No Arabic abstract
In representation learning, there has been recent interest in developing algorithms to disentangle the ground-truth generative factors behind a dataset, and metrics to quantify how fully this occurs. However, these algorithms and metrics often assume that both representations and ground-truth factors are flat, continuous, and factorized, whereas many real-world generative processes involve rich hierarchical structure, mixtures of discrete and continuous variables with dependence between them, and even varying intrinsic dimensionality. In this work, we develop benchmarks, algorithms, and metrics for learning such hierarchical representations.
Understanding and removing bias from the decisions made by machine learning models is essential to avoid discrimination against unprivileged groups. Despite recent progress in algorithmic fairness, there is still no clear answer as to which bias-mitigation approaches are most effective. Evaluation strategies are typically use-case specific, rely on data with unclear bias, and employ a fixed policy to convert model outputs to decision outcomes. To address these problems, we performed a systematic comparison of a number of popular fairness algorithms applicable to supervised classification. Our study is the most comprehensive of its kind. It utilizes three real and four synthetic datasets, and two different ways of converting model outputs to decisions. It considers fairness, predictive-performance, calibration quality, and speed of 28 different modelling pipelines, corresponding to both fairness-unaware and fairness-aware algorithms. We found that fairness-unaware algorithms typically fail to produce adequately fair models and that the simplest algorithms are not necessarily the fairest ones. We also found that fairness-aware algorithms can induce fairness without material drops in predictive power. Finally, we found that dataset idiosyncracies (e.g., degree of intrinsic unfairness, nature of correlations) do affect the performance of fairness-aware approaches. Our results allow the practitioner to narrow down the approach(es) they would like to adopt without having to know in advance their fairness requirements.
Learning rich representation from data is an important task for deep generative models such as variational auto-encoder (VAE). However, by extracting high-level abstractions in the bottom-up inference process, the goal of preserving all factors of variations for top-down generation is compromised. Motivated by the concept of starting small, we present a strategy to progressively learn independent hierarchical representations from high- to low-levels of abstractions. The model starts with learning the most abstract representation, and then progressively grow the network architecture to introduce new representations at different levels of abstraction. We quantitatively demonstrate the ability of the presented model to improve disentanglement in comparison to existing works on two benchmark data sets using three disentanglement metrics, including a new metric we proposed to complement the previously-presented metric of mutual information gap. We further present both qualitative and quantitative evidence on how the progression of learning improves disentangling of hierarchical representations. By drawing on the respective advantage of hierarchical representation learning and progressive learning, this is to our knowledge the first attempt to improve disentanglement by progressively growing the capacity of VAE to learn hierarchical representations.
We propose FineGAN, a novel unsupervised GAN framework, which disentangles the background, object shape, and object appearance to hierarchically generate images of fine-grained object categories. To disentangle the factors without supervision, our key idea is to use information theory to associate each factor to a latent code, and to condition the relationships between the codes in a specific way to induce the desired hierarchy. Through extensive experiments, we show that FineGAN achieves the desired disentanglement to generate realistic and diverse images belonging to fine-grained classes of birds, dogs, and cars. Using FineGANs automatically learned features, we also cluster real images as a first attempt at solving the novel problem of unsupervised fine-grained object category discovery. Our code/models/demo can be found at https://github.com/kkanshul/finegan
While current benchmark reinforcement learning (RL) tasks have been useful to drive progress in the field, they are in many ways poor substitutes for learning with real-world data. By testing increasingly complex RL algorithms on low-complexity simulation environments, we often end up with brittle RL policies that generalize poorly beyond the very specific domain. To combat this, we propose three new families of benchmark RL domains that contain some of the complexity of the natural world, while still supporting fast and extensive data acquisition. The proposed domains also permit a characterization of generalization through fair train/test separation, and easy comparison and replication of results. Through this work, we challenge the RL research community to develop more robust algorithms that meet high standards of evaluation.
Concept-based explanations have emerged as a popular way of extracting human-interpretable representations from deep discriminative models. At the same time, the disentanglement learning literature has focused on extracting similar representations in an unsupervised or weakly-supervised way, using deep generative models. Despite the overlapping goals and potential synergies, to our knowledge, there has not yet been a systematic comparison of the limitations and trade-offs between concept-based explanations and disentanglement approaches. In this paper, we give an overview of these fields, comparing and contrasting their properties and behaviours on a diverse set of tasks, and highlighting their potential strengths and limitations. In particular, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art approaches from both classes can be data inefficient, sensitive to the specific nature of the classification/regression task, or sensitive to the employed concept representation.