No Arabic abstract
One of the principal scientific challenges in deep learning is explaining generalization, i.e., why the particular way the community now trains networks to achieve small training error also leads to small error on held-out data from the same population. It is widely appreciated that some worst-case theories -- such as those based on the VC dimension of the class of predictors induced by modern neural network architectures -- are unable to explain empirical performance. A large volume of work aims to close this gap, primarily by developing bounds on generalization error, optimization error, and excess risk. When evaluated empirically, however, most of these bounds are numerically vacuous. Focusing on generalization bounds, this work addresses the question of how to evaluate such bounds empirically. Jiang et al. (2020) recently described a large-scale empirical study aimed at uncovering potential causal relationships between bounds/measures and generalization. Building on their study, we highlight where their proposed methods can obscure failures and successes of generalization measures in explaining generalization. We argue that generalization measures should instead be evaluated within the framework of distributional robustness.
The goal of domain generalization algorithms is to predict well on distributions different from those seen during training. While a myriad of domain generalization algorithms exist, inconsistencies in experimental conditions -- datasets, architectures, and model selection criteria -- render fair and realistic comparisons difficult. In this paper, we are interested in understanding how useful domain generalization algorithms are in realistic settings. As a first step, we realize that model selection is non-trivial for domain generalization tasks. Contrary to prior work, we argue that domain generalization algorithms without a model selection strategy should be regarded as incomplete. Next, we implement DomainBed, a testbed for domain generalization including seven multi-domain datasets, nine baseline algorithms, and three model selection criteria. We conduct extensive experiments using DomainBed and find that, when carefully implemented, empirical risk minimization shows state-of-the-art performance across all datasets. Looking forward, we hope that the release of DomainBed, along with contributions from fellow researchers, will streamline reproducible and rigorous research in domain generalization.
Generalization of deep networks has been of great interest in recent years, resulting in a number of theoretically and empirically motivated complexity measures. However, most papers proposing such measures study only a small set of models, leaving open the question of whether the conclusion drawn from those experiments would remain valid in other settings. We present the first large scale study of generalization in deep networks. We investigate more then 40 complexity measures taken from both theoretical bounds and empirical studies. We train over 10,000 convolutional networks by systematically varying commonly used hyperparameters. Hoping to uncover potentially causal relationships between each measure and generalization, we analyze carefully controlled experiments and show surprising failures of some measures as well as promising measures for further research.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have great expressive power, which can even memorize samples with wrong labels. It is vitally important to reiterate robustness and generalization in DNNs against label corruption. To this end, this paper studies the 0-1 loss, which has a monotonic relationship with an empirical adversary (reweighted) risk~citep{hu2016does}. Although the 0-1 loss has some robust properties, it is difficult to optimize. To efficiently optimize the 0-1 loss while keeping its robust properties, we propose a very simple and efficient loss, i.e. curriculum loss (CL). Our CL is a tighter upper bound of the 0-1 loss compared with conventional summation based surrogate losses. Moreover, CL can adaptively select samples for model training. As a result, our loss can be deemed as a novel perspective of curriculum sample selection strategy, which bridges a connection between curriculum learning and robust learning. Experimental results on benchmark datasets validate the robustness of the proposed loss.
While deep neural networks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on a variety of learning tasks, their performance relies on the assumption that train and test distributions are the same, which may not hold in real-world applications. Domain generalization addresses this issue by employing multiple source domains to build robust models that can generalize to unseen target domains subject to shifts in data distribution. In this paper, we propose Domain-Free Domain Generalization (DFDG), a model-agnostic method to achieve better generalization performance on the unseen test domain without the need for source domain labels. DFDG uses novel strategies to learn domain-invariant class-discriminative features. It aligns class relationships of samples through class-conditional soft labels, and uses saliency maps, traditionally developed for post-hoc analysis of image classification networks, to remove superficial observations from training inputs. DFDG obtains competitive performance on both time series sensor and image classification public datasets.
Bayesian optimization is an efficient nonlinear optimization method where the queries are carefully selected to gather information about the optimum location. Thus, in the context of policy search, it has been called active policy search. The main ingredients of Bayesian optimization for sample efficiency are the probabilistic surrogate model and the optimal decision heuristics. In this work, we exploit those to provide robustness to different issues for policy search algorithms. We combine several methods and show how their interaction works better than the sum of the parts. First, to deal with input noise and provide a safe and repeatable policy we use an improved version of unscented Bayesian optimization. Then, to deal with mismodeling errors and improve exploration we use stochastic meta-policies for query selection and an adaptive kernel. We compare the proposed algorithm with previous results in several optimization benchmarks and robot tasks, such as pushing objects with a robot arm, or path finding with a rover.