Technology
Emergent Communication: Generalization and Overfitting in Lewis Games
Lewis signaling games are a class of simple communication games for simulating the emergence of language. In these games, two agents must agree on a communication protocol in order to solve a cooperative task. Previous work has shown that agents trained to play this game with reinforcement learning tend to develop languages that display undesirable properties from a linguistic point of view (lack of generalization, lack of compositionality, etc). In this paper, we aim to provide better understanding of this phenomenon by analytically studying the learning problem in Lewis games. As a core contribution, we demonstrate that the standard objective in Lewis games can be decomposed in two components: a co-adaptation loss and an information loss. This decomposition enables us to surface two potential sources of overfitting, which we show may undermine the emergence of a structured communication protocol. In particular, when we control for overfitting on the co-adaptation loss, we recover desired properties in the emergent languages: they are more compositional and generalize better.
http://papers.nips.cc/paper_files/paper/2021/file/043ab21fc5a1607b381ac3896176dac6-Paper.pdf
In theory, the choice of ReLU0(0) in [0,1] for a neural network has a negligible influence both on backpropagation and training. Yet, in the real world, 32 bits default precision combined with the size of deep learning problems makes it a hyperparameter of training methods. We investigate the importance of the value of ReLU0(0) for several precision levels (16, 32, 64 bits), on various networks (fully connected, VGG, ResNet) and datasets (MNIST, CIFAR10, SVHN, ImageNet). We observe considerable variations of backpropagation outputs which occur around half of the time in 32 bits precision. The effect disappears with double precision, while it is systematic at 16 bits. For vanilla SGD training, the choice ReLU0(0) = 0 seems to be the most efficient. For our experiments on ImageNet the gain in test accuracy over ReLU0(0) = 1 was more than 10 points (two runs). We also evidence that reconditioning approaches as batch-norm or ADAM tend to buffer the influence of ReLU0(0)'s value. Overall, the message we convey is that algorithmic differentiation of nonsmooth problems potentially hides parameters that could be tuned advantageously.
Learning Stochastic Majority Votes by Minimizing a PAC-Bayes Generalization Bound
We investigate a stochastic counterpart of majority votes over finite ensembles of classifiers, and study its generalization properties. While our approach holds for arbitrary distributions, we instantiate it with Dirichlet distributions: this allows for a closed-form and differentiable expression for the expected risk, which then turns the generalization bound into a tractable training objective. The resulting stochastic majority vote learning algorithm achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and benefits from (non-vacuous) tight generalization bounds, in a series of numerical experiments when compared to competing algorithms which also minimize PACBayes objectives - both with uninformed (data-independent) and informed (datadependent) priors.
AMore Experimental Results
A.1 Comparison with SOTAModels on 60%/20%/20% Random Splits The main results of the full sets of experiments 17 with statistics of datasets are summarized in Table 2, where we report the mean accuracy (%) and standard deviation. We can see that after applied in ACM or ACMII framework, the performance of baseline models are boosted on almost all tasks and achieve SOTA performance on 9out of 10datasets. Especially, ACMII-GCN+ performs the best in terms of average rank (4.40) across all datasets. Overall, It suggests that ACM or ACMII framework can significantly increase the performance of GNNs on node classification tasks on heterophilic graphs and maintain highly competitive performance on homophilic datasets. The best results are highlighted in grey and the best baseline results (SOTA in Figure 6) are underlined. Results "*" are reported from [8, 26] and results " " are from [36].