In many sequential tasks, a model needs to remember relevant events from the distant past to make correct predictions. Unfortunately, a straightforward application of gradient based training requires intermediate computations to be stored for every element of a sequence. This requires to store prohibitively large intermediate data if a sequence consists of thousands or even millions elements, and as a result, makes learning of very long-term dependencies infeasible. However, the majority of sequence elements can usually be predicted by taking into account only temporally local information. On the other hand, predictions affected by long-term dependencies are sparse and characterized by high uncertainty given only local information. We propose \texttt{MemUP}, a new training method that allows to learn long-term dependencies without backpropagating gradients through the whole sequence at a time. This method can potentially be applied to any recurrent architecture. LSTM network trained with \texttt{MemUP} performs better or comparable to baselines while requiring to store less intermediate data.

Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) provide a probabilistic interpretation for deep learning models by imposing a prior distribution over model parameters and inferring a posterior distribution based on observed data. The model sampled from the posterior distribution can be used for providing ensemble predictions and quantifying prediction uncertainty. It is well-known that deep learning models with lower sharpness have better generalization ability. However, existing posterior inferences are not aware of sharpness/flatness in terms of formulation, possibly leading to high sharpness for the models sampled from them. In this paper, we develop theories, the Bayesian setting, and the variational inference approach for the sharpness-aware posterior. Specifically, the models sampled from our sharpness-aware posterior, and the optimal approximate posterior estimating this sharpness-aware posterior, have better flatness, hence possibly possessing higher generalization ability. We conduct experiments by leveraging the sharpness-aware posterior with state-of-the-art Bayesian Neural Networks, showing that the flat-seeking counterparts outperform their baselines in all metrics of interest.

Modern machine learning methods including deep learning have achieved great success in predictive accuracy for supervised learning tasks, but may still fall short in giving useful estimates of their predictive uncertainty. Quantifying uncertainty is especially critical in real-world settings, which often involve input distributions that are shifted from the training distribution due to a variety of factors including sample bias and non-stationarity. In such settings, well calibrated uncertainty estimates convey information about when a model's output should (or should not) be trusted. Many probabilistic deep learning methods, including Bayesian-and non-Bayesian methods, have been proposed in the literature for quantifying predictive uncertainty, but to our knowledge there has not previously been a rigorous large-scale empirical comparison of these methods under dataset shift. We present a large-scale benchmark of existing state-of-the-art methods on classification problems and investigate the effect of dataset shift on accuracy and calibration. We find that traditional post-hoc calibration does indeed fall short, as do several other previous methods. However, some methods that marginalize over models give surprisingly strong results across a broad spectrum of tasks.

As deep learning applications continue to become more diverse, an interesting question arises: Can general problem solving arise from jointly learning several such diverse tasks? To approach this question, deep multi-task learning is extended in this paper to the setting where there is no obvious overlap between task architectures. The idea is that any set of (architecture,task) pairs can be decomposed into a set of potentially related subproblems, whose sharing is optimized by an efficient stochastic algorithm. The approach is first validated in a classic synthetic multi-task learning benchmark, and then applied to sharing across disparate architectures for vision, NLP, and genomics tasks. It discovers regularities across these domains, encodes them into sharable modules, and combines these modules systematically to improve performance in the individual tasks. The results confirm that sharing learned functionality across diverse domains and architectures is indeed beneficial, thus establishing a key ingredient for general problem solving in the future.

We propose a novel deep learning method for local self-supervised representation learning that does not require labels nor end-to-end backpropagation but exploits the natural order in data instead. Inspired by the observation that biological neural networks appear to learn without backpropagating a global error signal, we split a deep neural network into a stack of gradient-isolated modules. Each module is trained to maximally preserve the information of its inputs using the InfoNCE bound from Oord et al [2018]. Despite this greedy training, we demonstrate that each module improves upon the output of its predecessor, and that the representations created by the top module yield highly competitive results on downstream classification tasks in the audio and visual domain. The proposal enables optimizing modules asynchronously, allowing large-scale distributed training of very deep neural networks on unlabelled datasets.

The application of stochastic variance reduction to optimization has shown remarkable recent theoretical and practical success. The applicability of these techniques to the hard non-convex optimization problems encountered during training of modern deep neural networks is an open problem. We show that naive application of the SVRG technique and related approaches fail, and explore why.

Despite the considerable progress in automatic abdominal multi-organ segmentation from CT/MRI scans in recent years, a comprehensive evaluation of the models' capabilities is hampered by the lack of a large-scale benchmark from diverse clinical scenarios. Constraint by the high cost of collecting and labeling 3D medical data, most of the deep learning models to date are driven by datasets with a limited number of organs of interest or samples, which still limits the power of modern deep models and makes it difficult to provide a fully comprehensive and fair estimate of various methods. To mitigate the limitations, we present AMOS, a large-scale, diverse, clinical dataset for abdominal organ segmentation. AMOS provides 500 CT and 100 MRI scans collected from multi-center, multi-vendor, multi-modality, multi-phase, multi-disease patients, each with voxel-level annotations of 15 abdominal organs, providing challenging examples and test-bed for studying robust segmentation algorithms under diverse targets and scenarios. We further benchmark several state-of-the-art medical segmentation models to evaluate the status of the existing methods on this new challenging dataset. We have made our datasets, benchmark servers, and baselines publicly available, and hope to inspire future research. Information can be found at https://amos22.grand-challenge.org.

Querying knowledge graphs (KGs) using deep learning approaches can naturally leverage the reasoning and generalization ability to learn to infer better answers. Traditional neural complex query answering (CQA) approaches mostly work on entity-centric KGs. However, in the real world, we also need to make logical inferences about events, states, and activities (i.e., eventualities or situations) to push learning systems from System I to System II, as proposed by Yoshua Bengio. Querying logically from an EVentuality-centric KG (EVKG) can naturally provide references to such kind of intuitive and logical inference. Thus, in this paper, we propose a new framework to leverage neural methods to answer complex logical queries based on an EVKG, which can satisfy not only traditional first-order logic constraints but also implicit logical constraints over eventualities concerning their occurrences and orders. For instance, if we know that happens before, then is unlikely to be the cause of due to implicit temporal constraint. To facilitate consistent reasoning on EVKGs, we propose Complex Eventuality Query Answering (CEQA), a more rigorous definition of CQA that considers the implicit logical constraints governing the temporal order and occurrence of eventualities. In this manner, we propose to leverage theorem provers for constructing benchmark datasets to ensure the answers satisfy implicit logical constraints. We also propose a Memory-Enhanced Query Encoding (MEQE) approach to significantly improve the performance of state-of-the-art neural query encoders on the CEQA task.

Imagen builds on the power of large transformer language models in understanding text and hinges on the strength of diffusion models in high-fidelity image generation. Our key discovery is that generic large language models (e.g., T5), pretrained on text-only corpora, are surprisingly effective at encoding text for image synthesis: increasing the size of the language model in Imagen boosts both sample fidelity and image-text alignment much more than increasing the size of the image diffusion model. Imagen achieves a new state-of-the-art FID score of 7.27 on the COCO dataset, without ever training on COCO, and human raters find Imagen samples to be on par with the COCO data itself in image-text alignment. To assess text-to-image models in greater depth, we introduce DrawBench, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark for text-to-image models. With DrawBench, we compare Imagen with recent methods including VQ-GAN+CLIP, Latent Diffusion Models, and DALL-E 2, and find that human raters prefer Imagen over other models in side-by-side comparisons, both in terms of sample quality and image-text alignment.

Existing regression models tend to fall short in both accuracy and uncertainty estimation when the label distribution is imbalanced. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic deep learning model, dubbed variational imbalanced regression (VIR), which not only performs well in imbalanced regression but naturally produces reasonable uncertainty estimation as a byproduct. Different from typical variational autoencoders assuming I.I.D. representations (a data point's representation is not directly affected by other data points), our VIR borrows data with similar regression labels to compute the latent representation's variational distribution; furthermore, different from deterministic regression models producing point estimates, VIR predicts the entire normal-inverse-gamma distributions and modulates the associated conjugate distributions to impose probabilistic reweighting on the imbalanced data, thereby providing better uncertainty estimation. Experiments in several real-world datasets show that our VIR can outperform state-of-the-art imbalanced regression models in terms of both accuracy and uncertainty estimation.