arXiv subjects

Abhimanyu Dubey

Publications and source records attributed to Abhimanyu Dubey.

35 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Cooperative Multi-Agent Bandits with Heavy Tails

We study the heavy-tailed stochastic bandit problem in the cooperative multi-agent setting, where a group of agents interact with a common bandit problem, while communicating on a network with delays. Existing algorithms for the stochastic bandit in this setting utilize confidence intervals arising from an averaging-based communication protocol known as~\textit{running consensus}, that does not lend itself to robust estimation for heavy-tailed settings. We propose \textsc{MP-UCB}, a decentralized multi-agent algorithm for the cooperative stochastic bandit that incorporates robust estimation with a message-passing protocol. We prove optimal regret bounds for \textsc{MP-UCB} for several problem settings, and also demonstrate its superiority to existing methods. Furthermore, we establish the first lower bounds for the cooperative bandit problem, in addition to providing efficient algorithms for robust bandit estimation of location.

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arXiv2020

Leveraging Communication Topologies Between Learning Agents in Deep Reinforcement Learning

A common technique to improve learning performance in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and many other machine learning algorithms is to run multiple learning agents in parallel. A neglected component in the development of these algorithms has been how best to arrange the learning agents involved to improve distributed search. Here we draw upon results from the networked optimization literatures suggesting that arranging learning agents in communication networks other than fully connected topologies (the implicit way agents are commonly arranged in) can improve learning. We explore the relative performance of four popular families of graphs and observe that one such family (Erdos-Renyi random graphs) empirically outperforms the de facto fully-connected communication topology across several DRL benchmark tasks. Additionally, we observe that 1000 learning agents arranged in an Erdos-Renyi graph can perform as well as 3000 agents arranged in the standard fully-connected topology, showing the large learning improvement possible when carefully designing the topology over which agents communicate. We complement these empirical results with a theoretical investigation of why our alternate topologies perform better. Overall, our work suggests that distributed machine learning algorithms could be made more effective if the communication topology between learning agents was optimized.

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arXiv2019

Thompson Sampling on Symmetric $α$-Stable Bandits

Thompson Sampling provides an efficient technique to introduce prior knowledge in the multi-armed bandit problem, along with providing remarkable empirical performance. In this paper, we revisit the Thompson Sampling algorithm under rewards drawn from symmetric $α$-stable distributions, which are a class of heavy-tailed probability distributions utilized in finance and economics, in problems such as modeling stock prices and human behavior. We present an efficient framework for posterior inference, which leads to two algorithms for Thompson Sampling in this setting. We prove finite-time regret bounds for both algorithms, and demonstrate through a series of experiments the stronger performance of Thompson Sampling in this setting. With our results, we provide an exposition of symmetric $α$-stable distributions in sequential decision-making, and enable sequential Bayesian inference in applications from diverse fields in finance and complex systems that operate on heavy-tailed features.

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arXiv2019

Smaller Models, Better Generalization

Reducing network complexity has been a major research focus in recent years with the advent of mobile technology. Convolutional Neural Networks that perform various vision tasks without memory overhaul is the need of the hour. This paper focuses on qualitative and quantitative analysis of reducing the network complexity using an upper bound on the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension, pruning, and quantization. We observe a general trend in improvement of accuracies as we quantize the models. We propose a novel loss function that helps in achieving considerable sparsity at comparable accuracies to that of dense models. We compare various regularizations prevalent in the literature and show the superiority of our method in achieving sparser models that generalize well.

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arXiv2019

Defense Against Adversarial Images using Web-Scale Nearest-Neighbor Search

A plethora of recent work has shown that convolutional networks are not robust to adversarial images: images that are created by perturbing a sample from the data distribution as to maximize the loss on the perturbed example. In this work, we hypothesize that adversarial perturbations move the image away from the image manifold in the sense that there exists no physical process that could have produced the adversarial image. This hypothesis suggests that a successful defense mechanism against adversarial images should aim to project the images back onto the image manifold. We study such defense mechanisms, which approximate the projection onto the unknown image manifold by a nearest-neighbor search against a web-scale image database containing tens of billions of images. Empirical evaluations of this defense strategy on ImageNet suggest that it is very effective in attack settings in which the adversary does not have access to the image database. We also propose two novel attack methods to break nearest-neighbor defenses, and demonstrate conditions under which nearest-neighbor defense fails. We perform a series of ablation experiments, which suggest that there is a trade-off between robustness and accuracy in our defenses, that a large image database (with hundreds of millions of images) is crucial to get good performance, and that careful construction the image database is important to be robust against attacks tailored to circumvent our defenses.

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arXiv2019

How to Organize your Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents: The Importance of Communication Topology

In this empirical paper, we investigate how learning agents can be arranged in more efficient communication topologies for improved learning. This is an important problem because a common technique to improve speed and robustness of learning in deep reinforcement learning and many other machine learning algorithms is to run multiple learning agents in parallel. The standard communication architecture typically involves all agents intermittently communicating with each other (fully connected topology) or with a centralized server (star topology). Unfortunately, optimizing the topology of communication over the space of all possible graphs is a hard problem, so we borrow results from the networked optimization and collective intelligence literatures which suggest that certain families of network topologies can lead to strong improvements over fully-connected networks. We start by introducing alternative network topologies to DRL benchmark tasks under the Evolution Strategies paradigm which we call Network Evolution Strategies. We explore the relative performance of the four main graph families and observe that one such family (Erdos-Renyi random graphs) empirically outperforms all other families, including the de facto fully-connected communication topologies. Additionally, the use of alternative network topologies has a multiplicative performance effect: we observe that when 1000 learning agents are arranged in a carefully designed communication topology, they can compete with 3000 agents arranged in the de facto fully-connected topology. Overall, our work suggests that distributed machine learning algorithms would learn more efficiently if the communication topology between learning agents was optimized.

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arXiv2018

Evaluating Generative Adversarial Networks on Explicitly Parameterized Distributions

The true distribution parameterizations of commonly used image datasets are inaccessible. Rather than designing metrics for feature spaces with unknown characteristics, we propose to measure GAN performance by evaluating on explicitly parameterized, synthetic data distributions. As a case study, we examine the performance of 16 GAN variants on six multivariate distributions of varying dimensionalities and training set sizes. In this learning environment, we observe that: GANs exhibit similar performance trends across dimensionalities; learning depends on the underlying distribution and its complexity; the number of training samples can have a large impact on performance; evaluation and relative comparisons are metric-dependent; diverse sets of hyperparameters can produce a "best" result; and some GANs are more robust to hyperparameter changes than others. These observations both corroborate findings of previous GAN evaluation studies and make novel contributions regarding the relationship between size, complexity, and GAN performance.

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arXiv2018

No Peek: A Survey of private distributed deep learning

We survey distributed deep learning models for training or inference without accessing raw data from clients. These methods aim to protect confidential patterns in data while still allowing servers to train models. The distributed deep learning methods of federated learning, split learning and large batch stochastic gradient descent are compared in addition to private and secure approaches of differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, oblivious transfer and garbled circuits in the context of neural networks. We study their benefits, limitations and trade-offs with regards to computational resources, data leakage and communication efficiency and also share our anticipated future trends.

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arXiv2018

Maximum-Entropy Fine-Grained Classification

Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC) is an important computer vision problem that involves small diversity within the different classes, and often requires expert annotators to collect data. Utilizing this notion of small visual diversity, we revisit Maximum-Entropy learning in the context of fine-grained classification, and provide a training routine that maximizes the entropy of the output probability distribution for training convolutional neural networks on FGVC tasks. We provide a theoretical as well as empirical justification of our approach, and achieve state-of-the-art performance across a variety of classification tasks in FGVC, that can potentially be extended to any fine-tuning task. Our method is robust to different hyperparameter values, amount of training data and amount of training label noise and can hence be a valuable tool in many similar problems.

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arXiv2018

Pairwise Confusion for Fine-Grained Visual Classification

Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC) datasets contain small sample sizes, along with significant intra-class variation and inter-class similarity. While prior work has addressed intra-class variation using localization and segmentation techniques, inter-class similarity may also affect feature learning and reduce classification performance. In this work, we address this problem using a novel optimization procedure for the end-to-end neural network training on FGVC tasks. Our procedure, called Pairwise Confusion (PC) reduces overfitting by intentionally {introducing confusion} in the activations. With PC regularization, we obtain state-of-the-art performance on six of the most widely-used FGVC datasets and demonstrate improved localization ability. {PC} is easy to implement, does not need excessive hyperparameter tuning during training, and does not add significant overhead during test time.

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arXiv2018

Coreset-Based Neural Network Compression

We propose a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) compression algorithm based on coreset representations of filters. We exploit the redundancies extant in the space of CNN weights and neuronal activations (across samples) in order to obtain compression. Our method requires no retraining, is easy to implement, and obtains state-of-the-art compression performance across a wide variety of CNN architectures. Coupled with quantization and Huffman coding, we create networks that provide AlexNet-like accuracy, with a memory footprint that is $832\times$ smaller than the original AlexNet, while also introducing significant reductions in inference time as well. Additionally these compressed networks when fine-tuned, successfully generalize to other domains as well.

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arXiv2018

Closing the AI Knowledge Gap

AI researchers employ not only the scientific method, but also methodology from mathematics and engineering. However, the use of the scientific method - specifically hypothesis testing - in AI is typically conducted in service of engineering objectives. Growing interest in topics such as fairness and algorithmic bias show that engineering-focused questions only comprise a subset of the important questions about AI systems. This results in the AI Knowledge Gap: the number of unique AI systems grows faster than the number of studies that characterize these systems' behavior. To close this gap, we argue that the study of AI could benefit from the greater inclusion of researchers who are well positioned to formulate and test hypotheses about the behavior of AI systems. We examine the barriers preventing social and behavioral scientists from conducting such studies. Our diagnosis suggests that accelerating the scientific study of AI systems requires new incentives for academia and industry, mediated by new tools and institutions. To address these needs, we propose a two-sided marketplace called TuringBox. On one side, AI contributors upload existing and novel algorithms to be studied scientifically by others. On the other side, AI examiners develop and post machine intelligence tasks designed to evaluate and characterize algorithmic behavior. We discuss this market's potential to democratize the scientific study of AI behavior, and thus narrow the AI Knowledge Gap.

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arXiv2018

MemeSequencer: Sparse Matching for Embedding Image Macros

The analysis of the creation, mutation, and propagation of social media content on the Internet is an essential problem in computational social science, affecting areas ranging from marketing to political mobilization. A first step towards understanding the evolution of images online is the analysis of rapidly modifying and propagating memetic imagery or `memes'. However, a pitfall in proceeding with such an investigation is the current incapability to produce a robust semantic space for such imagery, capable of understanding differences in Image Macros. In this study, we provide a first step in the systematic study of image evolution on the Internet, by proposing an algorithm based on sparse representations and deep learning to decouple various types of content in such images and produce a rich semantic embedding. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on a variety of tasks pertaining to memes and Image Macros, such as image clustering, image retrieval, topic prediction and virality prediction, surpassing the existing methods on each. In addition to its utility on quantitative tasks, our method opens up the possibility of obtaining the first large-scale understanding of the evolution and propagation of memetic imagery.

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arXiv2017

Modeling Image Virality with Pairwise Spatial Transformer Networks

The study of virality and information diffusion online is a topic gaining traction rapidly in the computational social sciences. Computer vision and social network analysis research have also focused on understanding the impact of content and information diffusion in making content viral, with prior approaches not performing significantly well as other traditional classification tasks. In this paper, we present a novel pairwise reformulation of the virality prediction problem as an attribute prediction task and develop a novel algorithm to model image virality on online media using a pairwise neural network. Our model provides significant insights into the features that are responsible for promoting virality and surpasses the existing state-of-the-art by a 12% average improvement in prediction. We also investigate the effect of external category supervision on relative attribute prediction and observe an increase in prediction accuracy for the same across several attribute learning datasets.

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arXiv2016

Deep Learning the City : Quantifying Urban Perception At A Global Scale

Computer vision methods that quantify the perception of urban environment are increasingly being used to study the relationship between a city's physical appearance and the behavior and health of its residents. Yet, the throughput of current methods is too limited to quantify the perception of cities across the world. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a new crowdsourced dataset containing 110,988 images from 56 cities, and 1,170,000 pairwise comparisons provided by 81,630 online volunteers along six perceptual attributes: safe, lively, boring, wealthy, depressing, and beautiful. Using this data, we train a Siamese-like convolutional neural architecture, which learns from a joint classification and ranking loss, to predict human judgments of pairwise image comparisons. Our results show that crowdsourcing combined with neural networks can produce urban perception data at the global scale.

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arXiv2016

Examining Representational Similarity in ConvNets and the Primate Visual Cortex

We compare several ConvNets with different depth and regularization techniques with multi-unit macaque IT cortex recordings and assess the impact of the same on representational similarity with the primate visual cortex. We find that with increasing depth and validation performance, ConvNet features are closer to cortical IT representations.

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arXiv2015

Coreset-Based Adaptive Tracking

We propose a method for learning from streaming visual data using a compact, constant size representation of all the data that was seen until a given moment. Specifically, we construct a 'coreset' representation of streaming data using a parallelized algorithm, which is an approximation of a set with relation to the squared distances between this set and all other points in its ambient space. We learn an adaptive object appearance model from the coreset tree in constant time and logarithmic space and use it for object tracking by detection. Our method obtains excellent results for object tracking on three standard datasets over more than 100 videos. The ability to summarize data efficiently makes our method ideally suited for tracking in long videos in presence of space and time constraints. We demonstrate this ability by outperforming a variety of algorithms on the TLD dataset with 2685 frames on average. This coreset based learning approach can be applied for both real-time learning of small, varied data and fast learning of big data.

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