No Arabic abstract
While autoregressive models excel at image compression, their sample quality is often lacking. Although not realistic, generated images often have high likelihood according to the model, resembling the case of adversarial examples. Inspired by a successful adversarial defense method, we incorporate randomized smoothing into autoregressive generative modeling. We first model a smoothed version of the data distribution, and then reverse the smoothing process to recover the original data distribution. This procedure drastically improves the sample quality of existing autoregressive models on several synthetic and real-world image datasets while obtaining competitive likelihoods on synthetic datasets.
Vision based localization is the problem of inferring the pose of the camera given a single image. One solution to this problem is to learn a deep neural network to infer the pose of a query image after learning on a dataset of images with known poses. Another more commonly used approach rely on image retrieval where the query image is compared against the database of images and its pose is inferred with the help of the retrieved images. The latter approach assumes that images taken from the same places consists of the same landmarks and, thus would have similar feature representations. These representation can be learned using full supervision to be robust to different variations in capture conditions like time of the day and weather. In this work, we introduce a framework to enhance the performance of these retrieval based localization methods by taking into account the additional information including GPS coordinates and temporal neighbourhood of the images provided by the acquisition process in addition to the descriptor similarity of pairs of images in the reference or query database which is used traditionally for localization. Our method constructs a graph based on this additional information and use it for robust retrieval by smoothing the feature representation of reference and/or query images. We show that the proposed method is able to significantly improve the localization accuracy on two large scale datasets over the baselines.
We identify empirical scaling laws for the cross-entropy loss in four domains: generative image modeling, video modeling, multimodal image$leftrightarrow$text models, and mathematical problem solving. In all cases autoregressive Transformers smoothly improve in performance as model size and compute budgets increase, following a power-law plus constant scaling law. The optimal model size also depends on the compute budget through a power-law, with exponents that are nearly universal across all data domains. The cross-entropy loss has an information theoretic interpretation as $S($True$) + D_{mathrm{KL}}($True$||$Model$)$, and the empirical scaling laws suggest a prediction for both the true data distributions entropy and the KL divergence between the true and model distributions. With this interpretation, billion-parameter Transformers are nearly perfect models of the YFCC100M image distribution downsampled to an $8times 8$ resolution, and we can forecast the model size needed to achieve any given reducible loss (ie $D_{mathrm{KL}}$) in nats/image for other resolutions. We find a number of additional scaling laws in specific domains: (a) we identify a scaling relation for the mutual information between captions and images in multimodal models, and show how to answer the question Is a picture worth a thousand words?; (b) in the case of mathematical problem solving, we identify scaling laws for model performance when extrapolating beyond the training distribution; (c) we finetune generative image models for ImageNet classification and find smooth scaling of the classification loss and error rate, even as the generative loss levels off. Taken together, these results strengthen the case that scaling laws have important implications for neural network performance, including on downstream tasks.
Machine learning is gaining popularity in a broad range of areas working with geographic data, such as ecology or atmospheric sciences. Here, data often exhibit spatial effects, which can be difficult to learn for neural networks. In this study, we propose SXL, a method for embedding information on the autoregressive nature of spatial data directly into the learning process using auxiliary tasks. We utilize the local Morans I, a popular measure of local spatial autocorrelation, to nudge the model to learn the direction and magnitude of local spatial effects, complementing the learning of the primary task. We further introduce a novel expansion of Morans I to multiple resolutions, thus capturing spatial interactions over longer and shorter distances simultaneously. The novel multi-resolution Morans I can be constructed easily and as a multi-dimensional tensor offers seamless integration into existing machine learning frameworks. Throughout a range of experiments using real-world data, we highlight how our method consistently improves the training of neural networks in unsupervised and supervised learning tasks. In generative spatial modeling experiments, we propose a novel loss for auxiliary task GANs utilizing task uncertainty weights. Our proposed method outperforms domain-specific spatial interpolation benchmarks, highlighting its potential for downstream applications. This study bridges expertise from geographic information science and machine learning, showing how this integration of disciplines can help to address domain-specific challenges. The code for our experiments is available on Github: https://github.com/konstantinklemmer/sxl.
High-dimensional generative models have many applications including image compression, multimedia generation, anomaly detection and data completion. State-of-the-art estimators for natural images are autoregressive, decomposing the joint distribution over pixels into a product of conditionals parameterized by a deep neural network, e.g. a convolutional neural network such as the PixelCNN. However, PixelCNNs only model a single decomposition of the joint, and only a single generation order is efficient. For tasks such as image completion, these models are unable to use much of the observed context. To generate data in arbitrary orders, we introduce LMConv: a simple modification to the standard 2D convolution that allows arbitrary masks to be applied to the weights at each location in the image. Using LMConv, we learn an ensemble of distribution estimators that share parameters but differ in generation order, achieving improved performance on whole-image density estimation (2.89 bpd on unconditional CIFAR10), as well as globally coherent image completions. Our code is available at https://ajayjain.github.io/lmconv.
As machine learning (ML) systems become pervasive, safeguarding their security is critical. Recent work has demonstrated that motivated adversaries could add adversarial perturbations to the test data to mislead ML systems. So far, most research has focused on providing provable robustness guarantees for ML models against a specific Lp norm bounded adversarial perturbation. However, in practice previous work has shown that there are other types of realistic adversarial transformations whose semantic meaning has been leveraged to attack ML systems. In this paper, we aim to provide a unified framework for certifying ML robustness against general adversarial transformations. First, we identify the semantic transformations as different categories: resolvable (e.g., Gaussian blur and brightness) and differentially resolvable transformations (e.g., rotation and scaling). We then provide sufficient conditions and strategies for certifying certain transformations. For instance, we propose a novel sampling-based interpolation approach with estimated Lipschitz upper bound to certify the robustness against differentially resolvable transformations. In addition, we theoretically optimize the smoothing strategies for certifying the robustness of ML models against different transformations. For instance, we show that smoothing by sampling from exponential distribution provides a tighter robustness bound than Gaussian. Extensive experiments on 7 semantic transformations show that our proposed unified framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art certified robustness approaches on several datasets including ImageNet.