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Basically they observe a pattern they call The Filter Lottery (TFL) where the random seed causes a high variance in the training accuracy: ![](http://i.imgur.com/5rWig0H.png) They use the convolutional gradient norm ($CGN$) \cite{conf/fgr/LoC015} to determine how much impact a filter has on the overall classification loss function by taking the derivative of the loss function with respect each weight in the filter. $$CGN(k) = \sum_{i} \left|\frac{\partial L}{\partial w^k_i}\right|$$ They use the CGN to evaluate the impact of a filter on error, and re-initialize filters when the gradient norm of its weights falls below a specific threshold. |
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_Objective:_ Design Feed-Forward Neural Network (fully connected) that can be trained even with very deep architectures. * _Dataset:_ [MNIST](yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/), [CIFAR10](https://www.cs.toronto.edu/%7Ekriz/cifar.html), [Tox21](https://tripod.nih.gov/tox21/challenge/) and [UCI tasks](https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/optical+recognition+of+handwritten+digits). * _Code:_ [here](https://github.com/bioinf-jku/SNNs) ## Inner-workings: They introduce a new activation functio the Scaled Exponential Linear Unit (SELU) which has the nice property of making neuron activations converge to a fixed point with zero-mean and unit-variance. They also demonstrate that upper and lower bounds and the variance and mean for very mild conditions which basically means that there will be no exploding or vanishing gradients. The activation function is: [![screen shot 2017-06-14 at 11 38 27 am](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/17261080/27125901-1a4f7276-50f6-11e7-857d-ebad1ac94789.png)](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/17261080/27125901-1a4f7276-50f6-11e7-857d-ebad1ac94789.png) With specific parameters for alpha and lambda to ensure the previous properties. The tensorflow impementation is: def selu(x): alpha = 1.6732632423543772848170429916717 scale = 1.0507009873554804934193349852946 return scale*np.where(x>=0.0, x, alpha*np.exp(x)-alpha) They also introduce a new dropout (alpha-dropout) to compensate for the fact that [![screen shot 2017-06-14 at 11 44 42 am](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/17261080/27126174-e67d212c-50f6-11e7-8952-acad98b850be.png)](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/17261080/27126174-e67d212c-50f6-11e7-8952-acad98b850be.png) ## Results: Batch norm becomes obsolete and they are also able to train deeper architectures. This becomes a good choice to replace shallow architectures where random forest or SVM used to be the best results. They outperform most other techniques on small datasets. [![screen shot 2017-06-14 at 11 36 30 am](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/17261080/27125798-bd04c256-50f5-11e7-8a74-b3b6a3fe82ee.png)](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/17261080/27125798-bd04c256-50f5-11e7-8a74-b3b6a3fe82ee.png) Might become a new standard for fully-connected activations in the future. |
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Normal RL agents in multi-agent scenarios treat their opponents as a static part of the environment, not taking into account the fact that other agents are learning as well. This paper proposes LOLA, a learning rule that should take the agency and learning of opponents into account by optimizing "return under one step look-ahead of opponent learning" So instead of optimizing under the current parameters of agent 1 and 2 $$V^1(\theta_i^1, \theta_i^2)$$ LOLA proposes to optimize taking into account one step of opponent (agent 2) learning $$V^1(\theta_i^1, \theta_i^2 + \Delta \theta^2_i)$$ where we assume the opponent's naive learning update $\Delta \theta^2_i = \nabla_{\theta^2} V^2(\theta^1, \theta^2) \cdot \eta$ and we add a second-order correction term on top of this, the authors propose - a learning rule with policy gradients in the case that the agent does not have access to exact gradients - a way to estimate the parameters of the opponent, $\theta^2$, from its trajectories using maximum likelihood in the case you can't access them directly $$\hat \theta^2 = \text{argmax}_{\theta^2} \sum_t \log \pi_{\theta^2}(u_t^2|s_t)$$ LOLA is tested on iterated prisoner's dilemma and converges to a tit-for-tat strategy more frequently than the naive RL learning algorithm, and outperforms it. LOLA is tested on iterated matching pennies (similar to prisoner's dilemma) and stably converges to the Nash equilibrium whereas the naive learners do not. In testing on coin game (a higher dimensional version of prisoner's dilemma) they find that naive learners generally choose the defect option whereas LOLA agents have a mostly-cooperative strategy. As well, the authors show that LOLA is a dominant learning rule in IPD, where both agents always do better if either is using LOLA (and even better if both are using LOLA). Finally, the authors also propose second order LOLA, which instead of assuming the opponent is a naive learner, assumes the opponent uses a LOLA learning rule. They show that second order LOLA does not lead to improved performance so there is no need to have a $n$th order LOLA arms race. |
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The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis is the idea that you can train a deep network, set all but a small percentage of its high-magnitude weights to zero, and retrain the network using the connection topology of the remaining weights, but only if you re-initialize the unpruned weights to the the values they had at the beginning of the first training. This suggests that part of the value of training such big networks is not that we need that many parameters to use their expressive capacity, but that we need many “draws” from the weight and topology distribution to find initial weight patterns that are well-disposed for learning. This paper out of Uber is a refreshingly exploratory experimental work that tries to understand the contours and contingencies of this effect. Their findings included: - The pruning criteria used in the original paper, where weights are kept according to which have highest final magnitude, works well. However, an alternate criteria, where you keep the weights that have increased the most in magnitude, works just as well and sometimes better. This makes a decent amount of sense, since it seems like we’re using magnitude as a signal of “did this weight come to play a meaningful role during training,” and so weights whose influence increased during training fall in that category, regardless of their starting point https://i.imgur.com/wTkNBod.png - The authors’ next question was: other than just re-initialize weights to their initial values, are there other things we can do that can capture all or part of the performance effect? The answer seems to be yes; they found that the most important thing seems to be keeping the sign of the weights aligned with what it was at its starting point. As long as you do that, redrawing initial weights (but giving them the right sign), or re-setting weights to a correctly signed constant value, both work nearly as well as the actual starting values https://i.imgur.com/JeujUr3.png - Turning instead to the weights on the pruning chopping block, the authors find that, instead of just zero-ing out all pruned weights, they can get even better performance if they zero the weights that moved towards zero during training, and re-initialize (but freeze) the weights that moved away from zero during training. The logic of the paper is “if the weight was trying to move to zero, bring it to zero, otherwise reinitialize it”. This performance remains high at even lower levels of training than does the initial zero-masking result - Finally, the authors found that just by performing the masking (i.e. keeping only weights with large final values), bringing those back to their values, and zeroing out the rest, *and not training at all*, they were able to get 40% test accuracy on MNIST, much better than chance. If they masked according to “large weights that kept the same sign during training,” they could get a pretty incredible 80% test accuracy on MNIST. Way below even simple trained models, but, again, this model wasn’t *trained*, and the only information about the data came in the form of a binary weight mask This paper doesn’t really try to come up with explanations that wrap all of these results up neatly with a bow, and I really respect that. I think it’s good for ML research culture for people to feel an affordance to just run a lot of targeted experiments aimed at explanation, and publish the results even if they don’t quite make sense yet. I feel like on this problem (and to some extent in machine learning generally), we’re the blind men each grabbing at one part of an elephant, trying to describe the whole. Hopefully, papers like this can bring us closer to understanding strange quirks of optimization like this one |
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#### Problem addressed: A fast way of finding adversarial examples, and a hypothesis for the adversarial examples #### Summary: This paper tries to explain why adversarial examples exists, the adversarial example is defined in another paper \cite{arxiv.org/abs/1312.6199}. The adversarial example is kind of counter intuitive because they normally are visually indistinguishable from the original example, but leads to very different predictions for the classifier. For example, let sample $x$ be associated with the true class $t$. A classifier (in particular a well trained dnn) can correctly predict $x$ with high confidence, but with a small perturbation $r$, the same network will predict $x+r$ to a different incorrect class also with high confidence. This paper explains that the exsistence of such adversarial examples is more because of low model capacity in high dimensional spaces rather than overfitting, and got some empirical support on that. It also shows a new method that can reliably generate adversarial examples really fast using `fast sign' method. Basically, one can generate an adversarial example by taking a small step toward the sign direction of the objective. They also showed that training along with adversarial examples helps the classifier to generalize. #### Novelty: A fast method to generate adversarial examples reliably, and a linear hypothesis for those examples. #### Datasets: MNIST #### Resources: Talk of the paper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq4A2mPCB0Y #### Presenter: Yingbo Zhou |