Deep generative models (DGMs) have shown promise in image generation. However, most of the existing work learn the model by simply optimizing a divergence between the marginal distributions of the model and the data, and often fail to capture the rich structures and relations in multi-object images. Human knowledge is a critical element to the success of DGMs to infer these structures. In this paper, we propose the amortized structural regularization (ASR) framework, which adopts the posterior regularization (PR) to embed human knowledge into DGMs via a set of structural constraints. We derive a lower bound of the regularized log-likelihood, which can be jointly optimized with respect to the generative model and recognition model efficiently. Empirical results show that ASR significantly outperforms the DGM baselines in terms of inference accuracy and sample quality.

Medical ultrasound technology is widely used in routine clinical applications such as disease diagnosis and treatment as well as other applications like real-time monitoring of human tongue shapes and motions as visual feedback in second language training. Due to the low-contrast characteristic and noisy nature of ultrasound images, it might require expertise for non-expert users to recognize tongue gestures. Manual tongue segmentation is a cumbersome, subjective, and error-prone task. Furthermore, it is not a feasible solution for real-time applications. In the last few years, deep learning methods have been used for delineating and tracking tongue dorsum. Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), which have shown to be successful in medical image analysis tasks, are typically weak for the same task on different domains. In many cases, DCNNs trained on data acquired with one ultrasound device, do not perform well on data of varying ultrasound device or acquisition protocol. Domain adaptation is an alternative solution for this difficulty by transferring the weights from the model trained on a large annotated legacy dataset to a new model for adapting on another different dataset using fine-tuning. In this study, after conducting extensive experiments, we addressed the problem of domain adaptation on small ultrasound datasets for tongue contour extraction. We trained a U-net network comprises of an encoder-decoder path from scratch, and then with several surrogate scenarios, some parts of the trained network were fine-tuned on another dataset as the domain-adapted networks. We repeat scenarios from target to source domains to find a balance point for knowledge transfer from source to target and vice versa. The performance of new fine-tuned networks was evaluated on the same task with images from different domains.

Not all neural network architectures are created equal, some perform much better than others for certain tasks. But how important are the weight parameters of a neural network compared to its architecture? In this work, we question to what extent neural network architectures alone, without learning any weight parameters, can encode solutions for a given task. We propose a search method for neural network architectures that can already perform a task without any explicit weight training. To evaluate these networks, we populate the connections with a single shared weight parameter sampled from a uniform random distribution, and measure the expected performance. We demonstrate that our method can find minimal neural network architectures that can perform several reinforcement learning tasks without weight training. On a supervised learning domain, we find network architectures that achieve much higher than chance accuracy on MNIST using random weights.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) which apply the deep neural networks to graph data have achieved significant performance for the task of semi-supervised node classification. However, only few work has addressed the adversarial robustness of GNNs. In this paper, we first present a novel gradient-based attack method that facilitates the difficulty of tackling discrete graph data. When comparing to current adversarial attacks on GNNs, the results show that by only perturbing a small number of edge perturbations, including addition and deletion, our optimization-based attack can lead to a noticeable decrease in classification performance. Moreover, leveraging our gradient-based attack, we propose the first optimization-based adversarial training for GNNs. Our method yields higher robustness against both different gradient based and greedy attack methods without sacrificing classification accuracy on original graph.

We demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, that adversarial robustness can significantly benefit from semisupervised learning. Theoretically, we revisit the simple Gaussian model of Schmidt et al. that shows a sample complexity gap between standard and robust classification. We prove that this gap does not pertain to labels: a simple semisupervised learning procedure (self-training) achieves robust accuracy using the same number of labels required for standard accuracy. Empirically, we augment CIFAR-10 with 500K unlabeled images sourced from 80 Million Tiny Images and use robust self-training to outperform state-of-the-art robust accuracies by over 5 points in (i) $\ell_\infty$ robustness against several strong attacks via adversarial training and (ii) certified $\ell_2$ and $\ell_\infty$ robustness via randomized smoothing. On SVHN, adding the dataset's own extra training set with the labels removed provides gains of 4 to 10 points, within 1 point of the gain from using the extra labels as well.

In this paper, the authors aim to combine the latest state of the art models in image recognition with the best publicly available satellite images to create a system for landslide risk mitigation. We focus first on landslide detection and further propose a similar system to be used for prediction. Such models are valuable as they could easily be scaled up to provide data for hazard evaluation, as satellite imagery becomes increasingly available. The goal is to use satellite images and correlated data to enrich the public repository of data and guide disaster relief efforts for locating precise areas where landslides have occurred. Different image augmentation methods are used to increase diversity in the chosen dataset and create more robust classification. The resulting outputs are then fed into variants of 3-D convolutional neural networks. A review of the current literature indicates there is no research using CNNs (Convolutional Neural Networks) and freely available satellite imagery for classifying landslide risk. The model has shown to be ultimately able to achieve a significantly better than baseline accuracy.

Unlike human speakers, typical text-to-speech (TTS) systems are unable to produce multiple distinct renditions of a given sentence. This has previously been addressed by adding explicit external control. In contrast, generative models are able to capture a distribution over multiple renditions and thus produce varied renditions using sampling. Typical neural TTS models learn the average of the data because they minimise mean squared error. In the context of prosody, taking the average produces flatter, more boring speech: an "average prosody". A generative model that can synthesise multiple prosodies will, by design, not model average prosody. We use variational autoencoders (VAE) which explicitly place the most "average" data close to the mean of the Gaussian prior. We propose that by moving towards the tails of the prior distribution, the model will transition towards generating more idiosyncratic, varied renditions. Focusing here on intonation, we investigate the trade-off between naturalness and intonation variation and find that typical acoustic models can either be natural, or varied, but not both. However, sampling from the tails of the VAE prior produces much more varied intonation than the traditional approaches, whilst maintaining the same level of naturalness.

The desire to run neural networks on low-capacity edge devices has led to the development of a wealth of compression techniques. Moonshine (Crowley et al., 2018a) is a simple and powerful example of this: one takes a large pre-trained network and substitutes each of its convolutional blocks with a selected cheap alternative block, then distills the resultant network with the original. However, not all blocks are created equally; for a required parameter budget there may exist a potent combination of many different cheap blocks. In this work, we find these by developing BlockSwap: an algorithm for choosing networks with interleaved block types by passing a single minibatch of training data through randomly initialised networks and gauging their Fisher potential. We show that block-wise cheapening yields more accurate networks than single block-type networks across a spectrum of parameter budgets. Code is available at https://github.com/BayesWatch/

This paper presents a method to explain how input information is discarded through intermediate layers of a neural network during the forward propagation, in order to quantify and diagnose knowledge representations of pre-trained deep neural networks. We define two types of entropy-based metrics, i.e., the strict information discarding and the reconstruction uncertainty, which measure input information of a specific layer from two perspectives. We develop a method to enable efficient computation of such entropy-based metrics. Our method can be broadly applied to various neural networks and enable comprehensive comparisons between different layers of different networks. Preliminary experiments have shown the effectiveness of our metrics in analyzing benchmark networks and explaining existing deep-learning techniques.

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to transfer the classifier learned from the source domain to the target domain in an unsupervised manner. With the help of target pseudo-labels, aligning class-level distributions and learning the classifier in the target domain are two widely used objectives. Existing methods often separately optimize these two individual objectives, which makes them suffer from the neglect of the other. However, optimizing these two aspects together is not trivial. To alleviate the above issues, we propose a novel method that jointly optimizes semantic domain alignment and target classifier learning in a holistic way. The joint optimization mechanism can not only eliminate their weaknesses but also complement their strengths. The theoretical analysis also verifies the favor of the joint optimization mechanism. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method yields the best performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation methods.