Goto

Collaborating Authors

 rainbow


Discovering Latent Graphs with GFlowNets for Diverse Conditional Image Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Capturing diversity is crucial in conditional and prompt-based image generation, particularly when conditions contain uncertainty that can lead to multiple plausible outputs. To generate diverse images reflecting this diversity, traditional methods often modify random seeds, making it difficult to discern meaningful differences between samples, or diversify the input prompt, which is limited in verbally interpretable diversity. We propose Rainbow, a novel conditional image generation framework, applicable to any pretrained conditional generative model, that addresses inherent condition/prompt uncertainty and generates diverse plausible images. Rainbow is based on a simple yet effective idea: decomposing the input condition into diverse latent representations, each capturing an aspect of the uncertainty and generating a distinct image. First, we integrate a latent graph, parameterized by Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets), into the prompt representation computation. Second, leveraging GFlowNets' advanced graph sampling capabilities to capture uncertainty and output diverse trajectories over the graph, we produce multiple trajectories that collectively represent the input condition, leading to diverse condition representations and corresponding output images. Evaluations on natural image and medical image datasets demonstrate Rainbow's improvement in both diversity and fidelity across image synthesis, image generation, and counterfactual generation tasks.


Resetting the Optimizer in Deep RL: An Empirical Study

Neural Information Processing Systems

We focus on the task of approximating the optimal value function in deep reinforcement learning. This iterative process is comprised of solving a sequence of optimization problems where the loss function changes per iteration. The common approach to solving this sequence of problems is to employ modern variants of the stochastic gradient descent algorithm such as Adam. These optimizers maintain their own internal parameters such as estimates of the first-order and the secondorder moments of the gradient, and update them over time. Therefore, information obtained in previous iterations is used to solve the optimization problem in the current iteration. We demonstrate that this can contaminate the moment estimates because the optimization landscape can change arbitrarily from one iteration to the next one. To hedge against this negative effect, a simple idea is to reset the internal parameters of the optimizer when starting a new iteration. We empirically investigate this resetting idea by employing various optimizers in conjunction with the Rainbow algorithm. We demonstrate that this simple modification significantly improves the performance of deep RL on the Atari benchmark.


Improve Agents without Retraining: Parallel Tree Search with Off-Policy Correction

Neural Information Processing Systems

Tree Search (TS) is crucial to some of the most influential successes in reinforcement learning. Here, we tackle two major challenges with TS that limit its usability: distribution shift and scalability. We first discover and analyze a counter-intuitive phenomenon: action selection through TS and a pre-trained value function often leads to lower performance compared to the original pre-trained agent, even when having access to the exact state and reward in future steps. We show this is due to a distribution shift to areas where value estimates are highly inaccurate and analyze this effect using Extreme Value theory. To overcome this problem, we introduce a novel off-policy correction term that accounts for the mismatch between the pre-trained value and its corresponding TS policy by penalizing under-sampled trajectories.


Resetting the Optimizer in Deep RL: An Empirical Study

Neural Information Processing Systems

We focus on the task of approximating the optimal value function in deep reinforcement learning. This iterative process is comprised of solving a sequence of optimization problems where the loss function changes per iteration. The common approach to solving this sequence of problems is to employ modern variants of the stochastic gradient descent algorithm such as Adam. These optimizers maintain their own internal parameters such as estimates of the first-order and the second-order moments of the gradient, and update them over time. Therefore, information obtained in previous iterations is used to solve the optimization problem in the current iteration. We demonstrate that this can contaminate the moment estimates because the optimization landscape can change arbitrarily from one iteration to the next one. To hedge against this negative effect, a simple idea is to reset the internal parameters of the optimizer when starting a new iteration. We empirically investigate this resetting idea by employing various optimizers in conjunction with the Rainbow algorithm. We demonstrate that this simple modification significantly improves the performance of deep RL on the Atari benchmark.


Distributional Reward Decomposition for Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Van Seijen et al. [2017] propose to split a state into different sub-states, each with a sub-reward obtained bytraining ageneral valuefunction, andlearnmultiple valuefunctions withsub-rewards. The architecture is rather limited due to requiring prior knowledge of how to split into sub-states.




Prioritizing Samples in Reinforcement Learning with Reducible Loss

Neural Information Processing Systems

Most reinforcement learning algorithms take advantage of an experience replay buffer to repeatedly train on samples the agent has observed in the past. Not all samples carry the same amount of significance and simply assigning equal importance to each of the samples is a naive strategy. In this paper, we propose a method to prioritize samples based on how much we can learn from a sample.