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Generalizing GANs: A Turing Perspective

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recently, a new class of machine learning algorithms has emerged, where models and discriminators are generated in a competitive setting. The most prominent example is Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). In this paper we examine how these algorithms relate to the Turing test, and derive what - from a Turing perspective - can be considered their defining features. Based on these features, we outline directions for generalizing GANs - resulting in the family of algorithms referred to as Turing Learning. One such direction is to allow the discriminators to interact with the processes from which the data samples are obtained, making them interrogators, as in the Turing test.


Wider and Deeper, Cheaper and Faster: Tensorized LSTMs for Sequence Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is a popular approach to boosting the ability of Recurrent Neural Networks to store longer term temporal information. The capacity of an LSTM network can be increased by widening and adding layers. However, usually the former introduces additional parameters, while the latter increases the runtime. As an alternative we propose the Tensorized LSTM in which the hidden states are represented by tensors and updated via a cross-layer convolution. By increasing the tensor size, the network can be widened efficiently without additional parameters since the parameters are shared across different locations in the tensor; by delaying the output, the network can be deepened implicitly with little additional runtime since deep computations for each timestep are merged into temporal computations of the sequence. Experiments conducted on five challenging sequence learning tasks show the potential of the proposed model.


Emergence of Language with Multi-agent Games: Learning to Communicate with Sequences of Symbols

Neural Information Processing Systems

Learning to communicate through interaction, rather than relying on explicit supervision, is often considered a prerequisite for developing a general AI. We study a setting where two agents engage in playing a referential game and, from scratch, develop a communication protocol necessary to succeed in this game. Unlike previous work, we require that messages they exchange, both at train and test time, are in the form of a language (i.e.


Discriminative State Space Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we introduce and analyze Discriminative State-Space Models for forecasting non-stationary time series. We provide data-dependent generalization guarantees for learning these models based on the recently introduced notion of discrepancy. We provide an in-depth analysis of the complexity of such models. Finally, we also study the generalization guarantees for several structural risk minimization approaches to this problem and provide an efficient implementation for one of them which is based on a convex objective.


Modulating early visual processing by language

Neural Information Processing Systems

It is commonly assumed that language refers to high-level visual concepts while leaving low-level visual processing unaffected. This view dominates the current literature in computational models for language-vision tasks, where visual and linguistic inputs are mostly processed independently before being fused into a single representation. In this paper, we deviate from this classic pipeline and propose to modulate the \emph{entire visual processing} by a linguistic input. Specifically, we introduce Conditional Batch Normalization (CBN) as an efficient mechanism to modulate convolutional feature maps by a linguistic embedding. We apply CBN to a pre-trained Residual Network (ResNet), leading to the MODulatEd ResNet (\MRN) architecture, and show that this significantly improves strong baselines on two visual question answering tasks. Our ablation study confirms that modulating from the early stages of the visual processing is beneficial.


Learning the Morphology of Brain Signals Using Alpha-Stable Convolutional Sparse Coding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Neural time-series data contain a wide variety of prototypical signal waveforms (atoms) that are of significant importance in clinical and cognitive research. One of the goals for analyzing such data is hence to extract such `shift-invariant' atoms. Even though some success has been reported with existing algorithms, they are limited in applicability due to their heuristic nature. Moreover, they are often vulnerable to artifacts and impulsive noise, which are typically present in raw neural recordings. In this study, we address these issues and propose a novel probabilistic convolutional sparse coding (CSC) model for learning shift-invariant atoms from raw neural signals containing potentially severe artifacts.


Hierarchical Implicit Models and Likelihood-Free Variational Inference

Neural Information Processing Systems

Implicit probabilistic models are a flexible class of models defined by a simulation process for data. They form the basis for models which encompass our understanding of the physical word. Despite this fundamental nature, the use of implicit models remains limited due to challenge in positing complex latent structure in them, and the ability to inference in such models with large data sets. In this paper, we first introduce the hierarchical implicit models (HIMs). HIMs combine the idea of implicit densities with hierarchical Bayesian modeling thereby defining models via simulators of data with rich hidden structure. Next, we develop likelihood-free variational inference (LFVI), a scalable variational inference algorithm for HIMs. Key to LFVI is specifying a variational family that is also implicit. This matches the model's flexibility and allows for accurate approximation of the posterior. We demonstrate diverse applications: a large-scale physical simulator for predator-prey populations in ecology; a Bayesian generative adversarial network for discrete data; and a deep implicit model for symbol generation.


Efficient Sublinear-Regret Algorithms for Online Sparse Linear Regression with Limited Observation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Online sparse linear regression is the task of applying linear regression analysis to examples arriving sequentially subject to a resource constraint that a limited number of features of examples can be observed. Despite its importance in many practical applications, it has been recently shown that there is no polynomial-time sublinear-regret algorithm unless NP$\subseteq$BPP, and only an exponential-time sublinear-regret algorithm has been found. In this paper, we introduce mild assumptions to solve the problem.


Label Distribution Learning Forests

Neural Information Processing Systems

Label distribution learning (LDL) is a general learning framework, which assigns to an instance a distribution over a set of labels rather than a single label or multiple labels. Current LDL methods have either restricted assumptions on the expression form of the label distribution or limitations in representation learning, e.g., to learn deep features in an end-to-end manner. This paper presents label distribution learning forests (LDLFs) - a novel label distribution learning algorithm based on differentiable decision trees, which have several advantages: 1) Decision trees have the potential to model any general form of label distributions by a mixture of leaf node predictions.