Recent work (Ilyas et al, 2019) suggests that adversarial examples are features not bugs. If adversarial perturbations are indeed useful but non-robust features, then what is their origin? In order to answer these questions, we systematically examine the learning dynamics of adversarial perturbations both in the pixel and frequency domains. We find that: (1) adversarial examples are not present at initialization but instead emerge very early in training, typically within the first epochs, as verified by a novel breakpoint-based analysis; (2) the low-amplitude high-frequency nature of common adversarial perturbations in natural images is critically dependent on an implicit bias towards sparsity in the frequency domain; and (3) the origin of this bias is the locality and translation invariance of convolutional filters, along with (4) the existence of useful frequency-domain features in natural images. We provide a simple theoretical explanation for these observations, providing a clear and minimalist target for theorists in future work. Looking forward, our findings suggest that analyzing the learning dynamics of perturbations can provide useful insights for understanding the origin of adversarial sensitivities and developing robust solutions.

One of the major breakthroughs in deep learning over the past five years has been the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), a neural network-based generative model which aims to mimic some underlying distribution given a dataset of samples. In contrast to many supervised problems, where one tries to minimize a simple objective function of the parameters, GAN training is formulated as a min-max problem over a pair of network parameters. While empirically GANs have shown impressive success in several domains, researchers have been puzzled by unusual training behavior, including cycling so-called mode collapse. In this paper, we begin by providing a quantitative method to explore some of the challenges in GAN training, and we show empirically how this relates fundamentally to the parametric nature of the discriminator network. We propose a novel approach that resolves many of these issues by relying on a kernel-based non-parametric discriminator that is highly amenable to online training---we call this the Online Kernel-based Generative Adversarial Networks (OKGAN). We show empirically that OKGANs mitigate a number of training issues, including mode collapse and cycling, and are much more amenable to theoretical guarantees. OKGANs empirically perform dramatically better, with respect to reverse KL-divergence, than other GAN formulations on synthetic data; on classical vision datasets such as MNIST, SVHN, and CelebA, show comparable performance.

Anomalies are by definition rare, thus labeled examples are very limited or nonexistent, and likely do not cover unforeseen scenarios. Unsupervised learning methods that don't necessarily encounter anomalies in training would be immensely useful. Generative vision models can be useful in this regard but do not sufficiently represent normal and abnormal data distributions. To this end, we propose constant curvature manifolds for embedding data distributions in unsupervised visual anomaly detection. Through theoretical and empirical explorations of manifold shapes, we develop a novel hyperspherical Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) via stereographic projections with a gyroplane layer - a complete equivalent to the Poincar\'e VAE. This approach with manifold projections is beneficial in terms of model generalization and can yield more interpretable representations. We present state-of-the-art results on visual anomaly benchmarks in precision manufacturing and inspection, demonstrating real-world utility in industrial AI scenarios. We further demonstrate the approach on the challenging problem of histopathology: our unsupervised approach effectively detects cancerous brain tissue from noisy whole-slide images, learning a smooth, latent organization of tissue types that provides an interpretable decisions tool for medical professionals.

An ability to grasp new concepts from their descriptions is one of the key features of human intelligence, and zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to incorporate this property into machine learning models. In this paper, we theoretically investigate two very popular tricks used in ZSL: "normalize scale" trick and attributes normalization and show how they help to preserve a signal's variance in a typical model during a forward pass. Next, we demonstrate that these two tricks are not enough to normalize a deep ZSL network. We derive a new initialization scheme, which allows us to demonstrate strong state-of-the-art results on 4 out of 5 commonly used ZSL datasets: SUN, CUB, AwA1, and AwA2 while being on average 2 orders faster than the closest runner-up. Finally, we generalize ZSL to a broader problem -- Continual Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) and test our ideas in this new setup. The source code to reproduce all the results is available at https://github.com/universome/czsl.

Outlier detection is an important data mining task with numerous practical applications such as intrusion detection, credit card fraud detection, and video surveillance. However, given a specific complicated task with big data, the process of building a powerful deep learning based system for outlier detection still highly relies on human expertise and laboring trials. Although Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has shown its promise in discovering effective deep architectures in various domains, such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, contemporary NAS methods are not suitable for outlier detection due to the lack of intrinsic search space, unstable search process, and low sample efficiency. To bridge the gap, in this paper, we propose AutoOD, an automated outlier detection framework, which aims to search for an optimal neural network model within a predefined search space. Specifically, we firstly design a curiosity-guided search strategy to overcome the curse of local optimality. A controller, which acts as a search agent, is encouraged to take actions to maximize the information gain about the controller's internal belief. We further introduce an experience replay mechanism based on self-imitation learning to improve the sample efficiency. Experimental results on various real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that the deep model identified by AutoOD achieves the best performance, comparing with existing handcrafted models and traditional search methods.

We develop a general approach to distill symbolic representations of a learned deep model by introducing strong inductive biases. We focus on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The technique works as follows: we first encourage sparse latent representations when we train a GNN in a supervised setting, then we apply symbolic regression to components of the learned model to extract explicit physical relations. We find the correct known equations, including force laws and Hamiltonians, can be extracted from the neural network. We then apply our method to a nontrivial cosmology example--a detailed dark matter simulation--and discover a new analytic formula which can predict the concentration of dark matter from the mass distribution of nearby cosmic structures. The symbolic expressions extracted from the GNN using our technique also generalized to out-of-distributiondata better than the GNN itself. Our approach offers alternative directions for interpreting neural networks and discovering novel physical principles from the representations they learn.

This paper studies how to learn variational autoencoders with a variety of divergences under differential privacy constraints. We often build a VAE with an appropriate prior distribution to describe the desired properties of the learned representations and introduce a divergence as a regularization term to close the representations to the prior. Using differentially private SGD (DP-SGD), which randomizes a stochastic gradient by injecting a dedicated noise designed according to the gradient's sensitivity, we can easily build a differentially private model. However, we reveal that attaching several divergences increase the sensitivity from O(1) to O(B) in terms of batch size B. That results in injecting a vast amount of noise that makes it hard to learn. To solve the above issue, we propose term-wise DP-SGD that crafts randomized gradients in two different ways tailored to the compositions of the loss terms. The term-wise DP-SGD keeps the sensitivity at O(1) even when attaching the divergence. We can therefore reduce the amount of noise. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our method works well with two pairs of the prior distribution and the divergence.

Abstract reasoning, particularly in the visual domain, is a complex human ability, but it remains a challenging problem for artificial neural learning systems. In this work we propose MXGNet, a multilayer graph neural network for multi-panel diagrammatic reasoning tasks. MXGNet combines three powerful concepts, namely, object-level representation, graph neural networks and multiplex graphs, for solving visual reasoning tasks. MXGNet first extracts object-level representations for each element in all panels of the diagrams, and then forms a multi-layer multiplex graph capturing multiple relations between objects across different diagram panels. MXGNet summarises the multiple graphs extracted from the diagrams of the task, and uses this summarisation to pick the most probable answer from the given candidates. We have tested MXGNet on two types of diagrammatic reasoning tasks, namely Diagram Syllogisms and Raven Progressive Matrices (RPM). For an Euler Diagram Syllogism task MXGNet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 99.8%. For PGM and RAVEN, two comprehensive datasets for RPM reasoning, MXGNet outperforms the state-of-the-art models by a considerable margin.

Robustness of neural networks has recently attracted a great amount of interest. The many investigations in this area lack a precise common foundation of robustness concepts. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a rigorous and flexible framework for defining different types of robustness that also help to explain the interplay between adversarial robustness and generalization. The different robustness objectives directly lead to an adjustable family of loss functions. For two robustness concepts of particular interest we show effective ways to minimize the corresponding loss functions. One loss is designed to strengthen robustness against adversarial off-manifold attacks, and another to improve generalization under the given data distribution. Empirical results show that we can effectively train under different robustness objectives, obtaining higher robustness scores and better generalization, for the two examples respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art data augmentation and regularization techniques.

A basic operation in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is spatial resizing of feature maps. This is done either by strided convolution (donwscaling) or transposed convolution (upscaling). Such operations are limited to a fixed filter moving at predetermined integer steps (strides). Spatial sizes of consecutive layers are related by integer scale factors, predetermined at architectural design, and remain fixed throughout training and inference time. We propose a generalization of the common Conv-layer, from a discrete layer to a Continuous Convolution (CC) Layer. CC Layers naturally extend Conv-layers by representing the filter as a learned continuous function over sub-pixel coordinates. This allows learnable and principled resizing of feature maps, to any size, dynamically and consistently across scales. Once trained, the CC layer can be used to output any scale/size chosen at inference time. The scale can be non-integer and differ between the axes. CC gives rise to new freedoms for architectural design, such as dynamic layer shapes at inference time, or gradual architectures where the size changes by a small factor at each layer. This gives rise to many desired CNN properties, new architectural design capabilities, and useful applications. We further show that current Conv-layers suffer from inherent misalignments, which are ameliorated by CC layers.