On the Benefits of Invariance in Neural Networks

Many real world data analysis problems exhibit invariant structure, and models that take advantage of this structure have shown impressive empirical performance, particularly in deep learning. While the literature contains a variety of methods to incorporate invariance into models, theoretical understanding is poor and there is no way to assess when one method should be preferred over another. In this work, we analyze the benefits and limitations of two widely used approaches in deep learning in the presence of invariance: data augmentation and feature averaging. We prove that training with data augmentation leads to better estimates of risk and gradients thereof, and we provide a PAC-Bayes generalization bound for models trained with data augmentation. We also show that compared to data augmentation, feature averaging reduces generalization error when used with convex losses, and tightens PAC-Bayes bounds. We provide empirical support of these theoretical results, including a demonstration of why generalization may not improve by training with data augmentation: the `learned invariance' fails outside of the training distribution.

Unpacking Information Bottlenecks: Unifying Information-Theoretic Objectives in Deep Learning

The information bottleneck (IB) principle offers both a mechanism to explain how deep neural networks train and generalize, as well as a regularized objective with which to train models. However, multiple competing objectives have been proposed based on this principle, and the information-theoretic quantities in these objectives are difficult to compute for large deep neural networks. This, in turn, limits their use as a training objective. In this work, we review these quantities, compare and unify previously proposed objectives and relate them to surrogate objectives more friendly to optimization. We find that these surrogate objectives allow us to apply the information bottleneck to modern neural network architectures. We demonstrate our insights on Permutation-MNIST, MNIST and CIFAR10.

Invariant Causal Prediction for Block MDPs

Generalization across environments is critical to the successful application of reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world challenges. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning abstractions that generalize in block MDPs, families of environments with a shared latent state space and dynamics structure over that latent space, but varying observations. We leverage tools from causal inference to propose a method of invariant prediction to learn model-irrelevance state abstractions (MISA) that generalize to novel observations in the multi-environment setting. We prove that for certain classes of environments, this approach outputs with high probability a state abstraction corresponding to the causal feature set with respect to the return. We further provide more general bounds on model error and generalization error in the multi-environment setting, in the process showing a connection between causal variable selection and the state abstraction framework for MDPs. We give empirical evidence that our methods work in both linear and nonlinear settings, attaining improved generalization over single- and multi-task baselines.

A Comparative Analysis of Expected and Distributional Reinforcement Learning

Since their introduction a year ago, distributional approaches to reinforcement learning (distributional RL) have produced strong results relative to the standard approach which models expected values (expected RL). However, aside from convergence guarantees, there have been few theoretical results investigating the reasons behind the improvements distributional RL provides. In this paper we begin the investigation into this fundamental question by analyzing the differences in the tabular, linear approximation, and non-linear approximation settings. We prove that in many realizations of the tabular and linear approximation settings, distributional RL behaves exactly the same as expected RL. In cases where the two methods behave differently, distributional RL can in fact hurt performance when it does not induce identical behaviour. We then continue with an empirical analysis comparing distributional and expected RL methods in control settings with non-linear approximators to tease apart where the improvements from distributional RL methods are coming from.

A Geometric Perspective on Optimal Representations for Reinforcement Learning

This paper proposes a new approach to representation learning based on geometric properties of the space of value functions. We study a two-part approximation of the value function: a nonlinear map from states to vectors, or representation, followed by a linear map from vectors to values. Our formulation considers adapting the representation to minimize the (linear) approximation of the value function of all stationary policies for a given environment. We show that this optimization reduces to making accurate predictions regarding a special class of value functions which we call adversarial value functions (AVFs). We argue that these AVFs make excellent auxiliary tasks, and use them to construct a loss which can be efficiently minimized to find a near-optimal representation for reinforcement learning. We highlight characteristics of the method in a series of experiments on the four-room domain.

GAN Q-learning

Distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) has seen empirical success in complex Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) in the setting of nonlinear function approximation. However, there are many different ways in which one can leverage the distributional approach to reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose GAN Q-learning, a novel distributional RL method based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) and analyze its performance in simple tabular environments, as well as OpenAI Gym. We empirically show that our algorithm leverages the flexibility and blackbox approach of deep learning models while providing a viable alternative to traditional methods.

The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation

This report surveys the landscape of potential security threats from malicious uses of AI, and proposes ways to better forecast, prevent, and mitigate these threats. After analyzing the ways in which AI may influence the threat landscape in the digital, physical, and political domains, we make four high-level recommendations for AI researchers and other stakeholders. We also suggest several promising areas for further research that could expand the portfolio of defenses, or make attacks less effective or harder to execute. Finally, we discuss, but do not conclusively resolve, the long-term equilibrium of attackers and defenders.