Variational Laplace Autoencoders

Variational autoencoders employ an amortized inference model to approximate the posterior of latent variables. However, such amortized variational inference faces two challenges: (1) the limited posterior expressiveness of fully-factorized Gaussian assumption and (2) the amortization error of the inference model. We present a novel approach that addresses both challenges. First, we focus on ReLU networks with Gaussian output and illustrate their connection to probabilistic PCA. Building on this observation, we derive an iterative algorithm that finds the mode of the posterior and apply full-covariance Gaussian posterior approximation centered on the mode. Subsequently, we present a general framework named Variational Laplace Autoencoders (VLAEs) for training deep generative models. Based on the Laplace approximation of the latent variable posterior, VLAEs enhance the expressiveness of the posterior while reducing the amortization error. Empirical results on MNIST, Omniglot, Fashion-MNIST, SVHN and CIFAR10 show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms other recent amortized or iterative methods on the ReLU networks.

Continual Learning on Noisy Data Streams via Self-Purified Replay

Continually learning in the real world must overcome many challenges, among which noisy labels are a common and inevitable issue. In this work, we present a repla-ybased continual learning framework that simultaneously addresses both catastrophic forgetting and noisy labels for the first time. Our solution is based on two observations; (i) forgetting can be mitigated even with noisy labels via self-supervised learning, and (ii) the purity of the replay buffer is crucial. Building on this regard, we propose two key components of our method: (i) a self-supervised replay technique named Self-Replay which can circumvent erroneous training signals arising from noisy labeled data, and (ii) the Self-Centered filter that maintains a purified replay buffer via centrality-based stochastic graph ensembles. The empirical results on MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and WebVision with real-world noise demonstrate that our framework can maintain a highly pure replay buffer amidst noisy streamed data while greatly outperforming the combinations of the state-of-the-art continual learning and noisy label learning methods. The source code is available at http://vision.snu.ac.kr/projects/SPR

Imbalanced Continual Learning with Partitioning Reservoir Sampling

Continual learning from a sequential stream of data is a crucial challenge for machine learning research. Most studies have been conducted on this topic under the single-label classification setting along with an assumption of balanced label distribution. This work expands this research horizon towards multi-label classification. In doing so, we identify unanticipated adversity innately existent in many multi-label datasets, the long-tailed distribution. We jointly address the two independently solved problems, Catastropic Forgetting and the long-tailed label distribution by first empirically showing a new challenge of destructive forgetting of the minority concepts on the tail. Then, we curate two benchmark datasets, COCOseq and NUS-WIDEseq, that allow the study of both intra- and inter-task imbalances. Lastly, we propose a new sampling strategy for replay-based approach named Partitioning Reservoir Sampling (PRS), which allows the model to maintain a balanced knowledge of both head and tail classes. We publicly release the dataset and the code in our project page.

Generative Adversarial Parallelization

Generative Adversarial Networks have become one of the most studied frameworks for unsupervised learning due to their intuitive formulation. They have also been shown to be capable of generating convincing examples in limited domains, such as low-resolution images. However, they still prove difficult to train in practice and tend to ignore modes of the data generating distribution. Quantitatively capturing effects such as mode coverage and more generally the quality of the generative model still remain elusive. We propose Generative Adversarial Parallelization, a framework in which many GANs or their variants are trained simultaneously, exchanging their discriminators. This eliminates the tight coupling between a generator and discriminator, leading to improved convergence and improved coverage of modes. We also propose an improved variant of the recently proposed Generative Adversarial Metric and show how it can score individual GANs or their collections under the GAP model.

Generating images with recurrent adversarial networks

Gatys et al. (2015) showed that optimizing pixels to match features in a convolutional network with respect reference image features is a way to render images of high visual quality. We show that unrolling this gradient-based optimization yields a recurrent computation that creates images by incrementally adding onto a visual "canvas". We propose a recurrent generative model inspired by this view, and show that it can be trained using adversarial training to generate very good image samples. We also propose a way to quantitatively compare adversarial networks by having the generators and discriminators of these networks compete against each other.