Nonparametric Partial Disentanglement via Mechanism Sparsity: Sparse Actions, Interventions and Sparse Temporal Dependencies

This work introduces a novel principle for disentanglement we call mechanism sparsity regularization, which applies when the latent factors of interest depend sparsely on observed auxiliary variables and/or past latent factors. We propose a representation learning method that induces disentanglement by simultaneously learning the latent factors and the sparse causal graphical model that explains them. We develop a nonparametric identifiability theory that formalizes this principle and shows that the latent factors can be recovered by regularizing the learned causal graph to be sparse. More precisely, we show identifiablity up to a novel equivalence relation we call "consistency", which allows some latent factors to remain entangled (hence the term partial disentanglement). To describe the structure of this entanglement, we introduce the notions of entanglement graphs and graph preserving functions. We further provide a graphical criterion which guarantees complete disentanglement, that is identifiability up to permutations and element-wise transformations. We demonstrate the scope of the mechanism sparsity principle as well as the assumptions it relies on with several worked out examples. For instance, the framework shows how one can leverage multi-node interventions with unknown targets on the latent factors to disentangle them. We further draw connections between our nonparametric results and the now popular exponential family assumption. Lastly, we propose an estimation procedure based on variational autoencoders and a sparsity constraint and demonstrate it on various synthetic datasets. This work is meant to be a significantly extended version of Lachapelle et al. (2022).

Weight-Sharing Regularization

Weight-sharing is ubiquitous in deep learning. Motivated by this, we introduce ''weight-sharing regularization'' for neural networks, defined as $R(w) = \frac{1}{d - 1}\sum_{i > j}^d |w_i - w_j|$. We study the proximal mapping of $R$ and provide an intuitive interpretation of it in terms of a physical system of interacting particles. Using this interpretation, we design a novel parallel algorithm for $\operatorname{prox}_R$ which provides an exponential speedup over previous algorithms, with a depth of $O(\log^3 d)$. Our algorithm makes it feasible to train weight-sharing regularized deep neural networks with proximal gradient descent. Experiments reveal that weight-sharing regularization enables fully-connected networks to learn convolution-like filters.

Balancing Act: Constraining Disparate Impact in Sparse Models

Model pruning is a popular approach to enable the deployment of large deep learning models on edge devices with restricted computational or storage capacities. Although sparse models achieve performance comparable to that of their dense counterparts at the level of the entire dataset, they exhibit high accuracy drops for some data sub-groups. Existing methods to mitigate this disparate impact induced by pruning (i) rely on surrogate metrics that address the problem indirectly and have limited interpretability; or (ii) scale poorly with the number of protected sub-groups in terms of computational cost. We propose a constrained optimization approach that $\textit{directly addresses the disparate impact of pruning}$: our formulation bounds the accuracy change between the dense and sparse models, for each sub-group. This choice of constraints provides an interpretable success criterion to determine if a pruned model achieves acceptable disparity levels. Experimental results demonstrate that our technique scales reliably to problems involving large models and hundreds of protected sub-groups.

Promoting Exploration in Memory-Augmented Adam using Critical Momenta

Adaptive gradient-based optimizers, particularly Adam, have left their mark in training large-scale deep learning models. The strength of such optimizers is that they exhibit fast convergence while being more robust to hyperparameter choice. However, they often generalize worse than non-adaptive methods. Recent studies have tied this performance gap to flat minima selection: adaptive methods tend to find solutions in sharper basins of the loss landscape, which in turn hurts generalization. To overcome this issue, we propose a new memory-augmented version of Adam that promotes exploration towards flatter minima by using a buffer of critical momentum terms during training. Intuitively, the use of the buffer makes the optimizer overshoot outside the basin of attraction if it is not wide enough. We empirically show that our method improves the performance of several variants of Adam on standard supervised language modelling and image classification tasks.

Additive Decoders for Latent Variables Identification and Cartesian-Product Extrapolation

We tackle the problems of latent variables identification and "out-of-support" image generation in representation learning. We show that both are possible for a class of decoders that we call additive, which are reminiscent of decoders used for object-centric representation learning (OCRL) and well suited for images that can be decomposed as a sum of object-specific images. We provide conditions under which exactly solving the reconstruction problem using an additive decoder is guaranteed to identify the blocks of latent variables up to permutation and block-wise invertible transformations. This guarantee relies only on very weak assumptions about the distribution of the latent factors, which might present statistical dependencies and have an almost arbitrarily shaped support. Our result provides a new setting where nonlinear independent component analysis (ICA) is possible and adds to our theoretical understanding of OCRL methods. We also show theoretically that additive decoders can generate novel images by recombining observed factors of variations in novel ways, an ability we refer to as Cartesian-product extrapolation. We show empirically that additivity is crucial for both identifiability and extrapolation on simulated data.

Identifiability of Discretized Latent Coordinate Systems via Density Landmarks Detection

Disentanglement aims to recover meaningful latent ground-truth factors from only the observed distribution. Identifiability provides the theoretical grounding for disentanglement to be well-founded. Unfortunately, unsupervised identifiability of independent latent factors is a theoretically proven impossibility in the i.i.d. setting under a general nonlinear smooth map from factors to observations. In this work, we show that, remarkably, it is possible to recover discretized latent coordinates under a highly generic nonlinear smooth mapping (a diffeomorphism) without any additional inductive bias on the mapping. This is, assuming that latent density has axis-aligned discontinuity landmarks, but without making the unrealistic assumption of statistical independence of the factors. We introduce this novel form of identifiability, termed quantized coordinate identifiability, and provide a comprehensive proof of the recovery of discretized coordinates.

PopulAtion Parameter Averaging (PAPA)

Ensemble methods combine the predictions of multiple models to improve performance, but they require significantly higher computation costs at inference time. To avoid these costs, multiple neural networks can be combined into one by averaging their weights (model soups). However, this usually performs significantly worse than ensembling. Weight averaging is only beneficial when weights are similar enough (in weight or feature space) to average well but different enough to benefit from combining them. Based on this idea, we propose PopulAtion Parameter Averaging (PAPA): a method that combines the generality of ensembling with the efficiency of weight averaging. PAPA leverages a population of diverse models (trained on different data orders, augmentations, and regularizations) while occasionally (not too often, not too rarely) replacing the weights of the networks with the population average of the weights. PAPA reduces the performance gap between averaging and ensembling, increasing the average accuracy of a population of models by up to 1.1% on CIFAR-10, 2.4% on CIFAR-100, and 1.9% on ImageNet when compared to training independent (non-averaged) models.

Can We Scale Transformers to Predict Parameters of Diverse ImageNet Models?

Pretraining a neural network on a large dataset is becoming a cornerstone in machine learning that is within the reach of only a few communities with large-resources. We aim at an ambitious goal of democratizing pretraining. Towards that goal, we train and release a single neural network that can predict high quality ImageNet parameters of other neural networks. By using predicted parameters for initialization we are able to boost training of diverse ImageNet models available in PyTorch. When transferred to other datasets, models initialized with predicted parameters also converge faster and reach competitive final performance.

Unlocking Slot Attention by Changing Optimal Transport Costs

Slot attention is a powerful method for object-centric modeling in images and videos. However, its set-equivariance limits its ability to handle videos with a dynamic number of objects because it cannot break ties. To overcome this limitation, we first establish a connection between slot attention and optimal transport. Based on this new perspective we propose MESH (Minimize Entropy of Sinkhorn): a cross-attention module that combines the tiebreaking properties of unregularized optimal transport with the speed of regularized optimal transport. We evaluate slot attention using MESH on multiple object-centric learning benchmarks and find significant improvements over slot attention in every setting.

CrossSplit: Mitigating Label Noise Memorization through Data Splitting

We approach the problem of improving robustness of deep learning algorithms in the presence of label noise. Building upon existing label correction and co-teaching methods, we propose a novel training procedure to mitigate the memorization of noisy labels, called CrossSplit, which uses a pair of neural networks trained on two disjoint parts of the dataset. CrossSplit combines two main ingredients: (i) Cross-split label correction. The idea is that, since the model trained on one part of the data cannot memorize example-label pairs from the other part, the training labels presented to each network can be smoothly adjusted by using the predictions of its peer network; (ii) Cross-split semi-supervised training. A network trained on one part of the data also uses the unlabeled inputs of the other part. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet and mini-WebVision datasets demonstrate that our method can outperform the current state-of-the-art up to 90% noise ratio.