanjun Dai for early discussions on related research ideas, Xingyou Song, Krzysztof Choromanski, and Kevin Wu for helping with infrastructure, and Jongwook Choi for helping with environment selection. Finally we thank Tom Small for designing animations for this post.

Source: Google AI Blog


LEAF: A Learnable Frontend for Audio Classification

Posted by Neil Zeghidour, Research Scientist, Google Research

Developing machine learning (ML) models for audio understanding has seen tremendous progress over the past several years. Leveraging the ability to learn parameters from data, the field has progressively shifted from composite, handcrafted systems to today’s deep neural classifiers that are used to recognize speech, understand music, or classify animal vocalizations such as bird calls. However, unlike computer vision models, which can learn from raw pixels, deep neural networks for audio classification are rarely trained from raw audio waveforms. Instead, they rely on pre-processed data in the form of mel filterbanks — handcrafted mel-scaled spectrograms that have been designed to replicate some aspects of the human auditory response.

Although modeling mel filterbanks for ML tasks has been historically successful, it is limited by the inherent biases of fixed features: even though using a fixed mel-scale and a logarithmic compression works well in general, we have no guarantee that they provide the best representations for the task at hand. In particular, even though matching human perception provides good inductive biases for some application domains, e.g., speech recognition or music understanding, these biases may be detrimental to domains for which imitating the human ear is not important, such as recognizing whale calls. So, in order to achieve optimal performance, the mel filterbanks should be tailored to the task of interest, a tedious process that requires an iterative effort informed by expert domain knowledge. As a consequence, standard mel filterbanks are used for most audio classification tasks in practice, even though they are suboptimal. In addition, while researchers have proposed ML systems to address these problems, such as Time-Domain Filterbanks, SincNet and Wavegram, they have yet to match the performance of traditional mel filterbanks.

In “LEAF, A Fully Learnable Frontend for Audio Classification”, accepted at ICLR 2021, we present an alternative method for crafting learnable spectrograms for audio understanding tasks. LEarnable Audio Frontend (LEAF) is a neural network that can be initialized to approximate mel filterbanks, and then be trained jointly with any audio classifier to adapt to the task at hand, while only adding a handful of parameters to the full model. We show that over a wide range of audio signals and classification tasks, including speech, music and bird songs, LEAF spectrograms improve classification performance over fixed mel filterbanks and over previously proposed learnable systems. We have implemented the code in TensorFlow 2 and released it to the community through our GitHub repository.

Mel Filterbanks: Mimicking Human Perception of Sound
The first step in the traditional approach to creating a mel filterbank is to capture the sound’s time-variability by windowing, i.e., cutting the signal into short segments with fixed duration. Then, one performs filtering, by passing the windowed segments through a bank of fixed frequency filters, that replicate the human logarithmic sensitivity to pitch. Because we are more sensitive to variations in low frequencies than high frequencies, mel filterbanks give more importance to the low-frequency range of sounds. Finally, the audio signal is compressed to mimic the ear’s logarithmic sensitivity to loudness — a sound needs to double its power for a person to perceive an increase of 3 decibels.

LEAF loosely follows this traditional approach to mel filterbank generation, but replaces each of the fixed operations (i.e., the filtering layer, windowing layer, and compression function) by a learned counterpart. The output of LEAF is a time-frequency representation (a spectrogram) similar to mel filterbanks, but fully learnable. So, for example, while a mel filterbank uses a fixed scale for pitch, LEAF learns the scale that is best suited to the task of interest. Any model that can be trained using mel filterbanks as input features, can also be trained on LEAF spectrograms.

Diagram of computation of mel filterbanks compared to LEAF spectrograms.

While LEAF can be initialized randomly, it can also be initialized in a way that approximates mel filterbanks, which have been shown to be a better starting point. Then, LEAF can be trained with any classifier to adapt to the task of interest.

Left: Mel filterbanks for a person saying “wow”. Right: LEAF’s output for the same example, after training on a dataset of speech commands.

A Parameter-Efficient Alternative to Fixed Features
A potential downside of replacing fixed features that involve no learnable parameter with a trainable system is that it can significantly increase the number of parameters to optimize. To avoid this issue, LEAF uses Gabor convolution layers that have only two parameters per filter, instead of the ~400 parameters typical of a standard convolution layer. This way, even when paired with a small classifier, such as EfficientNetB0, the LEAF model only accounts for 0.01% of the total parameters.

Top: Unconstrained convolutional filters after training for audio event classification. Bottom: LEAF filters at convergence after training for the same task.

Performance
We apply LEAF to diverse audio classification tasks, including recognizing speech commands, speaker identification, acoustic scene recognition, identifying musical instruments, and finding birdsongs. On average, LEAF outperforms both mel filterbanks and previous learnable frontends, such as Time-Domain Filterbanks, SincNet and Wavegram. In particular, LEAF achieves a 76.9% average accuracy across the different tasks, compared to 73.9% for mel filterbanks. Moreover we show that LEAF can be trained in a multi-task setting, such that a single LEAF parametrization can work well across all these tasks. Finally, when combined with a large audio classifier, LEAF reaches state-of-the-art performance on the challenging AudioSet benchmark, with a 2.74 d-prime score.

D-prime score (the higher the better) of LEAF, mel filterbanks and previously proposed learnable spectrograms on the evaluation set of AudioSet.

Conclusion
The scope of audio understanding tasks keeps growing, from diagnosing dementia from speech to detecting humpback whale calls from underwater microphones. Adapting mel filterbanks to every new task can require a significant amount of hand-tuning and experimentation. In this context, LEAF provides a drop-in replacement for these fixed features, that can be trained to adapt to the task of interest, with minimal task-specific adjustments. Thus, we believe that LEAF can accelerate development of models for new audio understanding tasks.

Acknowledgements
We thank our co-authors, Olivier Teboul, Félix de Chaumont-Quitry and Marco Tagliasacchi. We also thank Dick Lyon, Vincent Lostanlen, Matt Harvey, and Alex Park for helpful discussions, and Julie Thomas for helping to design figures for this post.

Source: Google AI Blog


A New Lens on Understanding Generalization in Deep Learning

Hanie Sedghi, Google Research and Preetum Nakkiran, Harvard University

Understanding generalization is one of the fundamental unsolved problems in deep learning. Why does optimizing a model on a finite set of training data lead to good performance on a held-out test set? This problem has been studied extensively in machine learning, with a rich history going back more than 50 years. There are now many mathematical tools that help researchers understand generalization in certain models. Unfortunately, most of these existing theories fail when applied to modern deep networks — they are both vacuous and non-predictive in realistic settings. This gap between theory and practice is largest for overparameterized models, which in theory have the capacity to overfit their train sets, but often do not in practice.

In “The Deep Bootstrap Framework: Good Online Learners are Good Offline Generalizers”, accepted at ICLR 2021, we present a new framework for approaching this problem by connecting generalization to the field of online optimization. In a typical setting, a model trains on a finite set of samples, which are reused for multiple epochs. But in online optimization, the model has access to an infinite stream of samples, and can be iteratively updated while processing this stream. In this work, we find that models that train quickly on infinite data are the same models that generalize well if they are instead trained on finite data. This connection brings new perspectives on design choices in practice, and lays a roadmap for understanding generalization from a theoretical perspective.

The Deep Bootstrap Framework
The main idea of the Deep Bootstrap framework is to compare the real world, where there is finite training data, to an "ideal world", where there is infinite data. We define these as:

  • Real World (N, T): Train a model on N train samples from a distribution, for T minibatch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) steps, re-using the same N samples in multiple epochs, as usual. This corresponds to running SGD on the empirical loss (loss on training data), and is the standard training procedure in supervised learning.
  • Ideal World (T): Train the same model for T steps, but use fresh samples from the distribution in each SGD step. That is, we run the exact same training code (same optimizer, learning-rates, batch-size, etc.), but sample a fresh train set in each epoch instead of reusing samples. In this ideal world setting, with an effectively infinite "train set", there is no difference between train error and test error.
Test soft-error for ideal world and real world during SGD iterations for ResNet-18 architecture. We see that the two errors are similar.

A priori, one might expect the real and ideal worlds may have nothing to do with each other, since in the real world the model sees a finite number of examples from the distribution while in the ideal world the model sees the whole distribution. But in practice, we found that the real and ideal models actually have similar test error.

In order to quantify this observation, we simulated an ideal world setting by creating a new dataset, which we call CIFAR-5m. We trained a generative model on CIFAR-10, which we then used to generate ~6 million images. The scale of the dataset was chosen to ensure that it is “virtually infinite” from the model’s perspective, so that the model never resamples the same data. That is, in the ideal world, the model sees an entirely fresh set of samples.

Samples from CIFAR-5m

The figure below presents the test error of several models, comparing their performance when trained on CIFAR-5m data in the real world setting (i.e., re-used data) and the ideal world (“fresh” data). The solid blue line shows a ResNet model in the real world, trained on 50K samples for 100 epochs with standard CIFAR-10 hyperparameters. The dashed blue line shows the corresponding model in the ideal world, trained on 5 million samples in a single pass. Surprisingly, these worlds have very similar test error — the model in some sense "doesn't care" whether it sees re-used samples or fresh ones.

The real world model is trained on 50K samples for 100 epochs, and the ideal world model is trained on 5M samples for a single epoch. The lines show the test error vs. the number of SGD steps.

This also holds for other architectures, e.g., a Multi-Layer-Perceptron (red), a Vision Transformer (green), and across many other settings of architecture, optimizer, data distribution, and sample size. These experiments suggest a new perspective on generalization: models that optimize quickly (on infinite data), generalize well (on finite data). For example, the ResNet model generalizes better than the MLP model on finite data, but this is "because" it optimizes faster even on infinite data.

Understanding Generalization from Optimization Behavior
The key observation is that real world and ideal world models remain close, in test error, for all timesteps, until the real world converges (< 1% train error). Thus, one can study models in the real world by studying their corresponding behavior in the ideal world.

This means that the generalization of the model can be understood in terms of its optimization performance under two frameworks:

  1. Online Optimization: How fast the ideal world test error decreases
  2. Offline Optimization: How fast the real world train error converges

Thus, to study generalization, we can equivalently study the two terms above, which can be conceptually simpler, since they only involve optimization concerns. Based on this observation, good models and training procedures are those that (1) optimize quickly in the ideal world and (2) do not optimize too quickly in the real world.

All design choices in deep learning can be viewed through their effect on these two terms. For example, some advances like convolutions, skip-connections, and pre-training help primarily by accelerating ideal world optimization, while other advances like regularization and data-augmentation help primarily by decelerating real world optimization.

Applying the Deep Bootstrap Framework
Researchers can use the Deep Bootstrap framework to study and guide design choices in deep learning. The principle is: whenever one makes a change that affects generalization in the real world (the architecture, learning-rate, etc.), one should consider its effect on (1) the ideal world optimization of test error (faster is better) and (2) the real world optimization of train error (slower is better).

For example, pre-training is often used in practice to help generalization of models in small-data regimes. However, the reason that pre-training helps remains poorly understood. One can study this using the Deep Bootstrap framework by looking at the effect of pre-training on terms (1) and (2) above. We find that the primary effect of pre-training is to improve the ideal world optimization (1) — pre-training turns the network into a "fast learner" for online optimization. The improved generalization of pretrained models is thus almost exactly captured by their improved optimization in the ideal world. The figure below shows this for Vision-Transformers (ViT) trained on CIFAR-10, comparing training from scratch vs. pre-training on ImageNet.

Effect of pre-training — pre-trained ViTs optimize faster in the ideal world.

One can also study data-augmentation using this framework. Data-augmentation in the ideal world corresponds to augmenting each fresh sample once, as opposed to augmenting the same sample multiple times. This framework implies that good data-augmentations are those that (1) do not significantly harm ideal world optimization (i.e., augmented samples don't look too "out of distribution") or (2) inhibit real world optimization speed (so the real world takes longer to fit its train set).

The main benefit of data-augmentation is through the second term, prolonging the real world optimization time. As for the first term, some aggressive data augmentations (mixup/cutout) can actually harm the ideal world, but this effect is dwarfed by the second term.

Concluding Thoughts
The Deep Bootstrap framework provides a new lens on generalization and empirical phenomena in deep learning. We are excited to see it applied to understand other aspects of deep learning in the future. It is especially interesting that generalization can be characterized via purely optimization considerations, which is in contrast to many prevailing approaches in theory. Crucially, we consider both online and offline optimization, which are individually insufficient, but that together determine generalization.

The Deep Bootstrap framework can also shed light on why deep learning is fairly robust to many design choices: many kinds of architectures, loss functions, optimizers, normalizations, and activation functions can generalize well. This framework suggests a unifying principle: that essentially any choice that works well in the online optimization setting will also generalize well in the offline setting.

Finally, modern neural networks can be either overparameterized (e.g., large networks trained on small data tasks) or underparmeterized (e.g., OpenAI's GPT-3, Google's T5, or Facebook's ResNeXt WSL). The Deep Bootstrap framework implies that online optimization is a crucial factor to success in both regimes.

Acknowledgements
We are thankful to our co-author, Behnam Neyshabur, for his great contributions to the paper and valuable feedback on the blog. We thank Boaz Barak, Chenyang Yuan, and Chiyuan Zhang for helpful comments on the blog and paper.

Source: Google AI Blog


Google at ICLR 2020

Posted by Christian Howard, Google Research

This week marks the beginning of the 8th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2020), a fully virtual conference focused on how one can learn meaningful and useful representations of data for machine learning. ICLR offers conference and workshop tracks, both of which include invited talks along with oral and poster presentations of some of the latest research on deep learning, metric learning, kernel learning, compositional models, non-linear structured prediction and issues regarding non-convex optimization.

As a Diamond Sponsor of ICLR 2020, Google will have a strong virtual presence with over 80 publications accepted, in addition to participating on organizing committees and in workshops. If you have registered for ICLR 20202, we hope you'll watch our talks and learn about the projects and opportunities at Google that go into solving interesting problems for billions of people. You can also learn more about our research being presented at ICLR 2020 in the list below (Googlers highlighted in blue).

Officers and Board Members
Includes: Hugo LaRochelle, Samy Bengio, Tara Sainath

Organizing Committee
Includes: Kevin Swersky, Timnit Gebru

Area Chairs
Includes: Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Been Kim, Chelsea Finn, Dale Schuurmans, George Tucker, Honglak Lee, Hossein Mobahi, Jasper Snoek, Justin Gilmer, Katherine Heller, Manaal Faruqui, Michael Ryoo, Nicolas Le Roux, Sanmi Koyejo, Sergey Levine, Tara Sainath, Yann Dauphin, Anders Søgaard, David Duvenaud, Jamie Morgenstern, Qiang Liu

Publications
SEED RL: Scalable and Efficient Deep-RL with Accelerated Central Inference (see the blog post)
Lasse Espeholt, Raphaël Marinier, Piotr Stanczyk, Ke Wang, Marcin Michalski‎

Differentiable Reasoning Over a Virtual Knowledge Base
Bhuwan Dhingra, Manzil Zaheer, Vidhisha Balachandran, Graham Neubig, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, William W. Cohen

Dynamics-Aware Unsupervised Discovery of Skills
Archit Sharma, Shixiang Gu, Sergey Levine, Vikash Kumar, Karol Hausman

GenDICE: Generalized Offline Estimation of Stationary Values
Ruiyi Zhang, Bo Dai, Lihong Li, Dale Schuurmans

Mathematical Reasoning in Latent Space
Dennis Lee, Christian Szegedy, Markus N. Rabe, Kshitij Bansal, Sarah M. Loos

Your Classifier is Secretly an Energy Based Model and You Should Treat it Like One
Will Grathwohl, Kuan-Chieh Wang, Jorn-Henrik Jacobsen, David Duvenaud, Kevin Swersky, Mohammad Norouzi

Adjustable Real-time Style Transfer
Mohammad Babaeizadeh, Golnaz Ghiasi

Are Transformers Universal Approximators of Sequence-to-sequence Functions?
Chulhee Yun, Srinadh Bhojanapalli, Ankit Singh Rawat, Sashankc J. Reddi, Sanjiv Kumar

AssembleNet: Searching for Multi-Stream Neural Connectivity in Video Architectures
Michael S. Ryoo, AJ Piergiovanni, Mingxing Tan, Anelia Angelova

AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty
Dan Hendrycks, Norman Mu, Ekin D. Cubuk, Barret Zoph, Justin Gilmer, Balaji Lakshminarayanan

BatchEnsemble: an Alternative Approach to Efficient Ensemble and Lifelong Learning
Yeming Wen, Dustin Tran, Jimmy Ba

Black-box Off-policy Estimation for Infinite-Horizon Reinforcement Learning (see the blog post)
Ali Mousavi, Lihong Li, Qiang Liu, Dengyong Zhou

Can Gradient Clipping Mitigate Label Noise?
Aditya Krishna Menon, Ankit Singh Rawat, Sashank J. Reddi, Sanjiv Kumar

CAQL: Continuous Action Q-Learning
Moonkyung Ryu, Yinlam Chow, Ross Anderson, Christian Tjandraatmadja, Craig Boutilier

Chameleon: Adaptive Code Optimization for Expedited Deep Neural Network Compilation
Byung Hoon Ahn, Prannoy Pilligundla, Amir Yazdanbakhsh, Hadi Esmaeilzadeh

Coherent Gradients: An Approach to Understanding Generalization in Gradient Descent-based Optimization
Satrajit Chatterjee

Consistency Regularization for Generative Adversarial Networks
Han Zhang, Zizhao Zhang, Augustus Odena, Honglak Lee

Contrastive Representation Distillation
Yonglong Tian, Dilip Krishnan, Phillip Isola

Deep Audio Priors Emerge from Harmonic Convolutional Networks
Zhoutong Zhang, Yunyun Wang, Chuang Gan, Jiajun Wu, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Antonio Torralba, William T. Freeman

Detecting and Diagnosing Adversarial Images with Class-Conditional Capsule Reconstructions
Yao Qin, Nicholas Frosst, Sara Sabour, Colin Raffel, Garrison Cottrell, Geoffrey Hinton

Detecting Extrapolation with Local Ensembles
David Madras, James Atwood, Alexander D'Amour

Disentangling Factors of Variations Using Few Labels
Francesco Locatello, Michael Tschannen, Stefan Bauer, Gunnar Rätsch, Bernhard Schölkopf, Olivier Bachem

Distance-Based Learning from Errors for Confidence Calibration
Chen Xing, Sercan Ö. Arik, Zizhao Zhang, Tomas Pfister

ELECTRA: Pre-training Text Encoders as Discriminators Rather Than Generators (see the blog post)
Kevin Clark, Minh-Thang Luong, Quoc V. Le, Christopher D. Manning

ES-MAML: Simple Hessian-Free Meta Learning (see the blog post)
Xingyou Song, Yuxiang Yang, Krzysztof Choromanski, Aldo Pacchiano, Wenbo Gao, Yunhao Tang

Exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Deep Covering Options
Yuu Jinnai, Jee Won Park, Marlos C. Machado, George Konidaris

Extreme Tensoring for Low-Memory Preconditioning
Xinyi Chen, Naman Agarwal, Elad Hazan, Cyril Zhang, Yi Zhang

Fantastic Generalization Measures and Where to Find Them
Yiding Jiang, Behnam Neyshabur, Hossein Mobahi, Dilip Krishnan, Samy Bengio

Generalization Bounds for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Philip M. Long, Hanie Sedghi

Generalized Convolutional Forest Networks for Domain Generalization and Visual Recognition
Jongbin Ryu, GiTaek Kwon, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Jongwoo Lim

Generative Models for Effective ML on Private, Decentralized Datasets
Sean Augenstein, H. Brendan McMahan, Daniel Ramage, Swaroop Ramaswamy, Peter Kairouz, Mingqing Chen, Rajiv Mathews, Blaise Aguera y Arcas

Generative Ratio Matching Networks
Akash Srivastava, Kai Xu, Michael U. Gutmann, Charles Sutton

Global Relational Models of Source Code
Vincent J. Hellendoorn, Petros Maniatis, Rishabh Singh, Charles Sutton, David Bieber

Hierarchical Foresight: Self-Supervised Learning of Long-Horizon Tasks via Visual Subgoal Generation
Suraj Nair, Chelsea Finn

Identity Crisis: Memorization and Generalization Under Extreme Overparameterization
Chiyuan Zhang, Samy Bengio, Moritz Hardt, Michael C. Mozer, Yoram Singer

Imitation Learning via Off-Policy Distribution Matching
Ilya Kostrikov, Ofir Nachum, Jonathan Tompson

Language GANs Falling Short
Massimo Caccia, Lucas Caccia, William Fedus, Hugo Larochelle, Joëlle Pineau, Laurent Charlin

Large Batch Optimization for Deep Learning: Training BERT in 76 Minutes
Yang You, Jing Li, Sashank Reddi, Jonathan Hseu, Sanjiv Kumar, Srinadh Bhojanapalli, Xiaodan Song, James Demmel, Kurt Keutzer, Cho-Jui Hsieh

Learning Execution through Neural Code Fusion
Zhan Shi, Kevin Swersky, Daniel Tarlow, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Milad Hashemi

Learning Heuristics for Quantified Boolean Formulas through Reinforcement Learning
Gil Lederman, Markus N. Rabe, Edward A. Lee, Sanjit A. Seshia

Learning to Learn by Zeroth-Order Oracle
Yangjun Ruan, Yuanhao Xiong, Sashank Reddi, Sanjiv Kumar, Cho-Jui Hsieh

Learning to Represent Programs with Property Signatures
Augustus Odena, Charles Sutton

MACER: Attack-free and Scalable Robust Training via Maximizing Certified Radius
Runtian Zhai, Chen Dan, Di He, Huan Zhang, Boqing Gong, Pradeep Ravikumar, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Liwei Wang

Measuring Compositional Generalization: A Comprehensive Method on Realistic Data
Daniel Keysers, Nathanael Schärli, Nathan Scales, Hylke Buisman, Daniel Furrer, Sergii Kashubin, Nikola Momchev, Danila Sinopalnikov, Lukasz Stafiniak, Tibor Tihon, Dmitry Tsarkov, Xiao Wang, Marc van Zee, Olivier Bousquet

Meta Reinforcement Learning with Autonomous Inference of Subtask Dependencies
Sungryull Sohn, Hyunjae Woo, Jongwook Choi, Honglak Lee

Meta-Dataset: A Dataset of Datasets for Learning to Learn from Few Examples
Eleni Triantafillou, Tyler Zhu, Vincent Dumoulin, Pascal Lamblin, Utku Evci, Kelvin Xu, Ross Goroshin, Carles Gelada, Kevin Swersky, Pierre-Antoine Manzagol, Hugo Larochelle

Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Biological Sequence Design
Christof Angermueller, David Dohan, David Belanger, Ramya Deshpande, Kevin Murphy, Lucy Colwell

Network Randomization: A Simple Technique for Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Kimin Lee, Kibok Lee, Jinwoo Shin, Honglak Lee

Observational Overfitting in Reinforcement Learning
Xingyou Song, Yiding Jiang, Stephen Tu, Behnam Neyshabur, Yilun Du

On Bonus-based Exploration Methods In The Arcade Learning Environment
Adrien Ali Taiga, William Fedus, Marlos C. Machado, Aaron Courville, Marc G. Bellemare

On Identifiability in Transformers
Gino Brunner, Yang Liu, Damian Pascual, Oliver Richter, Massimiliano Ciaramita, Roger Wattenhofer

On Mutual Information Maximization for Representation Learning
Michael Tschannen, Josip Djolonga, Paul K. Rubenstein, Sylvain Gelly, Mario Lucic

On the Global Convergence of Training Deep Linear ResNets
Difan Zou, Philip M. Long, Quanquan Gu

Phase Transitions for the Information Bottleneck in Representation Learning
Tailin Wu, Ian Fischer

Pre-training Tasks for Embedding-based Large-scale Retrieval
Wei-Cheng Chang, Felix X. Yu, Yin-Wen Chang, Yiming Yang, Sanjiv Kumar

Prediction, Consistency, Curvature: Representation Learning for Locally-Linear Control
Nir Levine, Yinlam Chow, Rui Shu, Ang Li, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Hung Bui

Provable Benefit of Orthogonal Initialization in Optimizing Deep Linear Networks
Wei Hu, Lechao Xiao, Jeffrey Pennington

Rapid Learning or Feature Reuse? Towards Understanding the Effectiveness of MAML
Aniruddh Raghu, Maithra Raghu, Samy Bengio, Oriol Vinyals

Reinforced Genetic Algorithm Learning for Optimizing Computation Graphs
Aditya Paliwal, Felix Gimeno, Vinod Nair, Yujia Li, Miles Lubin, Pushmeet Kohli, Oriol Vinyals

ReMixMatch: Semi-Supervised Learning with Distribution Alignment and Augmentation Anchoring
David Berthelot, Nicholas Carlini, Ekin D. Cubuk, Alex Kurakin, Han Zhang, Colin Raffel, Kihyuk Sohn

Scalable Model Compression by Entropy Penalized Reparameterization
Deniz Oktay, Johannes Ballé, Saurabh Singh, Abhinav Shrivastava

Scalable Neural Methods for Reasoning With a Symbolic Knowledge Base
William W. Cohen, Haitian Sun, R. Alex Hofer, Matthew Siegler

Semi-Supervised Generative Modeling for Controllable Speech Synthesis
Raza Habib, Soroosh Mariooryad, Matt Shannon, Eric Battenberg, RJ Skerry-Ryan, Daisy Stanton, David Kao, Tom Bagby

Span Recovery for Deep Neural Networks with Applications to Input Obfuscation
Rajesh Jayaram, David Woodruff, Qiuyi Zhang

Thieves on Sesame Street! Model Extraction of BERT-based APIs
Kalpesh Krishna, Gaurav Singh Tomar, Ankur P. Parikh, Nicolas Papernot, Mohit Iyyer

Thinking While Moving: Deep Reinforcement Learning with Concurrent Control
Ted Xiao, Eric Jang, Dmitry Kalashnikov, Sergey Levine, Julian Ibarz, Karol Hausman, Alexander Herzog

VideoFlow: A Conditional Flow-Based Model for Stochastic Video Generation
Manoj Kumar, Mohammad Babaeizadeh, Dumitru Erhan, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine, Laurent Dinh, Durk Kingma

Watch, Try, Learn: Meta-Learning from Demonstrations and Rewards
Allan Zhou, Eric Jang, Daniel Kappler, Alex Herzog, Mohi Khansari, Paul Wohlhart, Yunfei Bai, Mrinal Kalakrishnan, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn

Weakly Supervised Disentanglement with Guarantees
Rui Shu, Yining Chen, Abhishek Kumar, Stefano Ermon, Ben Poole

You Only Train Once: Loss-Conditional Training of Deep Networks
Alexey Dosovitskiy, Josip Djolonga

A Mutual Information Maximization Perspective of Language Representation Learning
Lingpeng Kong, Cyprien de Masson d’Autume, Wang Ling, Lei Yu, Zihang Dai, Dani Yogatama

ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations (see the blog post)
Zhenzhong Lan, Mingda Chen, Sebastian Goodman, Kevin Gimpel, Piyush Sharma, Radu Soricut

Asymptotics of Wide Networks from Feynman Diagrams
Ethan Dyer, Guy Gur-Ari

DDSP: Differentiable Digital Signal Processing
Jesse Engel, Lamtharn Hantrakul, Chenjie Gu, Adam Roberts

Doubly Robust Bias Reduction in Infinite Horizon Off-Policy Estimation
Ziyang Tang, Yihao Feng, Lihong Li, Dengyong Zhou, Qiang Liu

Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination (see the blog post)
Danijar Hafner, Timothy Lillicrap, Jimmy Ba, Mohammad Norouzi

Emergent Tool Use From Multi-Agent Autocurricula
Bowen Baker, Ingmar Kanitscheider, Todor Markov, Yi Wu, Glenn Powell, Bob McGrew, Igor Mordatch

Gradientless Descent: High-Dimensional Zeroth-Order Optimization
Daniel Golovin, John Karro, Greg Kochanski, Chansoo Lee, Xingyou Song, Qiuyi (Richard) Zhang

HOPPITY: Learning Graph Transformations to Detect and Fix Bugs in Programs
Elizabeth Dinella, Hanjun Dai, Ziyang Li, Mayur Naik, Le Song, Ke Wang

Learning to Plan in High Dimensions via Neural Exploration-Exploitation Trees
Binghong Chen, Bo Dai, Qinjie Lin, Guo Ye, Han Liu, Le Song

Model Based Reinforcement Learning for Atari (see the blog post)
Łukasz Kaiser, Mohammad Babaeizadeh, Piotr Miłos, Błazej Osinski, Roy H. Campbell, Konrad Czechowski, Dumitru Erhan, Chelsea Finn, Piotr Kozakowski, Sergey Levine, Afroz Mohiuddin, Ryan Sepassi, George Tucker, Henryk Michalewski

Neural Symbolic Reader: Scalable Integration of Distributed and Symbolic Representations for Reading Comprehension
Xinyun Chen, Chen Liang, Adams Wei Yu, Denny Zhou, Dawn Song, Quoc V. Le

SUMO: Unbiased Estimation of Log Marginal Probability for Latent Variable Models
Yucen Luo, Alex Beatson, Mohammad Norouzi, Jun Zhu, David Duvenaud, Ryan P. Adams, Ricky T. Q. Chen

Measuring the Reliability of Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
Stephanie C.Y. Chan, Samuel Fishman, John Canny, Anoop Korattikara, Sergio Guadarrama

Meta-Learning without Memorization
Mingzhang Yin, George Tucker, Mingyuan Zhou, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn

Neural Tangents: Fast and Easy Infinite Neural Networks in Python (see the blog post)
Roman Novak, Lechao Xiao, Jiri Hron, Jaehoon Lee, Alexander A. Alemi, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Samuel S. Schoenholz

Scaling Autoregressive Video Models
Dirk Weissenborn, Oscar Täckström, Jakob Uszkoreit

The Intriguing Role of Module Criticality in the Generalization of Deep Networks
Niladri Chatterji, Behnam Neyshabur, Hanie Sedghi

Reformer: The Efficient Transformer (see the blog post)
Nikita Kitaev, Łukasz Kaiser, Anselm Levskaya

Workshops
Computer Vision for Global Challenges
Organizing Committee: Ernest Mwebaze
Advisory Committee: Timnit Gebru, John Quinn

Practical ML for Developing Countries: Learning under limited/low resource scenarios
Organizing Committee: Nyalleng Moorosi, Timnit Gebru
Program Committee: Pablo Samuel Castro, Samy Bengio
Keynote Speaker: Karmel Allison

Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning
Organizing Committee: Moustapha Cisse
Co-Organizer: Natasha Jaques
Program Committee: John C. Platt, Kevin McCloskey, Natasha Jaques
Advisor and Panel: John C. Platt

Towards Trustworthy ML: Rethinking Security and Privacy for ML
Organizing Committee: Nicholas Carlini, Nicolas Papernot
Program Committee: Shuang Song

Source: Google AI Blog


Measuring Compositional Generalization

People are capable of learning the meaning of a new word and then applying it to other language contexts. As Lake and Baroni put it, “Once a person learns the meaning of a new verb ‘dax’, he or she can immediately understand the meaning of ‘dax twice’ and ‘sing and dax’.” Similarly, one can learn a new object shape and then recognize it with different compositions of previously learned colors or materials (e.g., in the CLEVR dataset). This is because people exhibit the capacity to understand and produce a potentially infinite number of novel combinations of known components, or as Chomsky said, to make “infinite use of finite means.” In the context of a machine learning model learning from a set of training examples, this skill is called compositional generalization.

A common approach for measuring compositional generalization in machine learning (ML) systems is to split the training and testing data based on properties that intuitively correlate with compositional structure. For instance, one approach is to split the data based on sequence length—the training set consists of short examples, while the test set consists of longer examples. Another approach uses sequence patterns, meaning the split is based on randomly assigning clusters of examples sharing the same pattern to either train or test sets. For instance, the questions "Who directed Movie1" and "Who directed Movie2" both fall into the pattern "Who directed <MOVIE>" so they would be grouped together. Yet another method uses held out primitives—some linguistic primitives are shown very rarely during training (e.g., the verb “jump”), but are very prominent in testing. While each of these experiments are useful, it is not immediately clear which experiment is a "better" measure for compositionality. Is it possible to systematically design an “optimal” compositional generalization experiment?

In “Measuring Compositional Generalization: A Comprehensive Method on Realistic Data”, we attempt to address this question by introducing the largest and most comprehensive benchmark for compositional generalization using realistic natural language understanding tasks, specifically, semantic parsing and question answering. In this work, we propose a metric—compound divergence—that allows one to quantitatively assess how much a train-test split measures the compositional generalization ability of an ML system. We analyze the compositional generalization ability of three sequence to sequence ML architectures, and find that they fail to generalize compositionally. We also are releasing the Compositional Freebase Questions dataset used in the work as a resource for researchers wishing to improve upon these results.

Measuring Compositionality

In order to measure the compositional generalization ability of a system, we start with the assumption that we understand the underlying principles of how examples are generated. For instance, we begin with the grammar rules to which we must adhere when generating questions and answers. We then draw a distinction between atoms and compounds. Atoms are the building blocks that are used to generate examples and compounds are concrete (potentially partial) compositions of these atoms. For example, in the figure below, every box is an atom (e.g., Shane Steel, brother, <entity>'s <entity>, produce, etc.), which fits together to form compounds, such as produce and <verb>, Shane Steel’s brother, Did Shane Steel’s brother produce and direct Revenge of the Spy?, etc.
Building compositional sentences (compounds) from building blocks (atoms)


An ideal compositionality experiment then should have a similar atom distribution, i.e., the distribution of words and sub-phrases in the training set is as similar as possible to their distribution in the test set, but with a different compound distribution. To measure compositional generalization on a question answering task about a movie domain, one might, for instance, have the following questions in train and test:

Train set Test set
Who directed Inception?
Did Greta Gerwig direct Goldfinger?
...		Did Greta Gerwig produce Goldfinger?
Who produced Inception?
...
While atoms such as “directed”, “Inception”, and “who <predicate> <entity>” appear in both the train and test sets, the compounds are different.

The Compositional Freebase Questions dataset

In order to conduct an accurate compositionality experiment, we created the Compositional Freebase Questions (CFQ) dataset, a simple, yet realistic, large dataset of natural language questions and answers generated from the public Freebase knowledge base. The CFQ can be used for text-in / text-out tasks, as well as semantic parsing. In our experiments, we focus on semantic parsing, where the input is a natural language question and the output is a query, which when executed against Freebase, produces the correct outcome. CFQ contains around 240k examples and almost 35k query patterns, making it significantly larger and more complex than comparable datasets — about 4 times that of WikiSQL with about 17x more query patterns than Complex Web Questions. Special care has been taken to ensure that the questions and answers are natural. We also quantify the complexity of the syntax in each example using the “complexity level” metric (L), which corresponds roughly to the depth of the parse tree, examples of which are shown below.

LQuestion → Answer
10What did Commerzbank acquire? → Eurohypo; Dresdner Bank
15Did Dianna Rhodes’s spouse produce Soldier Blue? → No
20Which costume designer of E.T. married Mannequin’s cinematographer? → Deborah Lynn Scott
40Was Weekend Cowgirls produced, directed, and written by a film editor that The Evergreen State College and Fairway Pictures employed → No
50Were It’s Not About the Shawerma, The Fifth Wall, Rick’s Canoe, White Stork Is Coming, and Blues for the Avatar executive produced, edited, directed, and written by a screenwriter’s parent? → Yes

Compositional Generalization Experiments on CFQ

For a given train-test split, if the compound distributions of the train and test sets are very similar, then their compound divergence would be close to 0, indicating that they are not difficult tests for compositional generalization. A compound divergence close to 1 means that the train-test sets have many different compounds, which makes it a good test for compositional generalization. Compound divergence thus captures the notion of "different compound distribution", as desired.

We algorithmically generate train-test splits using the CFQ dataset that have a compound divergence ranging from 0 to 0.7 (the maximum that we were able to achieve). We fix the atom divergence to be very small. Then, for each split we measure the performance of three standard ML architectures — LSTM+attention, Transformer, and Universal Transformer. The results are shown in the graph below.
Compound divergence vs accuracy for three ML architectures. There is a surprisingly strong negative correlation between compound divergence and accuracy.

We measure the performance of a model by comparing the correct answers with the output string given by the model. All models achieve an accuracy greater than 95% when the compound divergence is very low. The mean accuracy on the split with highest compound divergence is below 20% for all architectures, which means that even a large training set with a similar atom distribution between train and test is not sufficient for the architectures to generalize well. For all architectures, there is a strong negative correlation between the compound divergence and the accuracy. This seems to indicate that compound divergence successfully captures the core difficulty for these ML architectures to generalize compositionally.

Potentially promising directions for future work might be to apply unsupervised pre-training on input language or output queries, or to use more diverse or more targeted learning architectures, such as syntactic attention. It would also be interesting to apply this approach to other domains such as visual reasoning, e.g. based on CLEVR, or to extend our approach to broader subsets of language understanding, including the use of ambiguous constructs, negations, quantification, comparatives, additional languages, and other vertical domains. We hope that this work will inspire others to use this benchmark to advance the compositional generalization capabilities of learning systems.

By Marc van Zee, Software Engineer, Google Research – Brain Team

Measuring Compositional Generalization

Posted by Marc van Zee, Software Engineer, Google Research

People are capable of learning the meaning of a new word and then applying it to other language contexts. As Lake and Baroni put it, “Once a person learns the meaning of a new verb ‘dax’, he or she can immediately understand the meaning of ‘dax twice’ and ‘sing and dax’.” Similarly, one can learn a new object shape and then recognize it with different compositions of previously learned colors or materials (e.g., in the CLEVR dataset). This is because people exhibit the capacity to understand and produce a potentially infinite number of novel combinations of known components, or as Chomsky said, to make “infinite use of finite means.” In the context of a machine learning model learning from a set of training examples, this skill is called compositional generalization.

A common approach for measuring compositional generalization in machine learning (ML) systems is to split the training and testing data based on properties that intuitively correlate with compositional structure. For instance, one approach is to split the data based on sequence length — the training set consists of short examples, while the test set consists of longer examples. Another approach uses sequence patterns, meaning the split is based on randomly assigning clusters of examples sharing the same pattern to either train or test sets. For instance, the questions "Who directed Movie1" and "Who directed Movie2" both fall into the pattern "Who directed <MOVIE>" so they would be grouped together. Yet another method uses held out primitives — some linguistic primitives are shown very rarely during training (e.g., the verb “jump”), but are very prominent in testing. While each of these experiments are useful, it is not immediately clear which experiment is a "better" measure for compositionality. Is it possible to systematically design an “optimal” compositional generalization experiment?

In “Measuring Compositional Generalization: A Comprehensive Method on Realistic Data”, we attempt to address this question by introducing the largest and most comprehensive benchmark for compositional generalization using realistic natural language understanding tasks, specifically, semantic parsing and question answering. In this work, we propose a metric — compound divergence — that allows one to quantitatively assess how much a train-test split measures the compositional generalization ability of an ML system. We analyze the compositional generalization ability of three sequence to sequence ML architectures, and find that they fail to generalize compositionally. We also are releasing the Compositional Freebase Questions dataset used in the work as a resource for researchers wishing to improve upon these results.

Measuring Compositionality
In order to measure the compositional generalization ability of a system, we start with the assumption that we understand the underlying principles of how examples are generated. For instance, we begin with the grammar rules to which we must adhere when generating questions and answers. We then draw a distinction between atoms and compounds. Atoms are the building blocks that are used to generate examples and compounds are concrete (potentially partial) compositions of these atoms. For example, in the figure below, every box is an atom (e.g., Shane Steel, brother, <entity>'s <entity>, produce, etc.), which fits together to form compounds, such as produce and <verb>, Shane Steel’s brother, Did Shane Steel’s brother produce and direct Revenge of the Spy?, etc.
Building compositional sentences (compounds) from building blocks (atoms).
An ideal compositionality experiment then should have a similar atom distribution, i.e., the distribution of words and sub-phrases in the training set is as similar as possible to their distribution in the test set, but with a different compound distribution. To measure compositional generalization on a question answering task about a movie domain, one might, for instance, have the following questions in train and test:
While atoms such as “directed”, “Inception”, and “who <predicate> <entity>” appear in both the train and test sets, the compounds are different.

The Compositional Freebase Questions dataset
In order to conduct an accurate compositionality experiment, we created the Compositional Freebase Questions (CFQ) dataset, a simple, yet realistic, large dataset of natural language questions and answers generated from the public Freebase knowledge base. The CFQ can be used for text-in / text-out tasks, as well as semantic parsing. In our experiments, we focus on semantic parsing, where the input is a natural language question and the output is a query, which when executed against Freebase, produces the correct outcome. CFQ contains around 240k examples and almost 35k query patterns, making it significantly larger and more complex than comparable datasets — about 4 times that of WikiSQL with about 17x more query patterns than Complex Web Questions. Special care has been taken to ensure that the questions and answers are natural. We also quantify the complexity of the syntax in each example using the “complexity level” metric (L), which corresponds roughly to the depth of the parse tree, examples of which are shown below.
Compositional Generalization Experiments on CFQ
For a given train-test split, if the compound distributions of the train and test sets are very similar, then their compound divergence would be close to 0, indicating that they are not difficult tests for compositional generalization. A compound divergence close to 1 means that the train-test sets have many different compounds, which makes it a good test for compositional generalization. Compound divergence thus captures the notion of "different compound distribution", as desired.

We algorithmically generate train-test splits using the CFQ dataset that have a compound divergence ranging from 0 to 0.7 (the maximum that we were able to achieve). We fix the atom divergence to be very small. Then, for each split we measure the performance of three standard ML architectures — LSTM+attention, Transformer, and Universal Transformer. The results are shown in the graph below.
Compound divergence vs accuracy for three ML architectures. There is a surprisingly strong negative correlation between compound divergence and accuracy.
We measure the performance of a model by comparing the correct answers with the output string given by the model. All models achieve an accuracy greater than 95% when the compound divergence is very low. The mean accuracy on the split with highest compound divergence is below 20% for all architectures, which means that even a large training set with a similar atom distribution between train and test is not sufficient for the architectures to generalize well. For all architectures, there is a strong negative correlation between the compound divergence and the accuracy. This seems to indicate that compound divergence successfully captures the core difficulty for these ML architectures to generalize compositionally.

Potentially promising directions for future work might be to apply unsupervised pre-training on input language or output queries, or to use more diverse or more targeted learning architectures, such as syntactic attention. It would also be interesting to apply this approach to other domains such as visual reasoning, e.g. based on CLEVR, or to extend our approach to broader subsets of language understanding, including the use of ambiguous constructs, negations, quantification, comparatives, additional languages, and other vertical domains. We hope that this work will inspire others to use this benchmark to advance the compositional generalization capabilities of learning systems.

Source: Google AI Blog


ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-Supervised Learning of Language Representations

Posted by Radu Soricut and Zhenzhong Lan, Research Scientists, Google Research

Ever since the advent of BERT a year ago, natural language research has embraced a new paradigm, leveraging large amounts of existing text to pretrain a model’s parameters using self-supervision, with no data annotation required. So, rather than needing to train a machine-learning model for natural language processing (NLP) from scratch, one can start from a model primed with knowledge of a language. But, in order to improve upon this new approach to NLP, one must develop an understanding of what, exactly, is contributing to language-understanding performance — the network’s height (i.e., number of layers), its width (size of the hidden layer representations), the learning criteria for self-supervision, or something else entirely?

In “ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations”, accepted at ICLR 2020, we present an upgrade to BERT that advances the state-of-the-art performance on 12 NLP tasks, including the competitive Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD v2.0) and the SAT-style reading comprehension RACE benchmark. ALBERT is being released as an open-source implementation on top of TensorFlow, and includes a number of ready-to-use ALBERT pre-trained language representation models.

What Contributes to NLP Performance?
Identifying the dominant driver of NLP performance is complex — some settings are more important than others, and, as our study reveals, a simple, one-at-a-time exploration of these settings would not yield the correct answers.

The key to optimizing performance, captured in the design of ALBERT, is to allocate the model’s capacity more efficiently. Input-level embeddings (words, sub-tokens, etc.) need to learn context-independent representations, a representation for the word “bank”, for example. In contrast, hidden-layer embeddings need to refine that into context-dependent representations, e.g., a representation for “bank” in the context of financial transactions, and a different representation for “bank” in the context of river-flow management.

This is achieved by factorization of the embedding parametrization — the embedding matrix is split between input-level embeddings with a relatively-low dimension (e.g., 128), while the hidden-layer embeddings use higher dimensionalities (768 as in the BERT case, or more). With this step alone, ALBERT achieves an 80% reduction in the parameters of the projection block, at the expense of only a minor drop in performance — 80.3 SQuAD2.0 score, down from 80.4; or 67.9 on RACE, down from 68.2 — with all other conditions the same as for BERT.

Another critical design decision for ALBERT stems from a different observation that examines redundancy. Transformer-based neural network architectures (such as BERT, XLNet, and RoBERTa) rely on independent layers stacked on top of each other. However, we observed that the network often learned to perform similar operations at various layers, using different parameters of the network. This possible redundancy is eliminated in ALBERT by parameter-sharing across the layers, i.e., the same layer is applied on top of each other. This approach slightly diminishes the accuracy, but the more compact size is well worth the tradeoff. Parameter sharing achieves a 90% parameter reduction for the attention-feedforward block (a 70% reduction overall), which, when applied in addition to the factorization of the embedding parameterization, incur a slight performance drop of -0.3 on SQuAD2.0 to 80.0, and a larger drop of -3.9 on RACE score to 64.0.

Implementing these two design changes together yields an ALBERT-base model that has only 12M parameters, an 89% parameter reduction compared to the BERT-base model, yet still achieves respectable performance across the benchmarks considered. But this parameter-size reduction provides the opportunity to scale up the model again. Assuming that memory size allows, one can scale up the size of the hidden-layer embeddings by 10-20x. With a hidden-size of 4096, the ALBERT-xxlarge configuration achieves both an overall 30% parameter reduction compared to the BERT-large model, and, more importantly, significant performance gains: +4.2 on SQuAD2.0 (88.1, up from 83.9), and +8.5 on RACE (82.3, up from 73.8).

These results indicate that accurate language understanding depends on developing robust, high-capacity contextual representations. The context, modeled in the hidden-layer embeddings, captures the meaning of the words, which in turn drives the overall understanding, as directly measured by model performance on standard benchmarks.

Optimized Model Performance with the RACE Dataset
To evaluate the language understanding capability of a model, one can administer a reading comprehension test (e.g., similar to the SAT Reading Test). This can be done with the RACE dataset (2017), the largest publicly available resource for this purpose. Computer performance on this reading comprehension challenge mirrors well the language modeling advances of the last few years: a model pre-trained with only context-independent word representations scores poorly on this test (45.9; left-most bar), while BERT, with context-dependent language knowledge, scores relatively well with a 72.0. Refined BERT models, such as XLNet and RoBERTa, set the bar even higher, in the 82-83 score range. The ALBERT-xxlarge configuration mentioned above yields a RACE score in the same range (82.3), when trained on the base BERT dataset (Wikipedia and Books). However, when trained on the same larger dataset as XLNet and RoBERTa, it significantly outperforms all other approaches to date, and establishes a new state-of-the-art score at 89.4.
Machine performance on the RACE challenge (SAT-like reading comprehension). A random-guess baseline score is 25.0. The maximum possible score is 95.0.
The success of ALBERT demonstrates the importance of identifying the aspects of a model that give rise to powerful contextual representations. By focusing improvement efforts on these aspects of the model architecture, it is possible to greatly improve both the model efficiency and performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. To facilitate further advances in the field of NLP, we are open-sourcing ALBERT to the research community.

Source: Google AI Blog


Predicting the Generalization Gap in Deep Neural Networks

Posted by Yiding Jiang, Google AI Resident

Deep neural networks (DNN) are the cornerstone of recent progress in machine learning, and are responsible for recent breakthroughs in a variety of tasks such as image recognition, image segmentation, machine translation and more. However, despite their ubiquity, researchers are still attempting to fully understand the underlying principles that govern them. In particular, classical theories (e.g., VC-dimension and Rademacher complexity) suggest that over-parameterized functions should generalize poorly to unseen data, yet recent work has found that massively over-parameterized functions (orders of magnitude more parameters than the number of data points) generalize well. In order to improve models, a better understanding of generalization, which can lead to more theoretically grounded and therefore more principled approaches to DNN design, is required.

An important concept for understanding generalization is the generalization gap, i.e., the difference between a model’s performance on training data and its performance on unseen data drawn from the same distribution. Significant strides have been made towards deriving better DNN generalization bounds—the upper limit to the generalization gap—but they still tend to greatly overestimate the actual generalization gap, rendering them uninformative as to why some models generalize so well. On the other hand, the notion of margin—the distance between a data point and the decision boundary—has been extensively studied in the context of shallow models such as support-vector machines, and is found to be closely related to how well these models generalize to unseen data. Because of this, the use of margin to study generalization performance has been extended to DNNs, resulting in highly refined theoretical upper bounds on the generalization gap, but has not significantly improved the ability to predict how well a model generalizes.
An example of a support-vector machine decision boundary. The hyperplane defined by w∙x-b=0 is the "decision boundary" of this linear classifier, i.e., every point x lying on the hyperplane is equally likely to be in either class under this classifier.
In our ICLR 2019 paper, “Predicting the Generalization Gap in Deep Networks with Margin Distributions”, we propose the use of a normalized margin distribution across network layers as a predictor of the generalization gap. We empirically study the relationship between the margin distribution and generalization and show that, after proper normalization of the distances, some basic statistics of the margin distributions can accurately predict the generalization gap. We also make available all the models used as a dataset for studying generalization through the Github repository.
Each plot corresponds to a convolutional neural network trained on CIFAR-10 with different classification accuracies. The probability density (y-axis) of normalized margin distributions (x-axis) at 4 layers of a network is shown for three different models with increasingly better generalization (left to right). The normalized margin distributions are strongly correlated with test accuracy, which suggests they can be used as a proxy for predicting a network's generalization gap. Please see our paper for more details on these networks.
Margin Distributions as a Predictor of Generalization
Intuitively, if the statistics of the margin distribution are truly predictive of the generalization performance, a simple prediction scheme should be able to establish the relationship. As such, we chose linear regression to be the predictor. We found that the relationship between the generalization gap and the log-transformed statistics of the margin distributions is almost perfectly linear (see figure below). In fact, the proposed scheme produces better prediction relative to other existing measures of generalization. This indicates that the margin distributions may contain important information about how deep models generalize.
Predicted generalization gap (x-axis) vs. true generalization gap (y-axis) on CIFAR-100 + ResNet-32. The points lie close to the diagonal line, which indicates that the predicted values of the log linear model fit the true generalization gap very well.
The Deep Model Generalization Dataset
In addition to our paper, we are introducing the Deep Model Generalization (DEMOGEN) dataset, which consists of of 756 trained deep models, along with their training and test performance on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets. The models are variants of CNNs (with architectures that resemble Network-in-Network) and ResNet-32 with different popular regularization techniques and hyperparameter settings, inducing a wide spectrum of generalization behaviors. For example, the models of CNNs trained on CIFAR-10 have the test accuracies ranging from 60% to 90.5% with generalization gaps ranging from 1% to 35%. For details of the dataset, please see our paper or the Github repository. As part of the dataset release, we also include utilities to easily load the models and reproduce the results presented in our paper.

We hope that this research and the DEMOGEN dataset will provide the community with an accessible tool for studying generalization in deep learning without having to retrain a large number of models. We also hope that our findings will motivate further research in generalization gap predictors and margin distributions in the hidden layers.

Source: Google AI Blog