We address tracking and prediction of multiple moving objects in visual data streams as inference and sampling in a disentangled latent state-space model. By encoding objects separately and including explicit position information in the latent state space, we perform tracking via amortized variational Bayesian inference of the respective latent positions. Inference is implemented in a modular neural framework tailored towards our disentangled latent space. Generative and inference model are jointly learned from observations only. Comparing to related prior work, we empirically show that our Markovian state-space assumption enables faithful and much improved long-term prediction well beyond the training horizon. Further, our inference model correctly decomposes frames into objects, even in the presence of occlusions. Tracking performance is increased significantly over prior art.

A BSTRACT In the generative model approach of machine learning, it is essential to acquire an accurate probabilistic model and compress the dimension of data for easy treatment. However, in the conventional deep-autoencoder based generative model such as V AE, the probability of the real space cannot be obtained correctly from that of in the latent space, because the scaling between both spaces is not controlled. This has also been an obstacle to quantifying the impact of the variation of latent variables on data. In this paper, we propose Rate-Distortion Optimization guided autoencoder, in which the Jacobi matrix from real space to latent space has orthonormality. It is proved theoretically and experimentally that (i) the probability distribution of the latent space obtained by this model is proportional to the probability distribution of the real space because Jacobian between two spaces is constant; (ii) our model behaves as nonlinear PCA, where energy of acquired latent space is concentrated on several principal components and the influence of each component can be evaluated quantitatively. Furthermore, to verify the usefulness on the practical application, we evaluate its performance in unsupervised anomaly detection and it outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. 1 I NTRODUCTION Capturing the inherent features of a dataset from high-dimensional and complex data is an essential issue in machine learning. Generative model approach learns the probability distribution of data, aiming at data generation by probabilistic sampling, unsupervised/weakly supervised learning, and acquiring meta-prior (general assumptions about how data can be summarized naturally, such as disentangle, clustering, and hierarchical structure (Bengio et al., 2013; Tschannen et al., 2019)). It is generally difficult to directly estimate a probability density function(PDF) Px (x) of real data x. Accordingly, one promising approach is to map to the latent space z with reduced dimension and capture PDF Pz (z) . In recent years, deep autoencoder based methods have made it possible to compress dimensions and derive latent variables. While there is remarkable progress in these areas (van den Oord et al., 2017; Kingma et al., 2014; Jiang et al., 2016), the relation between x and z in the current deep generative models is still not clear. V AE (P .Kingma & Welling, 2014) is one of the most successful generative models for capturing latent representation. In V AE, lower bound of log-likelihood of Px (x) is introduced as ELBO. Then latent variable is obtained by maximizing ELBO.

We proposed a novel graph convolutional neural network that could construct a coarse, sparse latent point cloud from a dense, raw point cloud. With a novel non-isotropic convolution operation defined on irregular geometries, the model then can reconstruct the original point cloud from this latent cloud with fine details. Furthermore, we proposed that it is even possible to perform particle simulation using the latent cloud encoded from some simulated particle cloud (e.g. fluids), to accelerate the particle simulation process. Our model has been tested on ShapeNetCore dataset for Auto-Encoding with a limited latent dimension and tested on a synthesis dataset for fluids simulation. We also compare the model with other state-of-the-art models, and several visualizations were done to intuitively understand the model.

We propose a new aggregation framework for approximate dynamic programming, which provides a connection with rollout algorithms, approximate policy iteration, and other single and multistep lookahead methods. The central novel characteristic is the use of a bias function $V$ of the state, which biases the values of the aggregate cost function towards their correct levels. The classical aggregation framework is obtained when $V\equiv0$, but our scheme works best when $V$ is a known reasonably good approximation to the optimal cost function $J^*$. When $V$ is equal to the cost function $J_{\mu}$ of some known policy $\mu$ and there is only one aggregate state, our scheme is equivalent to the rollout algorithm based on $\mu$ (i.e., the result of a single policy improvement starting with the policy $\mu$). When $V=J_{\mu}$ and there are multiple aggregate states, our aggregation approach can be used as a more powerful form of improvement of $\mu$. Thus, when combined with an approximate policy evaluation scheme, our approach can form the basis for a new and enhanced form of approximate policy iteration. When $V$ is a generic bias function, our scheme is equivalent to approximation in value space with lookahead function equal to $V$ plus a local correction within each aggregate state. The local correction levels are obtained by solving a low-dimensional aggregate DP problem, yielding an arbitrarily close approximation to $J^*$, when the number of aggregate states is sufficiently large. Except for the bias function, the aggregate DP problem is similar to the one of the classical aggregation framework, and its algorithmic solution by simulation or other methods is nearly identical to one for classical aggregation, assuming values of $V$ are available when needed.

W e investigate the political roles of "Internet trolls" in social media. Political trolls, such as the ones linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), have recently gained enormous attention for their ability to sway public opinion and even influence elections. Analysis of the online traces of trolls has shown different behavioral patterns, which target different slices of the population. However, this analysis is manual and labor-intensive, thus making it impractical as a first-response tool for newly-discovered troll farms. In this paper, we show how to automate this analysis by using machine learning in a realistic setting. In particular, we show how to classify trolls according to their political role --left, news feed, right-- by using features extracted from social media, i.e., Twitter, in two scenarios: ( i) in a traditional supervised learning scenario, where labels for trolls are available, and ( ii) in a distant supervision scenario, where labels for trolls are not available, and we rely on more-commonly-available labels for news outlets mentioned by the trolls. Technically, we leverage the community structure and the text of the messages in the online social network of trolls represented as a graph, from which we extract several types of learned representations, i.e., embeddings, for the trolls. Experiments on the "IRA Russian Troll" dataset show that our methodology improves over the state-of-the-art in the first scenario, while providing a compelling case for the second scenario, which has not been explored in the literature thus far.

The combination of the re-parameterization trick with the use of variational auto-encoders has caused a sensation in Bayesian deep learning, allowing the training of realistic generative models of images and has considerably increased our ability to use scalable latent variable models. The re-parameterization trick is necessary for models in which no analytical variational bound is available and allows noisy gradients to be computed for arbitrary models. However, for certain standard output layers of a neural network, analytical bounds are available and the variational auto-encoder may be used both without the re-parameterization trick or the need for any Monte Carlo approximation. In this work, we show that using Jaakola and Jordan bound, we can produce a binary classification layer that allows a Bayesian output layer to be trained, using the standard stochastic gradient descent algorithm. We further demonstrate that a latent variable model utilizing the Bouchard bound for multi-class classification allows for fast training of a fully probabilistic latent factor model, even when the number of classes is very large.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are distributed trainable systems whose computing elements, or neurons, are characterized by internal analog dynamics and by digital and sparse synaptic communications. The sparsity of the synaptic spiking inputs and the corresponding event-driven nature of neural processing can be leveraged by energy-efficient hardware implementations, which can offer significant energy reductions as compared to conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs). The design of training algorithms lags behind the hardware implementations. Most existing training algorithms for SNNs have been designed either for biological plausibility or through conversion from pretrained ANNs via rate encoding. This article provides an introduction to SNNs by focusing on a probabilistic signal processing methodology that enables the direct derivation of learning rules by leveraging the unique time-encoding capabilities of SNNs. We adopt discrete-time probabilistic models for networked spiking neurons and derive supervised and unsupervised learning rules from first principles via variational inference. Examples and open research problems are also provided.

We introduce a variational approach to learning and inference of temporally hierarchical structure and representation for sequential data. We propose the Variational Temporal Abstraction (VTA), a hierarchical recurrent state space model that can infer the latent temporal structure and thus perform the stochastic state transition hierarchically. We also propose to apply this model to implement the jumpy-imagination ability in imagination-augmented agent-learning in order to improve the efficiency of the imagination. In experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed method can model 2D and 3D visual sequence datasets with interpretable temporal structure discovery and that its application to jumpy imagination enables more efficient agent-learning in a 3D navigation task.

October 1, 2019 Abstract We focus on the problem of black-box adversarial attacks, where the aim is to generate adversarial examples using information limited to loss function evaluations of input-output pairs. We use Bayesian optimization (BO) to specifically cater to scenarios involving low query budgets to develop query efficient adversarial attacks. We alleviate the issues surrounding BO in regards to optimizing high dimensional deep learning models by effective dimension upsampling techniques. Our proposed approach achieves performance comparable to the state of the art black-box adversarial attacks albeit with a much lower average query count. In particular, in low query budget regimes, our proposed method reduces the query count up to 80% with respect to the state of the art methods. 1 Introduction Neural networks are now well-known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples: additive perturbations that, when applied to the input, change the network's output classification [9]. Work investigating this lack of robustness to adversarial examples often takes the form of a back-and-forth between newly proposed adversarial attacks, methods for quickly and efficiently crafting adversarial examples, and corresponding defenses that modify the classifier at either training or test time to improve robustness. The most successful adversarial attacks use gradient-based optimization methods [9, 17], which require complete knowledge of the architecture and parameters of the target network; this assumption is referred to as the white-box attack setting.

Training neural networks to be certifiably robust is a powerful defense against adversarial attacks. However, while promising, state-of-the-art results with certified training are far from satisfactory. Currently, it is very difficult to train a neural network that is both accurate and certified on realistic datasets and specifications (e.g., robustness). Given this difficulty, a pressing existential question is: given a dataset and a specification, is there a network that is both certified and accurate with respect to these? While the evidence suggests "no", we prove that for realistic datasets and specifications, such a network does exist and its certification can be established by propagating lower and upper bounds of each neuron through the network (interval analysis) - the most relaxed yet computationally efficient convex relaxation. Our result can be seen as a Universal Approximation Theorem for interval-certified ReLU networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to prove the existence of accurate, interval-certified networks.