Computer vision tasks often have side information available that is helpful to solve the task. For example, for crowd counting, the camera perspective (e.g., camera angle and height) gives a clue about the appearance and scale of people in the scene. While side information has been shown to be useful for counting systems using traditional hand-crafted features, it has not been fully utilized in counting systems based on deep learning. In order to incorporate the available side information, we propose an adaptive convolutional neural network (ACNN), where the convolution filter weights adapt to the current scene context via the side information.

The iterations of many first-order algorithms, when applied to minimizing common regularized regression functions, often resemble neural network layers with pre-specified weights. This observation has prompted the development of learning-based approaches that purport to replace these iterations with enhanced surrogates forged as DNN models from available training data. For example, important NP-hard sparse estimation problems have recently benefitted from this genre of upgrade, with simple feedforward or recurrent networks ousting proximal gradient-based iterations. Analogously, this paper demonstrates that more powerful Bayesian algorithms for promoting sparsity, which rely on complex multi-loop majorization-minimization techniques, mirror the structure of more sophisticated long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, or alternative gated feedback networks previously designed for sequence prediction. As part of this development, we examine the parallels between latent variable trajectories operating across multiple time-scales during optimization, and the activations within deep network structures designed to adaptively model such characteristic sequences. The resulting insights lead to a novel sparse estimation system that, when granted training data, can estimate optimal solutions efficiently in regimes where other algorithms fail, including practical direction-of-arrival (DOA) and 3D geometry recovery problems. The underlying principles we expose are also suggestive of a learning process for a richer class of multi-loop algorithms in other domains.

In this paper, we examine a class of non-convex stochastic optimization problems which we call variationally coherent, and which properly includes pseudo-/quasiconvex and star-convex optimization problems. To solve such problems, we focus on the widely used stochastic mirror descent (SMD) family of algorithms (which contains stochastic gradient descent as a special case), and we show that the last iterate of SMD converges to the problem's solution set with probability 1. This result contributes to the landscape of non-convex stochastic optimization by clarifying that neither pseudo-/quasi-convexity nor star-convexity is essential for (almost sure) global convergence; rather, variational coherence, a much weaker requirement, suffices. Characterization of convergence rates for the subclass of strongly variationally coherent optimization problems as well as simulation results are also presented.

Collecting large training datasets, annotated with high-quality labels, is costly and time-consuming. This paper proposes a novel framework for training deep convolutional neural networks from noisy labeled datasets that can be obtained cheaply. The problem is formulated using an undirected graphical model that represents the relationship between noisy and clean labels, trained in a semi-supervised setting. In our formulation, the inference over latent clean labels is tractable and is regularized during training using auxiliary sources of information. The proposed model is applied to the image labeling problem and is shown to be effective in labeling unseen images as well as reducing label noise in training on CIFAR-10 and MS COCO datasets.

Relational reasoning is a central component of generally intelligent behavior, but has proven difficult for neural networks to learn. In this paper we describe how to use Relation Networks (RNs) as a simple plug-and-play module to solve problems that fundamentally hinge on relational reasoning. We tested RN-augmented networks on three tasks: visual question answering using a challenging dataset called CLEVR, on which we achieve state-of-the-art, super-human performance; text-based question answering using the bAbI suite of tasks; and complex reasoning about dynamical physical systems. Then, using a curated dataset called Sort-of-CLEVR we show that powerful convolutional networks do not have a general capacity to solve relational questions, but can gain this capacity when augmented with RNs. Thus, by simply augmenting convolutions, LSTMs, and MLPs with RNs, we can remove computational burden from network components that are not well-suited to handle relational reasoning, reduce overall network complexity, and gain a general ability to reason about the relations between entities and their properties.

We consider the problem of estimating multiple related functions computed by weighted automata~(WFA). We first present a natural notion of relatedness between WFAs by considering to which extent several WFAs can share a common underlying representation. We then introduce the model of vector-valued WFA which conveniently helps us formalize this notion of relatedness. Finally, we propose a spectral learning algorithm for vector-valued WFAs to tackle the multitask learning problem. By jointly learning multiple tasks in the form of a vector-valued WFA, our algorithm enforces the discovery of a representation space shared between tasks. The benefits of the proposed multitask approach are theoretically motivated and showcased through experiments on both synthetic and real world datasets.

We study fairness in collaborative-filtering recommender systems, which are sensitive to discrimination that exists in historical data. Biased data can lead collaborative-filtering methods to make unfair predictions for users from minority groups. We identify the insufficiency of existing fairness metrics and propose four new metrics that address different forms of unfairness. These fairness metrics can be optimized by adding fairness terms to the learning objective. Experiments on synthetic and real data show that our new metrics can better measure fairness than the baseline, and that the fairness objectives effectively help reduce unfairness.

We propose in this paper a novel approach to tackle the problem of mode collapse encountered in generative adversarial network (GAN). Our idea is intuitive but proven to be very effective, especially in addressing some key limitations of GAN. In essence, it combines the Kullback-Leibler (KL) and reverse KL divergences into a unified objective function, thus it exploits the complementary statistical properties from these divergences to effectively diversify the estimated density in capturing multi-modes. We term our method dual discriminator generative adversarial nets (D2GAN) which, unlike GAN, has two discriminators; and together with a generator, it also has the analogy of a minimax game, wherein a discriminator rewards high scores for samples from data distribution whilst another discriminator, conversely, favoring data from the generator, and the generator produces data to fool both two discriminators. We develop theoretical analysis to show that, given the maximal discriminators, optimizing the generator of D2GAN reduces to minimizing both KL and reverse KL divergences between data distribution and the distribution induced from the data generated by the generator, hence effectively avoiding the mode collapsing problem. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world large-scale datasets (MNIST, CIFAR-10, STL-10, ImageNet), where we have made our best effort to compare our D2GAN with the latest state-of-the-art GAN's variants in comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations. The experimental results demonstrate the competitive and superior performance of our approach in generating good quality and diverse samples over baselines, and the capability of our method to scale up to ImageNet database.

The predictive learning of spatiotemporal sequences aims to generate future images by learning from the historical frames, where spatial appearances and temporal variations are two crucial structures.

Processing sequential data of variable length is a major challenge in a wide range of applications, such as speech recognition, language modeling, generative image modeling and machine translation. Here, we address this challenge by proposing a novel recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture, the Fast-Slow RNN (FS-RNN). The FS-RNN incorporates the strengths of both multiscale RNNs and deep transition RNNs as it processes sequential data on different timescales and learns complex transition functions from one time step to the next. We evaluate the FS-RNN on two character based language modeling data sets, Penn Treebank and Hutter Prize Wikipedia, where we improve state of the art results to 1.19 and 1.25 bits-per-character (BPC), respectively. In addition, an ensemble of two FS-RNNs achieves 1.20 BPC on Hutter Prize Wikipedia outperforming the best known compression algorithm with respect to the BPC measure. We also present an empirical investigation of the learning and network dynamics of the FS-RNN, which explains the improved performance compared to other RNN architectures. Our approach is general as any kind of RNN cell is a possible building block for the FS-RNN architecture, and thus can be flexibly applied to different tasks.