arXiv subjects

Geoffrey Hinton

Publications and source records attributed to Geoffrey Hinton.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Teaching with Commentaries

Effective training of deep neural networks can be challenging, and there remain many open questions on how to best learn these models. Recently developed methods to improve neural network training examine teaching: providing learned information during the training process to improve downstream model performance. In this paper, we take steps towards extending the scope of teaching. We propose a flexible teaching framework using commentaries, learned meta-information helpful for training on a particular task. We present gradient-based methods to learn commentaries, leveraging recent work on implicit differentiation for scalability. We explore diverse applications of commentaries, from weighting training examples, to parameterising label-dependent data augmentation policies, to representing attention masks that highlight salient image regions. We find that commentaries can improve training speed and/or performance, and provide insights about the dataset and training process. We also observe that commentaries generalise: they can be reused when training new models to obtain performance benefits, suggesting a use-case where commentaries are stored with a dataset and leveraged in future for improved model training.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

How to represent part-whole hierarchies in a neural network

This paper does not describe a working system. Instead, it presents a single idea about representation which allows advances made by several different groups to be combined into an imaginary system called GLOM. The advances include transformers, neural fields, contrastive representation learning, distillation and capsules. GLOM answers the question: How can a neural network with a fixed architecture parse an image into a part-whole hierarchy which has a different structure for each image? The idea is simply to use islands of identical vectors to represent the nodes in the parse tree. If GLOM can be made to work, it should significantly improve the interpretability of the representations produced by transformer-like systems when applied to vision or language

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners

One paradigm for learning from few labeled examples while making best use of a large amount of unlabeled data is unsupervised pretraining followed by supervised fine-tuning. Although this paradigm uses unlabeled data in a task-agnostic way, in contrast to common approaches to semi-supervised learning for computer vision, we show that it is surprisingly effective for semi-supervised learning on ImageNet. A key ingredient of our approach is the use of big (deep and wide) networks during pretraining and fine-tuning. We find that, the fewer the labels, the more this approach (task-agnostic use of unlabeled data) benefits from a bigger network. After fine-tuning, the big network can be further improved and distilled into a much smaller one with little loss in classification accuracy by using the unlabeled examples for a second time, but in a task-specific way. The proposed semi-supervised learning algorithm can be summarized in three steps: unsupervised pretraining of a big ResNet model using SimCLRv2, supervised fine-tuning on a few labeled examples, and distillation with unlabeled examples for refining and transferring the task-specific knowledge. This procedure achieves 73.9% ImageNet top-1 accuracy with just 1% of the labels ($\le$13 labeled images per class) using ResNet-50, a $10\times$ improvement in label efficiency over the previous state-of-the-art. With 10% of labels, ResNet-50 trained with our method achieves 77.5% top-1 accuracy, outperforming standard supervised training with all of the labels.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations

This paper presents SimCLR: a simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. We simplify recently proposed contrastive self-supervised learning algorithms without requiring specialized architectures or a memory bank. In order to understand what enables the contrastive prediction tasks to learn useful representations, we systematically study the major components of our framework. We show that (1) composition of data augmentations plays a critical role in defining effective predictive tasks, (2) introducing a learnable nonlinear transformation between the representation and the contrastive loss substantially improves the quality of the learned representations, and (3) contrastive learning benefits from larger batch sizes and more training steps compared to supervised learning. By combining these findings, we are able to considerably outperform previous methods for self-supervised and semi-supervised learning on ImageNet. A linear classifier trained on self-supervised representations learned by SimCLR achieves 76.5% top-1 accuracy, which is a 7% relative improvement over previous state-of-the-art, matching the performance of a supervised ResNet-50. When fine-tuned on only 1% of the labels, we achieve 85.8% top-5 accuracy, outperforming AlexNet with 100X fewer labels.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

When Does Label Smoothing Help?

The generalization and learning speed of a multi-class neural network can often be significantly improved by using soft targets that are a weighted average of the hard targets and the uniform distribution over labels. Smoothing the labels in this way prevents the network from becoming over-confident and label smoothing has been used in many state-of-the-art models, including image classification, language translation and speech recognition. Despite its widespread use, label smoothing is still poorly understood. Here we show empirically that in addition to improving generalization, label smoothing improves model calibration which can significantly improve beam-search. However, we also observe that if a teacher network is trained with label smoothing, knowledge distillation into a student network is much less effective. To explain these observations, we visualize how label smoothing changes the representations learned by the penultimate layer of the network. We show that label smoothing encourages the representations of training examples from the same class to group in tight clusters. This results in loss of information in the logits about resemblances between instances of different classes, which is necessary for distillation, but does not hurt generalization or calibration of the model's predictions.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Subclass Distillation

After a large "teacher" neural network has been trained on labeled data, the probabilities that the teacher assigns to incorrect classes reveal a lot of information about the way in which the teacher generalizes. By training a small "student" model to match these probabilities, it is possible to transfer most of the generalization ability of the teacher to the student, often producing a much better small model than directly training the student on the training data. The transfer works best when there are many possible classes because more is then revealed about the function learned by the teacher, but in cases where there are only a few possible classes we show that we can improve the transfer by forcing the teacher to divide each class into many subclasses that it invents during the supervised training. The student is then trained to match the subclass probabilities. For datasets where there are known, natural subclasses we demonstrate that the teacher learns similar subclasses and these improve distillation. For clickthrough datasets where the subclasses are unknown we demonstrate that subclass distillation allows the student to learn faster and better.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Imputer: Sequence Modelling via Imputation and Dynamic Programming

This paper presents the Imputer, a neural sequence model that generates output sequences iteratively via imputations. The Imputer is an iterative generative model, requiring only a constant number of generation steps independent of the number of input or output tokens. The Imputer can be trained to approximately marginalize over all possible alignments between the input and output sequences, and all possible generation orders. We present a tractable dynamic programming training algorithm, which yields a lower bound on the log marginal likelihood. When applied to end-to-end speech recognition, the Imputer outperforms prior non-autoregressive models and achieves competitive results to autoregressive models. On LibriSpeech test-other, the Imputer achieves 11.1 WER, outperforming CTC at 13.0 WER and seq2seq at 12.5 WER.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2020

CvxNet: Learnable Convex Decomposition

Any solid object can be decomposed into a collection of convex polytopes (in short, convexes). When a small number of convexes are used, such a decomposition can be thought of as a piece-wise approximation of the geometry. This decomposition is fundamental in computer graphics, where it provides one of the most common ways to approximate geometry, for example, in real-time physics simulation. A convex object also has the property of being simultaneously an explicit and implicit representation: one can interpret it explicitly as a mesh derived by computing the vertices of a convex hull, or implicitly as the collection of half-space constraints or support functions. Their implicit representation makes them particularly well suited for neural network training, as they abstract away from the topology of the geometry they need to represent. However, at testing time, convexes can also generate explicit representations -- polygonal meshes -- which can then be used in any downstream application. We introduce a network architecture to represent a low dimensional family of convexes. This family is automatically derived via an auto-encoding process. We investigate the applications of this architecture including automatic convex decomposition, image to 3D reconstruction, and part-based shape retrieval.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Detecting and Diagnosing Adversarial Images with Class-Conditional Capsule Reconstructions

Adversarial examples raise questions about whether neural network models are sensitive to the same visual features as humans. In this paper, we first detect adversarial examples or otherwise corrupted images based on a class-conditional reconstruction of the input. To specifically attack our detection mechanism, we propose the Reconstructive Attack which seeks both to cause a misclassification and a low reconstruction error. This reconstructive attack produces undetected adversarial examples but with much smaller success rate. Among all these attacks, we find that CapsNets always perform better than convolutional networks. Then, we diagnose the adversarial examples for CapsNets and find that the success of the reconstructive attack is highly related to the visual similarity between the source and target class. Additionally, the resulting perturbations can cause the input image to appear visually more like the target class and hence become non-adversarial. This suggests that CapsNets use features that are more aligned with human perception and have the potential to address the central issue raised by adversarial examples.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Deflecting Adversarial Attacks

There has been an ongoing cycle where stronger defenses against adversarial attacks are subsequently broken by a more advanced defense-aware attack. We present a new approach towards ending this cycle where we "deflect'' adversarial attacks by causing the attacker to produce an input that semantically resembles the attack's target class. To this end, we first propose a stronger defense based on Capsule Networks that combines three detection mechanisms to achieve state-of-the-art detection performance on both standard and defense-aware attacks. We then show that undetected attacks against our defense often perceptually resemble the adversarial target class by performing a human study where participants are asked to label images produced by the attack. These attack images can no longer be called "adversarial'' because our network classifies them the same way as humans do.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Lookahead Optimizer: k steps forward, 1 step back

The vast majority of successful deep neural networks are trained using variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms. Recent attempts to improve SGD can be broadly categorized into two approaches: (1) adaptive learning rate schemes, such as AdaGrad and Adam, and (2) accelerated schemes, such as heavy-ball and Nesterov momentum. In this paper, we propose a new optimization algorithm, Lookahead, that is orthogonal to these previous approaches and iteratively updates two sets of weights. Intuitively, the algorithm chooses a search direction by looking ahead at the sequence of fast weights generated by another optimizer. We show that Lookahead improves the learning stability and lowers the variance of its inner optimizer with negligible computation and memory cost. We empirically demonstrate Lookahead can significantly improve the performance of SGD and Adam, even with their default hyperparameter settings on ImageNet, CIFAR-10/100, neural machine translation, and Penn Treebank.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited

Recent work has sought to understand the behavior of neural networks by comparing representations between layers and between different trained models. We examine methods for comparing neural network representations based on canonical correlation analysis (CCA). We show that CCA belongs to a family of statistics for measuring multivariate similarity, but that neither CCA nor any other statistic that is invariant to invertible linear transformation can measure meaningful similarities between representations of higher dimension than the number of data points. We introduce a similarity index that measures the relationship between representational similarity matrices and does not suffer from this limitation. This similarity index is equivalent to centered kernel alignment (CKA) and is also closely connected to CCA. Unlike CCA, CKA can reliably identify correspondences between representations in networks trained from different initializations.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Cerberus: A Multi-headed Derenderer

To generalize to novel visual scenes with new viewpoints and new object poses, a visual system needs representations of the shapes of the parts of an object that are invariant to changes in viewpoint or pose. 3D graphics representations disentangle visual factors such as viewpoints and lighting from object structure in a natural way. It is possible to learn to invert the process that converts 3D graphics representations into 2D images, provided the 3D graphics representations are available as labels. When only the unlabeled images are available, however, learning to derender is much harder. We consider a simple model which is just a set of free floating parts. Each part has its own relation to the camera and its own triangular mesh which can be deformed to model the shape of the part. At test time, a neural network looks at a single image and extracts the shapes of the parts and their relations to the camera. Each part can be viewed as one head of a multi-headed derenderer. During training, the extracted parts are used as input to a differentiable 3D renderer and the reconstruction error is backpropagated to train the neural net. We make the learning task easier by encouraging the deformations of the part meshes to be invariant to changes in viewpoint and invariant to the changes in the relative positions of the parts that occur when the pose of an articulated body changes. Cerberus, our multi-headed derenderer, outperforms previous methods for extracting 3D parts from single images without part annotations, and it does quite well at extracting natural parts of human figures.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Analyzing and Improving Representations with the Soft Nearest Neighbor Loss

We explore and expand the $\textit{Soft Nearest Neighbor Loss}$ to measure the $\textit{entanglement}$ of class manifolds in representation space: i.e., how close pairs of points from the same class are relative to pairs of points from different classes. We demonstrate several use cases of the loss. As an analytical tool, it provides insights into the evolution of class similarity structures during learning. Surprisingly, we find that $\textit{maximizing}$ the entanglement of representations of different classes in the hidden layers is beneficial for discrimination in the final layer, possibly because it encourages representations to identify class-independent similarity structures. Maximizing the soft nearest neighbor loss in the hidden layers leads not only to improved generalization but also to better-calibrated estimates of uncertainty on outlier data. Data that is not from the training distribution can be recognized by observing that in the hidden layers, it has fewer than the normal number of neighbors from the predicted class.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2018

DARCCC: Detecting Adversaries by Reconstruction from Class Conditional Capsules

We present a simple technique that allows capsule models to detect adversarial images. In addition to being trained to classify images, the capsule model is trained to reconstruct the images from the pose parameters and identity of the correct top-level capsule. Adversarial images do not look like a typical member of the predicted class and they have much larger reconstruction errors when the reconstruction is produced from the top-level capsule for that class. We show that setting a threshold on the $l2$ distance between the input image and its reconstruction from the winning capsule is very effective at detecting adversarial images for three different datasets. The same technique works quite well for CNNs that have been trained to reconstruct the image from all or part of the last hidden layer before the softmax. We then explore a stronger, white-box attack that takes the reconstruction error into account. This attack is able to fool our detection technique but in order to make the model change its prediction to another class, the attack must typically make the "adversarial" image resemble images of the other class.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Distilling a Neural Network Into a Soft Decision Tree

Deep neural networks have proved to be a very effective way to perform classification tasks. They excel when the input data is high dimensional, the relationship between the input and the output is complicated, and the number of labeled training examples is large. But it is hard to explain why a learned network makes a particular classification decision on a particular test case. This is due to their reliance on distributed hierarchical representations. If we could take the knowledge acquired by the neural net and express the same knowledge in a model that relies on hierarchical decisions instead, explaining a particular decision would be much easier. We describe a way of using a trained neural net to create a type of soft decision tree that generalizes better than one learned directly from the training data.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer

The capacity of a neural network to absorb information is limited by its number of parameters. Conditional computation, where parts of the network are active on a per-example basis, has been proposed in theory as a way of dramatically increasing model capacity without a proportional increase in computation. In practice, however, there are significant algorithmic and performance challenges. In this work, we address these challenges and finally realize the promise of conditional computation, achieving greater than 1000x improvements in model capacity with only minor losses in computational efficiency on modern GPU clusters. We introduce a Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts layer (MoE), consisting of up to thousands of feed-forward sub-networks. A trainable gating network determines a sparse combination of these experts to use for each example. We apply the MoE to the tasks of language modeling and machine translation, where model capacity is critical for absorbing the vast quantities of knowledge available in the training corpora. We present model architectures in which a MoE with up to 137 billion parameters is applied convolutionally between stacked LSTM layers. On large language modeling and machine translation benchmarks, these models achieve significantly better results than state-of-the-art at lower computational cost.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Regularizing Neural Networks by Penalizing Confident Output Distributions

We systematically explore regularizing neural networks by penalizing low entropy output distributions. We show that penalizing low entropy output distributions, which has been shown to improve exploration in reinforcement learning, acts as a strong regularizer in supervised learning. Furthermore, we connect a maximum entropy based confidence penalty to label smoothing through the direction of the KL divergence. We exhaustively evaluate the proposed confidence penalty and label smoothing on 6 common benchmarks: image classification (MNIST and Cifar-10), language modeling (Penn Treebank), machine translation (WMT'14 English-to-German), and speech recognition (TIMIT and WSJ). We find that both label smoothing and the confidence penalty improve state-of-the-art models across benchmarks without modifying existing hyperparameters, suggesting the wide applicability of these regularizers.

cs.NE↗