No Arabic abstract
Unsupervised structure learning in high-dimensional time series data has attracted a lot of research interests. For example, segmenting and labelling high dimensional time series can be helpful in behavior understanding and medical diagnosis. Recent advances in generative sequential modeling have suggested to combine recurrent neural networks with state space models (e.g., Hidden Markov Models). This combination can model not only the long term dependency in sequential data, but also the uncertainty included in the hidden states. Inheriting these advantages of stochastic neural sequential models, we propose a structured and stochastic sequential neural network, which models both the long-term dependencies via recurrent neural networks and the uncertainty in the segmentation and labels via discrete random variables. For accurate and efficient inference, we present a bi-directional inference network by reparamterizing the categorical segmentation and labels with the recent proposed Gumbel-Softmax approximation and resort to the Stochastic Gradient Variational Bayes. We evaluate the proposed model in a number of tasks, including speech modeling, automatic segmentation and labeling in behavior understanding, and sequential multi-objects recognition. Experimental results have demonstrated that our proposed model can achieve significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods.
Approximate inference in deep Bayesian networks exhibits a dilemma of how to yield high fidelity posterior approximations while maintaining computational efficiency and scalability. We tackle this challenge by introducing a novel variational structured approximation inspired by the Bayesian interpretation of Dropout regularization. Concretely, we focus on the inflexibility of the factorized structure in Dropout posterior and then propose an improved method called Variational Structured Dropout (VSD). VSD employs an orthogonal transformation to learn a structured representation on the variational noise and consequently induces statistical dependencies in the approximate posterior. Theoretically, VSD successfully addresses the pathologies of previous Variational Dropout methods and thus offers a standard Bayesian justification. We further show that VSD induces an adaptive regularization term with several desirable properties which contribute to better generalization. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on standard benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of VSD over state-of-the-art variational methods on predictive accuracy, uncertainty estimation, and out-of-distribution detection.
Images of scenes have various objects as well as abundant attributes, and diverse levels of visual categorization are possible. A natural image could be assigned with fine-grained labels that describe major components, coarse-grained labels that depict high level abstraction or a set of labels that reveal attributes. Such categorization at different concept layers can be modeled with label graphs encoding label information. In this paper, we exploit this rich information with a state-of-art deep learning framework, and propose a generic structured model that leverages diverse label relations to improve image classification performance. Our approach employs a novel stacked label prediction neural network, capturing both inter-level and intra-level label semantics. We evaluate our method on benchmark image datasets, and empirical results illustrate the efficacy of our model.
The convolutional layers are core building blocks of neural network architectures. In general, a convolutional filter applies to the entire frequency spectrum of the input data. We explore artificially constraining the frequency spectra of these filters and data, called band-limiting, during training. The frequency domain constraints apply to both the feed-forward and back-propagation steps. Experimentally, we observe that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are resilient to this compression scheme and results suggest that CNNs learn to leverage lower-frequency components. In particular, we found: (1) band-limited training can effectively control the resource usage (GPU and memory); (2) models trained with band-limited layers retain high prediction accuracy; and (3) requires no modification to existing training algorithms or neural network architectures to use unlike other compression schemes.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been successfully applied in many structured data domains, with applications ranging from molecular property prediction to the analysis of social networks. Motivated by the broad applicability of GNNs, we propose the family of so-called RankGNNs, a combination of neural Learning to Rank (LtR) methods and GNNs. RankGNNs are trained with a set of pair-wise preferences between graphs, suggesting that one of them is preferred over the other. One practical application of this problem is drug screening, where an expert wants to find the most promising molecules in a large collection of drug candidates. We empirically demonstrate that our proposed pair-wise RankGNN approach either significantly outperforms or at least matches the ranking performance of the naive point-wise baseline approach, in which the LtR problem is solved via GNN-based graph regression.
We present PrecisionBatching, a quantized inference algorithm for speeding up neural network execution on traditional hardware platforms at low bitwidths without the need for retraining or recalibration. PrecisionBatching decomposes a neural network into individual bitlayers and accumulates them using fast 1-bit operations while maintaining activations in full precision. PrecisionBatching not only facilitates quantized inference at low bitwidths (< 8 bits) without the need for retraining/recalibration, but also 1) enables traditional hardware platforms the ability to realize inference speedups at a finer granularity of quantization (e.g: 1-16 bit execution) and 2) allows accuracy and speedup tradeoffs at runtime by exposing the number of bitlayers to accumulate as a tunable parameter. Across a variety of applications (MNIST, language modeling, natural language inference) and neural network architectures (fully connected, RNN, LSTM), PrecisionBatching yields end-to-end speedups of over 8x on a GPU within a < 1% error margin of the full precision baseline, outperforming traditional 8-bit quantized inference by over 1.5x-2x at the same error tolerance.