Parallel Multiscale Autoregressive Density Estimation

PixelCNN achieves state-of-the-art results in density estimation for natural images. Although training is fast, inference is costly, requiring one network evaluation per pixel; O(N) for N pixels. This can be sped up by caching activations, but still involves generating each pixel sequentially. In this work, we propose a parallelized PixelCNN that allows more efficient inference by modeling certain pixel groups as conditionally independent. Our new PixelCNN model achieves competitive density estimation and orders of magnitude speedup - O(log N) sampling instead of O(N) - enabling the practical generation of 512x512 images. We evaluate the model on class-conditional image generation, text-to-image synthesis, and action-conditional video generation, showing that our model achieves the best results among non-pixel-autoregressive density models that allow efficient sampling.

LipNet: End-to-End Sentence-level Lipreading

Lipreading is the task of decoding text from the movement of a speaker's mouth. Traditional approaches separated the problem into two stages: designing or learning visual features, and prediction. More recent deep lipreading approaches are end-to-end trainable (Wand et al., 2016; Chung & Zisserman, 2016a). However, existing work on models trained end-to-end perform only word classification, rather than sentence-level sequence prediction. Studies have shown that human lipreading performance increases for longer words (Easton & Basala, 1982), indicating the importance of features capturing temporal context in an ambiguous communication channel. Motivated by this observation, we present LipNet, a model that maps a variable-length sequence of video frames to text, making use of spatiotemporal convolutions, a recurrent network, and the connectionist temporal classification loss, trained entirely end-to-end. To the best of our knowledge, LipNet is the first end-to-end sentence-level lipreading model that simultaneously learns spatiotemporal visual features and a sequence model. On the GRID corpus, LipNet achieves 95.2% accuracy in sentence-level, overlapped speaker split task, outperforming experienced human lipreaders and the previous 86.4% word-level state-of-the-art accuracy (Gergen et al., 2016).

Learning to learn by gradient descent by gradient descent

The move from hand-designed features to learned features in machine learning has been wildly successful. In spite of this, optimization algorithms are still designed by hand. In this paper we show how the design of an optimization algorithm can be cast as a learning problem, allowing the algorithm to learn to exploit structure in the problems of interest in an automatic way. Our learned algorithms, implemented by LSTMs, outperform generic, hand-designed competitors on the tasks for which they are trained, and also generalize well to new tasks with similar structure. We demonstrate this on a number of tasks, including simple convex problems, training neural networks, and styling images with neural art.

Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

We consider the problem of multiple agents sensing and acting in environments with the goal of maximising their shared utility. In these environments, agents must learn communication protocols in order to share information that is needed to solve the tasks. By embracing deep neural networks, we are able to demonstrate end-to-end learning of protocols in complex environments inspired by communication riddles and multi-agent computer vision problems with partial observability. We propose two approaches for learning in these domains: Reinforced Inter-Agent Learning (RIAL) and Differentiable Inter-Agent Learning (DIAL). The former uses deep Q-learning, while the latter exploits the fact that, during learning, agents can backpropagate error derivatives through (noisy) communication channels. Hence, this approach uses centralised learning but decentralised execution. Our experiments introduce new environments for studying the learning of communication protocols and present a set of engineering innovations that are essential for success in these domains.

Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning

In recent years there have been many successes of using deep representations in reinforcement learning. Still, many of these applications use conventional architectures, such as convolutional networks, LSTMs, or auto-encoders. In this paper, we present a new neural network architecture for model-free reinforcement learning. Our dueling network represents two separate estimators: one for the state value function and one for the state-dependent action advantage function. The main benefit of this factoring is to generalize learning across actions without imposing any change to the underlying reinforcement learning algorithm. Our results show that this architecture leads to better policy evaluation in the presence of many similar-valued actions. Moreover, the dueling architecture enables our RL agent to outperform the state-of-the-art on the Atari 2600 domain.

ACDC: A Structured Efficient Linear Layer

The linear layer is one of the most pervasive modules in deep learning representations. However, it requires $O(N^2)$ parameters and $O(N^2)$ operations. These costs can be prohibitive in mobile applications or prevent scaling in many domains. Here, we introduce a deep, differentiable, fully-connected neural network module composed of diagonal matrices of parameters, $\mathbf{A}$ and $\mathbf{D}$, and the discrete cosine transform $\mathbf{C}$. The core module, structured as $\mathbf{ACDC^{-1}}$, has $O(N)$ parameters and incurs $O(N log N )$ operations. We present theoretical results showing how deep cascades of ACDC layers approximate linear layers. ACDC is, however, a stand-alone module and can be used in combination with any other types of module. In our experiments, we show that it can indeed be successfully interleaved with ReLU modules in convolutional neural networks for image recognition. Our experiments also study critical factors in the training of these structured modules, including initialization and depth. Finally, this paper also provides a connection between structured linear transforms used in deep learning and the field of Fourier optics, illustrating how ACDC could in principle be implemented with lenses and diffractive elements.

Neural Programmer-Interpreters

We propose the neural programmer-interpreter (NPI): a recurrent and compositional neural network that learns to represent and execute programs. NPI has three learnable components: a task-agnostic recurrent core, a persistent key-value program memory, and domain-specific encoders that enable a single NPI to operate in multiple perceptually diverse environments with distinct affordances. By learning to compose lower-level programs to express higher-level programs, NPI reduces sample complexity and increases generalization ability compared to sequence-to-sequence LSTMs. The program memory allows efficient learning of additional tasks by building on existing programs. NPI can also harness the environment (e.g. a scratch pad with read-write pointers) to cache intermediate results of computation, lessening the long-term memory burden on recurrent hidden units. In this work we train the NPI with fully-supervised execution traces; each program has example sequences of calls to the immediate subprograms conditioned on the input. Rather than training on a huge number of relatively weak labels, NPI learns from a small number of rich examples. We demonstrate the capability of our model to learn several types of compositional programs: addition, sorting, and canonicalizing 3D models. Furthermore, a single NPI learns to execute these programs and all 21 associated subprograms.

Learning to Communicate to Solve Riddles with Deep Distributed Recurrent Q-Networks

We propose deep distributed recurrent Q-networks (DDRQN), which enable teams of agents to learn to solve communication-based coordination tasks. In these tasks, the agents are not given any pre-designed communication protocol. Therefore, in order to successfully communicate, they must first automatically develop and agree upon their own communication protocol. We present empirical results on two multi-agent learning problems based on well-known riddles, demonstrating that DDRQN can successfully solve such tasks and discover elegant communication protocols to do so. To our knowledge, this is the first time deep reinforcement learning has succeeded in learning communication protocols. In addition, we present ablation experiments that confirm that each of the main components of the DDRQN architecture are critical to its success.

Bayesian Optimization in a Billion Dimensions via Random Embeddings

Bayesian optimization techniques have been successfully applied to robotics, planning, sensor placement, recommendation, advertising, intelligent user interfaces and automatic algorithm configuration. Despite these successes, the approach is restricted to problems of moderate dimension, and several workshops on Bayesian optimization have identified its scaling to high-dimensions as one of the holy grails of the field. In this paper, we introduce a novel random embedding idea to attack this problem. The resulting Random EMbedding Bayesian Optimization (REMBO) algorithm is very simple, has important invariance properties, and applies to domains with both categorical and continuous variables. We present a thorough theoretical analysis of REMBO. Empirical results confirm that REMBO can effectively solve problems with billions of dimensions, provided the intrinsic dimensionality is low. They also show that REMBO achieves state-of-the-art performance in optimizing the 47 discrete parameters of a popular mixed integer linear programming solver.

Unbounded Bayesian Optimization via Regularization

Bayesian optimization has recently emerged as a popular and efficient tool for global optimization and hyperparameter tuning. Currently, the established Bayesian optimization practice requires a user-defined bounding box which is assumed to contain the optimizer. However, when little is known about the probed objective function, it can be difficult to prescribe such bounds. In this work we modify the standard Bayesian optimization framework in a principled way to allow automatic resizing of the search space. We introduce two alternative methods and compare them on two common synthetic benchmarking test functions as well as the tasks of tuning the stochastic gradient descent optimizer of a multi-layered perceptron and a convolutional neural network on MNIST.