No Arabic abstract
Representation learning is the foundation for the recent success of neural network models. However, the distributed representations generated by neural networks are far from ideal. Due to their highly entangled nature, they are di cult to reuse and interpret, and they do a poor job of capturing the sparsity which is present in real- world transformations. In this paper, I describe methods for learning disentangled representations in the two domains of graphics and computation. These methods allow neural methods to learn representations which are easy to interpret and reuse, yet they incur little or no penalty to performance. In the Graphics section, I demonstrate the ability of these methods to infer the generating parameters of images and rerender those images under novel conditions. In the Computation section, I describe a model which is able to factorize a multitask learning problem into subtasks and which experiences no catastrophic forgetting. Together these techniques provide the tools to design a wide range of models that learn disentangled representations and better model the factors of variation in the real world.
Recent advances in deep learning have made available large, powerful convolutional neural networks (CNN) with state-of-the-art performance in several real-world applications. Unfortunately, these large-sized models have millions of parameters, thus they are not deployable on resource-limited platforms (e.g. where RAM is limited). Compression of CNNs thereby becomes a critical problem to achieve memory-efficient and possibly computationally faster model representations. In this paper, we investigate the impact of lossy compression of CNNs by weight pruning and quantization, and lossless weight matrix representations based on source coding. We tested several combinations of these techniques on four benchmark datasets for classification and regression problems, achieving compression rates up to $165$ times, while preserving or improving the model performance.
How can intelligent agents solve a diverse set of tasks in a data-efficient manner? The disentangled representation learning approach posits that such an agent would benefit from separating out (disentangling) the underlying structure of the world into disjoint parts of its representation. However, there is no generally agreed-upon definition of disentangling, not least because it is unclear how to formalise the notion of world structure beyond toy datasets with a known ground truth generative process. Here we propose that a principled solution to characterising disentangled representations can be found by focusing on the transformation properties of the world. In particular, we suggest that those transformations that change only some properties of the underlying world state, while leaving all other properties invariant, are what gives exploitable structure to any kind of data. Similar ideas have already been successfully applied in physics, where the study of symmetry transformations has revolutionised the understanding of the world structure. By connecting symmetry transformations to vector representations using the formalism of group and representation theory we arrive at the first formal definition of disentangled representations. Our new definition is in agreement with many of the current intuitions about disentangling, while also providing principled resolutions to a number of previous points of contention. While this work focuses on formally defining disentangling - as opposed to solving the learning problem - we believe that the shift in perspective to studying data transformations can stimulate the development of better representation learning algorithms.
Recently there has been a significant interest in learning disentangled representations, as they promise increased interpretability, generalization to unseen scenarios and faster learning on downstream tasks. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of different notions of disentanglement for improving the fairness of downstream prediction tasks based on representations. We consider the setting where the goal is to predict a target variable based on the learned representation of high-dimensional observations (such as images) that depend on both the target variable and an emph{unobserved} sensitive variable. We show that in this setting both the optimal and empirical predictions can be unfair, even if the target variable and the sensitive variable are independent. Analyzing the representations of more than um{12600} trained state-of-the-art disentangled models, we observe that several disentanglement scores are consistently correlated with increased fairness, suggesting that disentanglement may be a useful property to encourage fairness when sensitive variables are not observed.
Time-series representation learning is a fundamental task for time-series analysis. While significant progress has been made to achieve accurate representations for downstream applications, the learned representations often lack interpretability and do not expose semantic meanings. Different from previous efforts on the entangled feature space, we aim to extract the semantic-rich temporal correlations in the latent interpretable factorized representation of the data. Motivated by the success of disentangled representation learning in computer vision, we study the possibility of learning semantic-rich time-series representations, which remains unexplored due to three main challenges: 1) sequential data structure introduces complex temporal correlations and makes the latent representations hard to interpret, 2) sequential models suffer from KL vanishing problem, and 3) interpretable semantic concepts for time-series often rely on multiple factors instead of individuals. To bridge the gap, we propose Disentangle Time Series (DTS), a novel disentanglement enhancement framework for sequential data. Specifically, to generate hierarchical semantic concepts as the interpretable and disentangled representation of time-series, DTS introduces multi-level disentanglement strategies by covering both individual latent factors and group semantic segments. We further theoretically show how to alleviate the KL vanishing problem: DTS introduces a mutual information maximization term, while preserving a heavier penalty on the total correlation and the dimension-wise KL to keep the disentanglement property. Experimental results on various real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that the representations learned by DTS achieve superior performance in downstream applications, with high interpretability of semantic concepts.
Deep learning owes much of its success to the astonishing expressiveness of neural networks. However, this comes at the cost of complex, black-boxed models that extrapolate poorly beyond the domain of the training dataset, conflicting with goals of finding analytic expressions to describe science, engineering and real world data. Under the hypothesis that the hierarchical modularity of such laws can be captured by training a neural network, we introduce OccamNet, a neural network model that finds interpretable, compact, and sparse solutions for fitting data, `{a} la Occams razor. Our model defines a probability distribution over a non-differentiable function space. We introduce a two-step optimization method that samples functions and updates the weights with backpropagation based on cross-entropy matching in an evolutionary strategy: we train by biasing the probability mass toward better fitting solutions. OccamNet is able to fit a variety of symbolic laws including simple analytic functions, recursive programs, implicit functions, simple image classification, and can outperform noticeably state-of-the-art symbolic regression methods on real world regression datasets. Our method requires minimal memory footprint, does not require AI accelerators for efficient training, fits complicated functions in minutes of training on a single CPU, and demonstrates significant performance gains when scaled on a GPU. Our implementation, demonstrations and instructions for reproducing the experiments are available at https://github.com/druidowm/OccamNet_Public.