Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

We describe Swapout, a new stochastic training method, that outperforms ResNets of identical network structure yielding impressive results on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR100.

We present a novel deep recurrent neural network architecture that learns to build implicit plans in an end-to-end manner purely by interacting with an environment in reinforcement learning setting. The network builds an internal plan, which is continuously updated upon observation of the next input from the environment. It can also partition this internal representation into contiguous sub-sequences by learning for how long the plan can be committed to - i.e. followed without replaning. Combining these properties, the proposed model, dubbed STRategic Attentive Writer (STRAW) can learn high-level, temporally abstracted macro-actions of varying lengths that are solely learnt from data without any prior information. These macro-actions enable both structured exploration and economic computation. We experimentally demonstrate that STRAW delivers strong improvements on several ATARI games by employing temporally extended planning strategies (e.g.

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performances in many natural language processing tasks, such as language modeling and machine translation. However, when the vocabulary is large, the RNN model will become very big (e.g., possibly beyond the memory capacity of a GPU device) and its training will become very inefficient. In this work, we propose a novel technique to tackle this challenge. The key idea is to use 2-Component (2C) shared embedding for word representations. We allocate every word in the vocabulary into a table, each row of which is associated with a vector, and each column associated with another vector.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

We introduce the value iteration network (VIN): a fully differentiable neural network with a'planning module' embedded within. VINs can learn to plan, and are suitable for predicting outcomes that involve planning-based reasoning, such as policies for reinforcement learning. Key to our approach is a novel differentiable approximation of the value-iteration algorithm, which can be represented as a convolutional neural network, and trained end-to-end using standard backpropagation. We evaluate VIN based policies on discrete and continuous path-planning domains, and on a natural-language based search task. We show that by learning an explicit planning computation, VIN policies generalize better to new, unseen domains.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

We present a new type of probabilistic model which we call DISsimilarity COefficient Networks (DISCO Nets). DISCO Nets allow us to efficiently sample from a posterior distribution parametrised by a neural network. During training, DISCO Nets are learned by minimising the dissimilarity coefficient between the true distribution and the estimated distribution. This allows us to tailor the training to the loss related to the task at hand. We empirically show that (i) by modeling uncertainty on the output value, DISCO Nets outperform equivalent non-probabilistic predictive networks and (ii) DISCO Nets accurately model the uncertainty of the output, outperforming existing probabilistic models based on deep neural networks.

We give a novel formal theoretical framework for unsupervised learning with two distinctive characteristics. First, it does not assume any generative model and based on a worst-case performance metric. Second, it is comparative, namely performance is measured with respect to a given hypothesis class. This allows to avoid known computational hardness results and improper algorithms based on convex relaxations. We show how several families of unsupervised learning models, which were previously only analyzed under probabilistic assumptions and are otherwise provably intractable, can be efficiently learned in our framework by convex optimization.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/