Evolution strategies (ES) are a family of black-box optimization algorithms able to train deep neural networks roughly as well as Q-learning and policy gradient methods on challenging deep reinforcement learning (RL) problems, but are much faster (e.g. hours vs. days) because they parallelize better. However, many RL problems require directed exploration because they have reward functions that are sparse or deceptive (i.e. contain local optima), and it is unknown how to encourage such exploration with ES. Here we show that algorithms that have been invented to promote directed exploration in small-scale evolved neural networks via populations of exploring agents, specifically novelty search (NS) and quality diversity (QD) algorithms, can be hybridized with ES to improve its performance on sparse or deceptive deep RL tasks, while retaining scalability. Our experiments confirm that the resultant new algorithms, NS-ES and two QD algorithms, NSR-ES and NSRA-ES, avoid local optima encountered by ES to achieve higher performance on Atari and simulated robots learning to walk around a deceptive trap. This paper thus introduces a family of fast, scalable algorithms for reinforcement learning that are capable of directed exploration. It also adds this new family of exploration algorithms to the RL toolbox and raises the interesting possibility that analogous algorithms with multiple simultaneous paths of exploration might also combine well with existing RL algorithms outside ES.

Adversarial examples are typically constructed by perturbing an existing data point within a small matrix norm, and current defense methods are focused on guarding against this type of attack. In this paper, we propose unrestricted adversarial examples, a new threat model where the attackers are not restricted to small normbounded perturbations. Different from perturbation-based attacks, we propose to synthesize unrestricted adversarial examples entirely from scratch using conditional generative models. Specifically, we first train an Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Network (AC-GAN) to model the class-conditional distribution over data samples. Then, conditioned on a desired class, we search over the AC-GAN latent space to find images that are likely under the generative model and are misclassified by a target classifier. We demonstrate through human evaluation that unrestricted adversarial examples generated this way are legitimate and belong to the desired class. Our empirical results on the MNIST, SVHN, and CelebA datasets show that unrestricted adversarial examples can bypass strong adversarial training and certified defense methods designed for traditional adversarial attacks.

Neural networks can learn to represent and manipulate numerical information, but they seldom generalize well outside of the range of numerical values encountered during training. To encourage more systematic numerical extrapolation, we propose an architecture that represents numerical quantities as linear activations which are manipulated using primitive arithmetic operators, controlled by learned gates. We call this module a neural arithmetic logic unit (NALU), by analogy to the arithmetic logic unit in traditional processors. Experiments show that NALU-enhanced neural networks can learn to track time, perform arithmetic over images of numbers, translate numerical language into real-valued scalars, execute computer code, and count objects in images. In contrast to conventional architectures, we obtain substantially better generalization both inside and outside of the range of numerical values encountered during training, often extrapolating orders of magnitude beyond trained numerical ranges.

In recent years, deep generative models have been shown to 'imagine' convincing high-dimensional observations such as images, audio, and even video, learning directly from raw data. In this work, we ask how to imagine goal-directed visual plans -- a plausible sequence of observations that transition a dynamical system from its current configuration to a desired goal state, which can later be used as a reference trajectory for control. We focus on systems with high-dimensional observations, such as images, and propose an approach that naturally combines representation learning and planning. Our framework learns a generative model of sequential observations, where the generative process is induced by a transition in a low-dimensional planning model, and an additional noise. By maximizing the mutual information between the generated observations and the transition in the planning model, we obtain a low-dimensional representation that best explains the causal nature of the data. We structure the planning model to be compatible with efficient planning algorithms, and we propose several such models based on either discrete or continuous states. Finally, to generate a visual plan, we project the current and goal observations onto their respective states in the planning model, plan a trajectory, and then use the generative model to transform the trajectory to a sequence of observations. We demonstrate our method on imagining plausible visual plans of rope manipulation.

We consider the problem of anomaly detection in images, and present a new detection technique. Given a sample of images, all known to belong to a ``normal'' class (e.g., dogs), we show how to train a deep neural model that can detect out-of-distribution images (i.e., non-dog objects). The main idea behind our scheme is to train a multi-class model to discriminate between dozens of geometric transformations applied on all the given images. The auxiliary expertise learned by the model generates feature detectors that effectively identify, at test time, anomalous images based on the softmax activation statistics of the model when applied on transformed images. We present extensive experiments using the proposed detector, which indicate that our algorithm improves state-of-the-art methods by a wide margin.

We propose a general, theoretically justified mechanism for processing missing data by neural networks. Our idea is to replace typical neuron's response in the first hidden layer by its expected value. This approach can be applied for various types of networks at minimal cost in their modification. Moreover, in contrast to recent approaches, it does not require complete data for training. Experimental results performed on different types of architectures show that our method gives better results than typical imputation strategies and other methods dedicated for incomplete data.

Scaling model capacity has been vital in the success of deep learning. For a typical network, necessary compute resources and training time grow dramatically with model size. Conditional computation is a promising way to increase the number of parameters with a relatively small increase in resources. We propose a training algorithm that flexibly chooses neural modules based on the data to be processed. Both the decomposition and modules are learned end-to-end. In contrast to existing approaches, training does not rely on regularization to enforce diversity in module use. We apply modular networks both to image recognition and language modeling tasks, where we achieve superior performance compared to several baselines. Introspection reveals that modules specialize in interpretable contexts.

Memory-based neural networks model temporal data by leveraging an ability to remember information for long periods. It is unclear, however, whether they also have an ability to perform complex relational reasoning with the information they remember. Here, we first confirm our intuitions that standard memory architectures may struggle at tasks that heavily involve an understanding of the ways in which entities are connected -- i.e., tasks involving relational reasoning. We then improve upon these deficits by using a new memory module -- a Relational Memory Core (RMC) -- which employs multi-head dot product attention to allow memories to interact. Finally, we test the RMC on a suite of tasks that may profit from more capable relational reasoning across sequential information, and show large gains in RL domains (BoxWorld & Mini PacMan), program evaluation, and language modeling, achieving state-of-the-art results on the WikiText-103, Project Gutenberg, and GigaWord datasets.

This paper introduces Wasserstein variational inference, a new form of approximate Bayesian inference based on optimal transport theory. Wasserstein variational inference uses a new family of divergences that includes both f-divergences and the Wasserstein distance as special cases. The gradients of the Wasserstein variational loss are obtained by backpropagating through the Sinkhorn iterations. This technique results in a very stable likelihood-free training method that can be used with implicit distributions and probabilistic programs. Using the Wasserstein variational inference framework, we introduce several new forms of autoencoders and test their robustness and performance against existing variational autoencoding techniques.

In many biological and medical contexts, we construct a large labeled corpus by aggregating many sources to use in target prediction tasks. Unfortunately, many of the sources may be irrelevant to our target task, so ignoring the structure of the dataset is detrimental. This work proposes a novel approach, the Multiple Domain Matching Network (MDMN), to exploit this structure. MDMN embeds all data into a shared feature space while learning which domains share strong statistical relationships. These relationships are often insightful in their own right, and they allow domains to share strength without interference from irrelevant data. This methodology builds on existing distribution-matching approaches by assuming that source domains are varied and outcomes multi-factorial. Therefore, each domain should only match a relevant subset. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed approach can have a tighter generalization bound than existing multiple-domain adaptation approaches. Empirically, we show that the proposed methodology handles higher numbers of source domains (up to 21 empirically), and provides state-of-the-art performance on image, text, and multi-channel time series classification, including clinically relevant data of a novel treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder.