Data augmentation as stochastic optimization

We present a theoretical framework recasting data augmentation as stochastic optimization for a sequence of time-varying proxy losses. This provides a unified approach to understanding techniques commonly thought of as data augmentation, including synthetic noise and label-preserving transformations, as well as more traditional ideas in stochastic optimization such as learning rate and batch size scheduling. We prove a time-varying Monro-Robbins theorem with rates of convergence which gives conditions on the learning rate and augmentation schedule under which augmented gradient descent converges. Special cases give provably good joint schedules for augmentation with additive noise, minibatch SGD, and minibatch SGD with noise.

Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for HVAC Control in Commercial Buildings

In commercial buildings, about 40%-50% of the total electricity consumption is attributed to Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems, which places an economic burden on building operators. In this paper, we intend to minimize the energy cost of an HVAC system in a multi-zone commercial building under dynamic pricing with the consideration of random zone occupancy, thermal comfort, and indoor air quality comfort. Due to the existence of unknown thermal dynamics models, parameter uncertainties (e.g., outdoor temperature, electricity price, and number of occupants), spatially and temporally coupled constraints associated with indoor temperature and CO2 concentration, a large discrete solution space, and a non-convex and non-separable objective function, it is very challenging to achieve the above aim. To this end, the above energy cost minimization problem is reformulated as a Markov game. Then, an HVAC control algorithm is proposed to solve the Markov game based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning with attention mechanism. The proposed algorithm does not require any prior knowledge of uncertain parameters and can operate without knowing building thermal dynamics models. Simulation results based on real-world traces show the effectiveness, robustness and scalability of the proposed algorithm.

Multi-objective Ranking via Constrained Optimization

In this paper, we introduce an Augmented Lagrangian based method to incorporate the multiple objectives (MO) in a search ranking algorithm. Optimizing MOs is an essential and realistic requirement for building ranking models in production. The proposed method formulates MO in constrained optimization and solves the problem in the popular Boosting framework -- a novel contribution of our work. Furthermore, we propose a procedure to set up all optimization parameters in the problem. The experimental results show that the method successfully achieves MO criteria much more efficiently than existing methods.

Line as object: datasets and framework for semantic line segment detection

In this work, we propose a learning-based approach to the task of detecting semantic line segments from outdoor scenes. Semantic line segments are salient edges enclosed by two endpoints on an image with apparent semantic information, e.g., the boundary between a building roof and the sky (See Fig. 1). Semantic line segments can be efficiently parameterized and fill the gap between dense feature points and sparse objects to act as an effective landmarks in applications such as large-scale High Definition Mapping (HDM). With no existing benchmarks, we have built two new datasets carefully labeled by humans that contain over 6,000 images of semantic line segments. Semantic line segments have different appearance and layout patterns that are challenging for existing object detectors. We have proposed a Semantic Line Segment Detector (SLSD) together with an unified representation and a modified evaluation metric to better detect semantic line segments. SLSD trained on our proposed datasets is shown to perform effectively and efficiently. We have conducted excessive experiments to demonstrate semantic line segment detection task as a valid and challenging research topic.

Testing Robustness Against Unforeseen Adversaries

Considerable work on adversarial defense has studied robustness to a fixed, known family of adversarial distortions, most frequently L_p-bounded distortions. In reality, the specific form of attack will rarely be known and adversaries are free to employ distortions outside of any fixed set. The present work advocates measuring robustness against this much broader range of unforeseen attacks---attacks whose precise form is not known when designing a defense. We propose a methodology for evaluating a defense against a diverse range of distortion types together with a summary metric UAR that measures the Unforeseen Attack Robustness against a distortion. We construct novel JPEG, Fog, Gabor, and Snow adversarial attacks to simulate unforeseen adversaries and perform a careful study of adversarial robustness against these and existing distortion types. We find that evaluation against existing L_p attacks yields highly correlated information that may not generalize to other attacks and identify a set of 4 attacks that yields more diverse information. We further find that adversarial training against either one or multiple distortions, including our novel ones, does not confer robustness to unforeseen distortions. These results underscore the need to study robustness against unforeseen distortions and provide a starting point for doing so.

Learning Fair Classifiers in Online Stochastic Settings

In many real life situations, including job and loan applications, gatekeepers must make justified, real-time decisions about a person's fitness for a particular opportunity. People on both sides of such decisions have understandable concerns about their fairness, especially when they occur online or algorithmically. In this paper we consider the setting where we try to satisfy approximate fairness in an online decision making process where examples are sampled i.i.d from an underlying distribution. The fairness metric we consider is "equalized odds", which requires that approximately equalized false positive rates and false negative rates across groups. Our work follows from the classical learning from experts scheme and extends the multiplicative weights algorithm by maintaining an estimation for label distribution and keeping separate weights for label classes as well as groups. Our theoretical results show that approximate equalized odds can be achieved without sacrificing much regret from some distributions. We also demonstrate the algorithm on real data sets commonly used by the fairness community.

Transfer of Adversarial Robustness Between Perturbation Types

We study the transfer of adversarial robustness of deep neural networks between different perturbation types. While most work on adversarial examples has focused on $L_\infty$ and $L_2$-bounded perturbations, these do not capture all types of perturbations available to an adversary. The present work evaluates 32 attacks of 5 different types against models adversarially trained on a 100-class subset of ImageNet. Our empirical results suggest that evaluating on a wide range of perturbation sizes is necessary to understand whether adversarial robustness transfers between perturbation types. We further demonstrate that robustness against one perturbation type may not always imply and may sometimes hurt robustness against other perturbation types. In light of these results, we recommend evaluation of adversarial defenses take place on a diverse range of perturbation types and sizes.

Limited Gradient Descent: Learning With Noisy Labels

Label noise may handicap the generalization of classifiers, and the effective learning of the main pattern from samples with noisy labels is an important issue. Recent studies have shown that deep neural networks tend to prioritize the learning of simple patterns over the memorization of noise patterns. This suggests the need for a method to search for the best generalization that learns the main pattern until noise begins to be memorized. An intuitive idea is to use a supervised approach to find the stop timing of learning by, for example, employing a clean verification set. In practice, however, a clean verification set is sometimes difficult to obtain. To solve this problem, we propose an unsupervised method called limited gradient descent to estimate the best stop timing. We modified the labels of a few samples in a noisy dataset to be almost false labels, creating a reverse pattern. By monitoring the learning progresses of the noisy samples and the reverse samples, we could determine the stop timing of learning. In this paper, we also provide some sufficient conditions on learning with noisy labels. Experimental results on CIFAR-10 demonstrate that our approach has a similar generalization performance to supervised methods. For uncomplicated datasets, such as MNIST, we add a relabeling strategy to further improve generalization and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Learning Vine Copula Models For Synthetic Data Generation

A vine copula model is a flexible high-dimensional dependence model which uses only bivariate building blocks. However, the number of possible configurations of a vine copula grows exponentially as the number of variables increases, making model selection a major challenge in development. In this work, we formulate a vine structure learning problem with both vector and reinforcement learning representation. We use neural network to find the embeddings for the best possible vine model and generate a structure. Throughout experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, we show that our proposed approach fits the data better in terms of log-likelihood. Moreover, we demonstrate that the model is able to generate high-quality samples in a variety of applications, making it a good candidate for synthetic data generation.

Sparsifying Neural Network Connections for Face Recognition

This paper proposes to learn high-performance deep ConvNets with sparse neural connections, referred to as sparse ConvNets, for face recognition. The sparse ConvNets are learned in an iterative way, each time one additional layer is sparsified and the entire model is re-trained given the initial weights learned in previous iterations. One important finding is that directly training the sparse ConvNet from scratch failed to find good solutions for face recognition, while using a previously learned denser model to properly initialize a sparser model is critical to continue learning effective features for face recognition. This paper also proposes a new neural correlation-based weight selection criterion and empirically verifies its effectiveness in selecting informative connections from previously learned models in each iteration. When taking a moderately sparse structure (26%-76% of weights in the dense model), the proposed sparse ConvNet model significantly improves the face recognition performance of the previous state-of-the-art DeepID2+ models given the same training data, while it keeps the performance of the baseline model with only 12% of the original parameters.